Love and Ruin
“I trapped you?”
“Some would see it that way, sure.”
It wasn’t enough that he had to rewrite everything that was happening between us. He wanted to rewrite the past, too. It made me sick and sad. And it didn’t end there.
“I used to have a wife,” he ranted. “I married one woman and now seem stuck with another.”
“Stuck? Then why don’t you blow it all apart? You’ve done it before. Hell, you’re doing it now. Tell me you aren’t.”
“I’m only trying to save myself,” he said. And the battle raged on.
We fought about his drinking—which had become bottomless, unstoppable—his boasting, his need to control everyone and everything around him. We fought about the house, about money, about work—everything that might be dragged out to spit and snarl over, chewing it to pieces. Once it might have felt cathartic for us to row like this, but now I only felt shredded and fearful and terribly unprepared. We had been drifting apart for a long time, but so slowly I could push the thought away. Now it was as if the glacier of unease we’d been standing on for years suddenly exploded. Ice had become fire.
And when I thought about the boys—Mouse and Gigi, and Bum—and how I might lose them now, I almost couldn’t bear it.
“I wish I could break into pieces,” I told him one night, just a week after I’d come back. “That would feel better somehow. Isn’t the worst when you can keep on walking and breathing and writing letters and going to the market and all the things you do when you’re alive, but really you’re blown apart?”
“That’s called self-preservation, darling.”
“I don’t want to be a preservationist, then. I don’t want any part of that. I want to be honest.”
“Have another whiskey.”
“I’ve already had too much. I can’t feel my fingers.”
“Then it’s doing its job.”
* * *
—
I didn’t know what to think or what to do except go back overseas. I called Charles Colebaugh and told him I was ready to finish the work I’d begun, but instead of the usual enthusiasm I’d come to expect from him, there was a strange tension on the line.
“Ernest is going to write for us. He rang the other day. I thought you knew.”
“What?” I was so surprised I couldn’t even speak for a moment. There was a lump in my throat the size of a starling. Finally I said, “He didn’t mention it.”
“We can only have one accredited journalist over there. I’m awfully sorry.”
“Twenty-six pieces, Charles. You’ve published twenty-six of my pieces since I first went to Spain, and you’re throwing me over for my own husband?”
“I think you know what a difficult spot I’m in. I have to think of circulation. And don’t forget he came to me. Please forgive me for saying it, Marty, but maybe you’re arguing with the wrong fellow.”
When the line went dead I held the phone in my hand for a long time, trying to quiet the roaring in my ears. If anyone had asked me years or even months ago if I thought Ernest was capable of such a thing I would have laughed. He loved and admired me too much to sink me. But this was pure retaliation. In his mind, I was the one doing the betraying. I had abandoned him for my work and my own ends, and now I would be made to suffer as he had suffered.
I couldn’t stand to think of what all this meant, or what it would possibly take for us to become allies again. I barely recognized him now. His demons had set up house, taking him over, and it seemed he didn’t recognize me, either. I saw no love anywhere in him for me, and this made me feel desperate.
His timing couldn’t have been worse, either. The invasion of Normandy was coming at any moment. I had been preparing for it since October, learning what I needed to learn and thinking of just how to cover it so that when the time came, my voice could chime in with the others to chronicle one of the most crucial moments in the history of war. But now I no longer had any official capacity, and no guarantee that anything I wrote would find a home. It was as if I’d been plunged back to the beginning, when I was wet behind the ears and headed to Spain.
For the first time in years, the memory brought me no comfort at all.
* * *
—
When I confronted Ernest, he only scowled, his jaw set against me, his eyes stony. “You pushed me to go all this while. You haven’t stopped pushing for a year. You only have yourself to blame if I finally took the hint.”
“You could have gone to any magazine in the world, absolutely any of them, and you took mine. I didn’t know you had such a cruel streak in you.” My face was hot.
“Well, with any luck I’ll get blown to smithereens. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“Don’t you have any feeling for me at all?” I asked, but his face remained closed.
When I walked down the hallway to bed I was light-headed. I reached out to touch the walls with my fingertips, feeling I’d gotten hopelessly lost in the dark. So lost I knew it would be an utter miracle if I somehow found my way again.
71
Ernest left for New York almost immediately. He was catching a seaplane for Shannon and then London. At first I thought he might have a few drops of civility left in him and try to find me a seat on the plane, too. I had no expense account now, and no one paying my way, and had already run through my Scribner’s advance for Liana. But he said it wasn’t possible. It was an RAF plane, and women were expressly forbidden.
I appealed to everyone I knew for a way over, and it was then I learned that Bumby had applied for a transfer to the Office of Strategic Services and got it. Almost the moment his security clearance came through and his training was complete, he volunteered to parachute behind enemy lines in a German-held part of France. He’d never launched himself out of a plane before, but he’d heard about it, I thought, feeling awful and terrified for him, and awash with guilt for exposing him to Rothschild and Churchill that night in Algiers.
