F. Scott Fitzgerald - Tender is the Night [36]
“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