The Paris Wife

THIRTY-NINE

The next few days were so strained and so full of quarrels, even in daylight, on the street, that Ernest packed a bag and left for Madrid early. It was easier to have him gone. I didn’t know what the future held, but I needed some rest and time to think.

I’d felt like a coward doing it, but I had followed through and canceled my performance. Now I had to deal with the awkwardness of making excuses to everyone. It felt terrible lying, blaming my nerves and lack of preparation-but not as terrible as going through with it, I thought. Particularly since news of the affair had spread, just as I’d suspected.

It was Kitty who told me. She came around just after Ernest left for Madrid and listened to everything in her stalwart way, letting me fall to pieces around her. Once I’d finished and only had tears left in me, she quietly said, “I’d like to say I’m surprised, but I’m not. I saw Pauline on the street just before she left for Schruns. She had her skis on her shoulders and was all loaded down with packages, and though she didn’t say anything, really, there was something about the way she talked about you two. An authority in her voice, as if you both belonged to her.”

“She has nerve. I’ll give her that.”

“Zelda said she and Scott were at the Rotonde when Pauline came in and started to go on about a letter she’d gotten from Hem, and how funny it was that he knew so much about women’s perfume, and did anyone else find that funny? She was obviously baiting. Luring suspicion.”

“Or maybe she couldn’t help herself. She’s in love with him.”

“Are you saying you have sympathy for her?” Kitty asked incredulously.

“Not at all. But love is love. It makes you do terribly stupid things.”

“I still love Pauline, God help me, but she’s very wrong in this. Freedom is one thing, but you draw the line at a friend’s husband. You have to.”

The weather turned glorious, with the creamy white horse chestnut blossoms choking the air with their sweetness-but I couldn’t get out and enjoy it. Bumby had fallen ill. It began with sniffles, but soon turned to fever. Now he was pale and listless, and fighting a terrible cough that only descended fully at night, waking us both. We kept to the apartment. I read him books and made up silly songs to distract him, but it was very difficult, for even several minutes together, to forget that my life was falling apart.

Every few days there would be a cable from Ernest. He was miserable in Madrid. The city was too cold and dusty, and the good corridas were far and few. The bulls were mysteriously weak and sick; he felt like a sick bull, too. There was no one to drink with. All his good friends were elsewhere, and he was very lonely. He was writing, though. In one Sunday afternoon, he’d finished three stories that he’d only had broken-up drafts of before, and the good energy seemed not to be slowing. He’d keep writing there and play it out. Were Bumby and I coming? If so, we should hurry up. He needed the company to keep from going crazy.

I wrote back saying that Bumby wasn’t well enough to travel. I wasn’t in any state either. I didn’t know where Ernest and I stood, and didn’t think I could bear waiting things out in a hotel room in Spain, particularly if I had to see cables arriving from Pauline every day. No, it was better to have this distance, and his writing was going all the stronger for it anyway. He always worked well during difficult times, as if pain helped him get to the bottom of something in himself and got the real machinery turning.

It also didn’t surprise me that he was feeling sorry for himself. There are men who love to be alone, but Ernest was not one of them. Solitude made him drink too much, and drinking kept him from sleeping, and not sleeping brought the bad voices and bad thoughts up from their depths, and then he drank more to try and silence them. And even if he didn’t admit it to me, I knew he was suffering because he’d hurt me badly with the affair. Knowing he was suffering pained me. That’s the way love tangles you up. I couldn’t stop loving him, and couldn’t shut off the feelings of wanting to care for him-but I also didn’t have to run to answer his letters. I was hurting, too, and no one was running to me.

Near the end of May, Bumby’s cough had rallied slightly, and I packed our bags and we went to Cap d’Antibes, to Gerald and Sara Murphy’s Villa America, where we had been invited to stay at the guesthouse. Many of our set were already there. Scott and Zelda were nearby at the Villa Paquita, in Juan-les-Pins, and Archie and Ada MacLeish were staying on a little cove a few miles up the beach. There would be plenty of sun and swimming and good food, and even though I knew it might be awkward for me, given that whispers had been circling for some time, I also wasn’t so provincial as to think our story would interest this group for long. Zelda had men dying for her, after all, and was proud to brag about it. Ours was barely a mouthful of gossip when you thought of it that way. Whatever the risks, I needed the break. Ernest would join us when he was through in Madrid, and by that time, I was hoping I felt enough like myself that I could face him.

