Beast (13 page)

This is what she thought had happened. Her shah or sultan (it amused her to think of all the possible Middle Eastern titles he probably didn't possess) had run the length of the ship, then jumped home. To add insult to injury, she lost her balance on the next sudden lean of the ship. She slipped and grabbed for the railing.

Her necklace flipped up to become a rattle of pearls clicking over the handrail, so that when she caught a grip, her hand wrapped around the string of pearls too. She felt a sharp tug on the back of her neck, then a release all at once as the strand broke. Black pearls popped and flew everywhere. They bounced well; they bounced high. They rolled magnificently across the deck in every direction, as well as off the deck and down onto the next—a quick, nacreous spill swallowed up into the wet night, the roll and clatter smothered almost instantly by the hiss of the ocean.

Louise was left with the wet string in her hand, her dress soaked, her hair a ruin, and her vaguely sore neck wearing a tiered necklace, completely missing its longest strand.

Ambergris begins as indigestion, when the beak of a squid or the hard internal shell of a cuttlefish
irritates the stomach lining of a sperm whale.

Charles Harcourt, Prince d'Harcourt

On the Nature and Uses of Ambergris

Charles had an extraordinary fondness for beautiful women. A fixation, some might even say.

Whichever, if he analyzed this predilection (and despite efforts not to. little bolts of understanding had struck him from time to time in recent years), it probably had to do with his horror of being thought ugly: To parade a beautiful woman on his arm seemed to say he
had
to be pleasing to the eye himself; how else could a goddess descended from Olympus stand to be near him? Whatever the reasons, his attraction to fabulous-looking females was legendary—along with his inordinate success with them, a success that was both his curse and his glory.

Most everyone at home suspected, for instance. that Pia was his mistress. This connection to her gave Charles a kind of glow up and down the Cote d'Azur, where cavorting with sought-after beauties was considered a mark of taste, adventurousness. and reflected on one's own irresistibility. On the other hand, Pia was not a very considerate woman.

For instance, when she called that evening, he mentioned he was having his dinner and asked ever so politely if he could call her back in half an hour. Her response was to tell him she hoped he choked on his food and fell over dead onto the table, after which she hung up on him. He stood there in the antechamber off the drawing room of his suite, clutching the phone by its throat in one hand, its staticky earpiece in the other. After a moment, he sighed and dutifully called her back If she were this upset, he reasoned…

The next little run of conversation, however, didn't go much better. Pia began it substantively with, "What I am saying is,
I
am allowed to be married and you are not."

Charles set his fork down onto his appointment book, then sat down into the desk chair. He said, "Pia, you may as well get used to it: I'm going to marry her. There are too many motivating reasons for me to do otherwise."

"Well, I won't be your piece on the side."

"Why not? I've been your piece on the side for more than two years."

"It's not the same thing and you know it."

He laughed. "No, I don't. It
is
the same."

"No, no, no, it isn't," Pia argued. "Men who scheme to have two women are horrible cads or worse."

He laughed again. "Worse?"

She had no reply.

He asked. "And what are women called who scheme to have two men?"

She harrumphed in response, then the line clicked dead again.

He rang her back after she had had a few minutes to calm herself. Quite reasonably, he thought, he asked. "Why aren't you at dinner with everyone else? How are you feeling?"

"Terrible," she said. "I threw up my lunch. I'm so nauseated I can't stand. I hate this ship."

He paused, then braved an indelicate question. "When were your last menses?"

"I'm bloody in them. I have cramps too."

"Ah. Well, that's good. I mean, I'm sorry." He navigated awkwardly. "That you have cramps, that is.

Can I get you anything?"

"Yes. Louise Vandermeer's head, if you wouldn't mind."

He scowled down into the black transmitter, instantly annoyed. "I think she's using it. Use yours: Stop bludgeoning me with this, Pia. Stop your pouting and tantruming."

The phone line disconnected again.

Charles went back to the dining room, tried to eat, but ended up wandering aimlessly through the suite, uncertain what he was doing, disturbed though unsure just what disturbed him. The telephone rang again.

This time he didn't answer it. It rang more than a dozen times, stopped, then began ringing again. When he went over to it finally, he noticed a black pearl lying against the spine of his appointment book. He had collected this after his meeting with Louise, after she had looked for him far and wide (when she should have looked near—he had been standing in the shadows of the open kennel door).

Charles was contemplating his booty, the single black pearl, when he sat down and picked up the receiver.

Without so much as saying hello, Pia's thin, petulant voice began, "But I don't even see how you had
time
to court this girl."

"I didn't. Her father courted me." He rolled the pearl in his fingers, held it up to the light. It was small as pearls went, but he remembered a pirate's ransom of them draped down the front of Louise Vandermeer, the curve of her bosom as solid as beaded armor.

His response on the phone was met with staticky silence. Then. "And you thought this was a good idea, marrying a girl you'd never met?"

He leaned back in his chair and set the pearl down, deciding he'd better keep his wits about him. "No,"

he said, "I thought it was silly. But they kept writing. I was afraid of offending them."

"You told me some of this. These are the people who wined and dined you from New York to Miami in their private railway car?"

"Yes."

Pia sniffed. "But when? How?" she asked. "When you and I were in New York together, you weren't"—she avoided the word as if by not pronouncing it she could keep it from being true—"

affiliated
with her then, were you?"

"No, not until Roland came back and you went off with him for three days to see the sights of New York." He waited for her to say something. Static. Air. He heaved a huge sigh. "Picture this," he said:

"After being offered the world by the Vandermeers for almost two weeks—the world, all save you—and turning it down, then still being treated as if I were a king by these people, I arrive back in New York.

