Along the Infinite Sea (11 page)

ANTIBES
•
1935

1.

A week passed. Charles had left with his friends before I returned; I was now wise enough to suspect why. Herr von Kleist packed up his few trunks and roared away in his beautiful Mercedes Roadster later that afternoon. My father—as always—rose late, retired late, and reserved nearly all of his time for his remaining guests. I had little to do except wander the garden and the beaches, to practice my cello for hours, to walk sometimes into the village, to examine the contents of my memory for signposts to my future.

On the seventh day of my isolation, I woke up under the settled conviction that I would move to Paris, to Montparnasse, and teach the cello while I found a master under whom to study. It seemed a natural place for me. I was both French and American, and I had read about how the streets and cafés around the boulevard du Montparnasse rattled with Americans seeking art and life and meaning and a cheap accommodation. If a certain handsome young German Jew were then to turn up on my stoop one day, perhaps requiring immediate medical
assistance, why, I would take him in with cheerful surprise. I would find a way to weave him into the hectic fabric of my happiness.

I was not going to wait any longer for my life to start. I was going to start my life on my own.

I repeated this to myself—a very nice tidy maxim, suitable for cross-stitch into a tapestry, a decorative pillow perhaps—as I walked down the stairs on my way to the breakfast room, where I expected the usual hours of peace until the rest of the household woke up. Instead, it was chaos. The hall was full of expensive leather trunks and portmanteaus, the rugs were being rolled up, the servants were running about as if an army were on the march. In the middle of it all stood my father, dressed immaculately in a pale linen suit, speaking on the telephone in rapid French, the cord wound around him and stretched to its limit.

“Papa?” I said. “What's going on?”

He held up one finger, said a few more urgent words, and set the receiver in its cradle with an exhausted sigh. He closed his eyes, collecting his thoughts, and then stepped to the hall table and set down the telephone.
“Mignonne,”
he said in French, opening his arms, “it is eight o'clock already. You are not ready?”

I took his hands and kissed his cheeks. He smelled of oranges, the particular scent of his shaving soap, which he purchased exclusively from a tiny apothecary in the Troisième, on the rue Charles-François-Dupuis. “Ready for what, Papa?”

“You did not see my message last night?” His eyes were heavy and bruised.

“What message? Papa, what's wrong?”

“I slipped it under your door. Perhaps you were already asleep.” He released my hands and pulled out a cigarette case from his jacket pocket. His fingers fumbled with the clasp. “It is a bit of a change of plans. We are leaving this morning, returning to Paris.”

“But we were to stay another week!”

“I'm afraid there is some business to which I must attend.” He managed to fit a cigarette between his lips. I took the slim gold lighter
from his fingers and lit the end for him. I concentrated on the movements of my fingers, this ordinary activity, to keep the panic from rising in my chest.

“But what about our guests?” I said.

“I have left messages. They will understand, don't you think?” He pulled the cigarette away and kissed my cheek. “Now run upstairs,
ma chérie
, and pack your things. Come, now. It is for the best. One should always leave the party before the bitter end, isn't it so?”

“Yes,” I said numbly, “of course,” and I turned and ran up the steps, two at a time, and burst without breath into my room, where I stayed only long enough to snatch the pair of slim black binoculars from my desk and bolt down the hall in the opposite direction, to the back stairs.

It was now the third week of August, and the sea washed restlessly against the rocks and beaches below as I stumbled along the clifftops, sucking air into my stricken lungs. I inhaled the warm scent of the dying summer, the weeks that would not return. I thought, I don't care, I don't care if we leave now and return to Paris, I have my own plans, I will live in Montparnasse, I will be sophisticated and insouciant, and he can find me or not find me, he can love me or not love me, I don't care, I don't care.

I skidded to a stop at the familiar rock, the rock where I had sat every day and watched the traffic in the giant mammary curves of the bay, in the delicate cleavage of which perched the village of Cannes. From here, you could see the boats zagging lazily, the ferries looping back and forth to the isles Lérins, to Sainte-Marguerite, where the fort nestled into the cliffs. I climbed to the top of the boulder and lifted the binoculars to my eyes and thought, I don't care, I don't care, please God, please God, I don't care.

