“Sure.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Do you want a fine?”
“No. I’d rather drink the wine. Do you have to work tomorrow?”
“We’ll see.
“Please work if you feel like it.”
“And tonight?”
“We’ll see about tonight. It’s been such an arduous day.”
In the night it was very dark and the wind had risen and they could hear it in the pines.
“David?”
“Yes.”
“How are you girl?”
“I’m fine.”
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“Let me feel your hair girl. Who cut it? Was it Jean? It’s cut so full and has so much body and it’s the same as mine. Let me kiss you girl. Oh you have lovely lips. Shut your eyes girl.”
He did not shut his eyes but it was dark in the room and out side the wind was high in the trees.
“You know it isn’t so easy to be a girl if you’re really one. If you really feel things.”
“I know.”
“Nobody knows. I tell you so when you’re my girl. It’s not that you’re insatiable. I’m satiable so easily. It’s just some feel and others don’t. People lie about it I think. But it s so nice just to feel and hold you. I’m so happy. Just be my girl and love me the way I love you. Love me more. The way you can now. You now. Yes you. Please you.”
They were dropping down the slope toward Cannes and the wind was heavy as they came onto the plain and skirted the deserted beaches, the tall grass bending and flattening as they crossed the bridge over the river and picked up speed on the last stretch of fast road before the town. David found the bottle, which was cold and wrapped in a towel, and took a long drink and felt the car leave the work behind and move away and up the small rise the black road was making. He had not worked this morning and now when she had driven them through the town and back into the country, he uncorked the bottle and drank again and offered it to her.
“I don’t need it,” Catherine said. “I feel too good.”
“Very well.”
They passed Golfe-Juan with the good bistro and the small open bar and then were through the pine woods and moving along the raw yellow beach of Juan-les-Pins. They crossed the small
peninsula on the fast black road and passed through Antibes driving beside the railway and then out through the town and beyond the port and the square tower of the old defenses and came out again into open country. “It never lasts,” she said. “I always eat that stretch too fast.”
They stopped and ate lunch in the lee of an old stone wall that was part of the ruin of some building hard by the side of a clear stream that came out of the mountains and crossed the wild plain on its way to the sea. The wind came hard out of a funnel in the mountains. They had spread a blanket on the ground and they sat close together against the wall and looked out across the waste country to the sea that was flat and scoured by the wind.
“It wasn’t much of a place to come to,” Catherine said. “I don’t know what I thought it would be like.”
They stood up and looked up at the hills with their poised villages and the gray and purple mountains behind. The wind whipped in their hair and Catherine pointed out a road that she had once driven into the high country.
“We could have gone somewhere up in there,” she said. “But it’s so closed in and picturesque. I hate those hanging villages.”
“This is a good place,” David said. “It’s a fine stream and we couldn’t have a better wall.”
“You’re being nice. You don’t have to be.”
“It’s a good lee and I like the place. We’ll turn our back on all the picturesque.”
They ate stuffed eggs, roast chicken, pickles, fresh long bread that they broke in pieces and spread Sovora mustard on and they drank rose.
“Do you feel good now?” Catherine asked.
“Sure.”
“And you haven’t felt bad?”