The Girl of the Lake Page 10

  Day three and the two of them got involved in a lawn-bowling tournament, then bravely split up. Robert headed to the volleyball courts, played a genteel match. Phillipe joined a hike through the hills (singing and foreign banter and great elaborate stops for wine and cheese, he’d later report, maybe a touch eerie and far too rocky, heady nonetheless).

  That evening they found themselves seated with Vedat and Maria, a voluble pair from Yalta, a place neither Robert nor Phillipe had heard of. “But is on Black Sea!” Vedat remonstrated. “Is site of peace accords after Vorld Var Two!”

  “Tessa Embrodar,” Maria suddenly gasped.

  “We’ve heard she’s coming!” Phillipe said passionately.

  “No, no! By the saints, she arrives!” the lady said.

  Her husband exclaimed something in their Ukrainian dialect, translated for his new friends: “Permission!”

  “Perfuction,” his wife corrected.

  Robert didn’t want to crane but managed to catch a glimpse—of a corpulent older man and his equally voluminous wife in elegant suit and gowns, chins high, making their way out to the terrace in a cortege of hotel staff, a college-looking girl following in tall blue jeans and cropped flannel shirt, oblivious dark-eyed survey of the room as if all the excitement had nothing to do with her, her hands managing her mane of bright chestnut hair as best they could in the tumult of ocean breezes in bright sun. The whole dining room seemed to have noticed the arrival, and conversations that had died long since came back to life as if some subtle, happy gas had been introduced to the hotel ventilation system. Robert distinctly did not recognize her: just a girl, admittedly striking.

  “Let us claim table on terrace,” Vedat said. He rushed out there embarrassingly, but in seconds a wave of hotel employees was transferring their bottles of cava and blown-glass flutes to a table not too far from the famous one.

  Up close, the young woman’s face was, in fact, familiar, and now Robert did remember her, the graceful bearing, the pouting mouth, the sudden shy grin as she caught his eye, the indifference as she dropped it, the really magnificent sweep of her shimmering chestnut hair, the fine cheekbones, the deep color of her skin, the tilt of her pelvis as she stood waiting for her chair to be wiped of dew, the tidy, small breasts pushed up mechanically by a not-invisible blue bra to make at least a little cleavage, the pretty, half-buttoned pink-plaid flannel shirt, her huge eyes scanning the room for anything more interesting than her companions and even her skyrocket career, unforgettable girl from the unremembered movie with Harrison Ford, startling in reality. She’d been riding a horse. Through the desert. In the film. She found Robert’s eye again, held it merrily, no idea of her powers, dropped him when her aunt said something that required a petulant answer.

  Best to stop staring, of course.

  “I belieff Robert is in luff,” Maria said thickly, leaning on his shoulder.

  “No, it is I,” said Vedat, leaning to kiss Phillipe’s cheek.

  VEDAT AND MARIA’S MANY rooms were at the far end of the castle in the height of one of the towers, sumptuously furnished, and with a den and deep couches to which the odd couples repaired for a nightcap and some surfing on the Internet to get a look at Tessa Embrodar in action. They watched film clips in several languages not English, the girl from about age sixteen to the present, which was still pretty young, not even midtwenties. On the terrace she’d been an actual person, manageably beautiful; but even on the laptop screen she was more a world treasure, exquisite in every proportion. The camera loved her, as the saying went. The camera was agog. Vedat found a romantic scene between her and a narrow Italian man with a chiseled face, a lot of kissing, those upturned breasts.

  “He turns all red,” Maria said heartily.

  Yes, Robert’s neck was burning.

  But Phillipe and Vedat were already onto the next clip—the girl riding a horse effortlessly across a barren landscape, that gorgeous banner of hair streaming behind her, her hips as she posted, full gallop, no stunt person standing in, what a rider!

  It was the Harrison Ford movie.

  Maria clicked it back again and again, the girl riding the overly enormous horse across the barren American plain.

  “Vee have DVD of Princesa,” Vedat said. “Vee borrow from front desk. They havink every Tessa film.”

  “We’ll make a study,” Phillipe said.

  Anyway, the two of them left to go set up the bedroom television, Vedat carrying his magnum of cognac.

