Along the Infinite Sea

by Beatriz Williams

  But mostly, Pepper loves to flirt. She loves the joy of the hunt, though she stops short of the kill. Like any Thoroughbred, she was born to run. That’s what matters, after all: the knowledge that you were the fleetest animal in the pack, and who cares if you get to stand in the winner’s circle with the flashbulbs popping and the garland looped around your neck? All you need, all you really feed on, is the knowledge that you’re the most desirable woman in the room.

  Until it doesn’t matter anymore.

  Because she’s not the same old Pepper, is she? Because at this very second, her right hand, obeying a primeval impulse, lies across the apex of her belly. She couldn’t have stopped it if she tried, if she actually held it down with her left hand. She, the predatory Pepper, is now on the defensive. She’s got something worth protecting.

  She can’t win. She can’t go back. Somewhere around the fourth or fifth month of pregnancy, she crossed an invisible line, a Rubicon of biology, and became a mother. She doesn’t belong here anymore. She may never belong here anymore.

  The reflection breaks over her like one of the more vigorous waves washing up on the beach this afternoon—the surf was brisk, the weather was on the move—and for an instant she hesitates, there in the doorway with all eyes on her.

  The instant passes and so does Pepper, right back into the Thunderbird, right back to the old house by the sea, though she maybe makes a wrong turn or two along the way.

  3.

  By the time Pepper undresses and crawls into bed, her limbs are done for the night. Her brain, on the other hand, doesn’t know when to quit.

  The room is peacefully dark, not a drop of light. She lies on her side, gazing at the space where the opposite wall should stand—if she could see it—and forces her eyes shut, except that they keep pinging open again, like a child’s pop-up toy, indefatigable. The baby kicks around in sympathy.

  After half an hour or so, she sits up and turns on the light. What’s happening to her, that her body is so weary and her brain can’t stop jumping? She wants to sleep. She wants to finish something first, and she doesn’t know what it is.

  Pepper used to sleep naked. It’s a sensual thing, a freedom thing, but since coming to Annabelle’s house, since jumping awake at every little whisper in the night, wondering if they’ve tracked her down already, she’s taken to wearing underwear and a long shirt. She still resents them for it. She swings her legs over the side of the bed and reaches for the linen robe draped across the nearby chair. She slings her arms inside and belts the sash high, above her bump. She leaves the slippers behind and makes her way softly across the midnight courtyard to the main house, which is unlocked, and pauses in the doorway, because she doesn’t know what she’s doing here.

  In the absence of purpose, she wanders to the kitchen and pours herself a drink of water from the tap. The house is so silent, she wants to scream.

  She stares through the kitchen window into the black courtyard. This silence, my God, this void. This itchy absence of sound. She would talk to anybody right now, just to get rid of the quiet. But mostly, she thinks, gazing at the corner of the courtyard where the lemon trees grow side by side with the bougainvillea, she wants to talk to Annabelle. Gentle, frank Annabelle, who disappeared nine days ago.

  She sets the empty glass in the sink and turns off the light. There is no Annabelle; even her dogs sleep elsewhere, in Clara’s quarters, down a corridor somewhere. She wanders back into the hall, bumping into corners, feeling her way along until her fingers strike air where the study should be. A pretty room; Pepper’s seen it from the outside. Though the furniture is sturdy and wholesome, and the colors richly neutral, Pepper has the feeling that this was Annabelle’s office and not her husband’s.

  She steps inside and flips on the light.

  The switch illuminates not an overhead fixture but the lamp on the desk, an old-fashioned number that looks like a retrofit from the days of kerosene. The rest of the desk is mostly empty. A telephone sits at the corner. Pepper’s heard it ring once or twice. It seems to have its own line; the one in the living room doesn’t ring in tandem. At the top of the desk is a small clock. Pepper walks around the corner and reads it. Half past one.

  If she picked up that telephone right now, at half past one in the morning, and she called her mother and said I’m pregnant, Mums, I want to come home, what would her mother say in return?

  She pulls out the chair and sinks down to stare at the telephone.

  She could call Vivian again. She should call Vivian again.

  She should call her mother.

  She puts out her hand and rests it on the smooth bakelite curve of the receiver, just centimeters away from the round dial, the little black numbers and letters. Hello, Mums, you’ll never guess. Pepper’s in trouble. Big, big trouble. Maybe even a little bit scared. Maybe, for once in her life, not quite sure what to do next.

  The hand falls away.

  Also, at the top of the desk, there is a pair of handsome pens in a small marble stand. Right next to the clock, right next to half past one in the morning.

  Pepper doesn’t write letters. She writes the occasional thank-you note, when she has to, but the humility and patience of letter writing don’t exactly flow like milk and honey in her veins. She’d rather talk to you in person, face-to-face, so she can put all her talents to use.

  But maybe this is one of those things you wrote down on paper, instead of telling them live and unrehearsed. Pepper takes one of the pens out of its holder and fingers the tip. Dear Mums and Dadums, It’s the craziest thing. Dear Mums and Dadums, I’ll bet you’re surprised to see a letter from me, your own daughter. Dear Mums and Dadums, I think it’s time I told you something.

