Along the Infinite Sea: Love, friendship and heartbreak, the perfect summer read
I couldn’t leave the wheel; I couldn’t check his pulse, his skin, the state of his wound. A sliver of panic penetrated my chest: the unreality of this moment, of the warm salt wind on my face, of the starlight and the man bleeding in the stern of my father’s old wooden launch. Half an hour ago, I had been lying on a garden wall. “Stefan, you’ve got to concentrate,” I said, but I really meant myself. Annabelle, you’ve got to concentrate. “Stefan. Listen to me. You’ve got to stay awake.”
His gaze came to a stop on mine. “Yes. Right you are.”
“How are you feeling?”
“I am bloody miserable, Mademoiselle. My leg hurts like the devil and my head is a little sick. But at least I am bloody miserable with you.”
I faced the water again and turned up the throttle. “Very good. You’re flirting again, that’s a good sign. Now, tell me. Where is your ship moored? This side of the harbor, or the other?”
“Not the harbor. The Île Sainte-Marguerite. The Plateau du Milieu, on the south side, between the islands.”
I looked to the left, where a few lights clustered atop the thin line between black water and blacker sky. There wasn’t much on Sainte-Marguerite, only forest and the old Fort Royal. But a ship moored in the protected channel between Sainte-Marguerite and the Île Saint-Honorat—and many did moor there; it was a popular spot in the summer—would not be visible from the mainland.
“Hold on,” I said, and I began a sweeping turn to the left, to round the eastern point of the island. The launch angled obediently, and Stefan caught himself on the edge. The lantern slid across the deck. He stuck out his foot to stop its progress just as the boat hit a chop and heeled. Stefan swore.
“All right?” I said.
“Yes, damn it.”
I could tell from the bite in his words—or rather the lack of bite, the dissonance of the words themselves from the tone in which he said them—that he was slipping again, that he was fighting the black curtain. We had to reach this ship of his, the faster the better, and yet the faster we went the harder we hit the current. And I could not see properly. I was guided only by the pinprick lights and my own instinct for this stretch of coast.
“Just hurry,” said Stefan, blurry now, and I curled around the point and straightened out, so that the Plateau de Milieu lay before me, studded with perhaps a dozen boats tugging softly at their moorings. I glanced back at Stefan to see how he had weathered the turn.
“The western end,” he told me, gripping the side of the boat hard with his left hand while his right held the wadded-up white shirt against his wound. Someone had sacrificed his dinner jacket over Stefan’s shoulders, to protect that bare and bloody chest from the salt draft and the possibility of shock, and I thought I saw a few dark specks on the sleek white wool. But that was always the problem about blood. It traveled easily, like a germ, infecting its surroundings with messy promiscuity. I turned to face the sleeping vessels ahead, an impossible obstacle course of boats and mooring lines, and I thought, We have got to get that tourniquet off soon, or they will have to remove the leg.
But at least I could see a little better now, in the glow of the boat lights, and I pushed the throttle higher. The old engine opened its throat and roared. A curse floated out across the water behind us, as I zigzagged delicately around the mooring lines.
“I see you are an expert,” said Stefan. “This is reassuring.”
“Which one is yours?”
“You can’t see it yet. Just a moment.” We rounded another boat, a pretty sloop of perhaps fifty feet, and the rest of the passage opened out before us, nearly empty. Stefan said, with effort: “To the right, the last one.”
“What, the great big one?” I pointed.
“Yes, Mademoiselle. The great big one.”
I opened the throttle as far as it could go. We skipped across the water like a smooth, round stone, like when Charles and I were children and left to ourselves, and we would take the boat as fast as it could go and scream with joy in the briny wind, because when you were a child you didn’t know that boats sometimes crashed and people sometimes drowned. That vital young men were shot and sometimes bled to death.
Stefan’s yacht rose up rapidly before us, lit by a series of lights along the bow and the glow of a few portholes. It was long and elegant, a sweet beauty of a ship. The sides were painted black as far as the final row of portholes, where the white took over, like a wide neat collar around the rim, like a nun’s wimple. I saw the name Isolde painted on the bow. “Ahoy!” I called out, when we were fifty feet away. “Isolde ahoy!”