Gerald met our train and drove us back to Villa America in a shockingly fast lemon-yellow roadster. I couldn’t help but be impressed by it all. The Murphys had been sculpting and perfecting the villa for more than a year while they lived in a hotel in town. Before they arrived on the scene in Antibes, there wasn’t really a scene. The town was small and sleepy, with a narrow spring season. No one ever went to the Riviera in summer, but the Murphys loved the summer and they loved Antibes; they would find a way to make the place suit them. They paid a hotelier in town to stay open all year for them alone, and soon enough, other hotels were staying open and more were being built. The beach had once been buried in seaweed, but Gerald had cleared it himself, a few yards at a time, and now it was pristine. Before the Murphys came along and made it fashionable, no one ever thought to sun on the beach. They invented sunbathing, and to be around them for any time at all made you think they’d invented everything that was good and pleasurable and civilized.

Their estate sat on seven acres of terraced gardens, with heliotrope running everywhere. There were lemon and date and olive and pepper trees. Black and white figs grew and an exotic Arabian maple with sheer white leaves. Aside from the guesthouse, there was also a small farm and stable, a gardener’s cottage, a chauffeur’s cottage, a playhouse for the Murphys’ three children, and a private painting studio for Gerald. Before we headed to the main house, he walked us to the end of a rocky path and onto the white, white sand of their private beach. Scott and Zelda were there, reclining on wide cane beach mats and drinking sherry from dainty crystal glasses. Scottie played nearby in the surf with the Murphy children, all of them very blond and dark skinned from the sun.

“Come have a drink, Hadley,” Zelda said, rising to kiss me on both cheeks. “You must need one after Gerald’s driving.”

“It is rather paralyzing coming over the coast road,” I said.

“Scott’s cocktails are paralyzing, too, but that’s what’s nice about them,” she said, and everyone laughed.

“How’s Hem getting on?” Scott asked, shading his eyes and squinting up at me.

“Well enough, I think. The writing’s been good.”

“Damn him anyway,” Scott said cheerfully. “It’s always good for him, isn’t it?”

“Is that what he says? Don’t believe it.”

“See there,” Zelda said, as if settling something between them.

“Yes, darling. I heard her.” Then both of them handed their glasses to Gerald for refreshing.

The main house had black marble flooring, black satin furniture, and bright white walls. The severity of the color scheme was offset, everywhere, by flowers from the garden-just-picked jasmine, gardenias, oleander, roses, and camellias. The whole operation was stunning, and I felt conspicuous even standing in the entry with my worn summer jacket. None of my clothes would do, in fact.

“Sara’s up in bed with a bit of a cold,” Gerald explained. “I’m sure she’ll rally and come down shortly.”

Bumby and I changed into our beach things and went down to the beach to wait for Sara, but she didn’t come down all that day. I was beginning to wonder if I should feel slighted when the Murphys’ physician arrived in the evening to check on her.

“He might as well take a look at Bumby, too,” Gerald said. “Sara can hear his cough from all the way upstairs. It really is worrisome.”

“It is, isn’t it? I was hoping the Mediterranean air would do him some good.”

“It might yet, but why not consult the doctor? Just to be safe.”

I agreed, and after a very thorough examination with Bumby being a perfect lamb undressed to his skivvies on the bed in the guesthouse, the doctor diagnosed whooping cough.

“Whooping cough?” I said with mounting alarm. “That’s serious, isn’t it?” The word that came to mind was fatal, but I couldn’t bear to say it out loud.

“Please calm down, Mrs. Hemingway,” the doctor said. “Based on his symptoms, the boy’s likely had the disease for months. The worst has passed, but he’ll need plenty of rest to recover fully, and he mustn’t be let near other children. We’ll have to quarantine him for at least two weeks.”

