Beast (20 page)

God bless this ship. It normally took six days to get across the Atlantic. But, with luck, it would take them more than a week at their present pace. He found himself hoping for another small leak, another minor setback, something to delay them and keep everyone else out of the way. How delightful, the slight uplift of his belly as the ship tottered. In the dark of his sitting room, he heard something rolling in the hearth of his fireplace—something tiny and hard that
tuppled
, grew silent for an instant, then spooled around slowly on the tile when the ship began to dip in the other direction. As the sound ticked back across the floor, Charles prayed for just this: seas rough enough to keep a pearl pitching along his floor all the way across the ocean and right into the port of Marseilles.

Ambergris is the most elegant of perfume fixatives, adding great lasting power while also
imparting a subtle velvetiness to the

Charles Harcourt, Prince d'Harcourt

On the Nature and Uses of Ambergris

Charles awoke at midday with a hazy sun streaming through his curtains. The sea was rough, but the rain had stopped. The sky had opened a little, though it remained cloudy. Beams of overcast light lit the room, spreading a ruddy, golden glow onto everything, from high ceilings to bolted-down furniture to his own belongings hanging or sliding a few inches this way then that with the ocean's toss.

He rolled over facedown into his sheets and took in a great, snorting smell of them. Louise. He put his nose against the pressed linen and traced her movements and outlines like a hound. Louise lying like a wanton, an arm above her head. Louise laughing, crawling on her hands and knees through the dark toward him. He wanted to lick the place that had pressed the small of her back. He wanted to have for breakfast the pillow on which she'd rested her knee as she'd slept.

Charles groaned and collapsed, his cheek pressed into the pillow. He closed his eyes. He wanted to cover these sheets with perfumer's grease—colorless, odorless, purified fat—and spread Louise upon them like flower petals.
Enfleurage
… he wanted to impregnate a thick layer of this unguent with the exhalations of her body. Then he would melt off this sublime essence and strain it into a bottle: attar of Louise. He could rub it all over himself, take a bath in it. Have it to console him when she wasn't here.

By day, like now.

As he got up and dressed, his knee hurt a bit. But it held—a stiff, aching joint that remained relatively normal in appearance. Triumph. Charles felt immortal, manly, heroic. He'd made love to a delightful young creature, half a dozen times, half a dozen ways, as if he'd been seventeen. He'd carried her for goodnessake across an unstable floor, spent himself into a stupor of exhaustion, then risen in the morning like Lazarus, healed and alive, a new man, capable of superhuman endeavors—and eager to begin the whole enterprise again.

He rang her room as he buttoned his shirt, looking out the alcove across his bedroom to the wonderfully darkening rain clouds outside. He blessed the squalling weather.

She answered, "Hello."

"Louise."

"Charles?"

Much too easily, he said. "Yes. How are you this morning?"

Her voice laughed. "A little sore but in love."

He frowned and smiled into the transmitter. "In love?"

"I adore you," she said. "I hated to leave." She rushed into what almost sounded like a planned declaration. "I want to sleep with you all night. I want to fly away with you. stay with you night and day.

In the dark forever, if need be: I will kill the sun. We will drown it. freeze it in ice. Or we can find a cave and never come out. Do you want me?" She added, "Do you have all four wives allowed by the Koran?"

Her renewed laughter tried to sound carefree, rising in particular to the last question, as if it and everything before it were nothing more than flirtatious banter.

Charles said seriously. "You wouldn't like North Africa."

"Is that where you're from?"

He lied, "Yes." He told the truth: "You wouldn't like the restrictions placed upon you in a Muslim country. You wouldn't like my having the power of life and death over you."

She left a pause, then said, "I'm not sure you don't have that already."

"Louise. This is an affair, not forever."

She listened but said nothing; just the static immediacy of her unsettled breathing in and out over the wire.

He said, "You are going to France to marry and start a home and a family. That is as far from your own culture as you dare venture, and even France will be difficult for you at times."

She waited then said ever so meekly, "I know you're right." Softer still, she said, "I know you are wise."

