Along the Infinite Sea

by Beatriz Williams

  I wanted to protest. But how could you say no to words like that? When you are so young, and he is so urgent. When the blood thrills down your fresh new limbs at the idea of waiting in a room at the Hôtel du Cap, overlooking the autumn sea, for your lover to return to your arms.

  I was so young, and we had just made love. My heart was turned over, my body remade. In three days and four nights, I had come to think that everything was possible, that you could live by love alone. I had come to think that my mother had made a terrible mistake, that she had chosen a title over love, decadence over purity, but I in my extravagant wisdom had chosen so much better than she had. I had chosen Stefan, and things would be different for me.

  So I kissed him and said Yes, yes, and he helped me dress, and I helped him pack up the house. We climbed back down the cliff to where his motorboat bobbed by the little jetty, waiting to whisk us away to paradise. To the Hôtel du Cap.

  14.

  We drove without speaking around the curves of the Antibes road, straight to the hotel, where Stefan with careless arrogance arranged a room under the name of Mr. and Mrs. Silverman. The clerk didn’t raise a single eyebrow. My cheeks were bright with shame. I scribbled out a note and addressed the envelope to my father in Paris. Stefan tipped the clerk generously.

  “There, you see?” he said, tossing his hat on the chair, when we had arrived in the room and dispatched the bellhop, who had led us to our room and pretended to carry our nonexistent luggage, with a ten-franc note. “Nothing could be easier.”

  I turned around in a slow circle. “You said something about a discreet room?”

  “This? This is nothing. Besides, if we had asked for a cheap room, the clerk would have thought it suspicious.”

  I glanced down at my dusty and rumpled skirt, my bare legs. “I’m not exactly dressed like a lady, am I?”

  Stefan lit a cigarette. “You are perfect. A perfectly respectable woman who has been out walking all morning. If you were a prostitute, you would be wearing stockings and a silk dress.”

  “And how would you know that?”

  He smiled and shrugged. “Common knowledge.”

  I came to stand against the French door to the balcony, as far away as I could from the open entryway to the bedroom. The walls and furniture were dressed abundantly in blue toile. Our house by the sea was so simple, I had almost forgotten what decoration was like. My cheeks were still pink; I felt the heat simmering just under my skin. Across the room, Stefan leaned against a too-delicate chair and watched me.

  “So, my Liebling,” he said. “Why don’t you take a nice bath, and I will order us a room-service lunch to make up for all the humble meals I offered you in Monte Carlo.”

  “I loved those meals. I loved eating them with you.”

  “This is very kind. But there is something to be said for fine cuisine, too, don’t you think?”

  “Very well,” I said. “But no mushrooms.”

  He smiled and picked up the curving receiver of the telephone. “No mushrooms.”

  15.

  When I emerged from the bath, a table had materialized in the middle of the room, covered with white linen and silver domes. Stefan stood by the open French door, smoking and watching the sea crash into the cliffs beyond. He had poured himself a drink, which sat half empty on the console near his elbow, next to an ashtray already half full of stubs. His hands were crammed in his pockets. Without looking at me, he removed the cigarette from his mouth and asked me how I enjoyed my bath. I said very much, and it was true. The miracle of water.

  “Good.” He placed his fist on the doorframe, and his knuckles were white. He asked me how I was feeling.

  I thought, I love you.

  He turned his head. His eyebrows were worried. “Annabelle?”

  “I’m feeling famished, Stefan, after that thing you did to me this morning, when we were supposed to be packing.”

  Stefan picked up his drink and finished it off. He looked into the glass, as if he could somehow conjure more. “Are you, now?” he said.

  “Famished.”

  “Then I suppose it is fortunate I ordered such an immense quantity of food.”

  Under the silver domes, there was roasted chicken and delicate new potatoes, haricots verts and a fragrant red Burgundy. We ate without saying much. Afterward we had chocolates and coffee, and Stefan sat back in his chair and smoked a cigarette while I tucked my feet up under the robe and sipped from a delicate demitasse cup. The coffee was hot and strong and expensive. “When do you leave?” I asked.

