Along the Infinite Sea (16 page)

“That's a first.”

“No sass from you, young lady. I was respectably married for
several
months before Junior arrived.”

“Do you want a medal for that?”

A creak of springs sounds faintly in the distance. Pepper props herself on the edge of the sofa table and waits for Vivian's familiar voice to reappear in her ear. The knot in her belly is beginning to unwind, under the tug of Vivian's familiar banter. Why didn't she call up Vivian before? They were born only eleven disgraceful months apart, after all, and it might as well be none. The snappy, happy Schuyler girls, tearing apart Manhattan and putting it back together again. Two and a half years ago, when Vivian moved into her own apartment after college, a dismal grubby fifth-floor walkup (it's always the fifth floor of a five-floor walkup, isn't it?), they had gone out to six different nightclubs before dawn, had smoked and drank and laughed and kissed all kinds of unsuitable men. And then they had gone back to Vivian's grubby apartment, holding each other up as they mounted the vomit-scented stairs, and collapsed together on Vivian's bed. Not another man in sight, at the end of the night: just two sisters, holding each other up.

“So. How are the hemorrhoids?” Vivian asks.

“Speak for yourself.”

“You're feeling good, then?”

“Tip-top. I never tossed a single cookie.”

“Ah, the luck of the wicked,” says Vivian. “Have you been seeing a doctor?”

“I guess that depends on what you mean by
seeing
.”

“Not in the biblical sense.”

“Then yes. At reasonably regular intervals. Everything seems to be shipshape.” The telephone cord crosses Pepper's belly in elongated squiggles. It's the same dress as last night, the blue tunic that matches her eyes. Pepper watches the fabric move, the cord shift. Baby's restless. “Any more questions?” she adds, though of course there is one last question, the obvious question, the biggie, the question even Vivian is almost too tactful to ask.

“So. Who's the father?” asks Vivian.

“No one you know,” says Pepper.

“Not at present, maybe, but I can guarantee he's going to know me shortly.” Vivian's tone is that of a cumulonimbus, towering on the horizon.

Pepper's already shaking her head, almost as if her sister can see her. “Down, Vivian.”

“If this little man-swine thinks he can get my sister in trouble and walk away scot-free—”

“I don't want to have anything to do with him, do you hear me? Not a single goddamned thing.” The words hurt her throat; she actually places her hand against the cords of her neck as she says them. The last word,
thing
, is just a whisper, stripped of conviction. Pepper shuts her eyes and squeezes her throat, squeezes hard, until her windpipe lies flat against the hard muscle. If she can't breathe, she can't speak, can she? She can't tell Vivian about the telephone call and the notes, the messages to the hotel, Captain Seersucker, the men outside who might be tourists and might not.

“That bad, is it?” Vivian says.

“Yeah.”

“So come home.”

Pepper shakes her head. “Can't.”

“Why not?”

“Because I like the weather down here, that's why.”

“At least tell me where you are.”

Pepper hesitates. “Cocoa Beach.”

Vivian sighs again, and for some reason Pepper thinks of her father, who was also there that day when she was fourteen, the day she wore her first bikini and found out what the older kids got up to during the summer, and who looked up from his newspaper when she ran in from the porch, clutching Mums's words to her half-naked bosom. He was sitting in the chair next to the window, and he looked as if he'd
swallowed a peach pit.
Had a good time?
he asked, in such a way that Pepper knew he'd seen every little thing from his perch up there above the beach, where he liked to spend his summer days watching the pretty girls go by. She said
Go to hell
, like every other teenager since after the war, while inside her head she thought,
My God, you old drunk, why don't you go out and tell Billy he can't just cop a feel like that, I mean, go out and thrash the sonofabitch for grabbing your fourteen-year-old daughter's tits behind the bathhouse.
Care
, for God's sake.

But he hadn't, had he? He hadn't heard what was pounding inside her head. He turned to the ashtray and made busy with the cigarette, and somewhere in the middle of all that stubbing he said,
Put something on, will you, before you start a riot.

Pepper was on her own, he meant. In these matters, Pepper would have to take care of Pepper.

