The Paris Wife (25 page)

“Are you quite all right?” Don said. “You’ve gone white.”

“Oh. Quite fine, thanks.”

He’d followed my eyes to Ernest and the woman. I’m sure everything was quite plain to him, but he smoothly deflected the moment. “That’s Duff Twysden,” he said. “Lady Twysden, actually. They say she married some British count. Count or viscount or lord twice removed. I can’t keep royalty straight.”

“Yes, well. Who can?”

I looked over at Ernest just as his eyes came up. The briefest crackling of suspicion passed between us, and then he got up and came over.

“ ’Scuse me, Don. I see you’ve met my wife.”

“Charmed,” Don said, before Ernest took my elbow and led me to the table where Duff sat expectantly.

“Lady Twysden,” he said, making the introductions. “Or do you prefer Smurthwaite these days?”

“Doesn’t matter as long as it’s Duff.” She half stood, extending a hand. “How d’you do?”

I was just collecting myself to say something pleasant when Kitty appeared out of the crowd. “God, I’m glad to see you,” she said. “Come let’s get a drink.”

Harold was just behind her and looking not at all well. He was pale and his upper lip was damp.

“Has something happened?” I asked, when we were nearer the bar.

“Harold’s leaving me.”

“You’re joking.”

“I wish I were.” She lit a cigarette and stared at the tip for a moment before inhaling in short stabs of breath. “Some restlessness has come in and taken him over. We always said we’d give each other every freedom. Funny, though, when it comes you don’t want it.”

“Is it someone else?”

“Isn’t it always?” She sighed. “It’s probably the new book, too. He wants to reinvent everything. I’m going to London soon. I wanted you to know.”

“Oh, Kitty, really? Is it as bad as all that?”

“Looks like it,” she said. “I have some things for you I can’t bear to pack. I’ll come over to the house.”

“I don’t care about the dresses. I don’t need them.”

“Nonsense.”

“You know what Ernest will say.”

She huffed, blowing out smoke. “Yes, but he hasn’t a clue how hard it is to be a woman.” She tossed her head in Duff’s direction. “It’s brutal out here, isn’t it? The competition isn’t just younger. They care more. They throw everything they’ve got into it.”

I didn’t quite know what to say. Kitty was one of the most poised and self-confident women I’d ever known, and here she was knocked off her feet and set spinning. It made me want to break Harold’s neck.

“Do you want to go home?” I asked.

“I can’t wither like a schoolgirl and have everyone feeling sorry for me. I’d die first. Let’s have champagne,” she said, putting on her bravest face. “Lots and lots of champagne.”

I stayed by Kitty’s side for the rest of the evening, but kept one eye on Ernest, too. This Duff character was just too lovely and too familiar. She and Ernest talked so freely you’d think they’d known each other for years, and I felt newly vulnerable after hearing Kitty’s news. The worst events always have the thrust of accidents, as if they come out of nowhere. But that’s just lack of perspective. Kitty was blindsided, but Harold had likely been plotting his escape for months. I couldn’t help but wonder if this could happen to me, too. Just how long had Duff been in the picture, anyway?

Sometime after midnight, when I just couldn’t stay awake another moment, I excused myself from Kitty and got Ernest’s attention. “It’s time to get your poor wife to bed,” I said. “I’m nearly falling over.”

“Poor Cat,” he said. “Go on home, then. Do you want me to find someone to walk with you?”

“You want to stay?” I asked sharply. Duff turned politely away.

“Of course. What’s the matter? I’m not the one who’s beat, right?”

My voice left me altogether, then, but Kitty appeared to save me. “I’ll mind your wife, Hem. You stay and have a good time.” She challenged him with a steely look, but he didn’t bite.

“That’s a good chap, Kitty. Thanks.” He stood and squeezed my arm in a brotherly way. “Get some rest.”

I nodded in a kind of trance while Kitty grabbed me firmly by the arm and led me away. When we were outside, I started to cry quietly. “I’m so embarrassed,” I said.

Kitty gave me a firm, buck-up sort of embrace. “He’s the one who should be embarrassed, darling. Her, too. They say she has to keep scores of men around because she can’t pay her own bills.”

“Duff,” I said. “Who calls themselves such a thing?”

