The Glass Ocean

by Beatriz Williams

  “I don’t know. Might be a little awkward, you know.” John lifted his hand and rubbed the corner of his mouth with one finger, possibly to hide the beginnings of a smile. “They seem to have a great deal to talk over.”

  “So I noticed.” I made a show of glancing around the room. “So what should we do in the meantime? Watch the rest of the movie, maybe?”

  “You could sleep here,” he said, and added hastily, in the same sentence, “on the sofa, I mean. I could take the daybed in the other room.”

  “I don’t have a toothbrush.”

  “I might have an extra. For emergencies.”

  “Emergencies?”

  “You never know.”

  He looked sincere, almost angelic. The dim lamplight softened the edges of his face. The color of that sweater was not his best—or maybe he was just pallid from fatigue and shock—but the surge of longing overtook me anyway, filling my chest, making my fingers tingle and ache.

  “A toothbrush emergency,” I said. “This happens to you often?”

  “Not often. Hardly at all, come to think of it. Possibly it was just wishful thinking, on my part. A small flicker of human hope.”

  His voice lost its teasing edge, and my mouth went dry. I felt the intensity of his mood, the quiet Langford charisma radiating from his skin. I couldn’t stand the intent shape of his eyes, so I turned away and pretended to inspect the sofa in question. Tried to think of something clever to say, something to keep up the banter, and I just couldn’t. No banter left inside me. No desire for wit and fun. Instead I found myself opening my mouth and talking about my father. How he was an expert on sofas.

  “A couch potato, was he? Er, no pun intended.”

  I turned my head and lifted an eyebrow.

  “You know, potatoes,” he said. “Like your book. Sorry, never mind. It’s late and my brain isn’t quite—”

  “He slept on them a lot. Sofas. He was an alcoholic. I’d wake up early and come into the living room—I was only four when they split up—and he’d be snoring on the couch, reeking of booze. That smell still kills me.”

  I’d turned back toward the sofa, Robert’s sofa, because I couldn’t look at John while I said a thing like that. The air stirred as he stepped toward me and stood by my side, staring at the furniture with me.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, like he meant it. Like he understood the true meaning of the word, akin to sorrow.

  “Eh, it was a long time ago. I’m over it. Sort of.”

  “I don’t think you ever really get over a thing like that, do you? He was your father.”

  “They’re supposed to be heroes, when you’re small. Time enough when you’re grown up to realize they’re just human. Just people, muddling through life like you are, making mistakes. But when you’re little, your dad should be Superman.”

  “Well, my father wasn’t Superman, least of all to me,” John said. “But at least I had a splendid family history to lean on. Or did.”

  “Now I’m going to blow that up for you, too.”

  “Oh, I’ll be all right. As you said. I’m an adult. I don’t require heroism from my ancestors anymore. In fact, I’ve found it’s rather more interesting when they’re not heroic, don’t you think?”

  I didn’t answer. Maybe the lack of sleep was catching up with me, I don’t know. Maybe my nerves were failing, after all that excitement. The air was cool, because the door had been left open so long, and it smelled of the outdoors, the damp grass and the muddy, wet scent of the river nearby.

  John touched my shoulder.

  I said, “He called us once, when I was a teenager, and Mom was at work. He’d cleaned himself up, he said. He still loved us, still loved my mother. Wanted to know if I could go to Mom for him and ask for another chance.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said I would. And I hung up and I didn’t tell her a word about it. I never told her. I don’t know whether it was because I hated him for what he’d done, or because I didn’t want to share my mother with him, or because I didn’t want to put her through all that hell again. Whether I was selfish or whether I was protecting her. And a few months later he drove his car into a parkway overpass. When they tested his blood, he had an alcohol level of point two five.”

  “It seems you made the right choice, then.”

