“Nick, you’ll lose me if you go back,” she said, suddenly sobbing violently. “I can’t tell you why, but I feel that is what will happen. You must say now.”
And because nothing really mattered to me except her happiness, and because I knew she loved me as much as I loved her, I gave her the promise.
She said, “You really mean that?”
“Yeah,” I said. “We’ll take the car on and we’ll go to the coast. We’ll get us a small house somewhere near the sea with a garden and we’ll be just you an’ I.”
“And you’ll be happy?”
“Sure, I’ll be happy. I’ll find something to do.” Lying there in the dark, I suddenly felt fine about the idea. We’d got money, we were going to the sun, and we had each other.
CHAPTER TWENTY
WE GOT A PLACE a few miles out from Santa Monica. It was small, but it was cute—the kind of place movie-stars week-end in. As soon as we saw it, we fell for it. The garden ran down to the sea, and if you wanted a bathe you just opened a gate in the wall and stepped on to the hot yellow sands. The sea was right ahead.
The house had two bedrooms and a large sitting-room leading out to a piazza that encircled the whole building. The garden was big enough to screen the house from the road. The rent was high, but we didn’t think twice about it—we took it.
Maybe I should have felt a heel taking all that money from Mardi, but I didn’t. If the money had been mine, I should have wanted Mardi to share it with me. Well, the money was hers, and I wasn’t going to spoil things by refusing to share with her.