The Paris Wife (19 page)

I’d put the novel down and climbed into bed to try for a nap when Ernest came in. His hair was damp and crushed from his wool hat, and his face was pink from the cold. He sat on the bed near me and I saw that his eyes had softened considerably. Time away with Chink had done him some good.

“You look very warm,” he said. “Do you mind if I share your cocoon?”

“Of course. If you think that’s a good idea.”

“I stopped at the chemist’s in the village,” he said, and took the little tin of condoms out of his trouser pocket.

“I’m surprised. You always say you hate them.”

“Not as much as being away from you.”

I looked at his trim belly and flanks as he undressed. “You’re very beautiful,” I said.

“So are you, Tatie.”

As he climbed into bed, his skin chilly against mine, it began to snow outside. We pressed ourselves together in a crush on the featherbed, his hands wonderfully rough, his hip bones sharp against my thighs. Later I would see plum-colored bruises there, and the skin on my face and breasts would be chapped and pink from where he hadn’t shaved, but for now there was only wordless desire and a feeling of return. He’d left me for a time. He’d doubted me, but now he was mine again and I wanted to keep him here in a tangle of limbs and bedsheets until I’d quieted every last voice and we were only right again.

After three weeks at Chamby, when we were well fed and sun chapped and had parted ways with Chink, we headed off to Rapallo, on the Italian Riviera, where the Pounds had a rented villa.

“Ezra thinks he’s discovered the place,” Ernest said on the train. “Though Wordsworth and Keats had a go at it before him.”

“Ezra thinks he’s discovered trees and the sky.”

“You have to admire the guy anyway, though, don’t you?”

“I don’t have to, but I will, I guess. For you.”

After traveling south for a full day and more, we were finally near Genoa, where the countryside grew ever more springlike and lovely.

“This is heaven,” I said. “I had no idea it would be so beautiful.” Through our window I caught glimpses of the sea, quick bursts of frothed blue, then dark rock again, then the sea. “Aren’t we lucky to be so happy, Tiny?” I said, just as we entered a mountain tunnel.

“Sure we are,” he said and kissed me. The sound of the train bounced against black rock, roaring in our ears.

When we arrived at Rapallo, I thought the town was charming, with its pale pink and yellow hotels on the shoreline, its quiet empty harbor. Ernest disliked it on sight.

“There’s no one here,” he said when we got to our hotel.

“Who should be?”

“I don’t know. It just doesn’t seem to have any life, this place.” He stood at the window in our room that faced the shore. “Doesn’t the sea seem a bit spineless to you?”

“It looks like the sea,” I said, and came up behind him and put my arms around him tightly. I knew it wasn’t the place that was troubling him. During our last week at Chamby, I had woken several mornings to find him at the small desk in our room, the sharpened pencil lifeless next to his hand, his blue
cahier
open but empty. He still wasn’t working, and the longer that went on, the harder it would be to start again. He was utterly determined to do it. He
would
do it. But how?

We played tennis every day in Rapallo and had long lunches with the Pounds in their terraced garden. Another couple arrived to join us on holiday, Mike Strater, a painter friend of Pound’s, and his wife, Maggie. They had a delicious-looking baby girl, with wisps of yellow hair and gray eyes. I liked to watch her exploring the world just beyond her blanket, plucking fistfuls of grass and staring at her hand intently, as if it held the secret to something. Meanwhile, Ernest and Mike ducked and lunged in a boxing match on the nearby flagstones. Aside from being a very good painter, Mike was athletic and game for a good deal, and I could tell Ernest liked him immediately. Mike was a much better physical match for Ernest than Pound, who tried very hard in his blustery way but had a poet’s delicate hands.

February was a changeable time in Italy. Some days were hung with mist, blotting out the hills behind the town until we felt very remote. The palm trees dripped and the swallows hid away somewhere. Sometimes the air was humid and drenched with sun. We could walk in the piazza or along the promenade to see fishermen on the concrete pier, dangling their poles out into the tide. The village was famous for its lace, and I liked to scan the shopwindows looking for the best pieces to send home as gifts while Ernest took long walks into the rocky hillside with Ezra, talking about Italian troubadours and the questionable virtues of automatic writing. Ernest liked to say he didn’t want his mind shut off when he was working because it was the only thing he had going for him. True enough, but when he was through for the day, he couldn’t turn his thoughts off without a glass of whiskey, and occasionally not even then. When he wasn’t writing at all, like now, it was often more than he could take. This was hard to watch and I worried about him.

