Along the Infinite Sea (45 page)

CUMBERLAND ISLAND
•
1966

1.

The knock arrives at sunset, half an hour after he stomped back, damp and chilled, from feeding the horses. He has showered and shaved and put on the teakettle, and at first he thinks the telephone wire has come loose again in the November wind, and is now flapping against the roof.

He pauses, fingers still wrapped around the handle of the kettle, and turns his cheek to the ceiling, listening. The sound comes again, three imperative knocks, knuckles against wood.

He doesn't have many visitors, and they usually mean trouble of some kind: horses loose or fences down or hurricanes on the way. That's surely why his pulse crashes against his neck, as the knock echoes about the empty rooms. Why his blood turns buoyant in his veins. Because there might be trouble.

He wipes his hands on the dishcloth and heads for the front door.

He doesn't have far to walk. The house is small and simple: living
room, dining room, and kitchen on the ground floor, along with a small office and plenty of bookshelves. (He has too many books to count, the natural consequence of solitude.) Upstairs, two roomy bedrooms and a bathroom. One of the bedrooms has a sleeping porch, and he really does sleep there in the summer, when the heat billows up from the tall marsh grasses to merge with the smoldering sky, and you almost can't breathe the air, it's so wet. He puts up the screens with the netting to keep the mosquitoes away, and he sleeps in a pair of cotton pajamas with no blanket. In the morning, he's covered in dew.

He walks across the living room to the entry hall, past the signs of his recent visitor. If he stands still and closes his eyes, he can still smell her in the air: a hint of perfume, the soap she uses. He can almost hear the trace of her laughter, like an echo trapped in the furniture she has touched. Right there, in the corner of the living room, just two days ago, he showed her how to waltz to the “Blue Danube.” Something every woman should do with a man who loves her.

When he reaches the entry hall, he pauses, because he hasn't heard the knock again, and maybe he was mistaken. Maybe he'll open the door and there will be nobody there. It's happened before, usually after his visitor leaves. He'll think he hears something, some sign of human love and habitation—maybe she's turned back after all, maybe she'll stay this time—but when he opens his eyes, he knows he's alone again. That this promising sound was just a delusion, after all.

Knock, knock.

Well, not a delusion this time.

He draws the cool air deep into his lungs, reaches for the knob, and opens the door, and there in the light from the porch stands a dark-haired woman in a coat of soft aubergine wool, full and delicate both at once, whose eyes open wide at the sight of his face.

“Stefan,” she whispers.

His hand sticks to the knob. His chest fills up with quicksilver and runs over. He thinks, Hell, I remembered her face all wrong, I forgot the shade of her eyes, I forgot her cheekbones and her pointed chin, I
forgot how beautiful she is. How could I forget that? When she lives inside my skin.

“May I come in?” she asks, and it seems he forgot that, too, the sound of her voice.

Somehow, he steps back and opens the door, just wide enough.

“Would you like some tea?” he asks.

2.

The next morning, it's so much easier. He opens his eyes from a velvet sleep, and for a moment he thinks he's in Monte Carlo, at the scorching end of August, and a tantalizing future still beckons outside his window. He can almost smell the lemon trees in the courtyard, and then he remembers it's Annabelle's skin. Her skin smells like lemons. What kind of miracle is that?

The light is still gray and hushed through the shutters. Annabelle is deeply asleep. It seems to him that he'll wake her if he stays in bed—wake her with the force of loving her—so he untangles her from his arms instead and slips downstairs to make coffee, the way she likes it.

The teacups still sit on the kitchen table, half full, and the sight makes him smile. The way they talked awkwardly—
How are you?
Fine, fine.
How do you like Cumberland Island?
It is marvelous, except for the terrible heat in July—and took their tea in tiny nervous sips.

The way Annabelle had crashed down her cup into the middle of another calcified sentence and said,
Don't look at me like that,
and he had said,
Like what?
and she said,
Like you want to kiss me.

