Beast (16 page)

"Is this really your name?" she asked.

"No."

She dismissed his whole effort, as if dusting her palms of it. "Well then," she said, "I shall call you

'Charles.'"

He nearly choked. "P-pardon me?"
Sharl
, she said. The way every French friend or acquaintance said it.

"It's as good as any name, and I may as well. It will eliminate the possibility, once I'm married, of wrong names at inappropriate moments."

He stood, leaning against the door, speechless, watching her silhouette become more defined as she passed in front of his terrace curtains, a lithe, curving glimmer that gave off' the exotic-sweet scent of his own flowers. This impossible jasmine phantasm walked across his sitting room, then around the bulky shadow of a chair.

She sat into this by the cold fireplace, then said to him, unbelievably, "Well, Charles, what shall we do with ourselves tonight?"

What he would like to have done was swat her once and throw her out. What was she doing, waltzing into a man's suite? (Did she do this often? Did she call all her lovers "Charles"?) Never mind that he was trying to get her into a situation more or less just like this one. He had barely started. This was too easy.

It felt wrong.

When he didn't say anything for a time, she said from her dark chair by the fireplace, "Are you angry that I'm here?"

"A little. How did you find me?"

"The operator."

He grimaced, remembering the tinny voice who, over the telephone line, had been so remarkably uncooperative with him. A conspiracy of women. "You can't get to the private suites without a key."

"You can if you use the service exit out the ballroom, then the side companionway—from the top of which, if I am not mistaken, you watched me last night with Lieutenant Johnston."

Not exactly from the top, but close enough. All right, a stalemate, tit for tat.

She crossed her legs, a kick and churn of stiff satin that kept time in the dark, a
shush
of silk, to the beat of a nervy confidence within her; she kicked her leg. "So." she said, "here I am, arrived and in thrall to the question: Just what do you want of me?"
Kick-shush, kick-shush
. When he didn't say anything, she added, "I thought perhaps walking half the length of the ship in the dark to find you, in your own lair, so to speak, might put your insecurities to rest."

"Insecurities?"

"Yes. with regard to my not being interested or interesting, whatever 'enough' to kiss. I mean, a secure man wouldn't need a woman to fall on her knees if he wanted to kiss her, would he?"
Kick-shush
.

Charles laughed. "Maybe I didn't want to."

Her kicking stopped for a moment. Then resumed. Her voice from the shadows by the fireplace was dismissive, a shrug. "You know better than I," she said. She left a pause—
kick-shush
—then asked, "So would you like to kiss me now, Charles?"

The hair on his neck lifted every time she used his given name. Damn this girl. Oh, he was going to kiss her all right.

He heaved his weight up off' the door, moving forward, toward the outline of two chairs by the fireplace, a piano-phantom hulking off to the side. He had the advantage, he knew, of no light behind him. As he came round the empty chair, he kicked the base of the occupied one with his foot and grabbed hold of the chair back. With his hand and foot, he gave it a solid push, sliding it around on the hearth tile, turning the chair with her in it as he bent and braced both hands on the stuffed armrests.

He heard her startle, then the rustle of her dress as she uncrossed her legs to square her stance. The kicking stopped. She pushed herself up and back from him in the chair. He bent low, his head down in her shadow. While muted, wavering, moonlight backlit the top of her head, a fairy-like array of curling individual hairs that haloed the faintly anxious sound of her breathing.

"Why the hell are you here?" he asked into her face. She smelled like the damnable jasmine—a sweet, compelling odor at the back of her hair, low, near the nape of neck.

Less sure of herself, she answered, "Because I—I was frightened and—"

"You were
what
?" he asked, incredulous.

"I was—Well, you talked to me." She struggled to stay cool, but he had scared her—thank God, she
could
be scared. He was beginning to wonder about this arrogant girl. Was she always this dauntless?

She finished, "The ship hit, well, you know, and I was—" She choked back something, then grew brave again. She blurted, "I was looking for company, and I liked the way that we talked today."

He gripped the armrests so hard that the whole chair jerked. "My God," he told her, "you have a mother and father, aunts and uncles on board by the dozens, as I recall from your stories. Talk to
them
."

