His brother was sitting hunched over his glass with his pipe between his teeth. He removed the pipe, glanced at Marc and with his eyes back on the table again he said, "You haven’t shown much talent for sticking so far, and if you’re really serious about marrying her, you’ll need a lot. I wouldn’t make it too tough for myself if I were you".
"I’m not worried about myself. I’m really in love with her; I’ve never felt this way about anyone before in my life. We just belong together, that’s all. Oh, hell", he said, exasperated, grinding out his cigarette. "You can’t explain these things".
There was a brief silence and then Marc asked, "Are you just against it on principle?"
"No", said David. "I haven’t got any of those particular principles. How long have you known her?"
"About a month. It hasn’t anything to do with that. I knew Eric better after I’d been talking to her for half an hour than I know René de Sevigny after ten years".
"That’s not what I’m talking about". David glanced at his watch, signaled the waiter for their bill and got up. Looking down at Marc, he said, "The trouble with you is, laddie, you’ve never really grown up. You haven’t found yourself yet. I’m sorry if I sound like a copy-book but I can’t think of any other way of putting it. And until you have, and really know what you want, you’d better stay clear of complicated situations. After all, it isn’t just a question of messing up your own life".
You haven’t found yourself yet.
He still did not know exactly what his brother had meant by that. And he certainly did not want to mess up Erica’s life, or even run the risk of hurting her. It was because he was afraid for her and for himself, but particularly for Erica, that he had sat on the opposite side of the car and kept on driving, or had gone from one public place to another, for what had once begun in the car or on the mountain or in a park-the only places in which they were ever alone-would inevitably end in a hotel in the Laurentians for a week-end. The idea of leaving Erica to pick up the pieces in Montreal when he himself went overseas, after one or several week-ends in the Laurentians, did not appeal to Marc particularly.
And along with everything else, he had himself to cope with.
The cocktails had arrived. He drank his all at once, then said to Erica who was staring at the cherry in the bottom of her glass, "Spear it with a match".
"I wonder what’s become of the tooth-pick?"
"It’s probably a war measure".
"What were you thinking about?"
"You", he said. "Us".
His life had been run largely by his intelligence so far; his emotions had never threatened to run away with him until now-the only thing which could be said ever to have run away with him was his lack of emotion. He had never got either himself or anyone else into trouble through feeling too much, only through his having felt too little.
And now, Erica. She was wearing some kind of green and white summer dress, sitting beside him with her fair hair almost down to her shoulders, spearing the cherry at the bottom of her glass with a match.
"Don’t look like that!" said Marc.
Erica raised her head and asked, startled, "Like what?"
But he did not know what he wanted her to look like, except that it would have been a help if she had looked less like herself. He moved a few inches away from her and ordered another cocktail.
There was a radio playing out in the hall. Erica ate the cherry and listened above the murmur of voices and the soft clatter of dishes, and asked finally, "What is it?"
"Schubert No. 5. I think he stole most of the last movement from Mozart".
Charles would have liked that, even if he had considered that Marc was slandering Schubert. The utterly lunatic part of it was that there was nothing about Marc which either Charles or her mother would not have liked.
"What did you say?" she asked a moment later.
"I said, you should have had a Martini too".
"Why?"
"Because all I’ve got in my room is half a bottle of gin".
"Are we going to your room?" Erica asked, looking at a woman out in the middle of the long, light room who was wearing a very large black hat and eating lobster.
"Don’t you think it’s about time you learned something about my background?"
She found that he was smiling at her, but the next moment the amusement died out of his oblique, greenish eyes. He took her hand suddenly for the first time, and held it with a pressure which went on steadily increasing until the waiter appeared on the other side of the table with his wagon of hors d’oeuvres, and he released it.
"Everything except onions, beets, herring and that pink stuff", said Erica, after the waiter had waited patiently for one of them to pay some attention to him. "What’s your room like?" she asked Marc.
"Depressing".
Some time later as she was struggling with her chicken, Erica remarked, "When I eat hors d’oeuvres I never have any appetite left for the rest of the meal".
"You never have any appetite anyhow".
He was watching her with an anxious expression and an angry look in the tight muscles around his mouth. "What was it today?" he demanded without warning. "More trouble?"
Erica glanced at him quickly and then answered matter-of-factly, "No, of course not. I’m just not hungry".
He picked up the basket of bread and when she shook her head, he put a slice on her plate anyhow. "You’ve got to eat, Eric". He gave her some butter and then asked, "Do you really think I’m worth it?"
"Yes", said Erica under her breath. Her eyes met his, and she said involuntarily, "Darling, don’t look at me like that!"
"I can’t help it. I’ve behaved very well so far but I don’t think it’s going to last much longer. In the meantime, you’d better go on eating. No woman looks romantic with her mouth full".
"Do I have to eat all of it?"
"There isn’t much, Eric, it’s mostly bones".
He was talking about something else and she thought that once again she had succeeded in heading him off, when he asked suddenly, as they were waiting for their dessert, "Do they go on at you about me all the time, or is it just intermittent?"
Evidently some of it had got through to him anyhow, in spite of the way she had worked to keep him from finding out, having realized from the beginning that the most dangerous aspect of the whole situation was not her father’s attitude toward Marc but Marc’s reaction to that attitude once he became fully aware of it. He would take it as final, because it was confirmed by so much in his own experience if for no other reason, when in fact it was not. Erica’s conviction that sooner or later Charles Drake would come round was not based on hope so much as on a fairly complete knowledge of Charles Drake. If, at some future date, he should be faced with the choice of accepting Marc Reiser or losing his daughter, then Miriam to the contrary, Charles would accept Marc Reiser, but whether she could succeed in convincing Marc of that fact was a different matter. Marc did not know her father. And in any case, to ask Marc simply to wait and put up with that attitude until her father was forced into a position where he had to change it, and with nothing to look forward to, so far as Marc could see, but a grudging "acceptance" under due pressure, was to ask altogether too much of anyone with as much pride as Marc Reiser. He could not be expected to realize that the word "acceptance" had a different meaning for her father than it had for most people. You had actually to have seen Charles Drake do one of his voltes-faces before you could believe it was possible. He did not put his prejudices behind him and go on from there; he went back to the beginning and started all over again.
If only Marc had known her father-if only her father had known Marc. But neither of them did, and all she could do was to go on playing for time, trying to keep Marc from finding out what her family really thought of him, until, after a while, they thought a little better.