From this angle, to the east of the islands, it was impossible to see where the
Isolde
lay moored—if she still lay moored at all—behind the Pointe du Dragon. I had tried—no, I hadn't
tried
, of course not, I had only dragged my gaze about as a matter of idle curiosity, but there was no glimpse of the beautiful black-and-white ship, longer and sleeker
than all the others moored there in the gentle channel between the two islands. I had taken her continued presence there as an article of faith. I had watched the boats ply the water, the stylish motorboats and the ferries and the serviceable tenders, and refused to think about the honey-haired woman who had come to see Stefan that first morning, and whether she was making another trip. Whether an unglamorous nineteen-year-old virgin was easily forgotten in the face of those kohl-lined eyes, that slender and practiced figure.

My legs wobbled, and the vision through the binoculars skidded crazily about. I planted my feet more firmly, each one in a separate hollow, and set my shoulders. The sea steadied before me, blue and ancient under the cloudless sky, and as I stared to the southeast, counting the tiny white waves, as if in obedience to a miraculous summons, I saw a long yacht come into view, around the edge of the point, black on the bottom and gleaming white in a rim about the top of the hull, steaming eastward toward Nice or Monaco, perhaps, or even farther south toward Italy.

The Cinque Ports were supposed to be beautiful at this time of year, and Portofino.

My heart grew and grew, splitting my chest apart, lodging somewhere in my throat so I couldn't breathe.

“She is a beautiful ship, don't you think?” said a voice behind me.

I closed my eyes and allowed my arms to fall, with the binoculars, into my thighs. I thought, I must breathe now, and I forced my throat to open. “Yes, very beautiful.”

“But you know, ships are so transient and so sterile. Nothing grows in them. So I have been thinking to myself, I must really find myself a villa of some kind, somewhere in the sunshine where I can raise olives and wine and children, with the assistance of perhaps a housekeeper to keep things tidy and make a nice hot breakfast in the morning, and a gardener to tend the flowers.”

My chest was moving in little spasms now, taking in shallow bursts of air. I said, or rather sobbed, “And what—will you do—in the winter?”

“Ah, a good question. Perhaps an apartment in Paris? One can follow the sun, of course, but I have always thought that it is best to know some winter, too, so that the summer, when it arrives, is the more gratefully received.”

I turned to face him. A tear ran down from each of my eyes and dripped along my jaw. Stefan stood with his hands in his pockets, right next to the rock, staring up at me gravely. His hair had grown a little, a tiny fraction of an inch, perhaps. I leaned down and put my hands on his shoulders.

“How strange,” I whispered. “I have just been thinking the same thing.”

He reached up and hooked me by the waist and swung me down from the top of the rock.

“Hush, now,” he said, between kisses. “Annabelle, it is all right, I am here.
Liebling
, stop, you are frantic, you must stop and think.”

“I don't want to think. I don't want to stop.” I kissed his lips and jaw and neck, I kissed him everywhere I could, wetting us both with my tears. “I have been stopping all my life. I want to live.”

“Ah, Annabelle. And I would have said you were the most
alive
girl I've ever met.”

“That's you. You have brought me to life.”

Stefan paused in his kisses, holding my face to the sunlight, as if I were a new species brought in for classification and he had no idea where to begin, my nose or my hair or my teeth. “Tell me what you want, Annabelle,” he said.

“But you know what I want.”

He took my hand and led me up the slope, where a cluster of olive trees formed an irregular circle of privacy. He urged me carefully down and I put my arms around his neck and dragged him into the grass with me. “I thought you had gone off with her,” I said, unbuttoning his shirt.

“What? Gone off with whom?”

“The honey-haired woman, the one you used to make love to.”

He drew back and stared at me. “My God. How stupid. What do I want with her?”

“I don't know. What you had before.”

“What I had before.” He lowered his head into the grass, next to mine. His body lay across me, warm and heavy, supported by his elbows. “You are the death of me,” he said softly. “I have no right to you.”

