Along the Infinite Sea (31 page)

The shadows of the fan blades chased themselves fruitlessly around the ceiling. They had lengthened by at least two centimeters since I had arrived. The minutes bled out, one by one, and soon there would be nothing left. I would rise from the bed and take my gloves and my hat, and I would walk out into the shimmering sidewalk as if I had not left all my blood inside.

“Then let's at least hold hands,” I said.

“We should not under any circumstances hold hands, Annabelle.”

My fingers touched his, and our damp hands curled together on the bedspread.

7.

My father adored Florian, and the affection was mutual. I would watch them play together on the floor next to the sofa, spreading toys and books all over the august inlaid floors of the apartment, and feel a strange combination of bemusement and betrayal.

“You weren't like this with me or Charles,” I said, the day after I had held Stefan's hand on the fourth-floor bedspread of the Paris Ritz.

“Wasn't I?”

“No. You were off amusing yourself most of the time.”

“I am amusing myself now,” he said, demonstrating a proper rhythm on the samba drums, and I looked at Alice, who reclined on the sofa with a magazine. She smiled beatifically and shrugged her bare shoulders.

We went into lunch a half hour later, and no amount of squealing and messiness could interrupt Papa's enchantment with his grandson. “Thank God he does not have his father's coloring,” Papa said, “as if someone had poured a measure of bleach over his head.”

Alice suppressed a giggle.

“I happen to like Johann's coloring,” I said.

“Oh, of course. It suits him perfectly, doesn't it? Like a great Teutonic iceberg.”

“Papa!” said Florian, and he threw his bread on the floor.

I bent over to retrieve the bread. “He can understand more than you think, you know.”

“Yes, of course. He is the cleverest boy, aren't you,
chouchou
?” Papa made a face, and Florian squealed.

I gazed at the two of them over the rim of my wineglass. “I suppose you might as well get used to this, since you're starting over again with one of your own.”

“Oh! We're getting married, by the way,” said Alice. “Next month, at the Hôtel du Cap. I should very much like you to be matron of honor, if your family can spare you.”

I stopped the wine on my lips. “Married?”

“Yes, of course,” said Papa. “I am not such an old blackguard as that.”

I set down the glass and wiped my fingers on my napkin. I thought, Poor Mummy. “Oh, I can imagine your asking. But I can't imagine a clever girl like Alice accepting you.”

“I hadn't much choice, I suppose. But I believe I know how to manage him.”

“You manage me extremely well,” Papa said, and they exchanged a look of such happiness that I lost my breath.

Why, they're in love, I thought, and the panic rose up from my chest to choke me. Alice wasn't supposed to be happy like this; she was supposed to be restless and eternally dissatisfied, and I was supposed to be the wise matron who had chosen her partner well, who dispensed wise advice about the care and management of husbands, and the joys to be discovered in a wholesome family life.

Florian jettisoned another piece of bread. His caramel eyes grew round and wet. “Want Papa,” he said, between heaving sobs, and he stretched out his arms to me.

I lifted him from his chair and held him against my chest, and his
little heartbeat pattered against mine, his little fist curled around mine. “Presumably you'll do a far better job of managing him than Mama did,” I said.

“But that was my fault,
mignonne
,” said Papa.

“Oh, you're admitting it, are you? That's a step in the right direction.”

“I am older and wiser, that's all,” said Papa. “Is it not possible for an old dog to learn his new tricks? I have determined that sexual congress is perhaps not so essential to happiness, after all.”

“But bloody important, nonetheless,” said Alice.

“Better late than never, I suppose,” I said.

Alice lit a cigarette. “But can you come? To the wedding, I mean. Will you be irrevocably in Germany, or does he let you out on good behavior, from time to time?”

“I'm sure he won't mind if I slip down for a few days.”

I began to ask Alice about the arrangements, dress and flowers and guests, and Papa excused himself. I stroked Florian's damp hair. The storm had passed, and his breath tickled the hollow of my throat, steady and gentle. Alice watched the door, and when it had closed behind my father's neat gray-suited back, she turned to me and asked me what was all this about my having an affair.

