Along the Infinite Sea

by Beatriz Williams

  He stepped toward me and laid his hand along my cheek. “I don’t remember,” he said.

  6.

  “So, then, Mademoiselle. You enjoy this sort of activity,” said Stefan.

  “Shouldn’t I?”

  We were sitting together on a chair on the balcony, perfectly still. I was on Stefan’s lap, wrapped in a single white sheet and glowing like a forge. The sea glittered before us, crossed by lazy boats. I smelled the lemon and the eucalyptus and thought, I will always remember this, the scent of lemon will always remind me of this moment.

  “Not every woman does,” he said, and then added hastily, “or so I am told.”

  “Well, I do. I enjoy it very much indeed.”

  He kissed my hair. “For this, I am most profoundly glad.”

  “But you know,” I said, after a moment, “I think I like this even more. The afterward.”

  “This?”

  “Yes. Sitting together like this, still humming. Close your eyes.” I passed my hand over his eyelids. “Do you feel it?”

  “Hmm. Yes. I see what you mean.”

  “It’s as if I’m inside your skin, and you’re inside mine at the same time. Like we can say things to each other, without speaking.”

  “And what am I saying to you now, Liebling?”

  I listened carefully to his heartbeat. “That you have fallen in love with me. That you love the way my skin smells, and the way my belly feels under your hand.”

  “Ah, very good. But you didn’t mention the rest. How I love your hair and your soft, round breasts and your enormous brown eyes, and your crooked toes and your legs, and the hollows of your arms, and your wide American mouth, and the way you look at me when I am inside you.”

  “How do I look at you?”

  “As if I could do anything. As if I am invincible.”

  “But you are. You are invincible.” I stretched out my leg and wiggled the foot. “Are my toes really crooked?”

  “Yes, they are beautifully crooked. I want to kiss every one of them.”

  I laughed. “You see what I mean? This is the best part of all.”

  “No, love. You are the best part of all. Because this has never been the best part for me, until you were in it.”

  “Why? What did you do before?”

  He yawned. “Left, if I could. Now don’t talk anymore. Close your eyes and listen to my heart instead.”

  I closed my eyes and counted the beats of his heart. When I reached infinity, the faint drone of an engine interrupted the quiet. I lifted my head and saw a motorboat breaking away from the harbor traffic, in a straight line toward us. “Someone’s coming,” I said.

  Stefan opened his eyes and lifted his head from the chair. “Ah. I believe that will be my coxswain, bringing your cello.”

  “What cello?”

  “The cello I found for you this past week, from a very reputable dealer in Monte Carlo who assures me it is an Amati. I am hoping you will try it out and tell me I have not been taken for a fool.”

  7.

  I played for nearly an hour, while the tears swam from my eyes: The first Bach cello suite, which I knew from memory, restless and hopeful, each note emerging from inside the miraculous wood like the revelation of a mystery. And then Chopin, because there are certain things that only Chopin knows how to say.

  When at last I laid the beautiful curves back in their case and wiped the strings clean, I kissed Stefan on the lips and told him he was not a fool.

  8.

  Later that afternoon, we climbed back down the cliff to walk on the stone beach. Stefan held my hand as we scrambled over a stand of slippery rocks, exposed by the tide. “About our villa,” I said. “Can it be by the sea?”

  “Wherever you like.”

  “I want it to be just like this. I want to look out in the morning and see the water, and think about the Romans and the Etruscans crossing the harbors, and Hannibal with his elephants, and Dido waiting for Aeneas. And Napoleon’s ships sneaking across to Alexandria, and Nelson coming after him.”

  Stefan’s eyes narrowed into the sun. His skin was darker now, a smooth golden tan, as if he’d spent the past week entirely outdoors. Doing what? I wondered. He said, “I love that, too. How ancient it is. How we are all mere specks in time, perched on the shore, watching each other pass in turn.”