He prescribed a dose of special cough medicine and a eucalyptus rub for his chest and back, to aid breathing, but even with tonics and reassurances on hand, I was worried about Bumby. I also felt terrible for not knowing he should have seen a doctor in Paris.

As soon as we got the diagnosis, Sara grew agitated and began making plans for us to be moved to a hotel in town. “You’ll still be our guests,” she insisted. “We just can’t have him here. You understand, don’t you?”

I did, of course. In fact, I felt dreadful that we were such a source of concern for everyone. I couldn’t stop apologizing as I packed our things.

The Murphys called their chauffeur to deliver us to our new lodgings, and the next morning sent him back with groceries and fresh fruit and vegetables from their garden. It was all very generous. I don’t know what we would have done without someone to look out for us there. But they couldn’t help with the nursing or the isolation, and I knew I couldn’t bear it alone. I sent a cable to Marie Cocotte in Paris, asking her to come and help care for Bumby, and one to Ernest in Madrid, explaining the situation. I didn’t ask him to come, though; I wanted him to arrive on his own or not at all.

Very shortly after it was clear we’d need to be quarantined, Scott and Zelda stepped in and volunteered the lease on their villa at Juan-les-Pins. They would move to a larger villa near the casino that had its own beach. This was a godsend, really. The place was lovely, with pretty hand-painted tile everywhere. There was a small garden with poppies and orange trees, and Bumby could play there safely, without infecting any other children. But I felt very low and separate and worried that Bumby would have a relapse. I spent my days rubbing eucalyptus oil on his chest and back, and trying to bribe him into taking his bitter medicine. At night I woke every few hours to feel his forehead for returning fever. The doctor came every day, and so did telegrams from Paris and Madrid. Pauline wrote to say how sorry she felt for me but also for Ernest, who was still lonely in Spain and feeling very desperate about it. I was so angry reading this I very nearly wrote back saying she could have him, but in the end I just folded the telegram in thirds, and then tore it into pieces.

One evening as I sat reading in the little garden, I heard a car horn, and there, coming up the drive, were the Murphys and the Fitzgeralds and the MacLeishes, all in separate cars. They stopped just in front of the terrace behind the iron fence, and the women glided out in their long beautiful dresses looking like works of art. The men were beautiful in their suits, and everyone was in high spirits. Gerald held a pitcher of very cold martinis, and as I walked up to the fence, he handed me a glass.

“Reinforcements have arrived,” he said, clearly pleased that he’d had the idea. Everyone gathered around to lift a glass, except for Scott.

“I’m on the wagon and trying very hard to be good,” he said.

Zelda frowned. “It’s so very boring to hear you say it, darling.”

“It’s true,” he said. “But just the same, I’m a good boy today. Smile for me, will you, Hadley?”

We all stood at the fence and chatted for some minutes, and then they glided back into the cars, followed by laughter, and headed off to the casino in town. I watched them go, wondering if I’d dreamed them, and then went inside to an early bedtime and a book.

When Ernest finally came in from Madrid, ten days after our quarantine was imposed, the Murphys threw him a champagne and caviar party at the casino. Marie Cocotte had come to care for Bumby and I felt tremendously relieved and free to leave the villa for the first time.

Ernest looked pale and tired when he arrived at the house. It had been cold in Madrid and he’d worked hard most days, late into the night. I was still exhausted from worry over Bumby, and also didn’t know at all how Ernest was feeling about me, but he greeted me with a nice long kiss and told me he’d missed me. I let myself be kissed, and didn’t ask what he’d decided to do about Pauline. I didn’t think it was safe to mention her name at all, and because I didn’t, and because that was the principal thing at stake in our lives, I felt absolutely powerless. “I missed you, too,” I said, and then went to dress for the party.

Gerald had spared no expense in welcoming Ernest to town, and why should he? The Murphys had inherited their money and had never once been without. There were camellias floating in glass bowls and mounds of oysters and fresh corn dotted with sprigs of basil. It seemed possible that the Murphys had specially ordered the deep purple Mediterranean sky and the nightingales thick in the hedges, trilling and whistling a series of crescendos. It began to grate on me. Did everything have to be so choreographed and civilized? Who could trust it anyway?

