The Paris Wife

missed you, too,” I said, and then went to dress for the party.

Gerald had spared no expense in welcoming Ernest to town, and why should he? The Murphys had inherited their money and had never once been without. There were camellias floating in glass bowls and mounds of oysters and fresh corn dotted with sprigs of basil. It seemed possible that the Murphys had specially ordered the deep purple Mediterranean sky and the nightingales thick in the hedges, trilling and whistling a series of crescendos. It began to grate on me. Did everything have to be so choreographed and civilized? Who could trust it anyway?

As we waited for Scott and Zelda to arrive, Ernest began telling the table about his recent correspondence with Sherwood Anderson over The Torrents of Spring, which had just been published in the States.

“I had to write him,” he said. “The thing was going to be out any day and I felt inclined to tell him how it happened and why I would be such a son of a bitch after he’d done so much to help me.”

“Good man, Hem,” Gerald said.

“Right, yes. You’d think so, wouldn’t you?”

“Didn’t he take it well?” Sara asked.

“He said it was the most insulting and patronizing letter he’d ever gotten, and that the book itself was rot.”

“He didn’t really say that,” I said.

“No, he said that it might have been funny if it had been a dozen pages instead of a hundred.”

“I thought it was awfully funny, Hem,” Gerald said.

“You haven’t read the book, Gerald.”

“Yes, but from everything you’ve said, it’s obviously very, very funny.”

Ernest turned away with a sour expression and began to apply himself to his glass of whiskey. “Stein let me have it, too,” he said, coming up for air. “She says I’ve been a shit and a very bad Hemingstein indeed, and that I can go to hell.”

“Oh dear,” Sara said. “I’m sorry to hear it.”

“Damn her anyway.”

“Come on now, Tatie,” I said. “You don’t mean that. She’s Bumby’s godmother, after all.”

“Then he’s bitched, isn’t he?”

I knew Ernest’s bravado was almost entirely invented, but I hated to think of all the good friends we’d lost because of his pride and volatile temper, starting in Chicago with Kenley. Lewis Galantiere, our first friend in Paris, had stopped speaking to Ernest when he’d called Lewis’s fiancee a despicable shrew. Bob McAlmon had finally had enough of Ernest’s bragging and rudeness and now crossed the street to avoid us in Paris. Harold Loeb had never recovered from Pamplona, and Sherwood and Gertrude, two of Ernest’s biggest champions, now topped the long and painful list. Just how many others would fall, I wondered as I looked around the candlelit table.

“Hemmy, my boy!” Scott shouted as he and Zelda crested the steps up from the beach. Scott had his socks and shoes off and his trousers rolled up. His tie was loose, and his jacket was rumpled. He looked several sheets to the wind.

“Have you been for a swim, Scott?” Ernest said.

“No, no. I’m dry as a bone.”

Zelda laughed at this with a small snort. “Yes, yes, Scott. You’re very dry, and that’s why you just recited all of Longfellow to that poor man on the pier.” She’d drawn her hair severely back from her face and pinned a giant white peony behind her ear. Her makeup was impeccable, but her eyes looked strained and tired.

“Who doesn’t like Longfellow?” Scott said as he landed in his chair with some aplomb, and we all laughed thinly. “Come, dear,” he said to Zelda, who was still standing. “Let’s have a drink with all these marvelously affected people. There’s caviar. What the blazes would we do without caviar?”

“Please shut up, darling,” she said, taking her seat. She smiled broadly and falsely at all of us. “He’ll be good now, I promise.”

The waiter came and brought more drinks, and then came again to serve the table next to us, where a beautiful young girl was sitting down to dinner with what looked like her father.

“Now that’s a pretty arrangement,” Scott said, staring at the girl hungrily. Ernest elbowed him to stop, but he wouldn’t stop.

“You are not a gentleman,” the father finally said to Scott in French, and then escorted the girl inside, well away from us.

“A gentleman is only one of the things I am not,” Scott said, turning back to our table. “I’m also not well and not smart and not nearly drunk enough to spend any kind of time with your lot.”

Gerald paled and turned to whisper something to Sara.

“I say, Gerald, old chap. How about you chuck an oyster at a fellow? I’m famished.”

Gerald looked at him coldly and turned away to speak to Sara again.

“Sara,” Scott said, trying to draw her attention away from her husband. “Sara, please look at me. Please.”

But she wouldn’t and that’s when Scott picked up a cut-glass ashtray from the table and pitched it well over Gerald’s shoulder at an empty table behind. Sara flinched. Gerald ducked and barked at Scott to stop. Scott grabbed another ashtray, which hit the table dead center and then ricocheted off with a loud clang.

Zelda seemed set on ignoring him entirely, but the rest of us were appalled and embarrassed.

“C’mon, Prince Charming,” Ernest finally said flatly. He went over to Scott and took his elbow, helping him up. “Let’s have a dance,” he said, and then led Scott right off the terrace and down the steps to the beach. Everyone stared after them except for Zelda, who was looking intensely at the hedges.

“Nightingale,” she said. “Was it a vision, or a waking dream?”

Archie MacLeish coughed and said, “Yes. Well.” Ada touched her marcelled hair lightly, as if it were glass, and I looked out to sea, which was black as the sky and invisible. Years and years later, the waiter brought the check.

I slept late the next morning, knowing Bumby was in Marie Cocotte’s capable care. When I came downstairs, Scott and Ernest sat at the long table in the dining room with a sheaf of carbon pages laid out before them.

“Scott’s just had a momentous idea,” Ernest said.

“Good morning, Hadley,” Scott said. “Very sorry for last night and all that. I’m a proper ass, aren’t I?”

“Yes,” I said, and then laughed lightly, with the affection I truly felt. When he was sober, as now, he was sane and sound-as refined as anyone you’d ever want to meet. I went to get some coffee and came back to the table to hear about the scheme.

Ernest said, “In the first fifteen pages of Sun, we get Jake’s autobiography, we get Brett and Mike’s backstory, but all of that we also get later, or it’s explained enough anyhow. Scott says we lop it all off, right at the head.”

“I think it will work,” Scott said very seriously, nodding into his cafe creme.

“It’s what I’ve always said about the stories, that you get by with as little explanation as possible. It’s all there already or it’s not. The exposition slows it and ruins it. Now’s my chance to see if it will work for something as long as a novel. What do you think, Tatie?” His eyes were very bright and he looked so young and like the boy I’d met in Chicago that I had to smile no matter what else I felt.

“I think it sounds brilliant. You’ll make it work beautifully. Get the knife.”

“That’s my girl.”

Don’t forget that, I wanted to say. I’m still your best girl.

I took my coffee to the terrace and looked out past the rooftops of the little town to where the sea stood bright blue and uncompromised by anything. Not a seagull, not a cloud. Behind me, the men had bowed their heads again and were back at work, talking it through meticulously because it was heart surgery and they were the surgeons, and it was as important as anything they’d ever done. Scott could be a terrible, painful drunk. Ernest could shove cruelly against everyone who’d ever helped him up and loved him well-but none of that mattered when the patient was at hand. In the end, for both of them, there was really only the body on the table and the work, the work, the work.

For a solid week after Ernest arrived from Madrid, we followed a routine that seemed very nearly sustainable. Every morning, we had sherry and biscuits on our terrace at Juan-les-Pins, just like they did at Villa America. At two o’clock, we went over to have lunch with the Murphys or the MacLeishes, while Bumby napped or played with Marie