“Exactly. I’d bet good money that even someone with as little sense as Hem wouldn’t leave a woman like you for that number. C’mon. Chin up.”

“You’ve been so good to me, Kitty. I can’t tell you how much I’ll miss you.”

“I know. I’m going to miss you, too, but what choice do I have? All I can do is run off to London and hope Harold chases me.”

“Will he?”

“I honestly don’t know.”

When I got home, Bumby was awake and gumming tearfully on a small rubber ring.

Marie looked at me apologetically. “He had a terrible dream, I think. Poor dear. He wouldn’t let me soothe him.”

“Thank you for staying so late, Marie.” When she’d gone I tried to settle Bumby, but he was whiny and fitful. It took me more than an hour to get him back to sleep, and by the time I fell into bed myself, I was so tired I felt delirious—but I couldn’t rest. I’d been feeling so strong and content with our life, but Kitty was right. The competition was getting fiercer all the time. Paris was filled with enticing women. They sat in the cafés with their fresh faces and long lovely legs and waited for something outrageous to happen. Meanwhile, my body had changed with motherhood. Ernest claimed to love my fleshier hips and breasts, but with so much else to look at, he could easily lose interest in me. Maybe he already had—and what could I do about it? What did anyone do?

When Ernest came home some time later, I was still awake and so tired I began to cry. I couldn’t help myself.

“Poor Mummy,” he said, climbing into bed beside me and holding me close. “I didn’t know you were so worn down. Let’s get you a nice long break.”

“God yes,” I said, feeling a flood of relief. “Someplace very far from here.”

Our “someplace very far” was the little village of Schruns in the Austrian Vorarlberg. We arrived just before Christmas 1924, and from our first day, we felt more at home there than we could have imagined. For less than half of what we spent each week in Paris, we had two comfortable rooms at the Taube Hotel and a nanny, Tiddy, to take Bumby around. There were thirty-eight kinds of beer and red wine and brandy and kirsch and champagne. The air was champagne. Bumby could breathe better at Schruns; we all could. Tiddy would pull him through the village on his wooden sleigh while Ernest worked, or tried to, in our room when the breakfast was done, and I practiced downstairs at the piano, which was there all for my having in the warm room. In the afternoons, after hard cheese and sausages and heavy bread and sometimes oranges, we’d ski.

We did a lot of skiing. A retired professional skier, Walther Lent, had opened a school, and we were his students. For weeks on end, there was only the pure white predictable crispness of snow. We’d hike for hours, up and up, because what good was it if we weren’t at the very top of something, with no one else around and no tracks or memory of anyone else, anywhere? Skiing this way took strength—incredible strength and stamina. There weren’t any lifts or trams. We carried our skis on our shoulders and anything else we’d need in rucksacks. To my great surprise, I could actually do it. Leaving Paris had been the best thing for me. I was sleeping well, I had help with the baby, and the fresh air and exercise had made me feel stronger and more fit than ever. On our slow climb up the long valley we’d see ptarmigan and deer and marten, sometimes a white Alpine fox. On the way down, we were aware only of virgin snow; the plunge and flight of glacier runs, great clouds of powder rising from our skis. I was the better skier, but Ernest was the better devourer of anything new—new air, new mantle of eggshell snow. We dropped and dropped. We flew.

If you leaned from our second-story window at the Taube, pushing the top of your body out and holding on to the stucco walls with your fingertips, you could see no fewer than ten Alps dipped in snow.

“How do you like that?” Ernest said the first time he tried this trick and then stood aside for me.

“I like it very much,” I said. By then he’d come and pressed himself against me, his arms coming full around until it was really him holding me there in case I should want to fall. “I like it very much,” I said again, because I had two strong arms and ten Alps in sight. He pulled me into the room and we lay down on the featherbed and made love. And I was reminded of what was best about us. How very easy and natural we could be as bodies, with no sharp angles or missteps and no need for talking. How in bed, as nowhere else, he was my favorite animal and I was his.

Behind the hotel there was a low hill where I practiced my skiing in the new snow while Ernest tried to work without much success. For the work alone he was missing Paris, the busyness of the city and his routine. Generally, if the work wasn’t good, nothing was, but at Schruns there was a softer bunting around the day. I could ski on the hill and know that he was looking out over the pasture, the farms and fields, and feeling tight in his head but not unhappy. And sometimes he was watching me race straight down the hill, low on my skis, coming fast at the hotel and turning sharply at the last minute.

