The Paris Wife

Cocotte. At cocktail time, our driveway would fill with three cars and much laughter as we went back on the quarantine and tried to make it stick, passing good food and liquor through the grillwork of the fence.

Ernest wrote very hard for the first few days, but then realized it was impossible to be really alone-and that maybe he didn’t want to be alone. Scott tried to get back on the wagon but failed miserably. He and Ernest spent a great deal of time talking about work, but they didn’t do any of it. They sunned on the beach and soaked up praise from the Murphys as if they could never get enough.

Sara was a natural beauty, with a thick, tawny bob and clear, piercing eyes. Scott and Ernest both longed for her attention, and Zelda couldn’t stand the competition. She grew edgier and bolder by the day, but she wouldn’t direct any ire at Sara. They were friends and confederates, after all-so she reserved her sharpest barbs for Ernest.

Zelda and Ernest had never liked each other. He thought she had too much power over Scott, that she was a destructive force and probably half mad to boot. She thought he was a phony, putting on macho airs to hide an effeminate center.

“I think you’re in love with my husband,” she said to Ernest one night when we were down at the beach and everyone had had too much to drink.

“Scott and I are fairies? That’s rich,” he said.

Zelda’s eyes were hard and dark. “No,” she said. “Just you.”

I thought Ernest might hit her, but she’d laughed shrilly and turned away, beginning to take off her clothes. Scott had been talking intently to Sara, but he came to full attention then. “What on earth are you doing, dear heart?”

“Testing your nerve,” she said.

To the right of the small beach was a towering cluster of stones. The highest point stood thirty feet or more above the waves, and the current below was always choppy, swirling over hidden jagged points. This is where Zelda headed at a steady swim while we all watched with a horrible curiosity. What would she do? What wouldn’t she do?

When she reached the base, she scaled the rocks easily. Scott stripped and followed her, but he’d barely reached the outcropping when she let out an Indian cry and plunged off. There was a terrible moment when we wondered if she’d killed herself, but she bobbed to the surface and gave an exhilarated laugh. The moon was very bright that night and we could easily see the shapes their bodies made. We could also hear more wild laughter as Zelda clambered up to do it again. Scott had a go at it, too, both of them drunk enough to drown.

“I’ve seen enough,” Ernest said, and we went home.

The next afternoon at lunch on the terrace, things were quietly strained until Sara finally said, “Please don’t scare us like that again, Zelda. It’s so dangerous.”

“But Sara,” Zelda said, batting her eyes as innocently as a schoolgirl, “didn’t you know, we don’t believe in conservation.”

Over the coming string of days, as Pauline lobbed her letters at us first from Bologna and then from Paris, I started to wonder if Ernest and I believed in conservation-if we had it in us to fight for what we had. Maybe Pauline was tougher than we were. She wheedled her way in, complaining that she felt so very far away from all the good action and couldn’t something be done to fix that? She wrote that she wasn’t afraid of the whooping cough because she’d had it as a child, and couldn’t she come and share our quarantine? She sent this in a letter to me and not to Ernest, and I was struck, as I often was with Pauline, by her intensity and single-mindedness. She never ever dropped her pretense that she and I were still friends. She never gave up an inch of her position.

Pauline arrived in Antibes on a blindingly clear afternoon. She wore a white dress and a white straw hat, and seemed impossibly fresh and clean, a dish of ice cream. A widening sunspot. Another woman might have felt self- conscious arriving on the scene this way, when everyone knew or at least suspected her role as mistress-but Pauline didn’t have an ounce of self-consciousness about her. She was like Zelda that way. They both knew what they wanted and found a way to get it or take it. They were frighteningly shrewd and modern and I was anything but that.

“Isn’t it nice for Hem,” Zelda said one evening, “that you’re so agreeable all the time? I mean, Hem really runs the show, doesn’t he?”

I’d flinched and said nothing, assuming she’d said it out of jealousy over the boys’ closeness, but she was right, too. Ernest did run the show and run me over more than occasionally, and that wasn’t by chance. He and I had both grown up in households where the women ruled with iron fists, turning their husbands and their children into quivering messes. I knew I would never be that way, not at any price. I’d chosen my role as supporter for Ernest, but lately the world had tipped, and my choices had vanished. When Ernest looked around lately, he saw a different kind of life and liked what he saw. The rich had better days and freer nights. They brought the sun with them and made the tides move. Pauline was a new model of woman and why couldn’t he have her? Why couldn’t he reach out and claim everything he wanted? Wasn’t that the way things were done?

For my part, I felt utterly stuck and conspired against. This was not my world. These were not my kind of people, and they were drawing Ernest in with every passing day. What could I do or say? He might ultimately fall out of love with Pauline and come fully back to me-that was still possible-but nothing was in my control. If I gave him an ultimatum and said she couldn’t stay, I would lose him. If I got hysterical and made public scenes, it would just give him an excuse to leave me. All that was left for me was a terrible kind of paralysis, this waiting game, this heartbreak game.

FORTY

He didn’t know how love managed to be a garden one moment and war the next. He was at war now, his loyalty tested at every turn. And the way it had been, the aching and delirious happiness of being newly in love, had passed out of his reach until he wasn’t certain he’d ever had it. Now, there were only lies and compromises. He lied to everyone, beginning with himself, because it was war and you did what you had to do to stay upright. But he was losing control, if he ever had it. The lies grew tighter and more difficult all the time. And because there was sometimes more pain than he could properly cope with, he had a black buckram notebook, thick with creamy rag paper, where he put down the ways he’d thought to kill himself if it ever came to that.

You could turn on the gas and wait for the slow fog and the blue and strangled half sleep. You could slash your wrists, the razors were always there, and there were other places on the body that were even quicker, the neck below the ear, the inner thigh. He’d seen knives in the gut and that wasn’t for him. It reminded him of gored horses in Spain, the purplish coil of entrails unzipped. Not that, then, not unless there wasn’t an alternative. There was out the window of a skyscraper. He’d thought of that in New York when he was drunk and happy after meeting Max Perkins and saw the Woolworth Building. Even happy he thought it. There was the deep middle of the sea, off an ocean liner at night, with only the stars as witness. But this was terribly romantic and you had to arrange the ocean liner in advance. There was any swim anywhere if you meant to do it. You could dive down deep and stay there, way down, letting the air slip out of you and just stay, and if anyone wanted you, well, they could come and get you. But as soon as he hit on it, he knew that the only way he would really do it was with a gun.

The first time he’d seriously looked at a gun and thought about pulling the trigger he was eighteen and had just been wounded at Fossalta. He’d felt a lightning rod of pure pain take him over, more pain than he’d known was possible. He’d lost consciousness and when he came to again his legs were mush and didn’t belong to him at all. His head didn’t either, but there he was on a stretcher, waiting to be carried away by the medics, surrounded by the dead and the dying. Overhead the sky went white, a stuttering of light and heat. Screaming. Blood everywhere. He lay there for two hours, and every time he heard the shelling, he couldn’t help himself; he started to pray. He didn’t know where the words came from, even, because he never prayed.

He was blood soaked, open to the sky, and the sky was open to death. Suddenly he saw the gun, an officer’s pistol very near his foot. If he could just reach it. Everyone was dying, and it was so much more normal and natural than this pain. This hideous openness. With his mind, he reached for the pistol. He reached again and failed. And then the medics came and they bore him away alive.