The Paris Wife (17 page)

She laughed. “If I don’t, it’s because I won’t touch absinthe.”

“It’s licorice candy and smoke,” I said.

“You’ll wish it were only that tomorrow,” Ernest said.

“Maybe, but it makes everything easier now, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, it does,” Ernest said, touching my glass with his. “So have it and to hell with tomorrow.”

“Hear, hear,” said Pound leaning forward in his rumpled tweed jacket and putting his elbows on the table. I was growing to like him more all the time—but I was generally liking everyone. I thought I might be in love with our waiter. He had the prettiest mustache, un-waxed and pure and fresh as flowers. I wanted to touch it or eat it.

“You should grow your mustache like that,” I said to Ernest, pointing not at all subtly.

“I am, dear. It’s just the same.”

I looked at him square. “So it is,” I said. “Where have you been?” And we all laughed.

Later, when we’d moved on to the Dôme, Pound started talking about the States.

“I’d never return to the Middle West,” he was saying, “I renounce it, in fact. Indiana’s full of prigs and idiots.”

“Oh, that old story,” Shakespear said in her low perfect whisper.

I looked into the long smoky mirror and touched my face, then the glass. “I can’t feel anything,” I said to Ernest. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

“Have another, Tatie,” Ernest said. “You’re very beautiful.”

Shakespear smiled at us with her curved mouth and her eyes smiled, too. “Look at our pretty lovers,” she said to Pound.

“Indiana’s always been an intellectual wasteland, mind you,” he said, and then blew a smoke ring that circled before being swallowed by the rest of it, the blue halo that was everywhere, blending and blurring. All of us breathing it in and out.

“All they have is the moral high ground,” he went on. “There’s nothing else within reach. I was useless teaching at Wabash. What did those young people with cornhusks between their ears want to hear me rant on about? Not Yeats, that’s for certain. Not poetry.”

“The actress was a small bit of poetry,” Shakespear said.

“The most scrumptious knees I’ve ever seen on a woman,” Pound said.

“Do go on,” Ernest said. “I’m getting hungry.”

“There was rain that night—it’s always raining in Indiana, intellectually speaking, you understand—and the actress … what was her name?”

“Bertha,” Shakespear said.

“Not Camille?” Ernest said.

“No, no. She wasn’t consumptive. Just didn’t want to get her hair damp. She had lovely hair. I’d suggested we go out to dinner, but then there was the matter of dampness.”

“One of my favorite problems,” Ernest said.

Everyone laughed and then Pound said, “When word got out I’d entertained her in my room, you’d think I’d murdered the girl instead of roasted a chicken.”

“Poor Ezra,” Shakespear said. “They fired him next day.”

“Poor Ezra nothing. I’d be in Indiana still, teaching poetry to stalks of corn.”

“And roasting the occasional chicken,” I said.

“Even chicken won’t save you from Indiana,” Ezra said.

Late that evening, after we’d abandoned the Dôme for the Ritz, Ernest and Pound began heatedly discussing the merits of Tristan Tzara. Pound thought the Surrealists might be onto something, possibly, if they could stay asleep long enough. Ernest thought they were idiots and they might just as well wake up so we could all move on to something else.

“I’m dropping off just listening to you all,” Shakespear said, and the two of us moved to the other side of the room and sat at a small table.

“You and Hem really are beautiful together,” she said.

“Are we?” I’d been drinking only warm water for an hour, and could finally feel my tongue.

“I wonder how that happens. Love, I mean.” She touched the sweep of her hair, still smooth and perfect.

“Don’t you and Pound have it?”

“Oh, no.” She laughed with a small puff of air. “We have what we have, though.”

“I’m not sure I understand you.”

“I’m not sure I do either.” She laughed a dark laugh and then became quiet, stirring her drink.

The weather turned wonderful that fall, and although we knew the cold, damp season would be coming soon enough, we were living deep into what we had and feeling happy and strong. Ernest was working well on his Nick Adams novel and new stories and saw so clearly the books they could be, it was almost as if they already fully existed. In our circle, everyone believed things would hit for him, and that it was only a matter of time.

“You’re making something new,” Pound told him one day in his studio. “Don’t forget that when it starts to hurt.”

“It only hurts to wait.”

