Beatriz Williams - Along the Infinite Sea - Love, friendship and heartbreak, the perfect summer read

“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.

“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.”

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.