Along the Infinite Sea Page 3

  And suddenly three hundred thousand dollars doesn’t seem like much security, after all. Suddenly there isn’t enough money in the world.

  Pepper stubs out the cigarette in the little chrome ashtray. “Where are we going, anyway?”

  “Oh, there’s a little headland up ahead, tremendous view of the ocean. I like to park there sometimes and watch the waves roll in.”

  “Sounds like a scream.”

  “You might try it, you know. It’s good for the soul.”

  “I have it on good authority, Mrs. Dommerich—from a number of sources, actually—that I haven’t got one. A soul, I mean.”

  Mrs. Dommerich laughs. They’re speaking loudly, because of the draft and the immense roar of the engine. She bends around another curve, and then the car begins to slow, as if it already knows where it’s going, as if it’s fate. They pull off the road onto a dirt track, lined by reeds a yard high, and such is the Roadster’s suspension that Pepper doesn’t feel a thing.

  “I’m usually coming from the north,” says Mrs. Dommerich. “We have a little house by the coast, near Cocoa Beach. When we first moved here from France, we wanted a quiet place where we could hide away from the world, and then of course the air-conditioning came in, and the world came to us in droves.” She laughs. “But by then it didn’t seem to matter. The kids loved it here too much, we couldn’t sell up. As long as I could see the Atlantic, I didn’t care.”

  The reeds part and the ocean opens up before them. Mrs. Dommerich keeps on driving until they reach the dunes, silver and black in the moonlight. Pepper smells the salt tide, the warm rot. The car rolls to a stop, and Mrs. Dommerich cuts the engine. The steady rush of water reaches Pepper’s ears.

  “Isn’t it marvelous?” says Mrs. Dommerich.

  “It’s beautiful.”

  Mrs. Dommerich finds her pocketbook and takes out a cigarette. “We can share,” she says.

  “I’ve already reached my limit.”

  “If we share, it doesn’t count. Halves don’t count.”

  Pepper takes the cigarette from her fingers and examines it.

  Mrs. Dommerich settles back and stares through the windshield. “Do you know what I love most about the ocean? The way the water’s all connected. The bits and pieces have different names, but really it’s all one vast body of salt water, all the way around the earth. It’s as if we’re touching Europe, or Africa, or the Antarctic. If you close your eyes, you can feel it, like it’s right there.”

  Pepper hands back the cigarette. “That’s true. But I don’t like to close my eyes.”

  “You’ve never made an act of faith?”

  “No. I like to rely on myself.”

  “So I see. But you know, sometimes it’s not such a bad thing. An act of faith.”

  Pepper snatches the cigarette and takes a drag. She blows the smoke back out into the night and says, “So what’s your game?”

  “My game?”

  “Why are you here? Obviously you know a thing or two about me. Did he send you?”

  “He?”

  “You know who.”

  “Oh. The father of your baby, you mean.”

  “You tell me.”

  Mrs. Dommerich lifts her hands to the steering wheel and taps her fingers against the lacquer. “No. Nobody sent me.”

  Pepper tips the ash into the sand and hands back the cigarette.

  “Do you believe me?” Mrs. Dommerich asks.

  “I don’t believe in anything, Mrs. Dommerich. Just myself. And my sisters, too, I guess, but they have their own problems. They don’t need mine on top of it all.”

  Mrs. Dommerich spreads out her hands to examine her palms. “Then let me help instead.”

  Pepper laughs. “Oh, that’s a good one. Very kind of you.”

  “I mean it. Why not?”

  “Why not? Because you don’t even know me.”

  “There’s no law against helping strangers.”

  “Well, I certainly don’t know a damned thing about you, except that you’re rich and your husband died last year, and you have children and love the ocean. And you drove this car across Germany thirty years ago—”

  “Twenty-eight.”

  “Twenty-eight. And even if that’s all true, it’s not much to go on.”

  “Isn’t it? Marriages have been made on less knowledge. Happy ones.”