  I stepped to the sofa and sat down on the edge of it, folding my hands around my knees and staring down at my interlocked fingers. “But what if he went out and got drunk that night because of me? Because I didn’t tell Mom? And what if I had told her, and everything had turned out all right? I would have had a father and Mom would’ve had her true love back, and he’d still be alive—”

  “Oh, Sarah.” John sat down next to me and drew me against his chest. “Trust me, there was no happy ending there. Trust me. You absolutely cannot redeem another human being. You just can’t. Only God can do that, I suppose, God or whatever it is you believe in. The only person whose behavior—whose goodness—you can control is yourself. You just get up every day and do the best you can.”

  I snuffled against his sweater.

  “I mean, I’m not saying you shouldn’t reach out and help others. Listen and love and support and whatever you can. But you can’t expect to save them. You can’t hold yourself responsible for their choices.”

  I turned my head to face the desk. My arms had come to rest lightly across his stomach; his arm held me securely around the shoulders. I said, “Is that what happened with Callie? You realized you couldn’t save her?”

  He laughed. “No, I realized that much earlier. But I’m sort of old-fashioned about the better-or-worse business, and I’d known about the drugs and all that before the wedding, so I wasn’t going to call quits because of that. It was the sex camp that did it for our marriage.”

  I drew back, and his arms loosened to let me go. “Sex camp?”

  “I can’t remember what they called it officially. Something about a physical therapy retreat for couples. Callie said we hadn’t been connecting in bed the way we used to, and that was why our marriage was falling apart, not the fact that she tended to stumble home high at six in the morning with one shoe missing. So I agreed to go, because—well, what did I have to lose, after all? I mean, it was sex camp.”

  “But what was it like?”

  “Very New Age-y. In the beginning, you weren’t allowed to touch each other. They had all these classes and seminars. Saucy stuff. I learned a great deal about the female orgasm, it must be said. And then—I believe it was the third night, just before we were given permission for what they called ‘mindful touching’—I went looking for my wife after dinner and found her bonking the instructor in the bondage room, so I went straight home and filed for divorce.”

  My hand flew to my mouth.

  “Are you laughing at me, Blake? Laughing at my misery?”

  “Of—of course not. It sounds—how terrible—I mean, the bondage room—were they actually—”

  “You are laughing. I can see your shoulders shaking.”

  “I am not—”

  “What a hard woman you are.” He reached out his long, rusty-pink arms and gathered me up. “Hard, cruel. Do you have any idea how shattering it is to see your wife mindfully touching another man?”

  “Well, you know, I’ve never had a wife.”

  “And you’re satirical.”

  “Also, I’ve never been to sex camp.”

  “Hmm. Never been inside a bondage room either, I expect?”

  “Nope. I did read that book, though. Almost all the way through.”

  “Child’s play,” John said, and he bent his head and kissed me.

  * * *

  For an instant, when I opened my eyes, I expected to see the red LED lights glowing across R2-D2’s perfectly round chest, telling me it was time to rise and shine.

  But the air around me was dark and musky, and a heavy arm lay across my middle, and a massive chest moved in a deep, steady rhythm against my back. And somethin
g else. I was happy. A fog of contentment inhabited my body, breathing silently through each pore.

  John.

  His name streaked across my mind, and it all rushed back: long, intimate kisses, clothing parted, John carrying me to the daybed in the other room. I remembered a feeling of wonder, mixed in with all the physical ecstasy of sex, and how I saw that wonder reflected in John’s own expression. Oh my God, I’d whispered, linking my hands around the back of his neck, and I don’t remember what he said in reply to that. Just that it got even better from there, and when culmination finally arrived, it was like nothing and nobody I’d ever known, like a spiritual relief, followed by the kind of silence that means all the things you cannot say out loud. Then sleep.

  And now? I couldn’t say how long I’d slept. Not long, surely, because the world outside the windows was as black as pitch, and I was still too tired to move. My brain, however, was awake. Awake and jumping. Alive with the thrill of falling in love—falling in love with John, oh God, John Langford, this warm, sturdy man sleeping beside me, his whole body now known to me—and alive also with another thought, another nagging question, hovering beneath all that bliss.

