The Paris Wife

THIRTY-ONE

In the railroad yard, the bulls came off the cars lowing and twisting and panicked, their eyes rolling back in their heads. They didn’t know where to go, and it was hard to watch because we knew that by the end of the day they’d be dead. It was morning and quite cool for July. The dust rose up from their hooves and into the air, stinging our eyes as Ernest pointed out the hunched and muscled place between the shoulder blades where the sword had to hit just right.

“Yes, sir,” said Harold Loeb. “That’s the moment of truth.”

Ernest’s face turned sour. “What would you know about it?”

“Enough, I guess,” Harold said.

Just then Duff came up and put her hand in the crook of Ernest’s arm. “It’s all wonderful, isn’t it?” She looked at him like a child about to get everything her own way, her eyes crinkling and her smile wide. “It makes a chap hungry, though. Who’s going to feed me anyway?”

“Oh, all right. Sure,” Ernest said, still sour, and the two of them led the way to the café. Ernest wore his beret and a navy sweater and white pants, a dark scarf knotted at his throat. Duff was perfect as ever with her long cotton sweater and Eton collar in pale green silk. Her hair was brushed back from her forehead and she walked straight and tall. Ernest matched her stride, his chin set in a proud way. He was probably still fuming at Harold, though trying to swallow it. From the back, the two of them together looked as if they belonged in a fashion magazine, and I saw Duff’s fiancé, Pat Guthrie, noticing this, too. Everyone noticed, and poor Pat had been looking pained for days.

I felt sorry for Pat, though I wouldn’t have wanted to live with him. He drank too much and could be a terrible bother when he did. Each afternoon he would start out sunny and pleased with everything. He liked to talk about popular music and could sing and dance with great energy and enthusiasm, but after three or four cocktails, something turned in him and he became snide and superior. If he kept on with it and Duff didn’t send him away, he changed again, growing sullen and morose. I wondered how she kept up with his moods-or how he himself did. When he woke up, did he feel disgusted for the way he’d twisted one way and then another? Did he remember any of it?

“What do you say we drink through till dark?” Harold said, coming up beside me.

I smiled and took his arm, wanting to make him feel better, if only for a moment. Maybe if we stuck together, he’d try to make me feel better, too. God knows I needed it.

The trip had started badly in Burguete, the week before, when we went to fish in the Irati-one of Ernest’s favorite rivers in the world-and found it all ruined. The landlady at our hotel had tried to warn us that the good fishing was gone, but Ernest had laughed her off. The loggers had been there for the beech and pine, and when we got to the river we found it full of trash and floating debris. Dams had been broken through. Dead fish littered the banks and clogged the small pools. It was almost too much to take in, but we stuck it out, anyway, for several days, trying to go farther out to the smaller streams. No one took a single fish.

Bill Smith, one of our old friends from Chicago, was with us, having been lured over by Ernest’s reports of world-class fishing, and of the bullfights that would follow. We hadn’t seen him at all since the days of the Domicile. When Kenley and Ernest had their falling-out, tension trickled through all of our connections to the Smith clan, but we’d since picked up a fairly regular correspondence with Kate, who was back in Chicago, working as a journalist. And when Bill arrived to meet us in Paris, we were happy to find that he was the same as ever, full of lively stories and game for anything. He’d brought with him every surefire fly he owned for the trip to Spain-all the old winners from summers fishing the Sturgeon or the Black up in Michigan-and I thought Ernest was going to cry when Bill opened his tackle box to show Ernest the flies, because they were useless.

In Pamplona, we still felt the wrongness. We had lots of friends around and it should have been jolly, but it wasn’t. In Paris, Ernest and Duff had done their dance around each other, but it had seemed harmless for the most part. Something had come in to change it, though, and that something was Harold. He’d fallen hard for Duff and swept her off for a week at St.-Jean-de-Luz. When Kitty told me about the affair, she said Harold had been so strange of late she’d suspected something like this was coming. I’d never understood the arrangement Harold and Kitty made of love. Now I felt equally baffled and more than a little upset by the way Ernest was reacting so extremely. He had no rights to Duff-none of this should have mattered at all to him, but it did, and suddenly everyone knew it.

The morning the fights began, we all woke up at dawn to see the running of the bulls through the streets. The first time I’d watched, the summer I was pregnant with Bumby, it seemed to pass so quickly I couldn’t remember what I’d seen. Now Bumby was safe in Paris with Marie Cocotte, and though I had wanted and needed a break from constant mothering, I didn’t know quite how to feel as a free agent.

