The Paris Wife

TWELVE

Our first apartment in Paris was at 74 Cardinal Lemoine, two oddly shaped rooms on the fourth floor of a building next door to a public dance hall, a bal musette, where at any time of day you could buy a ticket to shuffle around the floor as the accordion wheezed a lively tune. Anderson had said Montparnasse, but we couldn’t afford it, or any of the other more fashionable areas. This was old Paris, the Fifth Arrondissement, far away from the good cafés and restaurants and teeming not with tourists but working-class Parisians with their carts and goats and fruit baskets and open begging palms. So many husbands and sons had been lost in the war, these were mostly women and children and old men, and that was as sobering as anything else about the place. The cobblestone street climbed and wound up from the Seine near Pont Sully and ended at the Place de la Contrescarpe, a square that stank of the drunks spilling out of the bistros or sleeping in doorways. You’d see an enormous clump of rags and then the clump would move and you’d realize this was some poor soul sleeping it off. Up and down the narrow streets around the square, the coal peddlers sang and shouldered their filthy sacks of boulets. Ernest loved the place at first sight; I was homesick and disappointed.

The apartment came furnished, with an ugly oak dining set and an enormous false-mahogany bed with gilt trimmings. The mattress was good, as it would be in France, where apparently everyone did everything in bed-eat, work, sleep, make lots of love. That agreed with us, as little else in the apartment did, except maybe the lovely black mantelpiece over the fireplace in the bedroom.

Right away we began to rearrange the furniture, moving the dining table into the bedroom, and a rented upright piano into the dining room. Once we had that done, Ernest sat down at the table and began to write a letter to his family, which was anxious for news of us, while I unpacked our wedding china and the few nice things we’d brought along, like the pretty tea set that had been a gift from Fonnie and Roland, with its pattern of salmon-colored roses and leaf work. Cradling the round teapot in my hands and thinking about where it might belong in my tiny, medieval kitchen, I suddenly had such a pang for home that I began to cry. It wasn’t St. Louis I longed for exactly, but some larger and more vague idea of home-known, loved people and things. I thought of the wide front porch of my family’s house on Cabanné Place, where we lived until just after my father’s suicide: the swing that made a cricket’s noise when I lay in it, my head on a pillow, my eyes fixed on the perfectly straight varnished bead boarding above. Within minutes I was so soggy with longing I had to set down the teapot.

“Is that whimpering from my Feather Kitty?” Ernest said from the bedroom.

“I’m afraid so,” I said. I went to him, wrapping my arms around his neck and pressing my damp face into his collar.

“Poor wet cat,” he said. “I’m feeling it too.”

The table was propped against a narrow window and through it we could see the rough sides of neighboring buildings and shops and little else. In five days it would be Christmas.

“When I was a little girl my mother strung holly boughs along the red glass windows in the parlor. In sunlight or candlelight, everything glowed. That was Christmas.”

“Let’s not talk about it,” he said, and stood to hold me. He guided my head into his chest, to that spot where he knew I felt safest. Through the floorboards and walls, we could hear the accordion from the dance hall and we began to move to it, rocking lightly.

“We’ll settle in,” he said. “You’ll see.”

I nodded against his chest.

“Maybe we should go out now and shop for our Christmas stockings. That’ll cheer up the cat.”

I nodded again and we left for our shopping excursion. At the landing of every floor of the building, there was a basin and a communal toilet, which you used while standing on two pedals. The smells were terrible.

“It’s barbaric,” I said. “There must be a better system.”

“Better than pissing out the window, I suppose,” he said.

Out on the street, we turned left to go down the hill and stopped to peek into the doorway of the dance hall, where two sailors rocked bawdily against a pair of girls, both painfully skinny and heavily rouged. Above the bodies, strings of tin lanterns threw spangled shadows that made the room seem to swim and reel queasily.

“It’s a bit like a carnival in there,” I said.

“I imagine it improves when you’re drunk,” he said, and we quickly agreed everything would be much cheerier if we got drunk ourselves.

We’d yet to fully get our bearings, but we took a winding route in the general direction of the Seine, passing the Sorbonne and the Odéon Théâtre, until we found the Pré aux Clercs, a café on the rue des Saints-Pères that looked welcoming. We went in, taking a table near some British medical students who were talking drily about the effects of alcohol on the liver. Apparently they’d recently been intimate with cadavers.

“You can have my liver when I’m done with it,” Ernest joked with them. “But not tonight.”

Prohibition had been in full swing when we left the States, and though we’d never stopped drinking-who had?-it was a relief to be able to buy and enjoy liquor openly. We ordered Pernod, which was green and ghoulish looking once you added the water and sugar, and tried to concentrate on that instead of our dinner, which was a disappointing coq au vin with grayish coins of carrot floating in the broth.

“It doesn’t feel right to be so far from home at Christmas. We should have a proper tree and holly and a fat turkey roasting in the oven,” I said.

“Maybe,” he said. “But we have Paris instead. It’s what we wanted.”

“Yes,” I said. “But we’ll go home again someday, won’t we?”

“Of course we will,” he said, but his eyes had darkened with something-recollection or anxiety. “First we have to find a way to make it here. Do you think we can?”

“Of course,” I bluffed.

Out the café window, the streets were dim and the only passing thing was a horse pulling a tank wagon full of sewage, the cart’s wheels throwing spliced shadows.

