The Paris Wife

FORTY-ONE

Along the Golfe-Juan a white road cut into the cliff side. You could ride a bicycle there for five or ten or fifteen miles, looking out at the bright boats in the quays, the rocky beaches and pebbled beaches, and sometimes a shoal of impossibly soft-looking sand. Bathers napped beneath gaily striped red-and-white umbrellas looking as if they belonged in a painting. Everything did, the fishermen in dark caps releasing their nets, the stone ramparts that sheltered Antibes from the weather, and the red rooftops of the village stacked one on the other in terraced clusters.

Pauline and I often bicycled together after breakfast while Ernest worked. It wasn’t my idea, but we were there in paradise, after all, and had to do something. The lease at Villa Paquita ran out in early June, and so we rented two rooms at the Hôtel de la Pinède in Juan-les-Pins. Bumby and Marie Cocotte were nearby, in a small bungalow surrounded by pine trees. The cure for his whooping cough had at last begun to work, and he felt a little better every day. His color had returned and he was sleeping well, and our worrying about him was almost entirely gone. The quarantine was over, but we kept to ourselves in the daylight anyway, forming our own island, while just a few miles across the peninsula at Villa America, the Murphys and the Fitzgeralds and the MacLeishes carried on as before, drinking sherry with biscuits at ten-thirty sharp and Tavel with caviar and toast points at one-thirty and playing bridge at a gorgeous blue-and-green mosaic table that had been set up on the beach for this. The image on the tabletop was of a siren with flowing hair. She balanced on a rock and gazed into the distance. At Villa America, everyone loved the siren because she seemed to be a symbol of something. They loved her the way they loved their sherry and their toast points and every moment of every ritual that wound around them like clock springs.

At the Hôtel de la Pinède, we had our own rituals. We breakfasted late, and then Ernest went off to work in a small studio off the terrace while Pauline and I rode bicycles or swam and sunned at our little beach with Bumby. After lunch we had siesta, then bathed and dressed for cocktail hour either at Villa America, in one of the terraced gardens, or at the casino in town, and no one raised even an eyebrow in our presence or said anything that wasn’t in good taste because that was the contract.

Anyone looking on from nearly any vantage point would have believed that Pauline and I were friends. She might have believed it herself. I never really knew. She certainly worked hard to stay cheerful, inventing errands for us in the village to secure freshly picked figs or the very best tinned sardines.

“Wait until you try this olive,” she would say, or whatever it was-strong coffee or pastry or nice jam. “It’s heaven.”

I must have heard her say “It’s heaven” a thousand times over that summer, until I wanted to scream. I didn’t scream, though, and that became one of the things I grew to regret.

We had two rooms at the hotel, each with a double bed and heavy bureau and shuttered windows that opened onto the coastline. Ernest and I occupied one, and Pauline kept to herself in the other-at least at first. For a week or ten days, when Pauline and I came back from bicycling or swimming, she’d excuse herself to change for lunch, but then went to Ernest’s studio instead, passing through the hotel to where a second entrance lay unmarked, as inconspicuous as a broom closet. They likely had a secret knock. I imagined that and so much more, though it made me sick to do it. When she came to lunch an hour or so later, she was always freshly showered and impeccably dressed. She’d sit down, smiling, and begin to praise the lunch or the day extravagantly. It was all so modulated and discreet I wondered if she took a certain pleasure playing her role, as if in her mind a film reel was spinning and she was a great actress who never fumbled a single line.

I wasn’t nearly so clever. More and more I found myself at a loss for words and didn’t want to hear other people talking either. Their conversations seemed false and empty. I preferred to look at the sea, which said nothing and never made you feel alone. From my bicycle, I could watch the boats moving in blue chop, or focus on the bright green scrub growing out of the ramparts with great tenacity. Somehow it stayed rooted, no matter how the wind or waves attacked, immovable as the dark moss on the rocks below.

One morning after a storm had raged for hours the night before, Pauline was intent on pointing out every sign of demolition-overturned dinghies and fallen pine boughs, the tangle of umbrellas on the beach. I tried to escape her chatter by pedaling faster until I could only hear the rush of momentum, the purr of my wheels on the road. But she wouldn’t be thrown off.

“I’ve been trying to talk Drum into going stateside in the fall. You know my parents have land in Arkansas. The living is so cheap there you’d save a fortune.”

