History of a Pleasure Seeker

by Richard Mason

  He closed the grille and locked it.

  The curtain call was sublime. Don José had fortified himself with three excellent cognacs backstage and they mixed in his blood with the elation of having somehow seen the evening through. Germaine Lorette was contrite for having overshadowed him so completely. As he went to bow she told him he was the best Don José she had ever worked with. She kissed Escamillo, who was an old friend, but said nothing to the little slut playing Micaëla, who was altogether too gifted and too thin to merit praise. When she heard the cheer that greeted Stacey Meadows she strode onto the stage before it had even half died and sank to her knees with the grace of a child, though her joints were arthritic and she weighed sixteen stone. This trick of sudden fragility had driven audiences wild for thirty years. She remained in the depths of her curtsy, eyes downcast, until every person in the room was standing and applauding her.

  Piet Barol led them from the center of the first row. Jay Gruneberger watched his hands as he clapped and was glad. A steward tapped Piet on the shoulder and gave him a slip of ship’s notepaper, on which the words Follow the man who brings this were written. “From Mademoiselle Meadows, sir. You’ll want to come now, before the crush. May I guide you?” Piet looked for Didier, to show by a smile that there need be no awkwardness between them. He was not there. For several moments he hesitated, hoping he would return, but the thought of refusing this invitation did not enter his head.

  He rose and followed the man through a side door.

  A large crowd of male passengers was making the same pilgrimage. Though the backstage dressing rooms were formally out of bounds, access to them could be achieved by a discreet tip, and those with permanent mistresses in the chorus had nightly invitations. Piet was borne along with a boisterous crowd of the richest men on earth, which he took as an excellent omen of his own prospects. They reached a steel door and made a show of forcing it. Inside, in their flimsy costumes, gypsies and cigarette girls were smoking and undressing. They feigned horror at being disturbed, but in fact most of the invaders were known to them and welcome, and those who were not hoped to be and were scrupulously charming. After the first intrusion the door opened constantly, admitting flowers and champagne and flush-faced men.

  Piet stalked the crowd looking for a blue dress. It was often said of the chorus girls on the Eugénie that they looked as good in person as they did onstage. He passed through them admiringly but was not distracted.

  She made him wait twenty minutes. When she entered, she was wearing a wrap of pale pink silk and her dark curls were free of their braids. Both of them were pleased with how the other looked, relieved that the music and the low lights had not caused an embarrassing misjudgment.

  He went to her and bowed, raised his eyes to hers and smiled.

  “Do say you speak English.”

  “I speak English.”

  “Very good. All this French talk makes me so tired.” She went to a rack of clothes, and for a moment he thought she meant to change in front of him. Other girls were undressing; he tried not to see them or to hope that she would. She did not. She took a scarlet dressing gown from a hanger and said, “You might as well get us something to drink.”

  There was plenty to drink. They stood beside an open bottle of champagne, delivered to another passenger and forgotten when his lady summoned him.

  “Do tell me you aren’t a gigolo.”

  “Of course I’m not.”

  “It’s just that your clothes are so new and so chic. The effect is marvelous but not authentic.”

  Stacey Meadows was wary of too-perfect strangers, though she was also drawn to them. She was now twenty-six. Three years earlier, over tea in a New York hotel during a visit to that city with her mother, she had met a French vicomte with adorable manners. This charming gentleman, just touching fifty, had offered to show them the sights. By the afternoon of their second day together he had roundly banished Stacey’s virginity and left her thrilled with words of love. He had promised to marry her and given persuasive reasons why she should not tell her parents of his intentions; had paid for her passage to Paris and a suite at the Grand Hotel. Three days before her boat docked he had married a Belgian railway heiress. She learned of it soon after her arrival and in a flaming rage took herself to a music hall and got a job and thanked God for sparing her a pregnancy with that man’s child.