  That’s an odd thing to say, Pepper thinks, and she hears the words echoing: an act of faith. Well, that explains it. Maybe Mrs. Dommerich is one of those sweet little fools who thinks the world is a pretty place to live, filled with nice people who love you, where everything turns out all right if you just smile and tap your heels together three times.

  Or maybe it’s all an act.

  A little gust of salt wind comes off the ocean, and Pepper snuggles deeper into her cardigan. Mrs. Dommerich finishes the cigarette and smashes it out carefully into the ashtray, next to Pepper’s stub from the ride up. She reaches into the glove compartment and draws out a small thermos container. “Coffee?” she asks, unscrewing the cap.

  “Where did you get coffee?”

  “I had Jean-Louis fill it up for me before we left.”

  Pepper takes the small plastic cup. The coffee is strong and still hot. They sit quietly, sipping and gazing, sharing the smell of the wide Atlantic. The ocean heaves and rushes before them, unseen except for the long white crests of the rollers, picked out by the moon.

  Mrs. Dommerich asks: “If I were to guess who the father is, would I be right?”

  “Probably.”

  She nods. “I see.”

  Pepper laughs again. “Isn’t it hilarious? Who’d have thought a girl like me could be so stupid? It isn’t as if I didn’t have my eyes open. I mean, I knew all the rumors, I knew I might just be playing with a live grenade.”

  “But you couldn’t resist, could you?”

  “The oldest story in the book.”

  The baby stirs beneath Pepper’s heart, stretching out a long limb to test the strength of her abdomen. She puts her hand over the movement, a gesture of pregnancy that used to annoy her, when it was someone else’s baby.

  Mrs. Dommerich speaks softly. “Because he was irresistible, wasn’t he? He made you think there was no other woman in the world, that this thing you shared was more sacred than law.”

  “Something like that.”

  Mrs. Dommerich pours out the dregs of her coffee and wipes out the cup with a handkerchief. “I’m serious, you know. It’s the real reason I wanted to speak to you. To help you, if I can.”

  “You don’t say.”

  Mrs. Dommerich pauses. “You know, there are all kinds of heroes in the world, Miss Schuyler, though I know you don’t believe in that, either. And you’re a fine girl, underneath all that cynical bluster of yours, and if this man wasn’t what you hoped, I assure you there will be someone else who is.”

  Pepper looks out at the ocean and thinks about how wrong she is. There will never be someone else; how could there be? There will be men, of course. Pepper’s no saint. But there won’t be someone else. The thing about Pepper, she never makes the same mistake twice.

  She folds her arms atop her belly and says, “Don’t hold your breath.”

  Mrs. Dommerich laughs and gets out of the car. She stretches her arms up to the night sky, and the moon catches the glint in her wedding ring. “What a beautiful night, isn’t it? Not too cool, after all. I can’t bear the summers here, but it’s just the thing to cheer me up in November.”

  “What’s wrong with November?”

  Mrs. Dommerich doesn’t answer. She goes around the front of the car and settles herself on the hood, tucking up her knees under her chin. After a moment, Pepper joins her, except that Pepper’s belly sticks out too far for such a gamine little pose, so she removes her sandals, stretches her fe
et into the sand, and leans against the familiar warm hood instead.

  “Are we just going to sit here forever?” Pepper asks.

  Mrs. Dommerich wraps her arms around her legs and doesn’t speak. Pepper wants to tap her head like an eggshell, to see what comes out. What’s her story? Why the hell is she bothering with Pepper? Women don’t usually bother with Pepper, and she doesn’t blame them. Look what happens when you do. Pepper fertilizes her womb with your husband.

  “Well?” Pepper says at last, because she’s not the kind of girl who waits for you to pull yourself together. “What are you thinking about?”

  Mrs. Dommerich starts, as if she’s forgotten Pepper is there at all. “Oh, I’m sorry. Ancient history, really. Have you ever been to the Paris Ritz?”

  Pepper toes the sand. “Once. We went to Europe one summer, when I was in college.”

