The Paris Wife (30 page)

“I’m thinking it should start in Paris and then move. It’s what happens in Paris that fuels the fire. You can’t have the rest without it.”

“You always said you couldn’t write about Paris because you were too close to it.”

“Yes, I know, but for some reason it’s coming easily. We were in Pamplona two weeks ago, but I can write that, too. I don’t know why. Maybe all of my thoughts and rules about writing are just waiting to be proven wrong.”

“It’s good to be on fire, isn’t it?”

“I hope it goes on like this forever.”

It did go on. In Valencia, the excitement over the fiesta had pitched everything into a fever and we could just enjoy it. We sat at a street café and ate prawns sprinkled with fresh lime and cracked pepper, and beautiful paella in a dish nearly as wide around as our table. In the afternoons we went to the bullfights where Ordóñez swept his veronicas with absolute perfection.

“There it was. Did you see it?” Ernest said, pointing into the ring.

“What?”

“His death. The bull was so close. That’s what makes the dance of it. The torero has to know he’s dying and the bull has to know it, so when it’s pulled away at the last second, it’s like a kind of magic. That’s really living.”

One afternoon while he was napping and I was feeling restless, I thumbed through his notebooks, reading here and there admiringly. Quite by accident I came upon pages of sayings and turns of phrase that were recognizably Duff’s. I felt a shock at first, reading them. He had listened so closely to her, getting everything down, capturing her perfectly. And now it was all coming through, changed only slightly, in his heroine. It made me feel terribly jealous of her all over again until I was able to make sense of it. Ernest was a writer, not Duff’s lover. He’d seen her as a character, maybe even from the beginning. And now that he was living in the book, not in the street cafés in Pamplona, the tension and ugliness could be useful. The whole time had been constructive and necessary for the work. That’s why the words were coming so strongly now, with such heat.

From Valencia we went to Madrid again, and then to San Sebastian to escape the rising summer temperatures. In San Sebastian and then in Hendaye, Ernest wrote with great intensity in the mornings, and then we spent the rest of the day swimming and sunning ourselves on the beach. The sand was hot and sugary, and there were long purple mountains in the distance, and the crashing of the surf filled our ears and lulled us into a happy stupor. But by the end of the first week in August, I was missing Bumby too much to enjoy any more of it. I went back to Paris and Ernest returned to Madrid alone. There he worked better and harder than ever before. It was as though he was inventing the book and inventing himself as a writer at the same time. He wrote to say he’d stopped sleeping except for an hour here and there.
But when I wake again
, he wrote,
the sentences are there waiting for me, shouting to be set down. It’s extraordinary, Tatie. I can see the end from here and it’s something
.

At the tail end of August, Paris was virtually deserted. Anyone who could be anywhere else was, but Pauline Pfeiffer and Kitty had both remained in town for work. The three of us often met for dinner, sometimes with Bumby in tow and sometimes only after he was tucked into bed with Marie Cocotte to watch him. Although I initially felt uneasy around Pauline and Kitty as a pair—these fashionable, independent, and decidedly modern girls—at bottom they were both wonderfully frank and unfussy. That was why they liked me, too, they insisted, and I began to trust it.

Occasionally Pauline’s sister Jinny met us out in the cafés, and I found the two sisters quite funny together, as if they were a very chic vaudeville act with a shorthand of dark little jokes. They held their liquor well and didn’t embarrass themselves or others and always had interesting things to say. Jinny was unattached, but if Kitty was right about her preferring women, that made sense. It was harder to see why Pauline hadn’t yet married.

“It was all but settled with my cousin Matt Herold,” she said one day when I pressed her for more details. “I’d even modeled dresses and tasted half a dozen cakes.” She shuddered. “They all tasted like cake, of course.”

“Did something terrible happen between you?” I asked.

“No. That might have made some things easier, actually. I just didn’t think I loved him enough. I liked him. He would have been a wonderful provider, and a good father, too. I could see the whole thing, but never felt it. Not really. I wanted something grand and sweeping.”

“The kind of love you find in novels?”

“Maybe. That makes me incredibly stupid, I suppose.”

“Not at all. I love romance. Women these days seem too advanced for it.”

