Along the Infinite Sea (15 page)

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 above 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.

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.

So that part was all on the up and up. Pepper needed a job in Washington, Pepper found the best job going for a sparky young woman with an English degree, grades not to be ashamed of, manner polished, face and figure top-drawer. She never imagined she would fall in love.

She's always scorned that phrase,
falling in love
. It implies a certain lack of conviction, a lily-livered helplessness that Pepper despises. How could you just
fall
in love? You stepped into love willingly, didn't you, and if it wasn't convenient, you found someone else to step into:
Voilà.
So maybe that was why it happened. Her guard was down. The hours were long, the quarters close, the job intense, the man himself so . . . well. Let's pick an example. One night, working late, everyone else gone, the old story. He offered her a ride home. She accepted. The convertible, the warm breeze, the Lincoln Memorial passing in a noble floodlit blur. They got to talking. His thick hair rustled, his eyes gleamed. She thought, alive and sleepy at the same time, What would it be like to kiss him? And then he did. Kiss her. Pulled over on the deserted street next to the Potomac and kissed her, and he tasted of the bottle of Scotch they'd been sharing, and cigarettes, and warm human mouth. She had wrapped her hand around the nape of his neck and kissed him back, an act of instinct, because at two o'clock in the morning after a long day's Washington work you clean forgot about a wife you'd never met, tending a litter of unknown children. He pulled away, looking adorably confused.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean that. The Scotch, I guess.
And Pepper patted her hair and agreed that it must have been the Scotch, and they didn't say another word, and that was when it started. That was when she fell in love with him, tumbled right off the branch and never hit bottom, and maybe she should have quit there. Yes, that was her mistake, that she didn't quit right there. Because once she started falling, the sex was inevitable, one way or another. Yes, she had gone home and scrubbed herself all over, thought, What have I done? And then, I will never, ever do that again. But when a man liked sex as much as he did, and a woman was as beautiful and besotted as Pepper, they had better get the hell away from each other, or one day at least one of them will have too much to drink, will be working too hard and feeling sorry for herself and let her guard down. One day they will end up drunk in a hotel bed somewhere, making love three times in one night, and at least one of them will come to repent it.

And that's exactly what happened.

3.

So there it is, the ticking face of her gold Cartier watch, and it says
Eleven o'clock, you lazy bitch
, and it can't be wrong, can it? Pepper pushes open the French door to the main house and calls out
Hello?
like a question, because the only two sounds are the fountain tinkling in the courtyard and the relentless songbirds in the lemon trees, who seem to have taken a wrong turn looking for Sleeping Beauty.

In the dining room
, calls out Annabelle.

Pepper might well ask
Where's the dining room?
but instead she follows her nose to the coffee and the bacon, and her nose—another valuable Schuyler inheritance—doesn't lead her astray. The dining room has high ceilings and a pair of French doors open to the sunshine and the songbirds, and, more important, a heavy wooden sideboard loaded with breakfast in chafing dishes. Annabelle sets down her newspaper and waves to the chair opposite, which is set with cutlery and an empty coffee cup. The pot stands to the right.

“Good morning,” says Annabelle. “Please help yourself.”

Pepper is already snatching a plate and sinking a silver serving spoon into an impossibly creamy batch of scrambled eggs. Bacon. Link sausage. Porridge (ignored). Pitchers of orange and tomato juice. Pepper picks the tomato, even though she's in Florida. “Clara will bring your toast,” says Annabelle.

Pepper sits and pours the coffee. “Thank you.”

“You're welcome. Feeling better?”

“Divine. Do you always have a spread like this at breakfast?”

Annabelle laughs. “Poor Clara. I told her I had a guest, and she's so used to a houseful, she doesn't know how to do it differently. Luckily, I'm a good eater.”

“How many is a houseful?”

“Oh, my goodness. Including the older ones and their spouses and kids?” Annabelle ticks on her fingers, frowns, and ticks again.

“You're a grandmother?”

“Oh, yes. Several times over.”

The coffee is hot and dark as oil. Pepper adds a pinch of sugar but no cream. “You don't look it.”

“I was a young bride.”

“Where are all these teeming hordes now?”

“My youngest are in college. The older ones settled in New York, the Washington suburbs. But everyone meets here at Christmas and in the spring. The din is atrocious.”

“You make it sound so alluring.”

Annabelle folds up her newspaper and finishes her coffee. Pepper gazes at the slim blue pack of cigarettes resting at her one o'clock position, next to the saucer, a blue-and-white pattern: Wedgwood, maybe. As a young debutante, Pepper never paid much attention to china; that was her older sister Tiny's expertise. Tiny's one of those girls who picked out her wedding pattern when she was eight years old.

Annabelle stands up and hands her the newspaper across the table. Her eyes are as warm and sympathetic as chocolate. “You might want to take a look at the headlines,” she says. “Something about one of your sisters.”

4.

Pepper considers calling her mother first. She taps her fingernails against the telephone receiver,
click click click
, and stares out the mullioned window to the deserted beach across the road.