“They are likely asleep,” said Stefan.
I pulled back the throttle and brought the boat around. We bobbed on the water, sawing in our own wake, while I rummaged in the compartment under the wheel and brought out a small revolver.
“God in heaven,” said Stefan.
“I hope it’s loaded,” I said, and I pointed the barrel out to sea and fired.
The sound echoed off the water and the metal side of the boat. A light flashed on in one of the portholes, and a voice called out something outraged in German.
I cupped my hands around my mouth. “Isolde ahoy!”
“Ja, ja!”
“I have your owner! I have—oh, damn.”
The boat pitched. I grabbed the wheel. Behind me, Stefan was moving, and I hissed at him to sit down, he was going to kill himself.
But he ignored me and waved the bloodstained white shirt above his head. He brought the other hand to his mouth and yelled out a few choice German words, words I didn’t understand but comprehended perfectly, and then he crashed back down in his seat as if the final drops of life had been wrung out of him.
“Stefan!” I exclaimed. The boat was driving against the side of the ship; I steered frantically and let out the throttle a notch.
A figure appeared at the railing above, and an instant later a rope ladder unfurled down the curving side of the ship. I glanced at the slumping Stefan, whose eyes were closed, whose knee rested in a puddle of dark blood, and then back at the impossible swinging ladder, and I yelled frantically upward that someone had better get down here on the fucking double, because Stefan was about to die.
PEPPER
Route A1A • 1966
1.
Mrs. Dommerich leans back on her palms and stares at the moon. “Isn’t it funny? The same old moon that stood above the sky when I was your age. It hasn’t changed a bit.”
“I don’t do moons,” says Pepper. “Who was this American of yours? The one having the party?”
“He was a friend. He was living in Paris at the time. A very good friend.”
“What kind of friend?”
Mrs. Dommerich laughs. “Not that kind, I assure you. He might have been, if I hadn’t already fallen in love with a friend of his.” Without warning, she slides off the hood of the car to stand in the sand, staring out into the ocean. “We should be going.”
“Going where?”
She doesn’t answer. Unlike Pepper, she didn’t follow her own advice and wear a cardigan, and her forearms are bare to the November night. She crosses them against her chest, just beneath her breasts. The material falls gently from her body, and Pepper decides she isn’t quite like Audrey Hepburn after all. She’s slender, but she isn’t skinny. There is a soft roundness to her, an inviting fullness about her breasts and hips and bottom, which she carries so gracefully on her light frame that you almost don’t notice, unless you’re looking for it. Unless you’re a man.
She turns to Pepper. “I have an idea. Why don’t you come back with me to Cocoa Beach? We have a little guest cottage in the back. You can stay there until you’re ready to make some decisions. A little more private than the Breakers, don’t you think?”
“Are you serious?”
“Of course. I’d love the company. To tell the truth, it’s a bit lonely, now that my husband’s gone and the children are grown. And you need me.”
Pepper opens her mouth to say that she doesn’t need anyone.
“Yes, you do,” says Mrs. Dommerich, before the words come out.
“You’re just nuts, do you know that?”
“No, you’re nuts. You think—what? That I’m involved in some vast conspiracy to keep all this out of the public notice?” She waves her hand at Pepper’s belly. “That I’m in cahoots with the great man himself?”
“I’d be crazy not to consider it.”
Mrs. Dommerich narrows her eyes to consider Pepper’s point of view. “I suppose that’s fair enough,” she says. “But you’re already here. You’ve trusted me this far.”
“I haven’t trusted you a bit. I’m just trying to figure out your game.”
“Figure it out at my place, then.” Mrs. Dommerich walks around the left fender and opens the door. “It’s a hell of a lot more comfortable, for one thing. What have you got to lose?”
“My luggage. For one thing.”
Mrs. Dommerich swings into her seat and starts the engine. She calls out, over the throaty roar: “We’ll ring up the Breakers in the morning and have it sent over.”
Pepper stands there in the beam of the headlights, arms still crossed, trying to find Mrs. Dommerich’s heart-shaped face in the middle of all that glare. Mrs. Dommerich gives the horn an impatient little toot.