A week into our stay in Rapallo, I had something new to unsettle me, however. I woke feeling dizzy, with a strange roaring in my head. I tried to eat breakfast but couldn’t stomach it, and returned to bed.

“It must have been the mussels we had last night,” I said to Ernest, and stayed in our room until midday, when the feeling passed.

The next morning, when the same symptoms hit at precisely the same time, I forgave the mussels and began instead to count the days forward and back. We’d arrived in Chamby just before Christmas and a few days after my monthly bleeding. It was now February 10, and I hadn’t had another period. When Ernest left the room to meet Ezra, I found his cache of notebooks and studied the one in particular that could illuminate my situation. Sure enough, for the last year I’d never been late by more than a day or two. This was a week at least, maybe ten days. I felt a small thrill of excitement, but didn’t say anything to Ernest. It wasn’t a certainty yet, and I was too afraid of what he would say.

I couldn’t keep my secret forever, though. I could hardly stand the sight of food and even the smell of whiskey or a cigarette turned me green. Ernest was thankfully content to blame the exotic food, but Shakespear was growing suspicious. One afternoon as we sat at a table in the garden watching Ernest and Mike practicing tennis serves at one another, she looked at me with her head cocked and said, “There’s something different about you these days, isn’t there?”

“It’s my newly revealed cheekbones,” I said. “I’ve lost five pounds.”

“Maybe,” she said thoughtfully, but there was a strange clarity in her look that made me think she’d guessed the truth.

I tried to ignore it and said, “You seem to be reducing, too, my dear. You’re fading away.”

“I know. It’s this business with Olga Rudge,” she said with a sigh.

She’d long since told me about Olga, a concert violinist who’d been Pound’s mistress for more than a year. “What’s happened?” I asked. “Has something changed?”

“Not really. I expect him to be in love with half a dozen women, that’s simply who he is, but this one seems different. The affair’s not waning for one thing. And she’s appearing in the
Cantos
, well disguised in myth, of course. But I can see her.” She shook her pretty head as if to clear the image. “She’s dug in. I wonder if we’ll ever be free of her now.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “But it seems to me you’re awfully tolerant of him. I don’t understand marriage this way at all. I suppose I’m a Puritan.”

She shrugged gracefully. “Mike Strater’s in the middle of something now, too. An actress, I hear.”

“Oh, God. Does Maggie know?”

“Everyone knows. He’s gone off his head.”

“He doesn’t look it.”

“No,” Shakespear said, “but they never do. Men are stoics when it comes to matters of the heart.”

“You seem very stoic to me, too.”

“Yes,” she said. “But I work impossibly hard at it, darling.”

Ezra was famous for his roving affections; I expected nothing less from him. But the news about Mike Strater had thrown me, because he and Maggie looked so solid. I’d been watching and admiring them and their daughter, and stitching a fantasy about how our child—mine and Ernest’s—could squeeze in naturally at ringside and change very little about our lives or Ernest’s work. Now that dream was punctured. This baby was almost certainly coming, but into what?

Marriage could be such deadly terrain. In Paris, you couldn’t really turn around without seeing the result of lovers’ bad decisions. An artist given to sexual excess was almost a cliché, but no one seemed to mind. As long as you were making something good or interesting or sensational, you could have as many lovers as you wanted and ruin them all. What was really unacceptable were bourgeois values, wanting something small and staid and predictable, like one true love, or a child.

Later that afternoon, when we went back to our room at the Hotel Splendide, it began to rain hard and looked as if it wouldn’t ever stop. I stood at the window and watched it, feeling a growing worry.

“Mike Strater’s in love with some actress in Paris,” I said to Ernest from the window. “Did you guess?”

He sat on top of the bedclothes reading W. H. Hudson’s
Green Mansions
for the hundredth time. He barely looked up. “I don’t think it means anything. Ezra says he’s quite the philanderer.”

“When
does
it mean something? When everyone finally gets smashed to bits?”

