Lennox winced.
"What's the matter?" she asked quickly.
"It was the idea of lovers' knots. Mawkish. I was thinking of something really impressive, like: D. Boon cilled a Bar on this tree year 1760."
"You're the bear," Gabby said, feeling herself tenderly. "Don't come near me again. I've got a gun."
"But what were you doing here, darling?"
"You told me about your favorite spot. I had to see it."
"Go ahead and shoot," Lennox said, but this time he was gentler.
He was right when he told Robin that this love affair was backwards. Most people meet, get friendly, turn serious and become intimate. Lennox and Gabby had started intimately and were working their way back. They'd already been serious enough for a violent quarrel. Now they were getting friendly. They spent an hour together in that blissful past tense of all couples who are exploring each other.... "Did you?" and "Were you?" and "Had you?" They agreed, they compared, they disagreed. They matched experiences, tastes, habits, friends.
Gabby asked about Cooper and Lennox tried to describe what the friendship meant to him. "Sam's a whole man," he said. "Most men are only part men ... like sections of a tangerine. All split up. You have to put a lot together to get a whole."
"Do you mean F. Scott Fitzgerald's ideal? The entire man in the Goethe-Byron-Shaw tradition?"