Love and Ruin
“I think I’ve heard that story,” Ernest said wryly.
“We have all heard that story,” Paxtchi said and smiled at us like a wizard. He couldn’t have been more than thirty-five, and yet it seemed as if there was already nothing he didn’t know about love. Maybe it was true. Maybe, in the end, there was very little to know about anything. It seemed that way here on the veranda, where the candlelight quivered and dipped, and the wine was like cool velvet on my tongue.
I shut my eyes gently and listened as the men began singing again, letting the words fall without trying to catch them.
“You seem happy, Rabbit,” Ernest said in my ear.
“I am. I just remembered something.”
“Oh? What’s that?”
“That life doesn’t have to be complicated, not if we focus on what really matters. We have everything going for us.”
“Sure, we do.” He was smiling at me. “But I think you’re going to have a doozy of a headache tomorrow.”
“I don’t care. I’m rooting for us, Rabbit. Do you know that?”
“Yes.” He leaned close, his breath sweet with the wine. “I am, too.”
Then he kissed me, and the song began to rise again, and the night went on and on and on until it was morning.
34
We took to spending at least one evening every week with the pelota players, watching their practice games in the small park, or going to see them play seriously at the Frontón, buying a ticket like anyone else and sitting in the stands as each match unfolded. Now that I was learning the game, it was exciting to see the movement of the ball cracked against the wall and flung back, and then drinking as much as we could stand, sometimes weaving between bars in Havana, our arms linked to hold each other up. It was like finding a part of Spain again, an easy comradeship, and a wonderful way of being alive, though without the high explosives and the steady diet of fear.
If the Basques ever felt isolated from their own country and people, or ever considered leaving Cuba, they didn’t speak of it. They seemed to live only for the here and now. A single pelota ball sailing back from the wall. A single walk at sunset with friends. One meal, which might be the last—who ever knew?—so it had better be the best anyone could find.
In July we invited them to go out onto the Pilar with us. It was just past noon when we left the harbor in Cojímar and shot east along the island, past a string of tiny nameless cays. Ernest was up on the flying bridge hatless with his glasses in one hand and the steering wheel light as breath in the other. The sky behind him was so blue and cloudless that he seemed cut out of cloth and set there precisely. He belonged on the boat, on Pilar. He was easier there than almost anywhere, his tan legs planted square, a glimmer of coconut oil on his nose as he squinted under the sun and against the wind, running out fast toward the Gulf Stream.
We had the feather jigs behind us and to each side. Ernest was always fishing, even in his dreams, I think. Most of the Basque men—I called them that, though many seemed like boys, and might always be boys in their hearts—were up on the long sloped stern with me, the sun beating down from its zenith, so that we sat on our shadows as well as the deck. It was a perfect day. The water beneath us went from gray-green to green-blue and finally to the deep navy we were always pointed at. Above us, half-a-dozen terns wheeled, screaming. Then we moved through a school of reef squid that boiled above the foaming whitecaps, their small bodies bouncing like sequins, just ahead of whatever hunted them.
It was clear the Basques were comfortable on water, and every part of the running out was easy. We’d brought a light lunch and ate with our hands—alligator pears sprinkled with lime juice, hard Spanish cheese, and olives and wedges of brown bread—saving our appetites for the real meal we would have later, a Basque feast we’d been promised.
Within a few hours we came to a small, protected island Ernest liked. I recognized its cupped shape. He’d brought me here before, to swim along the reef while he goggle fished with a spear and the heavy-soled shoes he used to protect his feet from the razorlike coral.
It was a beautiful place and utterly private, empty but for us—as if we had special-ordered paradise. Out from the windward side of the cay, the sea broke and collapsed like smoke over the knife’s edge of the reef. Closer in, the water was clear as glass, translucent, with long white skeins of sandbars just beneath the surface. We made for the easternmost tip and then pulled around to the leeward side, where there was a small cove and white beach below broad, flapping palms.
Anchoring Pilar there, we went by skiff to the cove where the sand was very white and cool, now that the sun had passed to the other side of the island. The Basques had brought a bag of rice and another bag full of vegetables and a chicken and various mysterious items I knew would somehow become a wonderful dinner. Ernest built a cooking fire and then cleaned the few snooks and yellow jacks he’d caught from the trolling we’d done along the way, while Paxtchi began to cook over the open fire in a great steel concave pan he’d carried in his lap for most of the journey, obviously very proud of it. The rice and onions and peppers were mixed with stock and stirred with a great flat paddle, and then the chicken and the fish were added. It all cooked in layers and took a long while over the fire, so I went to swim down the beach a little, wading out to my chest and then pushing forward.
The water was wonderful. Ernest had given me a pair of motorcycle goggles that worked even better than a mask for swimming, and as I swam out to a spit of pale coral, a school of tiny, bullet-shaped fish moved beneath me, thousands upon thousands of them, their flesh so transparent I could see everything they were made of. Lower down, larger fish drifted slowly, bigger by far than me. It was a humbling feeling, but not a frightening one. I knew just how infinitesimal I was with the sea stretching out in every direction, on and on, and also below me, into cold black trenches where the strangest creatures lived, and where light didn’t penetrate. I was small, and unimportant, and that was a relief in a way.
