The Paris Wife (28 page)

“I can’t believe this is sport for you,” Bill said to Ernest very quietly.

“What else would it be? It’s life and death, brother, same as every day.”

The bull came forward, leading with the right horn, his thick head swung to one side so he looked like the devil, really, barreling at the scrambling caballero. But then a hand appeared from the other side of the wall. We couldn’t see who had offered help, but it was enough. The caballero got enough traction to run up the wall and over, and then he was free. A small cheer went up in the crowd when he was safe.

“I suppose you’re disappointed,” Bill said, looking at Ernest pointedly.

“Not at all.”

“Would he have gotten it very bad?” Duff asked.

“Maybe he would have. It can happen. I’ve seen it.”

“It’s terribly exciting, isn’t it?” she said.

“The best damned show there is.”

The last bull ran by us, and then the
pastores
came behind the bulls with sticks, and then the rocket went off, which meant all the bulls were safely in the ring.

“Beautiful,” Duff said.

I tried to remember if I thought them beautiful the first time, when Ernest had taught me the way he was teaching Duff now. My life had changed so much in the two short years since, but I remembered being excited and also strangely calm, because I was pregnant and felt safe, buffered from everything in the best way. My body was doing what it was meant to do, and these animals, they were living out their destinies, too. I could watch and not feel mauled or traumatized, but just sit next to Ernest and sew the clothes and blankets I was working on for the baby that would come in three months, no matter what happened on that day. And I remembered feeling very good about everything in the night, with the
riau-riau
dancing and the fireworks, though it was impossible to sleep for the noise.

We seemed to be the only Americans in Pamplona that first year. Ernest called it the Garden of Eden—but that had certainly changed now. Limousines brought society over from Biarritz. Uniformed chauffeurs opened doors all night and then waited near their cars for the revelers to tire and spill back into the leather cocoon stinking of champagne. But even with the rich coming in to spoil everything, it was spoiled already.

Harold was still crazy for Duff. You could see it at lunch when he went pale and Victorian with her one minute and then began to fuss with the waiter to make sure she had her drink.

“Oh, it’s fine, darling,” she said. “I’m still alive over here, at least for now.”

We were all crowded around an outdoor table, with Duff, Ernest, and Harold on one side and Pat, Bill, and myself on the other. Pat had on a beautiful summer suit with a navy linen jacket. He’d gone out and found a beret just like Ernest’s and wore it high on his forehead at an optimistic angle. And yet for all of Pat’s civilized trimmings, the moment Harold became too conspicuously attentive to Duff, he snapped and grew belligerent.

“Give it a rest, Harold,” he barked. “Go take a walk around the block.”

“Why don’t you shut it,” Harold said. “Or I’ll tell you what, just have another drink.” He turned and shouted loudly behind him to no one, “Bring this man a drink!”

Just then Don Stewart walked up looking cool and clean in gray flannels and a fresh white shirt. He glanced around the table, instantly sensing tension. “Who died, men?”

“No one of consequence,” Ernest said.

“I suddenly have a terrible headache,” I said. “I hope you’ll all excuse me.” I scooted around my side of the table and stood next to Don.

“Why don’t you walk the poor kid home, Donald?” Ernest said.

“I’m fine,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”

“Nonsense,” Don said. “You’re pale as a ghost.”

Before we’d even gotten to the door, the gap had closed around the table and you couldn’t even tell I’d been there. Ernest was sitting closer to Duff now, and Pat had squeezed around to be nearer, too. Duff sat at the middle of it all like a floating island of meringue. She didn’t even seem to notice.

I was grateful that Don had offered to shepherd me home. I was feeling terribly lonely, actually, and Don was easy to be with. Ever since we’d met the summer before, he sought my company when we were out in groups together. I felt he was a kindred spirit because he didn’t quite fit in Paris either. He was a smart and savvy writer who’d gone to Yale, but in many ways he was still the boy who grew up on a farm outside of Columbus, Ohio. In Paris, everyone was so drastic and dramatic, flinging themselves into ditches for each other.

“I get why no one bothers with the usual rules,” he said to me once. “I was in the war, too, you know. Nothing looks or feels the same anymore, so what’s the point?” His face grew serious. “Still, I miss good old-fashioned honorable people just trying to make something of life. Simply, without hurting anyone else. I know that makes me a sap.”

