Along the Infinite Sea (30 page)

I rested my palms on either side of my legs and stared at my knees. My dress had ridden up a few inches, and my stockings were bare to the sunlight that crept past Stefan's body into the room. I turned around his words: “To see me, just once.”

“Yes.”

A horn sounded from an angry motorcar on the street below, and the sound was so distant it might have belonged to another universe.

I realized I should not have come here. Nothing could have been more foolish than this. Poor Johann, I thought, and then, I should leave.

I should leave now.

I lifted my face and saw my own reflection in the mirror above the desk: fair skin, wide American mouth, dark hair curling in the heat, dark eyes large with alarm. My red lips moved. “Well, what do you think?”

“About what?

“Do you think I could help? That Johann would help you?”

He stared quietly down at the street below. The brim of his hat curled up against the windowpane.

“I don't know,” he said at last. “You could answer that better than I could, I suppose.”

There was a ceiling fan above the bed, stroking the hot air in long sweeps. It wasn't much, but at least it was circulation. It was movement. I concentrated on the stirring at the back of my neck and said, “He almost never talks to me about politics, though. It's two separate compartments in his mind: family and politics. I got him to talk about it once, last Christmas, and it ended rather badly.”

Stefan lifted his head from the window. “Did he hurt you?”

“No. God, no. He would never do that.” I smoothed out the creases in my dress. “I think it's fair to say he believes in Germany rather than Hitler. But I don't think he sees them in opposition. He thinks the worst aspects of Nazism will simply go away when times are a little better.”

“He's wrong.”

“Well, I'm willing to ask him, if there's the smallest chance.”

Stefan straightened and folded his arms against his white shirt. “I thought you were angry about our little plan.”

“I don't mind talking to Johann, if it helps you. I just didn't want you to want me to do it.”

“Did I ask you to do this, last night? Did I say one word about it?”

“No.”

“No, I didn't, because it makes me sick to think of you with him, plying him for information. I don't want to give you a single reason to go back to Germany and to be his wife.”

“Well, I
am
his wife.”

“I know you are.”

“And there must be some reason I'm his wife, instead of yours. It must have some purpose. So maybe this is it. This is why I'm married to Johann.”

“Ah, yes. Your continuing belief in a logical universe, despite all indication to the contrary.”

“Is it so wrong, to have faith?”

He stared at me for a moment, head tilted to the right, and then he walked across the room to the chair before the desk and sank into the seat. “All right, then. Let us suppose you were designed by God to lure the general to the just cause. What then? Let us suppose he takes your bait, and we formulate a plan to overturn Herr Hitler and his odious ideas. Let us suppose it is successful, and Germany is saved, maybe Europe itself is saved, hurrah. We are all heroes, we are all grateful to Herr von Kleist and his loyal wife, who helped him to see the justice of our cause.” He laid his arm on the desk and rubbed one finger against the polished wood, back and forth. His eyes held mine, narrowed and hard. “What then, my dear Frau von Kleist? Do you leave him in the lurch?”

“I—I don't know.”

“Or perhaps we have already run off together, you and I. Perhaps you have left your husband and son—”

“I would never leave Florian.”

“Then perhaps you have torn the boy away from his father and brought him with you to live with me, a stranger. Is that all part of this faith of yours?”

“You're being cruel.”

“The
thing
is cruel, Annabelle. The whole damned thing.” He reached into his jacket for his cigarettes and placed one in his mouth. “Have you heard of the fucking Nuremberg laws?”

“Yes, I—I have. It's horrible. Something to do with property and registration and—”

“I will explain. First of all, this legislation means that I am not a citizen of Germany any longer, because I am a Jew.” He paused to light the cigarette. “It means also that—I speak hypothetically, of course—should you happen to divorce your honorable husband for my sake, I cannot marry you, because a Jew cannot marry a gentile, it is against the law. And I cannot say
Aha!
, I will simply marry you here in Paris and then take you home to Germany, because the marriage is null and void the instant we cross the border.”