“All right,” Pepper says at last, walking back to her door and climbing inside. The leather seat takes her in like an old friend. “After all, I don’t suppose I have any choice.”
Mrs. Dommerich turns the car around and starts back down the dirt track to the highway, chased by the moon.
“Honey, you always have a choice,” she says. “The trick is making the right one.”
2.
“I suppose you can call me Pepper now,” she says, as they bounce elegantly back down through the parting in the reeds, “since I’m going to be your houseguest, and not a very good one.”
Mrs. Dommerich changes gears and accelerates down the dirt track.
“You’ll be a wonderful houseguest, Pepper. Better than you think. And you can call me Annabelle.”
3.
They are back on the highway, roaring north under the moon. The landscape passes by, dark and anonymous. Pepper yawns in the passenger seat. “Tell me about this lover of yours.”
“I thought you weren’t interested in romance.”
“I’m just being polite. And I don’t like silence.”
Annabelle shakes her head. “Tell me something. What do you believe in, Miss Pepper Schuyler?”
“Me? I believe in independence. I believe in calling the shots and keeping your eyes wide open. Because in the end, you know, he just wants to get into bed with you. That’s what they’re after. They’ll kiss you in the sunset, they’ll carry you upstairs, they’ll gaze into your eyes like you might disappear if they stop. They might even tell you they’re in love. But the point is to seduce you.”
Annabelle taps her thumbs on the steering wheel and considers this. “Do you know, though, I think I was the one who seduced him, in the end.”
“Well, that’s how they do it, the best of them. They make you think it was your idea.”
The draft whistles around them. Pepper checks her watch. It’s half past eleven o’clock, and she’s getting sleepy, except that the baby is pressing on a nerve that tracks all the way down her foot and turns her toes numb. She shifts her weight from one leg to the other.
“Do you know what I think, Miss Schuyler?”
“Call me Pepper, I said.”
“Is that your real name?”
“Pepper will do. But really. Tell me what you think about me, Annabelle. I’m dying to know.”
“I think you really are a romantic. You’re longing for true love with all your tough little heart. It’s just that you’re too beautiful, and it’s made you cynical.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Yes, it does. Any unearned gift makes you cynical, unless you’re a psychopath.”
“Beauty hasn’t made you cynical.”
“But I’m not beautiful. I suppose I’m attractive, and I have a few nice features. My eyes and skin. My figure, if you like your women petite. But I was never beautiful, certainly not compared to someone like you.”
“Don’t sell yourself short. Look at those cheekbones of yours.”
“Not like yours. I could hang my hat on yours. No, there were just two men in my life who thought I was beautiful, and I think they thought I was beautiful because they loved me, because they were attracted to something inside me, and not the other way around.”
Pepper laughs. “Trust me, it was the other way around.”
“How can you say that? You don’t know either man.”
“I know men.”
“You think you know men, but you only know cads, because the cads are the only ones brash enough to take you on. You don’t know the first thing about a man capable of a great love.”
“Because there’s no such thing. It’s just the sex instinct, the need for reproduction, and the more attractive the man, the more women he wants to reproduce with.”
“All right, Miss Schuyler. That’s quite enough. You just shut that steely old mouth of yours and hear me out.”
“So you’re feisty, after all!”
“When I have to be. So be quiet and listen up, and you might actually learn something, my so-wise friend with the prize-winning cheekbones and the knocked-up belly.” Annabelle taps her long fingers against the steering wheel. “In fact, I’ll make you a bet.”
A bet. Pepper’s heart does the old flutter.
“I don’t know,” she says, poker-faced. “What’re the stakes?”
“Stakes?”
Pepper shrugs. “It’s got to be interesting, that’s what my mother says. The only true crime is boredom.”
Annabelle laughs. “My, my. The apple doesn’t fall far. Well, then. Let’s see. You’re an unwed mother on the run, in need of a little extra insurance. I’ll bet my black pearl necklace to your gold Cartier watch that I’ll have you believing in true love by the time that baby of yours sees daylight.”
“I don’t know.” Pepper brushes her lap. “I haven’t seen this pearl necklace of yours.”
