Along the Infinite Sea

ALSO BY BEATRIZ WILLIAMS

Tiny Little Thing

The Secret Life of Violet Grant

A Hundred Summers

Overseas

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

Publishers Since 1838

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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New York, New York 10014

Copyright © 2015 by Beatriz Williams

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Williams, Beatriz.

Along the infinite sea / Beatriz Williams.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-698-16497-0

I. Title.

PS3623.I55643A79 2015 2015007434

813'.6—dc23

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Version_1

To those who escaped in time and those who did not and those who risked their lives to help

Contents

Also by Beatriz Williams

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Overture

Annabelle

First Movement

Pepper

Annabelle

Pepper

Annabelle

Pepper

Annabelle

Pepper

Annabelle

Second Movement

Annabelle

Pepper

Annabelle

Pepper

Annabelle

Intermezzo

Annabelle

Third Movement

Annabelle

Pepper

Annabelle

Pepper

Fourth Movement

Annabelle

Pepper

Annabelle

Pepper

Annabelle

Pepper

Annabelle

Fifth Movement

Pepper

Annabelle

Coda

Stefan

Historical Note

Acknowledgments

Overture

To see all without looking; to hear all without listening.

CÉSAR RITZ

King of Hoteliers, Hotelier of Kings

Annabelle

PARIS • 1937

All you really need to know about the Paris Ritz is this: by the middle of 1937, Coco Chanel was living in a handsome suite on the third floor, and the bartender—an intuitive mixologist named Frank Meier—had invented the Bloody Mary sixteen summers earlier to cure a Hemingway hangover.

Mind you, when I arrived at Nick Greenwald’s farewell party on that hot July night, I wasn’t altogether aware of this history. I didn’t run with the Ritz crowd. Mosquitoes, my husband called them. And maybe I should have listened to my husband. Maybe no good could come from visiting the bar at the Paris Ritz; maybe you were doomed to commit some frivolous and irresponsible act, maybe you were doomed to hover around dangerously until you had drawn the blood from another human being or else had your own blood drawn instead.

But Johann—my husband—wasn’t around that night. I tiptoed in through the unfashionable Place Vendôme entrance on my brother’s arm instead, since Johann had been recalled to Berlin for an assignment of a few months that had stretched into several. In those days, you couldn’t just flit back and forth between Paris and Berlin, any more than you could flit between heaven and hell; and furthermore, why would you want to? Paris had everything I needed, everything I loved, and Berlin in 1937 was no place for a liberal-minded woman nurturing a young child and an impossible rift in her marriage. I stayed defiantly in France, where you could still attend a party for a man named Greenwald, where anyone could dine where he pleased and shop and bank where he pleased, where you could sleep with anyone who suited you, and it wasn’t a crime.

For the sake of everyone’s good time, I suppose it was just as well that my husband remained in Berlin, since Nick Greenwald and Johann von Kleist weren’t what you’d call bosom friends, for all the obvious reasons. But Nick and I were a different story. Nick and I understood each other: first, because we were both Americans living in Paris, and second, because we shared a little secret together, the kind of secret you could never, ever share with anyone else. Of all my brother’s friends, Nick was the only one who didn’t resent me for marrying a general in the German army. Good old Nick. He knew I’d had my reasons.

The salon was hot, and Nick was in his shirtsleeves, though he still retained his waistcoat and a neat white bow tie, the kind you needed a valet to arrange properly. He turned at the sound of my voice. Annabelle! Here at last.

Not so very late, am I? I said.

We kissed, and he and Charles shook hands. Not that Charles paid the transaction much attention; he was transfixed by the black-haired beauty who lounged at Nick’s side in a shimmering silver-blue dress that matched her eyes. A long cigarette dangled from her fingers. Nick turned to her and placed his hand at the small of her back. Annabelle, Charlie. I don’t think you’ve met Budgie Byrne. An old college friend.

We said enchantée. Miss Byrne took little notice. Her handshake was slender and lacked conviction. She slipped her arm through Nick’s and whispered in his ear, and they shimmered off together to the bar inside a haze of expensive perfume. The back of Miss Byrne’s dress swooped down almost to the point of no return, and her naked skin was like a spill of milk, kept from running over the edge by Nick’s large palm.

