straight and tall. Ernest matched her stride, his chin set in a proud way. He was probably still fuming at Harold, though trying to swallow it. From the back, the two of them together looked as if they belonged in a fashion magazine, and I saw Duff’s fiance, Pat Guthrie, noticing this, too. Everyone noticed, and poor Pat had been looking pained for days.
I felt sorry for Pat, though I wouldn’t have wanted to live with him. He drank too much and could be a terrible bother when he did. Each afternoon he would start out sunny and pleased with everything. He liked to talk about popular music and could sing and dance with great energy and enthusiasm, but after three or four cocktails, something turned in him and he became snide and superior. If he kept on with it and Duff didn’t send him away, he changed again, growing sullen and morose. I wondered how she kept up with his moods-or how he himself did. When he woke up, did he feel disgusted for the way he’d twisted one way and then another? Did he remember any of it?
“What do you say we drink through till dark?” Harold said, coming up beside me.
I smiled and took his arm, wanting to make him feel better, if only for a moment. Maybe if we stuck together, he’d try to make me feel better, too. God knows I needed it.
The trip had started badly in Burguete, the week before, when we went to fish in the Irati-one of Ernest’s favorite rivers in the world-and found it all ruined. The landlady at our hotel had tried to warn us that the good fishing was gone, but Ernest had laughed her off. The loggers had been there for the beech and pine, and when we got to the river we found it full of trash and floating debris. Dams had been broken through. Dead fish littered the banks and clogged the small pools. It was almost too much to take in, but we stuck it out, anyway, for several days, trying to go farther out to the smaller streams. No one took a single fish.
Bill Smith, one of our old friends from Chicago, was with us, having been lured over by Ernest’s reports of world-class fishing, and of the bullfights that would follow. We hadn’t seen him at all since the days of the Domicile. When Kenley and Ernest had their falling-out, tension trickled through all of our connections to the Smith clan, but we’d since picked up a fairly regular correspondence with Kate, who was back in Chicago, working as a journalist. And when Bill arrived to meet us in Paris, we were happy to find that he was the same as ever, full of lively stories and game for anything. He’d brought with him every surefire fly he owned for the trip to Spain-all the old winners from summers fishing the Sturgeon or the Black up in Michigan-and I thought Ernest was going to cry when Bill opened his tackle box to show Ernest the flies, because they were useless.
In Pamplona, we still felt the wrongness. We had lots of friends around and it should have been jolly, but it wasn’t. In Paris, Ernest and Duff had done their dance around each other, but it had seemed harmless for the most part. Something had come in to change it, though, and that something was Harold. He’d fallen hard for Duff and swept her off for a week at St.-Jean-de-Luz. When Kitty told me about the affair, she said Harold had been so strange of late she’d suspected something like this was coming. I’d never understood the arrangement Harold and Kitty made of love. Now I felt equally baffled and more than a little upset by the way Ernest was reacting so extremely. He had no rights to Duff-none of this should have mattered at all to him, but it did, and suddenly everyone knew it.
The morning the fights began, we all woke up at dawn to see the running of the bulls through the streets. The first time I’d watched, the summer I was pregnant with Bumby, it seemed to pass so quickly I couldn’t remember what I’d seen. Now Bumby was safe in Paris with Marie Cocotte, and though I had wanted and needed a break from constant mothering, I didn’t know quite how to feel as a free agent.
The streets were slick that morning. A light rain had fallen before dawn, and you could see the bulls struggle for traction against the cobblestones. One went down and struggled, craning its thick neck, its eyes rolling to white, and the whole thing seemed to pass in slow motion.
We were standing just behind a low wall, close enough to smell the animal sweat of the bulls and the excitement of everyone watching. Though some didn’t watch or couldn’t.
“The bulls are almost prehistoric,” Ernest had told Bill in the cafe the night before. “They’ve been bred for six hundred years to do what they do, to make this run to the arena, to gore what they can on the way to their own certain death. It’s goddamned beautiful is what it is. Just wait till you see it for yourself.”
“I’m ready for it,” Bill said, but on the street with a clear view of everything, his conviction seemed to waver. While we watched, one of the young men ran too close to a thick bull and was shoved into the wall, just twenty feet away from where we stood. We could hear his arm snap at an angle behind his back. He cried out and tried to scramble up the wall, and the fear on his face was ugly to see.
“Too much for you, old boy?” Ernest said when he saw Bill look away.
“Maybe,” Bill said.
Ernest was standing near Duff, and his color was very high. “See there, now?” He pointed to the way the bull was coming at the young man, its square head ducked low. “The bull’s sight is very bad, but it smells him, and it’s taking its time. Look at him now. He’s coming, by God.”
“I can’t believe this is sport for you,” Bill said to Ernest very quietly.
“What else would it be? It’s life and death, brother, same as every day.”
The bull came forward, leading with the right horn, his thick head swung to one side so he looked like the devil, really, barreling at the scrambling caballero. But then a hand appeared from the other side of the wall. We couldn’t see who had offered help, but it was enough. The caballero got enough traction to run up the wall and over, and then he was free. A small cheer went up in the crowd when he was safe.
“I suppose you’re disappointed,” Bill said, looking at Ernest pointedly.
“Not at all.”
“Would he have gotten it very bad?” Duff asked.
“Maybe he would have. It can happen. I’ve seen it.”
“It’s terribly exciting, isn’t it?” she said.
“The best damned show there is.”
The last bull ran by us, and then the
“Beautiful,” Duff said.
I tried to remember if I thought them beautiful the first time, when Ernest had taught me the way he was teaching Duff now. My life had changed so much in the two short years since, but I remembered being excited and also strangely calm, because I was pregnant and felt safe, buffered from everything in the best way. My body was doing what it was meant to do, and these animals, they were living out their destinies, too. I could watch and not feel mauled or traumatized, but just sit next to Ernest and sew the clothes and blankets I was working on for the baby that would come in three months, no matter what happened on that day. And I remembered feeling very good about everything in the night, with the
We seemed to be the only Americans in Pamplona that first year. Ernest called it the Garden of Eden-but that had certainly changed now. Limousines brought society over from Biarritz. Uniformed chauffeurs opened doors all night and then waited near their cars for the revelers to tire and spill back into the leather cocoon stinking of champagne. But even with the rich coming in to spoil everything, it was spoiled already.
Harold was still crazy for Duff. You could see it at lunch when he went pale and Victorian with her one minute and then began to fuss with the waiter to make sure she had her drink.
“Oh, it’s fine, darling,” she said. “I’m still alive over here, at least for now.”
We were all crowded around an outdoor table, with Duff, Ernest, and Harold on one side and Pat, Bill, and myself on the other. Pat had on a beautiful summer suit with a navy linen jacket. He’d gone out and found a beret just like Ernest’s and wore it high on his forehead at an optimistic angle. And yet for all of Pat’s civilized trimmings, the moment Harold became too conspicuously attentive to Duff, he snapped and grew belligerent.
“Give it a rest, Harold,” he barked. “Go take a walk around the block.”
“Why don’t you shut it,” Harold said. “Or I’ll tell you what, just have another drink.” He turned and shouted loudly behind him to no one, “Bring this man a drink!”
Just then Don Stewart walked up looking cool and clean in gray flannels and a fresh white shirt. He glanced around the table, instantly sensing tension. “Who died, men?”
“No one of consequence,” Ernest said.
“I suddenly have a terrible headache,” I said. “I hope you’ll all excuse me.” I scooted around my side of the table and stood next to Don.
