The Paris Wife

His voice was so charged with bitterness, I had a hard time meeting his eyes, but he peered at me closely and intensely, saying, “Now I’ve scared you.”

“Only a little.” I tried to smile for him.

“I think we should go back upstairs and dance until morning.”

“Oh, Nesto. I’m awfully tired. Maybe we should just turn in.”

“Please,” he said. “I think it would help.”

“All right then.” I gave him my hand.

Back upstairs the party had mostly dispersed. Ernest slowly rolled the rug to one side and cranked the Victrola. Nora Bayes’s voice quavered into the room-Make believe you are glad when you’re sorry.

“That’s my favorite song,” I said to Ernest. “Are you clairvoyant?”

“No, just smart about how to get a girl to stand closer.”

I don’t know how long we danced that night, back and forth across the living room in a long slow ellipse. Every time the recording ended, Ernest shuffled away from me briefly to start it again. Back in my arms, he buried his face in my neck, his hands clasped low on my back. Three minutes of magic suspended and restrung. Maybe happiness was an hourglass already running out, the grains tipping, sifting past each other. Maybe it was a state of mind-as Nora Bayes insisted-a country you could sculpt out of air and then dance into.

“I’ll never lie to you,” I said.

He nodded into my hair. “Let’s always tell each other the truth. We can choose that, can’t we?”

He swept me around and around, slow and strong. The song ended, the needle clicked, whispered, shushed into silence. And we kept dancing, rocking past the window and back again.

SEVEN

When I returned home to St. Louis, Fonnie had a long string of questions and warnings. Just who was this Ernest Hemingway, anyway? What were his prospects? What could he offer me? She’d no sooner finish this line of questioning than begin her rant about my own shortcomings. Did Hemingway know about my nervous attacks and history with weakness? You’d have thought she was talking about a lame horse, but I wasn’t overtroubled. I knew Fonnie’s tactics by heart and could turn her voice off almost entirely. My own voice was harder to control, unfortunately. When I was with Ernest in Chicago I’d felt strong and capable of weathering uncertainty about the future. But outside the circle of his arms, well beyond his range and powerful physical effect on me, I was struggling.

It didn’t help that the stream of letters from him was growing moodier and more intermittent. He hated his job and was fighting with Kenley about an increase in his room and board. Kenley knows full well how I’m trying to save every last seed for Rome but insists on twisting my arm anyway, he wrote. Some friend. I wanted to commiserate, but was selfishly grateful for any delay in his plans.

I had quite a cache of letters by that point, well over a hundred, which I kept squirreled neatly away on a shelf in my closet upstairs. I took the box down and reread them on days I got no beautifully crumpled special, which happened more and more. They cost a dime in postage and he was saving those dimes for lire. It disturbed me to know he was prioritizing Jim Gamble, adventure, and his work. I also couldn’t forget how much younger he was than me. Nine years might not feel like much if we ever got to middle age together, but Ernest could be so very youthful and exuberant and full of plans I had a hard time imagining him in middle age at all. He was a light-footed lad on a Grecian urn chasing truth and beauty. Where did I fit in exactly?

“I think I’m too old to fall in love sometimes,” I said to Ruth one afternoon. We sat in my room on the bed, a plate of tea biscuits between us, while outside it snowed like it might never stop.

“You’re too old-or he’s too young?”

“Both,” I said. “In a way he’s lived more than I have, and he’s certainly had more excitement. But he can be awfully romantic and naive too. Like this business with Agnes. She did break his heart, I believe that full well, but he carries it around like a wounded child.”

“That’s not very fair, Hadley. You suffered over Harrison Williams, didn’t you?”

“I did. Oh, Ruth.” I put my head in my hands. “I don’t know what’s gotten into me. I think I’m just afraid.”

“Of course you are,” she said gently. “If you honestly think he’s too young for you, all right then, make your decision and stick to it.”

“Do you think I’ll stop worrying when I know he loves me for sure?”

“Just listen to yourself.”

“There’s so much to lose.”

“There always is,” she said.

I sighed and reached for another biscuit. “Are you always this wise, Ruth?”

“Only when it comes to other people’s lives.”

The next day there was no letter from Ernest, and the next day also none, and the next as well. It seemed clearer and clearer that he was either forgetting me or consciously pushing me to the side, choosing Rome and the hope of making a go with his writing instead. I was hurt, but also terribly jealous. He had something real to pin his hopes on, something to apply his life to. My dreams were plainer and, quite frankly, more and more tied to him. I wanted a simple house somewhere with Ernest coming up the walk whistling, his hat in his hand. Nothing he’d ever done or said suggested any such thing could ever happen. So just who was naive and romantic?

“If it’s over, I can be brave,” I told Ruth and Bertha on the evening of the third day, feeling a heavy knot clench and dissolve at the back of my throat. “I’ll roll up my sleeves and find someone else.”

“Oh, kid,” Ruth said. “You’re down for the count, aren’t you?”

After we went to bed, I tossed and turned for hours before falling into a light sleep sometime after two. The next morning, still feeling foggy-headed and quite low, I checked the letter box. It was too early for the mail to have arrived, but I did it anyway-I couldn’t help myself. There, in the box, was not one letter but two, both of them fat and promising. Rationally, I knew the mail boy must have come by with them the evening before, catching me unawares, but part of me wanted to believe that I had conjured the letters there with my longing. Either way, Ernest’s silence had finally broken. I leaned against the doorjamb, my eyes blurring with tears of relief.

Back upstairs, I tore open the letters greedily. The first spilled the usual news of work and fun at Kenley’s place, lately referred to as “the Domicile.” There had been a boxing match in the living room the night before, with Ernest playing the role of John L. Sullivan, ducking and weaving in long underwear and a brown silk sash. I laughed to think of him this way and was still laughing when I began reading the second letter. Still thinking about Rome, it began, but what if you came along-as wife?

Wife. The word stopped me cold. I hadn’t met his mother or any of his family. He hadn’t even been to St. Louis to sit in the front parlor and bear Fonnie’s disapproving gaze. Still, he might be serious. It was just the way he’d propose, off the cuff, following a joke about boxing. I wrote back later that morning: If you’re ready to make the mad dash I’m game.

Rome. Together. It was an extraordinary thought. When I let myself fantasize about marrying Ernest, we lived in St. Louis or Chicago, in a place very like the Domicile, full of fun and good talk at any hour. Living with Ernest in Italy was a thrilling and terrifying and completely revolutionary idea. When I was seventeen, I took a trip to Florence and Rome with my mother and two sisters. The whole thing went miserably, and I remembered very little beauty-only heat and fainting spells and mosquitoes. Being in Rome with Ernest had to be different. I would be different there. How could I not be? I could see us walking the Tiber arm in arm, crossing all the bridges one by one. Let’s go, I wrote blithely, flushed with anticipation. I’m already packed.

Then I walked outside without coat or scarf. The sky was low and gray, spilling fat wide flakes. I looked up into it and opened my mouth, tasting the snow.