The streets were slick that morning. A light rain had fallen before dawn, and you could see the bulls struggle for traction against the cobblestones. One went down and struggled, craning its thick neck, its eyes rolling to white, and the whole thing seemed to pass in slow motion.

We were standing just behind a low wall, close enough to smell the animal sweat of the bulls and the excitement of everyone watching. Though some didn’t watch or couldn’t.

“The bulls are almost prehistoric,” Ernest had told Bill in the café the night before. “They’ve been bred for six hundred years to do what they do, to make this run to the arena, to gore what they can on the way to their own certain death. It’s goddamned beautiful is what it is. Just wait till you see it for yourself.”

“I’m ready for it,” Bill said, but on the street with a clear view of everything, his conviction seemed to waver. While we watched, one of the young men ran too close to a thick bull and was shoved into the wall, just twenty feet away from where we stood. We could hear his arm snap at an angle behind his back. He cried out and tried to scramble up the wall, and the fear on his face was ugly to see.

“Too much for you, old boy?” Ernest said when he saw Bill look away.

“Maybe,” Bill said.

Ernest was standing near Duff, and his color was very high. “See there, now?” He pointed to the way the bull was coming at the young man, its square head ducked low. “The bull’s sight is very bad, but it smells him, and it’s taking its time. Look at him now. He’s coming, by God.”

“I can’t believe this is sport for you,” Bill said to Ernest very quietly.

“What else would it be? It’s life and death, brother, same as every day.”

The bull came forward, leading with the right horn, his thick head swung to one side so he looked like the devil, really, barreling at the scrambling caballero. But then a hand appeared from the other side of the wall. We couldn’t see who had offered help, but it was enough. The caballero got enough traction to run up the wall and over, and then he was free. A small cheer went up in the crowd when he was safe.

“I suppose you’re disappointed,” Bill said, looking at Ernest pointedly.

“Not at all.”

“Would he have gotten it very bad?” Duff asked.

“Maybe he would have. It can happen. I’ve seen it.”

“It’s terribly exciting, isn’t it?” she said.

“The best damned show there is.”

The last bull ran by us, and then the pastores came behind the bulls with sticks, and then the rocket went off, which meant all the bulls were safely in the ring.

“Beautiful,” Duff said.

I tried to remember if I thought them beautiful the first time, when Ernest had taught me the way he was teaching Duff now. My life had changed so much in the two short years since, but I remembered being excited and also strangely calm, because I was pregnant and felt safe, buffered from everything in the best way. My body was doing what it was meant to do, and these animals, they were living out their destinies, too. I could watch and not feel mauled or traumatized, but just sit next to Ernest and sew the clothes and blankets I was working on for the baby that would come in three months, no matter what happened on that day. And I remembered feeling very good about everything in the night, with the riau-riau dancing and the fireworks, though it was impossible to sleep for the noise.

We seemed to be the only Americans in Pamplona that first year. Ernest called it the Garden of Eden-but that had certainly changed now. Limousines brought society over from Biarritz. Uniformed chauffeurs opened doors all night and then waited near their cars for the revelers to tire and spill back into the leather cocoon stinking of champagne. But even with the rich coming in to spoil everything, it was spoiled already.

Harold was still crazy for Duff. You could see it at lunch when he went pale and Victorian with her one minute and then began to fuss with the waiter to make sure she had her drink.

“Oh, it’s fine, darling,” she said. “I’m still alive over here, at least for now.”

We were all crowded around an outdoor table, with Duff, Ernest, and Harold on one side and Pat, Bill, and myself on the other. Pat had on a beautiful summer suit with a navy linen jacket. He’d gone out and found a beret just like Ernest’s and wore it high on his forehead at an optimistic angle. And yet for all of Pat’s civilized trimmings, the moment Harold became too conspicuously attentive to Duff, he snapped and grew belligerent.

“Give it a rest, Harold,” he barked. “Go take a walk around the block.”

“Why don’t you shut it,” Harold said. “Or I’ll tell you what, just have another drink.” He turned and shouted loudly behind him to no one, “Bring this man a drink!”

Just then Don Stewart walked up looking cool and clean in gray flannels and a fresh white shirt. He glanced around the table, instantly sensing tension. “Who died, men?”

“No one of consequence,” Ernest said.

“I suddenly have a terrible headache,” I said. “I hope you’ll all excuse me.” I scooted around my side of the table and stood next to Don.

“Why don’t you walk the poor kid home, Donald?” Ernest said.

