Along the Infinite Sea

by Beatriz Williams

  “Breakfast is long past. But you can have eggs and coffee if you like. What are these?”

  “Flowers for you, ma petite. Lovely, aren’t they?”

  “For me?” I dropped my cello case against one of the chairs and stared at the vase on the round center table, which overflowed with close-packed blooms, all of them conspicuously out of season. I realized I had smelled the stargazer lilies all the way from the entrance hall.

  “Rather a humbling moment for your obedient servant.” Lady Alice joined me at the table, bringing an air of reverence with her. “One’s used to having worshipful flowers all to oneself.”

  “What’s this?” asked my father, from the doorway. He looked even more exhausted than Alice, though he was already washed and dressed, his dark hair damp against his neck.

  “Flowers for your daughter,” said Alice.

  He walked across the room to join us and placed a kiss on Alice’s shoulder, where the kaftan had slipped down. (What, this shocks you? I assure you, it took them all of two weeks.) “From whom?” he asked.

  “Not Charles,” I said.

  “No, Charles hasn’t two francs to rub together,” Alice said confidently. “But I took the liberty of opening the card myself.” She plucked it from the table and handed it to me. “Some German chap.”

  “German!”

  “Don’t be silly, darling. A nobleman, with terribly elegant handwriting. See for yourself.”

  I opened the card.

  With great Esteem on the Occasion of your musical Debut.

  Across the top, the name Johann von Kleist was engraved in discreet black letters.

  “Mon Dieu,” said my father. “What a very great surprise. I didn’t know the fellow had it in him.”

  7.

  In the beginning, Lady Alice had loved the idea of Paris. We’ll make you into a goddess, she had said on the train. We’ll be the queens of Montparnasse. She could use a change herself, something more interesting than luxury. She was tired of sleeping with rich men; she would try poor artists now, and see if that saved her soul.

  As I said, that resolution lasted all of two weeks, not that my father was all that rich anymore. But he wasn’t poor in the ordinary sense of the word, and the apartment was grand and littered with treasures, and the two of them actually seemed to be in love. Like to like, I supposed. Alice now wafted an air of delicate self-satisfaction like the most precious French perfume, and naturally her attention turned to my own affairs.

  “Of course you should see him,” she said to me, over lunch. “That’s what would complete things for you—your rehabilitation, I mean. A love affair.”

  “I don’t want to have a love affair.”

  “Of course you do. They’re great fun, for one thing, and for another, I think you need it. I was talking to an analyst the other day, and he said that you need to go to bed with someone else soon, before you develop a sexual complex.”

  “You and your complexes.”

  “They’re not my complexes, darling. They’re yours.”

  “I suppose your analyst proposed himself to do the honors.”

  She tipped her cigarette into the ashtray. “He did, in fact. But that doesn’t mean he’s not right.”

  “You do realize it’s all nonsense, this psychoanalysis business. This modern obsession with sex.”

  “No, it’s true. The sexual instinct is perfectly natural, it’s our life force, and when we suppress it the way you do—”

  “Herr von Kleist is twice my age,” I said.

  “Generally speaking, when it comes to lovers, the older the better,” said Lady Alice. “I daresay you haven’t looked at him properly. I did, at the concert. He was sitting at the back, looking aloof and powerful. That’s what age does to a man, the lucky chaps.”

  I thought of what Charles had said, on the pathway down to the boathouse. “Also, he’s probably a Nazi.”

  She blinked. “But why should that matter? You’re just going to bed with him; it isn’t as if you’re discussing politics and the Rhineland. I slept with a committed Communist once, the son of a filthy-rich banker. It was quite nice. We saw each other for a month or two, and he gave me the loveliest presents. I heard he later tried to bomb the Bourse.”

