Along the Infinite Sea

by Beatriz Williams

  So that part was all on the up and up. Pepper needed a job in Washington, Pepper found the best job going for a sparky young woman with an English degree, grades not to be ashamed of, manner polished, face and figure top-drawer. She never imagined she would fall in love.

  She’s always scorned that phrase, falling in love. It implies a certain lack of conviction, a lily-livered helplessness that Pepper despises. How could you just fall in love? You stepped into love willingly, didn’t you, and if it wasn’t convenient, you found someone else to step into: Voilà. So maybe that was why it happened. Her guard was down. The hours were long, the quarters close, the job intense, the man himself so . . . well. Let’s pick an example. One night, working late, everyone else gone, the old story. He offered her a ride home. She accepted. The convertible, the warm breeze, the Lincoln Memorial passing in a noble floodlit blur. They got to talking. His thick hair rustled, his eyes gleamed. She thought, alive and sleepy at the same time, What would it be like to kiss him? And then he did. Kiss her. Pulled over on the deserted street next to the Potomac and kissed her, and he tasted of the bottle of Scotch they’d been sharing, and cigarettes, and warm human mouth. She had wrapped her hand around the nape of his neck and kissed him back, an act of instinct, because at two o’clock in the morning after a long day’s Washington work you clean forgot about a wife you’d never met, tending a litter of unknown children. He pulled away, looking adorably confused. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. The Scotch, I guess. And Pepper patted her hair and agreed that it must have been the Scotch, and they didn’t say another word, and that was when it started. That was when she fell in love with him, tumbled right off the branch and never hit bottom, and maybe she should have quit there. Yes, that was her mistake, that she didn’t quit right there. Because once she started falling, the sex was inevitable, one way or another. Yes, she had gone home and scrubbed herself all over, thought, What have I done? And then, I will never, ever do that again. But when a man liked sex as much as he did, and a woman was as beautiful and besotted as Pepper, they had better get the hell away from each other, or one day at least one of them will have too much to drink, will be working too hard and feeling sorry for herself and let her guard down. One day they will end up drunk in a hotel bed somewhere, making love three times in one night, and at least one of them will come to repent it.

  And that’s exactly what happened.

  3.

  So there it is, the ticking face of her gold Cartier watch, and it says Eleven o’clock, you lazy bitch, and it can’t be wrong, can it? Pepper pushes open the French door to the main house and calls out Hello? like a question, because the only two sounds are the fountain tinkling in the courtyard and the relentless songbirds in the lemon trees, who seem to have taken a wrong turn looking for Sleeping Beauty.

  In the dining room, calls out Annabelle.

  Pepper might well ask Where’s the dining room? but instead she follows her nose to the coffee and the bacon, and her nose—another valuable Schuyler inheritance—doesn’t lead her astray. The dining room has high ceilings and a pair of French doors open to the sunshine and the songbirds, and, more important, a heavy wooden sideboard loaded with breakfast in chafing dishes. Annabelle sets down her newspaper and waves to the chair opposite, which is set with cutlery and an empty coffee cup. The pot stands to the right.

  “Good morning,” says Annabelle. “Please help yourself.”

  Pepper is already snatching a plate and sinking a silver serving spoon into an impossibly creamy batch of scrambled eggs. Bacon. Link sausage. Porridge (ignored). Pitchers of orange and tomato juice. Pepper picks the tomato, even though she’s in Florida. “Clara will bring your toast,” says Annabelle.

  Pepper sits and pours the coffee. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. Feeling better?”

  “Divine. Do you always have a spread like this at breakfast?”

  Annabelle laughs. “Poor Clara. I told her I had a guest, and she’s so used to a houseful, she doesn’t know how to do it differently. Luckily, I’m a good eater.”

  “How many is a houseful?”

  “Oh, my goodness. Including the older ones and their spouses and kids?” Annabelle ticks on her fingers, frowns, and ticks again.

  “You’re a grandmother?”

  “Oh, yes. Several times over.”