“Since we are speaking hypothetically,” I said, “I will then observe that marriage isn't necessary to me. I'm long past caring about a piece of paper.”

“Ah! Well, that is what is so elegant about these laws, Annabelle, because it turns out it doesn't matter if we are man and wife, we are still breaking the law, since in Germany a Jew cannot fuck a gentile. Did you know that? He cannot fuck a gentile, he cannot make a mongrel
Mischling
baby with her. They will send him to the camps if he dares to try. Do you know about these camps, Annabelle?”

I thought of Florian and his sweet dark hair curling on his temple, his red mouth and soft tongue, and I wrapped my hands around my knees so they wouldn't shake. Stefan's face was bright with passion, a few yards away. I said softly, “Then I suppose—again, hypothetically—we would simply live elsewhere.”

“Brilliant! Yes. The perfect solution to our hypothetical dilemma. Except that my daughter remains in Germany, to say nothing of my parents and siblings, which is a little problem for me, you understand. The people I love, our business. Our damned money, of which there is so much. Shoes, you know.” He laughed bitterly. “The irony, eh? My family sells the Nazis the very boots with which they seek to kick us.”

“Can't you convince them to emigrate?”

He laughed again and reached for the ashtray in the corner of the desk. “Oh, yes. I can see the conversation now:
Mother, Father, listen to me. I have in mind to marry again, a dazzling woman, you'll adore her, except for a few small matters. She is a gentile, and the divorced wife of a fucking Nazi general, so unless you are prepared to leave Germany, which you have told me again and again you will never do, why, you will never see us again.”

I whispered, “Surely not.”

“And there is my daughter. My daughter, Annabelle. How do I say to my Else,
Good-bye, my dear little love, I have fallen in love, and unless your mother and stepfather kindly agree to emigrate for our sake, I cannot see you again
? I cannot do it, Annabelle. I will damn myself forever if I do. No. I am already damned. I am damned to hell for loving you, who are married to another man. And if I say, well then, to hell with right and wrong, I will break God's law and take this woman I love to my bed, married or not, then I am breaking also the law of the Nazis.” He brought his fist down on the desk and pointed to the bed with his other hand, the one holding the cigarette. He was almost shouting now. “
This
is the perversity of the universe. Do you understand now, Annabelle? Do you understand this perversity? It is so perverse that my own family is in perfect harmony with the damned Nazis on this point. So at last I have fallen in love, in the manner of the great romantics, but if I want to marry this woman, if I want to take this woman I love back to my own country and fuck her, I am breaking the law, Annabelle. I am breaking the
fucking law
in my own home!”

“But they can't do that! I'm a French citizen, I'm an American, too, and they can't tell me I can love one man and not another.”

Stefan tossed the cigarette in the ashtray and leaned down on his elbows to bury his hands in his hair. “Don't you see, Annabelle? That is exactly the point. That is exactly what they are trying to do.”

“Then let's not let them win,” I said passionately. “Right now, let's beat them, let's love each other.”

“I thought we were speaking hypothetically.”

“Don't be stupid, Stefan.”

He sighed, rose from the chair, and picked up my pocketbook from the floor. One by one, he added the contents: lipstick, compact, ticket stubs, coins. “They already
have
won, my love. It is already done. I am not going to ask you to divorce your husband. We are not going to fuck like a pair of fugitives, not in this room now, not in Paris or Berlin or any damned place.” He snapped the pocketbook shut and reached for my hat and gloves. “I am going to drive you back to your apartment now.”

I stood numbly. The breeze from the window moved my dress against my legs. I held out my hands for my hat and gloves and pocketbook, and Stefan gave them to me, white-faced. Our fingers nearly touched, but not quite.

“My God, you are beautiful, though,” he said softly. “The shape of your eyes. That skin. I thought my memory must have been mistaken.”

