“Let’s not ever go back,” I said to Ernest one night as we lay in our bunk in the dormitory listening to snow and wind and nothing else.

“All right,” he said, holding me more tightly. “Aren’t we lucky to be so in love? No one thought we’d make it this far. No one was on our side at all, do you remember that?”

“Yes,” I said, and felt a small chill. We couldn’t hide from the world forever.

After three days, we came back down the mountain to find two telegrams waiting for Ernest. One was from Sherwood and the other was from Horace Liveright and both said the same thing: In Our Time would be a book. They were offering a two-hundred-dollar advance against royalties and were sending a contract soon.

It was an epic moment, one we’d never forget-and somehow the skiing seemed ineluctably part of it, as if we had to trek up nearly to the sky and fly back down to get this news. It was the end of Ernest’s struggle with apprenticeship, and an end to other things as well. He would never again be unknown. We would never again be this happy.

The next day we boarded a train back to Paris.

THIRTY

It rained nonstop that spring, but even in the rain, Paris was Ernest’s smorgasbord. He knew it all and loved to walk through it at night especially, dropping into cafes to see who was there and who wasn’t. He was recognizable everywhere with his long, unruly hair and tennis shoes and patched jacket, the quintessential Left Bank writer. It was ironic to see him become the very sort of artist that had made him cringe two years before, and a little painful for me, too. I missed him and I wasn’t sure I recognized him all the time, but I didn’t want to hold him back. Not when things were finally beginning to hit for him.

If Ernest was changing, Montparnasse was, too. American tourists flooded the scene hoping to get a glimpse of a real bohemian while the usual suspects grew wilder and stranger for the new audience. Kiki was one of the most famous artist’s models around, and Man Ray’s lover and muse. She could often be seen at the Dome or Rotonde with her pet mouse. It was small and white, and she wore it attached to her wrist with a delicate silver chain. The fleshy redhead Flossie Martin held court in front of the Select shouting obscenities to locals and tourists alike. Bob McAlmon vomited neatly in the flowerbeds of all the best cafes and then ordered another absinthe. That absinthe was illegal deterred no one, and the same held true for opium and cocaine. Ernest and I had always been more than happy enough with alcohol, but there was the very real feeling, for many, of needing to up the ante-to feel more and risk more. It grew harder and harder to shock anyone.

Duff Twysden was one of the wilder girls on the cafe scene. She drank like a man and told a good, filthy joke and could talk to absolutely anyone. She made her own rules and didn’t give a damn who knew it. When we returned from Austria, Ernest began to see more of her than ever. Sometimes they were joined by her fiance, Pat Guthrie. Pat was a famous drunk and often wasn’t well enough to leave their flat without causing a scene. I felt some relief knowing Duff was attached and, ostensibly, in love-but then again that didn’t always mean what it should.

Duff was very keen for company at night and so was Ernest, and they naturally gravitated toward each other. I worried about her a lot, but when he finally brought her by the sawmill to spend time with all of us, she crouched right down on the floor in front of Bumby.

“Hullo there. You’re very handsome, aren’t you?”

Bumby laughed and toddled behind me; he’d just learned to walk over the winter, and when he ran, he held his chubby legs so stiffly you thought he’d fall headlong into something.

“How very classic,” Duff said watching him with a laugh. “Why do all the men run away from me? I must be terrifying indeed.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” Ernest said.

For the rest of the visit, she sat at my table and made no pretensions about anything. She was well bred but not fussy, and had a broad, raw laugh that moved everything with it. I liked her. I didn’t want to, but I did.

Around this same time, Kitty returned from London and wrote to invite me to tea.

“What’s she doing back?” Ernest said. “I thought we were free of that gold-plated bitch.”

“Be fair!” I snapped.

“I am. I know a bitch when I see one.”

I tried to ignore him. He was never going to change his mind about Kitty, no matter what I said or did. It was one of his qualities that most frustrated me, how once you had a black tick in his book, you were pretty much done for. I’d have much rather not had to fight with him about her, but I was going to see Kitty anyway.

Unfortunately, the only nice dresses I owned were ones she herself had given me, and since I wouldn’t turn up in her castoffs, I went in a shabby skirt and sweater. As soon as I entered her apartment, I regretted the choice. She’d also invited two sisters from the Midwest, Pauline and Jinny Pfeiffer, and they were dressed to perfection. Pauline, I quickly learned, had come to Paris to work for Vogue. She was impossibly chic and wore a coat made of hundreds of chipmunk skins sewn painfully together and a pair of champagne-colored shoes that might have been the finest I’d ever seen. Jinny was the prettier of the two with these incredible almond-shaped eyes, but Pauline had something else, an almost boyish exuberance. She was slim through the hips and shoulders, with sharply cut dark bangs falling nearly to her eyebrows.

The two sisters were the daughters of a wealthy landowner from Arkansas, but they’d grown up in St. Louis. Kitty was just beginning to tell me about how close Pauline and Kate Smith had been at one time when Harold and Ernest came in from a boxing workout, sweaty and laughing.

I was surprised to see Harold-were he and Kitty on again?-but she quickly shot me a look that said Don’t ask. Meanwhile, why had Ernest come if not to harass Kitty? You’d think he would have tried to avoid her. I’d wanted an intimate reunion with my good friend, not tension and awkwardness, and definitely not Ernest and Harold sniffing around these striking new women as if they were exotic animals in a zoo exhibit.

As the afternoon wore on, Harold and Ernest both drank with vigor. I followed Kitty into the kitchen for more tea just as Ernest began to flirt with Jinny.

“I say,” Ernest said loudly to Harold. “I think I’d like to take this girl out on the town.”

“I wouldn’t give that a thought,” Kitty said to me in a low voice. “Jinny doesn’t go in for boys.”

“Really?” I said. From where I stood, Jinny was doing a pretty good imitation of a vamp. She’d turned her almond eyes on Ernest and batted them expertly.

“She just likes to hone her skills occasionally. She finds men amusing, I think.”

“It must be nice to be in such control,” I said. “And what about you? What’s happened with Harold?”

“Well, he did follow me to London, after a fashion. I’d all but given up. He says he’s not sure what he wants.”

“But he missed you.”

“Sure he missed me. They always do when you go running. How long can it last, though, now I’m here?”

“Why does everything have to be so complicated?” I said.

“I have no earthly idea,” Kitty said. “But clearly it does.”

Back out in the living room, Harold sat on the davenport alone with his feet up, lighting a thick cigar, while Jinny and Ernest and Pauline stood on the rug in front of him.

“I could take you both out,” Ernest said to the girls. “I’ve two arms after all.”

“Not really,” Harold said noticing me. “Your wife owns one.”

“All right then. I’ll take Jinny-as long as she wears her sister’s coat.”

Everyone laughed, and it was one of those domino moments. That laugh would eventually set off an entire series of events, but not yet. It just stood there in the room, tipping and tipping, but not falling.

Not falling yet. Not quite.

Over the coming months, in the spring of 1925, our circle of friends continued to shift. The change was subtle at first, and each instance seemed to have little to do with the others, but our old set was falling away and being replaced with richer and wilder specimens. Pound and Shakespear had begun spending more and more time at

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