“It’s very confusing, knowing what you want when there are so many choices. Sometimes I think I’d just as soon ditch marriage and work. I want to be
useful.
” She paused and laughed at herself. “I think I read that in a novel somewhere, too.”

“Maybe you can have everything you want. You seem very clever to me.”

“We’ll see,” she said. “And in the meantime we’ll be two bachelor girls.”

“Swimmingly free?”

“Why not?”

It was funny to think of myself this way. Ernest most certainly wouldn’t approve, and I wondered what he’d say about my spending so much time with Pauline. If Kitty was too decorative, Pauline would be as well. She was the type of professional beauty he generally despised. Not only did she talk endlessly about fashion, she was always maneuvering her way toward the most interesting people and sizing them up to see how they might be of use to her, her dark eyes snapping, her mind’s wheels turning shrewdly. There never seemed to be any spontaneity with Pauline. If she saw you, she meant to. If she spoke to you, she’d already planned what to say so it came out sharply and perfectly. I admired her confidence and was a little in awe of it, maybe. She had that sense of effortlessness that took, in the end, a great deal of effort. And though I never knew quite what to say around other women
like
her—Zelda, for instance—under Pauline’s fine clothes and good haircut, she was candid and sensible, too. I knew she wouldn’t unravel on me at any moment and quickly came to feel I could count on her.

In the middle of September, Ernest came home from Madrid looking exhausted and triumphant all at once. I watched him unpacking his cases and couldn’t help but feel astonished at what he’d accomplished. There were seven full notebooks, hundreds and hundreds of pages, all done in six weeks.

“Are you finished then, Tatie?”

“Nearly. I’m so close I almost can’t make myself write the end of it. Does that make sense?”

“Can I read it now?”

“Soon,” he said. He drew me toward him in a long crushing embrace. “I feel like I could sleep forever.”

“Sleep, then,” I said, but he pulled me toward the bed and began to tug at my clothes, his hands everywhere at once.

“I thought you were tired,” I said, but he kissed me roughly, and I didn’t say anything more.

A week later, he’d completed the first draft, and we went to the Quarter to celebrate with friends. We met at the Nègre de Toulouse, and everyone was in high spirits. Scott and Zelda turned up, as did Ford and Stella, Don Stewart, and Harold and Kitty. There were a few moments of awkwardness as everyone waited to see what was what. Pamplona had ended so painfully, but after the drinks came and several glasses were downed quickly, medicinally, the party loosened up. Ernest had more whiskey than he should have, but behaved himself until the very end of the evening when we met Kitty on the way out the door.

“Good show on your book, Hem.”

“Thanks,” he said. “It’s full of action and drama and everyone’s in it.” He gestured toward Bill and Harold. “I’m ripping those bastards all to hell, but not you, Kitty. You’re a swell girl.”

His voice was so cold and cutting, Kitty’s face went white. I pulled him out the door by his arm, feeling mortified.

“What?” he said. “What did I do?”

“You’re drunk,” I said, “let’s talk about it tomorrow.”

“I plan on getting drunk tomorrow, too,” he said.

I simply kept marching him toward home, knowing there would be remorse in the morning, along with a titanic headache.

I was right.

“Don’t be hurt by what I told Kitty,” he said when he finally woke near lunchtime, looking green. “I’m an ass.”

“It was a big night. You should get some dispensation.”

“Whatever I said, the book’s the book. It’s not life.”

“I know,” I said, but when he gave me the pages to read, it took me no time at all to realize that everything was just as it had happened in Spain, every sordid conversation and tense encounter. It was all nearly verbatim, except for one thing—I wasn’t in it at all.

Duff was the heroine. I’d known and expected this, but it was troubling just the same to see her name over and over. He hadn’t changed it yet to Lady Brett. Duff was Duff, and Harold was Harold, and Pat was a drunken sot, and everyone was in bad form except the bullfighters. Kitty was in the book, too—he’d lied about that—in a very unflattering role. Ernest had made himself into Jake Barnes and made Jake impotent, and what was I supposed to think of that? Was that how he saw his own morality or cowardice or good sense or whatever it was that had kept him from sleeping with Duff—as impotence?