  He was holding the last end of a cigarette in his other hand. I pried it loose and tossed it on the rocks and put my arms around his neck. I kissed him and he kissed me back until we fell on the rocks together, laughing, and he put my hands away. “No, we must stop,” he said. “It’s too soon. I am not such a brute as that. It is tempting fate, making love so much.”

  “I can’t stop. I have to touch you, to remind myself that it’s real.”

  He held me against him while the sun grew heavy across the water. A seagull cried furiously nearby, the only movement in the world, except for the quiet beat of Stefan’s heart against my back. I loved his smell, his warm arms secure around me. I thought I had nothing to fear now.

  “Yes,” he said at last. “I know what you mean.”

  9.

  After a dinner of cold chicken and bread and cheese, I played the Boccherini in B-flat major, one of my favorites, in the lemon-scented courtyard, until the sky was black and full of stars, and Stefan drew the cello from my hands. His face was so tender it hurt my throat. “Time for sleep, Annabelle. You have had a long day, haven’t you?” he said, and I told him I wasn’t ready to sleep yet, and he carried me to bed anyway, where we made love for the third time. Stefan thought we shouldn’t, not just because of tempting fate but because he was afraid of hurting me. I said it hurt only a little, just at the beginning, and I didn’t mind that because of what came after.

  He was worried and careful and thoroughly aroused. I loved that: how I could make him want me, against his own premonitions, even against his own conscience. I loved the skillful way he moved inside me, the way he turned me on my stomach and asked how I liked this, if it gave me more pleasure or less, more relief or less from the tender abrasion. I never imagined you could mate like that, like beasts, feverish and deep, and I cried out that yes, yes, I liked it very much.

  When we finished, there was nothing left on the bed but the two of us, panting softly against each other. I have been very selfish today, Mademoiselle, Stefan whispered, and I wanted to tell him that it was the opposite, that he had given me everything, but I was too tired even to move my lips.

  10.

  The strangest part, stranger even than having made love to begin with, was sleeping next to him. He was hot and large by my side, his arm heavy over my ribs. I didn’t know if he was sleeping or keeping watch. I kept waking up, though I was exhausted, just to make sure he was still there, that he hadn’t left, that his smell—smoke and after-dinner cognac and a kind of warm, sweet sweatiness—still surrounded me.

  Once, it didn’t. I sat up and saw his shadow against the bedroom window. I called his name and he came back to the bed, and I told him I was afraid he’d gone away.

  No, he said, never that.

  Then what were you doing? I asked.

  I have been thinking about the two of us, that’s all. Now go to sleep.

  Only if you sleep too.

  I will, Liebling. I will now.

  11.

  I first heard about Peggy Guggenheim from one of the other girls at Saint Cecilia’s. Until then, I hadn’t quite understood what my father had done that was so awful. I thought my mother was to blame somehow, that she had been hard and unforgiving over some simple human crime, and she should have been kinder to him.

  But one night, while we were saying our prayers, Camille Montmorency had leaned over to me and whispered that Peggy Guggenheim a sucé la bite de ton père. I was only thirteen, and I had never heard of such a thing, either in English or in French (in which, like
most things, the concept was rendered more elegantly). I denied it fiercely, of course, but the seed was planted. So that summer, at the Villa Vanilla, I asked my brother about it. He had looked at me speculatively and said he guessed I was old enough to know by now. He explained what had happened, how mother had returned home early with a headache from some party, and found the two of them locked in what the French (again, more elegantly) call le soixante-neuf, right there in the ancient marital bed of the de Créouvilles. Upon investigation, it seemed they had been carrying on an affair for some time, and in fact Papa had been carrying on such affairs with multiple women over a great deal of time, and did not see why he should desist from such innocent pleasures, simply because his so-Puritan wife disapproved of them.

  From that instant, my sympathies had switched sides. I couldn’t hate my Papa, of course, who was always kind in those few moments he could spare for me. But this Peggy Guggenheim. How I hated her. I read about her in the newspapers, and the more I read the more I hated her. She would sleep with anybody, she had no morals at all. No man was safe from her talons.

