The Paris Wife

“I’ll teach you. I’ll be the diving instructor today and Hem will watch and give you your marks.”

“Please, not that,” I said, trying to laugh.

“Some practicing first, then.” She turned and led the way up the little path along the beach where the brown stones were piled higher and higher. They were very dark and riddled with crevices and looked as if they’d been made by some god with clay and then baked in the sun over the millennia. The rocks were hot under our bare feet and we climbed them quickly until we stood nearly at the top.

Pauline looked over the edge to gauge the tide pushing and falling back fifteen feet below. “When you hear the rushing sound, that’s when you jump,” she said. Then she straightened and pointed her arms very gracefully over her head and long neck. She waited, and then, with the scalloped whoosh of the tide, she pushed from her lean legs and was out, hanging in space, and then rocketing down very straight and tall. The water closed over the place where she’d been and there was nothing, just water like the flat skin of a drum. Then she surfaced, pushing her hair back and squinting. “Good, then,” she shouted up. “Now you.”

“It looks too easy to be easy,” I called back, and she laughed.

Ernest had gone into the water and swum over, around the little cornice of rocks to where Pauline bobbed and waited for me.

“Let’s see you go, then,” he said, sweeping his arms back and forth as he treaded water.

“No marks and no corrections or I won’t do it at all,” I said.

“Don’t you want to get it right?” Ernest asked, squinting.

“No, actually. If I get it at all without smashing myself to hell on the rocks, it’ll be good enough.”

“Suit yourself, then.”

I stood at the edge and felt the hotness under my toes. I closed my eyes.

“Your arms should be straight up, touching your ears,” Pauline said.

“No corrections,” I said. I stood up tall and then arced my arms over my head. I listened for the shushing sound, but when I heard it, I found I couldn’t move. I was fixed there.

“C’mon, then, you’ve missed it,” Ernest said.

I didn’t answer him and didn’t open my eyes, and there was a moment of perfect vertigo, when I heard the whooshing of the surf again and felt I was part of it, swirling with it and also standing still, swept up and sewn into the sea and into the universe, but also very, very alone. When I finally looked down, here were these two wet heads in the slow-moving waves. They looked playful and natural as seals there, and suddenly I knew I wouldn’t jump and it had nothing to do with fear or embarrassment.

I wouldn’t jump because I didn’t want to join them. I felt the stones under my feet, smooth and hot, as I turned and climbed down slowly, undramatically.

“Hadley,” Ernest shouted after me, but I kept walking away from the beach, then down the road and toward the hotel. When I got to our room, I showered away all the sand and climbed into bed still wet and very clean and tired. The sheet was white and stiff and smelled like salt against my face. And as I closed my eyes, I made a wish that I would wake up feeling as strong and clear about things as I did just then.

When I woke up much later, I realized that Ernest hadn’t come to the room at all for siesta and that he must have gone to Pauline’s room instead. This was the first time he had gone to her in the daylight. Madame and Monsieur, the proprietors of the hotel, would know and everyone would know. With everything out in the open, it couldn’t ever go back to the way it was before. All right, then, I thought to myself. Maybe it’s better this way.

Just then the door to the room opened and Ernest came in. Pauline was behind him and they walked in together.

“We’ve been very worried about you,” Pauline said.

“You didn’t have any lunch. Are you feverish?” Ernest said. He came over and sat beside me on the bed and then Pauline sat on the other side, and they looked at me as if they were my parents. It was all so very strange and even absurd that I laughed.

“What’s funny?” Pauline said.

“Nothing at all,” I said, still smiling.

“She can be very mysterious, can’t she?” Pauline said to Ernest.

“Not usually, no,” Ernest said. “But she is now. What are you thinking, Cat? Are you well?”

“Maybe not,” I said. “I think I should rest through the evening. Do you mind?”

Pauline looked stricken and I realized she was truly worried about me, and that for whatever reason, maybe because her good Catholic upbringing urged kindness on her in the oddest moments, she needed me to be well and be her friend and approve of all of this. Approve of her taking my husband.

“Please go away,” I said to both of them.

Their eyes met over me.

“Really. Please.”

“Let me have Madame bring you something to eat,” Ernest said. “You’ll be sick if you don’t eat.”

“Fine. I don’t care.”

“Let me get it. I’d like to,” Pauline said, and she left to make arrangements about the meal the way a wife would.

“Everything’s handed over, then,” I said, once the door had closed behind her.

“What?”

“She can do everything now. She’ll take care of you just fine.”

“You’re not well. Just get some rest.”

“I’m not well, you’re right. You’re killing me, both of you.”

His eyes dropped to the sheet. “This isn’t easy for me either.”

“I know. We’re a sorry, sordid lot, the three of us. If we’re not careful, we’ll none of us get through it without terrible big chunks missing.”

“I’ve thought the same. What do you want? What will help?”

“I think it’s too late, don’t you?” I looked to the window where the light was fading rapidly. “You’d better leave soon or you’ll miss cocktails with the Murphys.”

“I don’t give a damn.”

“You do, though, and so does she. Just go. She’ll be the wife for tonight.”

“I hate to hear you talk this way. It makes me think we’ve ruined everything.”

“We have, Tatie,” I said sadly, and closed my eyes.

FORTY-THREE

I’d like to say that that was the last of it; that what was made plain to us that afternoon forced us out of the arrangement altogether. We were in the death throes, truly, but something made us each go on for weeks afterward, the way the body of an animal goes on moving after its head is gone.

The next week was the beginning of fiesta in Pamplona. We’d made a plan very early that summer to take Gerald and Sara Murphy with us, and we followed through with all of it, while Bumby went off to Brittany with Marie Cocotte for several weeks, his cough having dried up and vanished into nothing.

We stayed at the Hotel Quintana that year, in rooms that were right across the hall from the rooms of the toreros. Every afternoon we sat in the best possible ringside seats that Gerald had paid for. Every evening we sat round the same table at the Cafe Iruna in dark wicker chairs and drank ourselves into a stupor. Ernest was as much of an aficionado as always and applied himself to Gerald and Pauline’s education as he had mine and Duff’s and Bill Smith’s and Harold Loeb’s and Mike Strater’s and anyone else’s who would listen. Gerald was very serious about learning about the corrida. Ernest took him to the amateurs and they both went down in the ring to test their nerve with the yearling bulls, Ernest bare-handed that year, and Gerald holding on to his raincoat with white knuckles. When a bull rushed Gerald at top speed, he managed to turn him off at the last moment by twitching his coat to one side.

“That was a perfect veronica, old boy,” Ernest said to Gerald later at the Iruna, but Gerald knew he wasn’t a tough or strong enough man to suit Ernest. He didn’t believe him and wouldn’t take the praise.