The Paris Wife (15 page)

The next day we woke late and I still felt the Hennessy. Ernest must have been feeling it, too, because we weren’t even out of bed yet before he said, “The work won’t be any good at all today. I shouldn’t bother.”

“You could go and try anyway, just for a few hours,” I said, feeling a small sting because I didn’t mean it.

“No,” he said. “It won’t come to anything. I already know.”

We rose and had our breakfast, and then decided we would go out to Auteuil, to the horse races. It would be cooler out of the city. Marie Cocotte would pack a basket with sandwiches and wine, and then we’d get the racing forms and read them on the train. As soon as it was settled, I felt the pressure in my head leave, whooshing out quickly like a ghost being exorcised from a house. I felt guilty for how happy it made me not to share him—guilty and happy, all at the same time.

Ernest and I both loved Auteuil. We always went over the racing form together and then visited the paddocks to see the animals. I loved the deep smell of the horses and the track itself and the noises of the happy crowd taking its luck as it came. Ernest was fascinated by everything—the beautiful rippling of horse flesh, the stumpy-looking jockeys in their silks, the trainers standing at the rails and seeming to know something mysterious, the slang of the boys in the stable, and the smell of horse piss. We never had a lot to spend at the races, but we always had something, and it felt good to be out together in the sun. Ernest would spread his coat in the grass and we’d lunch there, and then I’d nap or just watch the clouds and wait for the next race. When we won, we had champagne, and sometimes when we lost, too, because we were happy to be there and be together, and what was money to us anyway? We never had enough to make a difference if we lost it.

That day, the favorite was a shiny dark beauty, a good jumper with a quick way. He had tight sharp lines on the jump, making you think you’d barely seen it at all. We didn’t bet on the favorite, but on another, lighter horse called Chèvre d’Or that was running a hundred and twenty to one. Sometimes we picked the horses together, after walking the paddock or standing at the rails and seeing how the horses moved and waiting for a feeling. Sometimes Ernest found someone he knew who’d give him a name or two, good odds. That day I followed my own hunches and found the horse myself. I could be lucky for us that way. It had happened before, and that day I felt sure it would happen again. Chèvre d’Or wasn’t quick and dark but moved like brandy in a glass. I watched his smooth legs and told Ernest he was the one.

“Let’s really bet on him,” I said. “Do we have enough?”

“Maybe we do,” he said.

“Let’s spend it anyway, even if we don’t.”

He laughed and went off to place the bet, still smiling at me. He loved it when I was bold.

“Are you still stuck on this horse?” he asked when he came back.

“I am.”

“Good. He’s got six months of living expenses on him.”

“You don’t mean it.”

“I do,” he said, and we crowded up to the rail with the rest, both of us tingling with risk.

My horse took the lead from the start. By the second hurdle, nothing could touch him. He was four lengths ahead by the fourth hurdle, a brandy-colored blur.

“He’s doing it,” I said, feeling flushed. My stomach was taut and knotted.

“He’s doing it all right,” Ernest said, watching the other horses break. But it was too late for any of them because Chèvre d’Or was too fast and too far ahead—too good as he was, ten lengths ahead, then more. The favorite gained and took the others, his jockey’s whip slicing, but my horse was in his own race.

He was twenty lengths ahead and twenty paces from the finish when it happened. As beautiful as the rest had been, that’s how ugly it was when he fell at the last jump. If he was brandy before, now he was a busted wheelbarrow. He was sticks and string, a child’s toy breaking with a crack. It was so terrible, I couldn’t watch. I buried my face in Ernest’s shoulder and didn’t see the end of the race, the horses parting around the fallen animal, the favorite taking everything he hadn’t earned.

I cried half the way home on the train, through the gloomy neighborhoods with the clotheslines and the garbage and the children dressed in rags, trying to forget the day and what we’d seen.

When our first anniversary came, we decided to spend it with Chink, in Cologne, and took a boat down the Rhine to meet him. The weather was still very warm then, and the days were lovely and long, and when we met up with Chink we were all very happy to be together. He was good for us, and we were good for him, and Cologne was beautiful.

