The Paris Wife

TWENTY-FOUR

When we returned to Paris in early April, I was very ready to be home. The trees were newly flowering, the streets were washed clean and hung with fresh laundry; children ran along the gravel paths in the Luxembourg Gardens. Ernest was working with intensity, and though I missed him when he was away, I was happier to be on my own than before.

It sounds funny to say it, but for the first time I had my own project. I took long walks every day for my health and tried to eat well and get plenty of rest. I bought yards and yards of soft white cotton and spent hours sitting in the sun and hand-stitching baby clothes. In the evenings I read the letters of Abélard and Héloïse, a love story that suited me far more than Fitzgerald’s disintegrating Jazz Age couple. I felt hopeful about absolutely everything as spring passed into early summer. My middle thickened and my breasts grew fuller. I was tan and strong and content-more substantial, as Shakespear had said-and began to believe that I’d finally discovered my purpose.

When he wasn’t toiling away in his room on the rue Descartes, Ernest spent a lot of time with Gertrude. She had commiserated when he told her about the lost manuscripts, of course, but was less sympathetic about his concerns over the coming baby.

“You’ll do it anyway. You’ll push through.”

“I’m not near ready,” he said.

Gertrude had narrowed her eyes at him and said, “I’ve never known a man who was. You’ll do just fine.”

“What were you hoping she’d say?” I asked when he relayed the story to me.

“I don’t know. I thought she might have some advice.”

“And did she?”

“No, actually. Nothing beyond ‘Do it anyway.’ ”

“That’s perfect advice for you. You will do it anyway.”

“Easy for you to say. All you have to do is cut and sew baby clothes.”

“That and make the baby, thank you very much. It’s not coming out of the sky.”

“Right,” he said distractedly, and went back to work.

Not long after we returned to Paris, Jane Heap, the editor of the Little Review, wrote asking Ernest to contribute something to the next issue. Among the lost sketches in the valise was a series of vignettes he was collectively calling Paris, 1922. They all began with the phrase “I have seen” and painted memorable and often violent moments he’d witnessed or read about in the past year. One depicted Chèvre d’Or’s ruinous collapse at Auteuil. Another described how Peggy Joyce’s Chilean lover had shot himself in the head because she wouldn’t marry him. Everyone had followed the actress’s desperate story in the headlines, but Ernest’s take on it was more vivid and alive than anything you could find in a newspaper. Whether he’d gotten the knowledge secondhand or not, each piece was graphic and brutal and completely convincing. Ernest believed he’d never done anything sharper or stronger, and Gertrude agreed. He was writing knockout punches.

“You might not want to hear it,” Gertrude said, “but I think your losing everything has been a blessing. You needed to be free. To start with nothing and make something truly new.”

Ernest nodded solemnly, but I knew he was tremendously relieved. So was I.

“I want to take another shot at the Paris vignettes for Jane Heap. But I don’t want to simply revive their corpses. New is new. I’m thinking of pushing them out into paragraphs, so they really begin to move.” He was watching her face carefully as he spoke, feeding off her encouragement. “Each would be less a sketch than a miniature wound up and let go.”

“By all means,” she said, and in a very short time, he was ready to show her a draft that captured the goring of a matador with ferocious intensity. He was particularly anxious to get her take on it because the scene was based on a story she herself had told him about the bullfights in Pamplona. You wouldn’t have known, reading the passage, that he’d never been.

“This is exceptional,” Gertrude said. “You’ve reproduced it exactly.”

“That was the point,” he said, clearly pleased to hear it. “But I want to know how bullfighting works firsthand. If I went myself, I could gather material for more sketches. Mike Strater’s keen to go and so is Bob McAlmon. Bob’s got plenty of money. He could front the whole trip.”

“Go,” Gertrude said.

“You should,” I agreed. “Everything’s pointing that way.”

When we got home that night, I asked Ernest if I could read all of the miniatures he’d done so far and was stopped cold by one about his time in Turkey. It was set on the Karagatch Road and described, among other things, a woman giving birth like an animal in the rain.