"I can't." She said angrily, "My parents barely see me. My cousins either revere me or think I'm bizarre.

My aunts and uncles are afraid of me; I'm considered difficult by most, if not bad outright."

Imagine that
, Charles thought. He stood up.

He looked around. Everywhere darkness. Darkness other than his own choosing. He had the eeriest feeling, as if his joke had taken on a life of its own. He shoved his hands into his trouser pockets.

Where he found a smooth, hard, round little pearl.

He pulled it out then—an improvised moment that came from God knew where—reached down and touched it to her cheek.

She drew back. "What is—"

"Quiet. Close your eyes—your other senses, Louise—then you tell me what it is."

Letting his thumb and the tips of his fingers move it along, Charles rolled the pearl into the hollow of her cheek, down along the edge of her mouth, across her chin, up, around, into the philtrum of her lip. He held it there a moment. "What is it?" he said. He felt her relax a degree, settle slightly into the chair.

Her breath was warm on his palm. The pearl moved with her mouth when she spoke. "It's cool and hard and round." She paused. "I don't know." She guessed, "Candy?"

He laughed. "You
are
a child."

But he liked this, her pearl on her skin. He bent over the chair again, bracing his weight on one arm as his other hand held the pearl in the little indention between her nose and mouth. He intended to roll it down over her lips, maybe take it along her jaw, down her neck, across her collarbone, then into the valley between her breasts, possibly dropping it down into the darkness there…

Louise flattened her top lip against her teeth, tipped her head up slightly, and. by this, rolled the pearl down to catch it between her lips. She sucked it out of his ringers into her mouth. He heard it click on her teeth. "Come and get it," she said, then laughed, a low cackling giggle, slightly breathy. The sound of a young girl teasing, playing in water way over her head. Or the sound of a young siren—a hatchling just coming into her own—with him the one in danger of drowning. Charles couldn't decide.

With his one hand still poised in the air. he bent his weight forward onto the other, taking his face toward the sound of her seductive laughter, bending into a cloud of grassy-sweet jasmine. Such a fragrant girl.

He revised his thinking. Though he must have always told himself that eighteen-year-olds were children, this one wasn't. He tilted his head, about to kiss her.

Then was nearly knocked in the face.

Apparently unaware of his movement, she sat forward abruptly. Warned by a waft of air, a shift of her odoriferous splendor, he ducked sideways. Her forehead hit his shoulder, narrowly missing his head. She bent into the darkness of the chair, presumably spitting the pearl out. "This is mine," she said, her speech clear of foreign objects. "It's my pearl! How did you get it?" With dawning discovery, she exclaimed,

"You were there! Where were you?"

"Under the eve, on the other side of the door." Charles grimaced and rose up again. "Watching from around it as you got soaking wet."

"I thought that you'd come back here. You know, run to the end of the ship, then sort of vaulted the railing and dropped down."

"Hardly." Charles made a pull of his mouth at such romantic nonsense, then headed in the general direction of the champagne that he had yet to open. Less a celebration, now, he needed a drink. "I would sooner wrestle snakes in a pit."

"What?"

He found the wine. The steward had put it across the room in a bucket of ice on the canape table beside the piano. "Would you like some champagne?"

"Aren't you Muslim?"

The alcohol. A breach in the teachings of the prophet.
By Allah
, Charles thought,
this young woman
had a frightening assortment of facts at her fingertips
. Trying to sound as sincere as possible, he said, "I am flattered that you should know so much about Islam. This is unusual in a Western woman."

"Oh, I didn't know much this morning. But I went to the library and read all day. I know a little more now."

Wonderful
. She probably knew more than he did.

All the more reason to take hold of the neck of the bottle, pop the cork, and pronounce cynically what he had found to be true when he had lived among the believers: "The wealthier a Muslim, the more likely he is to misbehave, especially far away from home."

The cork released, shooting. Champagne gushed with the
whoosh
of a geyser. Charles found a glass, the only glass as it turned out, then wet his arm and the sleeve of his gallibiya trying, by feel, to catch a rain of bubbling wine as he maintained his balance on a teeter-tottering floor.