How I hated her using nicknames for him so casually. That was our language. Our dance. “You can save your breath,” I said. “He’d rather cut off his arm than go home.”

“Actually, he thinks it’s a fine idea.”

“Arkansas?”

“Piggott. It’s rustic, of course, but you like rustic.”

“I like our life here. What are you trying to do?”

“I’m sorry. I’m only thinking of you. You’re bound to run out of money soon in Paris. He should be starting a second novel and worrying about nothing but that. You can afford nice new things in Piggott. Surely that means something to you.”

“No,” I said. “It doesn’t.”

For the rest of our ride, I fought back both incredulity and tears. I didn’t want to let Pauline see either, and so stayed well ahead, riding faster and faster. Some of the turns were perilous. If I had lost my balance even for a moment, I might have pitched out over the stone precipice and onto the jagged boulders below. I wobbled at times but kept my course, and it was a kind of sharply edged euphoria I felt, heading back to confront Ernest. My heart was flooded with adrenaline and my mind raced. What would I say? What could he say to defend himself?

When I reached the hotel I was in such a state I left my bicycle sprawled in the gravel and hurried into the hotel, breathless and covered with a fine film of sweat. I planned to burst into his studio, but of course the door was locked.

“Who is it?” he said when I knocked.

“Your wife,” I said, my voice thick with anger.

When he opened the door I could see he was very surprised to find me there. This was Pauline’s time or nearly so. He’d probably begun to anticipate her with growing desire.

“You can’t think I’d go to Arkansas,” I spat out before he’d even closed the door.

“Oh,” he said. “I was going to tell you soon. If you could think reasonably, you’d see it’s not a bad scheme at all.”

“We’d live with her parents?” I laughed shrilly.

“No, she’d find us all a house together, maybe in town.”

I could scarcely believe what I was hearing. “You want us to live all together.”

“We’re doing that now, aren’t we?”

“Yes, and it’s awful. It makes me sick to my stomach to know you’re making love to her.”

“I’m sorry, Tatie. But maybe that’s because the situation is new and we don’t know how to do it well.”

“Do you really think it can be done well?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to lose you.”

“And if I don’t agree?”

“Please, Tatie,” he said, his voice low and anguished. “Just try. If it works and we all start to feel good about it, we’ll head for Piggott in September. If it doesn’t, we’ll go back to Paris.”

“Alone?”

“Yes,” he said, though I could hear some kind of hesitancy or hedging in his voice. He wasn’t sure about any of this.

“I think it’s a mistake. All of it.”

“Maybe, but it’s too late to go back. There’s only what’s ahead now.”

“Yes,” I said sadly, and left the way I came.

Over the next few days, I began to wonder if Ernest’s proposal was a new idea, an attempt at some solution out of the mess at our feet, or if he’d intended it all along. For years we’d been surrounded by triangles-freethinking, free-living lovers willing to bend every convention to find something right or risky or liberating enough. I couldn’t say what Ernest felt watching their antics, but they seemed sad and even tortured to me. When we last heard from Pound, his mistress, Olga Rudge, had given birth to a daughter, though they agreed not to raise her. Nothing in Pound’s life invited a child and neither one of them wanted to feel compromised, apparently. They gave the baby to a peasant woman in the maternity ward where Olga delivered. The woman had miscarried and was only too happy to take her.

I was stunned that anyone could hand over a child so easily, but doubly surprised when we heard in another letter that Shakespear was pregnant. It wasn’t Pound’s child; in fact, she wasn’t saying a word about who the father was, only that she was keeping the baby. Her behavior was obviously retaliatory. That’s what terrible, sordid situations did to you, made you act crazily, against your own truths, against your self.

One afternoon when Ernest and I were napping in our room, Pauline came in on cat feet, making no noise whatsoever. I’d been having a dream in which I was being buried under tons of sand. It was an image of suffocation, and yet strangely not a nightmare. The sand felt warm and sugary, and as it crushed me slowly, I kept thinking, This is heaven. This is heaven. I was feeling so languid and so drugged, I didn’t even know Pauline was in the room until she’d slipped under the sheets on Ernest’s side of the bed. The afternoons were hot, and we slept naked. I knew what was happening, and I also didn’t want to come awake enough to feel it. I never opened my eyes. My body wasn’t mine exactly. No one spoke or made any noise that would shake me out of my trance. The bed was sand, I told myself. The sheets were sand. I was still in the dream.