  Yes, that was it.

  Pepper leans down and rummages through the desk drawers until she finds a box of stationery, thick and expensive and anonymous, no monogram or heading of any kind. She selects a few sheets and squares them on the blotter. She picks up the pen and writes the date and Dear Mums and Dadums, and that’s when she hears the front door opening and closing, so softly you’d have to be paranoid to notice it.

  4.

  For an instant, Pepper freezes. She grips her pen and thinks, It’s Annabelle, of course it’s Annabelle, but that doesn’t stop her heart from smashing against the wall of her chest. Doesn’t stop the adrenaline from hurtling through her veins.

  The lamp.

  Pepper pushes back the chair and launches herself to the switch on the wall. She turns off the light and flattens herself in the lee of the half-open door.

  The house has gone still again. No footsteps, not the slightest sound. But there should be footsteps, shouldn’t there? If someone’s just entered the house. Annabelle’s heels should be clattering happily along the flagstones of the entry. She should be rattling her car keys, setting down her suitcase, tossing her pocketbook on the table, going through the mail. But there’s nothing, a distinct void of noise, as pregnant as Pepper’s belly. She puts a hand on top, just to be sure, and tries to stop breathing.

  And then. A voice. Deep but soft, a male voice that wants to be heard by one person alone.

  “Who’s there?”

  If she could, Pepper would dissolve into the wall, become one with the paint and the plaster. Wouldn’t that just fix everything? Pepper Schuyler, dazzling socialite, shimmering Girl Friday, now a wall in a seaside Florida villa.

  The baby turns around and slugs her in the kidneys.

  Pepper releases a tiny gasp, just a tiny one, but it’s enough.

  “Who’s there?” This time, it’s a demand.

  Precious little light filters through the window and the half-open door. Pepper looks around slowly, keeping her cool, trying to remember what lay where. From the hallway outside comes the sound of footsteps, heavy, muffled by the rug.

  The bookshelf along the wall. Pepper reaches out her arm and fingers her w
ay along the top, something, anything. A metal shape finds her palm, too small, but that’s all there is. She can feel the footsteps now, vibrating the floorboards beneath her slippers. The object is slender but heavy, a small statue of some kind. Pepper slips back behind the door, just as it begins to move, just as a hand appears around the edge.

  She swings.

  But the hand, the damned hand actually knows she’s coming. Before she can snap her elbow forward, the fingers enclose her wrist, stopping the arc of the blow, and the next thing she knows, she’s tucked in a headlock against a too-solid chest, the metal object drops on her right foot, and as she opens her mouth to scream, the voice from the hallway growls in her ear.

  “What the hell have you done with my mother?”

  Annabelle

  PARIS • 1935

  1.

  At first, I refused to believe that I was pregnant. It didn’t seem possible; August was like another lifetime, an Annabelle who no longer existed. The antiseptic language of reproduction—The average emission of the human male contains some three to four hundred million individual gametes—had nothing to do with the breathless and beautiful act of intercourse with Stefan, the long heat-soaked hours in his arms.

  I ignored the signs staunchly, inventing every possible excuse, until I could not. Until Alice caught me vomiting in the bathroom at the end of October and brought me a worn white washcloth from the linen cupboard, which she ran under the faucet and handed to me with a sigh of resignation. “I suppose it was inevitable, the two of you so young and virile,” she said. “Really, he ought to have known better. I’ll ask around for a doctor. You will have to get it taken care of at once, of course, before poor von Kleist suspects anything.”

  I straightened. “What do you mean?”

  “My dear, he’s not going to want to have an affair with a pregnant woman. He’s certainly not going to want to wait around until the child’s born. And unless you’ve slept with him already, he won’t possibly believe it’s his.”

  “No.” I sank down on the stool and put my face in my hands. The washcloth was cool and damp against my cheek. “I haven’t slept with him.”

  I hadn’t even kissed him. I arrived every Tuesday morning for Frieda’s lesson, and had lunch with Johann afterward, though we took no more tours of the apartment and he hurried back to the embassy after driving me home in the black Mercedes.

  On Thursdays and Saturdays we went riding in the park. Johann called for me promptly at six, and I was back in my father’s apartment by nine-thirty, soaking my worn muscles in a hot bath. The pattern had become so regular, I arranged my week around it. Twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays, a large bouquet of flowers arrived from a fine Parisian florist. The blooms varied, but they were always fragrant and expensive. Alice and I would sit around the table and admire them as we drank our morning coffee. “I do hope he’s getting his money’s worth, then,” Alice said, a week ago, and when I told her that he wasn’t, not even a sou, she laughed. “Trust you to find the only man in Paris who doesn’t make his mistress earn her keep,” she said, shaking her head, and I didn’t bother to argue that he wasn’t keeping me at all. He sent flowers and gave me lunch and paid me a hundred francs a week for Frieda’s lesson: that was all.

