"I do," Catherine said. "I felt so happy when I came in. I knew I'd made you happy and I'd accomplished something prac tical too and then David made me feel like an idiot or a leper. I can't help it if I'm practical and sensible."
"I know, Devil," David said. "I just didn't want to get the work mixed up."
"But it's you who mixed it up," Catherine said. "Can't you see? Jumping back and forth trying to write stories when all you had to do was keep on with the narrative that meant so much to all of us. It was going so well too and we were just coming to the most exciting parts. Someone has to show you that the stories are just your way of escaping your duty."
Marita looked at him again and he knew what she was trying to tell him and he said, "I have to go get cleaned up. You tell Marita about it and I'll be back."
"We have other things to talk about," Catherine said. "I'm sorry I was rude about you and Marita. I couldn't be happier about you really."
David took everything that had been said in with him to the bathroom where he had a shower and changed into a newly washed fisherman's sweater and slacks. It was quite cool now in the evening and Marita was sitting at the bar looking at Vogue.
"She's gone down to see about your room," Marita said.
"How is she?"
"How should I know, David? She's a very great publisher now. She's given up sex. It doesn't interest her anymore. It's childish really, she says. She doesn't know how it could ever have meant anything to her. But she may decide to have an affair
with another woman if she ever takes it up again. There's quite a bit about another woman.
"Christ I never thought it would go this way."
"Don't," Marita said. "No matter what or how it is I love you and you are going to write tomorrow."
Catherine came in and said, "You look wonderful together and I'm so proud. I feel as though I'd invented you. Was he good today, Marita?"
"We had a nice lunch," Marita said. "Please be fair, Catherine."
"Oh I know he's a satisfactory lover," Catherine said. "He's always that. That's just like his martinis or how he swims or skis or flew probably. I never saw him with a plane. Everyone says he was marvelous. It's like acrobats really I suppose and just as dull. I wasn't asking about that."
"You were very good to let us spend a day together, Catherine," Marita said.
"You can spend the rest of your lives together," Catherine said. "If you don't bore each other. I have no further need of either of you.
David was watching her in the mirror and she looked calm, handsome and normal. He could see Marita looking at her very sadly.
"I do like to look at you though and I'd like to hear you talk if you'd ever open your mouths."
"How do you do," said David.
"That was quite a good effort," Catherine said. "I'm very well."
"Have any new plans?" David asked. He felt as though he were hailing a ship.
"Only what I've told you," Catherine went on. "They'll prob ably keep me quite busy."
"What was all the guff about another woman?"
He felt Marita kick him and he put his foot on hers to acknowledge.
190 '9'
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"That's not guff," Catherine said. "I want to have one more try to see if I've missed anything. I might have."
"All of us are fallible," David said and Marita kicked him again.
"I want to see," Catherine said. "I know enough about that now so I should be able to tell. Don't worry about your dark girl. She's not my type at all. She's yours. She's what you like and very nice it is but not for me. I'm not attracted to the gamin type."
"Perhaps I am a gamin," Marita said.
"That's a very polite word for that part."
"But I'm also more of a woman than you are Catherine."
"Go ahead and show David what sort of gamin you are. He'd like it.
"He knows what sort of woman I am.
"That's splendid," Catherine said. "I'm glad you both found your tongues finally. I do prefer conversation.
"You aren't really a woman at all," Marita said.
"I know it," Catherine said. "I've tried to explain it to David often enough. Isn't that true, David?"
David looked at her and said nothing.
"Didn't I?"
"Yes," he said.
"I did try and I broke myself in pieces in Madrid to be a girl and all it did was break me in pieces," Catherine said. "Now all I am is through. You're a girl and a boy both and you really are. You don't have to change and it doesn't kill you and I'm not. And now I'm nothing. All I wanted was for David and you to be happy. Everything else I invent."
Marita said, "I know it and I try to tell David."
"I know you do. But you don't have to be loyal to me or to anything. Don't do it. Nobody would anyway and you probably aren't really. But I tell you not to be. I want you to be happy and make him happy. You can too and I can't and I know it."
"You're the finest girl there is," Marita said.
"I'm not. I'm finished before I ever started."
"No. I'm the one," Marita said. "I was stupid and awful."
"You weren't stupid. Everything you said was true. Let's stop talking and be friends. Can we?"
"Can we please?" Marita asked her.
"I want to," Catherine said. "And not be such a tragic bully. Please take your time about the book, David. You know all I want is for you to write the best you can. That's what we started with. I'm over it now whatever this one was.
"You were just tired," David said. "I don't think you ate any lunch either."
"Probably not," Catherine said. "But I may have. Can we forget it all now though and just be friends?"
So they were friends; whatever friends are, David thought, and tried not think but talked and listened in the unreality that reality had become. He had heard each one speak about the other and he knew each must know what the other thought and probably what they each had told him. In that way they really were friends, understanding in their basic disagreement, trusting in their complete distrust and enjoying one another's company. He enjoyed their company too but tonight he'd had enough of it.
Tomorrow he must go back into his own country, the one that Catherine was jealous of and that Marita loved and respected. He had been happy in the country of the story and knew that it was too good to last and now he was back from what he cared about into the overpopulated vacancy of madness that had taken, now the new turn of exaggerated practicality. He was tired of it and he was tired of Marita's collaborating with her enemy. Catherine was not his enemy except as she was himself in the unfinding unrealizable quest that is love and so was her own enemy. She needs an enemy so badly always that she has to keep one near and she's the nearest and the easiest to attack knowing
.
the weaknesses and strengths and all the faults of our defenses. She turns my flank so skillfully then finds it is her own and the last fighting is always in a swirl and the dust that rises is our own dust.
