“Come on girl,” he said to Marita at the door of her room. “What’s holding you up besides your beautiful legs?”
“I’m ready, David,” she said. She had on a tight sweater and slacks and her face was shining. She brushed her dark hair and looked at him.
“It’s wonderful when you’re so gay.
“It’s such a good day,” he said. “And we’re so lucky.”
“Do you think so?” she said as they walked to the car. “Do you think we’re really lucky?”
“Yes,” he said. “I think it changed this morning or maybe in the night.”
204 205
Chapter Twenty-five
CATHERINE’s CAR was in the driveway of the hotel when they drove up. It was parked on the right side of the gravelled approach. David stopped the Isotta behind it and he and Marita got out and walked down the drive past the small, low empty blue car and onto the flagstones of the walk without speaking.
They passed David’s room with the locked door and the open windows and Marita stopped outside of her door and said, “Good bye.”
“What are you doing this afternoon?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll be here.”
He walked on down to the patio of the hotel and went in the main door. Catherine was sitting at the bar reading the Paris Herald with a glass and half a bottle of wine beside her on the bar. She looked up at him.
“What brought you back?” she asked.
“VVe had lunch in town and came on up,” David said.
“How is your whore?”
209
. .
“I haven’t one yet.”
“I mean the one you write the stories for.”
“Oh. The stories.
“Yes. The stories. The dreary dismal little stories about your adolescence with your bogus drunken father.”
“He wasn’t so bogus really.”
“Didn’t he defraud his wife and all his friends?”
“No. Just himself really.”
“You certainly make him despicable in these last sketches or vignettes or pointless anecdotes you write about him.”
“You mean the stories.”
“You call them stories,” Catherine said.
“Yes,” David said and poured a glass of the lovely cold wine on the bright clear day in the pleasant, sunny room in the clean, comfortable hotel and, sipping it, felt it fail to lift up his dead cold heart.
“Would you like me to go and get Heiress?” Catherine said. “It wouldn’t do to have her think that we’d had a misunder standing about whose day it is or that we’d taken up solitary drinking together.”
“You don’t need to get her.”
“I’d like to. She took care of you today and I didn’t. Really, David, I’m not a bitch yet. I just act and talk like one.”
While David waited for Catherine to come back he drank another glass of the champagne and read the Paris edition of The New York Herald she had left on the bar. Drinking the wine by himself it did not taste the same and he found a cork in the kitchen to stop up the bottle before he put it back in the ice chest. But the bottle did not feel heavy enough and lifting it against the light that came in the west window he saw how little wine was left and he poured it out and drank it off and put the bottle down on the tiled floor. Even when he drank it off quickly it did nothing for him.
210
Thank Cod he was breaking through on the stories now. What had made the last book good was the people who were in it and the accuracy of the detail which made it believable. He had, really, only to remember accurately and the form came by what he would choose to leave out. Then, of course, he could close it like the diaphragm of a camera and intensify it so it could be concentrated to the point where the heat shone bright and the smoke began to rise. He knew that he was getting this now.
What Catherine had said about the stories when she was trying to hurt him had started him thinking about his father and all the things he had tried to do whatever he could about. Now, he told himself, you must try to grow up again and face what you have to face without being irritable or hurt that someone did not understand and appreciate what you wrote. She understands it less and less. But you’ve worked well and nothing can touch you as long as you can work. Try to help her now and forget about yourself. Tomorrow you have the story to go over and to make perfect.