The Paris Wife (38 page)

Ernest had gone into the water and swum over, around the little cornice of rocks to where Pauline bobbed and waited for me.

“Let’s see you go, then,” he said, sweeping his arms back and forth as he treaded water.

“No marks and no corrections or I won’t do it at all,” I said.

“Don’t you want to get it right?” Ernest asked, squinting.

“No, actually. If I get it at all without smashing myself to hell on the rocks, it’ll be good enough.”

“Suit yourself, then.”

I stood at the edge and felt the hotness under my toes. I closed my eyes.

“Your arms should be straight up, touching your ears,” Pauline said.

“No corrections,” I said. I stood up tall and then arced my arms over my head. I listened for the shushing sound, but when I heard it, I found I couldn’t move. I was fixed there.

“C’mon, then, you’ve missed it,” Ernest said.

I didn’t answer him and didn’t open my eyes, and there was a moment of perfect vertigo, when I heard the whooshing of the surf again and felt I was part of it, swirling with it and also standing still, swept up and sewn into the sea and into the universe, but also very, very alone. When I finally looked down, here were these two wet heads in the slow-moving waves. They looked playful and natural as seals there, and suddenly I knew I wouldn’t jump and it had nothing to do with fear or embarrassment.

I wouldn’t jump because I didn’t want to join them. I felt the stones under my feet, smooth and hot, as I turned and climbed down slowly, undramatically.

“Hadley,” Ernest shouted after me, but I kept walking away from the beach, then down the road and toward the hotel. When I got to our room, I showered away all the sand and climbed into bed still wet and very clean and tired. The sheet was white and stiff and smelled like salt against my face. And as I closed my eyes, I made a wish that I would wake up feeling as strong and clear about things as I did just then.

When I woke up much later, I realized that Ernest hadn’t come to the room at all for siesta and that he must have gone to Pauline’s room instead. This was the first time he had gone to her in the daylight. Madame and Monsieur, the proprietors of the hotel, would know and everyone would know. With everything out in the open, it couldn’t ever go back to the way it was before.
All right, then
, I thought to myself.
Maybe it’s better this way
.

Just then the door to the room opened and Ernest came in. Pauline was behind him and they walked in together.

“We’ve been very worried about you,” Pauline said.

“You didn’t have any lunch. Are you feverish?” Ernest said. He came over and sat beside me on the bed and then Pauline sat on the other side, and they looked at me as if they were my parents. It was all so very strange and even absurd that I laughed.

“What’s funny?” Pauline said.

“Nothing at all,” I said, still smiling.

“She can be very mysterious, can’t she?” Pauline said to Ernest.

“Not usually, no,” Ernest said. “But she is now. What are you thinking, Cat? Are you well?”

“Maybe not,” I said. “I think I should rest through the evening. Do you mind?”

Pauline looked stricken and I realized she was truly worried about me, and that for whatever reason, maybe because her good Catholic upbringing urged kindness on her in the oddest moments, she needed me to be well and be her friend and approve of all of this. Approve of her taking my husband.

“Please go away,” I said to both of them.

Their eyes met over me.

“Really. Please.”

“Let me have Madame bring you something to eat,” Ernest said. “You’ll be sick if you don’t eat.”

“Fine. I don’t care.”

“Let me get it. I’d like to,” Pauline said, and she left to make arrangements about the meal the way a wife would.

“Everything’s handed over, then,” I said, once the door had closed behind her.

“What?”

“She can do everything now. She’ll take care of you just fine.”

“You’re not well. Just get some rest.”

“I’m not well, you’re right. You’re killing me, both of you.”

His eyes dropped to the sheet. “This isn’t easy for me either.”

“I know. We’re a sorry, sordid lot, the three of us. If we’re not careful, we’ll none of us get through it without terrible big chunks missing.”

“I’ve thought the same. What do you want? What will help?”

“I think it’s too late, don’t you?” I looked to the window where the light was fading rapidly. “You’d better leave soon or you’ll miss cocktails with the Murphys.”

“I don’t give a damn.”

“You do, though, and so does she. Just go. She’ll be the wife for tonight.”