  “Well, I was there in the summer of 1937, when the Ritz was the center of the universe. Everybody was there.” She stands up and dusts off her dress. “Anyway. Come along, my dear.”

  “Wait a second. What happened at the Ritz?”

  “Like I said, it’s ancient history. Water under the bridge.”

  “You were the one who brought it up.”

  Mrs. Dommerich folds her arms and stares at the ocean. Pepper’s toe describes a square in the sand and tops it off with a triangular roof. She tries to recall the Ritz, but the grand hotels of Europe had all looked alike after a while. Wasn’t that a shame? All that effort and expense, and in a week or two they all blurred together.

  Still, she remembers a bit. She remembers glamour and a glorious long bar, a place where Pepper could do business. What kind of business had sweet, elegant Mrs. Dommerich done there?

  Just as Pepper gives up, just as she reaches downward to thread her sandals back over her toes, Mrs. Dommerich turns away from the ocean, and you’d think the moon had stuck in her eyes, they’re so bright.

  “There was this party there,” she says. “A going-away party at the Ritz for an American who was moving back to New York. It was the kind of night you never forget.”

  Annabelle

  ANTIBES • 1935

  1.

  But long before the Ritz, there was the Côte d’Azur.

  My father had used the last of Mummy’s money to lease his usual villa for the summer, perched on a picturesque cliff between Antibes and Cannes, and such was the lingering glamor of his face and his title that everybody came. There were rich American artists and poor English aristocrats; there was exiled Italian royalty and ambitious French bourgeoisie. To his credit, my father didn’t discriminate. He welcomed them all. He gave them crumbling rooms and moderately fresh linens, cheap food and good wine, and they kept on coming in their stylish waves, smoking cigarettes and getting drunk and sleeping with one another. Someone regularly had to be saved from drowning.

  Altogether it was a fascinating summer for a young lady just out of a strict convent school in the grimmest possible northwest corner of Brittany. The charcoal lash of Biscay storms had been replaced by the azure sway of the Mediterranean; the ascetic nuns had been replaced by decadent Austrian dukes. And there was my brother, Charles. I adored Charles. He was four years older and terribly dashing, and for a time, when I was young, I actually thought I would never, ever get married because nobody could be as handsome as my brother, because all other men fell short.

  He invited his own guests, my brother, and a few of them were here tonight. In the way of older brothers, he didn’t quite worship me the way I worshipped him. I might have been a pet lamb, straying in my woolly innocence through his fields, to be shooed gently away in case of wolves. They held their own court (literally: they gathered in the tennis courts at half past eleven in the morning for hot black coffee and muscular Turkish cigarettes) and swam in their own corner of the beach, down the treacherous cliff path: naked, of course. There were no women. Charles’s retreat was run along strictly fraternal lines. If anyone fancied sex, he came back to the house and stalked one or another of my father’s crimson-lipped professional beauties, so I learned to stay away from the so-called library and the terrace (favored hunting grounds) between the hours of two o’clock in the afternoon and midnight, though I observed their comings and goings the way other girls read gossip magazines.

  Which is all a rather long way of explaining why I happened to be lying on the top of the garden wall, gazing quietly toward the lanterns and the female bodies in their shimmering dresses, the crisp drunk black-and-white gentlemen, on the moonless evening they brought the injured Jew to the house.

  At half past ten, shortly before the Jew’s arrival, I became aware of an immense heat taking shape in the air nearby. I waited for this body to carry on into the garden, or the scrubby sea lawn sloping toward the cliffs, but instead it lingered quietly, smelling of liquor and cigarettes. Without turning my head, I said, in English, “I’m sorry. Am I in your way?”

  “I beg your pardon. I did not wish to disturb you.” The English came without hesitation, a fluid intermingling of High German and British public schools, delivered in a thick bass voice.

  I told him, without turning my head, that he hadn’t. I knew how to kick away these unwanted advances from my father’s accidental strays. (The nuns, remember.)

  “Very good,” he said, but he didn’t leave.