  Immediately Maria put her hands on Robert, felt both biceps, patted his hair. She was older than he’d thought, with jowls and sad eyes, smelled floral, powdery. She clicked the computer again, and again Tessa rode off across the vast plain. “That girl, she luffs you,” Maria said, “She luffs my Robert!”

  “Just something about her,” Robert said, gazing into the computer screen.

  They watched the clip one more time, Maria rubbing Robert’s hands lovingly. He wasn’t sure later what look must have been on his face as he turned away from the screen, but Maria said, “Oh, oh. I’m sorry, Robert. Poor Robert.” She put her hands to his cheeks, gazed into his soul, clucking.

  Forgotten emotion! Or perhaps emotion unknown. He shook it off, helped Maria up off the couch (not an easy process), and shortly they joined the others in a cushioned nook that must have been a weapons cache at one time, anyway, there were shelves carved into the stone and the remains of iron brackets, a medieval crest in crumbling mosaic. Also wide couches and a flat-screen television so clear and gigantic that it was like a window. Vedat and Phillipe were waiting, Phillipe with the remote control tight in hand, his mouth looking unusually moist. Well, so what: he and Vedat had been kissing.

  Tessa’s face was the first shot in the film, a long close-up, a princess thinking dark thoughts and planning something, a luxuriously lengthy shot the likes of which you’d never see in an American film (as Phillipe pointed out): just trust the camera and the girl’s spectacular presence, no need for anything else, holy shit.

  IN THE MORNING THE actress appeared at breakfast alone. She might have been anyone’s brilliant grad school kid, T-shirt and capri pants, flip-flops, another highly visible bra, this one fire red. Not three tables away, she ate a huge pile of croissants with jam and butter, as Phillipe pointed out.

  “I don’t need a report on every fucking bite,” Robert said, his back to the girl. He wished he had worn pants and not his bathing suit, an old pair of surf jams he’d had for over twenty years, when you thought about it, from when he and Julia were first dating, bright pattern faded. Phillipe was badly hungover, not so much Robert, who wasn’t a drinker. They could only imagine, they said, what Vedat and Maria were going through after the way they’d chugged their Armagnac, two in the morning. The four of them had minutely dissected the Harrison Ford movie, which wasn’t very good, not really, even despite Tessa’s performance, dazzling. Very late they’d watched her most recent Spanish film, which was so very subtle, psychological, transgressive, eccentric—funny, too—the girl really had it all.

  “She’s putting salami on a croissant,” Phillipe said. “That’s her fifth one.” She’d been naked for half the scenes, or nearly naked, no discretion in the filming. Her aunt and uncle ought to have protected her, Phillipe had said, and repeated at every fulsome peek of flesh. He was oddly moralistic for a slut, as poor Julia had often pointed out. Maria and Vedat thought the nudity was fine—it was the story that was egregious, that a man would disown his own daughter in that fashion, shocking, and that even so she could behave that way in the end, even in medieval times. They translated from the Spanish as the movie went along, probably poorly, as no script could possibly be that halting and melodramatic. Robert had remained silent but thought it was the most beautiful film he’d ever seen, with the longest cuts imaginable, like looking at photographs, Maria with her hand on his arm, Tessa’s protean beauty five minutes at a stretch, Phillipe finally changing seats to escape Vedat’s little kisses.

  “She’s getting up,
” Phillipe said.

  And then she was standing at their table. Tessa Embrodar, the very girl. That face from the movies looming over the breadbasket, but in color and with a small pimple on its forehead. “Hi,” she said, acknowledging Phillipe and Robert equally. She beamed—any smile from her was a beam. Her hair was pulled back carelessly. She still had the lines of the sumptuous hotel sheets cut deeply into the side of her face.

  “Oh,” Phillipe said. “Oh!”

  “Good morning,” Robert said coolly. He felt a little mad at Tessa for the way she’d acted toward her family. But that was in the movie. He felt a little betrayed by the things she’d done naked with the Blue Knight of Grenada, too. But here she was, just a regular girl, and a little shy.

  “Do you swim this day?” she said, indicating Robert’s suit, his horrible bathing suit.

  “I love to swim,” he said.