But if I could step away from these doubts and questions even slightly, I could see how remarkable the work was, more exciting and alive than anything he’d ever written. He’d seen the good story in Pamplona when I’d felt only disaster and human messiness. He’d shaped it and made it something more; something that would last forever. I was incredibly proud of him and also felt hurt and shut out by the book. These feelings existed in a difficult tangle, but neither was truer than the other.

I read the pages in a state of anticipation and dread and often had to stop and set down the manuscript and right myself again. Ernest had been working so intently and in such solitude that any delay in getting an opinion was killing him.

“Is it any good?” Ernest said when I’d finally finished. “I have to know.”

“It’s more than good, Tatie. There’s nothing like it anywhere.”

He smiled with relief and elation and then let out a small whoop. “I’ll be damned,” he said. Bumby was on the floor nearby, chewing on a hand-carved toy locomotive that Alice and Gertrude had given him. Ernest swooped him up and lifted him toward the ceiling, and Bumby squealed happily, his apple cheeks filling with air.

“Papa,” he said. It had been his first word, and he loved to say it as often as possible. Ernest liked this, too.

“Papa has written an awfully good book,” Ernest said, smiling up at Bumby, who was growing pinker by the moment.

“Give Papa a kiss,” I said, and Bumby, who was now down in Ernest’s arms squirming happily, slathered his papa’s face.

It was such a fine moment, the three of us perfectly aligned, gazing at the same bright star, but later that night, when I was lying in bed trying desperately to sleep, my worries circled around again and wouldn’t let me rest. I’d been edited out of the book from page one, word one. Why didn’t Ernest seem concerned that I’d be hurt or made jealous? Did he assume I understood the story needed a compelling heroine, and that wasn’t me? He certainly didn’t follow me around with a notebook, jotting down every clever thing I said the way he did with Duff. Art was art, but what did Ernest tell himself? I needed to know.

“Tatie,” I said in the dark, half hoping he was sound asleep. “Was I ever in the book?”

Several seconds passed in silence and then, ever so quietly, he said, “No, Tatie. I’m sorry if that hurts you.”

“Can you tell me why?”

“Not exactly. The ideas come to me, not the other way around. But I think it might be that you were never down in the muck. You weren’t really there in the story, if that makes sense, but above it somehow, better and finer than the rest of us.”

“That’s not how it felt to me, but it’s a nice thought. I want to believe it.”

“Then do.” He turned over on his side, his open eyes searching for mine. “I love you, Tatie. You’re what’s best about me.”

I sighed into his words, feeling only the smallest sting of doubt. “I love you, too.”

Over the coming weeks, Ernest continued to work on the novel, tightening the language, scratching whole scenes out. It was all he thought about, and because he was so distracted, I was very happy to have friends around to keep me company. In the end, he didn’t seem to mind Pauline, and I was grateful for that.

“She chatters on about Chanel too much,” he admitted, “but she’s smart about books. She knows what she likes, and more than that, she knows
why
. That’s very rare, particularly these days, when everyone’s more and more full of hot air. You never know who to trust.”

With Ernest’s endorsement, Pauline began coming by the sawmill in the afternoons to keep me company. We’d have tea while Bumby played or napped, and sometimes she went with me to the music shop when I practiced at my borrowed piano.

“You really do play beautifully,” she said one day when I’d finished. “Especially the Busoni. I thought I was going to cry. Why is it you never played, really?”

“I couldn’t break through. I just wasn’t good enough.”

“You could still. You should.”

“You’re very dear, but it’s not true.” I stretched my fingers and then closed my music book. “This is my life now, anyway. I wouldn’t want another.”

“No, I wouldn’t either if I were you,” she said, but later, when we were walking home from the shop, the scheme was still on her mind. “You might not have to give anything up to take music more seriously,” she said. “A concert wouldn’t have to be terribly traumatic. Everyone loves you. They want to see you succeed.”

“It would take so much more time and effort,” I said. “And I’d need my own piano.”

“You should have your own anyway. Surely Hem knows that. I can talk to him if you’d like.”

“We’ll see,” I said. “I’ll give it some thought.”

The rush of anxiety about performing in front of others never diminished much, but more and more I began to wonder if a concert might be good for me after all—particularly now, when Ernest was so absorbed by his novel. The book blotted out every other thought and crept in even when we were making love. I could feel him there one moment, with me, inside me, but then gone the next, simply vanished into the world he was making.