As we waited for Scott and Zelda to arrive, Ernest began telling the table about his recent correspondence with Sherwood Anderson over The Torrents of Spring, which had just been published in the States.

“I had to write him,” he said. “The thing was going to be out any day and I felt inclined to tell him how it happened and why I would be such a son of a bitch after he’d done so much to help me.”

“Good man, Hem,” Gerald said.

“Right, yes. You’d think so, wouldn’t you?”

“Didn’t he take it well?” Sara asked.

“He said it was the most insulting and patronizing letter he’d ever gotten, and that the book itself was rot.”

“He didn’t really say that,” I said.

“No, he said that it might have been funny if it had been a dozen pages instead of a hundred.”

“I thought it was awfully funny, Hem,” Gerald said.

“You haven’t read the book, Gerald.”

“Yes, but from everything you’ve said, it’s obviously very, very funny.”

Ernest turned away with a sour expression and began to apply himself to his glass of whiskey. “Stein let me have it, too,” he said, coming up for air. “She says I’ve been a shit and a very bad Hemingstein indeed, and that I can go to hell.”

“Oh dear,” Sara said. “I’m sorry to hear it.”

“Damn her anyway.”

“Come on now, Tatie,” I said. “You don’t mean that. She’s Bumby’s godmother, after all.”

“Then he’s bitched, isn’t he?”

I knew Ernest’s bravado was almost entirely invented, but I hated to think of all the good friends we’d lost because of his pride and volatile temper, starting in Chicago with Kenley. Lewis Galantière, our first friend in Paris, had stopped speaking to Ernest when he’d called Lewis’s fiancée a despicable shrew. Bob McAlmon had finally had enough of Ernest’s bragging and rudeness and now crossed the street to avoid us in Paris. Harold Loeb had never recovered from Pamplona, and Sherwood and Gertrude, two of Ernest’s biggest champions, now topped the long and painful list. Just how many others would fall, I wondered as I looked around the candlelit table.

“Hemmy, my boy!” Scott shouted as he and Zelda crested the steps up from the beach. Scott had his socks and shoes off and his trousers rolled up. His tie was loose, and his jacket was rumpled. He looked several sheets to the wind.

“Have you been for a swim, Scott?” Ernest said.

“No, no. I’m dry as a bone.”

Zelda laughed at this with a small snort. “Yes, yes, Scott. You’re very dry, and that’s why you just recited all of Longfellow to that poor man on the pier.” She’d drawn her hair severely back from her face and pinned a giant white peony behind her ear. Her makeup was impeccable, but her eyes looked strained and tired.

“Who doesn’t like Longfellow?” Scott said as he landed in his chair with some aplomb, and we all laughed thinly. “Come, dear,” he said to Zelda, who was still standing. “Let’s have a drink with all these marvelously affected people. There’s caviar. What the blazes would we do without caviar?”

“Please shut up, darling,” she said, taking her seat. She smiled broadly and falsely at all of us. “He’ll be good now, I promise.”

The waiter came and brought more drinks, and then came again to serve the table next to us, where a beautiful young girl was sitting down to dinner with what looked like her father.

“Now that’s a pretty arrangement,” Scott said, staring at the girl hungrily. Ernest elbowed him to stop, but he wouldn’t stop.

“You are not a gentleman,” the father finally said to Scott in French, and then escorted the girl inside, well away from us.

“A gentleman is only one of the things I am not,” Scott said, turning back to our table. “I’m also not well and not smart and not nearly drunk enough to spend any kind of time with your lot.”

Gerald paled and turned to whisper something to Sara.

“I say, Gerald, old chap. How about you chuck an oyster at a fellow? I’m famished.”

Gerald looked at him coldly and turned away to speak to Sara again.

“Sara,” Scott said, trying to draw her attention away from her husband. “Sara, please look at me. Please.”