  The waiter arrived with lunch. We were sitting in the café around the corner, a sidewalk table that Lady Alice had obtained for us with a single silky gaze from her green eyes. She liked sitting outdoors, being on display. She would fold one gamine leg over the other and drape her hand with its cigarette around the curve of her knee; the other hand would caress a cup of coffee or a cocktail of some sort, depending on the hour (or not). Her honey hair would glint in the old autumn sunshine. Cafés were expensive, and cash was never all that plentiful in my father’s household, but somehow Alice always scraped together enough francs for a coffee and a sandwich at the Maginot.

  “Besides,” she said, when the waiter had left, “that’s part of the old frisson, isn’t it? Knowing you really shouldn’t sleep with him, and then you do.” She winked at me over the crust of her sandwich.

  Well, I couldn’t argue with that, could I? I thought about the horrifying inevitability with which I’d fallen into bed with Stefan. Yes, he was forbidden and dangerous. He was older and German and Jewish; he had just been mysteriously shot in the leg. What man could have been more perfectly unsuitable for me?

  So maybe Alice and her analyst were right, and I had a deep psychological appetite for unsuitable men. That was it, that was all it was. I hadn’t been in love at all, I was simply acting out a kind of script, like an actress playing herself. And now the play was over, and everyone had left the stage and gone home.

  Well, not quite everyone. Nick Greenwald. Stefan had sent a note to Nick Greenwald before he left France, asking him to look after this girl he’d fucked over the summer, in case she was pregnant.

  I lifted my knife and fork to the omelet before me. “It’s just a vase of flowers,” I said. “There’s no address. He was just being kind. He’s a friend of my father’s.”

  “Kindness is a dozen tulips, not a bouquet worth a thousand francs.”

  “A thousand francs! How do you know that?”

  “Because I’m an expert, my dear. I can look at a thing and know its worth in a second. It’s my particular talent. And what they say about love and money, that high-minded philosophy, it’s rubbish. You can always tell how much a man values you by the presents he gives you.”

  “Heartwarming.”

  “Isn’t it?” She put down her sandwich and lit another cigarette. “So I can assure you, Annabelle, darling,” she said, smiling, blowing smoke into the sidewalk, “we haven’t heard the last from this baron of yours.”

  Of course, she was right. The afternoon post brought a letter, addressed to me, on snowy thick stock, begging Mademoiselle de Créouville for the honor of accepting Fraulein Frieda von Kleist, age eleven, to her list of students.

  8.

  Eight days later, a few minutes before eleven o’clock in the morning, I arrived at the von Kleists’ apartment, a magnificent fifteen-room residence occupying three floors of a monumental Haussmann building on the avenue Marceau, for Fraulein von Kleist’s first lesson on the cello.

  Alice drove me there in Charles’s battered Renault. He had departed Paris abruptly a few days earlier, leaving behind the usual brief note, without any clue regarding his destination. But he had written a postscript, entirely atypical: Cheer up, Sprout, which was his childhood nickname for me.

  “I can’t tell you how thrilled I am,” said Alice. “This is exactly what you need.”

  “Yes, another fifty francs a week.”

  “You should hold out for a hundred. I’m sure he’ll pay whatever you ask.”

  The car rolled to a stop at the curb. I looked up at the monumental entrance and remembered that last scene at the Villa Van
illa, the look of terrible grief in von Kleist’s blue eyes, and the feeling that he had lived many decades longer than I had. There was something frightening about that, the knowledge of his experience and his misfortune. As if misfortune were somehow contagious, like a disease.

  Alice watched me pull my cello through the door. “Shall I pick you up afterward?”

  I rested the cello on the pavement and closed the door. “No, thank you. I’ll take a taxi.”

  I was ushered into the entrance hall promptly by a housekeeper in a neat black-and-white uniform, who called me votre altesse and asked me if I needed refreshment. I declined politely and sat down in a chair next to an empty Second Empire fireplace while my pulse knocked in my throat.

  I am here to teach music, I thought. That is all.

  The clock chimed, the door opened promptly, and a servant announced that Fraulein von Kleist was ready for her lesson.

