It seemed to.
“I see,” he said, and his face did change ever so slightly, with a certain gravity coming over him.
He was an arrogant ass. Fine. I had a little something on him anyway. Doctor Brauer indeed. “And you’re a man of medicine,” I said. “I so admire that.”
“Doctor of philosophy,” he said, his voice gone weary. As if I should have recognized one “doctor” from another by sight.
I could have given him a disappointed “I see,” but I still wanted to find out if I could break through his social walls before I tried anything more extreme to learn about him.
“Just as admirable,” I said. “A man of the mind.”
I saw what I thought was an incipient smile at this, but before it could emerge, his eyes shifted slightly, and then he overtly looked past me. Whatever he saw induced a clear flicker of outreaching life that I’d not yet perceived in Walter Brauer. But it passed almost at once, and he looked at me again.
I turned to see what he had seen.
So egghead Doctor Brauer was also a man, all right, to have been diverted by this sight, even in the midst of receiving an appropriate compliment for his mind. But he wasn’t much of a man, for turning away from this image so quickly.
This was a room of ivory-colored walls and full of women dressed in flounces and loose panel drapes and floating sleeves of silks and chiffons and satins, all in the ivory of our walls or in lilac or in pastel blue or green, a muted space with muted women. And all of it had just been struck by a bolt of black lightning from la mode moderne: Selene stood alone, barely inside the doorway, and she was wearing a black velvet gown that held her close even at her legs and the neck was high and sharp-pointed and the sleeves were long and she was edged at hem and wrist and throat with the pale gray of chinchilla fur. The only physical brightness about her — and dazzlingly bright she was — were her hands and her face and her long neck and a flame of a diamond barrette in her upgathered hair.
The band waltzed on, but beneath it the room grew quickly silent as she was noticed, and she did not move and she was noticed by others who told others and then all faces were turned to her and all voices were stilled and I ached to see her hair unfastened and falling upon her shoulders and down upon her breast.
Did her face turn ever so slightly in my direction and did her eyes move to me? I could not say for certain.
4
She did look at me across the captain’s table. Most notably in the wine-sipping interval between the snipe en cocotte and the quarters of lamb. We sat directly beneath the apex of the dining room dome at a table for ten, a rectangle with four chairs on each long side and the ends curved for two more places, one of which held Captain Turner himself, a small, sailor-muscled man whose very few words were accented straight from the Liverpool docks. She’d been placed by the dining room steward next to a silly ass of a playboy millionaire, Alfred Vanderbilt, primary inheritor of the Cornelius Vanderbilt steamships-and-railroads millions, infamous, a few years back, for having to settle $10 million on a Cuban diplomat for having jazzed his wife, who subsequently divorced the Cuban and then killed herself, alone, in a London hotel. When Selene shot me the look, he was bending to her, whispering something.
The look on her face was too complex for me to understand. It was not What an ass, rescue me from his company. But neither was it I’m being charmed here by this guy, who’s in my league and you’re not, so stop looking at me like that. I felt it wasn’t about Vanderbilt at all, really. There was a stark resignedness in her look. A look of I’d lift my hand to you, reach across to you, but there’s no use. She looked at me the way she would if she’d fallen off the ship and was about to sink and she knew I could not save her.
All of this lasted only a few moments. She turned her face to Vanderbilt and instantly she portrayed a laugh, a laugh as false and oversized as any she had ever executed before the cranking of a movie camera.
“You’re a writer I should know,” a man’s voice said from my left.
I was ready to look away from Selene, and beside me was Elbert Hubbard, an eccentric jack-of-all-trades American writer with a pageboy haircut who’d sold forty million copies of a pamphlet brazenly exploiting the story of one of the few American war heroes from McKinley’s Cuban affair. So Hubbard could do what? Attack the lack of initiative in office clerks and secretaries and other hirelings in American business.
He knew me, knew my work, was heading to Europe to report on the “mastoid degenerate” Kaiser Wilhelm and his war. As Hubbard talked, I nodded and portrayed attention as falsely as a movie actress, and I prodded my mind to go where it should have been all along: to a table I could not see from across the dining room, to Walter Brauer. The Germans surely did not book him in first class out of a sense of his or any of their agents’ high standing in the world. He had business here. Something to do en route. Something that was naturally located in first class.
“Don’t you think?” Hubbard said, as if he’d already asked something and I’d ignored him. Which no doubt he just had.
“I rely on your judgment,” I said, a line I always found useful in getting phony intellectuals to say quotable things.
He was satisfied and talked on.
The orchestra above us was playing a ragtime piece. I hoped I had not just agreed that the music was degenerate.
Hubbard’s pageboy bangs were degenerate.
I also hoped he hadn’t asked if I liked his bangs.
I needed to get away. I wanted to observe Brauer at his table, even if it was in passing. Was he dining near someone intentionally? Was he engaged in conversation?
Selene Bourgani was engaged in conversation. Vanderbilt’s voice smarmed on in the background. Something, at the moment, about his ninety-horsepower Fiat, how he would drive it to London for a board meeting of the International Horse Show Association.
I leaned toward Hubbard slightly, interrupted him. “Sorry,” I said. “I have to visit the washroom.”
Hubbard nodded, but his “Of course” was snipped with disappointment. His wife was on his other side and I was a new ear for his socialist-utopian ideas.
I rose, ready to quietly excuse myself to anyone at the table who looked at me. I scanned the faces, passing quickly over Selene and Vanderbilt. Her head was angled toward Vanderbilt’s nearby moving lips, her eyes cast into the flower arrangement. The captain lifted his indifferent gaze to me.
“Excuse me, Captain,” I said, though as softly as I could and still have him hear me. “I’ll be right back.”
He nodded.
I began to turn away, but I did glance at Selene once more. Vanderbilt’s face was still drawn near hers; he was speaking of a prize high stepper. But she’d lifted her face and was looking at me with that opaque complexity I’d seen earlier.
I nodded.
She nodded in return, I thought, but if I was right, it was the merest possible nod, as if she did not want Vanderbilt to notice.
I moved away toward the portside forward door.
I soon saw Brauer. He sat at a round, corner table, facing in my direction, but he did not see me as I slowed to pass. He was turned and was speaking to the man sitting next to him: a thin-faced, clean-shaven man with a tall, brown but lightly graying, Brilliantined pompadour, nodding at Brauer’s words.
I looked away and kept moving. The steward was standing nearby, monitoring three members of the waitstaff who were simultaneously launching themselves from the sideboard with wine bottles for refills.