Beast (14 page)

Something he seemed to be rectifying now. He was living that old satisfaction. For certainly the prettiest young woman he had seen in a long time liked him; he was sure of it. And fulfillment was guaranteed.

Even if he didn't succeed here on the ship, there was France, a wedding, and a marriage bed. Hallelujah.

Pia? Charles quizzed himself one more time. For two years, so much angst and longing and hope.
Was
she mature? he wondered. Not especially. Yet she was worldly and experienced and knowledgeable of many things. So did he feel horrible to have lost her?

No, he felt… hungry. What had become of his dinner?

Charles went back to the dining room, where he sat down and devoured what he had only been picking at when the first rude phone call had come: a fat artichoke, a mound of wild rice, a pheasant in a sauce of cream and honey with green peppercorns, a salad, then a dessert of fresh pear, three different cheeses, and two glasses of sauterne. The meal was room temperature but perfectly delicious. Wonderful in fact.

After it, he ordered himself a bottle of champagne.

He felt positively celebratory.

…
whereas ambergris is never found except upon the sea
.

Herman Melville

Moby Dick,
Chapter 20

1851

Of the nearly six hundred first-class passengers, roughly four dozen made it to dinner. Even Mary stayed in her room. Besides an elderly aunt down the table, Louise knew only one other person. Pia Montebello. who herself didn't arrive till the cheese and fruit course at the end of the meal. She looked, though, as if she too should have stayed in bed. She was sheet-white, her eyes puffy and red despite a good deal of makeup to disguise the face. Nonetheless, she joined Louise's far end of the group, which included a financier, a partner in Standard Oil (not Rockefeller but the other one who had something to do with railroads), and a society matron who had brought a little boy from across the hall to dinner, his parents having fallen victims to the storm's unrest.

Outside the long windows of the dining saloon, rain poured so hard upon the ocean, Louise had trouble hearing the man beside her (a young doctor and groom portion of newlyweds on their honeymoon). The weather pounded the decks. It beat against the windows. It turned the usual clink and chime of crystal, of silver on china into muffled clicks and clanks. The view itself was a running, watery blur of grays and purples. Inside, the evening's orchestra had been reduced to a quintet. Over the noise of rain. Brahms came through periodically in appropriate, weepy-bowed runs and sharp descents.

Meanwhile everyone sat at the captain's table, the captain, who often went absent, being present tonight for morale. He ordered champagne for all. It flowed. Except for this, with its attendant, slightly tipsy laughter, these survivors of the storm clung to decorum. The captain, in crisp whites, chatted magnanimously with men in full dinner dress: black tailcoats. stiff, starchy-white shirtfronts. The women were equally formal in satins and lace, their arms and necks jeweled, heavy with the trophies of lucrative unions with capitalist husbands—a boringly homogeneous group, not an Arab in sight.

For Louise, the dining saloon tonight—the whole ship—seemed a little bucket of artificial elegance, scooped up out of the glittering Upper East Side trough of New York, then set afloat on a reality of more fabulous proportion. She actually liked the storm. She liked the feel of it slinging her back into her chair, then allowing her forward. She liked its power to drown out conversation, to roar in crescendos louder than the music. The ride, the thrilling vitality of the elements battering away from outside, made life somehow more piquant.

"You know, we could all die," she said at one point. She meant to launch from here into a game of, What would you do if this night were your last on earth? An idea that filled her with romantic-morbid fascination.

It was nothing more than a parlor game to her as she sat here in well-lit, well-fed, dry, warm security.

Yet, game or not. conversation stopped so abruptly with her comment, she immediately herded herself back into conventional replies, polite disinterest. Dessert came. Coffee. This evening became like a thousand others, dismally the same as tea five hours ago. lunch before that, breakfast before that, dinner the night before, ad infinitum.

And of course there were more variations on Louise's leitmotif, as it were: All through dessert, the young doctor-groom struggled to say something to her, his hesitations and stammers partly from interference of the surroundings, partly from his own embarrassment at what he wanted to get out. Eventually, in one of the quieter moments of weather, he said, as if lifting a huge weight off his chest, "People must tell you this all the time… I mean, I adore my wife but… in a purely objective way, of course… the sight of you.

well, you're, ah, amazingly beautiful—"

Louise said, "Thank you," and stirred cream into her coffee.

The little boy across the table—he must have been about six—who had stared at her fairly uninterruptedly all through dinner, added. "My tutor reads me stories. I was wondering. Are you a goddess?"

She smiled at him. "Yes," she said. "And I have brought the storm. So be good or I shall throw this ship to the bottom."

He nodded, wide-eyed, appreciative of her generous immortality.

They were all rising, preparing to adjourn to the ballroom and continue this charade, when Mrs.

Montebello at last claimed Louise's attention. As others stood, she all but ran around the table. She had been forced to sit across and down four seats, just far enough that Louise could pretend she didn't exist.