Vivian speaks carefully into her ear. “You're sure you're all right, honey?”

Oh, Vivian. You with the nice doctor husband and the nice little cherub, the pretty sun-filled apartment in Gramercy and the glamorous job writing about glamorous people. Vivian, whose pregnant belly is perfectly legitimate, created in mutual love with her nice doctor husband. No more reckless nights out for Vivian, no more commiseration between Vivian and Pepper. How could you commiserate with someone who had no misery to share with you?

“I'm sure,” says Pepper, and before either of them can say anything else, she hangs up the receiver in its handsome ivory cradle, and for a long while afterward that rattle is the last sound in the room.

5.

But you can't keep Pepper cooped up indoors all day. Sooner or later she finds her way to the beach across the road, where the weather
is mild and the surf gentle. The tide reaches a few feet below the line of seaweed that serves as a high-water mark, and after a quarter-hour of walking, Pepper decides it's on its way out.

The comely young doctor in Chatham said that a long, brisk walk every morning was good for the baby and good for her. So Pepper walks briskly, a mile or so up the beach, and the sun is so warm she sits down on the deserted sand and stretches her toes toward the ocean. No curious eyes on her belly, no men grabbing her arm in a stairwell and telling her they had something important to discuss. No messages. No urgent notes.
Pepper, I don't know what kind of game you're playing, but we have to come to some kind of agreement here. A man in my position . . .

A man in his position. A man in his position could do whatever the hell he wanted, couldn't he? He could call on any resources he needed to track her down.

Three hundred thousand dollars was supposed to buy her safety. But where could she go that he couldn't find her? Her family, maybe. Her family would protect her, if they had to. The Schuylers might snipe among themselves, but they banded together effectively against outside attack. That was how they'd survived, while other families rose and fell around them: they stuck together. They held the line.

Except that this was no ordinary attack. And
attack
in any case meant casualties, and who knew what kind of casualties might be inflicted on innocent bystanders, as a result of Pepper having accidentally fallen in love and broken a commandment or two?

Pepper sits up. The sand falls away from her hair. She stares at the plumb horizon and thinks, My God, I made love to this man, we shared a hotel bed. We shared drinks and cigarettes and sex, we shared our bodies, the rummage of our souls.

And now this. Wondering whether her family is even safe. Whether her family would be safer if she goes to them, or safer if she does not. A doozy of a decision for Pepper to make, at a time like this.

6.

As Pepper crosses the road and starts along the circular drive toward the house, a pair of dogs lopes out to greet her. Weimaraners. She allows herself to be sniffed and inspected, and apparently she passes muster, because the dogs fall back to her heels and escort her inside like a visiting dignitary.

The rooms are still and sepulchral. Pepper was too distracted to pay much attention earlier—maybe she's still too distracted, but the long walk and the long ocean have settled her nerves just enough to make room for curiosity—and now she recognizes the quiet elegance of the house, the villa-like proportions, the simple furnishings. Annabelle Dommerich has taste. Pepper tosses her hat on the dining room table and wanders into the living room, from which she placed her telephone call to Vivian a few hours ago.

“Annabelle?” she calls out. “Mrs. Dommerich?”

One of the dogs nudges her hand. Dogs are marvelous, aren't they? No matter what your sins, if a dog can stand you, there must be some hope left for your soul. Pepper takes in the square proportions, the blue-and-white décor—Greece, she thinks, or some other lovely spot perched on the Adriatic, washed by a pale, hot sun—and she thinks, I could just about like this place.

The dog nudges her hand again, and Pepper, turning away from a large abstract painting, realizes that no one answered her call. The air is overgrown with silence. She casts a final glance along the four walls, the neat furniture, and as she fondles the dog's ears and prepares to leave, she thinks, That's strange, something's missing from this charming blue-and-white room overlooking the ocean, home in certain seasons to a large and fruitful family. Something no happy home ever lacks, something even the Schuylers display in silvery abundance, crowding every possible surface.

There aren't any photographs.

7.