I pressed my contacts for more information, but they could only tell me that he’d tucked a fly rod into his jump pack before he launched himself out over France, swearing to his commanding officer that it was a radio antenna. I hoped to God that he would stay safe, somehow, and wished more than anything that I could be near Ernest again, as he used to be. We needed to bind together now, to lean on each other. How else would we get through?
When my chance at transport finally came, I almost couldn’t believe it. The Norwegian freighter was outfitted to carry the two-and-a-half-ton amphibious assault Ducks, to be used in the D-day landings—that and loads and loads of dynamite. I was the sole passenger. There were no lifeboats anywhere, no place I might get a drink, since the ship was dry, and I wasn’t allowed to smoke on deck. The journey would take twenty days, a good long time to think about where I had just been and where I was going.
All I knew was that a hollow, haunted feeling followed me wherever I went. I thought of Ernest nearly nonstop and wondered if my heart had been somehow carved out of my body. I lay in my cramped bunk, staring at nothing. I paced between the hulking Ducks until my legs turned to jelly. When night finally came, I slept like the dead.
For days upon days, we had terrible fog. I stood at the railing of the ship desperate for a cigarette and anything that felt like peace while, all around us, the air remained thick and white as concrete. Over and over again, the freighter sounded its horn through the murk, announcing its presence. Every time, I jumped, feeling the sound reverberate through my body, vibrating the rungs of my rib cage, the ladder of my spine. The future was like this pressing fog, or like an endless wall of shadows. I was a shadow, too, and I found it was impossible to think of what might lie ahead for us—if there was any way to recover who we used to be together. The task seemed immense, and hope was nowhere—a thing that belonged to other people who were sturdy enough to carry it.
* * *
br />
—
Day followed night, or so it must have. The sun rose and set behind thick curtains. But finally, as we drew nearer to England, the fog began to lift. I woke one morning, and knew it was morning. A cold clear wind blew on deck. It pierced my wool peacoat and clawed at my face, and I needed it. I stood and watched the sea until I was so chilled I thought I might never be warm again, because there, in the bone-cracking clarity of that feeling, I could actually breathe. Off in the distance, there were icebergs. At first they were formless, only great smears of white here and there, like sunspots. But as we grew nearer, they shifted and winnowed and stood out more and more clearly, like pieces of architecture, or art, crystalline and bright and wild and alone. One was like a genie’s lamp, curving and spiraling up and up, made entirely of diamonds. Another floated like a mountain, while another sprouted the wings of a sheer-white pigeon or a dove, cracked through with light that radiated and flared and made my breath catch. There was no reason at all to feel any hope. There wasn’t, but in that cold exquisite moment, I couldn’t help myself.
72
When my Norwegian freighter finally docked at Liverpool, I gathered my things and went ashore. Almost immediately I ran into two correspondents who were talking about Ernest. Two days before, he’d been in a car accident after a party at Belgrave Square. The driver had been drunk and plunged them both into a steel water tank. Ernest had been thrown against the windshield, cracked his scalp, and banged up both his knees. He was now in a London hospital with a serious concussion.
I flew to the recovery ward without waiting to hear more. Even with things as terrible as they were, I had to go to him. What if I had lost him now, after everything? We’d been so stupid to push each other away, when love was the only thing that made sense anymore, given the way the world was going.
I found his room, ready to say anything, do anything, but I could barely push my way inside. There was a cocktail party going on. Extra chairs had been pulled in, and pals of his sprawled in them, joking and telling stories. A dozen or more empty whiskey bottles spilled from beneath Ernest’s bed, where he sat up cheerfully, not seeming at all surprised to see me. Other than an enormous snowy bandage wrapped around his head like the turban of some self-imposed pasha, he seemed perfectly fine to me.
In an instant, my mood turned. “I was told you were hurt.”
“Hello to you, too, Wife. I have fifty-seven stitches, for your information. Not that you actually care.” He said this right out loud, as if everyone there already knew the score about us. Of course they did. They’d heard every sordid detail straight from him.
“How can you be drinking with a concussion? Does your doctor know?”
“Who do you think brought the bottles in?”
As angry as I was, I pushed closer. “Have you heard Bum’s in France?”
“I got a letter yesterday. Apparently he’s getting nice fish.”
I could only stare at him, disbelievingly. His cocky expression, the hangers-on, this pretending that we hadn’t said the worst sorts of things to each other. It was all too much. “What are we doing? Please send everyone away, will you? Talk to me.”
But he ignored me, plunging ahead with a string of accusations. “I could have died in that car, and where is the tenderness, the sympathy? You can only think of yourself as usual.”
“I’m here,” I said, but I realized he couldn’t see it. Couldn’t see me at all. There was only disappointment standing in my place, the way we’d hurt each other, the arguments we’d been bludgeoning each other with for months. There was so much wreckage all around us, and if there was a way to break through, I couldn’t see it. I found I had nothing to say, either in anger or in love.
