The Paris Wife

  He came into the dining room, where Bumby was eating bread and bananas. He sat down and I could feel each of us, even Bumby, exhaling into that space. Just to be at the same table.

  I brought out a bottle of wine and we had that, and then shared a very simple dinner.

  “Scribner’s Magazine is paying me a hundred and fifty dollars for a story,” he said.

  “That’s a lot of money, isn’t it?”

  “I should say. Maybe you ought not read it, though. It’s about our train ride back from Antibes with the canary woman. It won’t be very pleasant for you.”

  “All right, I won’t,” I said, wondering to myself if he’d put the burning Avignon farmhouse in the story, as well, and the caved-in smoldering train cars. “Do you want to do the baby’s bath?”

  He rolled up his sleeves and got out the washtub, then squatted on the floor beside it while Bumby played and splashed.

  “He’s almost too big for the tub, isn’t he?” I said.

  “He’ll be three in a few weeks. We should give him a party with hats and strawberry ice cream.”

  “And balloons,” Bumby said. “And a little monkey.”

  “You’re a little monkey, Schatz,” Ernest said, and scooped him up in the big towel.

  Afterward, I put him to bed, and when I came out of his room and closed the door, Ernest was still at the table.

  “I don’t want to ask if I can stay,” he said.

  “So don’t ask,” I said. I flicked off the lamp and then went over to the table and knelt in front of him. He cupped the back of my head in his hand tenderly and I buried my face in his lap, breathing in the coarse fabric of his new trousers—ones he’d bought with Pauline’s help, no doubt, so she wouldn’t be embarrassed to parade him in front of her Right Bank friends. I pushed harder, and then flexed my fingertips along the backs of his calves.

  “Come on,” he said, trying to stand, but I didn’t rise. I suppose it was perverse, but I wanted to have him right there, on my terms, and keep him there until the hot, sick feeling in my stomach went away. He was still my husband.

  When I woke the next morning, he was asleep next to me and the bedding was warm around us. I pressed my body against his back, grazing his stomach with my palms until he was awake enough and we made love again. In some ways, it was as if nothing had changed. Our bodies knew each other so well we didn’t have to think about how to move. But when it was over and we lay still, I felt a terrible sadness come down because I loved him as much as I ever had. We’re the same guy, I thought, but it wasn’t really true. He’d always been emphatic over the years that we were essentially alike. We did grow to look like one another, with our hair short, our faces tan and healthy and round. But looking alike didn’t mean we weren’t alone, each of us.

  “Does this mean anything?” I asked, careful not to look at him when I said it.

  “Everything means something.” He was silent for several minutes and then said, “She’s ripping herself apart, you know.”

  “We all are. Did you see Schatz’s face last night? He was so happy to have you here. He must be very confused.”

  “We’re all bitched for sure.” He sighed and rolled over and started to dress. “You know, Pfife thinks you’re very wise to do all of this and to try to make some order out of the mess we’ve all made, but she’s falling to pieces over it and so am I.”

  “Why are you telling me this? What am I supposed to feel?”

  “I don’t know. But if I can’t tell you, who should I tell?”

  FORTY-FIVE

  s soon as he mentioned the split to the Murphys, Gerald had become so accommodating. Why was that? He’d pulled the studio out of a hat and money, too. He could draw on Murphy’s bank.

  “This isn’t just about marriage,” Gerald had said when he made the offer, just the two of them sharing a drink in private. “I don’t know what I’d do without Sara, but you’re different and so the rules are different, too. You can have a place in history. You do already. Your name’s there on a card, and you only have to turn one way and not the other.”

  “What do you have against Hadley?”

  “Nothing. How could I? She runs at a different speed is all. She’s more cautious.”

  “And I’ll have to be cutthroat. Is that what you mean?”

  “No. Just determined.”

  “She’s seen me through this whole while.”

  “Yes, and she’s done it beautifully. But what comes next, that’s all new. You need to be looking forward now. I know you see that.”

  He had often felt that Gerald overflattered him, but now with Sun behind him and so much ahead, he did feel as if there was so much more required. He didn’t know what, exactly, only that it would take everything he had.

  Pfife was full of ideas for the future. She’d already organized the marriage ceremony and had likely been planning it from the beginning. That was how she made a deal with God or her own conscience.

  “Tell me you love me,” she had said the first time, when he was still inside her.

  “I love you.” She was muscular and strong and it was interesting to have her in bed, strangely adversarial, with a wildness and a toughness that was nothing like Hadley.

  “More than you love her? Even if it’s not true, I want you to say it.”

  “I love you more,” he said.

  She pushed him over with her long firm legs and straddled him. Her hands on his chest. Her dark eyes boring into his intently. “Tell me you wish you’d met me first,” she said driving hard against him.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I would be your wife now. Your only wife.”

  Her expression was utterly removed and fierce all at once, and it unnerved him a little. Maybe she had to invent a life for them in her head, or else how could she live with herself and be Hadley’s friend? At Schruns, he had watched them side by side in front of the fire, talking and laughing. They had their legs crossed in the same direction, wearing the same socks and the same Alpine slippers. They weren’t sisters; they were nothing alike. He was the only thing that really joined them.

