“Oh, play it!” she exclaimed. “Am I going through the rest of life flinching at the word ‘father’?”
“—Thank the horse that pulled the buggy that night!
Thank you both for being justabit tight—”
Later they sat with the children on the Moorish roof and watched the fireworks of two casinos, far apart, far down on the shore. It was lonely and sad to be so empty-hearted toward each other.
Next morning, back from shopping in Cannes, Nicole found a note saying that Dick had taken the small car and gone up into Provence for a few days by himself. Even as she read it the phone rang—it was Tommy Barban from Monte Carlo, saying that he had received her letter and was driving over. She felt her lips’ warmth in the receiver as she welcomed his coming.
VIII
She bathed and anointed herself and covered her body with a layer of powder, while her toes crunched another pile on a bath towel. She looked microscopically at the lines of her flanks, wondering how soon the fine, slim edifice would begin to sink squat and earthward. In about six years, but now I’ll do—in fact I’ll do as well as any one I know.
She was not exaggerating. The only physical disparity between Nicole at present and the Nicole of five years before was simply that she was no longer a young girl. But she was enough ridden by the current youth worship, the moving pictures with their myriad faces of girl-children, blandly represented as carrying on the work and wisdom of the world, to feel a jealousy of youth.
She put on the first ankle-length day dress that she had owned for many years, and crossed herself reverently with Chanel Sixteen. When Tommy drove up at one o’clock she had made her person into the trimmest of gardens.
How good to have things like this, to be worshipped again, to pretend to have a mystery! She had lost two of the great arrogant years in the life of a pretty girl—now she felt like making up for them; she greeted Tommy as if he were one of many men at her feet, walking ahead of him instead of beside him as they crossed the garden toward the market umbrella. Attractive women of nineteen and of twenty-nine are alike in their breezy confidence; on the contrary, the exigent womb of the twenties does not pull the outside world centripetally around itself. The former are ages of insolence, comparable the one to a young cadet, the other to a fighter strutting after combat.
But whereas a girl of nineteen draws her confidence from a surfeit of attention, a woman of twenty-nine is nourished on subtler stuff. Desirous, she chooses her apéritifs wisely, or, content, she enjoys the caviare of potential power. Happily she does not seem, in either case, to anticipate the subsequent years when her insight will often be blurred by panic, by the fear of stopping or the fear of going on. But on the landings of nineteen or twenty-nine she is pretty sure that there are no bears in the hall.
Nicole did not want any vague spiritual romance—she wanted an “affair”; she wanted a change. She realized, thinking with Dick’s thoughts, that from a superficial view it was a vulgar business to enter, without emotion, into an indulgence that menaced all of them. On the other hand, she blamed Dick for the immediate situation, and honestly thought that such an experiment might have a therapeutic value. All summer she had been stimulated by watching people do exactly what they were tempted to do and pay no penalty for it—moreover, in spite of her intention of no longer lying to herself, she preferred to consider that she was merely feeling her way and that at any moment she could withdraw. . . .
In the light shade Tommy caught her up in his white-duck arms and pulled her around to him, looking at her eyes.
“Don’t move,” he said. “I’m going to look at you a great deal from now on.”
There was some scent on his hair, a faint aura of soap from his white clothes. Her lips were tight, not smiling and they both simply looked for a moment.
“Do you like what you see?” she murmured.
“Parle français.”
“Very well,” and she asked again in French. “Do you like what you see?”
He pulled her closer.
“I like whatever I see about you.” He hesitated. “I thought I knew your face but it seems there are some things I didn’t know about it. When did you begin to have white crook’s eyes?”
She broke away, shocked and indignant, and cried in English:
“Is that why you wanted to talk French?” Her voice quieted as the butler came with sherry. “So you could be offensive more accurately?”
She parked her small seat violently on the cloth-of-silver chair cushion.
“I have no mirror here,” she said, again in French, but decisively, “but if my eyes have changed it’s because I’m well again. And being well perhaps I’ve gone back to my true self—I suppose my grandfather was a crook and I’m a crook by heritage, so there we are. Does that satisfy your logical mind?”
He scarcely seemed to know what she was talking about.
“Where’s Dick—is he lunching with us?”
Seeing that his remark had meant comparatively little to him she suddenly laughed away its effect.
“Dick’s on a tour,” she said. “Rosemary Hoyt turned up, and either they’re together or she upset him so much that he wants to go away and dream about her.”
“You know, you’re a little complicated after all.”
“Oh no,” she assured him hastily. “No, I’m not really—I’m just a— I’m just a whole lot of different simple people.”