  On the other hand, he demanded nothing of me except my conversation, and not very much of that. It wasn’t that we didn’t talk; he was just economical with words and ideas. We spent most of our time in a kind of easy and understanding silence, a relief after the frenetic energy of Alice.

  “Well, then,” she said. “I’ll see what I can do. You’ll burn in hell, of course, but then won’t we all?”

  2.

  A month before my mother died, we had an enormous row. I was eleven and old enough to know things. There had been a father-daughter tea at my school, and of course I had no father to go with me, and so I went with my uncle, the husband of my mother’s sister, and sat awkwardly with him, drinking watery tea and eating stale cake, while the other girls laughed and talked with their genuine fathers, basking in their warm baths of paternal adoration. I came home and threw my hat against the wall in the parlor that smelled of lemon polish and damp wool. “It’s your fault, you left him! Why did you leave my father? You were cruel to him so he found another woman.”

  She had slipped her index finger in her book and closed the pages over it. Her face had gone a little pale. “You mustn’t speak about things you don’t understand, Annabelle.”

  “I understand more than you think. You drove him to someone else, and then you left him, and now I don’t have a father. I could be in France, I could be a princess, and instead I’m stuck here!” I pointed to the faded wallpaper, the shabby furniture, the tired knickknacks on the shelves, the battered radiator that banged in the corner. “And it’s your fault!”

  “You’ll understand when you’re older. It’s not that simple.”

  “When I’m grown up, I’m going to be a good wife. I’m going to lavish my husband with love so he’ll never go to another woman. I’m going to make sure my children have a father.”

  She replied in a quiet monotone that—at the time, so young—I had wrongly imagined was emotionless. “Darling, sometimes it doesn’t matter how good you are, and how much you love your husband. There are some men who need more than that, who will never be happy with just one woman. I did what I thought was right for you.”

  I had stamped my foot on the threadbare rug and told her she was wrong, that it was her fault. I would never do such an awful thing to my children. I would make sure they had a father who loved them.

  Oh, Annabelle, she said.

  I hate you, I shouted.

  Then I had run up the stairs to my room and shut the door and put my head under the pillow, so I wouldn’t hear her crying.

  3.

  The day after Alice discovered me in the bathroom, I went to the doctor, though not the one she recommended. I had no intention of seeing Alice’s doctor. I had seen the women in the convent hospital who had tried to get rid of their babies. Some of them had died. Others had been so ravaged inside that it was a wonder they had lived. We had treated them, of course, but the nuns had told us afterward that these were the wages of sin, that God might forgive a woman for some things, but not for this. Stefan’s child was my punishment for having loved Stefan without repenting, for having shared sexual passion with a married man.

  I went instead to my father’s doctor, a man named Périgault who looked nearly sixty and had gentle hands. He told me what I already knew, that I was going to have a baby at the end of May.

  “Very well,” I said. “What do you recommend?”

  Dr. Périgault drummed his fingers against the edge of the desk. His eyebrows made a ragged line along the top of his spectacles. “I recommend you find a husband, Mademoiselle de Créouville, with preference to the man who is the father of your baby.”

  I stared at his gray hair, at the bushiness of his brows above the round wire frames of his eyeglasses, and I wondered if he had known my mother at all.

  “What very helpful advice, Doctor,” I said. “But I’m afraid that isn’t possible. The man is already married.”

  4.

  Lady Alice was waiting outside in Charles’s old Renault. When she saw me, she dropped her cigarette on the pavement and reached across the seat to open the door. “Well? All sorted out?” she said.

  “I’m pregnant, if that’s what you mean.”

  “And didn’t the good doctor give you lots of lovely advice?”

  I turned my head to the blur of striped awnings and said, after a moment, “I swore, when I was a child, that I would never raise my children without a father. I would never do what my mother did.”

  “Darling, everyone’s doing it these days. Well, not everybody. But it’s not like thirty years ago, when your life would be ruined. Actually, it might make you a divine novelty, if you play your
hand properly.”

  “I don’t want to be a divine novelty.”

  “What do you want, then? To be some stupid respectable housewife in the banlieues, tending her flowers and her fat old husband?”

  “It doesn’t have to be so extreme.”

  “Yes, it does. Nobody stays in love forever, and then you’re just stuck together out of habit and inertia and bloody sniveling children. If you simply go on having passionate affairs, you never have to give it up. It’s like being in love constantly, for ever and ever, only with different people.”

  “Until you’re old and nobody wants to sleep with you.”

  She laughed and leaned her elbow on the doorframe. A delivery van reared up before us, and she wound around it, grinding what was left of the gears. “That will never happen to me,” she said. “I’ll kill myself before I get old.”

  “What a rosy picture you’ve painted for me. I can’t wait to get started.”

  “All I’m saying is that you’re looking at this all wrong. There’s no law that says you have to get married. So you’re convinced you have a propensity to sleep with philanders, because of your mother and father and all that. I’m sure my analyst would agree with you there. But don’t weep about it. Every girl wants to, if she admits it. If she would let herself. They’re heaps more fun, for one thing.”