“I’m fine,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”

“Nonsense,” Don said. “You’re pale as a ghost.”

Before we’d even gotten to the door, the gap had closed around the table and you couldn’t even tell I’d been there. Ernest was sitting closer to Duff now, and Pat had squeezed around to be nearer, too. Duff sat at the middle of it all like a floating island of meringue. She didn’t even seem to notice.

I was grateful that Don had offered to shepherd me home. I was feeling terribly lonely, actually, and Don was easy to be with. Ever since we’d met the summer before, he sought my company when we were out in groups together. I felt he was a kindred spirit because he didn’t quite fit in Paris either. He was a smart and savvy writer who’d gone to Yale, but in many ways he was still the boy who grew up on a farm outside of Columbus, Ohio. In Paris, everyone was so drastic and dramatic, flinging themselves into ditches for each other.

“I get why no one bothers with the usual rules,” he said to me once. “I was in the war, too, you know. Nothing looks or feels the same anymore, so what’s the point?” His face grew serious. “Still, I miss good old-fashioned honorable people just trying to make something of life. Simply, without hurting anyone else. I know that makes me a sap.”

“You’d like to find a girl like your mother, I’ll bet.”

“Maybe. I want things to make sense again. They haven’t in a long time.”

I believed I’d understood him at the time, but now as Don walked me back to the hotel, I felt our connection more strongly. I wanted things to make sense, too. More than anything.

“How are you holding up, pal?” he asked.

“Better than some, I expect. Poor Harold.”

“Poor Harold? What about Pat? He’s the one with the claim to Duff.”

“Seems like they have a pretty loose arrangement to me,” I said. “She drags Harold off to the Riviera for two weeks and then seems surprised that he’s mooning over her like a sad calf, and even more that Pat’s off his head about it. It’s cruel.”

“I don’t think she means to be cruel. She seems awfully sad under it all to me.”

We’d come to a corner where the Mercado was breaking apart for the day. A woman was stacking baskets, and another scooped blood-colored dried chiles into a canvas sack. Nearby, a little girl sat in the dirt, holding a chicken and singing to it. I slowed so we could watch her longer. Wonderfully black hair framed her heart-shaped face. She petted the chicken as she sang and seemed to have it in a trance.

“You’re looking at her like you want to gobble her up,” Don said. “You must miss your Bumby.”

“Like crazy. It’s easier when I don’t think about him. Sometimes I tell myself I’m two people. I’m his mum when I’m with him and someone else when I’m here, away.”

“Hem’s Hadley.”

“Maybe. Or maybe I’m my own Hadley.” We could see the stippled arch of the Hotel La Perla and the tangled wall of bougainvillea. I stopped and turned to him. “Why aren’t you all bound up with Duff, too? Everyone else is.”

“She’s a dish, all right, and it would be easy enough to give in. She’s asked me to take care of her bill at the hotel, you know, since she can’t ask Harold now. Maybe she’s asked Hem, too.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“Are you and Hem all right? He wouldn’t be stupid enough to throw you over for that title in a nice-fitting sweater, would he?”

I flinched. “Maybe we should have a drink.”

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said it. I think the world of you two. If you guys can’t make it, what chance do the rest of us have?”

“You really are a peach, Don,” I said, and moved forward to kiss him on the cheek. His skin was shaved clean as a baby’s and he smelled clean, like tonic.

“You might be the best girl there is,” he said with feeling, and returned the kiss. His lips were dry and chaste on my cheek, but then he moved ever so slightly and kissed me on the lips. When he pulled away, his eyes were moist and questioning. “I don’t suppose you love me, too, just a little?”

“I wish I did. It might balance things out.” I put my arms around his neck and held him close for a moment, feeling the sadness and confusion, all mixed up together in him. “This place has us all going crazy.”

“You’re not angry with me?”

“No,” I said. “We’re better friends now, I think.”

“Isn’t that a nice way to say it? I knew I wasn’t wrong about you.” He pulled away and brushed the hair out of my eyes. “I hope Hem knows what he has.”

“Me too,” I said, and went into the hotel. Inside, the señora was placing a cloth over her songbird’s cage.

“He doesn’t like the rockets,” she said as she settled the blanket more closely around the bars. “They make him tear at his own feathers. Have you seen this?”

“I have, Señora.” I passed her on my way to the staircase. “Can you please send brandy up?”

She looked behind me to see who might be coming along, so I added, “Just one glass.”

“Is the señora well?”

“Not very,” I said. “But the brandy will help.”