  “I ought to have left already.”

  “But that would hardly have been polite.”

  “No.” He let out a paper-thin stream of smoke and smiled vaguely at me. He had taken off his jacket and his tie; the day was growing warm, and even the sea breeze from the balcony couldn’t budge the heat from the noontime sun, which streamed directly through the south-facing window. I spotted a bowl of gardenias sitting on the console next to the doors, the source of the perfume.

  “I’m going to miss you,” I said.

  “Yes.” He stubbed out the cigarette and rose. I watched him walk to the balcony doors and open them to the widest possible extent. The breeze moved his white shirt. I set down my cup and went to him.

  “What’s wrong?” I whispered, touching his back.

  He raised his arm and pointed. “Look. You can see Sainte-Marguerite from here. There is the fort where I kissed you.”

  “Stefan, for God’s sake. Tell me.”

  He sighed deeply. “You are ruthless, Mademoiselle. You are like the damned bloodhound on the scent sometimes.”

  “Yes, when I have to.”

  His hand, which was braced on the doorframe, dropped away and slipped into his pocket. “I have been pondering my own selfishness, I suppose.”

  “You weren’t being selfish. I was. I threw myself at you, I wanted whatever you had to give me.”

  “No, I mean my whole life. I have been very thoughtless, without even realizing it. I have simply taken pleasure and tried, on occasion, to return it. And now there is you, Mademoiselle.”

  “A complication.”

  “Yes, a complication. But something else. I have been trying to think of the English word. A reckoning? I am forced to consider my own sins, for the first time in my life, and it is a sober task.”

  “I don’t know why making love to me should make you consider your sins.”

  He touched my cheek. “Because you are an innocent, Annabelle, and for all my crimes I had never yet corrupted the innocent.”

  “You didn’t corrupt me. That was the opposite of corruption. Those were the most beautiful days of my life.”

  Stefan let out a sigh and turned away to light another cigarette. “Can there be any more proof than that?” he murmured, and he walked through the French doors to the balcony and leaned his elbows on the railing. I followed him. He plied the cigarette between his fingers and said quietly, “I have had the feeling, since we drove away from the house, that I was leaving behind my own happiness. That when I made love to you there this morning, it was the last time I ever would.”

  The sun lit the curling tips of Stefan’s hair. I laid my elbow on the railing and faced his gaunt profile. “Oh, so is that what’s brought on all this moping? A premonition?”

  He turned. “You are a silly blithe American gentile, Annabelle de Créouville, with no respect at all for the perversity of the universe.”

  “Because the universe is not perverse. The universe is beautiful. Look at us here, the two of us, finding each other among billions.”

  “Yes,” he said, “that’s what is so perverse.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  He smoked quietly for a moment, staring into the trees below us. “Do you want to know how I imagined my life ten years ago, Annabelle? This is how my life was supposed
to go. I go to university, I join my father’s firm, I manage our businesses without, I hope, disgracing myself. I enlarge the family fortune. I find a nice lovely Jewish girl, as a good Jewish son is supposed to do, and we settle down together and grow old and everybody is happy, me and my family and my nice Jewish wife, and whatever else God chooses to bless us with.”

  “And now there is me,” I whispered.

  “Now there is you.”

  “I don’t want to upset your family.”

  He looked up. “My family, Annabelle? My family?”

  “Because I’m not a Jew.”

  Without warning, Stefan whirled around and slammed his fist against the paved wall behind us. I heard the sick sound of his flesh connecting with the pale stone. He said, into the wall, “No, Annabelle. You are not a Jew.”