  She formulated the foreign sentence without inflection such that it sounded more like a command than a question: “You want to swim to the island.”

  “You mean the Royal Mediterranean Island Swim Challenge?”

  The Blue Knight of Grenada had torn her clothes clear off her. She didn’t get his sarcasm, said, “Yes, of course. They doing it every Wednesday, yes, today. I need this partner for the rules. You swim. It is most safe. The hotel boat follow. It is the popular hotel swim. One kilometer. Like nothing, nada.” She pulled up her shirt and tugged down the waist of her capris to show that she wore her bikini underneath, long smooth belly.

  “I swim,” said Robert.

  AND SO IN AN hour Robert in his jams was diving into the Mediterranean Sea beside Tessa Embrodar. There were three other sets of swim partners and an odd man out, a middle-aged German fellow who had no buddy and didn’t care what the lifeguard said. Nor did the lifeguard care much about the rules, just a shrug: what was one more drowned German?

  Tessa’s aunt and uncle were aboard the hotel’s pontoon boat under the canopy in lounge chairs, perfectly content to be chatting with Vedat and Maria, who had decided to come along. Soon Maria was topless, her breasts already deeply tanned, enormous round brown balloons slightly deflated. Phillipe, terrified of boats, had gone to town with the pony man for lunch.

  The swimmers started in a knot, various levels of ability. The lifeguard paid no attention to them at all, got into a passionate talk with the boatman. Tessa, at least, took the buddy system seriously; with quick, strong strokes, she swam close beside Robert while the others fell behind: a gay couple in perfect physical form doing breaststroke to keep their hair dry, laughing and chatting together, also one of the young hetero couples, happy for the time away from their kids, choppy swimmers. The water was warm, the current speeding them along. A kilometer wasn’t far to go. Robert had been a champion in college. Tessa must have had coaching, too—excellent form. Halfway across, the two of them broke out of their speedy crawl and into a tandem breaststroke as if by plan. The water sheeted off her shoulders, her face. Her aunt had braided her hair for her in front of everyone. The lifeguard shouted—they were getting too far ahead of the boat. So they stopped, treaded water in the dulcet sea.

  “You swim as a dolphin,” she said puffing happily.

  “Leaping and spouting,” Robert replied, same.

  But she didn’t get it.

  He tried again: “Leaping and spouting like a dolphin,” he said.

  “You are beautiful to look at,” she said.

  “And you are too,” he said too hotly.

  She’d meant swimming. And, anyway, to be beautiful to her was as normal as putting on shoes. She stroked away from him—no more thought of the lifeguard, the boat—and burst quickly into a very fast backstroke. He caught her up within twenty strokes, and they swam on their backs like that through the gentle swells side by side and fast. Quickly again they were far, far ahead of the others, though when they stopped once more they saw that the odd man out, the German rule breaker, was catching up, thrashing the water, his balding head burned bright red. The hotel boat stayed with him, since he had no partner. Ahead the island was coming into focus: great rocky cliffs topped by sparse trees and a bit of meadow.

  “We is the best swimmers,” Tessa said.

  “No, you. You’re the best. If you took off, you’d leave me behind.”

  “Never would I!” But she did, she took off, full mermaid.

  No, the kilometer wasn’t long, but arriving at the island seemed a fine achievement. You swam around behind it and out of sight of the boat, found the hotel dock, which looked out on the open Mediterranean. Tessa beat Robert there by a full minute. But he beat the German by several more, and the German beat the boat. The rest of the swimmers were only halfway across the channel, twenty minutes or more behind. Robert sat on the perfect steel dock with the German, the actress dripping between them. Her suit was less than scanty, tiny crocheted sails. Her skin was brown as her hair. Her shoulders were wide, her arms muscled. She was a kid used to trainers and gyms and dance class and riding, capable of anything.

  “You schwim gudt, lonk leks,” the German said to her.

  She modeled her legs for them, turned them this way and that, modeled them quite a long while, inviting both men to ogle, in fact ogling them herself, and why not, these great works of nature. Robert looked out to the channel. Tessa was used to attention, all right. She punched his arm to regain his gaze. He had to remember forcefully that this young woman was not the murderous Princesa of the beautiful movie but only herself, a young lady.