Shutting my eyes tightly, I turned quickly on my heel without saying goodbye, and hurried out into the hall. The dim corridor was full of nurses and men in uniform. The rooms were full of wounded men and the smell of ether, and camphor, and death. I steadied myself and slowed and tried to catch my breath, but nothing felt real. Not my body in the hallway. Not the scene behind me. Not what lay ahead.
I’m not sure how I reached the Dorchester. I don’t remember anything of the journey, only that I wanted to sleep forever when I arrived.
“Ah, Mrs. Hemingway,” the clerk said, looking at my passport. “Welcome back. Your husband’s room is on the second floor. Shall I give you the adjacent room?”
I was worn so thin at that point I felt my legs buckle. This was what we’d come to, then. As far away from our beginnings at the Hotel Florida as hope was away from despair. As love was from hate. I gripped the desk in front of me, focusing on my hands to stay upright. “Please no,” I said, not caring that tears were coming, or that my face laid everything bare. “Put me on the highest floor, will you? Far, far away.”
73
Ernest always said there was a season for everything. A season to love and be loved. To work and rest your bones and your spirit. To dream and to doubt, to fear and to fly. What season was this, then, if not one of ruin? Of utter defeat? For seven years Ernest had been not so much in my heart and mind as in my very blood cells. And now I would have to learn to live without him. How? Where could one learn to do that kind of amputation, and walk away alive, and still be the same person?
* * *
—
For years now the Allies had been preparing for the invasion of France. Operation Overlord. D-day. More than two and a half million men were awaiting deployment in Britain for the surprise attack across the English Channel. Hundreds and hundreds of journalists and photographers were poised, too, everyone jockeying for a place at the vanguard. Ernest would be going on the Dorothea L. Dix, I heard, but there were only so many spaces aboard the ships and assault crafts, and certainly no room for a second-string reporter like myself with no official credentials. So I stayed behind in London with all the other unlucky correspondents, waiting for news that the invasion had begun.
This moment had been so long in coming, I think we were all afraid to exhale or move, or hope. We had all been briefed, so we knew when it was set to happen, down to the last second. And we stood there, watching the clock all together and knowing that nothing would ever be the same after the attack was launched, and that reporters and novelists and historians would be telling the story for a hundred or two hundred years. And it was happening now.
You expected some sort of explosion, the great seam of the world ripping open and spilling a cry. But there was only a strange silence. I didn’t know what to do with myself, and so walked around London in the cold morning air. It was a wet bleak day, with a steady mist that got in your lungs and in every joint. Over my head, the hulking black British Lancasters, my bomber boys, roared toward Normandy. I felt tense and more than a little helpless, pinned here while the world was changing utterly. And I knew I had to at least try to be there for it. If I found a way to the battle, I could gather the material I needed to write the piece I’d planned for months. If it was good enough, Collier’s would have to publish it, I told myself. And even if they didn’t, I could do better than to give up. Besides, what else did I have now?
I headed to the train station, and got myself as far as Dover, hoping I could find something, anything, to get me over. The docks were dark, and I felt like a prowler. I suppose I was. Just as I was eyeing possible ships, a military policeman approached me and asked for my credentials. I flashed him my Collier’s badge too quickly for him to see it had expired, and pointed to the nearest vessel, which was a hospital ship, the most obvious thing around with its bright white hull and huge blood-red crosses.
“I’m going to interview nurses for my magazine,” I told him, the lie flying to my lips the moment I opened my mouth.
“Right, then,” he said, not even blinking, and waved me through.
I could hardly believe it could be so easy. I almost laughed, but thought better of that and hurried on board. It was n
early ten o’clock by this point, and everything was quiet. Still, I knew if I was caught, I could be thrown off or even arrested, so I found a toilet with a locking door, stowing myself away. I’d never done anything so bold. I didn’t think about what would happen next, or what I’d do if I got caught, just squeezed myself into a corner, sitting cross-legged on the floor, and reached for the whiskey flask in my satchel. Thank God I had it. After a while, I heard the groan of machinery and movement as the ship weighed anchor, and felt very scared, suddenly, about everything. In the loud silence and the dark, I drank as much as I could stand, wondering about the future. Would I be caught and turned back? Would the ship be targeted and all of us blown to bits? Would I see Ernest again, or ever return to the Finca, my home? Would I be able to write the boys and explain or even see them, or was I expected to launch forward entirely on my own and without looking back, as if those years and all that love had never happened?
* * *
—
I slept on the floor that night, using my arm as a pillow. It was luck alone that no one discovered me there. At dawn, though I felt green as could be, I got brave enough to let myself out of my small prison. On deck, no one questioned me. Too much else was happening. We’d come all the way through the mine-filled Channel and now were sitting below the high yellow-green cliffs of Normandy surrounded by more ships than I had ever seen in my life or even knew existed. Thousands upon thousands of them made up the armada, massive destroyers and transport vessels and battleships. Small snub-nosed boats and cement barges and Ducks carried troops to the beaches, which were alive with pure chaos. Once they made the beach, there were two hundred yards or more of open ground to survive and then the cliffs. Overhead, the sky was a thick and billowing gray veil strung through with thousands of planes.