The memory of her anthropology professor, with whom she had clearly gone through the customary adoration-boredom-disgust cycle of student-teacher love affairs, had put Sandrine in a sulky, dissatisfied mood.
“You made a lovely little error about thirty seconds ago. The tribe is called the Piraha, not the Piranhas. Piranhas are the fish you fell in love with.”
“Ooh,” she said, brightening up. “So the Piraha eat piranhas?”
“Other way around, more likely. But the other people on the Blinding Light can’t be Piraha, we’re hundreds of miles from their territory.”
“You are tedious. Why did I ever let myself get talked into coming here, anyhow?”
“You fell in love with me the first time you saw me — in your father’s living room, remember? And although it was tremendously naughty of me, in fact completely wrong and immoral, I took one look at your stupid sweatshirt and your stupid pigtails and fell in love with you on the spot. You were perfect — you took my breath away. It was like being struck by lightning.”
He inhaled, hugely.
“And here I am, thirty-eight years of age, height of my powers, capable of performing miracles on behalf of our clients, exactly as I pulled off, not to say any more about this, a considerable miracle for your father, plus I am a fabulously eligible man, a tremendous catch, but what do you know, still unmarried. Instead of a wife or even a steady girlfriend, there’s this succession of inane young women from twenty-five to thirty, these Heathers and Ashleys, these Morgans and Emilys, who much to their dismay grow less and less infatuated with me the more time we spend together. ‘You’re always so distant,’ one of them said, ‘you’re never really with me.’ And she was right, I couldn’t really be with her. Because I wanted to be with you. I wanted us to be here.”
Deeply pleased, Sandrine said, “You’re such a pervert.”
Yet something in what Ballard had evoked was making the handsome dining room awkward and dark. She wished he wouldn’t stand still; there was no reason why he couldn’t go into the living room, or the other way, into the room where terror and fascination beckoned. She wondered why she was waiting for Ballard to decide where to go, and as he spoke of seeing her for the first time, was assailed by an uncomfortably precise echo from the day in question.
Then, as now, she had been rooted to the floor: in her family’s living room, beyond the windows familiar Park Avenue humming with the traffic she only in that moment became aware she heard, Sandrine had been paralyzed. Every inch of her face had turned hot and red. She felt intimate with Ballard before she had even begun to learn what intimacy meant. Before she had left the room, she waited for him to move between herself and her father, then pushed up the sleeves of the baggy sweatshirt and revealed the inscriptions of self-loathing, self-love, desire and despair upon her pale forearms.
“You’re pretty weird, too. You’d just had your fifteenth birthday, and here you were, gobsmacked by this old guy in a suit. You even showed me your arms!”
“I could tell what made you salivate.” She gave him a small, lop-sided smile. “So why were you there, anyhow?”
“Your father and I were having a private celebration.”
“Of what?”
Every time she asked this question, he gave her a different answer. “I made the fearsome problem of his old library fines disappear. Poof!, no more late-night sweats.” Previously, Ballard had told her that he’d got her father off jury duty, had cancelled his parking tickets, retroactively upgraded his B- in Introductory Chemistry to an A.
“Yeah, what a relief. My father never walked into a library, his whole life.”
“You can see why the fine was so great.” He blinked. “I just had an idea.” Ballard wished her to cease wondering, to the extent this was possible, about the service he had rendered for her father. “How would you like to take a peek at the galley? Forbidden fruit, all that kind of thing. Aren’t you curious?”
“You’re suggesting we go down those stairs? Wasn’t not doing that one of our most sacred rules?”
“I believe we were given those rules in order to make sure we broke them.”
Sandrine considered this proposition for a moment, then nodded her head.
That’s my girl, he thought.
“You may be completely perverted, Ballard, but you’re pretty smart.” A discordant possibility occurred to her. “What if we catch sight of our extremely discreet servants?”
“Then we know for good and all if they’re little tribesmen who chirp like bobolinks or handsome South American yacht bums. But that won’t happen. They may, in fact they undoubtedly do, see us, but we’ll never catch sight of them. No matter how brilliantly we try to outwit them.”
“You think they watch us?”
“I’m sure that’s one of their main jobs.”
“Even when we’re in bed? Even when we… you know.”
“Especially then,” Ballard said.
“What do we think about that, Ballard? Do we love the whole idea, or does it make us sick? You first.”
“Neither one. We can’t do anything about it, so we might as well forget it. I think being able to watch us is one of the ways they’re paid — these tribes don’t have much use for money. And because they’re always there, they can step in and help us when we need it, at the end.”
“So it’s like love,” said Sandrine.
“Tough love, there at the finish. Let’s go over and try the staircase.”
“Hold on. When we were out on deck, you told me that you felt you were being watched, and that it was the first time you’d ever had that feeling.”
“Yes, that was different — I don’t feel the natives watching me, I just assume they’re doing it. It’s the only way to explain how they can stay out of sight all the time.”
As they moved across the dining room to the inner door, for the first time Sandrine noticed a curtain the color of a dark camel hair coat hanging up at the top of the room’s oval. Until that moment, she had taken it for a wall too small and oddly shaped to be covered with bookshelves. The curtain shifted a bit, she thought: a tiny ripple occurred in the fabric, as if it had been breathed upon.
There’s one of them now, she thought. I bet they have their own doors and their own staircases.
For a moment, she was disturbed by a vision of the yacht honeycombed with narrow passages and runways down which beetled small red-brown figures with matted black hair and faces like dull, heavy masks. Now and then the little figures paused to peer through chinks in the walls. It made her feel violated, a little, but at the same time immensely proud of the body that the unseen and silent attendants were privileged to gaze at. The thought of these mysterious little people watching what Ballard did to that body, and she to his, caused a thrill of deep feeling to course upward through her body.
“Stop daydreaming, Sandrine, and get over here.” Ballard held the door that led to the gray landing and the metal staircase.
“You go first,” she said, and Ballard moved through the frame while still holding the door. As soon as she was through, he stepped around her to grasp the gray metal rail and begin moving down the stairs.
“What makes you so sure the galley’s downstairs?”
“Galleys are always downstairs.”
“And why do you want to go there, again?”
“One: because they ordered us not to. Two: because I’m curious about what goes on in that kitchen. And three: I also want to get a look at the wine cellar. How can they keep giving us these amazing wines? Remember what we drank with lunch?”