The Paris Wife

“My given name’s Shakespear, though without the e at the end. My father was a descendant of the great man himself.”

“Why no e?”

“I have no idea, actually. It’s more bohemian feeling that way. Not that I need help in that regard. My mother was mildly notorious for a time as the mistress of William Butler Yeats. That’s how I met Ezra, when he was Yeats’s assistant. I suppose I should have been a poet with all this history, but I married one instead.”

“We were reading Yeats a little in school, sprinkled in with the Robert Browning and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Ernest showed me ‘The Second Coming’ in a magazine. We were both very struck by it.”

“ ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity,’ ” she said. And then added, “I wonder how Uncle Willy would feel about all the passionate intensity around here?”

Over in their shadowy corner of the studio, Ernest was literally crouched at Pound’s feet while the older man lectured, waving a teapot around as he talked. His ginger-colored hair was growing wilder all the while, and I could see why Lewis Galantiere would compare him to Satan-not just because of the hair and his Satyr-like wiry goatee, but also because of his natural vehemence. I couldn’t hear individual words, but he ranted in a volcanic stream, gesturing constantly and rarely sitting down.

I thought the two were a funny match, with Dorothy so elegant and reserved, and Pound so vociferous, but she claimed he’d been very important in her work. She was a painter, and as we talked that afternoon she pointed out some of her canvases to me. I thought they were lovely, with colors and forms as soft and gauzy as Dorothy’s own voice and hands, but when I began to ask her questions about them, she quickly said, “They’re not to be shown.”

“Oh. Well, you’re showing them here, aren’t you?”

“Only incidentally,” she said, and smiled a beautiful smile, looking like something out of a painting herself.

At the end of our visit, after Ernest and I said our farewells, we made our way down the narrow staircase and out onto the street.

“I want to know everything,” I said.

“He’s very noisy,” Ernest said. “But he has some fine ideas. Big ideas, really. He wants to start movements, shape literature, change lives.”

“Then he should be a good person to know,” I said. “Watch that you don’t aggravate him, though. You’ve been warned about redheads.”

We laughed and walked to the nearest cafe, where Ernest told me more over squat glasses of brandy and water. “He’s got some funny ideas about women’s brains.”

“What? That they haven’t got any?”

“Something like that.”

“What about Dorothy? How’s he feel about her brains?”

“Hard to say-though he did tell me they both have leave to take lovers.”

“How forward thinking,” I said. “Do you suppose this is how all artists’ marriages go in Paris?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“It’s hardly something you could force on someone. You’d have to agree, wouldn’t you?”

“Are you feeling sorry for her? What if she likes it? What if it was all her idea?”

“Maybe, but more likely the other way around.” I drank from my brandy, eyeing him over my glass.

“In any case, he’s going to send some of my poems to Scofield Thayer at the Dial.”

“Not stories?”

“I don’t have anything good enough yet, but Pound said I should write some articles for them about American magazines.”

“Well, that’s flattering.”

“This has to be the beginning of something,” Ernest said. “Pound says he’ll teach me how to write if I teach him how to box.”

“Oh, God help us,” I said, laughing.

Our next major introduction came a few weeks later, when Gertrude Stein invited us to tea. Strangely, it went much the same way our encounter with Pound and Dorothy had. There were two corners here, too, one for the men-in this case, Ernest and Stein-and one for the women, with no crossover whatsoever.

When we arrived at the door, a proper French maid met us and took our coats, then led us into the room-the room, we knew by now, the most important salon in Paris. The walls were covered with paintings by heroes of cubism and postimpressionism and the otherwise highly modern-Henri Matisse, Andre Derain, Paul Gauguin, Juan Gris, and Paul Cezanne. One striking example was a portrait of Stein done by Picasso, who had long been in her social circle and often attended her salon. It was done in dark browns and grays, and the face seemed slightly detached from the body, heavier and blockier, with thickly lidded eyes.

She seemed to be somewhere between forty-five and fifty, with an Old World look to her dark dress and shawl and to her hair, which was piled in great skeins onto her beautiful head. She had a voice like rich velvet and brown eyes that took in everything at once. Later, when I had time to study her, I was struck with just how like Ernest’s her eyes were-the deepest and most opaque shade of brown, critical and accepting, curious and amused.

Stein’s companion, Alice Toklas, looked like a tight string of wire in comparison. She was dark in coloring with a sharply hooked nose and eyes that made you want to look away. After a few minutes of general conversation, she took my hand and off we went to the “wives’ corner.” I felt a twinge of regret that I wasn’t a writer or painter, someone special enough to be invited to talk with Gertrude, to sit near her in front of the fire, as Ernest did now, and speak of important things. I loved to be around interesting and creative people, to be part of that swell, but for the time being I was removed to the corner and interrogated by Miss Toklas on current affairs, about which I knew nothing. I felt like an idiot, and all the while we had tea and more tea and tiny, artfully arranged cakes. She did needlepoint, her fingers moving endlessly and efficiently. She never looked down and never stopped talking.

Meanwhile, Ernest was sharing a glass of some sort of gracefully tinted liquor with Gertrude. I think I half fell in love with her that day, from a distance, and Ernest did, too. When we walked home he had much to say about her taste, which was innovative and impeccable. He also admired her breasts.

“What do you think they weigh?” he asked. He seemed to seriously want to know.

I laughed. “I couldn’t even wager a guess.”

“How about them living together? Women, I mean.”

“I don’t know. They have such a life.”

“The paintings alone. It’s like a museum in there.”

“Better,” I said. “There are cakes.”

“And eau-de-vie. Still, it’s strange. Women together. I’m not sure I buy it.”

“What do you mean? You don’t believe they can get anything substantial from one another? That they love each other? Or is it the sex you don’t buy?”

“I don’t know.” He bristled defensively. “She said women together are the most natural thing in the world, that nothing is ugly to them or between them, but men together are full of disgust for the act.”

“She said this?”

“In broad daylight.”

“I suppose it’s flattering she was so open with you.”

“Should I give her an earful about our sex life next time?”

“You wouldn’t.”

“I wouldn’t.” He smiled. “She might want to come watch.”

“You’re horrible!”

“Yes, but you love me for it.”

“Oh, do I?” I said, and he swatted me on the hip.

Two weeks later, Gertrude and Alice accepted our invitation to come to tea in our dreary flat. What they thought as they climbed the dim and ramshackle stairwell, past the pissoir and the ghastly smells, I could hardly bear to guess-and yet they were gracious and accommodating, behaving as if they came to this quarter of Paris all the time. They drank our tea out of the wedding-gift china teapot-that at least was nice- and sat on the mahogany bed.

Gertrude had offered to look at some of Ernest’s work, and now she asked for it, reading quickly through the