  Stacey’s voice had been much praised in the front parlors of small but comfortable Chicago houses. It found instant favor in Paris too, and she got a teacher who knew what to make of her gifts. She neither spoke to the vicomte again nor took his money. As she became better known, she felt glad to have been flung so far from her respectable life in the Midwest. She wrote to her parents and told them she was well but did not apologize for running away, and it was only to her brother Fred that she gave a forwarding address. The day she posted this letter she went to an audition at the Opéra Comique and was accepted into the chorus. Barely two seasons later she had a soloist’s part on a highly publicized voyage on a famous ship, with Germaine Lorette in the title role. “So you are well dressed and self-made and you cry during affecting scenes at the opera,” she said. “I do approve.”

  “My mother and I sang your duet together. You gave it so well I felt she was speaking to me.”

  “You should be scolded, not forgiven. I can quite see that.”

  Elsewhere in the room girls were sitting on men’s laps, squealing as their corsets were unlaced. Piet did not wish to seem unsophisticated, and Stacey’s presence after three hours of tantalizing imagining inspired him to follow the example of the other men. He leaned forward and kissed her neck.

  The sting in his cheek made him gasp. Stacey rose. It was best to impose discipline from the beginning; otherwise all was chaos. Since the decisive shattering of her illusions she had had no patience with sentimentality, but the vicomte’s expert induction had left her with a very great liking for clean-smelling men with beautiful lips. Having encountered just such a one, she felt that a little anticipation would make their first embrace infinitely sweeter. She decided to postpone it. “You may call tomorrow after tea to repent. I have a quiet hour while my braids are plaited. We can talk without this mayhem.”

  “I’ll do my best to come.”

  “I’m sure your best will be enough.”

  But the chorus dressing rooms were not accessible from tourist class. “If I don’t come, you must know that I wished to but was detained. May I see you in Cape Town?”

  “I will be there as long as the ship.”

  “Permit me to look you up, then. What is your name, mademoiselle?”

  “Stacey Meadows.”

  “I shall find you, Miss Meadows.”

  “And I shall let myself be found.”

  Observing the exit of Piet Barol, Jay Gruneberger did his best to extricate himself from his conversation with Mrs. Cornelius Schermerhorn. He had unwisely told this lady, who was a passionate amateur botanist, that his wife grew several rare species of bromelia in the hothouses of their estate on the Hudson River. Mrs. Schermerhorn had gone to great lengths to get Bromelia balansae to flower, and never once been successful, and she was halfway through a detailed account of each effort (continued in Jay’s ear throughout Germaine Lorette’s standing ovation) when Piet disappeared. Jay did his best, but the subject was close to Mrs. Schermerhorn’s heart. It was fully three minutes before he could get away.

  By the time he had done so, there was no sign of the stranger with the patrician profile. Jay was considerably annoyed. The Eugénie would dock at St. Helena the next day, and his wife would join him, having gone out on Albert Verignan’s yacht a fortnight earlier to oversee the final arrangements. By fashionable standards the Grunebergers’ marriage was a deeply contented one, and Jay felt for Rose a tender affection that would not countenance seductions she might observe. She was the child of his parents’ oldest friends; he had known her since she was six and would not wound her. This meant that his opportunities to fol
low his own inclinations were limited. When the craving was insuperable he satisfied it hastily and opportunistically, generally in the male lavatories of railway stations and other insalubrious venues. Some of the men he met in these places asked him to pay them, and once or twice he had succumbed to this temptation and emerged from a dingy hotel two hours later, his overcoat pulled over his face, feeling soiled and regretful. For several days he had been imagining a seduction of an altogether more discriminating kind, conducted in the superb comfort of his accommodations on the Eugénie. To have the possibility presented and then snatched away seemed unjust. He went to the landing above the grand staircase, which offered an excellent vantage point.

  Once again the lad had vanished.

  Though Jay and Rose Gruneberger figured prominently in lists of “New York’s most invited,” and were always described as “popular” and “in demand” by the society press, Jay had no close friends. Twice at Yale he had confided his attraction to his own sex, and both times his confidant’s revulsion had withered their intimacy as surely as salt poured on a snail will kill it. The boys who had fallen in love with him at his New England prep school were now married fathers and when they met made no mention of earlier realities.