“The waiting helps you boil it down. That’s essential, and the hurting helps everything along in its way.”

Ernest put this wisdom in his pocket the way he did everything Pound said.

Soon enough, the light began to change in the streets in the late afternoon, thinning and waning, and we started to wonder if we had it in us to face the long winter.

“I’ve been thinking about writing to Agnes,” Ernest said to me one evening. “It’s been on my mind since Milan. Do you mind?”

“I don’t know. What do you want out of it?”

“Nothing. Just for her to know I’m happy and thinking of her.”

“And that your career is going just as you said it would.”

He smiled. “That’s the cherry on top, is all.”

“Send your letter.”

“Yes,” he said. “I already have.”

I felt a flare of jealousy. “You were so sure I wouldn’t mind?”

“Maybe. But if you did, I knew I could make you see it was all right. It’s just a letter, in any case, and we have each other.”

“That’s what Shakespear said the other night.”

“Shakespear? What does she know about love?”

“Maybe more than we do, because she doesn’t have it. She’s not in the thick of it.”

“That’s why I can’t write about Paris now, because it’s everywhere.”

“So you write about Michigan.”

“It feels so close. As if I could never lose it.” He’d been reading over the day’s work from a notebook on the table in front of him. He rested his hand on the pages, his fingertips brushing over the boldly slanted sentences. “But it’s not just the real place. I’m inventing it, too, and that’s the best part.”

Over his writing desk he’d pinned a pale blue map of northern Michigan, and all the essential places were there—Horton Bay, Petoskey, Walloon Lake, Charlevoix—the precise locations where important things had happened to him, Ernest, but also to Nick Adams. Ernest and Nick weren’t the same guy, but they knew a lot of the same things, like where and when to look for bait hoppers heavy with dew, and how the water moved and what it told you about where the trout were. They knew about mortar shelling in the middle of a still night, and what it felt like to see a place you’d loved burned down and hollowed out and changed. Nick’s mind wasn’t altogether right and you could sense the pressure coming up inside him, in a story like “Big Two-Hearted River,” though Ernest never had him look at it directly or name it.

“I love your Michigan stories,” I said.

He squinted at me through the lantern light, across the table. “Is that true?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Sometimes I wonder if you want me writing at all. I think it makes you feel lonely.”

“It’s not the writing that makes me lonely, it’s your being gone. It’s been so long since you’ve even tried to write here at home. Maybe it would work now and I could see you. I wouldn’t have to talk or disturb you.”

“You know I need to go away to make anything happen.” He closed the notebook and put his pencil on top, rolling it back and forth with his fingertips. “I have to be alone to get it started, but if I really was alone, that wouldn’t work either. I need to leave that place and come back here and talk to you. That makes it real and makes it stick. Do you get what I’m saying?”

“I think so.” I walked behind him and put my head on his shoulder, rubbing my face into his neck. But the truth was I didn’t, not really. And he knew.

“Maybe no one can know how it is for anyone else.”

I straightened and walked over to the window where the rain came down in streams and pooled on the sill. “I’m trying.”

“Me too,” he said.

I sighed. “I think it’s going to rain all day.”

“Don’t kid yourself. It’s going to rain for a month.”

“Maybe it won’t after all.”

He smiled at me. “All right, Tiny. Maybe it won’t.”

Near Thanksgiving 1922, the
Star
sent Ernest to cover a peace conference in Lausanne that would decide the territorial dispute between Greece and Turkey, the thing that had started the terrible business at Smyrna and had generally kept them killing each other for the better part of three years. When the cable came, I saw Ernest’s nervousness. He almost couldn’t open it and I knew why. We couldn’t take another fight like the last. We might not survive it.

“Lausanne,” he said finally. “We have the money. You’ll come, too.”

“I needn’t,” I said. “I can be good.”

“No,” he said. “I want you there.”

I was relieved he’d insisted and agreed to go—but by the time the trip was launched, I was sick in bed, my head stuffed and aching. I couldn’t eat anything without retching. We decided he would go alone, and that I would join him when I could travel. My old friend Leticia Parker from St. Louis happened to be coming through Paris just then, and she said she wanted to visit every day and take care of me when Ernest was gone. It wouldn’t be like his time in Turkey at all, or even like Genoa.

