“Can I read it now?”
“Soon,” he said. He drew me toward him in a long crushing embrace. “I feel like I could sleep forever.”
“Sleep, then,” I said, but he pulled me toward the bed and began to tug at my clothes, his hands everywhere at once.
“I thought you were tired,” I said, but he kissed me roughly, and I didn’t say anything more.
A week later, he’d completed the first draft, and we went to the Quarter to celebrate with friends. We met at the Negre de Toulouse, and everyone was in high spirits. Scott and Zelda turned up, as did Ford and Stella, Don Stewart, and Harold and Kitty. There were a few moments of awkwardness as everyone waited to see what was what. Pamplona had ended so painfully, but after the drinks came and several glasses were downed quickly, medicinally, the party loosened up. Ernest had more whiskey than he should have, but behaved himself until the very end of the evening when we met Kitty on the way out the door.
“Good show on your book, Hem.”
“Thanks,” he said. “It’s full of action and drama and everyone’s in it.” He gestured toward Bill and Harold. “I’m ripping those bastards all to hell, but not you, Kitty. You’re a swell girl.”
His voice was so cold and cutting, Kitty’s face went white. I pulled him out the door by his arm, feeling mortified.
“What?” he said. “What did I do?”
“You’re drunk,” I said, “let’s talk about it tomorrow.”
“I plan on getting drunk tomorrow, too,” he said.
I simply kept marching him toward home, knowing there would be remorse in the morning, along with a titanic headache.
I was right.
“Don’t be hurt by what I told Kitty,” he said when he finally woke near lunchtime, looking green. “I’m an ass.”
“It was a big night. You should get some dispensation.”
“Whatever I said, the book’s the book. It’s not life.”
“I know,” I said, but when he gave me the pages to read, it took me no time at all to realize that everything was just as it had happened in Spain, every sordid conversation and tense encounter. It was all nearly verbatim, except for one thing-I wasn’t in it at all.
Duff was the heroine. I’d known and expected this, but it was troubling just the same to see her name over and over. He hadn’t changed it yet to Lady Brett. Duff was Duff, and Harold was Harold, and Pat was a drunken sot, and everyone was in bad form except the bullfighters. Kitty was in the book, too-he’d lied about that-in a very unflattering role. Ernest had made himself into Jake Barnes and made Jake impotent, and what was I supposed to think of that? Was that how he saw his own morality or cowardice or good sense or whatever it was that had kept him from sleeping with Duff-as impotence?
But if I could step away from these doubts and questions even slightly, I could see how remarkable the work was, more exciting and alive than anything he’d ever written. He’d seen the good story in Pamplona when I’d felt only disaster and human messiness. He’d shaped it and made it something more; something that would last forever. I was incredibly proud of him and also felt hurt and shut out by the book. These feelings existed in a difficult tangle, but neither was truer than the other.
I read the pages in a state of anticipation and dread and often had to stop and set down the manuscript and right myself again. Ernest had been working so intently and in such solitude that any delay in getting an opinion was killing him.
“Is it any good?” Ernest said when I’d finally finished. “I have to know.”
“It’s more than good, Tatie. There’s nothing like it anywhere.”
He smiled with relief and elation and then let out a small whoop. “I’ll be damned,” he said. Bumby was on the floor nearby, chewing on a hand-carved toy locomotive that Alice and Gertrude had given him. Ernest swooped him up and lifted him toward the ceiling, and Bumby squealed happily, his apple cheeks filling with air.
“Papa,” he said. It had been his first word, and he loved to say it as often as possible. Ernest liked this, too.
“Papa has written an awfully good book,” Ernest said, smiling up at Bumby, who was growing pinker by the moment.
“Give Papa a kiss,” I said, and Bumby, who was now down in Ernest’s arms squirming happily, slathered his papa’s face.
It was such a fine moment, the three of us perfectly aligned, gazing at the same bright star, but later that night, when I was lying in bed trying desperately to sleep, my worries circled around again and wouldn’t let me rest. I’d been edited out of the book from page one, word one. Why didn’t Ernest seem concerned that I’d be hurt or made jealous? Did he assume I understood the story needed a compelling heroine, and that wasn’t me? He certainly didn’t follow me around with a notebook, jotting down every clever thing I said the way he did with Duff. Art was art, but what did Ernest tell himself? I needed to know.
“Tatie,” I said in the dark, half hoping he was sound asleep. “Was I ever in the book?”
Several seconds passed in silence and then, ever so quietly, he said, “No, Tatie. I’m sorry if that hurts you.”
“Can you tell me why?”
“Not exactly. The ideas come to me, not the other way around. But I think it might be that you were never down in the muck. You weren’t really there in the story, if that makes sense, but above it somehow, better and finer than the rest of us.”
“That’s not how it felt to me, but it’s a nice thought. I want to believe it.”
“Then do.” He turned over on his side, his open eyes searching for mine. “I love you, Tatie. You’re what’s best about me.”
I sighed into his words, feeling only the smallest sting of doubt. “I love you, too.”
Over the coming weeks, Ernest continued to work on the novel, tightening the language, scratching whole scenes out. It was all he thought about, and because he was so distracted, I was very happy to have friends around to keep me company. In the end, he didn’t seem to mind Pauline, and I was grateful for that.
“She chatters on about Chanel too much,” he admitted, “but she’s smart about books. She knows what she likes, and more than that, she knows
With Ernest’s endorsement, Pauline began coming by the sawmill in the afternoons to keep me company. We’d have tea while Bumby played or napped, and sometimes she went with me to the music shop when I practiced at my borrowed piano.
“You really do play beautifully,” she said one day when I’d finished. “Especially the Busoni. I thought I was going to cry. Why is it you never played, really?”
“I couldn’t break through. I just wasn’t good enough.”
“You could still. You should.”
“You’re very dear, but it’s not true.” I stretched my fingers and then closed my music book. “This is my life now, anyway. I wouldn’t want another.”
“No, I wouldn’t either if I were you,” she said, but later, when we were walking home from the shop, the scheme was still on her mind. “You might not have to give anything up to take music more seriously,” she said. “A concert wouldn’t have to be terribly traumatic. Everyone loves you. They want to see you succeed.”
“It would take so much more time and effort,” I said. “And I’d need my own piano.”
“You should have your own anyway. Surely Hem knows that. I can talk to him if you’d like.”
“We’ll see,” I said. “I’ll give it some thought.”
The rush of anxiety about performing in front of others never diminished much, but more and more I began to wonder if a concert might be good for me after all-particularly now, when Ernest was so absorbed by his novel. The book blotted out every other thought and crept in even when we were making love. I could feel him there one moment, with me, inside me, but then gone the next, simply vanished into the world he was making.
My playing wouldn’t change anything about his habits-I wasn’t naive enough to think that-but I thought it might give me my own focus and outlet, beyond the details of Bumby’s feeding schedule and exercise regimen. I loved being his mother, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t have other interests. Stella managed it beautifully. In fact, she was
