Читать книгу Along the Infinite Sea: Love, friendship and heartbreak, the perfect summer read - Beatriz Williams, Beatriz Williams - Страница 13

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.”