  Jay’s pride did not permit self-pity. He kept his loneliness in quarantine, confined in a vault reinforced by unsentimental discipline. He was able to ignore its existence for months at a time, but tonight he felt it seeping from its confinement. He went out onto the promenade deck. It had rained during dinner and the teak boards were slippery. Now the air was exotic with the scents of the tropics. The moon was a night off its fullness and sent an orange summons across the waves towards him. It was absurd to spend such a night without a lover. He escaped its beauty and went indoors, but the band’s merry music made him sadder.

  Jay Gruneberger’s business associates admired his capacity to engineer a situation to his satisfaction. The foundations of this ability were intelligence and persistence. He had felt certain he could speak to the fellow at least and ascertain from this encounter whether more might be hoped for. Now he abruptly lost the energy to mount another useless search. He went instead to the salon and ordered a cocktail. They would either meet or they would not. He left it in the lap of the gods.

  Piet left the chorus girls’ dressing room smitten. He was not depressed by his failure to achieve a more instant union with Stacey Meadows. Delay could only heighten their coming together and he admired her strictness wholeheartedly. As he walked down the corridor he felt euphoric. A year before he had been a junior clerk in Leiden, obliged to sleep in a musty alcove and shit in an outhouse. Now the most powerful men in the world took him for one of their own. He thought sympathetically of Didier and wondered whether he should find him at once and make things all right. He decided against it. His friend would feel patronized by immediate sympathy. He would look for him tomorrow and laugh their awkwardness away.

  Piet had a great gift for experiencing the present. It seemed a waste to burden it now with thoughts of the future or the past. He had the run of the world’s finest ship and the clothes and manners to enjoy this glittering world undetected. Who knew when such a situation might arise again? He resolved to drink the cup of pleasure deep and hurried on.

  The grand staircase was crowded. He had not had dinner and was pleasantly light-headed with hunger. He sauntered down the stairs, thinking of food, and looked into the smoking room where sandwiches of rare roast beef could be obtained at any hour. But the fug of a hundred postprandial cigars made his head spin. He left by a door in its west wall and found himself in a broad passage he had never been in before. The marble here was not painted. It was cut in vast slabs and covered floor, walls, and ceiling: a frothy cream jagged with shots of blue. At its summit was a gilt elevator and a menu stand embossed with the words GRILL ROOM.

  He pressed the button firmly.

  With an elegant whirring the cage came down—lined floor, walls and ceiling in marble. It did not seem that the chains that pulled it could support such weight, but the presence of a respectful attendant prohibited a display of nerves.

  “You’ll want to hurry, sir. Last orders are in fifteen minutes.”

  Piet stepped onto the platform and the doors slid shut. The lift began to rise. Up and up they went, through three decks, then four: each was crowded with people. It stopped on the fourth and a gay group joined him, the ladies in magnificent jewels. He was aware of their approving notice, and when one dropped her fan he retrieved it and was prettily thanked. The doors opened onto a vestibule painted like an afternoon sky, the rays of a gilt sun pointing towards the grill room’s entrance. The party with him were greeted rapturously and led to their table.

  “May I have your cabin number, sir?” Maurice Moureaux held his pen above the register. “There is a supplementary charge for the grill room. It will be added to your bill.”

  Over his last six transatlantic voyages, Maurice Moureaux had formed an understanding of some convenience with a plongeur in the first-class kitchens, a cocky Marseilleise of no education but great wit, with an immense prick. The purser disapproved of shipboard liaisons and had transferred Jean-Anton to the Joséphine two days before the Eugénie’s departure, leaving Maurice with no erotic companion. He was fastidious. Since encountering Piet Barol in the reading room’s service corridor he had found no one to his taste. To be able to ascertain his cabin number struck him as a piece of great good fortune. He repeated his question.

  “My cabin number?”