But she wouldn’t and that’s when Scott picked up a cut-glass ashtray from the table and pitched it well over Gerald’s shoulder at an empty table behind. Sara flinched. Gerald ducked and barked at Scott to stop. Scott grabbed another ashtray, which hit the table dead center and then ricocheted off with a loud clang.

Zelda seemed set on ignoring him entirely, but the rest of us were appalled and embarrassed.

“C’mon, Prince Charming,” Ernest finally said flatly. He went over to Scott and took his elbow, helping him up. “Let’s have a dance,” he said, and then led Scott right off the terrace and down the steps to the beach. Everyone stared after them except for Zelda, who was looking intensely at the hedges.

“Nightingale,” she said. “Was it a vision, or a waking dream?”

Archie MacLeish coughed and said, “Yes. Well.” Ada touched her marcelled hair lightly, as if it were glass, and I looked out to sea, which was black as the sky and invisible. Years and years later, the waiter brought the check.

I slept late the next morning, knowing Bumby was in Marie Cocotte’s capable care. When I came downstairs, Scott and Ernest sat at the long table in the dining room with a sheaf of carbon pages laid out before them.

“Scott’s just had a momentous idea,” Ernest said.

“Good morning, Hadley,” Scott said. “Very sorry for last night and all that. I’m a proper ass, aren’t I?”

“Yes,” I said, and then laughed lightly, with the affection I truly felt. When he was sober, as now, he was sane and sound-as refined as anyone you’d ever want to meet. I went to get some coffee and came back to the table to hear about the scheme.

Ernest said, “In the first fifteen pages of Sun, we get Jake’s autobiography, we get Brett and Mike’s backstory, but all of that we also get later, or it’s explained enough anyhow. Scott says we lop it all off, right at the head.”

“I think it will work,” Scott said very seriously, nodding into his café crème.

“It’s what I’ve always said about the stories, that you get by with as little explanation as possible. It’s all there already or it’s not. The exposition slows it and ruins it. Now’s my chance to see if it will work for something as long as a novel. What do you think, Tatie?” His eyes were very bright and he looked so young and like the boy I’d met in Chicago that I had to smile no matter what else I felt.

“I think it sounds brilliant. You’ll make it work beautifully. Get the knife.”

“That’s my girl.”

Don’t forget that, I wanted to say. I’m still your best girl.

I took my coffee to the terrace and looked out past the rooftops of the little town to where the sea stood bright blue and uncompromised by anything. Not a seagull, not a cloud. Behind me, the men had bowed their heads again and were back at work, talking it through meticulously because it was heart surgery and they were the surgeons, and it was as important as anything they’d ever done. Scott could be a terrible, painful drunk. Ernest could shove cruelly against everyone who’d ever helped him up and loved him well-but none of that mattered when the patient was at hand. In the end, for both of them, there was really only the body on the table and the work, the work, the work.

For a solid week after Ernest arrived from Madrid, we followed a routine that seemed very nearly sustainable. Every morning, we had sherry and biscuits on our terrace at Juan-les-Pins, just like they did at Villa America. At two o’clock, we went over to have lunch with the Murphys or the MacLeishes, while Bumby napped or played with Marie Cocotte. At cocktail time, our driveway would fill with three cars and much laughter as we went back on the quarantine and tried to make it stick, passing good food and liquor through the grillwork of the fence.

Ernest wrote very hard for the first few days, but then realized it was impossible to be really alone-and that maybe he didn’t want to be alone. Scott tried to get back on the wagon but failed miserably. He and Ernest spent a great deal of time talking about work, but they didn’t do any of it. They sunned on the beach and soaked up praise from the Murphys as if they could never get enough.

Sara was a natural beauty, with a thick, tawny bob and clear, piercing eyes. Scott and Ernest both longed for her attention, and Zelda couldn’t stand the competition. She grew edgier and bolder by the day, but she wouldn’t direct any ire at Sara. They were friends and confederates, after all-so she reserved her sharpest barbs for Ernest.

Zelda and Ernest had never liked each other. He thought she had too much power over Scott, that she was a destructive force and probably half mad to boot. She thought he was a phony, putting on macho airs to hide an effeminate center.