  The coffee is hot and dark as oil. Pepper adds a pinch of sugar but no cream. “You don’t look it.”

  “I was a young bride.”

  “Where are all these teeming hordes now?”

  “My youngest are in college. The older ones settled in New York, the Washington suburbs. But everyone meets here at Christmas and in the spring. The din is atrocious.”

  “You make it sound so alluring.”

  Annabelle folds up her newspaper and finishes her coffee. Pepper gazes at the slim blue pack of cigarettes resting at her one o’clock position, next to the saucer, a blue-and-white pattern: Wedgwood, maybe. As a young debutante, Pepper never paid much attention to china; that was her older sister Tiny’s expertise. Tiny’s one of those girls who picked out her wedding pattern when she was eight years old.

  Annabelle stands up and hands her the newspaper across the table. Her eyes are as warm and sympathetic as chocolate. “You might want to take a look at the headlines,” she says. “Something about one of your sisters.”

  4.

  Pepper considers calling her mother first. She taps her fingernails against the telephone receiver, click click click, and stares out the mullioned window to the deserted beach across the road.

  Mums doesn’t know about the baby. That’s why Pepper buried herself at Tiny’s house in Cape Cod at the beginning of summer, because she couldn’t face Mums and Daddy. She couldn’t even face Vivian. Strange that she should go running to Tiny in her time of trouble, to perfect Tiny, who never set a well-turned toe in the wrong place. Maybe she knew all along that Tiny had a juicy little secret of her own. Maybe she sensed the unhappiness churning behind Tiny’s immaculate shell, as opposed to the happiness that beams right out of Vivian’s eye sockets these days. Maybe she knew Tiny would prove a better companion in misery, during the slow, hot summer in Cape Cod.

  Or maybe Annabelle was right. Maybe she was just trying to punish herself.

  When Pepper was thirteen or fourteen, out in East Hampton for the summer, she wore her first bikini. She’d bought it in town with her careful hoard of spending money, and the following day, a Wednesday, she made her debut on the beach atop a colorful beach blanket, stretching her golden limbs toward the sun. No umbrella. A pair of older boys had wandered over within five minutes, the neighbor boys, sixteen and eighteen. If it isn’t little Pepper, all grown up, the eighteen-year-old said, toeing a friendly sprinkle of sand onto her bare abdomen. They had played a little volleyball, they had splashed in the surf. Billy (the older one) had put his hands around her naked waist and tossed her into a wave or two. Later, when she walked away to change, he had followed her and kissed her behind the weathered gray boards of the bathhouse, and while he was kissing her he slipped his hand inside the wet triangle covering her right breast and rubbed her nipple. I have to go now, she said, breaking away, and she had run up the steps and into the house before he could catch her—she could sprint, Pepper, when she had to—and there was Mums on the back porch, reading a newspaper, drinking something clear with a slice of lime and plenty of ice. Pepper never forgot the look on her mother’s face when she burst up the final step, panting, a little blurry. The sad shake of her head. You’re like me, aren’t you? she said. You just can’t help yourself. And Pepper said, Don’t be a square, we were just having fun, and Mums said, Sure, fun for him, and Pepper said, You don’t understand anything, just exactly like every teenager since the beginning of time.

  Mums hadn’t gotten mad. Mums kept her cool. She just laughed and finished her drink and said, Well, for God’s sake, whatever you do, don�
��t let them get you pregnant. Those exact words. Pepper recalls them like yesterday’s breakfast.

  Click click click.

  Pepper lifts the receiver and dials up her sister Vivian in Gramercy Park.

  “PEPPER! MY GOD! WHERE ARE YOU?”

  “I’m in Florida, love, keeping up my suntan. How’s things?”

  “MY GOD! HAVEN’T YOU HEARD?”

  “What, that Tiny’s getting a divorce? Old news.”

  “YOU KNEW ABOUT IT ALREADY?”

  “Of course I knew about it.” Pepper examines her fingernails. “I was on the Cape all summer, wasn’t I? I had a ringside seat.”

