The Paris Wife

Scott stood up as we approached their table, and Zelda smiled strangely, narrowing her eyes. She wasn’t beautiful, exactly, but her voice was-low and cultivated.

“How do you do?” she said, and then quickly turned to Ernest. “Scott says you’re the real thing.”

“Oh? He says you’re spectacular.”

“Aren’t you just darling, my darling?” she said, running her hand along the side of Scott’s sculpted head. With this gesture, which could have been extravagantly silly, she and Scott slipped behind a private net into their own little world. Their eyes locked and they weren’t with us anymore, or with anyone in the cafe at all, but only with each other, awash in a long secret look.

Later we watched them dance the Charleston and the effect was the same. They didn’t bounce wildly like the other couples; they were smooth as glass, their arms arcing back and forth as if on strings. Zelda’s dress bubbled up as she moved and every so often she reached to pull it up farther, past the tops of her garters. It was sort of shocking, but it didn’t look as if she meant to shock anyone. She danced for herself and for Scott. They moved in one another’s orbit, incredibly self-possessed, their eyes locked on each other.

“What do you think of her?” I asked Ernest.

“She’s not beautiful.”

“No, but she has something, doesn’t she?”

“I think she’s crazy.”

“Not really?”

“Really,” he said. “Have you looked into her eyes?”

At the end of the evening, they invited us to their flat in a fashionable Right Bank neighborhood off the Etoile. It was a rich building, you could see that right away, but when we got inside, the apartment itself was all chaos, with clothes and books and paper and baby things strewn everywhere. We pushed a great heap aside to make a place for ourselves on the sofa, but Scott and Zelda didn’t seem embarrassed at all. They went on entertaining each other just as they had in the cafe, but more loudly. Things got so noisy, in fact, that we heard a child’s crying from deep in the apartment, and then an English nanny came out bearing Scottie, their plump daughter. She was dressed in an elaborate bedtime costume with a fat bow listing to the side of her fine blond hair. Her face was prettily rumpled from her pillow.

“Oh, here’s my precious,” Zelda said, rising to scoop the girl up. “Aren’t you just a little lamb stew?” The girl smiled sleepily and seemed pleased, but the moment Zelda sat with her in a gilded but shabby wing chair, she became so preoccupied with trying to catch whiffs of Scott and Ernest’s conversation that the girl plopped right off her lap and onto the floor. Zelda didn’t even seem to notice it happened. The nanny swooped in and spirited the now-wailing Scottie off, and Zelda turned to me and said, “What were you saying?” Her eyes were scattered looking and strange, as if her mind were on another plane entirely. “I’m dying for my Scottie to be a flapper, you know. Decorative and unfathomable and all made of silver.”

“She’s adorable,” I said.

“Isn’t she? She’ll never be helpless. You can see that, can’t you?” Her intensity was sudden and alarming.

“Yes,” I agreed and wondered if Ernest had been right. But who could separate real madness out from the champagne, which was ongoing and everywhere?

As near as I could tell, the party never stopped for those two. Less than a week later, they showed up at the sawmill apartment at six o’clock in the morning, still drunk from their night out. We were sound asleep when they started banging on the door and singing our names out loudly. They didn’t seem to care that we were in our pajamas. We made coffee, but they didn’t drink it. They laughed, and swore allegiance to some ballet artist they’d met in the cafe the night before but that we’d never heard of.

“Zelda’s very sensitive to art, you know,” Scott said. “She’s not really of the earth at all, my girl.”

Zelda’s face grew dramatically stricken. “You’re not going to tell them, are you?”

“Maybe we should, darling. They’ll guess anyway.”

“Well, then.” Her eyes widened. “A short time ago, I fell very much in love with another man. It nearly killed me and Scott, too.”

Scott stood over her and made a motion as if he was smoothing her hair without actually touching it. “It nearly killed us, but it did kill the fellow. So horrible. It was in all the papers. You must have read something of it.”

I shook my head and said, “I’m so sorry you had to go through all of that. It does sound awful.”

“Yes, well,” Zelda said, snapping out of the moment as if an invisible director had called Scene. “The man did want to die for me. And it’s made Scott and me so much closer.”

Ernest flinched and stared into his coffee cup, saying nothing. I could tell that he hadn’t quite made up his mind about these two. They certainly didn’t seem our sort, but I wasn’t sure I knew what our sort was anymore. The rules seemed to be changing all the time.

“I knew she was off her cracker,” Ernest said once they’d gone, “but now I wonder about him, too. She’s sucking him in. As if she’s some sort of vampire.”

“She does seem to have Scott on a very short leash,” I said.

“I wouldn’t stand for it.”

“You wouldn’t have to,” I flared defensively.

“Now, Tatie. I didn’t mean anything. You’re not at all like Zelda. She’s so jealous of Scott’s work I think she’d be happy if he never wrote another word.”

“They couldn’t afford it if he stopped writing.”

“He told me they spent thirty thousand dollars last year, just swam through it all.”

“They live on thirty thousand and we live on three. It’s absurd.”

“I think we live better, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said emphatically.

From the other room, Bumby began to make stirring noises. I put down my coffee cup and stood to go and fetch him when Ernest said, “I wouldn’t want their life, but it’s hard to see so much money simply wasted when we haven’t got any. What if I borrowed from Scott for our trip to Pamplona in July?”

“Do you think we know them well enough for that?”

“Maybe not. We’ve got to get there somehow. Maybe Don Stewart?”

“He’s a good egg.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’ll tell you what, though. Everyone seems to want in on this trip. It’s getting very complicated.”

“It’s still weeks away. How complicated could it be?”

“You don’t want to know.”

THIRTY-ONE

In the railroad yard, the bulls came off the cars lowing and twisting and panicked, their eyes rolling back in their heads. They didn’t know where to go, and it was hard to watch because we knew that by the end of the day they’d be dead. It was morning and quite cool for July. The dust rose up from their hooves and into the air, stinging our eyes as Ernest pointed out the hunched and muscled place between the shoulder blades where the sword had to hit just right.

“Yes, sir,” said Harold Loeb. “That’s the moment of truth.”

Ernest’s face turned sour. “What would you know about it?”

“Enough, I guess,” Harold said.

Just then Duff came up and put her hand in the crook of Ernest’s arm. “It’s all wonderful, isn’t it?” She looked at him like a child about to get everything her own way, her eyes crinkling and her smile wide. “It makes a chap hungry, though. Who’s going to feed me anyway?”

“Oh, all right. Sure,” Ernest said, still sour, and the two of them led the way to the cafe. Ernest wore his beret and a navy sweater and white pants, a dark scarf knotted at his throat. Duff was perfect as ever with her long cotton sweater and Eton collar in pale green silk. Her hair was brushed back from her forehead and she walked