Page 428 - tender-is-the-night

Carlo?’
He brought the car to a stop with a squeak of tires.
‘No!’ he answered. ‘And, my God, I have never been so
happy as I am this minute.’
They had passed through Nice following the blue coast
and begun to mount to the middling-high Corniche. Now
Tommy turned sharply down to the shore, ran out a blunt
peninsula, and stopped in the rear of a small shore hotel.
Its tangibility frightened Nicole for a moment. At the
desk an American was arguing interminably with the clerk
about the rate of exchange. She hovered, outwardly tran-
quil but inwardly miserable, as Tommy filled out the police
blanks—his real, hers false. Their room was a Mediterra-
nean room, almost ascetic, almost clean, darkened to the
glare of the sea. Simplest of pleasures—simplest of places.
Tommy ordered two cognacs, and when the door closed be-
hind the waiter, he sat in the only chair, dark, scarred and
handsome, his eyebrows arched and upcurling, a fighting
Puck, an earnest Satan.
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 fig-
ure was darker and stronger than Dick’s, with high lights
along the rope-twists of muscle. Momentarily he had for-

428 Tender is the Night