You and I are all cozy for a few days, while Roland is in Washington. Then he comes back to New York early. For his sake, we've pretended to all our friends that I've gone back to France the week before, so I am suddenly stuck in a hotel without so much as my own name to keep me company, hoping no one recognizes me, while you are off for three 'surprise' days we didn't plan on—he even buys you a damn necklace at Tiffany's. While I sit in a hotel room, alone, bored and angry—and with a pretty amazing alternative staring me in the face.

"So I tested my options. I wired home that I wished a telegram sent in my name, inviting the Vandermeers to visit me again and reinitiate negotiations. My response through Nice was another telegram that leaped to the question of my cousin Gaspard in New York being given proxy to sign a marriage contract in my name. The suggested contract itself, short and sweet, was also wired—twice, to Nice and back across. Vandermeer said he had been thinking of retiring and that as his son-in-law he would give me everything, that he would step down and be 'pensioned off,' so to speak, though he requires a pretty big 'pension.' Still, it was a marvelous offer. Gaspard signed the agreement two days ago. And there you have it."

After a long pause, her voice said quietly, "You spent a small fortune on telegrams and engaged in a lot of complicated posturing, so you could sell yourself into a marriage to a girl you had never seen?"

Charles grew quiet. "Not exactly." He admitted. "I saw a painting of her at their house that first night I went there." Defensively he added, "It was stupid, really. I assumed it was one of those paintings that rich parents have done to flatter their offspring. You know the sort: idealized, much more comely than the subject is in reality. Never for a moment did I think she would be
more
stunning,
more
beautiful."

"
More
beautiful? She's a child, Charles."

His fingers had absently found the pearl again. He said, "Louise Vandermeer will be beautiful when she's eighty. It's in her bones, the way her eyes are set into her skull, the texture of her hair."

"You really find her that appealing?"

"Aesthetically."

She huffed a little breath. "As a man, a mature man, Charles, do you honestly find a smart-mouthed, eighteen-year-old brat physically appealing?"

Perhaps he should have lied. He might have, had he been speaking to Pia in person, been able to see her face. But sitting there at the desk in his anteroom, as he rolled a black pearl between his thumb and forefinger, the truth was such a revelation to Charles that the dishonest alternative didn't even occur to him. He said with simple wonder, "Yes. Absolutely."

When Pia hung up this time, it was so loud it made Charles startle and pull away from the earpiece.

A half hour later, Pia called again. She was crying when her voice burst through the receiver. With great howling sobs, she said, "We're through. If you don't give her up immediately, we're through forever."

"You're being absurd, Pia. You will regret this on dry land. You are sick and out of sorts."

"Yes." She was caught up for a few moments in a long concatenation of sobs and hiccuping. "I am sick of your philandering."

He laughed. "In two years, I have never strayed from your bed, I have loved you and honored you and offered to marry you a dozen times."

"Well, offer again."

Charles tensed, then asked, "Where is Roland?"

"Asleep beside me here."

He let out a guffaw—of relief, though he tried to disguise it.

Oblivious to everything but her own feelings, Pia returned to her original premise. "If you don't foreswear her right now and take care of this matter—you can send some more of your circuitous telegrams to her parents right here on the ship—we are through, Charles. Forever and always, finished."

Quite calmly, he heard himself say, "All right, Pia. Then we're finished forever and always."

It was as simple as that. Charles set the telephone down, receiver into its hook, astonished at himself. He tapped his fingers on the desk a moment, waiting to feel inconsolable, desolate. But he felt merely disencumbered, freer and better than he had felt in an eon. He and Pia were over. Done. Finished.

Whereas he would have expected this to level him, he straightened up where he stood and stretched effortlessly, glancing about him.

On the desk lay a pearl. Idly, he rolled it a moment over the surface of his books, his notes and formulae, his schedules and appointments. Then, putting the pearl into his trouser pocket, he reached with his other hand and began to riffle through pages. Standing there in the dim light of this little room, running his eyes down columns, slanting his head sideways to read the addenda and marginalia of his future, Charles realized he was going to marry Louise Vandermeer because it was good business, but that he was going to enjoy being her husband for one very unpredicted reason: He wanted to hold her so badly his skin twitched; at the thought of her, his scrotum thumped like a butter churn with its paddle in action.

And just admitting this profound insight to himself gave Charles an erection that could have lifted logs off a river.

He wanted this young girl to the point that his vision blurred. He could imagine her naked, as round of limb as a pearl, her skin iridescent. There
was
no other woman in the small mind of the only voting member of the Appealing Female Committee: the member in his pants, who stood at attention ready to make his vote count at the drop of a dress from pale shoulders… down a slender, young body into a pool of fabric on the floor…

God in Heaven, could his imagination ever fantasize on this particular subject.

Why? Charles wondered. He suspected he was experiencing a kind of belated adolescent lust, steamy, heady; especially piquant for all its delay. He could remember a girl, now that he thought of it, that he had eyed in his youth, a dunderhead next to Louise, but beautiful all the same. This girl—Ginette, as he recalled—had refused to sit beside him at mass. He had never spoken to her beyond one question. (Is this seat taken?)

She had never honored him with a word beyond her one brainless answer. (No, er, yes, it's taken; urn, in a minute it'll be taken as soon as somebody else comes.) After this setdown, Charles had quickly, and fearfully he concluded now, determined that Ginette was "too young," "a baby, really." He required more mature company. And so he had in many ways. But he also had lacked the confidence at eighteen to go after the prettiest young girl in the province.