“Is this what’s gotten into you today? It doesn’t concern us in the least.”

“Doesn’t it?”

“Of course not. You don’t catch infidelity like the measles.”

“You like him, though.”

“I do. He’s a good painter. He wants to come by here tomorrow and do my portrait. Yours, too, maybe, so you’d better find a less troubled face by then.” He smiled lightly and went back to his book.

Outside the rain picked up and the wind canted it sideways, so that the boats in the harbor tipped dangerously.

“I’m hungry,” I said.

“Then eat something.” He didn’t look up.

“If it would stop raining, we could eat in the garden on the flagstones.”

“It’s going to rain all day. Just eat something already or be quiet.”

I walked over to the mirror and studied myself impatiently.

“I want to grow my hair out again. I’m tired of looking like a boy.”

“You don’t,” he said to the book. “You’re perfect.”

“A perfect boy. I’m sick of it.”

“You’re just hungry. Have a pear.”

I watched him with his head bent over into his book. He’d been letting his hair grow, and now it was nearly the same length as mine. We had begun to look a bit alike, in fact, just as Ernest said he wished we might, long ago on a star-hung rooftop in Chicago. But we wouldn’t look this way for long. In a few months I would feel and see the roundness at my waist. It was unavoidable.

“If I had long lovely hair, I’d tie it up at my neck and it would be silky and perfect and I wouldn’t care about anything else.”

“Hmmm?” he said. “So do it.”

“I will. I’m going to.”

There was a pair of tiny nail scissors on the bureau under the mirror. On impulse, I took them up and trimmed a little hair under one ear, and then the other.

He watched me and laughed curiously. “You’ve lost your mind, you know.”

“Maybe. Now you.” I went over and straddled his waist, then snipped away at the hair under his ears until it matched mine. Tucking the hair into my shirt pocket, I said, “Now we’re just the same.”

“You’re a strange one today.”

“You’re not in love with any actress in Paris, are you?”

“God, no.” He laughed.

“Violinist?”

“No one.”

“And you’ll stay with me always?”

“What is it, Kitty? Tell me.”

I met his eyes then. “I’m going to have a baby.”

“Now?” The alarm registered immediately.

“In the fall.”

“Please tell me it’s not true.”

“But it is. Be happy, Tiny. I want this.”

He sighed. “How long have you known?”

“Not long. A week, maybe.”

“I’m not ready for this, not nearly.”

“You might be by then. You might even be glad for it.”

“It’s been a hell of a few months.”

“You’ll work again. I know it’s coming.”

“Something’s coming,” he said darkly.

The next few days were tense and difficult for us. Some part of me had hoped that Ernest’s arguments against a baby only went so deep, and that as soon as he knew one was really coming, he’d be happy, or at least happy for
me
. But he didn’t seem to be budging an inch in my direction. Our days looked very much the same as before, but I felt the distance between us and wondered how we’d bridge it to find each other again.

Then, in the midst of my brooding, a new guest arrived at the Pounds’ villa. His name was Edward O’Brien, and he was a writer and editor staying in the hills above the town, near the Albergo Montallegro monastery. Ezra had heard he was there and invited him down for lunch.

“O’Brien edits a collection of the year’s best stories,” Pound said, making the introductions out on the terrace near the tennis courts. “He’s been doing it since the war.” Turning to Ernest, he said, “Hemingway here writes a damned good story. He’s really very good.”

“I’m gathering material for the 1923 edition now,” O’Brien said to Ernest. “Do you have anything on hand?”

It was only luck that he did. Out of his satchel, he pulled a ragged copy of the jockey story, “My Old Man,” which Lincoln Steffens had since sent back. He handed it over to O’Brien, and then told an abbreviated story of how his work had been lost. “So this piece,” he said dramatically, “is all I have left. Just this last thing, like a small piece of the prow of a ship that’s rotting at the bottom of the sea.”

“Well, that’s very poetic,” O’Brien said, and he took the story up the hill to consider it.

When he’d left, I said to Ernest, as quietly as I could, “I wish you hadn’t talked that way to O’Brien. It makes me sick to my stomach.”

“Maybe that’s the baby, then.”

“Are you angry with me?”