“You’d like to find a girl like your mother, I’ll bet.”

“Maybe. I want things to make sense again. They haven’t in a long time.”

I believed I’d understood him at the time, but now as Don walked me back to the hotel, I felt our connection more strongly. I wanted things to make sense, too. More than anything.

“How are you holding up, pal?” he asked.

“Better than some, I expect. Poor Harold.”

“Poor Harold? What about Pat? He’s the one with the claim to Duff.”

“Seems like they have a pretty loose arrangement to me,” I said. “She drags Harold off to the Riviera for two weeks and then seems surprised that he’s mooning over her like a sad calf, and even more that Pat’s off his head about it. It’s cruel.”

“I don’t think she means to be cruel. She seems awfully sad under it all to me.”

We’d come to a corner where the Mercado was breaking apart for the day. A woman was stacking baskets, and another scooped blood-colored dried chiles into a canvas sack. Nearby, a little girl sat in the dirt, holding a chicken and singing to it. I slowed so we could watch her longer. Wonderfully black hair framed her heart-shaped face. She petted the chicken as she sang and seemed to have it in a trance.

“You’re looking at her like you want to gobble her up,” Don said. “You must miss your Bumby.”

“Like crazy. It’s easier when I don’t think about him. Sometimes I tell myself I’m two people. I’m his mum when I’m with him and someone else when I’m here, away.”

“Hem’s Hadley.”

“Maybe. Or maybe I’m my own Hadley.” We could see the stippled arch of the Hotel La Perla and the tangled wall of bougainvillea. I stopped and turned to him. “Why aren’t you all bound up with Duff, too? Everyone else is.”

“She’s a dish, all right, and it would be easy enough to give in. She’s asked me to take care of her bill at the hotel, you know, since she can’t ask Harold now. Maybe she’s asked Hem, too.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“Are you and Hem all right? He wouldn’t be stupid enough to throw you over for that title in a nice-fitting sweater, would he?”

I flinched. “Maybe we should have a drink.”

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said it. I think the world of you two. If you guys can’t make it, what chance do the rest of us have?”

“You really are a peach, Don,” I said, and moved forward to kiss him on the cheek. His skin was shaved clean as a baby’s and he smelled clean, like tonic.

“You might be the best girl there is,” he said with feeling, and returned the kiss. His lips were dry and chaste on my cheek, but then he moved ever so slightly and kissed me on the lips. When he pulled away, his eyes were moist and questioning. “I don’t suppose you love me, too, just a little?”

“I wish I did. It might balance things out.” I put my arms around his neck and held him close for a moment, feeling the sadness and confusion, all mixed up together in him. “This place has us all going crazy.”

“You’re not angry with me?”

“No,” I said. “We’re better friends now, I think.”

“Isn’t that a nice way to say it? I knew I wasn’t wrong about you.” He pulled away and brushed the hair out of my eyes. “I hope Hem knows what he has.”

“Me too,” I said, and went into the hotel. Inside, the señora was placing a cloth over her songbird’s cage.

“He doesn’t like the rockets,” she said as she settled the blanket more closely around the bars. “They make him tear at his own feathers. Have you seen this?”

“I have, Señora.” I passed her on my way to the staircase. “Can you please send brandy up?”

She looked behind me to see who might be coming along, so I added, “Just one glass.”

“Is the señora well?”

“Not very,” I said. “But the brandy will help.”

When I woke the next morning, Ernest was already up and gone. I’d heard him come in late in the night, but I didn’t stir and didn’t speak to him. By seven I was washed and dressed and down in the hotel’s small café where Ernest was finishing his coffee.

“I’ve ordered you
oeufs au jambon,
” he said. “Are you hungry?”

“Starved,” I said. “How’d it end last night?”

“Good and tight,” he said.

“Good and tight, or just tight?”

“What are you getting at?”

“Nothing.”

“Like hell,” he said. “Why don’t you say it?”

“I haven’t even had coffee,” I said. “Do we really need to quarrel?”

“We needn’t do anything. There isn’t time anyway.”

Bill came downstairs then and pulled up a chair. “I’m starved,” he said.

