Before they had finished the brandy they suddenly moved together and met standing up; then they were sitting on the bed and he kissed her hardy knees.
Struggling a little still, like a decapitated animal she forgot about Dick and her new white eyes, forgot Tommy himself and sank deeper and deeper into the minutes and the moment.
. . . When he got up to open a shutter and find out what caused the increasing clamor below their windows, his figure was darker and stronger than Dick’s, with high lights along the rope-twists of muscle.
Momentarily he had forgotten her too—almost in the second of his flesh breaking from hers she had a foretaste that things were going to be different than she had expected.
She felt the nameless fear which precedes all emotions, joyous or sorrowful, inevitable as a hum of thunder precedes a storm.
Tommy peered cautiously from the balcony and reported.
“All I can see is two women on the balcony below this. They’re talking about weather and tipping back and forth in American rocking-chairs.”
“Making all that noise?”
“The noise is coming from somewhere below them.
Listen.”
“Oh, way down South in the land of cotton
Hotels bum and business rotten
Look away—”
“It’s Americans.”
Nicole flung her arms wide on the bed and stared at the ceiling; the powder had dampened on her to make a milky surface.
She liked the bareness of the room, the sound of the single fly navigating overhead.
Tommy brought the chair over to the bed and swept the clothes off it to sit down; she liked the economy of the weightless dress and espadrilles that mingled with his ducks upon the floor.
He inspected the oblong white torso joined abruptly to the brown limbs and head, and said, laughing gravely:
“You are all new like a baby.”
“With white eyes.”
“I’ll take care of that.”
“It’s very hard taking care of white eyes—especially the ones made in Chicago.”
“I know all the old Languedoc peasant remedies.”
“Kiss me, on the lips, Tommy.”
“That’s so American,” he said, kissing her nevertheless.
“When I was in America last there were girls who would tear you apart with their lips, tear themselves too, until their faces were scarlet with the blood around the lips all brought out in a patch—but nothing further.”
Nicole leaned up on one elbow.
“I like this room,” she said.
“I find it somewhat meagre.
Darling, I’m glad you wouldn’t wait until we got to Monte Carlo.”
“Why only meagre?
Why, this is a wonderful room, Tommy—like the bare tables in so many Cezannes and Picassos.”
“I don’t know.”
He did not try to understand her.
“There’s that noise again.
My God, has there been a murder?”
He went to the window and reported once more:
“It seems to be two American sailors fighting and a lot more cheering them on.
They are from your battleship off shore.”
He wrapped a towel around himself and went farther out on the balcony.
“They have poules with them.
I have heard about this now—the women follow them from place to place wherever the ship goes.
But what women!
One would think with their pay they could find better women!
Why the women who followed Korniloff! Why we never looked at anything less than a ballerina!”
Nicole was glad he had known so many women, so that the word itself meant nothing to him; she would be able to hold him so long as the person in her transcended the universals of her body.
“Hit him where it hurts!”
“Yah-h-h-h!”
“Hey, what I tell you get inside that right!”
“Come on, Dulschmit, you son!”