Page 156 - tender-is-the-night

that he could see.
Rosemary opened her door full of emotions no one else
knew of. She was now what is sometimes called a ‘little wild
thing’—by twentyfour full hours she was not yet unified and
she was absorbed in playing around with chaos; as if her
destiny were a picture puzzle— counting benefits, counting
hopes, telling off Dick, Nicole, her mother, the director she
met yesterday, like stops on a string of beads.
When Dick knocked she had just dressed and been
watching the rain, thinking of some poem, and of full gut-
ters in Beverly Hills. When she opened the door she saw him
as something fixed and Godlike as he had always been, as
older people are to younger, rigid and unmalleable. Dick
saw her with an inevitable sense of disappointment. It took
him a moment to respond to the unguarded sweetness of her
smile, her body calculated to a millimeter to suggest a bud
yet guarantee a flower. He was conscious of the print of her
wet foot on a rug through the bathroom door.
‘Miss Television,’ he said with a lightness he did not feel.
He put his gloves, his brief-case on the dressing-table, his
stick against the wall. His chin dominated the lines of pain
around his mouth, forcing them up into his forehead and the
corner of his eyes, like fear that cannot be shown in public.
‘Come and sit on my lap close to me,’ he said softly, ‘and
let me see about your lovely mouth.’
She came over and sat there and while the dripping slowed
down outside—drip—dri-i-ip, she laid her lips to the beauti-
ful cold image she had created.
Presently she kissed him several times in the mouth,

156 Tender is the Night