Outside, the gray rain fell and fell. Where had spring gone? When I’d left for the Loire Valley, the leaves had been out on the trees, and the flowers were beginning to bloom, but now everything was drenched and drowned. It had been a false spring, a lie like all the other lies, and I found myself wondering if it would ever really come.
It was well past midnight when Ernest came home drunk. I was still awake and had moved from sad to angry many times over.
“I don’t want you here,” I said when he sat down on the bed to remove his shoes. “Go home to your lover if that’s what you want.”
“She’s headed to Bologna,” he said. “And how would you know what I want?”
I sat up quickly and slapped him as hard as I could, and then did it again.
He barely flinched. “Play the victim if you want, but no one’s a victim here. You should have kept your goddamned mouth shut. Now it’s all shot to hell.”
“Are you telling me you would have been perfectly happy to just go on this way, in love with her, saying nothing about it?”
“Something like that,” he said.
“I can’t believe you,” I said, and began to cry. “I can’t believe any of this.”
Just then, the baby woke in the next room and whimpered.
“Perfect,” he said, staring at the wall. “Now I guess he’ll start wailing, too.” He left the room and went into the kitchen, and a few minutes later when I came out in my robe to check on Bumby, he had already poured himself a whiskey and was reaching for the siphon.
Ernest never came to bed that night, and in the morning, when I got up to make breakfast, he had already left the apartment. Late in the afternoon he came home, and when he took off his coat and emptied his notebook and pencils from his pocket, I was surprised to see them, on this of all days.
“You worked today?”
“Like the devil,” he said. “I got a draft of a new story. It came out whole as a fish.”
I could only shake my head as I put some cold meat, cheese, and bread on a plate. Bumby came over as Ernest ate and sat on his knee and shared nibbles of his bread. I watched them for a time and then said, “What happens now?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t written this. I haven’t any idea what comes next.”
“Will you still go to Spain?”
“Why not? The plans are all made. I’m leaving on the twelfth. Not a day later if I don’t want to miss the corrida in Madrid. I’ll be back for your concert, of course. That won’t be a problem.”
“I can’t do it now,” I said. I’d all but forgotten about the performance. How could I possibly give it without dissolving into tears in front of everyone we knew?
“Why the hell not? The theater’s booked. You can’t back out.”
“I can and I will.”
“Everyone will talk, you know.”
“They’re probably doing that now. I wouldn’t be surprised if the cafes aren’t burning with this gossip.”
“To hell with them. Nothing hurts if you don’t let it.”
“You don’t really believe that?”
“I have to,” he said.
“Have you told Pauline?”
“That you know? Not yet.”
“Well, let’s ask her how we go on from here. I’m sure she has some brilliant plan.”
“Careful there.”
“Why? Are you afraid I’m becoming a bitch? If I am, we know who’s to blame.”
He got up and came back with a bottle of brandy and two glasses. “Drink this,” he said, filling the tumbler and passing it across the table. “You could use it.”
“Yes, let’s get stinking drunk.”
“All right. We’ve always been good at that.”
THIRTY-NINE
The next few days were so strained and so full of quarrels, even in daylight, on the street, that Ernest packed a bag and left for Madrid early. It was easier to have him gone. I didn’t know what the future held, but I needed some rest and time to think.
I’d felt like a coward doing it, but I had followed through and canceled my performance. Now I had to deal with the awkwardness of making excuses to everyone. It felt terrible lying, blaming my nerves and lack of preparation- but not as terrible as going through with it, I thought. Particularly since news of the affair had spread, just as I’d suspected.
It was Kitty who told me. She came around just after Ernest left for Madrid and listened to everything in her stalwart way, letting me fall to pieces around her. Once I’d finished and only had tears left in me, she quietly said, “I’d like to say I’m surprised, but I’m not. I saw Pauline on the street just before she left for Schruns. She had her skis on her shoulders and was all loaded down with packages, and though she didn’t say anything, really, there was something about the way she talked about you two. An authority in her voice, as if you both belonged to her.”
“She has nerve. I’ll give her that.”
“Zelda said she and Scott were at the Rotonde when Pauline came in and started to go on about a letter she’d gotten from Hem, and how funny it was that he knew so much about women’s perfume, and did anyone else find that funny? She was obviously baiting. Luring suspicion.”
“Or maybe she couldn’t help herself. She’s in love with him.”
“Are you saying you have sympathy for her?” Kitty asked incredulously.
“Not at all. But love is love. It makes you do terribly stupid things.”
“I still love Pauline, God help me, but she’s very wrong in this. Freedom is one thing, but you draw the line at a friend’s husband. You have to.”
The weather turned glorious, with the creamy white horse chestnut blossoms choking the air with their sweetness-but I couldn’t get out and enjoy it. Bumby had fallen ill. It began with sniffles, but soon turned to fever. Now he was pale and listless, and fighting a terrible cough that only descended fully at night, waking us both. We kept to the apartment. I read him books and made up silly songs to distract him, but it was very difficult, for even several minutes together, to forget that my life was falling apart.
Every few days there would be a cable from Ernest. He was miserable in Madrid. The city was too cold and dusty, and the good corridas were far and few. The bulls were mysteriously weak and sick; he felt like a sick bull, too. There was no one to drink with. All his good friends were elsewhere, and he was very lonely. He was writing, though. In one Sunday afternoon, he’d finished three stories that he’d only had broken-up drafts of before, and the good energy seemed not to be slowing. He’d keep writing there and play it out. Were Bumby and I coming? If so, we should hurry up. He needed the company to keep from going crazy.
I wrote back saying that Bumby wasn’t well enough to travel. I wasn’t in any state either. I didn’t know where Ernest and I stood, and didn’t think I could bear waiting things out in a hotel room in Spain, particularly if I had to see cables arriving from Pauline every day. No, it was better to have this distance, and his writing was going all the stronger for it anyway. He always worked well during difficult times, as if pain helped him get to the bottom of something in himself and got the real machinery turning.
It also didn’t surprise me that he was feeling sorry for himself. There are men who love to be alone, but Ernest was not one of them. Solitude made him drink too much, and drinking kept him from sleeping, and not sleeping brought the bad voices and bad thoughts up from their depths, and then he drank more to try and silence them. And even if he didn’t admit it to me, I knew he was suffering because he’d hurt me badly with the affair. Knowing he was suffering pained me. That’s the way love tangles you up. I couldn’t stop loving him, and couldn’t shut off the feelings of wanting to care for him-but I also didn’t have to run to answer his letters. I was hurting, too, and no one was running to me.
Near the end of May, Bumby’s cough had rallied slightly, and I packed our bags and we went to Cap d’Antibes,