Charles covered his cheek with his right hand—the same hand that Miss Byrne had just touched with her limp and slender fingers—and said that bastard always got the best-looking women.

I watched Nick’s back disappear into the crowd, and I was about to tell Charles that he didn’t need to worry, that Nick didn’t really look all that happy with his companion and Charles might want to give the delectably disinterested Miss Byrne another try in an hour, but at that exact instant a voice came over my shoulder, the last voice I expected to hear at the Paris Ritz on this night in the smoldering middle of July.

My God, it said, a little slurry. If it isn’t the baroness herself.

I thought perhaps I was hallucinating, or mistaken. It wouldn’t be the first time. For the past two years, I’d heard this voice everywhere: department stores and elevators and street corners. I’d seen its owner in every possible nook, in every conceivable disguise, only to discover that the supposed encounter was only a false alarm, a collision of deluded molecules inside my own head, and the proximate cause of the leap in my blood proved to be an ordinary citizen after all. Just an everyday fellow who happened to have dark hair or a deep voice or a certain shape to the back of his neck. In the instant of revelation, I never knew whether to be relieved or disappointed. Whether to lament or hallelujah. Either way, the experience wasn’t a pleasant one, at least not in the way we ordinarily experience pleasure, as a benevolent thing that massages the nerves into a sensation of well-being.

Either way, I had committed a kind of adultery of the heart, hadn’t I, and since I couldn’t bear the thought of adultery in any form, I learned to ignore the false alarm when it rang and rang and rang. Like the good wife I was, I learned to maintain my poise during these moments of intense delusion.

So there. Instead of bolting at the slurry word baroness, I took my deluded molecules in hand and said: Surely not.

Instead of spinning like a top, I turned like a figurine on a music box, in such a way that you could almost hear the tinkling Tchaikovsky in my gears.

A man came into view, quite lifelike, quite familiar, tall and just so in his formal blacks and white points, dark hair curling into his forehead the way your lover’s hair does in your wilder dreams. He was holding a lowball glass and a brown Turkish cigarette in his right hand, and he took in everything at a glance: my jewels, my extravagant dress, the exact state of my circulation.

In short, he seemed an awful lot like the genuine article.

There you are, you old bastard, said Charles happily, and sacré bleu, I realized then what I already knew, that the man before me was no delusion. That the Paris Ritz was the kind of place that could conjure up anyone it wanted.

Stefan, I said. What a lovely surprise.

(And the big trouble was, I think I meant it.)

First Movement

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.

OSCAR WILDE

Pepper

PALM BEACH • 1966

1.

The Mercedes-Benz poses on the grass like a swirl of vintage black ink, like no other car in the world.

You’d never guess it to look at her, but Miss Pepper Schuyler—that woman right over there, the socialite with the golden antelope legs who’s soaking up the Florida sunshine at the other end of the courtyard—knows every glamorous inch of this 1936 Special Roadster shadowing the grass. You might regard Pepper’s pregnant belly protruding from her green Lilly shift (well, it’s hard to ignore a belly like that, isn’t it?) and the pastel Jack Rogers sandal dangling from her uppermost toe, and you think you have her pegged. Admit it! Lush young woman exudes Palm Beach class: What the hell does she know about cars?

Well, beautiful Pepper doesn’t give a damn what you think about her. She never did. She’s thinking about the car. She slides her gaze along the seductive S-curve of the right side fender, swooping from the top of the tire to the running board below the door, like a woman’s voluptuously naked leg, and her hearts beats a quarter-inch faster.

She remembers what a pain in the pert old derrière it was to repaint that glossy fender. It had been the first week of October, and the warm weather wouldn’t quit. The old shed on Cape Cod stank of paint and grease, a peculiarly acrid reek that had crept right through the protective mask and into her sinuses and taken up residence, until she couldn’t smell anything else, and she thought, What the hell am I doing here? What the hell am I thinking?

Thank God that was all over. Thank God this rare inky-black 1936 Mercedes Special Roadster is now someone else’s problem, someone willing to pay Pepper three hundred thousand dollars for the privilege of keeping its body and chrome intact against the ravages of time.