  Robert said, “Tell us about the project you’re filming.”

  “I am sworn to silence,” she said, that beaming smile.

  “Just tellink: who ist direktor?” said the German.

  “Top secret,” said Tessa, wagging her finger, putting the phrase in audible quotation marks.

  Ah, yes. Top Secret. That was the name of the Harrison Ford film.

  THE BOATMAN AND THE lifeguard laid out a decadent picnic, enough food for a camel caravan. Tessa was a watermelon fan, it seemed; she pushed her whole face into a tremendous quadrant, let the juice drip down her chin and into the top of her bathing suit, heedless. When she was well painted she walked to the end of the dock and fell languorously into the sea, swam a long time alone.

  She and Robert were the only ones not drinking wine.

  The German, happily, had joined the young parents in a bottle of champagne and they’d walked up onto the shore out of earshot with a second bottle and crystal hotel glasses, lots of raucous laughter among them. Even the skipper of the boat pulled at a flask of something. He was ancient, unbowed. The lifeguard turned into a valet and darted among everyone, replenishing drinks and snacks, wiping up spills, even dabbing at Tessa’s uncle’s chin. Robert walked to the end of the dock, sat and watched the actress swim.

  Vedat and Maria were drinking cognac again, barking out jokes in their broken and incongruous Scots English and in several other languages. Tessa’s aunt and uncle were dressed elegantly for the heat, all silks and linens, clearly loving the company, laughing decorously. They hadn’t stepped off the boat, hadn’t so much as stirred from their lounge chairs, clearly found the whole island-swimming affair perfectly charming, a spectator sport. The gay couple laughed with them a while then wandered ashore and disappeared along a faint path holding hands. Soon they were out of sight.

  “Blow jobs,” Maria said cheerfully to laughter, even the boatman.

  Well, Robert thought, those weren’t the only words of English that had made it fully around the world. He pretended he didn’t hear. The proximity of the actress had made him delicate.

  They couldn’t return till the tide came back in—that was the program: swim with the tide both ways.

  The girl was still out in the water, tireless, guileless, doing flips and spins and spouting water, delighted with herself and her freedom: no cameras, no script.

  The boat had a head and Robert used it. Maria grabbed his hand as he passed. “There’s a path that way, too,” she said sug
gestively. “It goes all the way around.” And when she pointed you could see it—a rough path across the rocky shore. “Take her,” she said.

  Tessa’s aunt gave Robert a long look but added nothing.

  “If Tessa would like,” he said.

  “An adventure, this she like,” said her uncle, then put his fingers in his mouth, whistled impressively. And here came Tessa, swimming full speed up to the stern ladder on the boat, which she climbed easily, bursting out of the water, flinging her head back, arc of shining droplets. Any small part of her would be famous, Robert thought. Any single square centimeter would be a star!

  Her aunt said something, almost a song, in Spanish.

  Tessa replied, a long, even more musical sentence. Then to Robert: “I’m not to walk alone.”

  “I’ll accompany,” he said.

  Maria nodded happily, shooed them both with her hands.

  Vedat said, “Stay, talk. We make celebration.”

  “A walk,” Tessa said emphatically.

  The aunt wrapped Tessa’s lower half protectively in a thick hotel towel then rubbed the rest of her vigorously and unashamedly with sunblock (even the kid’s breasts, blunt fingers under her bikini top), and so Maria wrapped Robert and rubbed him, made a child of him, too, and in the end he and Tessa couldn’t get away fast enough. The two of them kicked into their hotel-issue flip-flops and climbed off the boat, fairly trotted away down the dock and marched resolutely up into the island. They passed the youngish couple and the German immediately, declined to sample their champagne, laughed at all the grinning and goofing: happy drunks.

  The German looked painfully burned, roasted pink. “Hi-ho!” he shouted, oblivious.

  THE PATH WAS VERY dry and rocky, but Tessa’s land pace was like her swimming pace, and soon she and Robert were sweating and puffing, making a long hill that took them around a corner and out of sight of the boat, though anyone looking through a telescope from the hotel could have spotted them. Ahead the gay couple was naked and frankly lying on one another petting, no move to hide themselves.