As soon as he started to think beyond his work, everything that he had locked out by the work came back to him. He thought of the night before and of Catherine and the girl today on the road that he and Catherine had driven two days before and he felt sick. They should be on the way back now. It’s after noon. Maybe they’re at the cafe. Don’t be solemn, she had said. But she meant something else too. Maybe she knows what she’s doing. Maybe she knows how it can turn out. Maybe she does know. You don’t.
So you worked and now you worry. You’d better write another story. Write the hardest one there is to write that you know. Go ahead and do that. You have to last yourself if you’re to be any good to her. What good have you been to her? Plenty, he said. No, not plenty. Plenty means enough. Go ahead and start the new one tomorrow. The hell with tomorrow. What a way to be. Tomorrow. Go in and start it now.
He put the note and the key in his pocket and went back into the work room and sat down and wrote the first paragraph of the new story that he had always put off writing since he had known what a story was. He wrote it in simple declarative sentences with all of the problems ahead to be lived through and made to come alive. The very beginning was written and all he had to do was go on. That’s all, he said. You see how simple what you cannot do is? Then he came out onto the terrace and sat down and ordered a whiskey and Perrier.
io8
The proprietor’s young nephew brought the bottles and ice and a glass from the bar and said, “Monsieur had no breakfast.”
“I worked too long.”
“C’est dommage,” the boy said. “Can I bring anything? A sandwich?”
“In our storeroom you will find a tin of Maquereau Vin Blanc Capitaine Cook. Open it up and bring me two on a plate.”
“They won’t be cold.”
“It makes no difference. Bring them.”
He sat and ate the maquereau yin blanc and drank the whiskey and mineral water. It did make a difference that they were not cold. He read the morning paper while he ate.
We always ate fresh fish at le Grau du Roi, he thought, but that was a long time ago. He started to remember Grau du Roi and then he heard the car coming up the hill.
“Take this away,” he said to the boy and he stood up and walked into the bar and poured himself a whiskey, put ice in it and filled the glass with Perrier. The taste of the wine-spiced fish was in his mouth and he picked up the bottle of mineral water and drank from it.
He heard their voices and then they came in the door as happy and gay as yesterday. He saw Catherine’s birch bright head and her dark face loving and excited and the other girl dark, the wind still in her hair, her eyes very bright and then suddenly shy again as she came closer.
“VVe didn’t stop when we saw you weren’t at the cafe,” Catherine said.
“I worked late. How are you, Devil?”
“I’m very well. Don’t ask me how this one is.
“Did you work well, David?” the girl asked.
‘That’s being a good wife,” Catherine said. “I forgot to ask.”
‘What did you do in Nice?”
“Can we have a drink and then tell?”
They were close to him on each side and he felt them both.
“Did you work well, David?” she asked again.
“Of course he did,” Catherine said. “That’s the only way he ever works, stupid.”
“Did you, David?”
“Yes,” he said and rumpled her head. “Thanks.”
“Don’t we get a drink?” Catherine asked. “We didn’t work at all. We just bought things and ordered things and made scandal.”
“We didn’t make any real scandal.”
“I don’t know,” Catherine said. “I don’t care either.”
“What was the scandal?” David asked.
“It wasn’t anything,” the girl said.
“I didn’t mind it,” Catherine said. “I liked it.”