  From the gravel path below came the sound of female laughter, as bright and unexpected as sleigh bells in the hot afternoon. A hundred yards away, the Mediterranean glittered and heaved, speckled with shipping, yachts and fishing boats and ferries and tenders, all of them absorbing the last hours of summer in perfect contentment and lazily unaware of the perverse universe contained atop this small hotel balcony. I picked up Stefan’s hand and kissed the torn and bleeding knuckles, one by one. I said, “Stay with me here, then. Stay a few days, away from everything else, your family and obligations and these stupid rules we’re supposed to follow.”

  “I have already done that, as long as I could. I cannot just pretend it isn’t there, Annabelle. I cannot just hide with you forever. I have to find some way for us to live.”

  “It doesn’t matter how we live, as long as we’re together.”

  He shook his head. “You are so young, Annabelle. What am I going to do with you?

  “You’re going to come inside and take me to bed. You’re going to let me show you how wonderful the universe can be.”

  Stefan studied my mouth. His face remained still, while his eyes filled with smoke. The laughter grew louder and then ended abruptly, as a door closed below us. He took his hand from mine, folded his arms, and looked at me gravely. “You do not understand a word I have said, Mademoiselle. Nothing could be worse than such audacity. The universe would then be ten times against us.”

  I untied the sash of my robe, right there on the open balcony while the woman laughed below us, and it occurred to me that we had done this before: me parting a dressing gown, Stefan gazing at me with astonished rapacity, as I prepared to commit an act of unexpected daring.

  “On the other hand, the universe might just be forced to surrender and join us,” I said, and I opened up the robe.

  16.

  You see? You were wrong, after all. No thunderbolts from above. We survived.

  Speak for yourself, Mademoiselle.

  So you’re not worried about the universe anymore?

  Liebling, if you think I am capable of any rational thought at this moment, then I fear you have still much more to learn about this business of making love.

  (I laid my head against his bare shoulder.)

  You know, I’m not asking you to leave your family. I would never do that.

  Of course you would not, Mademoiselle. Which is why these delicate matters are left to me.

  17.

  I wanted to go walking that afternoon, but Stefan insisted we stay in our room. He would leave in the morning, he said, and he didn’t want to share me with another living creature. He didn’t want to have to nod and smile at other guests when he could be filling his eyes with me.

  I slipped from his arms and took out my beautiful new cello from its case. I tuned each string and played the entirety of the first Bach cello suite in G major—prelude, allemande, courante—while Stefan lay on his back in the bed behind me and smoked in silence. When I finished, he asked me to play something else, and I did. For an hour I played for him, until he got up to pour himself another drink and came up behind me to kiss my neck. I put down my bow in mid-measure. No, he said. Don’t stop. I want you to play everything you have ever played for me, one more time.

  That will take a while, I said.

  We have all night.

  18.

  The afternoon fled, and I had to stop before my fingers bled. Stefan made me put on a dressing gown and ordered dinner. What about the restaurant? I asked, and he said no, we would have dinner here on the balcony, just the two of us, while the sun sank and the pungent Mediterranean colors faded to indigo.

  When the table was cleared away, I told Stefan we had to go outside now, because the rooms were so full of smoke that I couldn’t breathe. All right, he said, I suppose it’s dark enough.

  We walked along the gardens and cliffs without saying much. The air was cooler now and gentle and smelled of newly caught fish. I took the breeze deep into my lungs. Stefan held my hand. When we came to the Eden-Roc, he led me down the stairs to the little stone beach and put his arms around me as we looked out to sea.

  “What do you think of Capri?” he said.

  “I don’t know. I’ve never been there.”

  “It is beautiful. We will have the sea and our privacy. We can raise our olives and our children. I will have my agent look into some villas there.”

  A wave washed up, higher than the rest, and wet my toes.

  “What about the wine?” I whispered.

  “I am not certain if the soil is suitable for vineyards. I will investigate this for us. But if we cannot make wine?”

  I covered his hands with mine, around my waist.

  “Then I suppose we’ll have to be content with what we have.”

  19.