All the things I wanted to know about the future—whether Ernest would finally leave his wife, whether I could trust our love and the life we were building—those weren’t just hidden from me, but from everyone. Mystery reached over everything. Loss happened the way the tide did, again and again, washing the white sand flat.
I flapped my fins slowly and filled my lungs with air to stay afloat along the surface, the tide rippling under my chest and thighs. Five or six feet below me along the bottom, nearly camouflaged, was a stingray, diamond shaped and very still, with pale sand billowed over the edges of his body. Just above him and close to the bottom, where they liked to feed, several dozen small pompano swam, their bodies silvery blue with yellow undersides and fins. They seemed oblivious to me and to the ray, too. I watched them for a while, and was just about to head back to the beach, when I saw a shadow gliding toward me from deeper water. I felt an icy finger of panic trail over me, but it was only a sea turtle. Her front flippers were arced up like wings, and spotted yellow-brown. She flew more than swam, eyeing me as I moved almost directly over her, my silhouette tracing her wide shell. I’m not sure I breathed at all, watching her, and then she was gone.
When I got back to the beach, the food was beginning to smell marvelous, and Ernest had a towel ready that he’d warmed in front of the fire.
“Did you see anything good?” he asked as he rubbed my shoulders under the towel and then handed me some wine. My hair was dripping.
“It was all good, but maybe the best thing was a hawksbill turtle. She had a lovely amber color to her, and let me get very close.”
“How did you know it was a female?”
“I know a broad when I see one,” I teased. “We had an understanding, she and I. She was going to let me swim right up close if I didn’t thrash around and overexcite myself about her wonderfulness.”
“Can you eat them?” Paxtchi asked. He was still stirring his maste
rpiece with the wooden paddle, sweeping it back and forth in rhythm.
“Yes, but if you touched this one, I’d have to shoot you in the foot. I told you, we have an understanding.”
“Hold the violence,” Ernest said, grinning. “No one’s going to lay a finger on your turtle.”
We all laughed, and then I left the men to their cooking and talking and sat alone on the beach with a glass of tangy red wine. I pushed my feet deeply into the cool sand and watched the water moving over the breakers, each one like a seam of pearly blue that turned over and over before it spilled open.
The world was always changing, often violently. In Europe, the Nazis had recently signed the Pact of Steel with Italy, binding Berlin and Rome, Hitler and Mussolini, in an alliance that could only mean more senseless death. The threat was never very far away now, and it lent a particular intensity to moments like this one, the rolling surf and the laughter, the wine and the coming stars.
Paradise was always fragile. That was its very nature. But we were still here, inside it for the moment, weren’t we? I turned to see Ernest. He stood before the fire with his back to me, and as he waved his arms wildly in some story, the flames rose and curled, licking past him. Climbing higher and higher.
35
Ernest’s fortieth birthday came and, with it, a long letter from Pauline saying that there was no one like him in the world, and that she knew he would hit on what was best for them. It was signed with love and luck, and had us both pinned for a quarter of an hour in our long sitting room at the Finca as he read it aloud to me, and then over and over to himself silently. I didn’t know why he was sharing it with me when he typically kept his family life very separate. I also had no idea what to say, or even to think, afterward. Either Pauline’s resolve to save her marriage was more tightly woven and impenetrable than chain mail, or he had been secretly reassuring her. Both made me feel angry and sad and helpless, too.
We said we’d use the Finca to hide away from everything. Pauline never visited physically, for Ernest had staked his claim on the island long before as a private retreat. But she was always present in letters, cables, and phone calls about the boys; in bills passing from Key West to Havana, and bank checks passing back. Ernest rarely mentioned her name, but I always knew when she’d gotten a good jab in and hurt him. It was in his mood over drinks at the end of the day, or in the way he smashed the tennis ball in return over the crushed coral. Those smashes were never at me. This wasn’t my war. But it was breaking my heart.
Why was he still holding fast to the marriage, I wondered, and the pretense that they were still a family? What did he want from Pauline that he couldn’t get from our life together? What was still missing here, or inside me?
I wanted to phone my mother and ask her what I should do, but everything about this mess was so like what I’d already lived through with Bertrand that I couldn’t bear to. So I waited, and fretted, and tried to hang on to everything that was good about our life at the Finca. The simple perfection of each day. The sun, the garden, our lovemaking, our work. It was all so unexpectedly rich that I sometimes woke at night and lay there with my eyes open in the dark, feeling like a dragon on a fat heap of gold. I had never been so happy, nor had I ever felt so fragile, so wary of what there was to lose.
Finally, I too was barreling down on the ending of my novel. A few more weeks would do it, I thought. I had recently found a title for it in one of Ernest’s books about historic battles. Ernest liked to read the Bible when he looked for titles—that or crumbling tomes of old poetry—but I had a mystical approach to the naming of my books, believing that, if I just kept my eyes open, and paid close attention to everything I read, sometime something would leap off the page, highlighted by its own aptness. It was probably a silly theory, but it worked. I was peering over Ernest’s shoulder one evening, only half paying attention to the book in his hands, when the phrase flared right up at me, as if shouting its own name. A Stricken Field.