My hand went still on Florian's hair. “I'm not having an affair.”

“Then it's all perfectly innocent, your meeting a man every day at the Ritz?”

I whispered, “Where did you hear that?”

“The usual birdie. You haven't even bothered to disguise yourself, I'm told. Such an amateur.” She reached for Florian and settled him on her lap to play with her necklace. “It's Stefan, isn't it?”

I hesitated. Was there any point in lying to her? “Yes, it's Stefan, but it's not what you think.”

“My dear, you don't think I disapprove, do you? Enjoy yourself, by all means. When the cat's away and all that. I'm hardly the girl to judge.” She held Florian's fingertips and let him rise to his feet on her
lap. He laughed and grabbed her cheeks, and her arms went around him as if she were born for it, born to cuddle a baby on her lap. “Just watch yourself, lovest. I suspect this particular cat doesn't like his little mouse to play.”

8.

Can I ask you something?

Whatever you like, Annabelle.

What did you say to me, that time we made love on the beach?

(Stefan smoked his cigarette and sipped back the rest of his brandy.)

Don't say you don't remember.

Yes, I remember. I remember it well. I was praying to God that we would make a baby together in that moment, so that you would have no choice but to become mine, and vice versa.

(Around and around went the blades of the fan.)

I suppose it was a selfish thing to pray for, after all. You were not even twenty. But I could not help myself. I wanted some sign that I was not deluded, that God in his mercy had actually meant me for you.

(Around and around, making long swishing sounds like the ocean.)

Is something the matter, Annabelle?

No, Stefan. Nothing's wrong. But I think it's probably time for me to go home now.

9.

When I returned home, Florian hadn't yet woken up from his nap. He slept on his stomach, wearing only a shirt and napkin, damp and a little flushed by the heat. I stood by his crib and touched his dark hair. His fist made a twitch, a flexing of his small perfect fingers, and I
remembered how I had watched Stefan sleep one afternoon in Monte Carlo, naked on the bed, in the exact center of a beam of white sunlight. The utter peace of him. I remembered thinking how beautiful he was, and how lucky I was that I would spend my entire life watching him like this, as he slept off the bliss of lovemaking inside a patch of sun.

10.

I turned on my side to face Stefan's gaunt profile. “What if I don't go to Germany next month? What if we take Florian in the car with us and drive to Antibes for my father's wedding?”

Stefan's hands were folded beneath his head. He stared up at the rotating shadows on the ceiling. “You are not to ask me these things, Annabelle. You are to say to me,
Stefan, this is what I want,
and I will do it. God forgive me. I will find a way to give you what you want.”

11.

“I can't do it,” I said to Charles. “I can't spy on Johann for you. It's not honest.”

We were walking along the Seine with Florian, poking into the bookstalls and perspiring. Charles stopped and turned to me. A book lay open in his hands. Proust.

“But it's not spying,” he said. “Not really.”

“That's not why it's dishonest. It's dishonest because I'll have to pretend everything is normal. That I'm still in love with him, if I ever really was.”

Charles looked shocked, standing there holding his open Proust. Florian darted around the corner of the bookstall, and I launched
myself after him, losing my hat to the hot wind. He giggled and made me chase him, and when I caught him at last, I blew a raspberry into his tender throat and told him how much Mama loved him, how beautiful he was, how miraculously like his father.

“Papa!” he exclaimed, and he threw his arms around my neck.

12.

It was the twenty-ninth of July, and Stefan and I faced each other atop his bed on the fourth floor of the Paris Ritz. Our shoes were off—it was too hot, I said, and it was silly to think that shoes made any difference—and I was tracing my finger down the scar on the side of Stefan's face.

“I think I'm ready to tell you something,” I said.

He put his finger across my mouth.

“Let's not talk,” he said. “It is too hot to speak.”

13.

When I arrived home at the avenue Marceau an hour and a half later, I put my key into the lock and realized at once that something was different. A current of energy ran from lock to key to hand, as if someone had wired the door for electricity while I was out visiting Stefan at the Ritz.