The deposit has already been paid, into a special account Pepper set up in her own name. (Her own name, her own money: now, that was a glorious feeling, like setting off for Europe on an ocean liner with nothing but open blue seas ahead.) The rest will be delivered today, to the Breakers hotel where Pepper is staying, in a special-delivery envelope. Another delightful little big check made out in Pepper’s name. Taken together, those checks will solve all her problems. She’ll have money for the baby, money to start everything over, money to ignore whoever needs ignoring, money to disappear if she needs to, forever and ever. She’ll depend on no one. She can do whatever the hell she pleases, whatever suits Pepper Schuyler and—by corollary—Pepper Junior. She will toe nobody’s line. She will fear nobody.

So the only question left in Pepper’s mind, the only question that needs resolving, is the niggling Who?

Who the hell is this anonymous buyer—a woman, Pepper’s auction agent said—who has the dough and the desire to lay claim to Pepper’s very special Special Roadster, before it even reaches the public sales ring?

Not that Pepper cares who she is. Pepper just cares who she isn’t. As long as this woman is a disinterested party, a person who has her own reasons for wanting this car, nothing to do with Pepper, nothing to do with the second half of the magic equation inside Pepper’s belly, well, everything’s just peachy keen, isn’t it? Pepper will march off with her three hundred thousand dollars and never give the buyer another thought.

Pepper lifts a tanned arm and checks her watch. It’s a gold Cartier, given to her by her father for her eighteenth birthday, perhaps as a subtle reminder to start arriving the hell on time, now that she was a grown-up. It didn’t work. The party always starts when Pepper gets there, not before, so why should she care if she arrives late or early? Still, the watch has its uses. The watch tells her it’s twenty-seven minutes past twelve o’clock. They should be here any moment: Pepper’s auction agent and the buyer, to inspect the car and complete the formalities. If they’re on time, and why wouldn’t they be? By all accounts, the lady’s as eager to buy as Pepper is to sell.

Pepper tilts her head back and closes her eyes to the white sun. She can’t get enough of it. This baby inside her must have sprung from another religion, one that worshipped the gods in the sky or gained nourishment from sunbeams. Pepper can almost feel the cells dividing in ecstasy as she points herself due upward. She can almost feel the seams strain along her green Lilly shift, the dancing monkeys stretch their arms to fit around the ambitious creature within.

Well, that makes sense, doesn’t it? Like father, like child.

Good afternoon.

Pepper bolts upright. A small and slender woman stands before her, dark-haired, dressed in navy Capri pants and a white shirt, her delicate face hidden by a pair of large dark sunglasses. It’s Audrey Hepburn, or else her well-groomed Florida cousin.

Good afternoon, Pepper says.

The woman holds out her hand. You must be Miss Schuyler. My name is Annabelle Dommerich. I’m the buyer. Please, don’t get up.

Pepper rises anyway and takes the woman’s hand. Mrs. Dommerich stands only a few inches above five feet, and Pepper is a tall girl, but for some reason they seem to meet as equals.

I’m surprised to see you, says Pepper. I had the impression you wanted to remain anonymous.

Mrs. Dommerich shrugs. Oh, that’s just for the newspapers. Actually, I’ve been hugely curious to meet you, Miss Schuyler. You’re even more beautiful than your pictures. And look at you, blooming like a rose! When are you due?

February.

I’ve always envied women like you. When I was pregnant, I looked like a beach ball with feet.

I can’t imagine that.

It was a long time ago. Mrs. Dommerich takes off her sunglasses to reveal a pair of large and chocolaty eyes. The car looks beautiful.

Thank you. I had an expert helping me restore it.

You restored it yourself? Both eyebrows rise, so elegant. I’m impressed.

There was nothing else to do.

Mrs. Dommerich turns to gaze at the car, shielding her brows with one hand. And you found it in the shed on Cape Cod? Just like that, covered with dust? Untouched?

Yes. My sister-in-law’s house. It seemed to have been abandoned there.

Yes, says Mrs. Dommerich. It was.