In a barely perceptible tone, she said, "I love you."

Charles stared at the phone, thrilled to hear this. He adored her. He wanted to tell her so. But he was, of course, distressed to believe her words under the circumstances. She was to love everlastingly Charles Harcourt, not Charles of the Dark Ship. "Louise," he said, "you are a young woman infatuated with your first lover. This is not the same thing as love. We have slept together one time"—he had to correct himself—"well, several times, but during one interval. We have known each other twenty-four hours."

There was a hiatus, a silence. Then she said, "You're right, of course." She released a breath into soft laughter. "Of course, you are. I'm sorry if I made you uncomfortable." Her laughter became more relaxed, more genuine. She said. "I will see you tonight. At the crack of dark."

Night arrived and so did she, on the dot. The sun had been down completely maybe sixty seconds. He suspected she had been waiting on the other side of the door to knock.

When he opened it, Louise literally flew over the threshold. She leaped, a dewy jasmine projectile through the shadows of a tilting, unlit evening upon the ocean. He caught her by her ribs as her legs wrapped around him. then he had to catch himself, them both, backward against the wall. He nearly fell from the impact.

Her mouth hit him with similar force. She kissed him; he easily returned her fervor. The kiss was fierce and eager and grateful, lips and tongues thankful to press and bite and touch and explore. Her hands alighted upon his face, a nutter of inquisitive movement up his cheek. He jerked his head back, clonking it solidly on the wall. Her hands followed. He turned his head abruptly. But her palms found him again, lightly surrounding his jaw.

Charles had to reach up and forcefully take her hands away. "Don't touch my face," he said. "You can't see me that way either."

"Why not?" she whispered and laughed into his mouth.

"I don't want you to."

She reared back in the dark, hanging off his shoulders. He had to brace her weight. "Why?" she said.

"Do I know you?"

She was looking for a substantive answer to the questions. Why the dark now? Now that they were lovers already? Now that sight was so appealing?

She asked, "Am I
going
to know you? Do you visit Provence?" She continued to ask, then come up with answers to her own questions. "Oh. Oh dear. You
know
the Prince d'Harcourt. You can't be his friend, not sleeping with me." Then. "Oh. you are his enemy!"

This seemed like a solution. Charles even thought of a convenient mitigation. "His competitor," he told her. "We both make perfume. You're wearing jasmine in your hair that I'm going to sell him." Clever devil. This would allow Charles Harcourt to unload all the Wedding Night Jasmine off the ship into his own carts. He added, "Though this isn't the reason I want you, Louise. I want you for myself. For no other motive." It was true, so unconditionally true. "I want you, I want you, I want you, I want you," he said, spinning around from the wall and carrying her through the shadows of his rooms. "I have been mad these last hours without you."

He flopped her backward on the bed and joined her there, idiotically happy to slide up against the
shushy
silk of her dress and pull her to him. His glad mutterings turned into a chaining repetition of her name.
Louise, Louise, Louise
… A reiteration—did he speak this aloud?—that rang in his mind like a poem, a song, a mantra, an endless wonder. While he smelled his way through the dark to the soft place just under her chin where frontal jaw became throat, kissing her there as his fingers found the buttons of her stand-up collar. He must have uttered some of his inanely excessive pleasure aloud.

For she squirmed, giggled, and mimicked him: " 'Louise, Louise, Louise.'" Then she asked, "Why do you never call me
Lulu
, even though I have asked you to?"

He answered perhaps too quickly, too honestly. "Because I like
Louise
better. Much better.
Lulu
sounds like I am debauching a twelve-year-old."

She found this funny. After a startled pause, she erupted into rich, rippling laughter he could feel under his hand at her belly. He put his leg over her, his own belly against this vibration, then found her face in the dark and kissed this laughing young woman.

Less than a minute later, the two of them were so avid they ripped a button off his shirt then lost the drawstring of her drawers into its casing.

Afterward, lying beside him, her bare arm across his naked chest, she said into the dark. "Well, Louise, the mature and very old Louise, is perfectly capable of deceiving too, you know. I could see you in Provence and pretend I don't know you."