“My husband gave me that necklace as a Christmas present in 1937, from the Cartier shop on rue de la Paix, because he could not find another jeweler in Paris who was skilled enough to satisfy him.”
Pepper makes a few rapid calculations, carries the eight, adds a zero or two. The old heart flutters again.
“True love, you said?”
“True blue, faithful and everlasting.”
“In that case,” Pepper says, “you’re on.”
4.
Annabelle asks if there is any more coffee. Pepper reaches for the thermos and gives it a jiggle.
“Not much.” She pours what’s left into the plastic cup and hands it to Annabelle.
“Thank you.”
“You’re not getting sleepy, are you? I can always take a turn at the wheel.”
“Not on your life.” Annabelle hands back the empty cup. “Not that you’re not perfectly capable, I’m sure. But I’d like to drive her myself.”
Pepper tucks the thermos back into the glove compartment and latches the polished wooden door. “Because you have history, don’t you?”
“Yes, we do.” Annabelle pats the dashboard.
“I’d ask how it happened, but I’d rather stay awake.”
“I can’t really tell you, anyway. Too many lives involved.”
“My God, what a relief. I bore so easily, you understand.”
Annabelle laughs. “Do you, now? Have you ever been in love, Miss Schuyler?”
“It’s Pepper, remember?”
“Pepper, then. Tell me the truth. I’m taking you home with me, so you’ve got to be honest.” She pauses, and when Pepper doesn’t speak, she adds: “Besides, it’s one o’clock in the morning. No secrets after midnight.”
“I don’t know.” Pepper looks out the side, at the shadows blurring past. “Maybe.”
“Were you in love with the father of your baby, or someone else?”
“I was very deeply in lust with him, if that’s what you mean.”
“That’s not at all what I mean, but it can be very hard to tell the difference. Do you still want him?”
Pepper’s hand finds the neck of her cardigan. She thinks of the last time she saw the father of her baby, the day before she left Washington. “No. Not anymore. I’m cured.”
“If you say so. We’re very good at pretending, we women. And the heart is such a complicated little organ.”
A light flashes in the rearview mirror, and Pepper jumps in her seat. Annabelle glances into the mirror and slows the car a fraction. The light grows larger and brighter, resolving into two headlamps, and the drone of an engine undercuts the noise of their own car, their own draft. Annabelle glances again into the mirror and says something under her breath.
Pepper’s fingernails dig into the leather seat next to her leg. “What is it?” she says.
There is a flash of bright blue, followed instantly by red, and the shriek of a siren sails above their heads. Annabelle swears again—loudly enough that Pepper recognizes the curse as French—and slows the car.
“What are you doing?”
“What else can I do?”
The car drifts to the shoulder, and the siren reaches a new pitch behind them. The red and blue lights fill the air, throwing a lurid pattern on Annabelle’s cheeks and neck. She brakes gently, until the car comes to a stop. The siren screams in Pepper’s ears. She clenches her hands into balls of resistance against the authority of the roaring engine drawing up behind them, the unstoppable force that has found them here, of all places, in the middle of the night, on a deserted Florida highway next to the restless Atlantic. Two well-dressed women inside a car of rigid German steel.
The steel vibrates faintly. The lights and the roar increase to gigantic proportion, drenching the entire world, and then everything hurtles on to their left. The siren begins its Doppler descent, and the world goes black again, except for the flashing lights that narrow and narrow and finally disappear around a curve in the road, and the moon that replaces them.
“Holy God,” says Pepper, and she opens the car door and vomits into the sand.
ANNABELLE
Isolde • 1935
1.
The doctor arrived over the side of the boat just after I laid Stefan out on the deck and loosened the tourniquet.
“Why did you loosen this?” he demanded, dropping his bag on the deck and stripping his jacket.
“Because it had been on for well over half an hour. I wanted to save the leg.”
“There is no use saving the leg if the patient bleeds to death.”
At which point Stefan opened one eye and told the esteemed doctor he wanted to keep his fucking leg, and if the esteemed doctor couldn’t speak with respect to the woman who had saved Stefan’s life, the esteemed doctor could walk the fucking plank with a bucket of dead fish hanging around his neck to attract the sharks.