The grass prickles Pepper’s feet through the gaps in her sandals. Next to her, Mrs. Dommerich stands perfectly still, like she’s posing for a portrait, Woman Transfixed in a Crisp White Shirt. She talks like an American, in easy sentences, but there’s just the slightest mysterious tilt to her accent that suggests something imported, like the Chanel perfume that colors the air next to her skin. Though that skin is remarkably fresh, lit by a kind of iridescent pearl-like substance that most women spent fruitless dollars to achieve, Pepper guesses she must be in her forties, even her late forties. It’s something about her expression and her carriage, something that makes Pepper feel like an ungainly young colt, dressed like a little girl. Even considering that matronly bump that interrupts the youthful line of her figure.

At the opposite end of the courtyard, a pair of sweating men appear, dressed in businesslike wool suits above a pair of perfectly matched potbellies, neat as basketballs. One of them spots the two women and raises his hand in what Pepper’s always called a golf wave.

There they are, says Mrs. Dommerich. She turns back to Pepper and smiles. I do appreciate your taking such trouble to restore her so well. How does she run?

Like a racehorse.

Good. I can almost hear that roar in my ears now. There’s no other sound like it, is there? Not like anything they make today.

I wouldn’t know, really. I’m not what you’d call an enthusiast.

Really? We’ll have to change that, then. I’ll pick you up from your hotel at seven o’clock and we’ll take her for a spin before dinner. She holds out her hand, and Pepper, astonished, can do nothing but shake it. Mrs. Dommerich’s fingers are soft and strong and devoid of rings, except for a single gold band on the telling digit of her left hand, which Pepper has already noticed.

Of course, Pepper mumbles.

Mrs. Dommerich slides her sunglasses back in place and turns away.

Wait just a moment, says Pepper.

Yes?

I’m just curious, Mrs. Dommerich. How do you already know how the engine sounds? Since it’s been locked away in an old shed all these years.

Oh, trust me, Miss Schuyler. I know everything about that car.

There’s something so self-assured about her words, Pepper’s skin begins to itch, and not just the skin that stretches around the baby. The sensation sets off a chain reaction of alarm along the pathways of Pepper’s nerves: the dingling of tiny alarm bells in her ears, the tingling in the tip of her nose.

And just how the hell do you know that, Mrs. Dommerich? If you don’t mind me asking. Why exactly would you pay all that money for this hunk of pretty metal?

Mrs. Dommerich’s face is hidden behind those sunglasses, betraying not an ounce of visible reaction to Pepper’s impertinence. Because, Miss Schuyler, she says softly, twenty-eight years ago, I drove for my life across the German border inside that car, and I left a piece of my heart inside her. And now I think it’s time to bring her home. Don’t you? She turns away again, and as she walks across the grass, she says, over her shoulder, sounding like an elegant half-European mother: Wear a cardigan, Miss Schuyler. It’s supposed to be cooler tonight, and I’d like to put the top down.

2.

At first, Pepper has no intention of obeying the summons of Annabelle Dommerich. The check is waiting for her when she calls at the front desk at the hotel, along with a handwritten telephone message that she discards after a single glance. She has the doorman call her a taxi, and she rides into town to deposit the check in her account. The clerk’s face is expressionless as he hands her the receipt. She withdraws a couple hundred bucks, which she tucks into her pocketbook next to her compact and her cigarettes. When she returns to the hotel, she draws herself a bubble bath and soaks for an hour, sipping from a single glass of congratulatory champagne and staring at the tiny movements disturbing the golden curve of her belly. Thank God she hasn’t got any stretch marks. Coconut oil, that’s what her doctor recommended, and she went out and bought five bottles.

The water turns cool. Pepper lifts her body from the tub and wraps herself in a white towel. She orders a late room-service lunch and stands on the balcony, wrapped in her towel, smoking a cigarette. She considers another glass of champagne but knows she won’t go through with it. The doctor back on Cape Cod, a comely young fellow full of newfangled ideas, said to go easy on the booze. The doctor also said to go easy on the smokes, but you can’t do everything your doctor says, can you? You can’t give up everything, all at once, when you have already given up so much.