“I hate to hear you talk this way. It makes me think we’ve ruined everything.”

“We have, Tatie,” I said sadly, and closed my eyes.

I’d like to say that that was the last of it; that what was made plain to us that afternoon forced us out of the arrangement altogether. We were in the death throes, truly, but something made us each go on for weeks afterward, the way the body of an animal goes on moving after its head is gone.

The next week was the beginning of fiesta in Pamplona. We’d made a plan very early that summer to take Gerald and Sara Murphy with us, and we followed through with all of it, while Bumby went off to Brittany with Marie Cocotte for several weeks, his cough having dried up and vanished into nothing.

We stayed at the Hotel Quintana that year, in rooms that were right across the hall from the rooms of the toreros. Every afternoon we sat in the best possible ringside seats that Gerald had paid for. Every evening we sat round the same table at the Café Iruna in dark wicker chairs and drank ourselves into a stupor. Ernest was as much of an
aficionado
as always and applied himself to Gerald and Pauline’s education as he had mine and Duff’s and Bill Smith’s and Harold Loeb’s and Mike Strater’s and anyone else’s who would listen. Gerald was very serious about learning about the corrida. Ernest took him to the amateurs and they both went down in the ring to test their nerve with the yearling bulls, Ernest bare-handed that year, and Gerald holding on to his raincoat with white knuckles. When a bull rushed Gerald at top speed, he managed to turn him off at the last moment by twitching his coat to one side.

“That was a perfect veronica, old boy,” Ernest said to Gerald later at the Iruna, but Gerald knew he wasn’t a tough or strong enough man to suit Ernest. He didn’t believe him and wouldn’t take the praise.

“I promise to do it better next year, Papa,” he said. “It matters to me that I truly do it well.”

I smiled at Gerald across the table, because I hadn’t done anything really well or truly for months. I was sad to my bones and Ernest was, too, and across the table Pauline looked as if she might burst into tears at any moment. We none of us were on our game. We none of us were living by our own standards.

At the end of that chaotic week, Pauline boarded the train for Bayonne with the Murphys. She was headed back to Paris, to work. We were off to San Sebastian because that was what we’d always planned to do. But at a certain point, I knew the plans wouldn’t hold anymore. The bottom would drop out of every day.

In San Sebastian there was a measure of peace with Pauline gone, but all that really meant was we could quarrel more freely, without interruption. We said nothing new to one another, but the old material still worked if we were loud and ugly enough with it.

“She’s a whore,” I told him. “And you’re selfish and a coward.”

“You don’t love me. You don’t love anything,” he said.

“I hate you both.”

“What do you want from me?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I wish you’d die.”

We embarrassed ourselves in cafés and taxicabs. We couldn’t sleep unless we drank too much, but if we crossed some line with the drinking, we couldn’t sleep at all, and then would just lie there beside one another, our eyes dry and red from crying, our throats clenched.

Pauline continued to write every day and her voice was like a wasp in my ear:
I’m missing my cherishables beyond reason. Please write to me, Hadley. I know we can all take care of each other and be happy. I just
know
it
.

“We can’t go on like this, can we?” Ernest said, picking up one of Pauline’s letters and then putting it down again. “Do you think we can?”

“I hope not.”

“The world’s gone to hell in every direction.”

“Yes,” I said.

“You make your life with someone and you love that person and you think it’s enough. But it’s never enough, is it?”

“I couldn’t say. I don’t know anything about love anymore. I just want to stop feeling for a while. Can we do that?”

“That’s what the whiskey’s for.”

“It’s letting me down, then,” I said. “I’m raw all over.”

“Let’s go home.”

“Yes, it’s time we do. But not together. That’s done.”

“I know it is,” he said.

We looked at each other across the room and saw everything plainly and couldn’t say anything more for a long time.

On our way back to Paris, we stopped overnight at Villa America, but we’d given up trying to fool anyone, even ourselves. Over cocktails at the beach, we told Gerald and Sara that we were splitting up.

“It can’t be,” Gerald said.

“It can. It is,” Ernest said, draining his glass. “But keep that coming, will you?”

Sara gave me a tender look—as tender as she was capable of—and then got up to mix another shaker of martinis.