“I think you’re in love with my husband,” she said to Ernest one night when we were down at the beach and everyone had had too much to drink.

“Scott and I are fairies? That’s rich,” he said.

Zelda’s eyes were hard and dark. “No,” she said. “Just you.”

I thought Ernest might hit her, but she’d laughed shrilly and turned away, beginning to take off her clothes. Scott had been talking intently to Sara, but he came to full attention then. “What on earth are you doing, dear heart?”

“Testing your nerve,” she said.

To the right of the small beach was a towering cluster of stones. The highest point stood thirty feet or more above the waves, and the current below was always choppy, swirling over hidden jagged points. This is where Zelda headed at a steady swim while we all watched with a horrible curiosity. What would she do? What wouldn’t she do?

When she reached the base, she scaled the rocks easily. Scott stripped and followed her, but he’d barely reached the outcropping when she let out an Indian cry and plunged off. There was a terrible moment when we wondered if she’d killed herself, but she bobbed to the surface and gave an exhilarated laugh. The moon was very bright that night and we could easily see the shapes their bodies made. We could also hear more wild laughter as Zelda clambered up to do it again. Scott had a go at it, too, both of them drunk enough to drown.

“I’ve seen enough,” Ernest said, and we went home.

The next afternoon at lunch on the terrace, things were quietly strained until Sara finally said, “Please don’t scare us like that again, Zelda. It’s so dangerous.”

“But Sara,” Zelda said, batting her eyes as innocently as a schoolgirl, “didn’t you know, we don’t believe in conservation.”

Over the coming string of days, as Pauline lobbed her letters at us first from Bologna and then from Paris, I started to wonder if Ernest and I believed in conservation-if we had it in us to fight for what we had. Maybe Pauline was tougher than we were. She wheedled her way in, complaining that she felt so very far away from all the good action and couldn’t something be done to fix that? She wrote that she wasn’t afraid of the whooping cough because she’d had it as a child, and couldn’t she come and share our quarantine? She sent this in a letter to me and not to Ernest, and I was struck, as I often was with Pauline, by her intensity and single-mindedness. She never ever dropped her pretense that she and I were still friends. She never gave up an inch of her position.

Pauline arrived in Antibes on a blindingly clear afternoon. She wore a white dress and a white straw hat, and seemed impossibly fresh and clean, a dish of ice cream. A widening sunspot. Another woman might have felt self-conscious arriving on the scene this way, when everyone knew or at least suspected her role as mistress-but Pauline didn’t have an ounce of self-consciousness about her. She was like Zelda that way. They both knew what they wanted and found a way to get it or take it. They were frighteningly shrewd and modern and I was anything but that.

“Isn’t it nice for Hem,” Zelda said one evening, “that you’re so agreeable all the time? I mean, Hem really runs the show, doesn’t he?”

I’d flinched and said nothing, assuming she’d said it out of jealousy over the boys’ closeness, but she was right, too. Ernest did run the show and run me over more than occasionally, and that wasn’t by chance. He and I had both grown up in households where the women ruled with iron fists, turning their husbands and their children into quivering messes. I knew I would never be that way, not at any price. I’d chosen my role as supporter for Ernest, but lately the world had tipped, and my choices had vanished. When Ernest looked around lately, he saw a different kind of life and liked what he saw. The rich had better days and freer nights. They brought the sun with them and made the tides move. Pauline was a new model of woman and why couldn’t he have her? Why couldn’t he reach out and claim everything he wanted? Wasn’t that the way things were done?

For my part, I felt utterly stuck and conspired against. This was not my world. These were not my kind of people, and they were drawing Ernest in with every passing day. What could I do or say? He might ultimately fall out of love with Pauline and come fully back to me-that was still possible-but nothing was in my control. If I gave him an ultimatum and said she couldn’t stay, I would lose him. If I got hysterical and made public scenes, it would just give him an excuse to leave me. All that was left for me was a terrible kind of paralysis, this waiting game, this heartbreak game.