The Paris Wife

TWENTY

Careful now,” Ernest said. “You know you’re inviting the devil in.”

“Am I?”

“You know you are.”

“He can come then, as long as he comes this way, all in green vapor.”

We were at the Select with Pound and Dorothy, whom we’d taken to calling Shakespear. Pound had just taken on the editorship of a new literary press called Three Mountains and was keen to publish something of Ernest’s. We were all in high spirits that night, and I’d only meant to have the one glass of absinthe, to celebrate.

“You must go more slowly,” Pound said.

“Must I?” I said, but he wasn’t talking to me at all, but to the waiter pouring water over a sugar cube into the drink, which was going from a wickedly clear yellow-green to a cloudy white as the water dripped in. Absinthe was illegal in France and had been for years. So was opium, but you could find both everywhere in Paris if you knew where to look. I loved the delicate licorice taste and the way the ritual of the cube and specially perforated spoon made raindrops, sugar drops. Our waiter was doing it beautifully, I thought, but Pound grabbed the pitcher with force, taking over.

“You’re drunk, darling,” Shakespear said to him in her civilized whisper.

“I’m trying to picture you drunk,” Ernest said to her. “I’m betting you never spill a drop.”

She laughed. “If I don’t, it’s because I won’t touch absinthe.”

“It’s licorice candy and smoke,” I said.

“You’ll wish it were only that tomorrow,” Ernest said.

“Maybe, but it makes everything easier now, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, it does,” Ernest said, touching my glass with his. “So have it and to hell with tomorrow.”

“Hear, hear,” said Pound leaning forward in his rumpled tweed jacket and putting his elbows on the table. I was growing to like him more all the time-but I was generally liking everyone. I thought I might be in love with our waiter. He had the prettiest mustache, un-waxed and pure and fresh as flowers. I wanted to touch it or eat it.

“You should grow your mustache like that,” I said to Ernest, pointing not at all subtly.

“I am, dear. It’s just the same.”

I looked at him square. “So it is,” I said. “Where have you been?” And we all laughed.

Later, when we’d moved on to the Dôme, Pound started talking about the States.

“I’d never return to the Middle West,” he was saying, “I renounce it, in fact. Indiana’s full of prigs and idiots.”

“Oh, that old story,” Shakespear said in her low perfect whisper.

I looked into the long smoky mirror and touched my face, then the glass. “I can’t feel anything,” I said to Ernest. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

“Have another, Tatie,” Ernest said. “You’re very beautiful.”

Shakespear smiled at us with her curved mouth and her eyes smiled, too. “Look at our pretty lovers,” she said to Pound.

“Indiana’s always been an intellectual wasteland, mind you,” he said, and then blew a smoke ring that circled before being swallowed by the rest of it, the blue halo that was everywhere, blending and blurring. All of us breathing it in and out.

“All they have is the moral high ground,” he went on. “There’s nothing else within reach. I was useless teaching at Wabash. What did those young people with cornhusks between their ears want to hear me rant on about? Not Yeats, that’s for certain. Not poetry.”

“The actress was a small bit of poetry,” Shakespear said.

“The most scrumptious knees I’ve ever seen on a woman,” Pound said.

“Do go on,” Ernest said. “I’m getting hungry.”

“There was rain that night-it’s always raining in Indiana, intellectually speaking, you understand-and the actress… what was her name?”

“Bertha,” Shakespear said.

“Not Camille?” Ernest said.

“No, no. She wasn’t consumptive. Just didn’t want to get her hair damp. She had lovely hair. I’d suggested we go out to dinner, but then there was the matter of dampness.”

“One of my favorite problems,” Ernest said.

Everyone laughed and then Pound said, “When word got out I’d entertained her in my room, you’d think I’d murdered the girl instead of roasted a chicken.”

“Poor Ezra,” Shakespear said. “They fired him next day.”

“Poor Ezra nothing. I’d be in Indiana still, teaching poetry to stalks of corn.”

“And roasting the occasional chicken,” I said.

“Even chicken won’t save you from Indiana,” Ezra said.

Late that evening, after we’d abandoned the Dôme for the Ritz, Ernest and Pound began heatedly discussing the merits of Tristan Tzara. Pound thought the Surrealists might be onto something, possibly, if they could stay asleep long enough. Ernest thought they were idiots and they might just as well wake up so we could all move on to something else.

