Along the Infinite Sea: Love, friendship and heartbreak, the perfect summer read

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 indicates the deck is 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 one. Very kind of you.”

“I mean it. Why not?”

“Why not? Because you don’t even know me.”

“There’s no law against helping strangers.”

“Well, I certainly don’t know a damned thing about you, except that you’re rich and your husband died last year, and you have children and love the ocean. And you drove this car across Germany thirty years ago—”

“Twenty-eight.”

“Twenty-eight. And even if that’s all true, it’s not much to go on.”

“Isn’t it? Marriages have been made on less knowledge. Happy ones.”

That’s an odd thing to say, Pepper thinks, and she hears the words echoing: an act of faith. Well, that explains it. Maybe Mrs. Dommerich is one of those sweet little fools who thinks the world is a pretty place to live, filled with nice people who love you, where everything turns out all right if you just smile and tap your heels together three times.

Or maybe it’s all an act.

A little gust of salt wind comes off the ocean, and Pepper snuggles deeper into her cardigan. Mrs. Dommerich finishes the cigarette and smashes it out carefully into the ashtray, next to Pepper’s stub from the ride up. She reaches into the glove compartment and draws out a small thermos container. “Coffee?” she asks, unscrewing the cap.

“Where did you get coffee?”

“I had Jean-Louis fill it up for me before we left.”

Pepper takes the small plastic cup. The coffee is strong and still hot. They sit quietly, sipping and gazing, sharing the smell of the wide Atlantic. The ocean heaves and rushes before them, unseen except for the long white crests of the rollers, picked out by the moon.

Mrs. Dommerich asks: “If I were to guess who the father is, would I be right?”

“Probably.”

She nods. “I see.”

Pepper laughs again. “Isn’t it hilarious? Who’d have thought a girl like me could be so stupid? It isn’t as if I didn’t have my eyes open. I mean, I knew all the rumors, I knew I might just be playing with a live grenade.”

“But you couldn’t resist, could you?”

“The oldest story in the book.”

The baby stirs beneath Pepper’s heart, stretching out a long limb to test the strength of her abdomen. She puts her hand over the movement, a gesture of pregnancy that used to annoy her, when it was someone else’s baby.

Mrs. Dommerich speaks softly. “Because he was irresistible, wasn’t he? He made you think there was no other woman in the world, that this thing you shared was more sacred than law.”

“Something like that.”

Mrs. Dommerich pours out the dregs of her coffee and wipes out the cup with a handkerchief. “I’m serious, you know. It’s the real reason I wanted to speak to you. To help you, if I can.”

“You don’t say.”

Mrs. Dommerich pauses. “You know, there are all kinds of heroes in the world, Miss Schuyler, though I know you don’t believe in that, either. And you’re a fine girl, underneath all that cynical bluster of yours, and if this man wasn’t what you hoped, I assure you there will be someone else who is.”

Pepper looks out at the ocean and thinks about how wrong she is. There will never be someone else; how could there be? There will be men, of course. Pepper’s no saint. But there won’t be someone else. The thing about Pepper, she never makes the same mistake twice.

She folds her arms atop her belly and says, “Don’t hold your breath.”

Mrs. Dommerich laughs and gets out of the car. She stretches her arms up to the night sky, and the moon catches the glint in her wedding ring. “What a beautiful night, isn’t it? Not too cool, after all. I can’t bear the summers here, but it’s just the thing to cheer me up in November.”

“What’s wrong with November?”

Mrs. Dommerich doesn’t answer. She goes around the front of the car and settles herself on the hood, tucking up her knees under her chin. After a moment, Pepper joins her, except that Pepper’s belly sticks out too far for such a gamine little pose, so she removes her sandals, stretches her feet into the sand, and leans against the familiar warm hood instead.

“Are we just going to sit here forever?” Pepper asks.

Mrs. Dommerich wraps her arms around her legs and doesn’t speak. Pepper wants to tap her head like an eggshell, to see what comes out. What’s her story? Why the hell is she bothering with Pepper? Women don’t usually bother with Pepper, and she doesn’t blame them. Look what happens when you do. Pepper fertilizes her womb with your husband.

“Well?” Pepper says at last, because she’s not the kind of girl who waits for you to pull yourself together. “What are you thinking about?”

Mrs. Dommerich starts, as if she’s forgotten Pepper is there at all. “Oh, I’m sorry. Ancient history, really. Have you ever been to the Paris Ritz?”

Pepper toes the sand. “Once. We went to Europe one summer, when I was in college.”

“Well, I was there in the summer of 1937, when the Ritz was the center of the universe. Everybody was there.” She stands up and dusts off her dress. “Anyway. Come along, my dear.”

“Wait a second. What happened at the Ritz?”

“Like I said, it’s ancient history. Water under the bridge.”

“You were the one who brought it up.”

Mrs. Dommerich folds her arms and stares at the ocean. Pepper’s toe describes a square in the sand and tops it off with a triangular roof. She tries to recall the Ritz, but the grand hotels of Europe had all looked alike after a while. Wasn’t that a shame? All that effort and expense, and in a week or two they all blurred together.

Still, she remembers a bit. She remembers glamour and a glorious long bar, a place where Pepper could do business. What kind of business had sweet, elegant Mrs. Dommerich done there?

Just as Pepper gives up, just as she reaches downward to thread her sandals back over her toes, Mrs. Dommerich turns away from the ocean, and you’d think the moon had stuck in her eyes, they’re so bright.

“There was this party there,” she says. “A going-away party at the Ritz for an American who was moving back to New York. It was the kind of night you never forget.”