“It’s a little dark,” Ernest said.
“War is dark,” I argued. “But it’s a difficult thing to get right.”
“A title, you mean?”
“All of it. Everything. I want so much for this book to be good.”
“It already is, Rabbit. What you’re doing is wonderful. You can trust that.”
“God, I hope you’re right.”
* * *
—
Like every late August in recent years, Ernest would soon head to the L-Bar-T Ranch in northern Wyoming, one of his favorite hunting and fishing spots ever. Bumby had already gone west with Hadley and her second husband, Paul, and would be waiting for him at the ranch when he arrived. Gigi and Patrick would come out, too, after the end of their summer camp in Connecticut. Pauline had apparently left the country for her spontaneous trip to France, wanting to sail over before, as Ernest put it, “all of Europe blew up.”
“I think I’ll ask Toby Bruce to fetch them and bring them out by train,” he said, problem-solving. Toby had been a help to Ernest and his family for years, and was one of the few people he trusted absolutely to care for everything from his car to his guns to Pilar—and now the boys.
“I’m sure he’ll do it,” I said, but I was distracted. Just because Pauline had gone to Europe didn’t mean she wouldn’t appear in Wyoming eventually. She had plenty of time to get there, and a lot to lose if she didn’t.
“Try not to worry, Rabbit,” he said, reading my face. “I’m going to do my damnedest to get this all settled soon. You’ve been so patient.”
It was dim in the room, with the light from the lamps only stretching so far. The quiet was thick. We were both afraid to say more, but I was more afraid not to. “It isn’t really patience, darling. Is it?”
36
Leaving Havana was an elaborate migration when all was said and done. I traveled with Ernest as far as St. Louis, going first to Key West in Pilar to retrieve the car and give all the specifics to Toby Bruce about the boys. Then, loaded to the gills in Ernest’s black Buick convertible, we launched ourselves at America, driving ten or twelve hours a day, the way he liked to travel, with very few breaks, and the windows rolled down, the radio blasting away.
He loved everything about this sort of cross-country trek—all the little motels in no-name towns, the filling stations and roadside stands, and eating bologna sandwiches for dinner, and pissing in ditches or open fields whenever he needed, just pulling the car over and not caring who might drive by.
I liked the open country and the warm air that pushed through the windows, but I was less charmed by primitivism and squalor. He had stopped shaving and drove barefoot, wearing the same canvas shorts with a piece of rope for a belt. It was all I could do to get him to wash his hands a few times a day.
“All women secretly pine for cavemen,” he said when I complained.
“It’s an interesting theory.” I couldn’t help laughing. “But Mother won’t let you in the house.”
“She’s going to adore me—all mothers do.”
I very much hoped he was right. Aside from Ernest, my mother was the most important person in my life. It was too much to imagine that she’d approve of our relationship, since Ernest was still tied to another, but I felt confident that if she just spent a little time with us together, she’d see what was extraordinary about him, and why I was risking so much to be with him.
* * *
—
When we finally arrived, she had made a roast for us, and everything went better than I’d dared to expect. We sat up late, talking about the treaty Germany had just signed with the Soviet Union not to join with any other power or attack the other. During the war in Spain, Stalin had aided the Loyalists against Franco, but now it seemed more and more that the world’s most powerful men were uniting. Soon they would be unstoppable.
Sighing, Mother changed the subject and asked Ernest to talk about h
is sons.
“Patrick is eleven. We call him the Mexican Mouse ’cause he gets so brown. He can read two or three books a day and says I should write a new one fatter than Green Hills so it will make me even more money.” He laughed. “I don’t have the heart to tell him that book was a bust.”
“Nonsense,” she said. “He doesn’t care about any of that. He’s got to be proud of you. And your others?”
“Jack is fifteen and mostly away at boarding school. We’ve called him Bumby since he was a baby in Paris. Gregory’s nearly eight. Gigi, and he’s something, all right. Won ten dollars shooting craps at camp last week. He might support me one day, you know. He’s like Midas with those dice.”
Mother looked alarmed for a moment. “You don’t really take him to the tables, do you?”
“Nah, at home he plays squatting in the alley like they do in Morocco. But I should take him to the tables. He could start sending me an annuity.”
She laughed then. “Marty never cared about money, she only wanted to travel. One day she snuck out of the house and hid herself in the cart of the man who delivered our ice.”
His eyes lit up. “Yes, I’ve heard that story. It’s a good one.”
“What I didn’t tell you is I couldn’t sit down for a week afterward,” I said.
“Well, yes. But that was her only thrashing ever,” Mother was quick to add.
He winked at me. “No doubt she deserved others.”
“No doubt at all,” I said, and we all laughed.
* * *
—
As the evening drew to a close, I felt a sense of accomplishment. It seemed as though Ernest was going to win over my mother without even trying. And she’d asked about the boys. That was a good sign, too. Someday, if all went as planned, they’d be her grandchildren. She should be interested, I thought, letting myself be hopeful, just a little, that this would all work out in my favor, and soon.