  He wasn’t sleeping well and his nightmares were back. Sometimes, in the still middle of the night, he thought about the women he’d loved. He remembered trying to please his mother, and how awful that was. He called her Fweetee and invented songs for her, and when she took him to Boston on the train, alone, when he was ten years old, he remembered how proud he was to sit with her in the dining car and eat crab salad with a three-pronged silver fork, hushed white linens all around. But shortly after they returned home, another baby had come and then another, and he was too old to be so desperate for her anyway. He killed the desperation off slowly and deliberately by remembering how changeable and critical she was, under the tenderness, and how he couldn’t trust her.

  This trick didn’t always work. Sometimes a woman stayed mysterious and unmanageable, like Kate, and sometimes she got down into the core of you and stayed there, no matter what. Hadley was the best woman he knew, and far too good for him. He’d always thought it and kept thinking it even when she lost the valise with his manuscripts. He tried never to let himself dwell on that day. It had been the most terrible thing he’d ever lived through. Being wounded was one thing. That had broken up his body and awakened him to fear and terror. It was still with him, like the shrapnel buried deep in the tissue of his muscles. But his work, that was him. When it was gone, he’d felt entirely empty, like he might simply recede and become air—a hurt place and a feeling around nothingness.

  He still loved Hadley afterward. He couldn’t and wouldn’t stop loving her, maybe ever, but she’d killed something in him, too. He’d once felt so anchored and solid and safe with her, but now he wondered if he could ever trust anyone. That was the real question and he didn’t have an answer. Sometimes it felt as if there were a flawed keystone at the center of him, threatening everything invisibly. Pauline was his future. He’d made his promises and was committed to giving her all he had.
But if he was honest with himself, he knew he didn’t trust her either. That part of love might be lost to him forever.

  FORTY-SIX

  n the middle of October, Ernest came around with a copy of The Sun Also Rises, which had just been published in the States. He made a great ceremony of unwrapping it from the brown paper and string and handing it to me shyly. Just inside the flyleaf, the book was dedicated to Bumby and to me. He’d changed it since we separated to include my name.

  “Oh, Tatie. It really is a beautiful book and I’m so proud.”

  “You like the dedication, then?”

  “I love it. It’s just perfect.”

  “Good, then. I wanted to do this much for you at least. I’ve made such a wreck of everything and there’s so much damage, now, all around.”

  “Yes,” I said, very moved. “But look at this.” I held up the book. “Look what you can do. You made this.”

  “It’s us. It’s our life.”

  “No, it was you from the beginning. You must have known that, writing it.”

  “Maybe so.” He looked at the book in my hands, and then turned away to the window.

  I did my best to try to break out of old habits and see friends. There were a few people from the old days who wanted to help. Ada MacLeish called round to take me to dinner and get my mind off things. Gertrude and Alice invited me to tea, but I thought it would be a bad idea to rekindle that friendship and risk Ernest believing I was choosing Gertrude over him. Loyalty was a dicey game, and it was tough to know whom I could safely turn to. Kitty was torn. Pauline was her friend but so was I; she’d never liked Ernest at all and didn’t trust him. She came to the apartment a few times but asked me not to pass on to Ernest that I’d seen her.

  “Caught behind enemy lines and all that,” she said.

  “How is it I’m the enemy when she’s the other woman? That seems very unfair, doesn’t it?”

  “When Harold and I split, you’d think I’d fallen into the pissoir for all people cared for me. It takes time. Things will shift back your way after a while. Just breathe through it, darling.”

  One afternoon I thought Bumby was napping, but he must have heard me crying at the dining table, my head in my arms. I didn’t know he was in the room until I heard him ask, “What are you worrying about, Mama?”

  “Oh, Schatz, I’m fine,” I said, drying my eyes on my sweater.

  But I wasn’t fine. I was lower than I’d ever been and finding it harder and harder to rally. It was early November and fewer than sixty days into the hundred when I asked Ernest if he’d watch Bumby so I could go away for a bit to think. He agreed to give me the time, and at the eleventh hour, I asked Kitty to go with me. I had chosen Chartres and told her that, without her good company, I wouldn’t be able to appreciate the châteaux and the lovely countryside, but in truth I was afraid to be alone.

  We checked into the Grand Hôtel de France just before sunset, and though it was a little chilly, Kitty suggested we take a walk around the lake before dinner. The air was crisp and all the trees seemed sharply etched.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about my wedding vows,” I said to Kitty when we were halfway around. “I promised to love him for better or worse, didn’t I?”

  “Worse has definitely arrived.” She frowned. “Honestly, I had a hard time choking down my own vows. The way I see it, how can you really say you’ll love a person longer than love lasts? And as for the obeying part, well, I just wouldn’t say it.”

  “I didn’t say that part either, but strangely I’ve managed it anyway.”

  “When I met Harold, he’d lost his faith in marriage, too, and so we made our own private pact. We would be partners and equals as long as things were good, but when love ended, we’d end, too.”

  “It’s an admirable idea, but I can’t believe it can ever be that civilized. It wasn’t for you two.”

