A man was ragtiming “By the Beautiful Sea” on the Broadwood grand and I found a place against a support pillar near the front where I could see between heads to the performance space. The pianist was followed by a Scottish comedian. I could barely understand the heavily brogued words of his jokes, much less their humor. Some in the audience seemed to catch on — the Scots, no doubt — but most were politely waiting for the next act. I endured this for a time, letting my mind drift to trivial things, and finally I looked around the room.
Edward Cable was sitting in one of the easy chairs in the second row, his arms pulled stiffly to his sides. I sensed this much from his place and his pose and from the manner of the women on either side of him, not to mention from their gender: he was alone, having arrived early to the event, with nothing else to do, pining for his lost companion. The comic tended to raise his voice to a near shout at the climax of each joke. One of those shouts came as I watched Cable. He made the slightest flinch at the volume and did not otherwise move.
Then the comic was done. I looked to the front. A tuxedo bounded up and began talking, but I did not listen. My gaze slid on to the far side of the room. And there stood Selene. She was waiting to go on. Her long, empire-waisted dress was sleeveless, as was her sea-green wrap, and she wore long, black gloves. Her throat and the swell of her chest were bare, as were her arms from her shoulder to the middle of her biceps. I found myself stirred most by the unexpected nakedness of that six inches of arm.
The tuxedo yammered about her fame and beauty, and her face was turned slightly away from the audience but not focused on the speaker either. I wanted her to shift her gaze a bit to her left, toward me. I wanted her to look at me. To see me.
Instead, she closed her eyes for a long few moments. As I’d grown up backstage in countless theaters, I’d often seen actresses do this before going on. But even across this room I sensed something else in her at that moment. She was looking inward. And she was looking ahead. She was about to sing to us and she was reflecting on the secret context. I felt sure of all this.
Her eyes still closed, she lifted her face a little and turned it slightly to the left, as if she had just concluded something in her meditation. And the tuxedo announced her: “The internationally renowned, the incomparably beautiful Miss Selene Bourgani!”
Selene’s face descended and she opened her eyes, and she found herself looking straight at me.
The crowd was applauding mightily and a few of the young Brit collegiates were crying “Right ho!” and Selene should have been moving to center stage. But she lingered one beat, and then another, looking at me, though her eyes — at least from across the room — showed me no feeling at all. But the lingering did.
Then she shifted her gaze away and she glided to the place where the juggler and the comic had stood and she turned to the throng and smiled. I expected a radiant, film-actress, outsized smile. But it was not. It was quite small, really, this smile, considering the audience, considering their ardor. And then she gave us her famous profile, as she nodded over her bare shoulder to the pianist.
He played a few bars of introduction and she turned back to us all and she began to sing the first verse.
I knew the song. A couple of years ago, a girl in Chicago and I had a rough-and-tumble, me blowing off steam after covering the Second Balkan War. She owned a cylinder of this song and about played the grooves off it in our couple of months together.
Selene sang it with a deep, dark vibrato:
“I’ve been worried all day long.
Don’t know if I’m right or wrong.
I can’t help just what I say.
Your love makes me speak this way.”
This much was just as it had been seared into my brain from spin after spin of Mr. Edison’s cylinder. But then Selene turned her face to me and she found my eyes and she slowed the song down just a little — the pianist subtly adjusted as he heard this — and I could see her mind working as she improvised and interpolated new words:
“Why, oh why, did I close the door?
You must know I wanted more.
But now I’m crying.
No use denying:
I vanish on the nearing shore.”
I can be dense about these things sometimes, but it was me she’d closed the door on, and I had no doubt she intended to disappear from me in England. So when she let go of my eyes and faced the audience and sang the familiar chorus to us all, I had no choice but to think she was still singing to me. Just to me:
“You made me love you.
I didn’t want to do it.
I didn’t want to do it.
You made me want you,
And all the time you knew it.
I guess you always knew it.
You made me happy sometimes,
You made me glad.
But there were times dear,
You made me feel so sad.
You made me sigh, for
I didn’t want to tell you.
I didn’t want to tell you.
I want some love that’s true.
Yes I do,
Deed I do,
You know I do.
Give me, give me what I cry for.
You know you got the brand of kisses that I’d die for.
You know you made me love you.”
And she was done. The crowd was on its feet, applauding and shouting “Brava!” and she closed her eyes again, as she had when she was waiting to go on, as if she were meditating. Briefly. And she bowed. She did not curtsey. She bowed. A long, slow, stiff bow from the waist. The bow of a Prussian officer in a social setting with civilians, feeling uncomfortable, waiting to leave.
She did this once. She bowed only once, and then she looked fleetingly to me, one last time, and she turned away and moved quickly to the far side of the room and disappeared from my sight beyond the crowd.
I followed her progress to the back of the lounge by watching the bodies turning to send their ongoing applause straight to her as she was leaving them.
Then she was gone. And everyone was facing back to the empty space where she had just sung, and they continued to applaud her, even though she had vanished.
12
I stood before her door.
I had approached softly. The corridor itself was very quiet, even though many on the ship were still awake, even now, well past midnight, already a couple of hours advanced into May 7, 1915.
Before the end of the charity concert Captain Turner had stood in the performance space and made a short, clumsy, self-contradictory speech revealing a special telegraph warning from the naval area commander in Queenstown that German U-boats were known to be presently active off the Irish coast, but Turner urged us not to worry, as our ship was too fast and we would have the Royal Navy to protect us but in the meantime don’t dare light any cigarettes on deck.
Many of the first-class passengers were now sleeping fully dressed and fitful in the public spaces, on chairs and settees and on pallets on the floors of the Writing Room and the Smoking Room and the Lounge, the Dining Room and the Entrance Hall, even on the landings of the Grand Staircase. Others paced the decks in the dark, wearing their life jackets.
But as I stood in front of Selene’s door, there was only silence. I had hesitated for a long while, roaming the promenade decks, wanting to confront her about the man — and the government — she was dealing with, but knowing that now more than ever I needed to play the supporting role of the usable and disposable newspaperman-lover so that I could play the leading role of an American secret agent.
All of which sounded suddenly ridiculous in my head. I was crazy about this woman. I’d soon have to deal with what she was and what she was doing, but I wanted her badly now. I lifted my hand to knock, but before I could, the door swung open and she was a vision in scarlet silk and golden dragons.