“You have every right. I'm giving you the right.”

He turned his mouth to my ear. “Don't say that. Tell me to stop, tell me to take you home.”

“No. That's not why you came for me, to take me home.”

He lifted his head again, and his eyes were heavy and full of smoke. “No. God forgive me. That is not why I came for you.”

I touched his cheek with my thumb and began to unbutton my blouse, and he put his fingers on mine and said, “No, let me. Let me do it.”

He uncovered my breasts and kissed me, and his hands were gentle on my skin. “So new and pure,” he said. “I don't think I can bear it.”

I spread out my arms in the warm grass.

“God will curse me for this,” he said.

“No, he won't.”

He kissed me again and lifted my skirt to my waist. I hadn't worn stockings or a girdle. He worked my underpants down my legs and leaned over my belly to touch me with his gentle fingers, in such an unexpected and unbearably tender way that my legs shook and my lungs starved, and at last I made a little cry and grabbed his waist, because I couldn't imagine what else to hold on to. His shirt was unbuttoned and came away in my hands. “Tell me to stop, Annabelle,” he said.

“Please don't stop. I'll die if you stop.”

He muttered something in German and fumbled with his trousers and lowered himself over me, so that his forearms touched my shoulders and he arched above my ribs. I felt his legs settle between mine,
pushing me apart while the grass prickled my spine. I loved his breath, the tobacco smell of him.

“Put your arms around me, Annabelle,” he said, and I pressed my palms against the back of his sunburned neck. He reached down with one hand and bent my knee upward, and I thought, My God, what have I done? He said, with his hand still on my raised knee,
Are you sure, Annabelle, are you sure you want this?
and I nodded my head once, because even when you looked down from the heights to measure the distance to the surface, and the terror turned your limbs to water, you knew you had to dive, you had no choice except to jump. And as I nodded, I lifted my other knee because I thought I'd be damned if I didn't jump in with both feet. Stefan's eyes went opaque. He sank his belly down to mine and said my name as he pushed into me, just my name—twice, a cry that was more like a groan,
Annabelle, Annabelle
—but I, Annabelle, had no air in my lungs to say anything at all, no way of telling him what I felt, the splitting apart, the roar of panic smothered by the gargantuan joy of possession.

He lay buried and still, breathing hard, and I thought, so dizzy I was almost sick, So that's it, it's over, we've made love, but then he moved again and I cried out, and he stopped and kissed me and said my name again, stroking my hair.
Open your eyes
, he said, but I couldn't. He moved again, kissing me as he went, and the sickness undulated into something else, a collusion between us, his skin on my hands, the roughness of his breath. I opened my eyes and thought, My God, this is it, now we are making love.

2.

We lay submerged for ages, while the morning went on without us. I had no will to move, no idea what movement was. At some point I opened my eyes and found the slow crump of my heartbeat against Stefan's ribs. He was beautifully heavy, pinning us to the earth, and in
my bemusement I thought he had fallen asleep. The tiny green leaves rustled above us, as if nothing had happened, nothing had changed at all. I watched them move, watched the patient blue sky beyond them, the wisps of dark hair near my eyes. Stefan's neck was smooth and damp beneath my fingers. Between my legs, I was shocked and stretched and aching, and I did not want it to stop, I wanted this abundance to continue forever.

When he spoke, the softness of his voice stunned me.

“
Gott im Himmel.
Annabelle. I did not expect that.”

“It was unexpected and beautiful.”

“Everything about you has been unexpected and beautiful.” He pushed back my hair, which had come loose across my face. “Look at you. What a brute I am.”

“I didn't give you a choice.”

“A man has always the choice. Did I hurt you?”

“No, no.”

“Yes, I did. I hurt you. I tried to be gentle, but I have never done that before, been with an innocent.”

“Never? Really?”

“Never. And I can't seem to regret it. A cad as well as a brute.” He kissed my lips, rose up on his hands, and lifted himself carefully away. He gazed back at me and his face was deep with remorse. I sat up and laid my bold palms against his cheeks. “Don't look at me like that.”