He put the cahiers of manuscript away in the suitcase and
locked it and came out the door of his room and walked along the front of the hotel to where Marita was reading.
“Do you want breakfast?” she asked.
“I think I’d like a drink.”
“Let’s have it at the bar,” she said. “It’s cooler.”
They went in and sat down on stools and David poured from the Haig Pinch bottle into a glass and filled it up with cold Perrier.
“What became of Catherine?”
“She left very happy and gay.
“And how are you?”
“Happy and shy and rather quiet.”
“Too shy for me to kiss you?”
They held each other and he could feel himself start to be whole again. He had not known just how greatly he had been divided and separated because once he started to work he wrote from an inner core which could not be split nor even marked nor scratched. He knew about this and it was his strength since all the rest of him could be riven.
They sat at the bar while the boy laid the table and the first coolness of fall was in the breeze from the sea and then sitting at the table under the pines they felt it again as they ate and drank.
“This cool breeze comes all the way from Kurdistan,” David said. “The equinoctial storms will be coming soon.”
“They won’t come today,” the girl said. “We don’t have to worry about them today.”
“There hasn’t been a blow of any kind since when we met in Cannes at the cafe.”
“Can you still remember things that long ago?”
“It seems further away than the war.”
“I had the war the last three days,” the girl said. “I just left it this morning.”
182 183
. .
“I never think about it,” David said.
“Now I’ve read it,” Marita told him, “but I don’t understand about you. You never made clear what you believed.”
He filled her glass and then refilled his own.
“I didn’t know until afterwards,” he said. “So I didn’t try to act as though I did. I suspended thinking about it while it was happening. I only felt and saw and acted and thought tactically. That’s why it’s not a better book. Because I wasn’t more intelligent.”
“It is a very good book. The flying parts are wonderful and the feeling for the other people and for the planes themselves.”
“I’m good on other people and on technical and tactical things,” David said. “I don’t mean to talk wet or to brag. But, Marita, nobody knows about himself when he is really involved. Yourself isn’t worth considering. It would be shameful at the time.”
“But afterwards you know.”
“Sure. Sometimes.”
“Can I read the narrative?”
David poured wine in the glasses again.
“How much did she tell you?”
“She said she told me everything. She tells things very well you know.”
“I’d rather you didn’t read it,” David said. “All it would do is make trouble. I didn’t know there would be you when I wrote it and I can’t help her telling you things but I don’t have to have you read about them too.”
“Then I mustn’t read it?”
“I wish you wouldn’t. I don’t want to give you orders.”
“Then I have to tell you,” the girl said.
“She let you read it?”
“Yes. She said I should.”
“God damn her.”
“She didn’t do it to do wrong. It was when she was so worried.”
“So you read it all?”
“Yes. It’s wonderful. It’s so much better than the last book and now the stories are so much better than it or than anything.”
“What about the Madrid part?” He looked at her and she looked up at him and then moistened her lips and did not look away and she said very carefully, “I knew all about that because I’m just the way you are.
When they were lying together Marita said, “You don’t think about her when you make love to me?”
“No, stupid.”
“You don’t want me to do her things? Because I know them all and I can do them.”
“Stop talking and just feel.”