Ernest grew a fierce black beard that winter and looked magnificent in it. The work wasn’t coming, but there were rounds of bowling and poker by the fire in the evenings and schnapps, made from mountain gentians, that felt hot and tonicy and blue on your tongue and in your throat, just what you’d think drinking violets might be like. The hotel’s dining room was thick with smoke in the evenings. After dinner, I’d play the Bach or Haydn I’d practiced earlier in the day. Ernest would read Turgenev in his chair by the fire or play poker and smoke or talk about the war with Herr Nels, our proprietor. The wood smoke and the wool, the snow and the lovemaking—all of it warm and winding about us, building the good winter.

The only thing that wasn’t perfect during this time was Ernest’s worrying about his career. It didn’t reassure him that all his friends were convinced of his talent, or that the reviews of
Three Stories and Ten Poems
had been nearly ecstatic. It was a little book, not at all on scale with his big dreaming. He’d sent his family several copies hot off the press, and they’d been returned with a chilly letter from Ernest’s father saying he and Grace weren’t comfortable having such material in the house. It was vulgar and profane at best. They wanted great things for him and hoped he would someday find a way to use his God-given talent to write something with strong morals and virtues. Until he did, he shouldn’t feel compelled to send anything he published home. The letter stung Ernest to the core. No matter what he said, he still deeply wanted his family’s approval.

“To hell with them, anyway,” he said, but he kept the letter, folding it carefully and putting it in the drawer where he stored all of his important correspondence.
Families can be vicious
, he was fond of saying, and I could see what he meant clearly now. I could also see how he used the damage, pushing against it, redoubling his efforts to show them he didn’t need their love or endorsement. He would keep fighting until he had
Vanity Fair
and the
Saturday Evening Post
. Until an American editor took a chance on him and he had a book, a real one, published the way he’d always dreamed.

It didn’t help his mood that things were taking off for Harold. He’d finished his novel when he said he would, sent it directly off to Boni and Liveright. And they’d taken it. We got the news just before we left for Schruns. Harold had come to the apartment fairly bursting with excitement. “What do you know, Hem. Did you ever think it would hit for me?”

“Sure, why not?” Ernest had said. He was seething with professional jealousy, of course, but he held his tongue and behaved, opening a bottle of brandy and bringing the siphon over. “Anderson’s been trying to get me to go with Liveright, too. I have a handful of good stories, and I’m thinking of sending them off with the sketches I’ve been doing, the miniatures.”

“They’re just the place to do it,” Harold said. “What are you waiting for?”

“I don’t know. There are other fish in the sea, right? What about Scribner’s? Or Henry Doran?”

“Wherever you land, you’ll do what’s best. It’s all going to happen for you, too. You’ll see.”

I knew with a certainty that Ernest would have leaped at the chance to have any major publisher do the book, but with a lot of cajoling from me and Harold and Sherwood too, Ernest finally mailed the manuscript to Boni and Liveright just before Christmas. He’d settled on the title
In Our Time
because he’d tried to get to the heart of life at this very moment, with all its violence and chaos and strange beauty. It was the best work he’d done, and he felt good about having sent it off into the world, but the wait for a response was torturing him. When forwarded mail arrived for us at the Taube, Ernest raked through it impatiently looking for one thing, an acceptance letter. It was all he’d ever wanted.

At the end of February, Herr Lent led us up the valley to the Madlenerhaus, an Alpine station that stayed open even in the late winter. It had a good simple kitchen and a dormitory that rocked in high winds like the berth of a great ship. From there, we could hike five hundred meters up the slope and plunge down again along the Silvretta, a pristine glacier, our skis kicking up untouched powder. After skiing all day we’d drop into bed at night exhausted.

“Let’s not ever go back,” I said to Ernest one night as we lay in our bunk in the dormitory listening to snow and wind and nothing else.

“All right,” he said, holding me more tightly. “Aren’t we lucky to be so in love? No one thought we’d make it this far. No one was on our side at all, do you remember that?”

“Yes,” I said, and felt a small chill. We couldn’t hide from the world forever.