Tender Is the Night (13 page)

“Couldn’t
you have lunch, or maybe dinner, or lunch the day after?” begged the girl.
Rosemary looked about for Dick, finding him with the hostess, to whom he had
been talking since they came in. Their eyes met and he nodded slightly, and
simultaneously the three cobra women noticed her; their long necks darted
toward her and they fixed finely critical glances upon her. She looked back at
them defiantly, acknowledging that she had heard what they said. Then she threw
off her exigent vis-à-vis with a polite but clipped parting that she had just
learned from Dick, and went over to join him. The hostess—she was another tall
rich American girl, promenading insouciantly upon the national prosperity—was
asking Dick innumerable questions about
Gausse’s
Hôtel
, whither she evidently wanted to come, and battering
persistently against his reluctance. Rosemary’s presence reminded her that she
had been recalcitrant as a hostess and glancing about she said: “Have you met
any one
amusing, have you met Mr.—” Her eyes groped for a
male who might interest Rosemary, but Dick said they must go. They left
immediately, moving over the brief threshold of the future to the sudden past
of the stone façade without.

“Wasn’t
it terrible?” he said.

“Terrible,”
she echoed obediently.

“Rosemary?”

She
murmured, “What?” in an awed voice.

“I feel
terribly about this.”

She was
shaken with audibly painful sobs. “Have you got a handkerchief?” she faltered.
But there was little time to cry, and lovers now they fell ravenously on the
quick seconds while outside the taxi windows the green and cream twilight
faded, and the fire- red, gas-blue, ghost-green signs began to shine
smokily
through the tranquil rain. It was nearly six, the
streets were in movement, the bistros gleamed, the Place de la Concorde moved
by in pink majesty as the cab turned north.

They
looked at each other at last, murmuring names that were a spell. Softly the two
names lingered on the air, died away more slowly than other words, other names,
slower than music in the mind.

“I don’t
know what came over me last night,” Rosemary said. “That glass of champagne?
I’ve never done anything like that before.”

“You
simply said you loved me.”

“I do
love you—I can’t change that.” It was time for Rosemary to cry, so she cried a
little in her handkerchief.

“I’m
afraid I’m in love with you,” said Dick, “and that’s not the best thing that
could happen.”

Again
the names—then they lurched together as if the taxi had swung them. Her breasts
crushed flat against him, her mouth was all new and warm, owned in common. They
stopped thinking with an almost painful relief, stopped seeing; they only
breathed and sought each other. They were both in the gray gentle world of a
mild hangover of fatigue when the nerves relax in bunches like piano strings,
and crackle suddenly like wicker chairs. Nerves so raw and tender must surely
join other nerves, lips to lips, breast to breast. . . .

They
were still in the happier stage of love. They were full of brave illusions
about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self
seemed to be on a plane where no other human relations mattered. They both
seemed to have arrived there with an extraordinary innocence as though a series
of pure accidents had driven them together, so many accidents that at last they
were forced to conclude that they were for each other. They had arrived with
clean hands, or so it seemed, after no traffic with the merely curious and
clandestine.

But for
Dick that portion of the road was short; the turning came before they reached
the hotel.

“There’s
nothing to do about it,” he said, with a feeling of panic. “I’m in love with
you but it doesn’t change what I said last night.”

“That
doesn’t matter now. I just wanted to make you love me—if you love me
everything’s all right.”

“Unfortunately
I do. But Nicole mustn’t know—she mustn’t suspect even faintly. Nicole and I
have got to go on together. In a way that’s more important than just wanting to
go on.”

“Kiss me
once more.”

He
kissed her, but momentarily he had left her.

“Nicole
mustn’t suffer—she loves me and I love her—you understand that.”

She did
understand—it was the sort of thing she understood well, not hurting people.
She knew the Divers loved each other because it had been her primary
assumption. She had thought however that it was a rather cooled relation, and
actually rather like the love of herself and her mother. When people have so
much for outsiders didn’t it indicate a lack of inner intensity?

“And I
mean love,” he said, guessing her thoughts. “Active love— it’s more complicated
than I can tell you. It was responsible for that crazy duel.”

“How did
you know about the duel? I thought we were to keep it from you.”

“Do you
think Abe can keep a secret?” He spoke with incisive irony. “Tell a secret over
the radio, publish it in a tabloid, but never tell it to a man who drinks more
than three or four a day.”

She
laughed in agreement, staying close to him.

“So you
understand my relations with Nicole are complicated. She’s not very strong—she
looks strong but she isn’t. And this makes rather a mess.”

“Oh, say
that later! But kiss me now—love me now. I’ll love you and never let Nicole
see.”

“You darling.”

They
reached the hotel and Rosemary walked a little behind him, to admire him, to
adore him. His step was alert as if he had just come from some great doings and
was hurrying on toward others.
Organizer of private gaiety,
curator of a richly incrusted happiness.
His hat was a perfect hat and
he carried a heavy stick and yellow gloves. She thought what a good time they
would all have being with him to-night.

They
walked upstairs—five flights. At the first landing they stopped and kissed; she
was careful on the next landing, on the third more careful still. On the
next—there were two more—she stopped half way and kissed him fleetingly
good-by. At his urgency she walked down with him to the one below for a
minute—and then up and up. Finally it was good-by with their hands stretching
to touch along the diagonal of the banister and then the fingers slipping
apart. Dick went back downstairs to make some arrangements for the
evening—Rosemary ran to her room and wrote a letter to her mother; she was
conscience-stricken because she did not miss her mother at all.