“That’s going around,” Ernest said. He signaled the waiter over and asked for another plate for Bill and café au lait, and then signed the bill. “I’m going to arrange for our tickets. I’ll see you up there.”

When he was gone, Bill looked sheepish.

“What really happened last night?”

“Nothing I want to remember,” he said.

“Don’t tell me then.”

“I don’t know all of it, anyway. Harold said something to Pat, and then Hem flared up and called Harold something terrible. It wasn’t pretty.”

“I would guess not.”

“Don showed up and tried to straighten things out, but it was too late. Harold had called Ernest out in the street to settle it.”

“Harold did? It wasn’t the other way around?”

“No. And that was something, really.”

“Is Harold all right?”

“Right as rain. They never touched each other.”

“Thank God.”

“Apparently Hem offered to hold Harold’s glasses for him and that broke the spell. They both laughed and felt like stupid bastards for even starting it up.”

“What’s wrong with all of us, Bill? Can you tell me that?”

“Hell if I know,” he said. “We drink too much for starters. And we want too much, don’t we?”

“What is it we want exactly?” I said, feeling a stir of melancholy and confusion. I wondered how Bill was making sense of the way Ernest was throwing himself so obviously at Duff. What
could
he think? What could he say?

“Everything, of course. Everything and then some.” He scratched his chin and then tried a joke. “My headache today proves it.”

I studied him for a moment. “If this is a festival, why aren’t we happy?”

He cleared his throat and looked away. “We shouldn’t miss the amateurs, right? Hem says it’s the best show for your money and that I should get right in.”

I sighed. “You don’t have to prove anything to him. You didn’t seem to go in for the running.”

“No,” he said, seeming slightly ashamed. “But I’m ready to give it another go. I’m not dead yet.”

“Why does everyone keep saying that?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s just one of those things.”

The amateurs had long been Ernest’s favorite element of the fiesta. For years he’d been practicing veronicas with everything from the curtains to my old coat and getting good at them. Now he could bulldog the bulls, spinning away at the last moment. Afterward he’d be high and happy and practice some more in our room at the hotel with the cape he’d bought from a shop well off the square that didn’t cater to tourists. The cape was heavy red serge with simple black braid as a border all the way around. He had started collecting corks for the bottom of it, because it was the corks that allowed the matador to really control the cape and swing it well and wide.

When it was time for the amateurs that morning, he took the cape with him as he climbed down into the ring with several dozen eager men and boys all ready to test their wits. Bill went, too, but Harold stayed put for the moment, a few seats down from Duff.

“Pat’s still pretty green this morning,” Duff said when I took my seat beside her. “It was a long night.”

“So I heard.”

“We missed you, you know. Everything’s more fun with you along.”

I gave her a sharp look, thinking she was putting me on, but her face was open and warm. That was the thing about Duff; she was a wreck with men, but a good chap all the way around, and she had her own code. I didn’t believe she’d actually sleep with Ernest even if he’d wanted to—because she liked me and knew being a wife was hard business. She’d been married twice already and was set to marry Pat if they ever pulled together the money for it. She told me once that she’d never been very good at marriage but that she didn’t seem to be able to stop giving it a go.

Down in the ring, the picadors had pretty good control of things, so the action seemed light and fairly harmless. There was only one bull in the ring at a time, and this first was caramel colored and slow moving. It came along and shoved its foreleg against Bill’s rump, and he fell to one side like a character in a cartoon. It had everyone laughing. Ernest was just getting into the spirit of things when Harold climbed past us and got down into the ring, too.

“Oh, Harold,” Duff said to no one in particular because he looked like a caricature of a rich and helpless American in his pale yellow Fair Isle sweater and snow-white sneakers. We both watched him. “I’ve told him there’s nothing between us, you know.”

“I’m not sure he hears it,” I said, trying to be as delicate as possible.

“Men hear what they like and invent the rest.”

Once Harold had reached the ring, he looked up to where we were and smiled broadly. The caramel bull was near him and getting nearer, and Harold dodged to one side to avoid the horns, as everyone did. The bull trotted past and then whirled to come again, and that’s when Harold grabbed onto the horns and let the bull carry him for a few paces. It was like watching a well-rehearsed circus act. Harold had to be as surprised by his success as much as anyone, but when the bull set him down again, light as a feather, he turned back to us, looking jubilant.