The waiter quickly fetched a champagne cocktail and a package of English cigarettes. The cocktail Lawrence downed in a gulp and called for more. The second he drank with more restraint.
Though I had not seen him since two summers before—at Land’s End, an isolated village in Massachusetts—our conversation was rambling and disjointed, like that of incompatible strangers who find no ease in silence. This annoyed me, for our similarity of tastes, I felt, should more than outweigh the separation.
As the late afternoon merged into early evening, the mistral blew its cold and sinister breath out to the Mediterranean. We drank steadily, Lawrence all the while jibing at me for clinging to so impotent a mixture as vermouth, currant juice and seltzer. He had reached his fifth cocktail, but through the exercise of will, apparently, was still sober. Nevertheless, he worried me.
Furtively, almost defensively, Lawrence sat in his chair. I reacted to his attitude by bracing myself against an intangible, though imminent, danger which thickened the atmosphere. He breathed jerkily, emitting from time to time a sharp clicking sound, as though part of his breathing mechanism had suddenly refused to function. Quivers ran through his body and ended in a twitch.
But he spoke with a crisp enunciation, and so precisely that each word seemed to have been scoured and weighed before utterance. On not a syllable was the checkrein loosened. I sensed a splendid effort at self-control.
I suddenly recalled the wild absurdity of Lawrence’s recent work. In Paris, three months before, I had gone to his exhibition at the Vendome Galleries and left the place convinced that Lawrence Bainridge had gone stark mad.
“Flowers, Messieurs?” A flower girl, her wicker tray heaped with heavy-scented blossoms, paused before us. “No? Ah, Messieurs, but one little rose apiece—for luck!” she said.
Then she picked up a red rose bud and pinned it to the lapel of Lawrence’s coat.
“Ugh! Take it away!” he screamed. “I can’t stand it!” He tore the flower from his coat and hurled it into the gutter.
“Lawrence!” I reproved, “You’re drunk.”