Pepper crosses the hall, calling Annabelle's name. She sticks her head inside the next room, which seems to be a music room of some kind: there is a handsome ebony piano next to the window, and a straight-backed chair placed before a wooden music stand. A cello case is propped against the wall.

Pepper prepares to withdraw her head, but something on the opposite wall catches her eye. She steps closer and sees a large black-and-white photograph—yes, a photograph at last—depicting a dainty dark-haired woman on a stage somewhere, holding a cello between her knees. Her face is rapturously crinkled, a kind of ecstasy of concentration, and her arms have been caught in the very act of creation. She's wearing a dress that might be any color from black to scarlet, but you didn't really notice the dress, did you? You noticed that rapturous face, those poised and graceful arms, the curving cello between her legs.

Annabelle Dommerich, in the act of ecstatic creation.

Annabelle Dommerich. Wasn't there something familiar about that name, after all?

Pepper begins to breathe again, and that's when she notices that she had, in fact, stopped. Breathing, that is. That her chest had frozen a little, at the sight of that photograph. How old is that black-and-white image? How long ago did Annabelle Dommerich play the cello on a stage like that? Impossible to tell by the dress or even the hairstyle. Annabelle is so perfectly ageless.

So. Annabelle Dommerich's got a history of her own—not an everyday, trials-and-tribulations history, births and deaths and whatever else, but the kind of breathless and brilliant history that gives Vivian her
Metropolitan
magazine fodder. Fame and fortune and forbidden passion. But more than that. A rare black Mercedes, fleeing into the German night and then disappearing into a shed on Cape Cod.

A cello.

Pepper runs her curious finger along the curve of the top of the cello case, which is old and leathery and somewhat battered, not the kind of case you'd expect from a world-class musician. On the other hand, why not? Pepper doesn't do symphonies, at least not since the entire junior class at Nightingale-Bamford went to a matinee at Carnegie Hall, a compulsory exercise. It was the end of autumn, and a famous pianist was performing, but Pepper had spent the first half of the concert in the ladies' room with Edie Brooks-Huntington, whose boyfriend had just jilted her. Edie was a weepy kind of girl, went through a box of tissues at least, so Pepper took her seat only after the intermission, and even then, for the first ten minutes, her brain was occupied with plots for revenge against the Faithless Michael, until at last the music stole over her, note by note, and she realized that the piano was in some mysterious way expressing the exact same emotion. That the piano lamented, too; the piano wanted revenge.

Pepper never returned to Carnegie Hall. But she hadn't forgotten that moment of companionship with the grand piano. When, several years later, she was passing by Daddy's study and heard that same piece of music floating through the doorway, she had actually paused in the hallway outside and pressed her quiet hand against her ribs, until the last note bled away and the needle scratched to the end of the record, and Daddy had risen from his chair, lifted the arm, and changed the record to something else, a violin concerto, never knowing that Pepper stood there in the hallway, hidden by the door, sharing the music with him.

Pepper looks back at the photograph—one single photograph in the whole entire pad, and this would be it—and calls out softly, maybe not even meaning to be heard.

Annabelle?

8.

When she reaches the dining room, the French doors stand open to the courtyard, channeling a tide of ripe lemon and spicy eucalyptus. Pepper opens her throat and breathes it in. “Annabelle?” she calls again.

The dogs start off down the opposite corridor. Pepper follows them. Beautiful, athletic things. Their coats are a healthy silver-taupe, their tails undocked and wagging briskly. The hindquarters disappear around a corner, and for the first time Pepper hears a human voice, fondly scolding the dogs,
Oh, you wicked things, there you are, stay down now.
But it's not Annabelle Dommerich; it's the woman who brought in Pepper's toast and refilled her coffee.

“Oh, hello, Clara,” Pepper says. “I don't suppose you know where I might find my hostess?”

Clara says, “I was just coming to find you, Miss Schuyler. Mrs. Dommerich left an hour ago.”

“Left? Where to? Errands?”

“Oh, no. Gone off on one of her trips again.” Clara offers an apologetic smile and sticks a hand into her apron pocket. She pulls out a sheet of thick ecru writing paper, folded in half. “She told me to tell you she was sorry not to say good-bye in person.”