I turned the handle and opened the door, and there was a great peal of laughter from the drawing room, yes, a great peal of laughter from a delighted Florian, and an answering roar from deep in an enormous chest.

14.

The day my mother's appendix burst, we were on Cape Cod, staying with her sister and my multitude of cousins. Mummy had complained of a sour stomach the night before, and my aunt, always intensely practical, always a little jealous of Mummy's French title and perhaps a little smug that the expensive French marriage had ended exactly as she had predicted on their wedding day, told Mummy she had always been too soft, and to take an Alka-Seltzer and go to bed.

The next morning, I awoke to a strange quiet in the house, as if every floorboard had lost its will to live. I looked across the still air to Charles's bed, which lay empty and unmade, the sheets flung back in haste.

I sat up, and the door cracked open. It was my cousin Franklin, golden-skinned and blue-eyed and white-toothed, a perfect American teenager. He was off to Harvard in the fall, and eventually he was supposed to be president. Charles hated him. He took cheap shots at football, Charles said.

“Awake?” asked Franklin.

“Why is the house so quiet?”

He told me that the house was so quiet because everyone was at the hospital, and everyone was at the hospital because my mother had been taken there in the night, and now she was dead.

Dead, I said.

Dead, said Franklin. I'm sorry.

I said it was a stupid joke, and Franklin said he was sorry but it wasn't a joke. It was appendicitis. They had tried to operate, but it was too late.

I sank back in my pillow and drew the blanket over my head. I said four Hail Marys, and when I finished the last one I knew it was true, that Mummy was gone, that I would always hate Franklin Hardcastle for saying he was sorry when he really wasn't.

Later, when the shock had worn off, I wondered how the floorboards had known. How the house had known something was wrong before I had.

15.

In the drawing room, Florian was riding on top of Johann's back as if my husband were a horse in the Bois de Boulogne. Johann saw me first. He lifted his large head in mid-whinny and his face shed its delight.

“Johann,” I whispered. “I thought you were in Germany.”

He reached behind his back and grasped Florian's kicking legs, and he maneuvered the two of them until he was standing before me with Florian in his arms, clinging for dear life. His eyes were a clear and somber blue.

“My wife,” he said, “my darling wife, I had to come. I have missed you so much.”

I opened my mouth to reply, but the door from the hallway banged open and a ball of blondness hurtled into my arms. “Mother!” exclaimed Frieda, and I burst into tears instead.

16.

Johann asked me if I had eaten, and I said I had. He gave Florian to Frieda and said she must play with her brother while Papa talked with Mother. He had given me his handkerchief, and I was still cleaning myself up while he took my hand and led me into the bedroom and closed the door. He picked up my other hand and fell to his knees and kissed my fingers. “
Mein Liebling
, my treasure. My wife. Annabelle. I am so sorry.”

I thought, This can't be happening. I'm supposed to meet Stefan in
an hour, I'm supposed to pack two suitcases—one for me and one for Florian—and meet Stefan on the eastern side of the Place Vendôme at four-thirty precisely, where he will be waiting in a hired automobile to drive us south to Antibes.

I tugged my husband upward. “Johann, please. Get up. Don't say that.”

He moved his hands to the small of my back and pressed his mouth into my stomach. “Ah, your smell,” he said. “My God. I am holding you finally. I have been so sick, Annabelle, and I have been wrong. My son, I have missed him so much.”

“He's missed you, too,” I whispered. My hands went to his hair, because what else could I do? The short blond bristles were soft on my palms.

“On my knees, Annabelle, I ask you to forgive me. Forgive your old husband, who became too stiff and proud and forgot what it is like to be twenty-one.”

“There's nothing to forgive, Johann. Please. Get up.”

He rose and pressed me to his chest. “It was Frieda. She said to me,
Father, you are moping, I have never seen you so unhappy. You must do something.
And she said,
Annabelle is not like Mama, you cannot make her something she is not.
And I realized she was right. I have been an old fool with his young wife.”