XVIII

Although
the Divers were honestly apathetic to organized fashion, they were nevertheless
too acute to abandon its contemporaneous rhythm and beat—Dick’s parties were
all concerned with excitement, and a chance breath of fresh night air was the
more precious for being experienced in the intervals of the excitement.

The
party that night moved with the speed of a slapstick comedy. They were twelve,
they were sixteen,
they
were quartets in separate
motors bound on a quick Odyssey over
Paris
.
Everything had been foreseen. People joined them as if by magic, accompanied
them as specialists, almost guides, through a phase of the evening, dropped out
and were succeeded by other people, so that it appeared as if the freshness of
each one had been husbanded for them all day. Rosemary appreciated how
different it was from any party in
Hollywood
,
no matter how splendid in scale. There was, among many diversions, the car of
the Shah of Persia. Where Dick had commandeered this vehicle, what bribery was
employed, these were facts of irrelevance. Rosemary accepted it as merely a new
facet of the fabulous, which for two years had filled her life. The car had
been built on a special chassis in
America
. Its wheels were of silver,
so was the radiator. The inside of the body was inlaid with innumerable
brilliants which would be replaced with true gems by the court
jeweller
when the car arrived in Teheran the following
week. There was only one real seat in back, because the Shah must ride alone,
so they took turns riding in it and sitting on the marten fur that covered the
floor.

But
always there was Dick. Rosemary assured the image of her mother, ever carried
with her, that never, never had she known any one so nice,
so
thoroughly nice as Dick was that night. She compared him with the two
Englishmen, whom Abe addressed conscientiously as “Major
Hengest
and Mr.
Horsa
,” and with the heir to a Scandinavian
throne and the novelist just back from Russia, and with Abe, who was desperate
and witty, and with Collis Clay, who joined them somewhere and stayed along—and
felt there was no comparison. The enthusiasm, the selflessness behind the whole
performance ravished her, the
technic
of moving many
varied types, each as immobile, as dependent on supplies of attention as an
infantry battalion is dependent on rations, appeared so effortless that he
still had pieces of his own most personal self for everyone.

—Afterward
she remembered the times when she had felt the happiest. The first time was
when she and Dick danced together and she felt her beauty sparkling bright
against his tall, strong form as they floated, hovering like people in an
amusing dream—he turned her here and there with such a delicacy of suggestion
that she was like a bright bouquet, a piece of precious cloth being displayed
before fifty eyes. There was a moment when they were not dancing at all, simply
clinging together.
Some time
in the early morning they
were alone, and her damp powdery young body came up close to him in a crush of
tired cloth, and stayed there, crushed against a background of other people’s
hats and wraps. . . .

The time
she laughed most was later, when six of them, the best of them, noblest relics
of the evening, stood in the dusky front lobby of the Ritz telling the night
concierge that General Pershing was outside and wanted
caviare
and champagne. “He brooks no delay. Every man, every gun is at his service.”
Frantic waiters emerged from nowhere, a table was set in the lobby, and Abe
came in representing General Pershing while they stood up and mumbled
remembered fragments of war songs at him. In the waiters’ injured reaction to
this anti-climax they found themselves neglected, so they built a waiter trap—a
huge and fantastic device constructed of all the furniture in the lobby and
functioning like one of the bizarre machines of a Goldberg cartoon. Abe shook
his head doubtfully at it.

“Perhaps
it would be better to steal a musical saw and—”

“That’s
enough,” Mary interrupted. “When Abe begins bringing up that it’s time to go
home.” Anxiously she confided to Rosemary:

“I’ve
got to get Abe home. His boat train leaves at eleven. It’s so important—I feel
the whole future depends on his catching it, but whenever I argue with him he
does the exact opposite.”

“I’ll
try and persuade him,” offered Rosemary.

“Would
you?” Mary said doubtfully. “Maybe you could.”

Then
Dick came up to Rosemary:

“Nicole
and I are going home and we thought you’d want to go with us.”

Her face
was pale with fatigue in the false dawn. Two wan dark spots in her cheek marked
where the color was by day.

“I
can’t,” she said. “I promised Mary North to stay along with them—or
Abe’ll
never go to bed. Maybe you could do something.”

“Don’t
you know you can’t do anything about people?” he advised her. “If Abe was my
room-mate in college, tight for the first time, it’d be different. Now there’s
nothing to do.”

“Well,
I’ve got to stay. He says he’ll go to bed if we only come to the
Halles
with him,” she said, almost defiantly.

He
kissed the inside of her elbow quickly.

“Don’t
let Rosemary go home alone,” Nicole called to Mary as they left.
“We feel responsible to her mother.”

—Later
Rosemary and the
Norths
and a manufacturer of dolls’
voices from
Newark
and ubiquitous Collis and
a big
splendidly dressed oil
Indian named George T.
Horseprotection
were riding
along on top of thousands of carrots in a market wagon. The earth in the carrot
beards was fragrant and sweet in the darkness, and Rosemary was so high up in
the load that she could hardly see the others in the long shadow between
infrequent street lamps. Their voices came from far off, as if they were having
experiences different from hers, different and far away, for she was with Dick in
her heart, sorry she had come with the
Norths
,
wishing she was at the hotel and him asleep across the hall, or that he was
here beside her with the warm darkness streaming down.

“Don’t
come up,” she called to Collis, “the carrots will all roll.” She threw one at
Abe who was sitting beside the driver, stiffly like an old man. . . .