“How will it work? Where will you live?” Gerald said.

“We haven’t quite worked that out yet,” I said. “It’s all very new.”

Gerald looked thoughtfully out to sea for several minutes and then said to Ernest, “I’ve got the studio, you know, at rue Froidevaux. It’s yours if you want it. As long as you need.”

“That’s damned good of you.”

“You have to count on your friends, right?”

When Sara came back, Don Stewart and his pretty new bride, Beatrice Ames, trailed her. They were honeymooning at a hotel in town.

“Donald,” I said, and embraced him warmly, but his face was pale and he looked uneasy, and so did Beatrice. Sara had obviously whispered our news on the way down to the beach. She’d made very good time.

More chairs were brought round the little mosaic table in the sand, and we all drank pointedly and watched the dusk come.

“I don’t mind saying I thought you two were indestructible,” Donald said.

“I know it,” Gerald said. He turned to Sara. “Haven’t I always said the Hemingways did marriage like no one else? That they seemed lassoed to some higher thing?”

“All right then,” Ernest broke in. “Let’s cut the postmortem, shall we? We’re sick enough as it is.”

“Let’s have something happy,” I said. “Tell us about the wedding, Don.”

Don flushed and looked to Beatrice. She was a very pretty Gibsongirl type, with a high forehead and red bow-shaped mouth, but just then she’d lost her composure. “I don’t think we should talk about it,” she said. “It doesn’t feel right.”

“Oh, that,” Ernest said. “You’ll get used to it.” His lips were tight and dry and his eyes were resigned. I could tell that all of this was going too fast for him but that he was playing through it anyway, following the gin and the blithe talk. The end had been coming for months and months, ever since our time at Schruns, but now that it was on us, we didn’t know what to do with it.

It wasn’t until the next afternoon, when we were on the train back to Paris, that the full weight of what was happening hit us both. The day was airless and oppressively hot, and the train was too full. We shared a sleeping compartment with an American woman who carried an intricately scrolled birdcage with a small yellow canary inside. Before we’d said more than hello to her, the woman launched into an elaborate story of how the bird was a present for her daughter who had been engaged to marry a Swiss engineer before she stepped in to break up the match. “I immediately saw how I needed to send him packing,” the woman said. “You know how the Swiss are.”

“Yes, of course,” Ernest said, tightening his lips around the words. He knew no such thing. “You’ll excuse me,” he said. “I think I’ll go and look for the porter.” When he came back, he was carrying a bottle of brandy and we drank it straight out of the water glasses on hand.

We were near Marseilles by then, and out the window everything seemed very dusty and white-gray—the olive trees, the farmhouses and fieldstone walls and hills in the distance. All of it looked strangely bleached out and the woman was somehow still talking about marriage and how she hoped her daughter would forgive her. I drank my brandy and had another and tried not to hear the woman at all. The bird chirped prettily, but I found I didn’t want to hear that either.

As evening fell, the woman finally closed her eyes and began to snore, her thick head nodding on her shoulders. We were coming into Avignon, where a farmhouse was on fire in a dry field. We could see the flames rising dramatically into the darkening sky and sheep running back and forth behind sagging fencing looking wild and panicked. The blaze must have announced itself early on, because much of the furniture was spread out in the field well away from the house while men worked to save what they could. I saw a pink enamel washtub and a rocking chair and a baby buggy on its side, and it was all utterly heartbreaking. This was someone’s life, a pile of furniture like matchsticks. It didn’t look rescued but abandoned—while smoke billowed in great plumes.

When we approached Paris, it was very near morning. Ernest and I had both slept very little all night, and we had talked very little as well. What we did was drink and look out the window, where it seemed the signs of destruction were unending. On the outskirts of the city, near Choisy-le-Roi, a wrecked baggage car steamed in a crush to one side of the tracks.

“Are we really going through with this?” I said to Ernest.

“I don’t know, are we?”

Just then, the American woman woke and stretched loudly and then took the velvet drape off the birdcage to wake the canary. Somehow it was morning and we were home, though it was hard to feel anything. I’d drunk so much brandy, my hands twitched with it and my heart thudded dully in my chest.