  “AND YOU DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING?”

  “For God’s sake, stop shouting like that. It was a private little matter, wasn’t it, and anyway, it’s not the kind of thing you can talk about over the telephone, in-laws lurking in every corner. Especially when your sister writes the nosiest gossip column in New York.”

  “It is not a gossip column.” With dignity. “It’s a witty and elegant disquisition of social customs in our magnificent little town. And it’s the most-read page in the entire Metropolitan magazine.”

  “I rest my case,” says Pepper.

  The line goes quiet.

  “Vivian?”

  “I’m here.”

  Pepper winds the cord around her fingers. “Have you talked to Tiny about it?”

  “No, as a matter of fact. She’s nowhere to be found. Mums got a letter from her yesterday. She’s not saying what’s in it. Poor Mums, she had her heart set on Tiny being First Lady. Now she’s stuck with a divorcée and a doctor’s wife. Her dreams crumbled in the dust. I guess it’s all up to you now, Pepper, sweetheart. Any promising young senators up your sleeve?”

  “Actually, I’m pregnant,” says Pepper.

  Again with the silent receiver.

  “Vivian?”

  “Say that again, Pepper. I’m not sure I heard you properly.”

  “I’m pregnant.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Don’t fall all over yourself with congratulations.”

  Vivian draws in a long breath that crackles against Pepper’s ear. “Well, well. My God. Knocked up, the middle child. You’re sure?”

  Pepper looks down at her stomach. “Pretty sure.”

  “Does Mums know?”

  “Of course not.”

  “When are you due?”

  “February.”

  “FEBRUARY! But that’s—that’s—”

  “Soon. I know.”

  “Holy moley. How the hell did you hide it from Tiny?”

  “I didn’t. She knows. That’s why she let me stay on the Cape into the autumn. Fixing up that old car of hers.”

  Vivian snorts. “Oh, now I get it. I should have smelled a rat, Pepper Schuyler rattling around in a greasy old garage for months on end. And I thought there must be a man involved.”

  “Oh, there was. A delicious one. Regretfully, he wasn’t mine. He was Tiny’s.”

  “TINY!”

  “Indeedy. The ex–Mrs. Hardcastle. Not so virtuous as one might think.”

  There is a groan, as of stones being laid atop an already heavy burden. “Stop. You’re hurting my ears. I’m going to have to sit down.”

  “Sit down? You, Vivian?”

  “Well, I’m in a delicate condition, too, if you’ll recall. By my legitimate husband, I feel compelled to add.”

  “That’s a first.”

  “No sass from you, young lady. I was respectably married for several months before Junior arrived.”

  “Do you want a medal for that?”

  A creak of springs sounds faintly in the distance. Pepper props herself on the edge of the sofa table and waits for Vivian’s familiar voice to reappear in her ear. The knot in her belly is beginning to unwind, under the tug of Vivian’s familiar banter. Why didn’t she call up Vivian before? They were born only eleven disgraceful months apart, after all, and it might as well be none. The snappy, happy Schuyler girls, tearing apart Manhattan and putting it back together again. Two and a half years ago, when Vivian moved into her own apartment after college, a dismal grubby fifth-floor walkup (it’s always the fifth floor of a five-floor walkup, isn’t it?), they had gone out to six different nightclubs before dawn, had smoked and drank and laughed and kissed all kinds of unsuitable men. And then they had gone back to Vivian’s grubby apartment, holding each other up as they mounted the vomit-scented stairs, and collapsed together on Vivian’s bed. Not another man in sight, at the end of the night: just two sisters, holding each other up.

  “So. How are the hemorrhoids?” Vivian asks.

  “Speak for yourself.”

  “You’re feeling good, then?”

  “Tip-top. I never tossed a single cookie.”

  “Ah, the luck of the wicked,” says Vivian. “Have you been seeing a doctor?”

  “I guess that depends on what you mean by seeing.”

  “Not in the biblical sense.”