One afternoon I was lying back on the grass watching Ernest and Chink fish. Ernest reached into the duffel bag on the bank next to him and pulled out a bottle of cold white wine that he uncorked with his teeth. In his other hand he held the rod, its line well out, the water moving around it in gentle eddies. There was a nice breeze, and yellow pollen blew by in small clouds and sifted down on us from the trees.

“You boys look like something out of a painting,” I said, squinting up at them.

“We have an admirer,” Ernest said to Chink.

I got up out of the grass and walked over to Ernest and watched him closely for several minutes. “Show me how it’s done,” I said.

“Tired of admiring already?”

“No.” I smiled. “But I’d like to give it a try.”

“All right, then.” He stood behind me on the soft, grassy bank and showed me how to point the rod. I swung my arm back and forward again in a smooth arc, just as he said, and managed to release the reel perfectly. It sailed out into the current like a dream.

“That felt good,” I said.

“That’s how you know you’ve done it right,” Chink said.

“What now?”

“Now you wait,” Ernest said, and walked over to the rod case. Before he’d even reached it I felt a small tug at the line, then another stronger tug. On instinct, I pulled up and the hook struck. I could feel the fish working against it.

“Hey,” Chink said, watching. “She’s a ringer.”

Ernest rushed back and helped me land the trout, and then the fish was on the grass, pale brown and spotted.

“I feel a little sorry for him,” I said.

“You can throw him back if you’d like,” Chink said.

“Like hell she will,” Ernest said, laughing.

“No, I want to eat him. I want to know if it tastes different when you catch it yourself.”

“Good girl,” Ernest said. “It does, you know.”

“I thought so.”

“This one’s got the killer instinct,” Chink said, and we all laughed.

“You might as well know it all,” Ernest said later when I had landed three trout, one after the other. He showed me how to clean and gut the fish and rinse the body well in the stream for cooking.

“I’m not disgusted,” I said as we worked.

“I know it. I can tell.”

We roasted my three over the fire on sticks, as well as the other half dozen Chink and Ernest had caught between them.

“I like mine best,” I said, licking salt off my fingertips.

“I like yours best, too,” Ernest said, and opened another bottle of wine as the sky softened and evening came on.

In Cologne itself, the mood was more troubled. At the British Occupation Garrison, where Chink had recently been stationed, an angry mob had vandalized a statue of Wilhelm II on horseback, wrenching down the huge iron sword and shattering off the spurs. Other rioters had murdered a German policeman, chasing him into the river and then severing his fingers when he tried to hold on to a bridge to save himself. From a distance, the city looked like something out of a fairy tale with red-roofed houses and villagers dressed in lederhosen, but like the rest of Allied-occupied Germany, it was in a state of supreme unrest.

A few days later, on September 14, we were in a café catching up on our newspapers when we learned that the Turkish port city of Smyrna was burning. The Greco-Turkish war had been raging for three years, since the repartitioning of the Ottoman Empire that came out of the war, but the conflict had finally broken with this fire. No one knew who was responsible. The Greeks blamed the Turks and vice versa, and the only clear thing was the tragic results. The harbor had been set alight with petroleum, as had many of the Greek and Armenian quarters in the town. People were driven out of their houses and into the streets. Scores drowned in the harbor, and others were slaughtered where they stood. Refugees were fleeing into the hills. We felt very chastened where we sat in the café, having our fine lunch, for not having been more aware of the conflict.

“I imagine I’ll be there soon enough,” Chink said. His expression was stern.

“Maybe I will, too,” Ernest said, and I felt a cold rush go through me.

“You don’t really think so,” I said.

“I don’t know. It’s possible.”

“I’ve always wanted to see Istanbul,” Chink said.

“
Constantinople
’s a better word, though,” Ernest said. “Or
Byzantium.
”

“Right,” Chink said. “Well, either way, it’s in the crapper now, isn’t it?”

Back in Paris, we hadn’t even unpacked before a telegram came for Ernest from the
Star
. John Bone was sending him to Turkey to report on the conflict, just as he’d suspected. He would leave in three days’ time. He’d just read the news, the torn envelope still in his hands, when I felt myself come crashing down.

“What is it?” Ernest said, watching my face fall. “I won’t be long. It will be like Genoa, the same as that. And then I’ll be home and we’ll be together again.”

