White Moon Black Sea (15 page)

She had chosen well when she had selected Adam, this handsome adventurer, as her first male lover as well as her secret business associate. His deflowering of her had been magnificent. It left her with an insatiable lust for male lovers. He had added in a splendid way another sexual dimension to her life. And thereafter, with every orgasm
achieved with her various lovers, another part of Tana Dabra came alive: The female, the woman latent so long within her.

And there had been lovers enough. After her first encounter with Adam in the highlands of Ethiopia, she had been obliged to roam cautiously through her country, Somaliland, the Sudan, Egypt, Kenya. She had chosen the most handsome and virile men for herself. Proud and noble black tribesmen to white hunters and governers found her irresistible, and she tasted all kinds of sex, reveling in it. She teased her conquests with her lust, and with her sudden appearances and vanishings. Few knew her name, where she had come from, or where she was going. Her survival demanded anonymity. And then necessity turned to habit, and that habit became her sexual pattern, until she met the Greek, Minos. After Minos she discovered gigolos, or “toy-boys” as she heard one style himself. And sleeping with them, since the spring of the year, had been her pattern for her sexual love life.

They were wonderful studs, obviously; it was their business to be. And very good actors. But oh, the dullness of the humans within! Except one, maybe. That beautiful gigolo in expensive, impeccable evening dress she had found eating escargots in a workingmen’s café at four o’clock one morning. She had paid a thousand dollars for him for the night, and it had been worth every penny. She had been gone before he awoke but had not neglected to extract from him a telephone number.

The menus were taken away, the wine ordered, and extra knives, forks, and spoons placed beside their service plates. And then they were alone.

“I had no idea you were in Paris on the night of the gala. Were you at the ball?”

“No, I saw you at the Opéra. I all but spied on you through a pair of opera glasses. That’s when I noticed the look in your eye you reserve for your wife.”

At that moment Tana Dabra remembered that she had seen a flicker of just such a look on one other occasion. From the toy-boy. The thousand-dollar gigolo, before he fell asleep. And there had been words, words she could
not remember because she had scarcely bothered to listen to them. She had put it down to toy-boy fawning.

They drank their Kir Royals in silence, awaiting the first course. A rich and voluptuous silence spoke volumes for them. A perfect silence that allowed them to slowly drift apart and yet remain together in the space it created between them. It allowed Adam and Tana Dabra to settle into the atmosphere of what was unquestionably one of the loveliest restaurants in the world.

“I love it here, Adam. It’s exciting, and I am slightly mesmerized by these murals. They must be very old. I have seen few restaurants like this before.”

“Believe me, even with all its history, and the world’s famous and infamous who have dined here, it has seen few people like you either.” They both began to laugh, and Adam realized he had rarely seen or heard Tana Dabra laugh before. The lilt in her laughter gave him hope for her happiness.

“They were painted in the reign of Napoleon the Third. And we are sitting where Victor Hugo used to sit. You see, it is labeled with his name.” Tana Dabra turned around to read the metal plate. “Over there is where Honoré de Balzac sat to dine. They say of him that he used to wolf down a hundred oysters, twelve lamb chops, a duckling with turnips, a brace of roast partridges, a whopping sole in cream sauce, as assortment of desserts, and twelve pears. At a single sitting, no less.”

Tana Dabra was wide-eyed. “It’s not possible,” she exclaimed, aghast, but then recalled the gargantuan statues she had seen of the man.

“Oh, but I assure you it was and he did. There are many stories about the Parisians and their appetites that appear to be impossible. There have always been fabulous restaurants. One of them, the Café Anglais, was the site of the spectacle of three Parisian gentlemen spending the equivalent today of two thousand English pounds. On what? Well, a feast that consisted of a hundred pairs of frogs legs. It took fifty workers to break through the ice and catch the creatures.”

“And what are we going to dine on?” There were extravagances she did not aspire to.