  For a long time, I lived in despair. I thought there was no escape from being either a Peggy Guggenheim or a victim of such women, unless you didn’t marry at all, unless you never allowed yourself to fall in love. Like most adolescent obsessions, this had faded over time, but I’d never quite lost the dread entirely. It had hovered like a ghost in the back of my heart, sometimes howling and rattling its chains, and sometimes quiet. On the first night I slept in Stefan’s bed, an image woke me with a jolt in the hour before dawn: Stefan standing half dressed before a window, like a man I had glimpsed once at the Villa Vanilla, holding the head of a glossy-haired woman who knelt between his legs.

  “What’s the matter?” said Stefan, waking, too.

  The dream was so vivid, I thought it had actually occurred. My heart was pounding; my stomach felt as if it had been turned the wrong way. “How do I know you’re not going to sleep with Peggy Guggenheim?” I demanded.

  Stefan was still half asleep, and understandably confused. He propped himself up on his elbows. “Peggy Guggenheim? Why the devil would I want to sleep with her? She is as old as my mother.”

  “With anyone. How do I know you’re not going to sleep with someone else?”

  He stared at me with his morning eyes. His hair spilled recklessly into his forehead. He was not ignorant; he must have known the scandal of my parents’ marriage. “You don’t,” he said gently.

  Stefan’s face looked exactly as it had in my dream, except his eyes were open now, instead of closed in rapture. I rolled over into the pillow, away from him, and he laid his palm on the small of my back.

  “You don’t know that, Annabelle. You simply have to trust me.”

  “How do I trust you?” I whispered.

  “Do you want me to make a promise to you? I will, if you want, but everyone can make a promise.”

  “No. I don’t want you to promise me.”

  His hand was warm and still on my back. “So I will tell you this, Annabelle. I am not one of your Christian saints, but I am a fair man. It seems to me that since I am the first man you have ever had in your bed, it is only justice that you are the last woman I will have in mine.”

  I stared at the dark wall and reflected.

  “I don’t know. That sounds an awful lot like a promise.”

  “No, it is not. A promise is like the law, it can be broken. Not without consequence, but it can be broken. This is more like your American constitution. It is the terms by which I have allowed myself to form this union with you.”

  I turned over and found his face close to mine, too close and too shadowed to make him out. “But why? Why me?”

  He shrugged. “Because you are Annabelle. I can either be the man who deserves the love of Annabelle de Créouville, for whose happiness this fidelity is essential, or I will have to do without her. And since it seems I cannot do without you . . . well . . .” He shrugged again. “So there it is.”

  “Well,” I said, when I could speak, “you seem to have given this some thought.”

  “Yes. Now stop looking at me in this manner, or I will be forced to make love to you again, and you will not be able to walk.”

  I slid my arms around his neck. “But why would I need to walk anywhere?”

  12.

  We stayed at the little villa by the sea for three days and four nights. The skies were blue and hot, the evenings full of stars. We didn’t see another soul, except when we went into town for food, and we shed our modesty and our clothes in the luminous August air and bound ourselves together, sometimes only talking and sometimes making love, sometimes silent and sometimes clamorous, sometimes slow and gentle and sometimes feverish, sometimes in bed and sometimes on the balcony or in the courtyard or the bath.

  And once—because after all we were young, and this was the ancient sun-drenched coast of Europe—on the beach after dark, in the company of a bottle of ice-cold champagne and a thick blanket to soften the ground.

  The sun had been exceptionally hot that day, and by evening the temperature in the house was almost unbearable. After a late dinner, we had swum in the sea to cool off and dragged ourselves onto the blanket, still dripping. The moon hadn’t risen yet, and I could hardly see Stefan’s body against mine. His skin tasted like salt. He lifted himself on his elbows and eased slowly inside me, and as he did, he said something in German, under his breath.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing, love.”

