“Want to dive?” he called.
She shook her head.
“I’ll wait for you.”
“No,” she called up and waded out into the water up to her thighs.
“How is it?” David called down.
“Much cooler than it’s ever been. Almost cold.”
“Good,” he said, and as she watched him and waded, the water came over her belly and touched her breasts and he straightened, rose on his toes, seemed to hang slowly without falling and then knifed out and down, making a boil in the water that a porpoise might have made reentering slickly into the hole that he had made in rising. She swam out toward the circle of milling water and then he rose beside her and held her up and close and then put his salty mouth against her own.
“File est bonne, la mer,” he said. “Toi aussi.”
They swam out of the cove and beyond into the deep water past where the mountain dropped down into the sea, and lay on their backs and floated. The water was colder than it had been but the very top was warmed a little and Marita floated with her back arched high, her head all underwater but her nose, and her brown breasts were lapped gently by the movement the light breeze gave the sea. Her eyes were shut against the sun and David was beside her in the water. His arm was under her head and then he kissed the tip of her left breast and then the other breast.
“They taste like the sea,” he said.
“Let’s go to sleep out here.”
“Could you?”
“It’s too hard to keep my back arched.”
“Let’s swim way out and then swim in.”
. .
“All right.”
They swam far out, further than they had ever swum before, far enough so they could see past the next headland and on out until they could see the broken purple line of the mountains behind the forest. They lay there in the water and watched the coast. Then they swam in slowly. They stopped to rest when they lost the mountains and again when they lost the headland and then swam slowly and strongly on in past the entrance to the cove and pulled themselves out on the beach.
“Are you tired?” David asked.
“Very,” Marita said. She had never swum that far before.
“Are you still pounding?”
“Oh I’m fine.”
David walked up the beach and over to the rock and found one of the bottles of Tavel and two towels.
“You look like a seal,” David said sitting down beside her on the sand.
He handed her the Tavel and she drank from the bottle and handed it back. He took a long drink and then on the smooth dry sand, stretched out in the sun, the lunch basket by them and the wine cool as they drank from the bottle, Marita said, “Catherine wouldn’t have gotten tired.”
“The hell she wouldn’t. She never swam that far.”
“Truly?”
“We swam a long way, girl. I was never out where we could see those backdrop mountains before.”
“All right,” she said. “There isn’t anything we can do about her today so let’s not think about it. David?”
“Yes.”
“Do you still love me?”
“Yes. Very much.”
“Perhaps I made a great mistake with you and you’re just being kind to me.
“You didn’t make any mistakes and I’m not being kind to you.
Marita took a handful of radishes and ate them slowly and drank some wine. The radishes were young and crisp and sharp in flavor.
“You don’t have to worry about working,” she said. “I know. That will be all right.”
“Sure,” David said.
He cut one of the artichoke hearts up with the fork and ate a chunk swirled in the mustard sauce Madame had made.
“May I have the Tavel?” Marita said. She took a good swallow of the wine and set the bottle down by David putting its base firmly in the sand and leaning it against the basket. “Isn’t it a good lunch Madame made, David?”
“It’s an excellent lunch. Did Aurol really give her a black eye?”
“Not a real one.”
“She has a bad tongue with him.”