The first course arrived just as she asked the question. Adam and Tana Dabra lapsed into silence again, savoring the elaborate service of their hors d’oeuvres. The sommelier poured the first of the wines they would drink with their lunch, a Puligny-Montrachet 1969, a great white burgundy: Strong, perfumed, intense, dry yet luscious, perfect for the pâté of crayfish Adam had ordered for Tana Dabra and the crayfish soup he had chosen for himself.

They raised their glasses and touched the rims together, searching each other’s eyes. The flickers of lust were still there for her in his, and sexual feelings began to smolder in her. But she saw not a trace of anything else. Even in the thousand-dollar gigolo she was now sure she had seen more. They smiled and drank a silent toast to each other, and she knew she would find that toy-boy and have him again.

They barely exchanged words over their lunch, except to comment on the exquisite food and the ambrosial wine. They savored every morsel of the dishes that made the restaurant famous: Salt cod with celery and bay, bass with mustard, garnished with deep-fried fennel, filet of lamb in a potato cake, veal kidney with sweetbreads and lemon, and every drop of the Richebourg 1966, from the nineteen-acre Grand Cru vineyard in Vosne-Romanée.

More than once their eyes met and each of them acknowledged that their sensual delight in each other, earlier in the day and now over the meal, would always be a part of the fullness of their lives. Unthinkable as it would have been to them, how could they know these would be their last moments alone together?

They were just finishing their desserts — a raspberry mousse placed on leaves of dark chocolate, and a bitter chocolate mousse veined with crême fraiche — and drinking Fargues 1970, a sauterne — extremely elegant and light — which sealed the occasion for them as if with a flutter of butterfly wings, when the maitre d’ arrived. He excused himself to Adam, then bent down and whispered
something in Tana Dabra’s ear. She said nothing to Adam, only raised her glass and he followed suit. She smiled at him and they drank.

Coffee was served and cigars were brought. Adam chose a vintage Davidoff. The tobacco steward prepared it for him, neatly and cleanly cutting off the tip and warming the end over a flame. Adam placed it between his lips and proceeded to light it, turning it slowly between his fingers over the flame held by the steward. He puffed on the cigar, now lit evenly, enjoying the bite of tobacco on his tongue.

“I shall always remember how sexy you look as you light a cigar.”

Her remark caught his attention. It was one of the more personal things she had said to him. He smiled at her. “Only that?”

“Oh no, much more,” she said, returning his smile. Abruptly then she changed the subject. “Our charade. I hope you remember your lines. And the timing. It was your plan to make me safe from the regime, Adam. It was my choice to decide when and where. This morning was the when. On the quay was the where. And so far it has been not only successful but enjoyable. Now comes the hard part. We are about to go public, to perform our next impressions. We must be good, because this time the world will be watching. There’s a TV cameraman from the evening news program here to photograph Paris’s newest discovery: One black African goddess.”

She reached across the table. He took her hand in his and was aware of a slight tremor in it. He lowered his lips to her long slender fingers and kissed them. He repeated the kiss lightly on the back of her hand. When he looked up, he saw that she had closed her eyes. Slowly she withdrew her hand from his and opened her large black-brown eyes, the more seductive for the tear of farewell he saw in them. She held up her hand to silence him before he could break the spell with words, gathered up her handbag, and slipped away from the table.

He sat for a while after she was gone, contemplating the erotic trysts he had had with this courageous and most extraordinarily clever, yet pagan creature. He knew that
the adventurer, the hunter in him, would always respond to her call.

Before he followed her instructions and placed his calls to Addis Ababa, he made a detour to the Place Vendôme. He purchased a fifty-nine carat, oval-shaped and cushion cut, pigeon-blood ruby of extraordinary quality. Encircled by magnificent sapphires and mounted on a thick, black, silk-braided cord with a clasp of sapphires, the necklace would be just large enough to collar her throat. On the card he wrote: “Tender is the night.”

8

“W
ell here I am,” she announced, throwing her leather shoulder bag onto one of the beach chairs, a broad smile spreading across her face. She threw her arms out and stiffened her body, freezing it for a second in a presentation pose.

