couldn’t stop and Ernest knew something was very wrong.
Still, it was ages before I could say the words. Steffens excused himself, telling Ernest he’d phone to arrange a meeting. When he was gone, Ernest made me sit down at a cafe table near the entrance of the station. All around us couples and families kissed good-bye or bade each other farewell, and they seemed so painfully untroubled to me. A fresh wave of tears came.
“What is it?” Ernest asked again and again, first worried and tender, then angry, then worried again. “Whatever it is, we’ll get through it. Nothing can be that bad.”
But it was. It was exactly that bad. I shook my head and cried harder, and it went on this way until finally I was able to tell him about packing the case and stowing it for the journey.
I didn’t need to say more. His face grew pale and very serious. “You lost it on the train.”
“It was stolen out from under me.”
He nodded, taking it all in, and I watched his eyes carefully, how they changed and steadied, changed and steadied. He was trying to be brave for me, I knew. Because he wasn’t sure what I’d do.
“You couldn’t have packed everything. Why would I need it all?”
“If you were going to be making changes in the originals, I thought you’d want the copies, too, so that everything would be right.”
“You must have left something,” he said.
I shook my head and waited. Would he snap from the strain and fly into a rage? I’d certainly earned that. I’d taken what was his-what was most his in the world-without his asking me to, as if I had that right. And now it was gone.
“I have to go back. I need to know it for myself.”
“I’m so sorry, Tatie.” I shook with remorse and heartsickness.
“It’s going to be all right. I made it. I can make it all again.”
I knew he was bluffing if not outright lying, but I held him tight and let him hold me, and we said all the words people say to each other when they know the worst has come.
Late that night, he boarded a train back to Paris while I waited in Lausanne in a wet knot. Steffens took me to dinner and tried to calm my nerves, but even with several whiskeys in me, I jangled.
He was gone for two days and sent no cable. But just as I could see myself reaching into the cupboard over and over, packing everything away in the valise, I could see him coming into the quiet apartment and discovering for himself that it was all really gone.
Turning on all the lights, he first looks at everything in plain sight, the table and the bed, the kitchen. He looks at the floor and walks between the two rooms slowly, saving the cupboard until he’s seen everything else, because that’s the last place, and there won’t be anywhere to look after and no hope left at all. He has a drink first, then another, but finally he has to see it. He puts his hand on the knob and pulls the door open and then he knows everything. There isn’t a page left in the cupboard. Not a note or a scrap. He looks and looks, standing there, wrenched out and hollow. As desolate as the cupboard is, that’s how he is too because the pages belong to him and are him. It’s like someone has taken a broom to his insides and swept them out until everything’s clean and bright and hard and empty.
TWENTY-THREE
When Ernest came back from Paris, he was tender with me and kept saying over and over that all was forgiven, but his eyes were bruised looking and changed. There was still work to do at the conference, and he did it as he always did, throwing himself into the day and coming home tired and glad for a drink. I passed my time walking through the town looking for gifts to send home for Christmas. Even more than our first year in France, I was desperate to see something that captured the holiday as I remembered it from childhood. I wandered for hours, peering in shopwindows, but search as I might, nothing in Lausanne looked like Christmas to me.
At the end of the week, we readied our things for the trip to Chamby. “It doesn’t seem right to simply follow our plans through after all that’s happened,” I said to Ernest as we packed.
“Maybe,” he said. His voice sounded tired. “But what should we do instead?”
“Go back to Paris?”
“That would be worse, wouldn’t it?”
“I don’t think I can bear Christmas Day feeling like this. Everything’s such a bust. Maybe it’s time we think about going home.”
“Stateside? And admit failure? Are you trying to kill me?”
“I’m sorry. It’s just hard to know how to go on.”
“Yes,” he said. He picked up his Corona and carefully nestled it in its black case before snapping the case closed. “It certainly is.”
When we arrived at Chamby, the town was the same. Our chalet was perfect and exactly as before, as were the snow-covered mountains and our proprietors, the Gangwisches, who greeted us as if we were long-lost family members. It was all so welcome after our heavyhearted time in Lausanne that we surrendered completely. Before we’d even unpacked, we put on our skiing togs and caught the last train up the mountain to Les Avants. The sun was fading as we tied on our skis and flew down the powder-laced slope toward the village. With the wind roaring in our ears and stinging our cheeks, we raced along, Ernest just ahead of me, his bad knee bandaged with strong black cloth. He favored it a little, but looked lighter in his body than I’d seen in some time. I was grateful and relieved and sent a small prayer of thanks out to the snowy firs and the creamy sky turning every shade of pink, and Lake Geneva in the distance, flat and polished as glass.
The next day we slept late in our big soft four-poster bed and didn’t even wake when the maid tiptoed in to start the fire. We roused ourselves later, when the room was warm and the porcelain stove purred with the blaze.
“We were right to come, Tatie,” I said and nestled behind Ernest, kissing his neck and the buttons of his spine.
“Yes,” he said. “Let’s enjoy every minute and not think about anything else.”
“There isn’t anything else,” I said. I rolled to cover him, straddling his flat, strong belly. I pushed my nightgown over my hips and then reached to draw him inside of me.
He groaned and closed his eyes, giving himself over completely.
Chink arrived on Christmas Day, and in the end, our holiday wasn’t sad at all. We’d hung stockings for each other and for Chink, and we opened those, and then had a dinner fit for kings. It was only when we sat by the fire late that night, warm brandy in our bellies and more in our glasses, that Ernest brought up the terrible business of his lost manuscripts.
“Oh, kid,” Chink said when Ernest reached the end of the story. “Can you really start over with nothing?”
“I don’t know. I wrote the damned stuff once, didn’t I?” Ernest said. “I have to, in any case.”
Chink nodded seriously.
“I’ve been working like a dog for the
“That’s my Tatie,” I said. Chink raised his glass, and we all toasted Christmas and each other.
But as the days passed, Ernest’s notebooks and pencils stayed packed away. His Corona never left its black case. He said nothing about this and I didn’t either; I knew better. Meanwhile, we skied all day and sometimes well into the evening, when the sun bled through the cloud line and seemed to be showing us something no one had seen before. We enjoyed every moment of Chink’s good company and each other’s, too. We made love every day, sometimes twice a day-that is, until I told Ernest I’d left our usual precautions back in Paris.
We had always tracked my monthly cycles carefully. Ernest did this himself, the way he kept accounts of everything in our marriage. There was a notebook for recording expenses and incoming monies, another for correspondence, another for noting story ideas and how many words he’d written each day. And there was a notebook marked