  Let it go, Blake. Close your eyes and go back to sleep. Concentrate on this precious arm against your ribs, on the thump of his heart at your back. His legs tangled comfortably around yours. Concentrate on all of this before it’s gone. Before you fly back to New York and real life.

  But my eyes wouldn’t close. I picked out the shapes in the room, the faint outline of the doorway to the study. Robert Langford’s study, where he wrote all his books, where his secrets lived and breathed. Small secrets and large ones, the mother lode of all secrets, which he might or might not have told the world, except the world didn’t notice. My father is a traitor. My father stood back and allowed the deaths of a shipful of innocent people, men and women and children, just to save his own reputation. My father nearly caused my own death.

  How did you forgive a man for that? How did you keep that secret, all those years? What did it mean? Was Robert the one who had purged Sir Peregrine’s files? Why? Why not just let the bastard swing from the gallows of public opinion?

  Or had we jumped to the wrong conclusion, after all?

  Something was missing. Well, a lot of things were missing, but as I lay there, counting the beats of John’s heart, savoring the warmth of his breath in my hair, it seemed to me that we were missing something essential. The key to it all, the puzzle piece that made all the others fit together.

  Carefully I lifted John’s arm and slipped out from the shelter of his body. He made a noise of discontent, but he didn’t wake. The air was cold on my naked skin, so I gathered the first thing under my hand—the sheepskin throw—and wrapped it around my shoulders. The softness of it surprised me. I tiptoed from the room, shut the connecting door, and switched on the lamp on the desk.

  John’s iPad still sat in place, paused in the middle of Night Train to Berlin. The screen was dark, and I didn’t know the passcode. I sat down in the chair anyway, bringing my feet up to rest on the edge of the seat, wrapping my arms around my knees. I couldn’t recall the details of the book, but I did remember that it had been one of my favorites, as I sped through the Langford oeuvre. Everything had fit together so elegantly. And the characters. Rendered so vividly, so lifelike, I’d felt, as I read, that I knew them personally. That they actually existed, in some alternate book universe. Tristan Beaufort, of course, but also the secondary characters. The father, the passengers on the train. There had been a romance, right? He’d seduced a married woman. And there was some connection to the whole espionage plot, some reason he seduced her, or maybe he found out the connection afterward? I couldn’t remember, and yet it felt important, somehow. Urgent. Maybe even the reason I’d woken up.

  I unfolded my legs, one by one, constrained by a certain stiffness in my nooks and crannies. Sex with John Langford, it turned out, involved all the major muscle groups and most of the smaller ones, plus a few I hadn’t even known existed until now. I bent down to the stack of notes and items of interest that I kept in a file box near the desk, and I sifted through the contents with more curiosity than energy. I should go back to bed. Nothing useful could possibly come of this. In the morning, my head would be clearer, my body renewed. I could search with purpose. Still my fingers kept flipping, looking for the right folder, my notes on Robert’s books, until they came to rest not on a notebook, but something else. Something smaller. Thick, sleek paper.

  I lifted it away from the stack.

  The program from the 1952 Carnegie Hall concert. The pianist. Mary Talmadge.

  I sat back in the chair and thumbed idly through the pages. The old advertisements, the concert notes, the thanks to benefactors. The proceeds of this concert will benefit the Talmadge Musical Conservatory in Savannah, Georgia. Of course. I’d heard of the conservatory, one of the most prestigious in the country. Founded by some legendary philanthropist and his wife, who were obviously related to Mary Talmadge in some way.

  But of what interest to Robert? Why would he have kept this particular program, from a concert in New York? Was he that obsessed with music?

  I peered at Mary Talmadge’s photograph. She was beautiful, even and perhaps especially against the tailored black-and-white setting, looking off to some point in the distance, her long, elegant pianist’s fingers displayed prominently against her cheek.

  Maybe that was it. Her beauty. Robert was a bit of a connoisseur, wasn’t he?