Deena stood, as if rooted in the sand, her high-heeled black patent leather sandals dangling from one hand. Moses was behind, loaded down with all sorts and sizes of gift-wrapped boxes, their bright papers and sumptuous bows glinting in the sunshine that was trying to break the grayness of the day. Behind him, her husband, Brindley, tall, slender, handsome, and distinguished, every inch the English gentleman and solicitor, was impeccable in his Saville Row clothes, except that he was barefoot with his trousers rolled up to his knees. In one arm he carried a collection of vintage, worn and weary-looking teddy bears. He trailed behind him a stuffed, life-size baby dromedary camel on wheels.

Mirella lifted herself out of her chair, tears of joy filling her eyes. Deena broke her pose and the two women rushed into each other’s arms. Moses and Brindley, Rashid and Adam, who had been sitting with Mirella, watched the
reunion with smiles of delight. And there was relief that Deena, Mirella’s oldest, closest friend, had arrived to be with her until after the birth of her child.

“Oh, what an entrance. You’re just what I need. How did you know you’re just the person I want with me now? I didn’t let on over the telephone, did I? I thought I’d kept my anxiety nicely suppressed.”

“Well you did, but this lot didn’t, and thank the Lord they didn’t, because here I am, and thrilled to see you and be with you. Fresh from playing lady of the manor in Gloucestershire. Getting into breeding horses I am, my dear. As one of those horsey English beauties said, ‘Her first season at Ascot, the right hat, and she fancies she’s in business. Someone should advise her the bloodline is everything.’ You know, the great English put-down. You should have seen her face when I popped up from behind the hedge, where I was sitting with one very amused Royal who enjoys a grand-scale gaffe like that. ‘Oh, Daphne, how good to know that I got it right on the first try, I’m only sorry it makes me odd woman out in a society that reveres a loser,’ I said.

“Thank God for our Vassar days, Mirella, and your classy family. First-class training ground for a Brooklyn Jewish princess who marries an English lord of the realm to learn to soak up that sort of kindergarten bitchiness.”

Mirella hugged her friend again. “In your own small way you’re wonderful,” she said.

“Just don’t talk
wonderful
to me. Look at you. How can a woman about to pop out a baby at any minute look so ravishing and have so many men dancing attendance on her? Not excluding my own husband. I wish I had your formula. How do you manage to keep two of the most handsome, sexy, and interesting men in the world? And my husband and Moses?”

She looked away from Mirella for a moment to Brindley, shrugged her shoulders, and said, “Sorry about that, darling, but you always say you want to deal in realities.” She tossed a quick smile at Moses, then turned back to Mirella. “And turn them into a bunch of nervous wimps?

“Here were you and I having a gossip every other day
over the ocean. But not a hint did I have that you wanted me to come. I can’t remember how many times I asked if you wanted me with you for a few weeks and got the impression that it was too personal and private a time, that you wanted only Adam with you.”

“Well, that was true, Deena, up to a point.”

Adam interrupted them, took Deena in his arms and gave her a great hug, whispered in her ear, “Thank you, I’m so grateful,” and kissed her welcome. She rolled her eyes as if in ecstasy and gave a great sigh. Then Adam turned to Moses and suggested he put the boxes down or take them off to the house. Then he went to admire the genuine Mongolian dromedary on wheels.

Rashid was next. He hugged and kissed Deena and whispered, “I will be ever grateful to you for this, Deena. I’ll call you later.” Then he went to join Brindley and Adam. Mirella sat back down again in her beach chair, shaking her head in wonder over her friend and her entrance.

“Shall we go back to the house, Deena?”

“I should say not! Moses,” she ordered “put the parcels down. We’ll open them here on the beach. Now that’s what surprises and presents are all about, the fun of the moment.” Moses went to where she stood and, bending down, whispered as discreetly as he could, hoping Mirella would lose his words in the sound of the ocean and the men’s voices, “Don’t tell her I called you.”

Deena was fussing with the boxes, obviously looking for a certain one. She looked up and said, “What do you mean, Moses? Not tell Mirella you called? Don’t be ridiculous. In fact, you should have been the first to call. No matter how many years I’ve known you and confided in you, and think of you as my own ear and eye in Mirella’s house, you always manage to overdo the discretion. You were acting an even worse wimp than the others about her. As a matter of fact, you came last in the race to the telephone.”

