The Paris Wife

NINETEEN

When he was gone, I felt sad and guilty, hating myself instantly. I looked at the whiskey bottle on the shelf and even held it for a moment before putting it back. Not before lunch. I would never make it through that way. So I made some coffee instead and peeled an orange and tried not to think about him on the train. He would be two days traveling, at least, and then he’d be in another world, and a dangerous one. All I could do was hope that he’d be safe, and that the thread that bound us was strong enough to weather the damage done.

Except for two scribbled postcards sent before he was over the border into Turkey, I didn’t hear from Ernest when he was gone and I blamed the cable service for it because I didn’t want to think what else his silence might mean. I read his first story in the Star when it arrived two weeks later, but thinking too specifically about what was happening there-not just violence but disease, too, apparently, cholera and malaria in epidemic proportions-only made things worse, so I burned the paper and went for a walk.

Marie Cocotte came every afternoon. “You need to get out of your bed,” she said, and brought me an apron to tie around my robe. Together we made boeuf bourguignon and blanquette de veau and cassoulet, and it was all lovely, though I couldn’t make myself eat it.

Lewis Galantière came by and sat at the terrible dining table and tried to drag me out to Michaud’s.

“James Joyce has apparently fathered six more children just this week. They’re all there, eating an enormous mutton and spouting milk out their nostrils. Tell me you don’t need to see it for yourself.”

I made myself smile and then dressed, putting on my coat and my least unfashionable shoes. “Let’s go around the corner, though,” I said. “Not Michaud’s tonight, all right?”

“I’m your humble servant, madame.”

I didn’t tell Lewis or anyone else how bad things had gotten between us. I was too embarrassed. In the mornings I wrote letters and lied, telling Grace and Dr. Hemingway that all was fine and well. I explained how smoothly Ernest’s work had been going for the Star, how promising his career looked. I didn’t say he’d recently decided to break his exclusive contract with them and file stories under a pseudonym for the International News Service. All of this had been negotiated in secret and meant lying and stickiness when something for INS hit the wire before his “exclusives” for the Star did, but he’d claimed it was worth it for the money. He’d work it out with his own conscience. I had a harder time with this dishonesty, because it seemed to speak of something larger. The way he was always out for himself, whatever the cost.

But thinking this way got me nowhere. Nowhere but back to the whiskey, that is, so I put my thinking down with the stack of letters and walked to the Musée du Luxembourg instead, to visit the Monets. I stood and looked into the brightest patches of his lilies and the lovely purpling in the water and tried not to see anything else at all.

At the end of October, in the very early morning, Ernest stepped off his train at the Gare de Lyon looking as if he’d been in a terrible battle and lost. He was weak and exhausted and feverish with malaria. He’d shed twenty pounds or more, and I hardly recognized him. He moved into my arms and collapsed there, and then we went home where he leaned over the basin and let me shampoo his head, which was crawling with lice.

“I’m so sorry for everything, Tatie,” I said when his eyes were closed.

“Let’s not say anything about it. It doesn’t matter now.”

I took up the scissors and cut his hair very close to his head and picked the rest of the lice out one by one, bringing the lamp over so I could see everything. Then I rubbed his body all over with cream and helped him into fresh clean sheets where he slept for twenty-four hours. When he woke up, I brought him eggs and toast and ham and mustard, and he ate this all gratefully, and then he slept again.

He didn’t leave the bed for a week, and sometimes I just watched him sleep and knew by the look of him that he’d suffered in ways he wouldn’t be able to talk about, not for a long time. The breach between us had been terrible and the silence, too, but his time in Turkey had come to outshadow all of that. And maybe he was right that it didn’t matter. He was home now, and we were together again, and maybe it would all be all right as long as we didn’t think about it or give it any room or air.

After a week, he could get out of bed and bathe and dress and was almost ready to see friends. He went to his duffel bag and moved the notebooks aside to bring out presents rolled in newspaper and layers of cloth. He’d brought me a bottle of attar of roses and also a heavy amber necklace with big, rough beads that were threaded with black coral and silver.

“It’s as beautiful as anything ever,” I said, holding up the necklace.

“It belonged to an extremely important Russian diplomat who’s now a waiter.”

“I hope you paid him well for it.”

“I did, and got him drunk to boot,” Ernest said, nearly himself now.

I waited for him to say more about it all, but he just sat at the table and drank his coffee and asked after the newspapers.

I knew he loved me again; I could see that. No matter what each of us had felt or thought about the other in our weeks apart, that time was over now. I opened the bottle of attar of roses, which was a deep yellow and smelled like pure rose, the absolute thing. Somehow, without finding or fixing any words to it, the next part of our story had begun.