The Paris Wife

“I’m sorry, Tatie. But maybe that’s because the situation is new and we don’t know how to do it well.”

“Do you really think it can be done well?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to lose you.”

“And if I don’t agree?”

“Please, Tatie,” he said, his voice low and anguished. “Just try. If it works and we all start to feel good about it, we’ll head for Piggott in September. If it doesn’t, we’ll go back to Paris.”

“Alone?”

“Yes,” he said, though I could hear some kind of hesitancy or hedging in his voice. He wasn’t sure about any of this.

“I think it’s a mistake. All of it.”

“Maybe, but it’s too late to go back. There’s only what’s ahead now.”

“Yes,” I said sadly, and left the way I came.

Over the next few days, I began to wonder if Ernest’s proposal was a new idea, an attempt at some solution out of the mess at our feet, or if he’d intended it all along. For years we’d been surrounded by triangles-freethinking, free-living lovers willing to bend every convention to find something right or risky or liberating enough. I couldn’t say what Ernest felt watching their antics, but they seemed sad and even tortured to me. When we last heard from Pound, his mistress, Olga Rudge, had given birth to a daughter, though they agreed not to raise her. Nothing in Pound’s life invited a child and neither one of them wanted to feel compromised, apparently. They gave the baby to a peasant woman in the maternity ward where Olga delivered. The woman had miscarried and was only too happy to take her.

I was stunned that anyone could hand over a child so easily, but doubly surprised when we heard in another letter that Shakespear was pregnant. It wasn’t Pound’s child; in fact, she wasn’t saying a word about who the father was, only that she was keeping the baby. Her behavior was obviously retaliatory. That’s what terrible, sordid situations did to you, made you act crazily, against your own truths, against your self.

One afternoon when Ernest and I were napping in our room, Pauline came in on cat feet, making no noise whatsoever. I’d been having a dream in which I was being buried under tons of sand. It was an image of suffocation, and yet strangely not a nightmare. The sand felt warm and sugary, and as it crushed me slowly, I kept thinking, This is heaven. This is heaven. I was feeling so languid and so drugged, I didn’t even know Pauline was in the room until she’d slipped under the sheets on Ernest’s side of the bed. The afternoons were hot, and we slept naked. I knew what was happening, and I also didn’t want to come awake enough to feel it. I never opened my eyes. My body wasn’t mine exactly. No one spoke or made any noise that would shake me out of my trance. The bed was sand, I told myself. The sheets were sand. I was still in the dream.

FORTY-TWO

In the morning, when the sun pried its way through the slats of the plantation shutters and fell on my face, I knew the day had come whether I wanted it or not, and I opened my eyes. A breeze pushed the cream linen curtains so they swayed. Light fell in oblong swatches along the dark wood floor, and I yawned and stretched and pushed the sheets back. Across from the bed was a long mirror and I saw myself in it, brown as can be and solid and firm from all the swimming and bicycling. My hair had lightened in the sun until the only red left was just a hint of ginger, and my eyes were clear and bright and I looked very well. I’d already stopped being surprised by this-how I could look strong and healthy when I was dying, really.

At our hotel, there were three of everything-three breakfast trays, three terry-cloth robes, three wet bathing suits on the line. On the crushed rock path along the windward side of the hotel, three bicycles stood on their stands. If you looked at the bicycles one way, they looked very solid, like sculpture, with afternoon light glinting cleanly off the chrome handlebars-one, two, three, all in a row. If you looked at them another way, you could see just how thin each kickstand was under the weight of the heavy frame, and how they were poised to fall like dominoes or the skeletons of elephants or like love itself. But when I noticed this, I kept it to myself because that, too, was part of the unwritten contract. Everything could be snarled all to hell under the surface as long as you didn’t let it crack through and didn’t speak its name, particularly not at cocktail hour, when everyone was very jolly and working hard to be that way and to show how perfectly good life could be if you were lucky, as we were. Just have your drink, then, and another and don’t spoil it.

After I dressed and bathed, I went downstairs to the little garden terrace and there was our breakfast on the table in the sun. Three oeufs au jambon with lots of butter and pepper, three steaming brioches, three glasses of juice. Ernest came out from where he had been working, in the little room off the terrace.

“Good morning, Tatie. You’re looking very well.”

“Yes,” I said. “And so are you.”

He wore tan canvas shorts and a black-and-white-striped fisherman’s sweater from Grau-du-Roi and his feet were bare. I was dressed similarly, and when Pauline came out onto the terrace, she was freshly washed with her dark hair combed back straight from her face and she, too, wore the striped fisherman’s sweater. We all looked just the same as we said good morning to one another and ate our breakfasts hungrily, as if we’d never eaten before.

The sun was already very bright on the beach, and it struck everything evenly. The sand was almost white with it. The water flashed it back blindingly.

“Our swim will be good today,” Pauline said.

“Yes,” Ernest said, breaking his brioche in half so that the steam rose prettily. “And then we’ll have Madame bring the Bollinger, very chilled, and some of the sardines with capers. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” he said, turning to me.

“It sounds perfect.”

After breakfast, I went to tell Madame what we’d planned for lunch and then packed a small bag for the beach. I found my shoes and walked down the lane to the bungalow, where Bumby was playing in the yard.

“Hello, little boy-bear,” I said, scooping him up to nibble his ears. “I think you’re taller today. You seem very large to Mama.”

He was pleased to hear this, pushing his shoulders back and jutting out his round chin.

Marie said, “No coughing at all last night, madame.”

“Aren’t you very good?” And when he nodded proudly, I said, “Come then, boy-bear, we’ll go for our swim.”

At the small moon of beach at the other end of the road, Ernest and Pauline had already set up the blankets and umbrellas and were lying in the sand like tortoises with their eyes closed. We sunned on the beach all in a row while Bumby and Marie played in the surf and made little patterns with shells in the sand. When the sun grew too hot, I went into the water, which always hit you cold and was wonderful that way. I ducked my head and then surfaced, and swam out several hundred yards, where things were still. I treaded water and let the swells buoy me. At the top of one, I could look back at the beach and see them small and perfect, my husband and child and the woman who was now more to us than we could manage. From that distance, they all looked equal and serene and I couldn’t hear them or feel them. At the bottom, in the trough of the wave, I could see only the sky, that high white place that seemed not to change much for all of our suffering.

As a kind of experiment, I stopped swimming and let my arms and legs fall, my whole weight fall as deep as it would. I kept my eyes open as I sank down and looked up at the surface. My lungs began to sting, first, and then burn, as if I’d swallowed some small piece of volcano.

I knew if I stayed there and let the water come into me, come through every door of me, some things would be easier. I wouldn’t have to watch my life disappear, bead by bead, away from me and toward Pauline.

The little volcano in me burned, and then something popped, and I knew that even if I didn’t want to live this way anymore, I also didn’t want to die. I closed my eyes and kicked hard for the surface.

Back on the beach, Pauline rose and greeted me. “Let’s try and dive, shall we?”

“I don’t think I’d be very good at it.”