"No." Charles stared up into the blank, black canopy. He was having trouble making up reasons, making up more lies on top of lies. "I shall have a hard enough time pretending I don't know you." It was going to be awful pretending he wasn't her lover. He thought to add, "Should we meet, that is, which is unlikely. I rarely cross the Mediterranean." He sighed. He closed his eyes. "I like home. I doubt I shall ever roam far from it again…"

Louise, however, only heard the part where he said no, then something more about their never seeing each other again. She preferred not to think about her future. She changed the subject. "What do you like about yourself?" she asked.

It took him a moment to respond, then he said, "What do
you
like?"

"Oh, your hands and that way you have of—"

He laughed and cut her off. "No, about yourself." His hand dropped out of the dark onto her mouth, covering her reply. "About yourself in the dark," he restricted. "What do you like about yourself best, here in this room, right now?" He lifted his hand.

The moment he uncovered her mouth, she said, "Oh, my senses," and giggled. "And wondering where your hand will alight next."

He
tsked
like a schoolmaster. (She loved teasing him, because his tone had become oh-so-responsible and instructive; he took their age difference far too seriously.) "All right, your second-favorite part." His hand settled to stroke her hip.

She snuggled against his motion, staring up, seeing nothing. She didn't know the answer to his question.

He coached toward a broader direction. "What seems important to you? What do you want to do with your life?"

"Nothing. That's my problem." She rolled up onto her knees, then on impulse stood all the way up onto her feet into a delicious, black instability. She could barely balance for the bounce of the mattress, the dark, and the sway of the ship. The springs gave noisily as she danced into compensation and adjustment in the middle of the bed. Charles's heavy body bounced with her movements, till he shifted—his weight left the mattress completely.

"Where are you going?" she asked.

"To the water closet. Keep talking. I can hear you from here."

To the sound of a heavy stream hitting the toilet, Louise declaimed in her mother's intonation, " 'A lady should stand on a pedestal.'" In her own voice, she called, "My parents' bywords, you know, are, 'You must realize your potential.' My marriage potential, they mean; for them, I have no other."

"So what do you want for yourself?" he said as he came back round the doorway of the bathroom.

"I don't know." She thought as she swayed there on the bed to the rhythm of the ship. She said with some bewilderment, "Marriage, I suppose." She paused. "And something else. There must be something else besides." She laughed. She could hear Charles's breathing. She knew where he was in that uncanny way of the dark, when he stood suddenly nearby. He was at the bed, right in front of her. She said down toward him, "What do you think? Does this count as a pedestal?" She placed her hands on his shoulders and bounced twice on the bed, as if it were a circus trampoline.

"I think," he said, "that ladies—delicious ladies such as yourself—" He lay his hands on her hips as he redirected the pronoun, making it more specific. "I think that
you
, Louise, belong in the arms of a warm, loving man, right up against him. No pedestals. Just yourself as you are." He caught her on the next bounce.

In the pause as he held her in the air, her hair swung against her back and buttocks. The mass of it slid and brushed her like a cool, living thing as he threw her onto the mattress. She landed on her back, and her hair flew up. Louise had never realized how pleasant her own hair felt against her skin. Or how nice it might feel to fly naked through the dark. Every moment with her pasha seemed to bring more of this, new sensory awakenings. She closed her eyes and let herself bounce on the bed—until he stopped her with his own weight.

As he settled on top of her, she asked up into his face, "Do you know what my cousin Mary wants to do with her life?"

He petted her head, her face, saying, "You will find something to do with yourself, Louise. You are young yet." He kissed her forehead. "What I was saying a moment ago was that you must find yourself: know yourself, learn yourself. Then what you want to do becomes obvious."

She laughed at this. It sounded good, but she wasn't sure what it meant. She asked, "Don't you want to know what Mary thinks is obvious?"

"All right. What does
Marx
want to do with her life?"

"Become a nun." Louise giggled.

"A nun."