  We returned to our room smelling of the sea. The smoke had left through the open windows and the balcony doors, and I made Stefan promise not to light any more cigarettes. We undressed and got into bed, me on the left and Stefan on the right, the way we had arranged it from the first night. Let’s just sleep, Stefan said, facing me in the darkness. I want to see if I can resist you.

  You can’t resist me, I said, and I was right. You will wake up tomorrow and you won’t be able to walk, Stefan said sadly afterward, cradling me against him, and I told him I was at the Hôtel du Cap, I didn’t need to lift a finger if I didn’t want to. The windows were all open, and the room was cool and new. We lay quietly entangled, inhaling the gardenias, inhaling the salty marine scent of each other, and I thought, This is the last time, I will wake up tomorrow and he’ll be gone. And I won’t be able to walk.

  20.

  Once, during the night, I sat up and saw Stefan’s 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 already.

  “No,” he said, “not yet. In a few hours, before the sun comes up. Go back to sleep, Annabelle, Liebling.”

  “What were you doing?”

  He took me back against his chest, in the way we had been lying before. “I put some money in the desk drawer for you. There is also the name of my banker in Paris, who will help you if you need anything else while I am gone.”

  “What else would I need? You won’t be gone that long, will you?”

  “I mean in case there is an emergency, or you perhaps need to tell me something.”

  In my innocence, I couldn’t imagine what I would need to tell him, other than everything. I lay there quietly, matching my breathing to his, paying attention to each respiration so I would remember them all.

  Stefan said, “Also, I have been thinking a little, about this constitution that governs our union.”

  “You wish to add an amendment or two? An escape clause?”

  “No. I have been thinking that perhaps constitution is the wrong word. It is maybe more like a covenant.”

  “Stefan,” I said in French, “I think I’m falling in love with you.”

  He lifted my hair and kissed me in the tender sliver of skin ab
ove my ear. “Oui, Mademoiselle de Créouville. C’est la même chose avec moi.”

  21.

  When I woke up, the sun was just rising, and Stefan was gone.

  I rolled onto my stomach and went back to sleep, with his pillow pressed across my breast.

  Pepper

  COCOA BEACH • 1966

  1.

  The shower in Annabelle Dommerich’s guest cottage runs hot as blazes, the way Pepper likes it. She closes her eyes while the water burns down her back, turning her skin red, raising blisters almost. Like a disinfectant.

  The baby stirs. Pepper looks down at her belly, the curious round ball of it, and pushes her finger against a protruding wet lump. The lump shifts and pushes back, and Pepper, transfixed, says the only thing that comes to mind.

  Hello.

  How crazy, being pregnant. You said to yourself casually, “I’m pregnant,” like you might say you were bored or sunburned, and in the beginning that’s what it was, a theoretical condition, manifest in inconvenient little symptoms that had no obvious link to the biological reality, the peculiar fact that a new and separate human being was growing inside the center of you. You didn’t notice the human being until much later, and you still couldn’t quite picture it in your head, a baby. A real one. A tiny fat red little person.

  I’m sorry about all this, Pepper adds. (Not aloud, for God’s sake.)

  But that’s the trouble. Sorry isn’t enough, is it? You could never be sorry enough.

  2.

  Because she hadn’t set out to sleep with another woman’s husband, had she? She had her scruples, believe it or not. Everyone always said, It’s Pepper Schuyler, lock up your husbands, but it wasn’t true. This was the first husband she’d ever slept with.

  She’d taken the job after Vivian got married, because a girl had to do something with her life; she couldn’t just sit around waiting for her own Dr. Charming to show up, and anyway Pepper wasn’t really interested in marrying Dr. Charming. Too much fun to be had, too many adventures to record in the precious few years of excitement your youth and beauty—they did run together, youth and beauty, didn’t they?—allowed you. New York was getting old, and she looked down the New Jersey Turnpike toward Washington and said I’ll have that. Of course, Dad wouldn’t even consider law school—I’ve wasted enough money educating daughters—so she made a few phone calls, called in a few favors, and what do you know, the new junior senator from New York needed a Girl Friday.