The Paris Wife

poems, a few stories, part of a novel set in Michigan. Just as he’d done in Chicago, when I read his work for the first time, Ernest paced and twitched and seemed to be in pain.

“The poems are very good,” Stein said finally. “Simple and quite clear. You’re not posing at anything.”

“And the novel?”

I thought he was very brave to ask or even show her the pages, because he was newly in love with it. So protective was he, he had shown me next to nothing.

“It’s not the kind of writing that interests me,” she said finally. “Three sentences about the color of the sky. The sky is the sky and that’s all. Strong declarative sentences, that’s what you do best. Stick to that.”

As Stein spoke Ernest’s face fell for a moment, but then he recovered himself. She’d hit on something he’d recently begun to realize about directness, about stripping language all the way down.

“When you begin over, leave only what’s truly needed.”

He nodded, lightly flushed, and I could almost hear his mind closing in on her advice and adding it to Pound’s. “Cut everything superfluous,” Pound had said. “Go in fear of abstractions. Don’t tell readers what to think. Let the action speak for itself.”

“What do you think about Pound’s theory about symbolism?” he asked her. “You know, that a hawk should first and foremost be a hawk?”

“That’s obvious, isn’t it?” she said. “A hawk is always a hawk, except”-and here she raised one heavy eyebrow and gave a mysterious smile-“except when the hawk is a cabbage.”

“What?” Ernest said, grinning and game and clearly perplexed.

“Exactly,” Gertrude said.

FOURTEEN

Over the coming weeks, Ernest took Gertrude’s advice and pitched out most of the novel to begin from scratch. During this time, he came home whistling and famished and eager to show me what he’d done. The new pages crackled with energy. It was all adventure, hunting and fishing and rutting. His character’s name was Nick Adams and he was Ernest but bolder and purer-as Ernest would be if he followed every instinct. I loved the material and knew he did, too.

In the meantime, he’d discovered Sylvia Beach’s famous Shakespeare and Company on the Left Bank and was surprised to find she’d lend him books on credit. He came home with his arms loaded down with volumes of Turgenev and Ovid, Homer, Catullus, Dante, Flaubert, and Stendhal. Pound had given him a long reading list that was sending him back to the masters and also pointing him forward, toward T. S. Eliot and James Joyce. Ernest was a good student. He devoured everything, working his way through eight or ten books at once, putting one down and picking another up, leaving tented spines all over the apartment. He’d also borrowed Three Lives and Tender Buttons, two books Gertrude had published to a very small audience. It seemed most of the literary world didn’t know what to make of her strangeness, and neither did Ernest. He read one of the poems from Tender Buttons aloud to me: “A carafe, that is a blind glass. A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing.”

He put the book down, shaking his head. “ ‘A single hurt color’ is nice, but the rest just goes right through me.”

“It’s interesting,” I said.

“Yes. But what does it mean?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything.”

“Maybe,” he said, and picked up Turgenev again.

It was April by this time, our first spring in Paris, and the rains fell soft and warm. Since we’d first arrived, Ernest had been supplementing our small income by writing editorials for the Toronto Star. One day he received notification from his editor, John Bone, that they wanted him in Genoa for an international economic conference. They would pay him seventy-five dollars a week plus expenses, but there wasn’t any allowance made for wives. I would stay in Paris, the first separation in our seven months of marriage.

“Don’t worry, Cat,” he said as he packed up his beloved Corona. “I’ll be back before you know it.”

For the first few days, I enjoyed my solitude. Ernest was such a big person, metaphorically speaking. He took up all the air in a room and magnetized and drew everyone to him, men and women and children and dogs. For the first time in many months, I could wake to quiet and hear my own thoughts and follow my own impulses. But soon enough there was a shift. I don’t know how to describe it, but after the blush of my own company wore off, I became so aware of Ernest’s absence it was as if the lack of him had moved into the apartment with me. His shadow was there at breakfast and at bedtime. It hung from the curtains in the bedroom where the accordion music pushed in and out like a bellows.

Ernest had suggested I go to Sylvia’s bookshop for tea, and though I did go once, I couldn’t help but think she was just being polite by engaging me in conversation. She liked writers and artists, and I was neither. I went to dinner at Gertrude and Alice’s, and although I felt they were truly becoming friends, I missed Ernest. His was the company I liked best. It was almost embarrassing to admit how dependent on him I’d become. I tried to stave off depression by going everywhere I was invited and staying out of the apartment as much as possible. I haunted the Louvre and the cafes. I practiced for hours at a new Haydn piece to perform for Ernest when he returned. I thought playing would make me feel better, but in truth it only reminded me of the worst times in St. Louis, when I was lonely and cut off from the world.

Ernest was gone for three weeks, and by the end of that time I was sleeping so badly in our bed I’d often move in the middle of the night to an upright wingback chair and try to rest there, huddled in blankets. I couldn’t enjoy much of anything except walking to the Ile St.-Louis to the park I’d come to love and rely on. The trees were flowering now, and there was the thick smell of horse chestnut blossoms. I also liked to look around at the houses surrounding the park and wonder about the people who filled them, what kinds of marriages they had and how they loved or hurt each other on any given day, and if they were happy, and whether they thought happiness was a sustainable thing. I’d stay in the park as long as I could, and then walk home through sunshine I couldn’t quite feel.

When Ernest finally came home in May, I squeezed him hard, my eyes filling with tears of relief.

“What’s this now? Did you miss me, Feather Cat?”

“Too much.”

“Good. I like to be missed.”

I nodded into his shoulder, but part of me couldn’t help wondering if it was good to rely on him so utterly. He admired my strength and resilience and counted on it; more than this, I liked feeling strong and was uncomfortable knowing that had vanished when he left. Was my happiness so completely tied to him now that I could only feel like myself when he was near? I had no idea. All I could do was undress him slowly while, in the dance hall below us, the accordion wrenched away at a melancholy tune.

We had over two hundred dollars from the Toronto Star burning with possibility when Ernest came back, and decided to splurge on a trip to Switzerland. He was feeling good about nearly everything just then. Scofield Thayer at the Dial had recently sent back the poems Pound had recommended with a stingingly impersonal rejection letter, but Ernest had made a lot of new connections in Genoa, other correspondents he’d worked closely with such as Max Eastman, an American editor who wanted Ernest to send along some of his prose sketches, and Lincoln Steffens, the famous muckraking journalist who impressed Ernest to no end with his bold politics. Steffens had recently traveled to the Soviet Union and come back with an enthusiasm for communism, telling the press and anyone else who would listen, “I have been over into the future, and it works.” Ernest was thrilled to have Steffens take notice of him and, bolstered by a new sense of community and ambition, he’d just sent off fifteen poems to Harriet Monroe at Poetry.

“Why the hell not?” he said. “Maybe the door won’t open unless I bang on it loud and long.”

“It’s all going to happen for you,” I said. “I feel it coming.”