And for what? For a baby. His baby, of all things. So stupid, Pepper. You thought you were so clever and brave, you thought you had it all under control, and now look at you. All knocked up and nowhere to go.

The beach is bright yellow and studded with sunbathers before a lazy surf. Pepper reaches to tuck in her towel and lets it fall to the tiled floor of the balcony. No one sees her. She leans against the balcony rail, naked and golden-ripe, until her cigarette burns to a tiny stump in her hand, until the bell rings with her room-service lunch.

After she eats, she sets the tray outside her door and falls into bed. She takes a long nap, over the covers, and when she wakes up she slips into a sleeveless tunic-style cocktail dress, brushes her hair, and touches up her lipstick. Before she heads for the elevator, she takes a cardigan from the drawer and slings it over her bare shoulders.

3.

But the elevator’s stuck in the lobby. That was the trouble with hotels like the Breakers; there was always some Greek tycoon moving in, some sausage king from Chicago, and the whole place ground to a halt to accommodate his wife and kids and help and eighty-eight pieces of luggage. Afterward, he would tell his friends back home that the place wasn’t what it was cracked up to be, and the natives sure were unfriendly.

Pepper taps her foot and checks her watch, but the elevator is having none of it. She heads for the stairs.

On the one hand, you have the luxurious appointments of the Breakers, plush carpets and mirrors designed to show you off to your best advantage. On the other hand, you have the stairwell, like an escape from Alcatraz. Pepper’s spindly shoes rattle on the concrete floors; the bare incandescent bulbs appear at intervals as if to interrogate her. She has just turned the last landing, lobby escape hatch in sight, when a man comes into view, leaning against the door. He’s wearing a seersucker suit—a genuine blue-striped seersucker suit, as if men actually wore them anymore—and his arms are crossed.

For an instant, Pepper thinks of a platinum starlet, sprawled naked on her bedroom floor a few years back. Killed herself, poor bimbo, everyone said, shaking the sorrowful old head. Drugs, of course. A cautionary Hollywood tale.

Nice suit, says Pepper. Are they making a movie out there?

He straightens from the door and shoots his cuffs. Miss Schuyler? Do you have a moment?

I don’t think so. Certainly not for strangers who lurk in stairwells.

I’m afraid I must insist.

I’m afraid you’re in my way. Do you mind stepping aside?

In response, Captain Seersucker stretches his thick candy-stripe arm across the passage and places a hand against the opposite wall.

Well, well, says Pepper. A nice beefy fellow, aren’t you? How much do they hire you out for? Or do you do it just for the love of sport?

I’m just a friend, Miss Schuyler. A friend of a friend who wants to talk to you, that’s all, nice and friendly. So you’re going to have to come with me.

Pepper laughs. You see, that’s the trouble with you musclemen. Not too much in the noggin, is there?

Miss Schuyler—

Call me Pepper, Captain Seersucker. Everyone else does. She holds out her hand, and when he doesn’t take it, she pats his cheek. A big old lug, aren’t you? Tell me, what do you do when the quiz shows come on the TV? Do you just stare all blank at the screen, or do you try to learn something?

Miss Schuyler—

And now you’re getting angry with me. Your face is all pink. Look, I don’t hold it against you. We can’t all be Einstein, can we? The world needs brawn as well as brain. And the girls certainly don’t mind, do they? I mean, what self-respecting woman wants a man hanging around who’s smarter than she is?

Look here—

Now, just look at that jaw of yours, for example. So useful! Like a nice square piece of granite. I’ll bet you could crush gravel with it in your spare time.

He lifts his hand away from the wall and makes to grab her, but Pepper’s been waiting for her chance, and she ducks neatly underneath his arm, pregnancy and all, and brings her knee up into his astonished crotch. He crumples like a tin can, lamenting his injured manhood in loud wails, but Pepper doesn’t waste a second gloating. She throws open the door to the lobby and tells the bellboy to call a doctor, because some poor oaf in a seersucker suit just tripped on his shoelaces and fell down the stairs.

4.

I thought you wouldn’t come, says Mrs. Dommerich, as Pepper slides into the passenger seat of the glamorous Mercedes. Every head is turned toward the pair of them, but the lady doesn’t seem to notice. She’s wearing a wide-necked dress of midnight-blue jacquard, sleeves to the elbows and hem to the knees, extraordinarily elegant.

