The Garden of Eden

After swimming, David, Catherine, and Marita return to the hotel. David walks immediately to his writing room, where he discovers that his notebooks containing his short stories and review clippings are gone. All that remains is the narrative about his relationship with Catherine. David searches the office. He thinks Catherine may have hidden his work. He does not want to believe that she has burned his writing, but slowly he realizes that this is the only explanation. He feels “sick inside himself” (159).

David finds Marita and Catherine in the bar. Catherine refuses to say where or when she burned David’s stories and clippings. When Marita leaves, Catherine says she burned everything in a big iron drum. She says that she did it for David and “all of us” (160). Catherine is pleased that David can now work full time on their narrative, and she is glad that he is being “reasonable about it” (161). She insists that she is helping David. He admits that all he wants is to kill her. The only reason he does not is that she is “crazy” (162). Catherine becomes angry and threatens to divorce him, or stay with him, or kill him, whichever will harm him more. David regrets his outburst but privately damns his wife “to hell” (162). Catherine explains that she plans to go to Paris the next day to search for artists to illustrate their narrative. David cannot convince her otherwise. Catherine insists that she is working on a “reasoned and coordinated project” (164); she even wants to pay for the short stories she burned. David tells Catherine to do as she pleases and that he is “going out for a while” (164). He offers to take Catherine’s car for a ride to check everything before she drives to Paris. On the way out, he invites Marita to ride with him.

David and Marita drive to Cannes. He explains what Catherine has done to his work. When they reach Cannes, they go to the café where they first met. Marita encourages David and assures him that he can rewrite the stories. David knows that he will never be able to recapture them because stories can only be written once, and he can “never do it again” (166). All Marita can do, he says, is to prevent him from murdering Catherine. They sit and drink, thinking about how their situation came to be so absurd.

David and Marita return to the hotel. The hotel owner’s wife tells David that Catherine has gone and that she has left a note for David. Catherine has taken the train to Biarritz. At the encouragement of the hotel owner’s wife, David and Marita eat as “nothing is helped by your not eating” (169). Afterward, they go to Marita’s room. The fact that the bed has been “made up for two people” suggests to David that the owners of the hotel approve of his relationship with Marita (169). In turn, Marita wonders “what sort of wife” she will be for David (170).

In the morning, David re-reads the note he received from Catherine. In the note, she apologizes for the awful act of burning his stories, but she still tries to justify herself. She says that she will return and that they will “settle things the best we can” (171). As David sips a beer with his breakfast, he thinks that he will not be able to write today. Nevertheless, he attempts to re-write one of the stories that Catherine burned.

David spends the morning writing. He writes short sentences and then immediately dislikes them. His mind is a “complete blankness” (173). Marita sees David, and she understands his pain. They share a drink and then go to the beach, where the water is “much cooler” than before (174). They swim out farther than they had before, then return to the beach. Sharing a picnic, they talk about how the hotel owner hit his wife and blackened her eye. Marita believes that the man was “within his rights to hit her if she was insulting” (177). David refers to himself and Marita as “the Bournes” even if they do not have the paperwork yet (177).

They return to the hotel. Marita watches David sleep and then smiles at herself in the mirror. When David wakes, they drink at the bar. Marita tells him that it would be good if he could have some time with male friends as he has “been overrun with girls” (178). Marita wonders whether such new friends might steal David away from her. If they do, she says, she will kill them. After the experience with Catherine, Marita is more concerned about David having female friends who might break up their relationship. David tells her that he loves her and not to worry. As they lay together that evening, she tells David that she is his “good girl who loves [him]” (179). They fall asleep. 

David wakes in the morning and sees Marita next to him. He leaves her in bed and walks to his writing room. He begins to write a new story based on a different memory about his father. David is pleased with the results. He continues to write into the afternoon, and there is “no sign that any of it would ever cease returning to him intact” (180).