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.