The doctor said nothing, and I assisted him right there on the deck as he dug into the hole and extracted the bullet, as he cleaned and stitched up the wound and Stefan drifted in and out of consciousness, always waking up with a faint start and a mumbled apology, as if he had somehow betrayed us by not remaining alert while the forceps dug into his raw flesh and the antiseptic was poured over afterward.
“You are a lucky man, Silverman,” said the doctor, dropping the small metal bullet into a towel, and I thought, Silverman, Stefan Silverman, that’s his name, and wiped away the gathering perspiration on his broad forehead.
The doctor asked for the sutures, and I rooted through the bag and laid everything out on the towel next to Stefan’s arm: sutures, needle, antiseptic. “What’s your blood type, nurse?” the doctor asked as he worked, as I silently handed him each suture, and I said I was O negative, and he replied: “Good, what I hoped you would say. Can you spare a pint, do you think?” and I said I could, of course, of course. I was glowing a little, in my heart, because he had called me nurse, and no one had ever called me anything useful before. And because I had brought Stefan Silverman safely to his ship through the dark and the salt wind, and the doctor was efficiently fixing him, putting his leg back together again, and the ball of terror was beginning to drop away from my belly at last.
The doctor stood at last and told me that he was finished, and I should dress the wound. “Not too tight; you nurses are always dressing a wound too tight. I will have to come back with the transfusion equipment. It may take an hour or two. Can you stay awake with him?”
Yes, I could.
“Then we will put him in his bed.” He signaled for one of the crew, who were hovering anxiously nearby, and somehow made himself clear with gestures and a few scant words of German. Two of the men hoisted Stefan up—he was out cold by now, his dark head turned to one side—and the doctor yelled at them to be careful. He turned to me. “Don’t leave his side for a second. You know what to look for, I think? Signs of shock?”
“Yes. I will watch him like a child, I promise.”
2.
He did look like a child, lying there on his clean white bed, when I had tucked the sheets around his bare chest, and his face was so pale and peaceful I checked his pulse and his breathing every minute or so to make certain he hadn’t died. I turned off the electric light overhead and kept only the small lamp burning next to his bed, just enough to see him by. His skin was smooth, only a few faint lines about the eyes, and his hair was quite dark, curling wetly around his ears and forehead. He was about my brother’s age, I thought, twenty-three or -four. His lashes were long and dark, lying against his cheek, and I wondered what color his eyes were. Stefan Silverman’s eyes. When I touched his shoulder, his lids fluttered.
“Shh,” I said. “Go to sleep.”
He opened those eyes just long enough for me to decide that they were probably brown, but a very light brown, like a salt caramel. He tried to focus and I thought he failed, because his lids dropped again and his head turned an inch or two to the side, away from me.
But then he said, almost without moving his lips: “Stay, Mademoiselle.”
I smoothed the sheets against his chest, an excuse to touch him. He smelled of gin and antiseptic. I thought, It’s like waiting forever for the film to start, and then it does.
“As long as you need me,” I told him.
3.
At half past eight o’clock in the morning, Stefan’s mistress arrived.
Or so I assumed. I could hear a woman on the other side of the cabin door, shrill and furious like a mistress. She was remonstrating with someone in French (of course), and her opponent was speaking back to her in German. Stefan opened his eyes and stared, frowning, at the ceiling.
“I think you have a visitor,” I said.
He sighed. “Can you give us a minute or two, Mademoiselle?”
“You shouldn’t see anyone. You have lost so much blood. You need to rest.”
“Yes, but I’m feeling better now.”
I wanted to remind him that he was feeling better only because he had a pint of Annabelle de Créouville coursing through his veins. I rose to my feet—a little carefully, because a pint of blood meant a great deal more to me than it did to him—and went to the door.
The woman stopped shrilling when she saw me. She was dressed in a long and shimmering evening gown, and her hair was a little disordered. There was a diamond clip holding back a handful of once-sleek curls at her temple, and a circle of matching diamonds around her neck. Her lipstick was long gone. Her eyes flicked up and down, taking me in, exposing the line of smudged kohl on her upper lid. “And who are you?” she asked, in haughty French, though I could tell from her accent that she was English.