  She was a lovely girl. She had her father’s icy coloring, except that on her the effect was bright and ethereal rather than arctic. She actually rose to her feet and curtsied when I entered, and her face was full of reverence. “Mademoiselle de Créouville,” she said, in perfect French, “I am so gratified that you have agreed to take me on. When I listened to you play at His Highness’s apartment last week—”

  “Were you there?” I asked, surprised.

  “Oh, yes! It was wonderful. My father had spoken so highly of your talent, and I have always wanted to learn the cello. I adore the voice, don’t you? Oh, of course you do! How silly of me. But really, it’s so rich and melancholy and delicious. Papa told me you were giving a concert, and I begged him to let me go.” She spoke sunnily, not at all like a girl who had lost her mother; in fact, her entire body—she was quite tall and slender, so that she looked older than eleven—radiated sunshine, from her pale blond hair to her luminous young skin. She’d said the word melancholy with the kind of relish only a girl of her age and innocence could muster.

  “I’m very flattered,” I said.

  “Of course, he hurried me away when the concert was over. He said the party afterward was just for the grown-ups.” Frieda might have let her eyes roll a fraction of an inch, and I nearly laughed because she reminded me of myself, and here I was, not twenty years old, feeling ancient by comparison.

  “Your father is very wise. Is this your instrument?”

  She turned to the cello, which was propped against a sturdy armchair, bow resting gently on the cushion. “Yes. Is it acceptable?”

  “It looks very fine.”

  “Papa’s very serious about music. He said there was no point in getting an inferior instrument.”

  I ran my fingers along the strings. “I understand you play the piano?”

  “Yes, and the harp.”

  “So you can read music already, and have some musical theory.”

  “Yes, Mademoiselle. I could read music almost before I could read books.”

  She was so eager and happy. I smiled at her and settled on the piano bench next to the armchair.

  “Very good, Fraulein,” I said. “Now sit down, pick up your bow like so, and we will begin with the A string.”

  9.

  The lesson was an hour, and when the elegant ormolu clock on the mantel read five minutes to eleven, the door of the music room opened and Herr von Kleist walked inside, wearing a plain military jacket of field gray and a pair of riding breeches.

  I looked up from the music, but he motioned for us to continue and sat down on the sofa by the window, one leg crossed over the other. He was wearing leather riding boots the color of cognac, polished to an oily gleam. He sat absolutely still against the blue damask, while the sunlight fell on his pale hair and his daughter concentrated ferociously on her bowing. At one minute to twelve, he rose to his feet.

  “Very good, Mademoiselle de Créouville. I appreciate your patience, teaching a novice.”

  “Not at all. I wish all my students were so eager to learn.”

  He turned to his daughter. “Frieda, my dear. Thank Mademoiselle for her time and trouble.”

  “Thank you, Mademoiselle!” She rose to her feet, bow in hand.

  “You’re welcome, Fraulein. You are an excellent student.”

  I showed her how to loosen her bow and put away the instrument in its case. When she finished, von Kleist told her to go upstairs to Fraulein Schmidt for her lunch, and as soon as the door closed behind her, he turned back to me with an expression I might almost have called sheepish.

  “She is my youngest,” he said, “so I indulge us both with a governess, instead of sending her away to school.”

  “She’s a lovely girl. Whatever you’re doing, it seems to be the right thing.”

  “Thank you, Mademoiselle. Luncheon is now being served. Would you care to stay?”

  I had been expecting something from him—an invitation to meet later and more discreetly, or perhaps a note of some kind—but not this, abrupt and formal and respectable. My fingers froze on the fastening of the cello case. “I don’t wish to impose,” I said.

  “Nonsense. I have already made the arrangements with my housekeeper. Frieda will eat upstairs with Fraulein Schmidt.”

  I could have refused. I thought, If I am going to refuse him, if I’m not going to go through with this, I should do it now. But as I straightened from the cello, and my mouth, panicked and guilty, opened to make the excuses, I caught a glimpse of von Kleist’s stiff face, and the vulnerability of his eyes, and I felt a surge of perverse power.

  The clock chimed noon. I smiled. “In that case, I should be delighted.”

  10.