  He occupied a massive hole in the darkness behind me, and that—combined with the massive voice, the hint of dialect—suggested that this man was Herr von Kleist, an army general and Junker baron who had arrived three days ago in a magnificent black Mercedes Roadster with a single steamer trunk and no female companion. How he knew my father, I couldn’t say; not that prior acquaintance with the host was any requirement for staying at the Villa Vanilla. (That was my name for the house, in reference to the sandy-pale stone with which it was built.) I had spoken to him a few times, in the evenings before dinner. He always sat alone, holding a single small glass of liquor.

  I rose to a sitting position and swung my feet down from the wall. “I’ll leave you to yourself, then,” I said, and I prepared to jump down.

  “No, please.” He waved his hand. “Do not stir yourself.”

  “I was about to leave anyway.”

  “No, you mistake me. I only came to see if you were well. I saw you steal out here and lie on the garden wall.” He gestured again. “I hope you are not unwell.”

  “I’m quite well, thank you.”

  “Then why are you here, alone?”

  “Because I like to be alone.”

  He nodded. “Yes, of course. This is what I thought about you, when you were playing your cello for us the other night.”

  He was dressed in a precise white jacket and tie, making him seem even larger than he did by day, and unlike the other guests he had no cigarette with him, no glass of some cocktail or another to occupy his hands, though I smelled both in the air surrounding him. The moon was new, and I couldn’t see his face, just the giant outline of him, the smudge of shadow against the night. But I detected a slight nervousness, a particle of anxiety lying between me and the sea. I’d seen many things at the Villa Vanilla, but I hadn’t seen nervousness, and it made me curious.

  “Really? Why did you think that?”

  “Because—” He stopped and switched to French. “Because you are different from the others here. You are too young and new. You shouldn’t be here.”

  “None of us should be here, really. It is a great scandal, isn’t it?”

  “But you particularly. Watching this.” Another gesture, this time at the terrace on the other side of the wall, and the shimmering figures inside it.

  “Oh, I’m used to that.”

  “I’m very sorry to hear that.”

  “Why should you be sorry? You’re a part of it, aren’t you? You came here willingly, unlike me, who simply lives here and can’t help it. I expect you know
what goes on, and why. I expect you’re here for your share.”

  He hesitated. There was a flash of light from the house, or perhaps the driveway, and it lit the top of his head for an instant. He had an almost Scandinavian cast to him, this baron, so large and fair. (I pictured a Viking longboat invading some corner of Prussia, generations ago.) His hair was short and bristling and the palest possible shade of blond; his eyes were the color of Arctic sea ice. I thought he was about forty, as old as the world. “May I sit down?” he asked politely.

  “Of course.”

  I thought he would take the bench, but instead he placed his hands on the wall, about five feet down from me, and hoisted his big body atop as easily as if he were mounting a horse.

  “How athletic of you,” I said.

  “Yes. I believe firmly in the importance of physical fitness.”

  “Of course you do. Did you have something important to tell me?”

  He stared toward Africa. “No.”

  Someone laughed on the terrace behind us, a high and curdling giggle cut short by the delicate smash of crystal. Neither of us moved.

  Herr von Kleist sat still on the brink of the wall. I didn’t know a man that large could have such perfect control over his limbs. “My friend the prince, your father, I saw him quite by chance last spring, at the embassy in Paris. He told me that I must come to his villa this summer, that I am in need of sunshine and amitié. I thought perhaps he was right. I am afraid, in my inexperience, I did not guess the meaning of his word amitié.”

  “Your inexperience?” I said dubiously.

  “I have never been to a place like this. Like the void left behind by an absence of imagination, which they are attempting, in their wretchedness and ignorance, to fill with vice.”

  “Yes, you’re right. I’ve just been thinking exactly the same thing.”

  “My wife died eleven years ago. That is loss. That is a void left behind. But I try to fill that loss with something substantial, with work and the raising of our children.”

  What on earth did you say to a thing like that? I ventured: “How many children do you have?”