Along the Infinite Sea Read online

  “Oh, trust me, Miss Schuyler. I know everything about that car.”

  There’s something so self-assured about her words, Pepper’s skin begins to itch, and not just the skin that stretches around the baby. The sensation sets off a chain reaction of alarm along the pathways of Pepper’s nerves: the dingling of tiny alarm bells in her ears, the tingling in the tip of her nose.

  “And just how the hell do you know that, Mrs. Dommerich? If you don’t mind me asking. Why exactly would you pay all that money for this hunk of pretty metal?”

  Mrs. Dommerich’s face is hidden behind those sunglasses, betraying not an ounce of visible reaction to Pepper’s impertinence. “Because, Miss Schuyler,” she says softly, “twenty-eight years ago, I drove for my life across the German border inside that car, and I left a piece of my heart inside her. And now I think it’s time to bring her home. Don’t you?” She turns away again, and as she walks across the grass, she says, over her shoulder, sounding like an elegant half-European mother: “Wear a cardigan, Miss Schuyler. It’s supposed to be cooler tonight, and I’d like to put the top down.”

  2.

  At first, Pepper has no intention of obeying the summons of Annabelle Dommerich. The check is waiting for her when she calls at the front desk at the hotel, along with a handwritten telephone message that she discards after a single glance. She has the doorman call her a taxi, and she rides into town to deposit the check in her account. The clerk’s face is expressionless as he hands her the receipt. She withdraws a couple hundred bucks, which she tucks into her pocketbook next to her compact and her cigarettes. When she returns to the hotel, she draws herself a bubble bath and soaks for an hour, sipping from a single glass of congratulatory champagne and staring at the tiny movements disturbing the golden curve of her belly. Thank God she hasn’t got any stretch marks. Coconut oil, that’s what her doctor recommended, and she went out and bought five bottles.

  The water turns cool. Pepper lifts her body from the tub and wraps herself in a white towel. She orders a late room-service lunch and stands on the balcony, wrapped in her towel, smoking a cigarette. She considers another glass of champagne but knows she won’t go through with it. The doctor back on Cape Cod, a comely young fellow full of newfangled ideas, said to go easy on the booze. The doctor also said to go easy on the smokes, but you can’t do everything your doctor says, can you? You can’t give up everything, all at once, when you have already given up so much.

  And for what? For a baby. His baby, of all things. So stupid, Pepper. You thought you were so clever and brave, you thought you had it all under control, and now look at you. All knocked up and nowhere to go.

  The beach is bright yellow and studded with sunbathers before a lazy surf. Pepper reaches to tuck in her towel and lets it fall to the tiled floor of the balcony. No one sees her. She leans against the balcony rail, naked and golden-ripe, until her cigarette burns to a tiny stump in her hand, until the bell rings with her room-service lunch.

  After she eats, she sets the tray outside her door and falls into bed. She takes a long nap, over the covers, and when she wakes up she slips into a sleeveless tunic-style cocktail dress, brushes her hair, and touches up her lipstick. Before she heads for the elevator, she takes a cardigan from the drawer and slings it over her bare shoulders.

  3.

  But the elevator’s stuck in the lobby. That was the trouble with hotels like the Breakers; there was always some Greek tycoon moving in, some sausage king from Chicago, and the whole place ground to a halt to accommodate his wife and kids and help and eighty-eight pieces of luggage. Afterward, he would tell his friends back home that the place wasn’t what it was cracked up to be, and the natives sure were unfriendly.

  Pepper taps her foot and checks her watch, but the elevator is having none of it. She heads for the stairs.

  On the one hand, you have the luxurious appointments of the Breakers, plush carpets and mirrors designed to show you off to your best advantage. On the other hand, you have the stairwell, like an escape from Alcatraz. Pepper’s spindly shoes rattle on the concrete floors; the bare incandescent bulbs appear at intervals as if to interrogate her. She has just turned the last landing, lobby escape hatch in sight, when a man comes into view, leaning against the door. He’s wearing a seersucker suit—a genuine blue-striped seersucker suit, as if men actually wore them anymore—and his arms are crossed.