I handed the pieces back, praising them to high heaven, as they deserved, but also couldn’t help saying, “You don’t have to hide how scared you are about this baby coming. Not from me.”

“Sure I’m scared. How will I work? What will happen to our good time?”

“Not just that. I know you’re worried about me.”

“A little.”

“Please don’t. Nothing bad will happen.”

“How could you possibly know that? Something could always go wrong. I’ve seen it myself.”

“It’s going to be fine. I can feel it.”

“Just the same, I’ve been wondering if we shouldn’t have the baby in Toronto. I could get full-time work at the Star. The hospitals are supposed to be very fine there, and I would have a steady job. We’ll need the money for sure.”

“Aren’t you a good papa already,” I said, and kissed him softly on the mouth.

“I’m trying to want this. To ward off all the troubling thoughts, too.”

“And stuff in as much living as you can before the baby comes?”

“That too, yes.”

The coming weeks brought a flurry of plans about Spain. He met often with Strater and Bob McAlmon in cafés, planning the itinerary, but for whatever reason Ernest always came back from these meetings peevish and irritated with the other men. McAlmon was a poet and friend of both Ezra and Sylvia. He was married to the British writer Annie Ellerman, who wrote under the pseudonym Bryher. It was very widely known that Annie was a lesbian and that Bob was keener on men than women. The marriage was one of convenience. On and off, Annie had been very involved with the poet H.D., another of Pound’s “pupils,” and although none of this seemed to trouble Bob in the least, it got under Ernest’s skin. I wasn’t exactly sure why. We were surrounded by every combination of sexual pairing and triangulation, so I didn’t think it was the homosexuality that got to Ernest per se. It was more likely the distribution of power. Annie was an heiress. Her father was a shipping magnate who happened to be the wealthiest man in England. Although Bob had money of his own, it wasn’t anywhere near what Annie had, and there was the impression that she kept him on a leash and that he needed her if he was going to go on running his brand-new press, Contact Editions. Bob was dependent on Annie, and Ernest might someday be dependent on Bob, if he wanted to be published. Contact Editions was new but earmarked for greatness and actively looking for the sharpest, freshest writing possible.

Knowing that he should impress Bob meant that Ernest was ineluctably drawn to offend him. By the time Bob, Ernest, and Mike Strater had left for Spain, Ernest and Bob were barely even speaking. The trip became an awkward one in many ways. Bob (with help from Annie) was footing all the bills, and this brought out the very worst in Ernest. He was always critical of the rich and hated to feel obligated. I learned later from Mike that Ernest had also immediately taken over as the “expert” on the trip, lecturing the other men incessantly. He loved bullfighting from the very first moment. In his letters to me, he talked only of the courage of the toreros and the bulls, too. The whole thing was a great and moving tragedy that you could see and feel, close enough to raise the hair on your neck.

When he came back a week later, he was brimming with enthusiasm. He practiced the dramatically flared passes he’d learned in Ronda and Madrid with a tablecloth in our apartment.

He turned parallel to our table, the only bull available for the moment. “There’s an incredible calm as the matador watches the animal come, only thinking of what he has to do to bring him in correctly and not about the danger. That’s where the grace is. And the difficulty, of course.”

“I’d love to see it,” I said.

“You might find it hard to watch,” he said.

“Maybe, but it sounds like something I wouldn’t want to miss. The fights might even be a good influence on the baby,” I said.

“Yes, he’ll be a real man before he’s even born.”

“What makes you so sure it’s a boy?”

“What else would it be?”

We made plans to go back together in July, to the Fiesta de San Fermin in Pamplona, where Gertrude and Alice had gone the summer before. It was supposed to be the very best arena for bullfighting, drawing the most murderous bulls and highest-skilled toreros. Although I’d expressed only excitement at the prospect, Ernest was determined to prepare me for the violence.

