Garden of Eden (31 page)

"It's
an excellent lunch. Did Aurol really give her a black eye?"

"Not
a real one."

"She
has a bad tongue with him."

"There's
the difference in age and he was within his rights to hit her if she was
insulting. She said so. At the end. And she sent you messages.

'What
messages?"

"Just
loving messages.

"She
loves you," David said.

"No.
You stupid. She's only on my side."

"There
aren't any sides anymore," David said.

"No,"
Marita said. "And we didn't try to make sides. It just happened."

"It
happened all right." David handed her the jar with the cut up artichoke
heart and the dressing and found the second bottle of Tavel. It was still cool.
He took a long drink of the wine. "We've been burned out," he said.
"Crazy woman burned out the Bournes."

"Are
we the Bournes?"

"Sure.
We're the Bournes. It may take a while to have the papers. But that's what we
are. Do you want me to write it out? I think I could write that."

"You
don't need to write it."

"I'll
write it in the sand," David said.

They
slept well and naturally through the late afternoon and when the sun was low
Marita woke and saw David lying in the bed by her side. His lips were closed
and he was breathing very slowly and she looked at his face and his covered
eyes that she had only seen lidded in sleep twice before and looked at his
chest and his body with the arms straight by his sides. She went over to the
door of the bathroom and looked at herself in the full length mirror. Then she
smiled at the mirror. When she was dressed she went out to the kitchen and
talked with Madame.

Later,
David was still asleep and she sat by him on the bed. In the dusk his hair was
whitish against his dark face, and she waited for him to wake.

They
sat at the bar and were both drinking Haig Pinch and Perrier. Marita was being
very careful with her drink. She said, "I think you should go to town
every day and get the papers and have a drink and read by yourself. I wish
there was a club or a real cafe where you met your friends."

"There
isn't"

"Well,
I think it would be good every day for you to be away from me for a while when
you're not working. You've been overrun with girls. I'm always going to see you
have your men friends. That's one thing very bad that Catherine did."

"Not
on purpose and it was my own fault."

"Maybe
that's true. But do you think we'll have friends? Good friends?"

"We
each have one already."

"Will
we have others?"

"Maybe."

"Will
they take you away because they know more than I do?" "They won't
know more. "Will they come along young and new and fresh with new things
and you be tired of me?" "They won't and I won't be." "I'll
kill them if they do. I'm not going to give you away to anyone the way she
did." "That's good." "I want you to have men friends and
friends from the war and to shoot with and to play cards at the club. But we
don't have to have you have women friends, do we? Fresh, new ones who will fall
in love and really understand you and all that?" "I don't run around
with women. You know that." "They are new all the time," Marita
said. "There are new ones every day. No one can ever be sufficiently
warned. You most of all." "I love you," David said, "and
you're my partner too. But take it easy. Just be with me. "I'm with
you." "I know it and I love to look at you and know you're here and
that we'll sleep together and be happy."

In
the dark, Marita lay against him and he felt her breasts against his chest and
her arm behind his head and her hand touching him and lips against his.
"I'm your girl," she said in the dark. "Your girl. No matter
what I'm always your girl. Your good girl who loves you. "Yes, my dearest
love. Sleep well. Sleep well." "You go to sleep first," Marita
said, "and I'll be back in a minute." He was asleep when she came
back and she got in under the sheet and lay beside him. He was sleeping on his
right side and breathing softly and steadily.

DAVID
WOKE IN THE MORNING when the first light came in the window. It was still gray
outside and there were different pine trunks than the ones he usually woke to
see and a longer gap beyond them toward the sea. His right arm was stiff
because he had slept on it. Then, awake, he knew he was in a strange bed and he
saw Marita lying sleeping by him. He remembered everything and he looked at her
lovingly and covered her fresh brown body with the sheet and then kissed her
very lightly again and putting on his dressing gown walked out into the dew-wet
early morning carrying the image of how she looked with him to his room. He
took a cold shower, shaved, put on a shirt and a pair of shorts and walked down
to his working room. He stopped at the door of Marita's room and opened it very
carefully. He stood and looked at her sleeping, and closed the door softly and
went into the room where he worked. He got out his pencils and a new cahier,
sharpened five pencils and began to write the story of his father and the raid
in the year of the Maji-Maji rebellion that had started with the trek across
the bitter lake. He made the crossing now and completed the dreadful trek of
the first day when the sunrise had caught them with the part that had to be
done in the dark only half finished and the mirages already making as the heat
became unbearable. By the time the morning was well advanced and a strong fresh
east breeze was blowing through the pines from the sea he had finished the
night at the first camp under the fig trees where the water came down from the
escarpment and was moving out of that camp in the early morning and up the long
draw that led to the steep cut up onto the escarpment.

He
found he knew much more about his father than when he had first written this
story and he knew he could measure his progress by the small things which made
his father more tactile and to have more dimensions than he had in the story
before. He was fortunate, just now, that his father was not a simple man.

David
wrote steadily and well and the sentences that he had made before came to him
complete and entire and he put them down, corrected them, and cut them as if he
were going over proof. Not a sentence was missing and there were many that he
put down as they were returned to him without changing them. By two o'clock he
had recovered, corrected and improved what it had taken him five days to write
originally. He wrote on a while longer now and there was no sign that any of it
would ever cease returning to him intact.

THE END