“I’m dropping off just listening to you all,” Shakespear said, and the two of us moved to the other side of the room and sat at a small table.

“You and Hem really are beautiful together,” she said.

“Are we?” I’d been drinking only warm water for an hour, and could finally feel my tongue.

“I wonder how that happens. Love, I mean.” She touched the sweep of her hair, still smooth and perfect.

“Don’t you and Pound have it?”

“Oh, no.” She laughed with a small puff of air. “We have what we have, though.”

“I’m not sure I understand you.”

“I’m not sure I do either.” She laughed a dark laugh and then became quiet, stirring her drink.

The weather turned wonderful that fall, and although we knew the cold, damp season would be coming soon enough, we were living deep into what we had and feeling happy and strong. Ernest was working well on his Nick Adams novel and new stories and saw so clearly the books they could be, it was almost as if they already fully existed. In our circle, everyone believed things would hit for him, and that it was only a matter of time.

“You’re making something new,” Pound told him one day in his studio. “Don’t forget that when it starts to hurt.”

“It only hurts to wait.”

“The waiting helps you boil it down. That’s essential, and the hurting helps everything along in its way.”

Ernest put this wisdom in his pocket the way he did everything Pound said.

Soon enough, the light began to change in the streets in the late afternoon, thinning and waning, and we started to wonder if we had it in us to face the long winter.

“I’ve been thinking about writing to Agnes,” Ernest said to me one evening. “It’s been on my mind since Milan. Do you mind?”

“I don’t know. What do you want out of it?”

“Nothing. Just for her to know I’m happy and thinking of her.”

“And that your career is going just as you said it would.”

He smiled. “That’s the cherry on top, is all.”

“Send your letter.”

“Yes,” he said. “I already have.”

I felt a flare of jealousy. “You were so sure I wouldn’t mind?”

“Maybe. But if you did, I knew I could make you see it was all right. It’s just a letter, in any case, and we have each other.”

“That’s what Shakespear said the other night.”

“Shakespear? What does she know about love?”

“Maybe more than we do, because she doesn’t have it. She’s not in the thick of it.”

“That’s why I can’t write about Paris now, because it’s everywhere.”

“So you write about Michigan.”

“It feels so close. As if I could never lose it.” He’d been reading over the day’s work from a notebook on the table in front of him. He rested his hand on the pages, his fingertips brushing over the boldly slanted sentences. “But it’s not just the real place. I’m inventing it, too, and that’s the best part.”

Over his writing desk he’d pinned a pale blue map of northern Michigan, and all the essential places were there-Horton Bay, Petoskey, Walloon Lake, Charlevoix-the precise locations where important things had happened to him, Ernest, but also to Nick Adams. Ernest and Nick weren’t the same guy, but they knew a lot of the same things, like where and when to look for bait hoppers heavy with dew, and how the water moved and what it told you about where the trout were. They knew about mortar shelling in the middle of a still night, and what it felt like to see a place you’d loved burned down and hollowed out and changed. Nick’s mind wasn’t altogether right and you could sense the pressure coming up inside him, in a story like “Big Two-Hearted River,” though Ernest never had him look at it directly or name it.

“I love your Michigan stories,” I said.

He squinted at me through the lantern light, across the table. “Is that true?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Sometimes I wonder if you want me writing at all. I think it makes you feel lonely.”

“It’s not the writing that makes me lonely, it’s your being gone. It’s been so long since you’ve even tried to write here at home. Maybe it would work now and I could see you. I wouldn’t have to talk or disturb you.”

“You know I need to go away to make anything happen.” He closed the notebook and put his pencil on top, rolling it back and forth with his fingertips. “I have to be alone to get it started, but if I really was alone, that wouldn’t work either. I need to leave that place and come back here and talk to you. That makes it real and makes it stick. Do you get what I’m saying?”

“I think so.” I walked behind him and put my head on his shoulder, rubbing my face into his neck. But the truth was I didn’t, not really. And he knew.

“Maybe no one can know how it is for anyone else.”

I straightened and walked over to the window where the rain came down in streams and pooled on the sill. “I’m trying.”

“Me too,” he said.

I sighed. “I think it’s going to rain all day.”

“Don’t kid yourself. It’s going to rain for a month.”

“Maybe it won’t after all.”

He smiled at me. “All right, Tiny. Maybe it won’t.”