Behind him, he heard her say. "Well. then. 'To misbehavior.' Yes, I'll have some too. And what did you mean, you would rather wrestle snakes?"

"Pardon?"

She asked, "You hate heights?"

Absently, his thumb over the rim of the glass to measure the level, he said, "Oh. Yes." He poured till his thumb was wet.

"Yet you sleep at the top of a very high ship."

"Oh, I don't mind looking out over them. Leaping into them, though, is another matter. My father used to have to pull me off my pony, I mean, literally pry my fingers out of his mane and yank me off screaming. I loved to ride, but it took me years to get over simply swinging down off the animal. As to higher places, well, let's just say I take stairs one at a time and I don't leap over railings."

He took the full glass over to her. "We will have to share," he said as he offered it toward her shadow. "I hadn't planned on a guest."

Their hands found one another. Hers were cool and smooth; alas, as soft as a child's, though she had long, graceful fingers. These fingers slid under his as he relinquished the glass into them. Then he pulled over the piano bench and sat beside her. "So, Louise—" he began.

"You may as well call me Lulu. All my friends do." Something hit his elbow, her arm. "Would you like some?" she offered.

The champagne. He took it, another caress of fingers, another physical exchange in the dark. Her hands felt light, deft, as they passed their heavy object. The champagne glass was lead crystal, a mass of complicated cuts and edges.

It was also mostly empty.

She was a lulu all right. "So, Lulu—" Charles said, winced, then threw his head back to down the last swallow she'd left. "On a night like tonight, why would you come straight here? Why not hunt down a member of this family of yours that you so adore and hate at the same time?"

"I told you, I can't."

"You told me you wouldn't," he corrected. "You complained, yet all afternoon you backhandedly cherished them aloud."

"Did I?"

"Yes. Your parents, who pay no attention to you, except to take care of your every whim. Your cousin, who is silly but whom you love to the point of having taken the blame for her on occasion. Your aunt, who thinks you are a bad influence yet brags about you at dinner."

To hear this recounted annoyed Louise. She hadn't said this exactly, but of course he was right; she loved these people. She said, "Well. Ungrateful wretch that I am, then, I suppose."

Louise herself wished he would stop mentioning a family who would not approve of her decision to come here. They would not understand her willful step from the light, where she commanded attention, into a place where she wasn't sure what might happen next or whose rules governed.

She knew only that she had come to a man, the man from the kennel, who was comfortable in darkness.

It anyone could feel at ease in a tilted ship with its lights out, here was the fellow. Her pasha, her misbehaving Arab in western trousers—she had glimpsed now and then the silhouette of his leg, the breadth of his shoulders; she had felt the furl of his robe when he moved. These hints, abetted by a few hours' reading, made funny things happen in her imagination.

In the shadows, she could almost see silk pillows on the floor, beside them a cold hookah full of Turkish tobacco, the room itself draped in fluttering, filmy curtains, a rolled prayer rug somewhere canted against a chest full of myrrh. For her, this forbidden room, from the second she'd entered it, held an exotic peace, a deep inner privacy, the sanctuary of a mosque. Or a seraglio… harem… zenana.

Words. The library's books today had been sprinkled with such impossible concepts, alongside random details and sweeping summaries, all interpreted through western prejudice. (Muslims didn't drink alcohol, yet were allowed to kill one another for honorable cause. They prayed five times a day, yet hid their women from guests and neighbors lest they be overcome by vice. The races were excitable and vengeful, Arabs. Bedouins, Berbers, and Moors, peoples older than time, their countries the cradle of civilization itself.) Most of her reading, she knew, gave superficial impressions, all probably wrong from over generalization. Yet these images were interesting, oh-so-interesting to her… symbolic of some profound difference she sensed between herself and this man, a cultural difference, she thought; a perspectival difference. She was enormously curious about him. no, titillated by him; no. both.

And oddly, rivetingly off balance without the ability to smile at him or otherwise dazzle his sight.