I wasn’t going to. But then I remembered what a bore it is, sitting around my hotel room, and I came around.

I’m glad you did.

Mrs. Dommerich turns the ignition, and the engine roars with joy. Cars like this, they like to be driven, Pepper’s almost-brother-in-law said, the first time they tried the engine, and at the time Pepper thought he was crazy, talking about a machine as if it were a person. But now she listens to the pitch of the pistons and supposes he was probably right. Caspian usually was, at least when it came to cars.

I guess you know how to drive this thing? Pepper says.

Oh, yes. Mrs. Dommerich puts the car into gear and releases the clutch. The car pops away from the curb like a hunter taking a fence. Pepper notices her own hands are a little shaky, and she places her fingers securely around the doorframe.

Just as the hotel entrance slides out of view, she spots a pair of men loitering near the door, staring as if to bore holes through the side of Pepper’s head. Not locals; they’re dressed all wrong. They’re dressed like the man in the stairwell, like some outsider’s notion of how you dressed in Palm Beach, like someone told them to wear pink madras and canvas deck shoes, and they’d fit right in.

And then they’re gone.

Pepper ties her scarf around her head and says, in a remarkably calm voice, Where are we going?

I thought we’d have dinner in town. Have a nice little chat. I’d like to hear a little more about how you found her. What it was like, bringing her back to life.

Oh, it’s a girl, is it? I never checked.

Ships and automobiles, my dear. God knows why.

You know, says Pepper, drumming her fingers along the edge of the window glass, don’t take this the wrong way, but I can’t help noticing that you two seem to be on awfully familiar terms, for a nice lady and a few scraps of old metal.

I should be, shouldn’t I? I paid an awful lot of money for her.

For which I can’t thank you enough.

Well, I couldn’t let her sit around in some museum. Not after all we’ve been through together. She pats the dashboard affectionately. She belongs with someone who loves her.

Pepper shakes her head. I don’t get it. I don’t see how you could love a car.

Someone loved this car, to put it back together like this.

It wasn’t me. It was Caspian.

Who’s Caspian?

Pepper opens her pocketbook and takes out her compact. We’ll just say he’s a friend of my sister’s, shall we? A very good friend. Anyway, he’s the enthusiast. He couldn’t stand watching me try to put it together myself.

I’m eternally grateful. I suppose he knows a lot about German cars?

It turns out he was an army brat. They lived in Germany when he was young, right after the war, handing out retribution with one hand and Hershey bars with the other.

Mrs. Dommerich swings the heavy Mercedes around a corner, on the edge of a nickel. Pepper realizes that the muscles of her abdomen are clenched, and it’s nothing to do with the baby. But there’s no question that Mrs. Dommerich knows how to drive this car. She drives it the way some people ride horses, as if the gears and the wheels are extensions of her own limbs. She may not be tall, but she sits so straight it doesn’t matter. Her scarf flutters gracefully in the draft. She reaches for her pocketbook, which lies on the seat between them, and takes out a cigarette with one hand. Do you mind lighting me? she asks.

Pepper finds the lighter and brings Mrs. Dommerich’s long, thin Gauloise to life.

Thank you. She blows a stream of smoke into the wind and holds out the pack to Pepper. Help yourself.

Pepper eyes the tempting little array. Her shredded nerves jingle in her ears. Maybe just one. I’m supposed to be cutting back.

I didn’t start until later, Mrs. Dommerich says. When my babies were older. We started going out more, to cocktail parties and things, and the air was so thick I thought I might as well play along. But it never became a habit, thank God. Maybe because I started so late. She takes a long drag. Sometimes it takes me a week to go through a single pack. It’s just for the pure pleasure. It’s like sex, you want to be able to take your time and enjoy it.

Pepper laughs. "That’s a new one on me. I always thought the more, the merrier. Sex and cigarettes."

My husband never understood, either. He smoked like a chimney, one after another, right up until the day he died.

And when was that?

A year and a half ago. She checks the side mirror. Lung cancer.

I’m sorry.