The menfolk looked every which way but Mirella’s. Suddenly there were things for them to see all around the beach. That broke both women up with laughter.

“Well, whaddya know?” chuckled Mirella. “I had no notion.”

“That
was
the idea,” said Adam, awarding Deena a forgiving look.

“Oh, I am really going to enjoy hearing every bit of this,” teased Mirella, looking at the men.

Rashid for once, in a merely domestic matter, was short of excuses. He gave up and declared, “This is your baby shower.” He sounded ridiculous enough to make him throw up his hands and begin to laugh himself. Self-mockery rippled around the group.

“I’m going to go up to the house to change, and I think you should too, Deena. It’s a bit damp and chilly down here. And you’re not exactly dressed in beachwear.”

“True,” she said, going to Brindley while pulling the pin from her small but very chic, black-lacquered straw hat. She handed it to him. Then she unbuttoned the short, white peplumed jacket, trimmed in black, and gave that to him as well. Mirella watched her friend standing in a pretty, black-and-white, large floral Italian silk dress with a stylish short skirt. Deena dug her bare toes in and out of the sand while she asked Brindley to bring trousers, a top, and a sweater down for her, so that she could stay and talk with Mirella.

Mirella looked up at the sky. She thought that the weather, so changeable all day, was going to hold. Just at the moment, the sun was out, making the beach, sand dunes, and ocean shine bright. And the air, even with its end-of-summer nip that made everything seem fresh and new, was still warm enough to suggest swimming.

But the day had been overcast, with a sky of milky-gray broken by occasional rays of diffused sunlight. The very smell of the ocean, damp sand, and intermittent swirls of mist that rolled in over the ocean, made Mirella feel closer to life. For some days now, it had been almost impossible to get her away from the ocean shore, or keep her from swimming in the rough, cold salt water. She craved swimming, almost obsessively, and she yearned for the long gusts of warm wind that came hurtling across the waves on to the beach, spraying a fine mist over the sand
before soughing their way out to sea again. The sunshine and the gray calms were so theatrical in their contrasts that she liked to imagine a god of some sort was turning it on and off at some celestial control panel.

Deena picked up a stack of gift boxes and dropped them at Mirella’s feet, then plopped into the chair next to Mirella and reached out to take her hand.

“We can’t open a thing until Brindley gets back. Wait until you see the things I bought for you and the baby. What a shopping spree I went on!”

Before she had a chance to catalogue her purchases, Rashid said, turning from the women to Adam, “I think it’s time we checked the rods.”

So the women watched the two men walk away from them, and Deena said, “They are still both passionately in love with you, Mirella.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Then what’s wrong? They are very concerned, really anxious. Enough to call me — each, of course, not wanting the other to know, or you to know — that they felt you needed me.”

“Nothing is wrong, I promise you. I’m fine, the baby is fine. And any day now it’s going to pop out, as you so aptly put it.”

“Well, if nothing is wrong with you, then something is wrong with them. And my husband, and Moses.”

“They called as well?”

“That’s right.”

The two women remained silent for a minute. Deena closing her eyes and letting the toasty rays of the sun warm her face. She sighed. “I’m so happy they called and I’m here. I love England and our country seat, Lyttleton Park. Boy, do English trees ever stop dripping? Summer, winter, all the seasons, dripping trees. I miss the Hamptons. No matter how much it rains in the Hamptons, it’s not a place of endlessly dripping trees.”

Mirella began to laugh. Deena said ordinary things in ways that induced gaiety. “It’s been a wonderful day. A funny beach day, but the kind you get here at this time of year. And just the sort I like.”

They sat in silence, in their wooden deck chairs — salvaged from the
Normandie
when it went down after a fire while docked in the Hudson River — stretched out along the water’s edge, the men’s fishing rods set up nearby for surf casting. Rashid’s Scottish gillie and Moses had been working along at the sport with the other men since early morning.

“What did they say?” asked Mirella.