  Except there was something familiar about her, wasn’t there? I couldn’t say what. The eyes, the expression that conveyed an age far greater than her smooth skin suggested. I’d seen her photograph before, of course—she was a legendary figure in the mid-century music scene—but it wasn’t that. It was something more intimate.

  I tossed the program on the desk, and as I did so, a small, ecru rectangle of notepaper slipped free from the last page. I caught it just before it fluttered to the floor.

  Albert Hall next. Will you be there? XO

  The handwriting was distinctly feminine.

  “Sarah?”

  I looked up. John stood in the doorway to the bedroom, blinking sleepily, wearing nothing at all. A warm glow spread across my skin. “Right here,” I said, and I set down the program and rose from the chair.

  “Thank God. Thought you’d bolted already.”

  I turned off the lamp, walked across the room, and wrapped my arms around his waist. “The thing about Americans?” I said, just before kissing him. “We’re not as stupid as you think we are.”

  * * *

  Only later, as I nestled in John’s arms and drifted inevitably to sleep, did my scattered mind recall that nagging detail about Night Train to Berlin.

  “The husband!” I exclaimed.

  “What husband?” John mumbled. “Not yours, I hope.”

  “No. The one in Night Train to Berlin. It wasn’t Beaufort who knew the plans, remember? It was the husband. The husband of the woman he seduced on the train.”

  John answered with a snore.

  Chapter 26

  Caroline

  At Sea

  Friday, May 7, 1915

  A loud snore erupted from behind Caroline where she sat with Gilbert in the dining saloon, staring at the dish of ice cream Gilbert had ordered for her, but for which she had no appetite.

  Caroline turned slightly and recognized the old man with the extravagant moustache from the smoking room the previous evening. He sat alone, his head drooping perilously close to his plate of pouding souffle Tyrolienne, sound asleep.

  “In some countries, I’m sure falling asleep after a meal is meant as the highest of compliments.” Gilbert’s voice held the trace of a smile.

  She turned to him with surprise. It had been so long since she’d seen him this relaxed, or make an attempt at light humor. His face brightened with a broad smile, showing the crease in his cheek she’d fallen in love with, reminding her of how they’d once been when he w
as courting her, and how full he’d made her young heart. She couldn’t help but smile back, then immediately felt it falter. She stared down at her melting ice cream, wondering if she ate it very fast, if it would freeze her mind so she wouldn’t have to think about the looming decision she had to make in less than a day. A decision she was no closer to reaching than she’d been the previous night as she crept from Robert’s bed.

  Caroline pushed the bowl away in disgust, remembering, too, the shared ice cream with Robert at another garden party, and how he’d told her to press her tongue against the roof of her mouth to stop the sensation of ice imprisoning her brain when she ate it too fast.

  “I’m sorry, darling,” Gilbert said. “I thought you liked ice cream.”

  “I do.” She attempted a smile, but it felt more like a grimace. “I just have no appetite.”

  His eyes searched hers, and Caroline knew what he was hoping to find. Yet she couldn’t look away. If he chose to believe that she could be expecting a child, and it was a thought that made him happy, then she wouldn’t take that away from him. She couldn’t. She’d already taken so much.

  She glanced around the dining room at the other first-class passengers enjoying lunch, surprised to see everyone eating vigorously as if it might be their last meal for days instead of just a few hours. “I’m surprised anyone has an appetite,” she said, attempting to continue the light tone. “It’s as if we do nothing but eat on board, with our daily schedules centered around what time the next meal will be served. I’ll be amazed if I can fit into all of my clothes once we disembark in Liverpool tomorrow.”

  “You could be as large as an iceberg and I’d still think you are the most beautiful woman in the world.”

  Caroline laughed, the genuineness of it surprising her. “Are you allowed to use that word while aboard an ocean liner, Gil? There must be some law.”

  “There might be, but no one will ever try to stop me from telling my wife how beautiful she is. Or how her laugh can brighten my sourest moods, and how her music lights the world. Or how very much I love her.”