nothing when he handed the cape to me but was very serious.
“I think he’s in love with you,” Ernest said, when Ordonez had walked away to build energy in the crowd.
“How could he be? He’s a child,” I said, but I was proud and felt changed by the honor.
Back at the hotel that night when we were dressing for dinner, Ernest said, “I’m working out a new novel. Or it’s working itself out, really, in my head. About the bullfights. The hero will be Ordonez, and the whole thing will take place in Pamplona.” His eyes were bright, and the enthusiasm in his voice was unmistakable.
“That sounds awfully good.”
“It does, doesn’t it? I’m calling the young torero Romero. It starts at a hotel, at three in the afternoon. Two Americans are staying there, in rooms across the hall, and when they go to meet Romero, it’s a great honor and they notice how alone he is, and how he’s thinking about the bulls he’ll face that day. He can’t share that with anyone.”
“He would feel that way, wouldn’t he?” I said. “You have to write it.”
“Yes,” he said, and although we left and had a long and delicious dinner with several bottles of wine between us, he was already with the book, inside of it. Over the coming days, his thinking grew deeper. He began to write in intense spurts, in the cafes early in the mornings, and in the hotel very late at night, when I could hear the aggressive scratching of his pencil. When we left Madrid for the fiesta at Valencia, he’d filled two thick notebooks, two hundred handwritten pages in fewer than ten days, but he wasn’t happy with the opening anymore.
“I’m thinking it should start in Paris and then move. It’s what happens in Paris that fuels the fire. You can’t have the rest without it.”
“You always said you couldn’t write about Paris because you were too close to it.”
“Yes, I know, but for some reason it’s coming easily. We were in Pamplona two weeks ago, but I can write that, too. I don’t know why. Maybe all of my thoughts and rules about writing are just waiting to be proven wrong.”
“It’s good to be on fire, isn’t it?”
“I hope it goes on like this forever.”
It did go on. In Valencia, the excitement over the fiesta had pitched everything into a fever and we could just enjoy it. We sat at a street cafe and ate prawns sprinkled with fresh lime and cracked pepper, and beautiful paella in a dish nearly as wide around as our table. In the afternoons we went to the bullfights where Ordonez swept his veronicas with absolute perfection.
“There it was. Did you see it?” Ernest said, pointing into the ring.
“What?”
“His death. The bull was so close. That’s what makes the dance of it. The torero has to know he’s dying and the bull has to know it, so when it’s pulled away at the last second, it’s like a kind of magic. That’s really living.”
One afternoon while he was napping and I was feeling restless, I thumbed through his notebooks, reading here and there admiringly. Quite by accident I came upon pages of sayings and turns of phrase that were recognizably Duff’s. I felt a shock at first, reading them. He had listened so closely to her, getting everything down, capturing her perfectly. And now it was all coming through, changed only slightly, in his heroine. It made me feel terribly jealous of her all over again until I was able to make sense of it. Ernest was a writer, not Duff’s lover. He’d seen her as a character, maybe even from the beginning. And now that he was living in the book, not in the street cafes in Pamplona, the tension and ugliness could be useful. The whole time had been constructive and necessary for the work. That’s why the words were coming so strongly now, with such heat.
From Valencia we went to Madrid again, and then to San Sebastian to escape the rising summer temperatures. In San Sebastian and then in Hendaye, Ernest wrote with great intensity in the mornings, and then we spent the rest of the day swimming and sunning ourselves on the beach. The sand was hot and sugary, and there were long purple mountains in the distance, and the crashing of the surf filled our ears and lulled us into a happy stupor. But by the end of the first week in August, I was missing Bumby too much to enjoy any more of it. I went back to Paris and Ernest returned to Madrid alone. There he worked better and harder than ever before. It was as though he was inventing the book and inventing himself as a writer at the same time. He wrote to say he’d stopped sleeping except for an hour here and there.
THIRTY-THREE
At the tail end of August, Paris was virtually deserted. Anyone who could be anywhere else was, but Pauline Pfeiffer and Kitty had both remained in town for work. The three of us often met for dinner, sometimes with Bumby in tow and sometimes only after he was tucked into bed with Marie Cocotte to watch him. Although I initially felt uneasy around Pauline and Kitty as a pair-these fashionable, independent, and decidedly modern girls-at bottom they were both wonderfully frank and unfussy. That was why they liked me, too, they insisted, and I began to trust it.
Occasionally Pauline’s sister Jinny met us out in the cafes, and I found the two sisters quite funny together, as if they were a very chic vaudeville act with a shorthand of dark little jokes. They held their liquor well and didn’t embarrass themselves or others and always had interesting things to say. Jinny was unattached, but if Kitty was right about her preferring women, that made sense. It was harder to see why Pauline hadn’t yet married.
“It was all but settled with my cousin Matt Herold,” she said one day when I pressed her for more details. “I’d even modeled dresses and tasted half a dozen cakes.” She shuddered. “They all tasted like cake, of course.”
“Did something terrible happen between you?” I asked.
“No. That might have made some things easier, actually. I just didn’t think I loved him enough. I liked him. He would have been a wonderful provider, and a good father, too. I could see the whole thing, but never felt it. Not really. I wanted something grand and sweeping.”
“The kind of love you find in novels?”
“Maybe. That makes me incredibly stupid, I suppose.”
“Not at all. I love romance. Women these days seem too advanced for it.”
“It’s very confusing, knowing what you want when there are so many choices. Sometimes I think I’d just as soon ditch marriage and work. I want to be
“Maybe you can have everything you want. You seem very clever to me.”
“We’ll see,” she said. “And in the meantime we’ll be two bachelor girls.”
“Swimmingly free?”
“Why not?”
It was funny to think of myself this way. Ernest most certainly wouldn’t approve, and I wondered what he’d say about my spending so much time with Pauline. If Kitty was too decorative, Pauline would be as well. She was the type of professional beauty he generally despised. Not only did she talk endlessly about fashion, she was always maneuvering her way toward the most interesting people and sizing them up to see how they might be of use to her, her dark eyes snapping, her mind’s wheels turning shrewdly. There never seemed to be any spontaneity with Pauline. If she saw you, she meant to. If she spoke to you, she’d already planned what to say so it came out sharply and perfectly. I admired her confidence and was a little in awe of it, maybe. She had that sense of effortlessness that took, in the end, a great deal of effort. And though I never knew quite what to say around other women
In the middle of September, Ernest came home from Madrid looking exhausted and triumphant all at once. I watched him unpacking his cases and couldn’t help but feel astonished at what he’d accomplished. There were seven full notebooks, hundreds and hundreds of pages, all done in six weeks.
“Are you finished then, Tatie?”
“Nearly. I’m so close I almost can’t make myself write the end of it. Does that make sense?”