When I first realized I was going to have a baby, before Johann had proposed, while I was sick with pregnancy and with the thought of what I had done with Stefan, I had spent many hours staring up at the ceiling above my bed, reconfiguring the scenes of our meeting in such a way that I could have resisted him. I could have prevented this entire disaster. I decided he wasn't really all that handsome, and his charisma was just a mirage, an image of an oasis in a desert, easily ignored. That sense of connection with him, those hours of discovery, had been proven a lie: I hadn't really known him at all.

But I had been a fool, hadn't I? Standing here before Stefan's bed, two years later, a wholly different Annabelle, a wife and mother, accepting my hat from his hands without quite touching his fingers, I returned Stefan's gaze with equal wonder. I realized that no one could be so breathtaking, no one could be so familiar and so perfectly connected to me. His bones were like my bones. The shape of my eyes was like the shape of his.

How can we bear this? I asked.

(He took the hat from my hands and placed it gently on my head.)

Because we have to. Because you will know my heart is somewhere in the world, beating for you.

(I secured my hat and wiggled my fingers into my gloves. I asked if I would see him again.)

No, he said. It was for the best if we didn't.

6.

Eight days later, we lay side by side on Stefan's bed on the fourth floor of the Paris Ritz. The wooden fan rotated slowly above us. The heat had intensified, an almost unbearable compression of July air, ninety-nine parts automobile exhaust and one part oxygen.

“We should drive away somewhere,” I said.

“Where? The heat is general across Europe, I believe.”

“Anywhere. We could go to Versailles, or to Antibes. Your friend's house in Monte Carlo.”

“I'm afraid he is living there himself, at present.”

“What about your yacht?”

Stefan blew out a long cloud of smoke. “She is anchored in Capri. I am thinking of selling her.”

I sat up, shocked. “You can't sell her!”

“Why not? There is not much point anymore. How can I sail in her again, when your darling shade haunts every last corner? Lie down, now. You are blocking the air from the fan.”

I sank back into my hollow in the bedspread. I was damp with perspiration, and so was Stefan: all sheen and languor, not because we had made love three times in the past hour—we had not—but because today was the twenty-fourth of July, and all Paris was gripped with heat, and we lay together on a bed, fully clothed, down to our shoes.

That was our rule, you see. We could not possibly be having an affair if our shoes remained snug on our feet, if our clothes remained
intact, if we did not touch each other's skin except by accident or necessity, such as the handing over of the gloves and the hat, or the pouring of a drink, or the lighting of a cigarette, which I sometimes liked to do for him, simply because I envied the cigarette.

“It is still a matter of sin, however,” Stefan had said, the second day we had met like this. “We are indulging in the most elemental intimacy, and there is also the necessity for self-abuse, without which I could not possibly lie here next to you every day with any pretense of tranquility.”

I'd told him that this wasn't strictly necessary, that there were plenty of women downstairs who would be happy to perform on him whatever form of abuse he required, and he hadn't answered except to snort and reach for his drink on the bedside table. I had spent the following twenty-three hours wondering what particular meaning was contained in that snort, until Stefan opened the door to my knock the next day and took my hat and gloves, and it wasn't that I had forgotten the question: I simply ceased to care about the answer.

I came back the next day, and the next. I developed an affectionate relationship with the plasterwork of the ceiling above the bed. I imagined how we must look from above, and how the gilded borders formed a kind of picture frame around the two of us, Annabelle and Stefan, lying on our backs in the center of the bed, elegantly dressed, not quite touching. I knew each repeat, each fold and flaw, each nick in the paint and the gilding as I knew my own skin. I followed the familiar creamy progress of a scroll and said, “What are we doing here?”

“I haven't the slightest idea,” said Stefan. “This is an unprecedented exercise for me.”

“I don't think it's a sin. How can it be a sin? It's so pure, existing like this with you.”

“My dear, it is worse than a sin. We could commit the physical act of adultery, and we would not, in the middle of it, be so perfectly attached as we are like this.”

“Then why don't we make love? Since it's the lesser of two evils.”

“Because the one would not negate the other. Because if we made love, it would not make this existing together any more innocent.”