  “Or the name of your suite.” Moureaux smiled his glossy smile and stood as tall as he could; he worried about being short.

  For an instant Piet faltered, confronted by the decision between retreat and advance. He decided to advance. “The Henri de Navarre.”

  “And your name, sir?”

  “Van Sigelen. Frederik van Sigelen.”

  “Come this way, Mr. van Sigelen. Will you be dining alone?”

  Piet nodded.

  “What a pleasure to see you again.” Moureaux took a leather-bound menu and led him to a table by the window. In the long oval mirrors an orange moon glowed. The ceiling was glazed; Piet had never seen such stars. It was the most expensive room on the oceans, a private concession run by César Ritz. Only dishes that had been served to the kings at Versailles were offered here, and the amounts beside them were among the largest he had ever seen in print.

  Moureaux unfolded his napkin and placed it on his lap. There was a dance floor at the far end of the room, surrounded on three sides by waves and stars. “I shall send the sommelier at once, sir.”

  A flutter of subsiding adrenaline made Piet shiver. He had dared and won—again! He felt triumphantly alive. Moureaux bowed and retreated; but moments later, as Piet weighed the merits of quail and turbot, the steward returned.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. van Sigelen. The register has Mr. and Mrs. Rossiter in the Henri de Navarre Suite.”

  “Did I say Navarre? I meant Marie Antoinette.”

  “Of course.” Moureaux hoped that the handsome young passenger had made this error to ensure that they spoke again. He asked Piet whether he had explored the ship to his full satisfaction.

  “She’s a glorious machine.”

  “I should be happy, at any moment, to show you over her.”

  “I’ll remember that.”

  The band began to play the Waltz of the Flowers. It was a piece of music that summoned for Moureaux the glory of his youth in St. Petersburg, when he had been the most admired waiter at its composer’s favorite restaurant. As the clarinet swirled, he was again twenty-two and incontrovertibly desirable. He bowed and returned to the register. When Piet stood and followed him his heart beat faster.

  It was clear to Piet Barol that he should not be present for much further examination of the passenger list. “I’ve left my cigarettes in my cabin,” he said nonchalantly. “I’ll just go and get them.”

  “Permit me to have a packet sent to your table immediately. Which brand may
I obtain for you?”

  “I have them hand-rolled in England. I’ll get them myself.”

  It was possible to deduce a great deal about a person’s inclinations from the contents of his wardrobes. Moureaux was glad to have this opportunity to conduct a discreet examination. “Allow me to fetch them for you.”

  “They’re in a locked case. I’ll go.”

  The gaiety of the music inspired daring. “I could accompany you, if you wish.”

  “That’s not necessary.”

  “Very well, sir. The kitchen will be closing shortly. I shall ask the chef to wait for you. May I take your order?”

  “The turbot.”

  “Thank you.”

  Piet went to the elevator and pressed the button.

  Moureaux began to prepare his bill and to wonder how he might contrive to bring him breakfast in bed one morning. He felt dreamy and romantic and could not find the name van Sigelen anywhere on the passenger manifest. He scanned the lists of suites. Catherine de Médicis. Henri de Navarre. Joan of Arc. Louis XIV. Marie Antoinette. By this entry were the words: Schermerhorn, Mrs. Cornelius. Coffee should be iced after Malta.

  “One moment, sir.”

  The lift doors opened and Piet stepped into the car. He turned as the trellis shut, and in his glance were both insolence and fear.

  Abruptly, Moureaux knew.

  He was temporarily anesthetized by shock. As Piet sank out of sight he opened his mouth but made no sound. He, Maurice Moureaux, had fallen for a stowaway! It made him breathless, then furious. There was a ship’s telephone on the desk; he lifted it and dropped his voice. “Alert bleu. Male. Midtwenties. Evening dress. Of good stature. Dark hair.” As he gave this description he was aware of its inadequacy. “Send word to the stewards’ mess. He has just gone down in the grill room elevator. Watch all exits. I shall come at once and identify him.”