The Paris Wife

THIRTY-SEVEN

When he saw Pfife on the street in her good-looking coat, she was always so fresh and full of life. She cocked her head to one side when he talked to her and squinted her eyes and listened. She listened with everything she had and talked that way, too. When she said things about his work, he had the feeling that she understood what he was trying to do and why it mattered. He liked all of this, but hadn’t meant to do anything about it. Then one night she’d been at the sawmill until very late. Hadley had gone to bed with a raw throat and they’d stayed up talking. When it came time for Pfife to go, instead of putting her in a taxi, he walked her home. It was three miles at least, but they covered the distance in a kind of trance, smiling strangely at one another, their steps ringing on the cobblestones. They walked ever more slowly as they approached her door, but finally there was nowhere else to go.

She turned to him and said, “You can kiss me.”

“All right,” he said, and kissed her deeply on the lips. Then he walked home alone, desire buzzing through him, wondering if Hadley would suspect anything.

A few days later they met by chance at the Dingo. It had been chance for him in any case. They’d each had a glass of Pernod and then she said, “If we stay here some of our friends will eventually turn up and then we’ll have to stay for good.”

“Where should we go?”

She’d given him a serious look and paid the check herself, and then they’d walked quickly to her apartment on the rue Picot. Her sister was out for the evening and they hadn’t even turned on the lights or pretended they were there for anything else. He’d been surprised by her intensity-she was very Catholic, after all, and he’d guessed she’d be timid and full of guilt. But the guilt came much later. For the moment, there was only the totally convincing and wonderful strangeness of her. Her narrow hips and very long white legs were nothing like his wife’s. Her breasts were like the small tight halves of peaches and she was a new country, and he was very happy to be with her as long as he didn’t think about what it stood for.

When he went home to his wife, he’d felt like a terrible shit for doing it and swore to himself that it wouldn’t happen again. And then, when it did, over and over, more and more planned and deliberate all the time, he wondered how he’d ever get out of the mess he’d made. If Hadley knew it would kill her twice, once for each of them betraying her. But if she didn’t, well, that was almost worse. It wasn’t even quite true, that way, because she was his life and nothing meant anything if she didn’t know it.

He loved them both and that’s where the pain came in. He carried it in his head like a fever and made himself sick thinking about it. And sometimes, after hours lying awake, it came to him clearly that he only had to change his life to match his circumstances. Pound had managed it. He had Shakespear and Olga both and no one doubted he loved them. He didn’t have to lie; everyone knew everything and it all worked because he’d kept pushing and hadn’t compromised or become someone else.

That was the trick, wasn’t it? Ford was almost as old as his own father, but he had done it, too. When his first wife wouldn’t divorce him, he simply changed his name and married Stella, who was very beautiful and true and also never enough. He took up with Jean Rhys, moving her right into the house where Stella painted in one room and the baby cried in another, and in yet another he edited Jean’s books and bedded her, too. Everyone called Jean “Ford’s girl” and Stella “Ford’s wife,” and that made everything plain enough apparently.

Why couldn’t Pfife be his girl? The arrangement might be deadly, but couldn’t marriage also be, if it banked the coals in you? You could grow very quiet in marriage. A new girl got you talking, and telling her everything made it fresh again. She called you out of your head and stopped the feeling that the best part of you was being shaved away, inch by inch. You owed her for that. No matter what else happened, however terrible, you wouldn’t forget it.