  I wrapped my legs around him and said that wasn’t fair, we couldn’t keep our thoughts from each other after all we had done.

  He went still inside me. The rocks rubbed my back through the blanket. Stefan touched my hair with his fingers and moved again, a slow rhythm. “I will tell you if it comes true, Annabelle, but not before.”

  “A wish?”

  “Yes, Annabelle. Now let us put you on top of me instead, so we do not injure your beautiful back on these damned rocks.”

  He rolled over and positioned me above him. I came first, in a cry that ricocheted gently from the cliffs, until Stefan gripped my hips and followed me. Afterward, we slept on the beach until the air began to cool, and Stefan carried me up the path to the house, and into a bed that had never felt so soft.

  13.

  On the morning of the fourth day, I woke to find Stefan already awake and dressed, smoking on the balcony while the sun crept up from behind Italy.

  “You’re up early,” I said.

  “Yes.” He nodded to the harbor. “The ship is ready, as you see.”

  I lifted my hand to my brow. I couldn’t see anything; the glare of the rising sun found my eyeballs at a crucifying angle. “What a pity. Can’t we stay a little longer?”

  “No, my love. We cannot. We have already ignored the world too long.”

  His voice was stern and melancholy. I came around in front of him and knelt between his outstretched legs. The new pink sunshine coated his face. I laid my hands on his thighs and said, “So do we leave for Paris now? Or do we search for our villa with the olive groves and the vineyards?”

  He took the cigarette from his mouth and stubbed it out in the ashtray on the floor. “Ah, yes. This path we will travel together.”

  “Yes. Our path. Or have you changed your mind?”

  I was naked between his legs, and the breeze touched my skin, cool with the early sea. Stefan’s eyes were wholly absorbed in me. He touched the tiny bumps on my arms. “I have not changed my mind, Annabelle. You know that. But listen to me. This thing you want, this path, it is a complication for me. It is a path I did not imagine until now, and there are some family affairs I must arrange. On my own, love, back home in Germany. Do you understand?”

  “Of course.”

  He leaned forward, until his face was inches away from mine. “No, don’t look at me like
that. I am happy to do this. I am so happy, I will make these arrangements of mine with the utmost haste, so I can return to you, and we can plant our olives and our vineyards before the winter sets in. But in the meantime, you must stay here a little longer, Annabelle, just until I can arrange for—”

  “Stay here without you?”

  “Yes.” He hesitated. “Just for a short while. Just until I can return to you.”

  “But I can’t stay here, all alone. I’ll have to go to Paris, to my father—”

  “No! No, not to your father. Listen to me. This is why I have been thinking, on my ship last week and late at night when you are asleep. I have an idea. Do this for me, Annabelle. You know that right near your father’s villa is the Hôtel du Cap.”

  “Of course I know it.”

  “If I take a room there for you, if I leave you some money, can you stay there quietly until I can return for you?”

  His hands were curled around my arms, and his eyes had lost their smoke and grown sharp and intent, like a general planning a campaign. I hardly recognized him. I said, a little bewildered, “But how long will that be?”

  He hesitated. “I don’t know. As soon as I can, is that fair? And I will write to you faithfully, whenever possible, though you must not try to reply. We will find you a quiet room, and in a week or two when the summer is over this circus will be tranquil, the crowds will have left. Say you will do it, Annabelle, you will wait there for me.”

  Wait for Stefan, while he went off without me. To Germany, to his friends and old mistresses, the life he had without me. I felt the old panic rise up in my chest.

  “But—I don’t know, I haven’t thought—what will my brother say?” I said helplessly.

  “Don’t tell him. God, don’t tell him about us, not until I return and I can come to him properly. Can you promise me?” He took my face in his hands and kissed me so passionately, I couldn’t breathe. “Promise me. You will wait quietly, you will tell no one about us. I must make things safe for you first, Annabelle, safe for us both, and then we will have no more secrets from the world. We will be together before God and man.”