He signaled the waiter over to order us two more Pernods, and we got down to serious drinking. By the time the café closed, we were so tight we had to hold on to one another for balance as we walked. Uphill was infinitely harder than down, particularly in our state, but we managed in our slow way, stopping to rest in doorways, sometimes sharing a sloppy kiss. This was something you could do in Paris without drawing much attention.

At home, we were both sick, one after another, in the chamber pot. The dance hall was still roaring with drunks when we went to bed; the accordion had risen to a fever pitch. We nuzzled forehead to forehead, damp and nauseous, keeping our eyes open so the world wouldn’t spin too wildly. And just as we were falling asleep, I said, “We’ll remember this. Someday we’ll say this accordion was the sound of our first year in Paris.”

“The accordion and the whores and the retching,” he said. “That’s our music.”

It rained for much of January, and once that passed, winter in Paris was stingingly cold and clear. Ernest had believed he could write anywhere, but after a few weeks of working in the cramped apartment, always aware of me, he found and rented a single room, very nearby, on rue Descartes. For sixty francs a month, he had a garret not much bigger than a water closet, but it was perfect for his needs. He didn’t want distractions and didn’t have any there. His desk overlooked the unlovely rooftops and chimney pots of Paris. It was cold, but cold could keep you focused, and there was a small brazier where he could burn bundles of twigs and warm his hands.

We fell into a routine, rising together each morning and washing without talking, because the work had already begun in his head. After breakfast, he’d go off in his worn jacket and the sneakers with the hole at the heel. He’d walk to his room and struggle all day with his sentences. When it was too cold to work or his thoughts grew too murky, he’d walk for long hours on the streets or along the prettily ordered paths of the Luxembourg Gardens. Along the Boulevard Montparnasse there was a string of cafés-the Dôme, the Rotonde, the Select-where expatriate artists preened and talked rot and drank themselves sick. Ernest felt disgusted by them.

“Why is it every other person you meet says they’re an artist? A real artist doesn’t need to gas on about it, he doesn’t have time. He does his work and sweats it out in silence, and no one can help him at all.”

I could certainly see how hanging around cafés all day wasn’t work, but I also wondered if everyone was as serious and inflexible about their craft as Ernest was. I imagined there were lots of other writers who worked in their own houses and could tolerate conversation at breakfast, for instance. Who managed to sleep through any given night without stewing or pacing or scratching at a notebook while a single candle smoked and wavered. I missed Ernest’s company all day, but he didn’t seem to miss mine, not while there was work to do. When he craved contact, he stopped in to visit the Cézannes and Monets at the Musée du Luxembourg, believing they had already done what he was striving for-distilling places and people and objects to their essential qualities. Cézanne’s river was thick and brown and realer for it. That’s what Ernest was after-and sometimes the going was achingly slow. Many days he came home looking exhausted, defeated, as if he’d been struggling with sacks of coal all day instead of with one sentence at a time.

When Ernest worked, I kept house for us, making the bed, sweeping and dusting and washing up the breakfast dishes. In the late morning, I’d take a market basket into the street and do our shopping, hunting for the best bargains. Even though it was on the Right Bank of the Seine and nowhere near our apartment, I liked to walk to Les Halles, the open-air market that was known as the Stomach of Paris. I loved the maze of stalls and stands with offerings more exotic than anything I’d ever seen back home. There was all manner of game, venison and boar and pyramids of soft, limp hares. Everything was displayed naturally, hooves and tusks and fur left intact so you knew just what you were looking at. Although it was disconcerting to know these creatures had recently been up and running in the nearby fields and farms, there was something almost beautiful in the sheer volume and variety of things on display, all edible in some form. I didn’t half know what to do with most of it-unplucked pheasant and goose, or the baskets of small dun-colored birds I couldn’t even identify-but I loved to look before gravitating toward the vegetable and fruit stalls. I always stayed much longer than I needed to, walking and admiring the bushels of leeks and parsnips, oranges and figs and thick-skinned apples.

But in the alleyways behind the marketplace, fruit and meat rotted in crates. Rats crawled; pigeons crowded and pecked each other savagely, trailing feathers and lice. This was reality, and though living with Ernest was giving me more tolerance for the real than ever before, it made me feel sick even so. It was like looking into the gutters at the Place de la Contrescarpe, where colored dyes ran freely from the flower vendors’ carts: brief false lushness, and ugliness underneath. What had Ernest said way back when in Chicago? Love is a beautiful liar? Beauty was a liar, too. When I saw the rats the first time, I wanted to drop my basket where it was and run away, but we weren’t rich enough for symbolic gestures. So I walked.

From the wasted alleyways threading out from Les Halles, I walked toward the Seine. At the edge of the Pont Neuf, the quay was harsh and imposing. A cold wind sliced through my thin coat, but just beyond was the Île St.-Louis with the beautifully preserved houses and elegant streets that made it an oasis. I walked all the way along the island until I found a park at the tip, thick with bare chestnut trees, and then followed a little staircase down to the river. Fishermen were stringing their lines for goujon and frying them up on the spot. I bought a handful wrapped in newspaper and sat on the wall watching the barges move under Pont Sully. The nest of fish was crisp under a coarse snow of salt and smelled so simple and good I thought it might save my life. Just a little. Just for that moment.