The way he had stared at her, hammering heart, thinking, God in heaven, what does she mean, can it be true, and then thinking, Of course it's true, it's Annabelle, Stefan, it's your own fucking
Annabelle
walking in your front door three decades later, out of the clear blue sky, wanting you to break the ice and everything else, and you are just going to sit there with your cock in your hand while the clock ticks and the
house groans and the minutes bleed irretrievably away, the dwindling minutes remaining to you both?

The way she had risen from her chair like a princess and said,
Unless you don't want to kiss me, after all,
and he said,
But of course I want to kiss you,
and she had given him a look both defiant and vulnerable and turned to climb the stairs, and he had thought how very like Annabelle this was, like no one else in the world.

The way he had then run after her and hoisted her over his shoulder and taken her up the rest of the stairs before he could doubt himself. The way she had laughed and put her soft palms on his skin and kissed him, and somehow it had all worked perfectly, being inside Annabelle again, losing himself inside Annabelle, drenching himself in the purity of her heart, his skin inside her skin, her skin inside his, in a thoroughly imperfect way.

The way it had worked again, even more perfectly imperfect, an hour later.

And Annabelle was right, as always: the awkwardness dissolved at the first touch, poof, like magic. You know where you stand with a woman, when you have just made love to her after a long absence. She knows where she stands with you. You can go to sleep happy, listening to each other's heartbeats, because you know her again and she knows you, because you are no longer strangers, and you will work everything out in the morning, over hot coffee and a good smoke.

3.

When he returns with the coffee, she's awake, propped up against his pillow. Her breasts are heavier than before, darker at the tips, a woman's breasts. Just looking at them makes his ribs hurt.

She takes the coffee and sips. “So who's the woman?”

He's busy lighting a cigarette, and nearly spits it out of his mouth. “What woman?”

“The woman you were dancing with the other night. I saw you through the window.” She gives him a challenging look. “Does your heart beat for her, too?”

He resumes lighting the cigarette, takes a good drag, and blows the smoke out slowly and with profound enjoyment. Then he crawls up the bed and starts kissing her breasts. “Yes, as a matter of fact. My heart beats for her, too. The two of you beauties, you are the great loves of my life.”

She pushes his head away. “Bastard.”

He's laughing and kissing her. He's so full of relief—that quicksilver in his chest last night, it turned out to be relief, of an elite and highly distilled grade—and so full of Annabelle. He takes the coffee from her hand and puts it on the bedside table. He sticks the cigarette in the corner of his mouth and grasps her two hands, so she will the hell stop hitting him with them. “That was Else,” he said. “Else visits me here.”

As if her limbs have turned to butter. “Else?” she whispers.

“Yes. Didn't you get a good look, when you spied on the two of us through my window? She tracked me down a few years ago. I made her promise not to tell you.” He removes the cigarette and resumes kissing her. “Johann was still alive.”

“I see.” She lies against his pillow without moving, accepting the kisses. “And when he died?”

“I thought I would wait for you to come to me. I didn't know if you wanted me, after everything. After so many years.”

“Oh, Stefan. Don't be stupid.” She moves finally, threading her hands in his hair.

He stops kissing her then, just lies on her soft body with his lips in her neck, smelling her lemon smell, letting the shock settle in his bones, letting her skin become his skin. He is in bed with Annabelle, and it's not a dream. He opened the door last night, and she was there, genuine hot cross Annabelle bun, warm and round in his arms.

“I brought your cello,” she whispers.

“My cello?”

“The Amati you gave me. I played it everywhere for you. I played it
in Carnegie Hall and the Boston Pops, I played it on every single recording I ever made. Did you hear any of them?”

He wants to say
Every one
, but his lips won't move.

“So I thought I would bring it back to you. That was my excuse, that the instrument really belonged to you, and I was just playing it for you, all these years. That was how I worked up the courage to come here.”

Holy shit, he is going to cry.

