“No. We’ve had enough miracles for one day.”
“Just a little?”
David looked at Catherine and then at his own face in the mirror. His was as brown as hers and it was her haircut.
“You really want it that much?”
“Yes I do, David. Truly. Just to try it a little bit. Please.”
He looked once more in the mirror and walked over then and sat down. The coiffeur looked at Catherine.
“Go ahead and do it,” she said.
Chapter Ten
THE PATRON WAS SITTING at one of his tables on the terrace of the long house with a bottle of wine, a glass and an empty coffee cup reading the Eclaireur de Nice when the blue car came up in a rush on the gravel and Catherine and David got out and caine walking down the flagstones to the terrace. He had not expected them back so soon and he was nearly asleep but he stood up and said the first thing that came in his head as they were opposite him.
“Madame et Monsieur ont fait decolorer les cheveux. C’est bien.”
“Merci Monsieur. On le fait toujours dans le mois d’aout.”
“C’est bien. C’est tres bien.”
‘That’s nice,” said Catherine to David. “We’re good clients. What the good client does is tres bien. You’re tres bien. My God you are.”
In their room a good sailing breeze was blowing in from the sea and the room was cold.
“I love that blue shirt,” David said. “Stand there like that in it.
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“It’s the color of the car,” she said. “Would it look nicer with out a skirt?”
“Everything on you looks nicer without a skirt,” he said. “I’m going out and see that old goat and be an even better client.”
He came back with a bucket of ice and a bottle of the champagne that the proprietor had ordered for them and that they had drunk so seldom and he held two glasses on a small tray in his other hand.
“This ought to be fair warning for them,” he said.
“We didn’t need it,” Catherine said.
“We can just try it. It won’t take fifteen minutes to cool.”
“Don’t tease. Please come to bed and let me see you and feel you.
She was taking his shirt up over his head and he stood up and helped her.
After she was asleep David got up and looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. He picked up a brush and brushed his hair. There was no other way to brush it but the way it had been cut. It would disarrange and muss but it had to fall that way and the color was the same as Catherine’s. He went to the door and looked at her on the bed. Then he came back and picked up her big hand mirror.
“So that’s how it is,” he said to himself. “You’ve done that to your hair and had it cut the same as your girl’s and how do you feel?” He asked the mirror. “How do you feel? Say it.
“You like it,” he said.
He looked at the mirror and it was someone else he saw but it was less strange now.
“All right. You like it,” he said. “Now go through with the rest of it whatever it is and don’t ever say anyone tempted you or that anyone bitched you.”
He looked at the face that was no longer strange to him at all but was his face now and said, “You like it. Remember that. Keep that straight. You know exactly how you look now and how you are.
Of course he did not know exactly how he was. But he made an effort aided by what he had seen in the mirror.
They ate dinner on the terrace in front of the long house that night and were very excited and quiet and enjoyed looking at each other in the shaded light on the table. After dinner Catherine said to the boy who had brought their coffee, “Find the pail for the champagne in our room and ice a new bottle please.”
“Do we want another?” David asked.
“I think so. Don’t you?”