But I had never told him about how low I’d been when he was away in Genoa, how every day without him had been a struggle against myself.

“I don’t want you to go,” I said.

“What?”

“Tell them you can’t, that I’m ill.”

“You’re not making any sense.”

“But I am, don’t you see? I’m telling the truth for once.”

“No, you’re being childish. This is a tantrum, and I want you to stop it now.”

That’s when I began to cry, which was worst of all; he hated tears.

“Please stop,” he said. “We’ve just had a wonderful time in Cologne, haven’t we? Why can’t we just be happy?”

“That’s all I want,” I said, but the tears still came. I opened my suitcase, then closed it again and went into the kitchen to boil water for tea. I thought maybe he’d gone into the bedroom, but he was there, just behind me, pacing.

“It’s too far away,” I finally said.

“That’s the point, isn’t it? You don’t want a war breathing down your neck.”

“Can’t we just pretend the telegram never came?”

“No, we can’t.” His face grew suddenly hard then, because I was asking him to choose me over his work. “To hell with the tea,” he said, but I kept at it, measuring leaves for the pot and pouring water through the porcelain sieve. He strode back and forth behind me in the tiny kitchen, waiting for me to apologize. When I didn’t and didn’t even turn around, he finally stormed out of the apartment.

I knew he’d gone to a café. I could have found him easily and it might have been fine, then, if I had. We could have had a brandy and water and agreed to put it behind us. Or asked the waiter to bring the absinthe and let it erase everything beautifully. But I stayed where I was and drank the damn tea, though I didn’t even want it.

By the time Ernest came home, I was drunk and pretending to sleep. I’d abandoned the tea and taken up a bottle of whiskey instead. I’d eaten nothing, and just drank the whiskey, several glasses, warm without water. When I was drunk enough to do it, I took up the lovely china teapot which had come so far with us and let it drop to the floor with a crash. I meant to leave the pieces there for him to see, but once I’d done it, it was too small and childish—the act of a tantrum, like he’d said. I hated feeling so desperate and out of control, but couldn’t seem to rein it in either. I picked up the mess, one wet ruined shard at a time, and put it in a small paper sack. Then I went to bed. My head swam viciously on the pillow, but I closed my eyes and tried to slow my breathing. Much later, I heard him on the stairs, then in the room.

“Hadley,” he said, sitting next to me on the bed. He touched my face and neck lightly, but I didn’t move. “Let’s don’t do this, Feather Cat.”

I pinched my eyes tight to keep the tears from coming, and tried to appear as if I were sleeping. But he knew I wasn’t.

“Damn you,” he said, when I wouldn’t open my eyes or answer him. He gave my shoulder a rough shove. “It’s the job. You know I have to go.”

“You don’t have to. You want to go.”

“To hell with you anyway,” he said, and left to sleep elsewhere.

Maybe he went back to his room on the rue Descartes that night or slept on the long bench downstairs in the dance hall. I don’t know. He stayed out until after noon the next day, and then came in to pack and make arrangements. He moved around the apartment, throwing things into a bag, getting his notebooks together.

“Is this how it’s going to be then?”

I stared out the window at nothing.

“You said you’d never do this, you know.”

He was right. Over and over I’d sworn I’d never stand in the way of his work, particularly when we were just beginning, when I saw his career as my own and believed it was my role or even my fate to help him carve a way. But more and more I understood that I didn’t know what those promises really meant. Part of me wanted him to be as unhappy as I was. Maybe then he’d give in and stay.

But he didn’t. We didn’t speak or touch for three days, and when he left, on September 25, he was so hurt and angry I could barely stand to look at him. I stood at the door and watched him struggle with his bags on the stairs. Toward the bottom, he dropped the valise holding his Corona. It fell hard, bounced with a sickening clatter, and then fell again. He kicked it angrily before he picked it up. When he got to the door at the bottom of the stairs, he kicked that, too, and then I heard nothing.

It might be malaria breaking through the quinine, but everything is strangely yellow. The long road is a tamped and stark ocher color and the mountains in the distance are darker. There’s a river, the Maritza, and it’s running high and fast because it’s been raining for five days and the rain, too, is yellow
.