“Not everyone can stomach it,” he said. “McAlmon drank brandy all through his first bullfight. Every time the bull rushed the horses, it made him go green. He said he couldn’t imagine anyone ever finding anything to love about it, and if they did, they were deranged.”

“I don’t think the two of you are meant to be friends.”

“Maybe not, but it’s looking like he and Annie want to do a book of stories for me. Or maybe stories and poems.”

“Really? If you hate him so much, why would you want him to do the book?”

“Someone’s got to. Now I only have to write the damned thing.”

All of Pamplona was awake when our bus lumbered into the walled city in the middle of the night. The streets were so crowded with bodies that I wondered how the bus could budge at all, but the dancers moved in a ripple away from the rumbling engine and then filled in again once we’d passed. We continued to climb the narrow streets toward the public square, and when we reached it there was such a blur of noise and motion-dancers whirling, musicians drumming and blasting reed pipes, fireworks exploding in loud bursts of white smoke-we nearly lost our luggage. Once we had it securely in hand and found our hotel, our reservations, which Ernest had made weeks before, had been given away.

Back on the street again, Ernest told me to stay and wait for him while he looked for lodging. I watched him borne away by the crowd without feeling much hope that he’d find a room, much less make his way back to me. The streets themselves seemed to be shifting. I backed against a thick stone wall and tried to stand my ground as dancers spun by in blue and white. The women wore flaring full skirts. They circled each other, snapping their fingers and stamping their black-heeled shoes on the cobblestones. Their hair was loose and beautiful. Some carried tambourines or bells, and though the music sounded chaotic to me, with shrill fifing and drumming that shook the bones of my knees, the women seemed to hear a clear rhythm and move to it perfectly, their legs lifting in time, their arms arcing out from their sides. The men wore blue shirts and trousers, with red kerchiefs at their necks, and danced together in large groups. They called out to one another with happy yelps that were instantly absorbed. It was all like nothing I’d ever seen.

Somehow Ernest navigated the madness. He returned to collect me, and though all the hotels were booked and had been for weeks, he’d managed to secure us a room in a private house nearby, six nights for twice what we paid in rent each month in Paris.

“So much?” I said, feeling a bit ill at the amount. “How can we possibly afford it?”

“Chin up, Tiny. We’ll be paid back in sketches. I need to be here. I feel that so powerfully.”

I couldn’t argue with his instinct and was dead on my feet besides. We took the room and were grateful for it, but in the end we might as well have stayed on the streets all night like everyone else. The whole city had been waiting all year for this week, this joyful night. They could dance forever, it seemed, and it struck me as funny that we’d been keen to come here to escape the chaos of Bastille Day in Paris, when this was as frenetic if not worse.

I finally got out of bed near 6:00 a.m., knowing there would be no rest for me, and walked out onto the balcony. On the street beneath me, there were as many people about as the night before, but they seemed more focused and directed. It was nearly time for the running of the bulls, but I didn’t know that. I only knew something was happening. I went inside and dressed quietly, but Ernest woke anyway from his very light sleep, and by the time we were back at the balcony together, a cannon had sounded with a crack. We saw its white smoke scatter above the public square, and then the crowd gathered there began to sing. Our room was perfectly situated. We could see and hear everything from where we stood at the railing. A group of men and boys sang a passionate song in Spanish. I understood nothing, but didn’t really need to.

“I think it’s about danger,” I said to Ernest over the din.

“Happy danger,” he said. “They’re excited to test themselves. To see if they can outrun their fear.”

He knew the bulls would be released soon. Gertrude and Alice had relayed in great detail all they’d seen at the fiesta the year before, and so had Mike Strater. But Ernest wasn’t content to hear what it was like; he wanted to know it firsthand. And if I hadn’t been there with him, I knew he wouldn’t be standing on the balcony at all. He really wanted to be down in the square, preparing himself to run.

“Viva San Fermin,” the crowd shouted. “Gora San Fermin!”