  For an instant, Pepper thinks of a platinum starlet, sprawled naked on her bedroom floor a few years back. Killed herself, poor bimbo, everyone said, shaking the sorrowful old head. Drugs, of course. A cautionary Hollywood tale.

  “Nice suit,” says Pepper. “Are they making a movie out there?”

  He straightens from the door and shoots his cuffs. “Miss Schuyler? Do you have a moment?”

  “I don’t think so. Certainly not for strangers who lurk in stairwells.”

  “I’m afraid I must insist.”

  “I’m afraid you’re in my way. Do you mind stepping aside?”

  In response, Captain Seersucker stretches his thick candy-stripe arm across the passage and places a hand against the opposite wall.

  “Well, well,” says Pepper. “A nice beefy fellow, aren’t you? How much do they hire you out for? Or do you do it just for the love of sport?”

  “I’m just a friend, Miss Schuyler. A friend of a friend who wants to talk to you, that’s all, nice and friendly. So you’re going to have to come with me.”

  Pepper laughs. “You see, that’s the trouble with you musclemen. Not too much in the noggin, is there?”

  “Miss Schuyler—”

  “Call me Pepper, Captain Seersucker. Everyone else does.” She holds out her hand, and when he doesn’t take it, she pats his cheek. “A big old lug, aren’t you? Tell me, what do you do when the quiz shows come on the TV? Do you just stare all blank at the screen, or do you try to learn something?”

  “Miss Schuyler—”

  “And now you’re getting angry with me. Your face is all pink. Look, I don’t hold it against you. We can’t all be Einstein, can we? The world needs brawn as well as brain. And the girls certainly don’t mind, do they? I mean, what self-respecting woman wants a man hanging around who’s smarter than she is?”

  “Look here—”

  “Now, just look at that jaw of yours, for example. So useful! Like a nice square piece of granite. I’ll bet you could crush gravel with it in your spare time.”

  He lifts his hand away from the wall and makes to grab her, but Pepper’s been waiting for her chance, and she ducks neatly underneath his arm, pregnancy and all, and brings her knee up into his astonished crotch. He crumples like a tin can, lamenting his injured manhood in loud wails, but Pepper doesn’t waste a second gloating. She throws open the door to the lobby and tells the bellboy to call a doctor, because some poor oaf in a seersucker suit just tripped on his shoelaces and fell down the stairs.

  4.

  “I thought you wouldn’t come,” says Mrs. Dommerich, as Pepper slides into the passenger seat of the glamorous Mercedes. Every head is turned toward the pair of them, but the lady doesn’t seem to notice. She’s wearing a wide-necked dress of midnight-blue jacquard, sleeves to the elbows and hem to the knees, extraordinarily elegant.

  “I wasn’t going to. But then I remembered what a bore it is, sitting around my hotel room, and I came around.”

  “I’m glad you did.”

  Mrs. Dommerich turns the ignition, and the engine roars with joy. Cars like this, they like to be driven, Pepper’s almost-brother-in-law said, the first time they tried the engine, and at the time Pepper thought he was crazy, talking about a machine as if it were a person. But now she listens to the pitch of the pistons and supposes he was probably right. Caspian usually was, at least when it came to cars.

  “I guess you know how to drive this thing?” Pepper says.

  “Oh, yes.” Mrs. Dommerich puts the car
into gear and releases the clutch. The car pops away from the curb like a hunter taking a fence. Pepper notices her own hands are a little shaky, and she places her fingers securely around the doorframe.

  Just as the hotel entrance slides out of view, she spots a pair of men loitering near the door, staring as if to bore holes through the side of Pepper’s head. Not locals; they’re dressed all wrong. They’re dressed like the man in the stairwell, like some outsider’s notion of how you dressed in Palm Beach, like someone told them to wear pink madras and canvas deck shoes, and they’d fit right in.

  And then they’re gone.

  Pepper ties her scarf around her head and says, in a remarkably calm voice, “Where are we going?”

  “I thought we’d have dinner in town. Have a nice little chat. I’d like to hear a little more about how you found her. What it was like, bringing her back to life.”

