“Why don’t you walk the poor kid home, Donald?” Ernest said.
“I’m fine,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”
“Nonsense,” Don said. “You’re pale as a ghost.”
Before we’d even gotten to the door, the gap had closed around the table and you couldn’t even tell I’d been there. Ernest was sitting closer to Duff now, and Pat had squeezed around to be nearer, too. Duff sat at the middle of it all like a floating island of meringue. She didn’t even seem to notice.
I was grateful that Don had offered to shepherd me home. I was feeling terribly lonely, actually, and Don was easy to be with. Ever since we’d met the summer before, he sought my company when we were out in groups together. I felt he was a kindred spirit because he didn’t quite fit in Paris either. He was a smart and savvy writer who’d gone to Yale, but in many ways he was still the boy who grew up on a farm outside of Columbus, Ohio. In Paris, everyone was so drastic and dramatic, flinging themselves into ditches for each other.
“I get why no one bothers with the usual rules,” he said to me once. “I was in the war, too, you know. Nothing looks or feels the same anymore, so what’s the point?” His face grew serious. “Still, I miss good old-fashioned honorable people just trying to make something of life. Simply, without hurting anyone else. I know that makes me a sap.”
“You’d like to find a girl like your mother, I’ll bet.”
“Maybe. I want things to make sense again. They haven’t in a long time.”
I believed I’d understood him at the time, but now as Don walked me back to the hotel, I felt our connection more strongly. I wanted things to make sense, too. More than anything.
“How are you holding up, pal?” he asked.
“Better than some, I expect. Poor Harold.”
“Poor Harold? What about Pat? He’s the one with the claim to Duff.”
“Seems like they have a pretty loose arrangement to me,” I said. “She drags Harold off to the Riviera for two weeks and then seems surprised that he’s mooning over her like a sad calf, and even more that Pat’s off his head about it. It’s cruel.”
“I don’t think she means to be cruel. She seems awfully sad under it all to me.”
We’d come to a corner where the Mercado was breaking apart for the day. A woman was stacking baskets, and another scooped blood-colored dried chiles into a canvas sack. Nearby, a little girl sat in the dirt, holding a chicken and singing to it. I slowed so we could watch her longer. Wonderfully black hair framed her heart-shaped face. She petted the chicken as she sang and seemed to have it in a trance.
“You’re looking at her like you want to gobble her up,” Don said. “You must miss your Bumby.”
“Like crazy. It’s easier when I don’t think about him. Sometimes I tell myself I’m two people. I’m his mum when I’m with him and someone else when I’m here, away.”
“Hem’s Hadley.”
“Maybe. Or maybe I’m my own Hadley.” We could see the stippled arch of the Hotel La Perla and the tangled wall of bougainvillea. I stopped and turned to him. “Why aren’t you all bound up with Duff, too? Everyone else is.”
“She’s a dish, all right, and it would be easy enough to give in. She’s asked me to take care of her bill at the hotel, you know, since she can’t ask Harold now. Maybe she’s asked Hem, too.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“Are you and Hem all right? He wouldn’t be stupid enough to throw you over for that title in a nice-fitting sweater, would he?”
I flinched. “Maybe we should have a drink.”
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said it. I think the world of you two. If you guys can’t make it, what chance do the rest of us have?”
“You really are a peach, Don,” I said, and moved forward to kiss him on the cheek. His skin was shaved clean as a baby’s and he smelled clean, like tonic.
“You might be the best girl there is,” he said with feeling, and returned the kiss. His lips were dry and chaste on my cheek, but then he moved ever so slightly and kissed me on the lips. When he pulled away, his eyes were moist and questioning. “I don’t suppose you love me, too, just a little?”
“I wish I did. It might balance things out.” I put my arms around his neck and held him close for a moment, feeling the sadness and confusion, all mixed up together in him. “This place has us all going crazy.”
“You’re not angry with me?”
“No,” I said. “We’re better friends now, I think.”
“Isn’t that a nice way to say it? I knew I wasn’t wrong about you.” He pulled away and brushed the hair out of my eyes. “I hope Hem knows what he has.”
“Me too,” I said, and went into the hotel. Inside, the senora was placing a cloth over her songbird’s cage.
“He doesn’t like the rockets,” she said as she settled the blanket more closely around the bars. “They make him tear at his own feathers. Have you seen this?”
“I have, Senora.” I passed her on my way to the staircase. “Can you please send brandy up?”
She looked behind me to see who might be coming along, so I added, “Just one glass.”
“Is the senora well?”
“Not very,” I said. “But the brandy will help.”
THIRTY-TWO
When I woke the next morning, Ernest was already up and gone. I’d heard him come in late in the night, but I didn’t stir and didn’t speak to him. By seven I was washed and dressed and down in the hotel’s small cafe where Ernest was finishing his coffee.
“I’ve ordered you
“Starved,” I said. “How’d it end last night?”
“Good and tight,” he said.
“Good and tight, or just tight?”
“What are you getting at?”
“Nothing.”
“Like hell,” he said. “Why don’t you say it?”
“I haven’t even had coffee,” I said. “Do we really need to quarrel?”
“We needn’t do anything. There isn’t time anyway.”
Bill came downstairs then and pulled up a chair. “I’m starved,” he said.
“That’s going around,” Ernest said. He signaled the waiter over and asked for another plate for Bill and cafe au lait, and then signed the bill. “I’m going to arrange for our tickets. I’ll see you up there.”
When he was gone, Bill looked sheepish.
“What really happened last night?”
“Nothing I want to remember,” he said.
“Don’t tell me then.”
“I don’t know all of it, anyway. Harold said something to Pat, and then Hem flared up and called Harold something terrible. It wasn’t pretty.”
“I would guess not.”
“Don showed up and tried to straighten things out, but it was too late. Harold had called Ernest out in the street to settle it.”
“Harold did? It wasn’t the other way around?”
“No. And that was something, really.”
“Is Harold all right?”
“Right as rain. They never touched each other.”
“Thank God.”
“Apparently Hem offered to hold Harold’s glasses for him and that broke the spell. They both laughed and felt like stupid bastards for even starting it up.”