“I mean, I couldn't just walk through the front door and throw myself at you,” she adds, very reasonable, as if she hadn't done just that in the kitchen last night, over two cups of anemic Lipton.

So he starts to laugh instead, helpless gusts of laughter. He loses the cigarette in the pillows and has to go scrabbling for it, still laughing, shaking with goddamned unstoppable amusement, until at last he puts the cigarette in the ashtray and springs from the bed and opens up every single shutter over every single window, filling the room with a salmon-pink sunrise.

She looks at him like he's crazy. “What are you doing?”

“I am admiring your breasts in the sunshine,” he says.

“Oh.” She settles back in the pillows and spreads her arms. “If that's all.”

And that is one of the things he loves most about Annabelle, what has not changed about her in all these years: her joy. Like the first time he made love to her, on the cliffs at Antibes, the delight that seeped from her pores, the transparent love with which she drenched him, the wanton absence of any shame, even though she was a virgin who had been kissed only once. That was why he couldn't resist her then, and he can't resist her now. She turns his sorrow into joy.

4.

When he's finished making love to her a third time—and it takes a while, make no mistake, he's not the young man he was, not that she
seems to mind the additional effort one bit—they lie boneless on the bed, drunk and sated as a pair of new lovers, surrounded by twenty-eight years of questions.

He tells her about the war, and working for the French Resistance, the bullet in his chest that nearly brought him to a bad end. He shows her the scar. Thank God for penicillin, he says. He talks about wandering aimlessly through Europe after the war—the worst years, he says, because there was no purpose anymore, no friends left alive, nothing to do but despair over the six million lives he had failed to save—until he crashed into some sort of bottom (wasn't that the phrase?) and moved to America. He says, I thought I could at least be on the same continent as you, the same continent as our children. I could see what they were up to, what fine young people they were becoming. She says, in a breaking voice, You said
our
children, and he strokes her hair and says, Yes, I was their father and you are their mother, and you cannot possibly know how I left my heart on the floor of that barn for you to keep for me, how much my heart was in your hands.

Then why did you do it? she says. Why did you leave us like that?

Because I had no choice, my Annabelle. Because I had a profound debt to repay, a fucking world to save. Because he was the better man. Because he loved you so well.

So she tells him about the early years, how they waited in Monte Carlo until the boys arrived from England, until Margaret reached them with the girls; how she and Johann and all the children sailed to America in the
Isolde
, how they left the Mercedes in a shed at her aunt's house in Cape Cod, so no one would connect the Dommerich brood with the Nazi general who committed subversion and treason and then disappeared. How she couldn't bear him at first, because he wasn't Stefan, and then gradually the shared parenthood brought them together—he was such a good father, she had to love him for that alone—and the shared secrets, too. And then Henrik started nursery school, and she wanted another baby so badly, she would have slept with Stalin if she had to. So we finally went to bed together, she says, and I got pregnant
with the twins two seconds later, let that be a lesson. He laughs and says it was no more than she deserved, sleeping with someone else, and then she goes quiet and he knows what she's thinking.

He says, I came close a few times, I admit. I came damned close.

But you never?

No.

Ever?

(He sighs.)

Not even once, Annabelle, though I thought sometimes it would kill me, I was so lonely.

(There is a long silence, laden with awe.)

Why not?

Because we had a covenant, remember? And because you were raising the children for me, all the way across the ocean, and I had nothing else to give you in return. I had nothing but that.

The wind is picking up again. A shutter bangs against the side of the house, because he forgot to latch it, in his haste to see the sunshine on Annabelle's skin.

He says, And there is another reason.

What was that?

Because there was a time when this fidelity was the only virtue I had left. The only vow I hadn't broken.

(She lies quietly in his arms, until he thinks that maybe she's gone to sleep.)

Then:

Do you know what I think?

What do you think, Annabelle? (And isn't that the best part of all? Just saying her name aloud.)