  “Oh, it’s a girl, is it? I never checked.”

  “Ships and automobiles, my dear. God knows why.”

  “You know,” says Pepper, drumming her fingers along the edge of the window glass, “don’t take this the wrong way, but I can’t help noticing that you two seem to be on awfully familiar terms, for a nice lady and a few scraps of old metal.”

  “I should be, shouldn’t I? I paid an awful lot of money for her.”

  “For which I can’t thank you enough.”

  “Well, I couldn’t let her sit around in some museum. Not after all we’ve been through together.” She pats the dashboard affectionately. “She belongs with someone who loves her.”

  Pepper shakes her head. “I don’t get it. I don’t see how you could love a car.”

  “Someone loved this car, to put it back together like this.”

  “It wasn’t me. It was Caspian.”

  “Who’s Caspian?”

  Pepper opens her pocketbook and takes out her compact. “We’ll just say he’s a friend of my sister’s, shall we? A very good friend. Anyway, he’s the enthusiast. He couldn’t stand watching me try to put it together myself.”

  “I’m eternally grateful. I suppose he knows a lot about German cars?”

  “It turns out he was an army brat. They lived in Germany when he was young, right after the war, handing out retribution with one hand and Hershey bars with the other.”

  Mrs. Dommerich swings the heavy Mercedes around a corner, on the edge of a nickel. Pepper realizes that the muscles of her abdomen are clenched, and it’s nothing to do with the baby. But there’s no question that Mrs. Dommerich knows how to drive this car. She drives it the way some people ride horses, as if the gears and the wheels are extensions of her own limbs. She may not be tall, but she sits so straight it doesn’t matter. Her scarf flutters gracefully in the draft. She reaches for her pocketbook, which lies on the seat between them, and takes out a cigarette with one hand. “Do you mind lighting me?” she asks.

  Pepper finds the lighter and brings Mrs. Dommerich’s long, thin Gauloise to life.

  “Thank you.” She blows a stream of smoke into the wind and holds out the pack to Pepper. “Help yourself.”

  Pepper eyes the tempting little array. Her shredded nerves jingle in her ears. “Maybe just one. I’m supposed to be cutting back.”

  “I didn’t start until later,” Mrs. Dommerich says. “When my babies were older. We started going out more, to cocktail parties and things, and the air was so thick I thought I might as well play along. But it never became a habit, thank God. Maybe because I started so late.” She takes a long drag. “Sometimes it takes me a week to go through a single pack. It’s just for the pure pleasure. It’s like sex, you want to be able to take your time and enjoy it.”

  Pepper laughs. “That’s a new one on me. I always thought the more, the merrier. Sex and cigarettes.”

  “My husband never understood, either. He smoked like a chimney, one after another, right up until the day he died.”

  “And when was that?”

  “A year and a half ago.” She checks the side mirror. “Lung cancer.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  They begin to mount the bridge to the mainland. Mrs. Dommerich seems to be concentrating on the road ahead, to the flashing lights that indicated the deck was going up. She rolls to a stop and drops the cigarette from the edge of the car. When she speaks, her voice has dropped an octave, to a rough-edged husk of itself.

  “I used to try to make him stop,” she says. “But he didn’t seem to care.”

  5.

  They eat at a small restaurant off Route 1. The owner recognizes Mrs. Dommerich and kisses both her cheeks. They chatter together in French for a moment, so rapidly and colloquially that Pepper can’t quite follow. Mrs. Dommerich turns and introduces Pepper—my dear friend Miss Schuyler, she calls her—and the man seizes Pepper’s belly in rapture, as if she’s his mistress and he’s the guilty father.

  “So beautiful!” he says.

  “Isn’t it, though.” Pepper removes his hands. Since the beginning of the sixth month, Pepper’s universe has parted into two worlds: people who regard her pregnancy as a kind of tumor, possibly contagious, and those who seem to think it’s public property. “Whatever will your wife say when she finds out?”

  “Ah, my wife.” He shakes his head. “A very jealous woman. She will have my head on the carving platter.”

  “What a shame.”