They begin to mount the bridge to the mainland. Mrs. Dommerich seems to be concentrating on the road ahead, to the flashing lights that indicated the deck was going up. She rolls to a stop and drops the cigarette from the edge of the car. When she speaks, her voice has dropped an octave, to a rough-edged husk of itself.

I used to try to make him stop, she says. But he didn’t seem to care.

5.

They eat at a small restaurant off Route 1. The owner recognizes Mrs. Dommerich and kisses both her cheeks. They chatter together in French for a moment, so rapidly and colloquially that Pepper can’t quite follow. Mrs. Dommerich turns and introduces Pepper—my dear friend Miss Schuyler, she calls her—and the man seizes Pepper’s belly in rapture, as if she’s his mistress and he’s the guilty father.

So beautiful! he says.

Isn’t it, though. Pepper removes his hands. Since the beginning of the sixth month, Pepper’s universe has parted into two worlds: people who regard her pregnancy as a kind of tumor, possibly contagious, and those who seem to think it’s public property. Whatever will your wife say when she finds out?

Ah, my wife. He shakes his head. A very jealous woman. She will have my head on the carving platter.

What a shame.

When they are settled at their table, supplied with water and crusty bread and a bottle of quietly expensive Burgundy, Mrs. Dommerich apologizes. The French are obsessed with babies, she says.

I thought they were obsessed with sex.

It’s not such a stretch, is it?

Pepper butters her bread and admits that it isn’t.

The waiter arrives. Mrs. Dommerich orders turtle soup and sweetbreads; Pepper scans the menu and chooses mussels and canard à l’orange. When the waiter sweeps away the menus and melts into the atmosphere, a pause settles, the turning point. Pepper drinks a small sip of wine, folds her hands on the edge of the table, and says, Why did you ask me to dinner, Mrs. Dommerich?

I might as well ask why you agreed to come.

Age before beauty, says Pepper, and Mrs. Dommerich laughs.

That’s it, right there. That’s why I asked you.

Because I’m so abominably rude?

Because you’re so awfully interesting. As I said before, Miss Schuyler. Because I’m curious about you. It’s not every young debutante who finds a vintage Mercedes in a shed at her sister’s house and restores it to its former glory, only to put it up for auction in Palm Beach.

I’m full of surprises.

Yes, you are. She pauses. To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t going to introduce myself at all. I already knew who you were, at least by reputation.

Yes, I’ve got one of those things, haven’t I? I can’t imagine why.

You have. I like to keep current on gossip. A vice of mine. She smiles and sips her wine, marrying vices. The sparky young aide in the new senator’s office, perfectly bred and perfectly beautiful. They were right about that, goodness me.

Pepper shrugs. Her beauty is old news, no longer interesting even to her.

Yes, exactly. Mrs. Dommerich nods. Her hair is cut short, curling around her ears, a stylish frame for the heart-shaped, huge-eyed delicacy of her face. A few silver threads catch the light overhead, and she hasn’t tried to hide them. You caused a real stir, you know, when you started working in the senator’s office last year. I suppose you know that. Not just that you’re a walking fashion plate, but that you were good at your job. You made yourself essential to him. You had hustle. There are beautiful women everywhere, but they don’t generally have hustle. When you’re beautiful, it’s ever so much easier to find a man to hustle for you.

Yes, but then you’re stuck, aren’t you? It’s his rules, not yours.

The skin twitches around Mrs. Dommerich’s wide red mouth.

True. That’s what I thought about you, when I saw you. I saw you were expecting, pretty far along, and all of a sudden I understood why you fixed up my car and sold it to me for a nice, convenient fortune. I understood perfectly.

Oh, you did, did you? Pepper lifts her knife and examines her reflection. A single blue Schuyler eye stares back at her, turned up at the corner like the bow of an especially elegant yacht. Then why the hell were you still curious enough to invite me out?

The waiter arrives solemnly with the soup and the mussels. Mrs. Dommerich waits in a pod of elegant impatience while he sets each dish exactly so, flourishes the pepper, asks if there will be anything else, and is dismissed. She lifts her spoon and smiles.

Because, my dear. I can’t wait to see what you do next.

