The Garden of Eden

Chapter Ten

THE PATRON WAS SITTING at one of his tables on the terrace of the long house with a bottle of wine, a glass and an empty coffee cup reading the Eclaireur de Nice when the blue car came up in a rush on the gravel and Catherine and David got out and caine walking down the flagstones to the terrace. He had not expected them back so soon and he was nearly asleep but he stood up and said the first thing that came in his head as they were opposite him.

"Madame et Monsieur ont fait decolorer les cheveux. C'est bien."

"Merci Monsieur. On le fait toujours dans le mois d'aout."

"C'est bien. C'est tres bien."

"That's nice," said Catherine to David. "We're good clients. What the good client does is tres bien. You're tres bien. My God you are."

In their room a good sailing breeze was blowing in from the sea and the room was cold.

"I love that blue shirt," David said. "Stand there like that in it.

"It's the color of the car," she said. "Would it look nicer with out a skirt?"

"Everything on you looks nicer without a skirt," he said. "I'm going out and see that old goat and be an even better client."

He came back with a bucket of ice and a bottle of the champagne that the proprietor had ordered for them and that they had drunk so seldom and he held two glasses on a small tray in his other hand.

"This ought to be fair warning for them," he said.

"We didn't need it," Catherine said.

"We can just try it. It won't take fifteen minutes to cool."

"Don't tease. Please come to bed and let me see you and feel you."

She was taking his shirt up over his head and he stood up and helped her.

After she was asleep David got up and looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. He picked up a brush and brushed his hair. There was no other way to brush it but the way it had been cut. It would disarrange and muss but it had to fall that way and the color was the same as Catherine's. He went to the door and looked at her on the bed. Then he came back and picked up her big hand mirror.

"So that's how it is," he said to himself. "You've done that to your hair and had it cut the same as your girl's and how do you feel?" He asked the mirror.

"How do you feel? Say it.

"You like it," he said.

He looked at the mirror and it was someone else he saw but it was less strange now.

"All right. You like it," he said. "Now go through with the rest of it whatever it is and don't ever say anyone tempted you or that anyone bitched you."

He looked at the face that was no longer strange to him at all but was his face now and said, "You like it. Remember that. Keep that straight. You know exactly how you look now and how you are.

Of course he did not know exactly how he was. But he made an effort aided by what he had seen in the mirror.

They ate dinner on the terrace in front of the long house that night and were very excited and quiet and enjoyed looking at each other in the shaded light on the table. After dinner Catherine said to the boy who had brought their coffee,

"Find the pail for the champagne in our room and ice a new bottle please."

"Do we want another?" David asked.

"I think so. Don't you?"

"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."

"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."

The…