  When they are settled at their table, supplied with water and crusty bread and a bottle of quietly expensive Burgundy, Mrs. Dommerich apologizes. The French are obsessed with babies, she says.

  “I thought they were obsessed with sex.”

  “It’s not such a stretch, is it?”

  Pepper butters her bread and admits that it isn’t.

  The waiter arrives. Mrs. Dommerich orders turtle soup and sweetbreads; Pepper scans the menu and chooses mussels and canard à l’orange. When the waiter sweeps away the menus and melts into the atmosphere, a pause settles, the turning point. Pepper drinks a small sip of wine, folds her hands on the edge of the table, and says, “Why did you ask me to dinner, Mrs. Dommerich?”

  “I might as well ask why you agreed to come.”

  “Age before beauty,” says Pepper, and Mrs. Dommerich laughs.

  “That’s it, right there. That’s why I asked you.”

  “Because I’m so abominably rude?”

  “Because you’re so awfully interesting. As I said before, Miss Schuyler. Because I’m curious about you. It’s not every young debutante who finds a vintage Mercedes in a shed at her sister’s house and restores it to its former glory, only to put it up for auction in Palm Beach.”

  “I’m full of surprises.”

  “Yes, you are.” She pauses. “To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t going to introduce myself at all. I already knew who you were, at least by reputation.”

  “Yes, I’ve got one of those things, haven’t I? I can’t imagine why.”

  “You have. I like to keep current on gossip. A vice of mine.” She smiles and sips her wine, marrying vices. “The sparky young aide in the new senator’s office, perfectly bred and perfectly beautiful. They were right about that, goodness me.”

  Pepper shrugs. Her beauty is old news, no longer interesting even to her.

  “Yes, exactly.” Mrs. Dommerich nods. Her hair is cut short, curling around her ears, a stylish frame for the heart-shaped, huge-eyed delicacy of her face. A few silver threads catch the light overhead, and she hasn’t tried to hide them. “You caused a real stir, you know, when you started working in the senator’s office last year. I suppose you know that. Not just that you’re a walking fashion plate, but that you were good at your job. You made yourself essential to him. You had hustle. There are beautiful women everywhere, but they don’t generally have hustle. When you’re beautiful, it’s ever so much easier to find a man to hustle for you.”

  “Yes, but the
n you’re stuck, aren’t you? It’s his rules, not yours.”

  The skin twitches around Mrs. Dommerich’s wide red mouth.

  “True. That’s what I thought about you, when I saw you. I saw you were expecting, pretty far along, and all of a sudden I understood why you fixed up my car and sold it to me for a nice, convenient fortune. I understood perfectly.”

  “Oh, you did, did you?” Pepper lifts her knife and examines her reflection. A single blue Schuyler eye stares back at her, turned up at the corner like the bow of an especially elegant yacht. “Then why the hell were you still curious enough to invite me out?”

  The waiter arrives solemnly with the soup and the mussels. Mrs. Dommerich waits in a pod of elegant impatience while he sets each dish exactly so, flourishes the pepper, asks if there will be anything else, and is dismissed. She lifts her spoon and smiles.

  “Because, my dear. I can’t wait to see what you do next.”

  6.

  Pepper lights another cigarette after dinner, while Mrs. Dommerich drives the Mercedes north along the A1A. For air, she says. Pepper doesn’t care much about air, one way or another, but she does care about those two men hanging around the entrance of the hotel before they left. She can handle one overgrown oaf in a stairwell, maybe, but two more was really too much.

  So Pepper says okay, she could use some air. Let’s take a little drive somewhere. She draws the smoke pleasantly into her lungs and breathes it out again. Air. To the right, the ocean ripples in and out of view, phosphorescent under a swollen November moon, and as the miles roll under the black wheels Pepper wonders if she’s being kidnapped, and whether she cares. Whether it matters if Mrs. Dommerich acts for herself or for someone else.

  He was going to track her down anyway, wasn’t he? Sooner or later, the house always won.

  Pepper used to think that she was the house. She has it all: family, beauty, brains, moxie. You think you hold all the cards, and then you realize you don’t. You have one single precious card, and he wants it back.