Deena turned in her chair and lay on her side facing her friend. Mirella most clumsily did the same.

“Adam? That you were very well, happy. The nurseries in all the houses were ready. That you would have the baby here in East Hampton, in the house. A nurse and a nanny were already in residence, a midwife and a doctor on standby. And that you want nothing to do with any of them until you go into labor. All you want is to swim in the ocean. Immersion all the time, with no clothes on. Swim and linger on the beach. He says he goes along with you sometimes, and it’s very exciting and he can understand how you feel. It’s a primitive kind of thing, a sort of watery nesting instinct. Maybe a desire to return to the sea, if that’s really where we all came from. Anyway, some sort of natural thing like that. He has suggested that you have Dr. Michel Odent, the French pioneer of natural childbirth, take over the birth of the baby. Maybe even deliver in a pool of water, as some of his other patients have. But you declined all that, claiming you are organized enough with the help at hand.

“I think he admires you for it. He see it’s right for you to want to have the baby with minimal fuss and organization, since you believe that giving birth is an irrational, emotional, and sexual experience that is difficult enough already. He says that in these last weeks of your pregnancy, more so than ever, you have wanted to go along with your feelings, not with what the doctors dictate. And that he goes right along with you. That you are not obliged to choose how to have the baby until you are ready. That you have left all your options open, and that he wants you to have the baby any way you want: in a darkened room, in a squatting position, or hanging from his neck — Does
Odent really recommend that? — or in a hospital, lying in bed, at home. You have both talked it out months ago, but now you skirt the issue. All you do talk about, and endlessly, is swimming, how you crave swimming. And the reason he wants me to be with you is that he thinks you might confide in me something you’d hesitate to confide in him.”

“Well, everything he told you is true. I give him full marks for sensitivity to feminine anxieties. When did he call you?”

“A few days ago. He called from Paris. Said he had flown the Concorde over for an emergency meeting and was Concording right back to you. He was scared you might go into labor with him not there for you.”

Tears filled Mirella’s eyes.

“Oh dear,” said Deena, taking her friend’s hand.

“I want to tell you about it, Deena. He is, of course, right. You are the only one in the world I would be able to talk this out with.”

Brindley arrived with the beach togs for Deena. She ducked into the gaily striped canvas marquee the Coreys used for changing.

“Not bad when you need her, is she? I hope you’re pleased to have her here. If you don’t want Deena to stay, she will understand. Just seeing you for the day and going on her shopping spree for you and the baby will have compensated for the flight.”

“I’m thrilled she’s here, Brindley. I didn’t know how much I wanted to see her until I saw her, if you know what I mean. But I am curious. Why did you ask her to come and stay with me?”

He covered his embarrassment very professionally and looked directly into her eyes.

“You gave up a conventional life when I discovered you were the sole heir to the Oujie legacy and you inherited, then met Rashid, and chose to marry Adam. I have been close to you through it all. I feel I know you quite well. The new life you have created for yourself in the last two years seems to work. You have learned to navigate in the fast lane with Rashid and Adam because all three of you in
your own ways run there alone. You have a keen sense of how to keep your identity, a part of your self, from them. You retain a kind of mystery. That always surprises and intrigues. It’s part of your fatal charm. It’s what makes you a femme fatale. I sensed that you were worried about losing that with the birth of the baby. Am I wrong? Is it just I who is concerned that you will lose it, and your emotional life will come unstuck and tumble down around you? Oh, I didn’t mean to say all that. I am being melodramatic, I suppose. Sorry. But you and Adam and Rashid are romantics. And there is nothing romantic about having a baby. Miraculous certainly. And enriching. But hardly romantic. Silly of me to feel this way, I suppose. So silly that I never explained my feelings about it, even to Deena. I simply told her I was worried about you, and that your mother, Lili, has been a bother. I knew that would get her here fast.”

He smiled, and she returned his smile. But Mirella was quite overwhelmed at how astute and caring Brindley was being. His steady, sincere gaze did not conceal his embarrassment from her. She felt she had to say something to him to lift his unease.