  “No,” she said. “Lately I’ve wondered if maybe I’m not meant to have love—the lasting kind, I mean.”

  “I’m not sure what I’m meant to have. Or be for that matter.”

  “Maybe this break from Ernest will give you a chance to find out.”

  “Maybe it will.” I looked up to find we’d made it all around the lake while we talked and now were back, exactly, at where we’d started.

  After a week at Chartres, my head finally began to clear. One morning, I sent Kitty off to explore alone and wrote: Dearest Tatie, I love you now more than I ever have in some ways and though different people view their marriage vows differently, I meant mine to the death. I’m ready to be yours forever if you must know it, but since you’ve fallen in love and want to marry someone else, I feel I have no choice but to move aside and let you do that. The one hundred days are officially off. It was a terrible idea and it embarrasses me now. Tell Pauline whatever you choose. You can see Bumby as much as ever you like. He’s very much yours and loves and misses you. But please let’s only write about the divorce and not talk about it. I can’t quarrel with you anymore and I can’t see you much either, because it hurts too much. We’ll always be friends—delicate friends, and I’ll love you ’til I die, you know. Ever yours, the Cat.

  I was crying hard when I mailed the letter, but felt lighter for it. I spent the rest of the morning staring into the fire in my room, and when Kitty came back from sightseeing alone, I was still in my pajamas and robe.

  “You look different,” she said, and there was a great deal of kindness in her eyes. “Are you through with it, then?”

  “I’m trying to be. Will you help me by opening us a very good Château Margaux?”

  “I’m sure Hem’s been just as miserable waiting for a decision from you,” she said, uncorking the wine. “Although I don’t know how I could still have a stitch of sympathy for him after that damned novel of his. He was even crueler to Harold. He’s going to lose all his friends, you know.”

  “He might very well,” I said. “I still don’t know why he needed to write it that way, stepping on bodies as he went, but you have to admit it’s a brilliant book.”

  “Do I? You’re not in it at all. How do you forgive him that?”

  “The same as always.”

  “Right,” she said, and we lifted our glasses silently.

  Kitty and I drove back to Paris several days later and it was there I received Ernest’s reply:

  My dearest Hadley—I don’t know how to thank you for your very brave letter. I’ve been worried for you and for all of us because of this terrible deadlock. We’ve drawn things out so painfully, neither of us knowing how to move ahead without causing more damage. But if divorce is the next necessary step, then I trust that once we start, we’ll begin to feel stronger and better and more like ourselves again.

  He went on to say that he wanted me to have all the royalties from Sun and that he had already written Max Perkins telling him this, and finished by saying:

  I think you’re a wonderful mother, and that Bumby couldn’t be better off than in your very lovely and capable hands. You are everything good and straight and fine and true—and I see that so clearly now, in the way you’ve carried yourself and listened to your own heart. You’ve changed me more than you know, and will always be a part of everything I am. That’s one thing I’ve learned from this. No one you love is ever truly lost.

  Ernest

  FORTY-SEVEN

  e called Paris the great good place, then, and it was. We invented it after all. We made it with our longing and cigarettes and Rhum St. James; we made it with smoke and smart and savage conversation and we dared anyone to say it wasn’t ours. Together we made everything and then we busted it apart again.

  There are some who said I should have fought harder or longer than I did for my marriage, but in the end fighting for a love that was already gone felt like trying to live in the ruins of a lost city. I couldn’t bear it, and so I backed away—and the reason I could do it at all, the reason I was strong enough and had the legs and the heart to do it, was because Ernest had
come along and changed me. He helped me see what I really was and what I could do. Now that I knew what I could bear, I would have to bear losing him.

  In the spring of 1927, Bumby and I sailed for the States for a nice long break from Paris and all that still could drag on us there. We lived in New York for several months, and then got on a long slow train across the country that dropped us, finally, in Carmel, California. I rented us a house close to the beach in a grove of pines. The sky went on forever there, and cypresses stood twisted by the wind, and the sunshine made me feel stronger. It was there I learned that Ernest and Pauline had married, in a small Catholic ceremony in Paris. Somehow he’d managed to convince the priest that he was Catholic, and as such, since his first marriage had been presided over by a Methodist minister, it didn’t count. I read this news on a rare cloudy day in May, while Bumby dug a trench in the sand with his shovel. Seawater spilled over the sides, dissolving the sand walls even as they were being built. It made me want to cry just watching, so I took the letter and walked to the water’s edge. Beyond the breakers, the waves bled from gray to white and the horizon was white, too, everything melting into everything else. Out past all that water, Ernest and Pauline were building a life together. He and I had already had our time, and though it was still very close and real to me, as beautiful and poignant as any place on the map, it was, in truth, another time—another country.

  Bumby came over to where I stood and pressed his damp salty face into my skirt.

  “Should we make a boat?” I asked.

  He nodded yes, and I folded Ernest’s letter, creasing and squaring the edges until it seemed sturdy. I gave it to Bumby and together we waded out into the surf and let the boat go. It bobbed and dipped, words on water, and when the waves gradually took it, I only cried a very little, and then it was gone.

  EPILOGUE