  “Then yes. At reasonably regular intervals. Everything seems to be shipshape.” The telephone cord crosses Pepper’s belly in elongated squiggles. It’s the same dress as last night, the blue tunic that matches her eyes. Pepper watches the fabric move, the cord shift. Baby’s restless. “Any more questions?” she adds, though of course there is one last question, the obvious question, the biggie, the question even Vivian is almost too tactful to ask.

  “So. Who’s the father?” asks Vivian.

  “No one you know,” says Pepper.

  “Not at present, maybe, but I can guarantee he’s going to know me shortly.” Vivian’s tone is that of a cumulonimbus, towering on the horizon.

  Pepper’s already shaking her head, almost as if her sister can see her. “Down, Vivian.”

  “If this little man-swine thinks he can get my sister in trouble and walk away scot-free—”

  “I don’t want to have anything to do with him, do you hear me? Not a single goddamned thing.” The words hurt her throat; she actually places her hand against the cords of her neck as she says them. The last word, thing, is just a whisper, stripped of conviction. Pepper shuts her eyes and squeezes her throat, squeezes hard, until her windpipe lies flat against the hard muscle. If she can’t breathe, she can’t speak, can she? She can’t tell Vivian about the telephone call and the notes, the messages to the hotel, Captain Seersucker, the men outside who might be tourists and might not.

  “That bad, is it?” Vivian says.

  “Yeah.”

  “So come home.”

  Pepper shakes her head. “Can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I like the weather down here, that’s why.”

  “At least tell me where you are.”

  Pepper hesitates. “Cocoa Beach.”

  Vivian sighs again, and for some reason Pepper thinks of her father, who was also there that day when she was fourteen, the day she wore her first bikini and found out what the older kids got up to during the summer, and who looked up from his newspaper when she ran in from the porch, clutching Mums’s words to her half-naked bosom. He was sitting in the chair next to the window, and he looked as if he’d swallowed a peach pit. Had a good time? he asked, in such a way that Pepper knew he’d seen every little thing from his perch up there above the beach, where he liked to spend his summer days watching the pretty girls go by. She said Go to hell, like every other teenager since after the war, while inside her head she thought, My God, you old drunk, why don’t you go out and tell Billy he can’t just cop a feel like that, I mean, go out and thrash the sonofabitch for grabbing your fourteen-year-old daughter’s tits behind the bathhouse. Care, for God’s sake.

  But he hadn’t, had he? He hadn’t heard what was pounding inside her head. He turned to the ashtray and made busy with the cigaret
te, and somewhere in the middle of all that stubbing he said, Put something on, will you, before you start a riot.

  Pepper was on her own, he meant. In these matters, Pepper would have to take care of Pepper.

  Vivian speaks carefully into her ear. “You’re sure you’re all right, honey?”

  Oh, Vivian. You with the nice doctor husband and the nice little cherub, the pretty sun-filled apartment in Gramercy and the glamorous job writing about glamorous people. Vivian, whose pregnant belly is perfectly legitimate, created in mutual love with her nice doctor husband. No more reckless nights out for Vivian, no more commiseration between Vivian and Pepper. How could you commiserate with someone who had no misery to share with you?

  “I’m sure,” says Pepper, and before either of them can say anything else, she hangs up the receiver in its handsome ivory cradle, and for a long while afterward that rattle is the last sound in the room.

  5.

  But you can’t keep Pepper cooped up indoors all day. Sooner or later she finds her way to the beach across the road, where the weather is mild and the surf gentle. The tide reaches a few feet below the line of seaweed that serves as a high-water mark, and after a quarter-hour of walking, Pepper decides it’s on its way out.

  The comely young doctor in Chatham said that a long, brisk walk every morning was good for the baby and good for her. So Pepper walks briskly, a mile or so up the beach, and the sun is so warm she sits down on the deserted sand and stretches her toes toward the ocean. No curious eyes on her belly, no men grabbing her arm in a stairwell and telling her they had something important to discuss. No messages. No urgent notes. Pepper, I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing, but we have to come to some kind of agreement here. A man in my position . . .