Now, though, she took hold of Louise's arm.

"My dear," she said. "Charles Harcourt—"

Louise looked around at her.

"He is the prince whom you are going to marry, isn't he?"

"Yes."

"I know him."

Louise blinked, not certain how to react. "Well, for someone who was all questions this morning, you are certainly well-informed tonight."

"Yes," she said with a knowing, somewhat ghoulish smile. The woman looked positively dreadful. Sick, angry, fretful. She waited a moment before she said, "Someone told me. A prince. Then I thought. Well, how many French princes are there, anyway?"

Louise said blankly, "Several, if I'm not mistaken."

"So don't you want to know what he's like?"

"I already know what he's like. My parents have spent a good bit of time in his company."

"And so have I." the woman said meaningfully.

What was she saying? My goodness. It occurred to Louise: Her husband-to-be kept a mistress. Or had kept a mistress. Or was having trouble with one. This one. Mrs. Montebello of American diplomatic circles had slept with the Prince d'Harcourt, and she wanted Louise to know it.

"Wouldn't you like to hear what he
looks
like, perhaps?"

"I have a good idea what he looks like." But the woman was obviously going to tell her. anyway. Louise sighed, then said. "All right, what does he look like?"

"Well, he's magnificent."

Louise frowned, then blinked at this new interpretation.

Mrs. Montebello continued, "He's huge, muscular, imposing, and on the aggressive side when it comes to—" She laughed abruptly, as if this were a joke.

"Why, it never occurred to me before," she said, "but I suppose he could be quite terrifying, I mean, to a
young
girl—"

To a virgin, she meant. Louise was astounded—and mesmerized—by the woman's nerve, though she was unimpressed by the information itself. So her one-eyed husband-to-be was rich and powerful enough to have an attractive friend to play with, albeit a rather old friend—Mrs. Montebello had to be at least thirty. Good. Then this woman could take care of him in any area Louise herself found distasteful.

Mrs. Montebello seemed about to say something. But further mischief from this quarter was interrupted.

Everyone heard it at the same time: a loud, dull thud that came from the outside, the sea. and seemed to reverberate throughout the whole interior of the ship, above, below. Within the room, the wall panels themselves shuddered. The dining saloon tipped away from the sound, to the port side, and stayed tipped for the full length of a low, keening grind that started forward of the room, slowly sliding along and below to the aft.

All conversation, music, breathing itself, stopped for the duration of this—about five or six seconds.

Then the noise quit as suddenly as it started, and the ship leveled.

Someone moaned. A woman still sitting at the far end of the table began to whimper. There was no doubt about it: The
Concordia
had hit something.

A second later the electricity in the room blinked out. Pandemonium. Louise just stood there as people began to scream. A man ran into her. Several people pushed her aside in their rush round the table, until she had been moved to the wall, pressed up against a mirror there. She heard the word
lifeboats
, then a man saying, "Women and children first. Let them by. Women and children to the lifeboats." There were perhaps two or three minutes of everyone trying to organize themselves. Then just as surprisingly, the lights at the far end of the room came back on, half the room still unlit—but enough light to leave everyone staring at each other, caught in the midst of what suddenly seemed a foolish panic.

The captain stepped forward. "Everyone be seated. I am going to the bridge. I shall send someone shortly with an advisement of what has occurred." He left.

Some sat. Louise remained at the wall, clutching the mirror's thick, deep-carved frame. Where she realized something: The idea of real death was not attractive at all, not the least bit gamelike. And she—

she—
was no goddess. She was mortal. If this ship disappeared into the foamy sea, she would die.

Louise, confident Louise, imperturbable Louise had a most unpredicted reaction.
Too young
, her mind cried.
There are so many things yet I want to do. Except for a few trips across town and one
botched trip to Montreal, I have done nothing even remotely adult; I have done nothing to break
myself out of this circumscribed life
. A kind of tantrum took hold.
I have not become anyone
interesting. Anything more than pretty! Yet I am capable of it, I'm sure
. She revised.
No, it's not
interesting
that I want to become; I want to become myself, and I'm not even sure who that is! I
want to experience the world, explore it, learn what part of it is me, what part is not
…

Louise began to tremble, not a knee-banging shake but a jitter of muscles, a persistent shiver all the way through to her liver that wouldn't stop.

The captain didn't send anyone but rather came back himself to announce "the best possible news under the circumstances." All was well for the moment. Two bulkheads had been pierced, but the other fourteen appeared to be perfectly watertight. The
Concordia
would stay afloat. As near as anyone could understand, she had hit an iceberg that the search lights had missed, something very small. The chief engineers even thought it was possible to plug the two bulkheads and pump them out. Meanwhile the captain thought it best, given the storm, that they use what power they had to move full throttle forward.