The Paris Wife

FORTY

He didn’t know how love managed to be a garden one moment and war the next. He was at war now, his loyalty tested at every turn. And the way it had been, the aching and delirious happiness of being newly in love, had passed out of his reach until he wasn’t certain he’d ever had it. Now, there were only lies and compromises. He lied to everyone, beginning with himself, because it was war and you did what you had to do to stay upright. But he was losing control, if he ever had it. The lies grew tighter and more difficult all the time. And because there was sometimes more pain than he could properly cope with, he had a black buckram notebook, thick with creamy rag paper, where he put down the ways he’d thought to kill himself if it ever came to that.

You could turn on the gas and wait for the slow fog and the blue and strangled half sleep. You could slash your wrists, the razors were always there, and there were other places on the body that were even quicker, the neck below the ear, the inner thigh. He’d seen knives in the gut and that wasn’t for him. It reminded him of gored horses in Spain, the purplish coil of entrails unzipped. Not that, then, not unless there wasn’t an alternative. There was out the window of a skyscraper. He’d thought of that in New York when he was drunk and happy after meeting Max Perkins and saw the Woolworth Building. Even happy he thought it. There was the deep middle of the sea, off an ocean liner at night, with only the stars as witness. But this was terribly romantic and you had to arrange the ocean liner in advance. There was any swim anywhere if you meant to do it. You could dive down deep and stay there, way down, letting the air slip out of you and just stay, and if anyone wanted you, well, they could come and get you. But as soon as he hit on it, he knew that the only way he would really do it was with a gun.

The first time he’d seriously looked at a gun and thought about pulling the trigger he was eighteen and had just been wounded at Fossalta. He’d felt a lightning rod of pure pain take him over, more pain than he’d known was possible. He’d lost consciousness and when he came to again his legs were mush and didn’t belong to him at all. His head didn’t either, but there he was on a stretcher, waiting to be carried away by the medics, surrounded by the dead and the dying. Overhead the sky went white, a stuttering of light and heat. Screaming. Blood everywhere. He lay there for two hours, and every time he heard the shelling, he couldn’t help himself; he started to pray. He didn’t know where the words came from, even, because he never prayed.

He was blood soaked, open to the sky, and the sky was open to death. Suddenly he saw the gun, an officer’s pistol very near his foot. If he could just reach it. Everyone was dying, and it was so much more normal and natural than this pain. This hideous openness. With his mind, he reached for the pistol. He reached again and failed. And then the medics came and they bore him away alive.

He’d always thought of himself as brave, but he didn’t have a chance to find out that night of the shelling. He wasn’t any closer to knowing now. In the fall, he’d promised himself he’d do it if the situation with Pfife wasn’t resolved by Christmas, and it hadn’t been and he still hadn’t done it. He told himself then it was because he loved her too much and Hadley, too, and he couldn’t cause suffering for either of them-but they all suffered badly anyway.

Now it was summer and things were more and more impossible. He couldn’t imagine living without Hadley and didn’t want to, but Pfife was winding herself more firmly around his heart. She used the word “marriage” and meant it more all the time.

He wanted them both, but there was no having everything, and love couldn’t help him now. Nothing could help him but bravery, and what was that anyhow? Was it reaching for the gun or sitting with the pain and the shaking and the terrible fear? He couldn’t know for sure, but since that first gun, he’d reached for many. When the time came, he knew it would be a gun and that he’d simply trip the trigger with a bare toe. He didn’t want to do it, but if things got too bad-if they got very bad indeed-then suicide was always permissible. It had to be.