Catherine wanted to play backgammon with Marita after dinner. They always played it seriously and for money and when Catherine went to get the board Marita said to David, "Please don't come to my room tonight after all."
"Good."
"Do you understand?"
"Let's skip that word," David said. His coldness had come back as the time for working moved closer.
"Are you angry?"
"Yes," David said.
"At me?"
"You can't be angry with someone who's ill."
"You haven't lived very long," David said. "That's exactly who everyone is always angry with. Get ill sometime yourself and see."
"I wish you wouldn't be angry."
"I wish I'd never seen any of you."
"Please don't, David."
"You know it isn't true. I'm oniy getting ready to work." He went into their bedroom and put on the reading light on his side of the bed and made himself comfortable and read one of the W. H. Hudson books. It was Nature in Downiand and he had taken it to read because it had the most unpromising title. He knew enough to know a time was coming when he'd need all the books and he was saving the best ones. But once past the title of this one nothing in it bored him. He was happy to read and he was back out of his life and with Hudson and his brother riding their horses into the tumbled whiteness of breast-high thisdedown in the moonlight and gradually the click of dice and
the iow sound of the girls' voices became real again too so that when, after a time, he went out to make himself a whiskey and Perrier to take back to his reading they seemed, when he saw them playing, to be actual human beings doing something normal and not figures in some unbelievable play he had been brought unwillingly to attend.
He went back to the room and read and drank his whiskey and Perrier very slowly and he had undressed and turned the light off and was almost asleep when he heard Catherine come in to the bedroom. It seemed to him that she was gone a long time in the bathroom before he felt her come to bed and he lay still and breathed steadily and hoped he might really go to sleep.
"Are you awake, David?" she asked.
"I think so."
"Don't wake up," she said. "Thank you for sleeping here."
"I usually do."
"You don't have to."
"Yes I do."
"I'm glad you did. Good night."
"Good night."
"Would you kiss me good night?"
"Sure," he said.
He kissed her and it was Catherine as she had been before when she had seemed to come back to him for a while.
"I'm sorry I was such a failure again."
"Let's not talk about things."
"Do you hate me?"
"Can we start again the way I'd planned things?"
"I don't think so.
"Then why did you come in here?"
"This is where I belong."
"No other reason?"
'94 '95
.
"I thought you might be lonely."
"I was."
"Everybody's lonely," David said.
"It's terrible to be in bed together and be lonely."
"There isn't any solution," David said. "All your plans and schemes are worthless."
"I didn't give it a chance."
"It was all crazy anyway. I'm sick of crazy things. You're not the only one gets broken up.
"I know. But can't we try it again just once more and I really be good? I can. I nearly was.
"I'm sick of all of it, Devil. Sick all the way through me."
"Wouldn't you try it just once more for her and for me both?"
"It doesn't work and I'm sick of it."
"She said you had a fine day and that you were really cheerful and not depressed. Won't you try it once more for both of us? I want it so much."
"You want everything so much and when you get it it's over and you don't give a damn."
"I was just overconfident this time and then I get insufferable. Please can we try it again?"
"Let's go to sleep, Devil, and not talk about it.
"Kiss me again please," Catherine said. "I'll go to sleep because I know you'll do it. You always do everything I want because you really want to do it too."
"You only want things for you, Devil."
"That's not true, David. Anyway I am you and her. That's what I did it for. I'm everybody. You know about that don't you?"
"Go to sleep, Devil."
"I will. But would you please kiss me again first so that we won't be lonely?"
Chapter Twenty- four
IN THE MORNING he was on the far slope of the mountain again. The elephant was no longer travelling as he had been but was moving aimlessly now, feeding occasionally and David had known they were getting dose to him. He tried to remember how he had felt. He had no love for the elephant yet. He must remember that. He had only a sorrow that had come from his own tiredness that had brought an understanding of age. Though being too young, he had learned how it must be to be too old. He was lonesome for Kibo and thinking of Juma killing the elephant's friend had turned him against Juma and made the elephant his brother. He knew then how much it meant to him to have seen the elephant in the moonlight and for him to have followed him with Kibo and come close to him in the clearing so that he had seen both of the great tusks. But he did not know that nothing would ever be as good as that again. Now he knew they would kill the elephant and there was nothing he could do about it. He had betrayed the elephant when he had gone back to tell them at the shamba. They would kill me and they would kill Kibo too
196 '97
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if we had ivory, he had thought and known it was untrue. Prob ably the elephant is going to find where he was born now and they'll kill him there. That's all they'd need to make it perfect. They'd like to have killed him where they killed his friend. That would be a big joke. That would have pleased them. The god damned friend killers.
They had moved to the edge of thick cover now and the elephant was close ahead. David could smell him and they could all hear him pulling down branches and the snapping that they made. His father put his hand on David's shoulder to move him back and have him wait outside and then he took a big pinch of ashes from the pouch in his pocket and tossed it in the air. The ash barely slanted toward them as it fell and his father nodded at Juma and bent down to follow him into the thick cover. David watched their backs and their asses go in and out of sight. He could not hear them move.
