Along the Infinite Sea Read Online Free

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.”
    â€œMy husband never understood, either. He smoked like a chimney, one after another, right up until the day he died.”
    â€œAnd when was that?”
    â€œA year and a half ago.” She checks the side mirror. “Lung cancer.”
    â€œI’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 indicated the deck was 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.
    â€œI used to try to make him stop,” she says. “But he didn’t seem to care.”
    5.
    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.
    â€œSo beautiful!” he says.
    â€œIsn’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?”
    â€œAh, my wife.” He shakes his head. “A very jealous woman. She will have my head on the carving platter.”
    â€œWhat a shame.”
    When they are settled at their table, supplied with water and crustybread and a bottle of quietly expensive Burgundy, Mrs. Dommerich apologizes. The French are obsessed with babies, she says.
    â€œI thought they were obsessed with sex.”
    â€œIt’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?”
    â€œI might as well ask why you agreed to come.”
    â€œAge before beauty,” says Pepper, and Mrs. Dommerich laughs.
    â€œThat’s it, right there. That’s why I asked you.”
    â€œBecause I’m so abominably rude?”
    â€œBecause 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.”
    â€œI’m full of surprises.”
    â€œYes, 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.”
    â€œYes, I’ve got one of those things, haven’t I? I can’t imagine why.”
    â€œYou 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.
    â€œYes,