The cannon sounded again as the bulls were set loose, and we saw the runners coming very fast along the cobbled streets below. Everyone wore white shirts and pants with bright red scarves around their waists and necks. Some carried newspapers to wave the bulls away and all wore an expression that seemed ecstatic. After the runners, six bulls thundered past with such power the house shook under our feet. Their hooves rang on the cobblestones and their thick dark heads ducked low, looking murderous. Some of the men were overcome and had to scramble up the side of the barricades lining the street. Onlookers reached to help them escape, but there was also a palpable anticipation as the crowd waited to see if some unlucky one wouldn’t be fast or limber enough.

There was no goring that day, at least not that we saw, and I was very relieved when the bulls were safely in the arena. The entire ritual took only a few minutes, but I realized I’d been holding my breath.

We breakfasted on wonderfully sweet café con leche and dense rolls, and then I tried to nap in our room while Ernest walked the streets of Pamplona taking notes on everything he saw. It was all poetry to him, the heavily lined faces of the old Basque men, each one with the same blue cap. The young men wore wide-brimmed straw hats instead and carried hand-sewn wine skins over their shoulders, their arms and backs well muscled from hard labor. Ernest came back to the room excited by it all, and talking about the lunch he’d just eaten, perfectly crisped river trout stuffed with fried ham and onions.

“The best fish I’ve ever eaten. Get dressed. You have to try it.”

“You really want to go back to the same café and watch me eat?”

“Watch nothing. I’m going to have it again.”

Later that afternoon when the first fight began, we sat in good barrera seats right up next to the action. Ernest had paid a premium to make sure we had an excellent view of the action, but he was also protective of me.

“Look away now,” he said when the first horseman set the long, barbed banderilla into the withers of the bull, and the blood ran freely. He said it again when the first horse was gored badly, and again when the fine young torero, Nicanor Villalta, killed his bull with deft precision. But I didn’t look away.

We sat in the barrera seats all that afternoon and saw six bulls die, and the whole while I watched and listened and felt swept up by it all. Between fights, I cross-stitched a white cotton blanket for the baby.

“You’ve surprised me,” Ernest said, near the end of the day.

“Have I?”

“You weren’t brought up to know how to watch something like this. I guessed you’d go weak. I’m sorry, but I did.”

“I wasn’t sure how I’d feel, but I can tell you now. Safe and strong.” I’d come to the end of a row of stitches and tied a neat, flat knot, the way my mother had taught me to do when I was a girl. As I smoothed the floss with my fingertips, satisfied with my work, I couldn’t help but think how shocked she would be to see me in this passionate, violent place and not cringing the least, but weathering it like a natural.

“When I was very young, I used to be fearless. I’ve told you.”

He nodded.

“When I lost it, I think my family was happy.”

“I don’t know that you ever really lost it. I see it in you now.”

“I’m stronger because of the baby. I can feel him moving when the pipes sound and the crowd roars. He seems to like it.”

Ernest smiled with obvious pride, and then said, “Families can be vicious, but ours won’t be.”

“Our baby will know everything we know. We’ll be very honest and not hold anything back.”

“And we won’t underestimate him.”

“Or make him feel terrified of life.”

“This is getting to be a very tall order, isn’t it?” Ernest said, and we laughed happily, buoyed by our wishing.

Late that same night, when again we weren’t sleeping for the fireworks and the drumming and the riau-riau dancing, Ernest said, “What about Nicanor as a name for the baby?”

“He’ll be a fine torero with that name. He can’t help it.”

“We’ve had some fun, haven’t we?” He squeezed me tightly in his arms.

“It’s not all over.”

“No, but I figure I have to be steady when the baby comes. I’ll earn the bread and be the papa and there won’t be time to think about what I want.”

“For the first year, maybe, but not forever.”

“A year of sacrifice, then. And then he’ll have to take his chances with the rest of us.”

“Nicanor,” I repeated. “It rings, doesn’t it?”

“It does, but that doesn’t mean the little bugger gets more than a year.”