Mums doesn't know about the baby. That's why Pepper buried herself at Tiny's house in Cape Cod at the beginning of summer, because she couldn't face Mums and Daddy. She couldn't even face Vivian. Strange that she should go running to Tiny in her time of trouble, to perfect Tiny, who never set a well-turned toe in the wrong place. Maybe she knew all along that Tiny had a juicy little secret of her own. Maybe
she sensed the unhappiness churning behind Tiny's immaculate shell, as opposed to the happiness that beams right out of Vivian's eye sockets these days. Maybe she knew Tiny would prove a better companion in misery, during the slow, hot summer in Cape Cod.

Or maybe Annabelle was right. Maybe she was just trying to punish herself.

When Pepper was thirteen or fourteen, out in East Hampton for the summer, she wore her first bikini. She'd bought it in town with her careful hoard of spending money, and the following day, a Wednesday, she made her debut on the beach atop a colorful beach blanket, stretching her golden limbs toward the sun. No umbrella. A pair of older boys had wandered over within five minutes, the neighbor boys, sixteen and eighteen.
If it isn't little Pepper, all grown up,
the eighteen-year-old said, toeing a friendly sprinkle of sand onto her bare abdomen. They had played a little volleyball, they had splashed in the surf. Billy (the older one) had put his hands around her naked waist and tossed her into a wave or two. Later, when she walked away to change, he had followed her and kissed her behind the weathered gray boards of the bathhouse, and while he was kissing her he slipped his hand inside the wet triangle covering her right breast and rubbed her nipple.
I have to go now,
she said, breaking away, and she had run up the steps and into the house before he could catch her—she could sprint, Pepper, when she had to—and there was Mums on the back porch, reading a newspaper, drinking something clear with a slice of lime and plenty of ice. Pepper never forgot the look on her mother's face when she burst up the final step, panting, a little blurry. The sad shake of her head.
You're like me, aren't you?
she said.
You just can't help yourself.
And Pepper said,
Don't be a square, we were just having fun,
and Mums said,
Sure, fun for him,
and Pepper said,
You don't understand anything,
just exactly like every teenager since the beginning of time.

Mums hadn't gotten mad. Mums kept her cool. She just laughed and finished her drink and said,
Well, for God's sake, whatever you do,
don't let them get you pregnant.
Those exact words. Pepper recalls them like yesterday's breakfast.

Click click click.

Pepper lifts the receiver and dials up her sister Vivian in Gramercy Park.

“PEPPER! MY GOD! WHERE ARE YOU?”

“I'm in Florida, love, keeping up my suntan. How's things?”

“MY GOD! HAVEN'T YOU HEARD?”

“What, that Tiny's getting a divorce? Old news.”

“YOU KNEW ABOUT IT ALREADY?”

“Of course I knew about it.” Pepper examines her fingernails. “I was on the Cape all summer, wasn't I? I had a ringside seat.”

“AND YOU DIDN'T SAY ANYTHING?”

“For God's sake, stop shouting like that. It was a private little matter, wasn't it, and anyway, it's not the kind of thing you can talk about over the telephone, in-laws lurking in every corner. Especially when your sister writes the nosiest gossip column in New York.”

“It is
not
a gossip column.” With dignity. “It's a witty and elegant disquisition of social customs in our magnificent little town. And it's the most-read page in the entire
Metropolitan
magazine.”

“I rest my case,” says Pepper.

The line goes quiet.

“Vivian?”

“I'm here.”

Pepper winds the cord around her fingers. “Have you talked to Tiny about it?”

“No, as a matter of fact. She's nowhere to be found. Mums got a letter from her yesterday. She's not saying what's in it. Poor Mums, she had her heart set on Tiny being First Lady. Now she's stuck with a divorcée and a doctor's wife. Her dreams crumbled in the dust. I guess it's all up to you now, Pepper, sweetheart. Any promising young senators up your sleeve?”

“Actually, I'm pregnant,” says Pepper.

Again with the silent receiver.

“Vivian?”

“Say that again, Pepper. I'm not sure I heard you properly.”

“I'm pregnant.”

“That's what I thought.”

“Don't fall all over yourself with congratulations.”

Vivian draws in a long breath that crackles against Pepper's ear. “Well, well. My God. Knocked up, the middle child. You're sure?”

Pepper looks down at her stomach. “Pretty sure.”

“Does Mums know?”

“Of course not.”

“When are you due?”

“February.”

“FEBRUARY! But that's—that's—”

“Soon. I know.”

“Holy moley. How the hell did you hide it from Tiny?”

“I didn't. She knows. That's why she let me stay on the Cape into the autumn. Fixing up that old car of hers.”

Vivian snorts. “Oh,
now
I get it. I should have smelled a rat, Pepper Schuyler rattling around in a greasy old garage for months on end. And I thought there must be a man involved.”

“Oh, there was. A delicious one. Regretfully, he wasn't mine. He was Tiny's.”

“TINY!”

“Indeedy. The ex–Mrs. Hardcastle. Not so virtuous as one might think.”

There is a groan, as of stones being laid atop an already heavy burden. “Stop. You're hurting my ears. I'm going to have to sit down.”

“Sit down? You, Vivian?”

“Well, I'm in a delicate condition, too, if you'll recall. By my legitimate husband, I feel compelled to add.”