  Von Kleist’s silent housekeeper ushered us into a small but elegant dining room—the family dining room, he assured me—which was already set intimately for two. The spring sun burst through the pair of large windows, overlooking what must be the garden below, or perhaps a courtyard. I glimpsed the nearby buildings, the multitude of windows and balconies, and felt the unbearable visibility of the city. A bowl of delicate new white roses nestled in the middle of the silver and crystal, and a bottle of champagne in a bucket next to one of the chairs. Von Kleist held out the other one for me.

  Lady Alice had dressed me in sky-blue silk that morning, because it suited my eyes, she said. My dark hair and my large brown eyes, my round little French figure and my large red American smile. He can’t resist you in a dress like that, she said, and I told her I wasn’t sure if I wanted him to resist me or not, and she laughed and said, You’ll make up your mind after he pours the champagne, and as von Kleist eased the cork softly out of the bottle—the familiar pop made me flinch—and drizzled it into my glass, I wondered how she had known. The champagne was Laurent-Perrier, and the worn label suggested something vintage. I remembered what Lady Alice had said over lunch, about the value of a man’s presents. Or perhaps he simply liked vintage champagne.

  Von Kleist filled his own glass and said, “I hope you are comfortable, Mademoiselle.”

  “Quite comfortable. This is a lovely room.”

  “Thank you. I have leased the apartment for some time, since I first came to Paris.” He sat down and lifted his glass. The sunlight entered his eyes. “I am very glad to see you are well, Mademoiselle.”

  I touched my glass to his. “It’s Annabelle. And I’m glad to see you’re well, too.”

  When we had finished lunch, the sun had tipped over the roof and the room had turned blue and almost dusky. Herr von Kleist asked if I would like to see the other principal chambers of the apartment and I said I would. He stood and helped me from my chair, and his hand was dry and large in contrast to mine. When I stood, dizzy with champagne, he seemed enormous.

  “How tall are you, really?” I asked.

  “A hundred and ninety-six centimeters.”

  “It’s very intimidating.”

  “Is it? I hope not.”

 
; “Yes, it is. You have almost thirty-two centimeters over me. More than a foot.” I didn’t know why I was saying these things. I had had too much champagne. I stared at the buttons of von Kleist’s uniform, holding the field gray forcibly closed over his warlike chest, and I thought it was impossible that someone so big could covet someone so little.

  “But why should that frighten you?” he said. “It is the natural duty of the large to protect the small.”

  I had to tilt back my head to see his face, which was shadowed and quizzical in the absence of the sun. “I’d like to see the library first,” I said.

  11.

  We made a circuit, and ended in the library again, where the housekeeper had laid out coffee. It was now two o’clock. “I’m afraid I’ve kept you from your work,” I said.

  “Not at all. What do you think of the place?” He accepted a cup and saucer. Men poured wine, women poured coffee and tea. There was something in there, an important reflection, but I was still a little too dull from the champagne to capture it.

  “It’s magnificent and beautiful and terribly orderly,” I said.

  He laughed for the first time, and it was richer than I imagined. “You were perhaps expecting chaos from me?”

  “No.” I laughed, too. “But it’s very different from my father’s apartment. Of course, they’d cleaned it all up for the concert, but you must have noticed the dilapidation.”

  He shrugged politely. “I like the peace, you see. If there is disorder, it is hard for the spirit to be peaceful.”

  I nodded to the silver-framed photographs clustered on the round table by my side. “Is that your wife?”

  “Yes.”

  I set down my cup and lifted one of them, of a blond woman who held a giggling flaxen-haired child in her arms. They were outdoors, in a field of some kind, with a tree in the background to the left. The woman was smiling hugely. “She looks happy. And quite young.”

  “She was. She was seventeen when we married. We knew each other as children. When I returned home from the front on convalescent leave, I discovered she had grown rather abruptly into a young lady, as girls do. I fell in love with her at once. By the end of summer we were engaged, and the wedding took place in October, before I left for the front again. I had just turned twenty.”