6.

Pepper lights another cigarette after dinner, while Mrs. Dommerich drives the Mercedes north along the A1A. For air, she says. Pepper doesn’t care much about air, one way or another, but she does care about those two men hanging around the entrance of the hotel before they left. She can handle one overgrown oaf in a stairwell, maybe, but two more was really too much.

So Pepper says okay, she could use some air. Let’s take a little drive somewhere. She draws the smoke pleasantly into her lungs and breathes it out again. Air. To the right, the ocean ripples in and out of view, phosphorescent under a swollen November moon, and as the miles roll under the black wheels Pepper wonders if she’s being kidnapped, and whether she cares. Whether it matters if Mrs. Dommerich acts for herself or for someone else.

He was going to track her down anyway, wasn’t he? Sooner or later, the house always won.

Pepper used to think that she was the house. She has it all: family, beauty, brains, moxie. You think you hold all the cards, and then you realize you don’t. You have one single precious card, and he wants it back.

And suddenly three hundred thousand dollars doesn’t seem like much security, after all. Suddenly there isn’t enough money in the world.

Pepper stubs out the cigarette in the little chrome ashtray. Where are we going, anyway?

Oh, there’s a little headland up ahead, tremendous view of the ocean. I like to park there sometimes and watch the waves roll in.

Sounds like a scream.

You might try it, you know. It’s good for the soul.

I have it on good authority, Mrs. Dommerich—from a number of sources, actually—that I haven’t got one. A soul, I mean.

Mrs. Dommerich laughs. They’re speaking loudly, because of the draft and the immense roar of the engine. She bends around another curve, and then the car begins to slow, as if it already knows where it’s going, as if it’s fate. They pull off the road onto a dirt track, lined by reeds a yard high, and such is the Roadster’s suspension that Pepper doesn’t feel a thing.

I’m usually coming from the north, says Mrs. Dommerich. We have a little house by the coast, near Cocoa Beach. When we first moved here from France, we wanted a quiet place where we could hide away from the world, and then of course the air-conditioning came in, and the world came to us in droves. She laughs. But by then it didn’t seem to matter. The kids loved it here too much, we couldn’t sell up. As long as I could see the Atlantic, I didn’t care.

The reeds part and the ocean opens up before them. Mrs. Dommerich keeps on driving until they reach the dunes, silver and black in the moonlight. Pepper smells the salt tide, the warm rot. The car rolls to a stop, and Mrs. Dommerich cuts the engine. The steady rush of water reaches Pepper’s ears.

Isn’t it marvelous? says Mrs. Dommerich.

It’s beautiful.

Mrs. Dommerich finds her pocketbook and takes out a cigarette. We can share, she says.

I’ve already reached my limit.

If we share, it doesn’t count. Halves don’t count.

Pepper takes the cigarette from her fingers and examines it.

Mrs. Dommerich settles back and stares through the windshield. Do you know what I love most about the ocean? The way the water’s all connected. The bits and pieces have different names, but really it’s all one vast body of salt water, all the way around the earth. It’s as if we’re touching Europe, or Africa, or the Antarctic. If you close your eyes, you can feel it, like it’s right there.

Pepper hands back the cigarette. That’s true. But I don’t like to close my eyes.

You’ve never made an act of faith?

No. I like to rely on myself.

So I see. But you know, sometimes it’s not such a bad thing. An act of faith.

Pepper snatches the cigarette and takes a drag. She blows the smoke back out into the night and says, So what’s your game?

My game?

"Why are you here? Obviously you know a thing or two about me. Did he send you?"

He?

You know who.

Oh. The father of your baby, you mean.

You tell me.

Mrs. Dommerich lifts her hands to the steering wheel and taps her fingers against the lacquer. No. Nobody sent me.

Pepper tips the ash into the sand and hands back the cigarette.

Do you believe me? Mrs. Dommerich asks.

I don’t believe in anything, Mrs. Dommerich. Just myself. And my sisters, too, I guess, but they have their own problems. They don’t need mine on top of it all.

Mrs. Dommerich spreads out her hands to examine her palms. Then let me help instead.

Pepper laughs. "Oh, that’s a good