By the time I felt well enough to join him, it was early December. I packed happily, knowing that when the conference was over and the reporting done, we’d have a long skiing holiday at Chamby and have Christmas there with Chink and then go on to Italy and Spain. All in all, we wouldn’t be back in Paris for four months, and I was ready for a nice long break from the cold and dampness. I hadn’t been out of bed for a week and wasn’t sure I’d have the energy for skiing, but I was damned well going to try.

Along with the travel plans passing back and forth between us, Ernest had also cabled to say that Lincoln Steffens, one of the journalists he’d met in Genoa, was in Lausanne and highly impressed with his dispatches. He wanted to see everything Ernest had written so far, but he only had one thing with him, “My Old Man,” a story about a boy and his ruined jockey father. Steffens thought the story was wonderful and compared it to Sherwood Anderson. Ernest didn’t like being compared to anyone, and it seemed worse, somehow, that it was Anderson, a friend and champion, but it helped that Steffens had offered to send the story on to an editor friend at
Cosmopolitan
. Ernest had one published piece at that point, in a small art magazine out of New Orleans called the
Double Dealer
. There was only that, and the promise from Pound about printing something for Three Mountains. This was much more promising, thrilling even.

As I packed my big suitcase, I thought about how long we’d be gone, and how anxious Ernest would be to return to his stories and the novel. It went without saying that he’d like to show more of his work to Steffens, so I headed for the dining room, to the cupboard where Ernest kept all his manuscripts. I gathered everything together and packed it in a small valise. This was my surprise for him, and I felt buoyed by it as I left the apartment for the Gare de Lyon.

The station was busy, but I had never seen it any other way. Porters scrambled by in their red jackets—past the waxed wooden benches and the ornamental palms and the well-dressed travelers headed home or away with anticipation. By morning, I would be with Ernest again and all would be well, and this was my only thought as I moved through the station and handed my bags to a porter. He helped me onto the train, put the big suitcase with my clothes on the rack up high, and placed the small valise under my seat, where I could reach it. The train was nearly empty. We had half an hour before departure, so I went to stretch my legs and get a newspaper. I threaded through the station, past the vendors with their apples and cheese and Evian water, the rented blankets and pillows and warm wrapped sandwiches and little flasks of brandy. When the conductor called for boarding I hurried onto the train with the stream of passengers and found my compartment just as it was before. Except for the small valise.

It wasn’t under my seat. I didn’t see it anywhere.

In a panic, I called for the conductor.

“Is there something I can do?” my seatmate said while I waited for him to appear. She was a middle-aged American who seemed to be traveling alone. “I can lend you something of mine to wear.”

“It isn’t clothing!” I shrieked, and the poor woman turned away, understandably horrified. When the conductor finally arrived, he didn’t seem to understand, either. I couldn’t stop crying long enough to find the right words in my terrible French. Finally he called over two French policemen, who led me outside the train and interrogated me while everyone stared. They asked for my identification cards, which one officer examined while the other asked me to describe the bag and my actions in detail.

“It was yours, this valise?”

“My husband’s.”

“Is he on board?”

“No, he’s in Switzerland. I was bringing it to him. It’s his work. Three
years
’ worth of work,” and here I lost any remaining composure. I felt sick with rising dread. “Why are you standing here questioning me?” My voice pitched shrilly. “He’s getting away! He’s probably long gone by now!”

“Your husband, madame?”

“The thief, you idiot!”

“We cannot help you if you’re going to be hysterical, madame.”

“Please.” I felt as if I might lose my mind. “Please just search the train. Search the station.”

“Can you estimate the value of the case and its contents?”

“I don’t know,” I said in a fog. “It’s his
work.
”

“Yes, so you said. We’ll do what we can.” And the two men walked off officiously.

The conductor agreed to hold the train for another ten minutes while the police performed their search. They walked from one end of the train to the other asking the passengers if they’d seen the bag. I didn’t for a moment believe that whoever had stolen it was still on the train. It had obviously been a common pickpocket who’d seen an opportunity and taken it, hoping for valuables. Instead, it contained every thought and sentence Ernest had sweated over since we came to Paris and well before, the Chicago stories and sketches, every poem and fragment. He never threw anything away, and it was all there.