The Paris Wife

out onto the platform. It was nearly September, and the morning air was cool and dewy.

“Sixty-nine rue Froidevaux,” Ernest told the taxi driver, and my breath caught in my throat. He was going to Gerald’s studio, not home with me. Not back to anything. It really was over.

“Why not just go to Pauline’s apartment directly?” I said.

“Please don’t start. This is painful enough.”

“What would you know about pain? You’re doing this, you bastard.”

I didn’t know what I was saying. The brandy was still clogging my bloodstream and moving my thoughts. For the moment, all I really knew was that I couldn’t be alone. I started to hyperventilate, and when Ernest moved closer, worried for me, I lashed out at him with the flat of my palm, hitting his chest, his shoulder, his jaw. Everything landed strangely, the way it does in dreams. My hand felt elastic and so did his body. I started to cry then and couldn’t stop.

“Pardon my wife,” Ernest said to the driver in French. “She’s not well.”

When the cab finally stopped, Ernest got out and came over to my side and opened the door for me. “C’mon then,” he said. “You need to sleep.”

I let him lead me up the stairs like a mannequin. Inside the studio, there was a cold concrete floor, a single table and two chairs, and a low sink with a pitcher and stand. He walked me over to a narrow platform bed and tucked me into it, pulling a red wool blanket up to my chin. Then he climbed behind me and brought his arms around and tucked his knees against the backs of mine, hugging me as tightly as possible.

“There’s a good cat,” he said to the back of my neck. “Please sleep now.”

I started to shake. “Let’s not do this. I can’t.”

“Yes, you can. It’s already done, my love.” And he rocked us back and forth as we both cried, and when I slept finally, I didn’t give in to it as much as I was taken over by it, like a sickness or like death.

When I woke up hours later, he was already gone. My head swam from the brandy and there was another level of nausea that came from a deep and unanswerable place. My life was in shambles; how would I right myself? How would I get through this? Picking up a piece of charcoal from a low table, I wrote him a note on sketchbook paper that was much calmer and more collected than I felt or even believed I could feel: So sorry for the scene in the cab. I’ve lost my mind, but I’ll do my best to be as good as I can about everything. I’ll want to see you, I will, but I won’t search you out.

I left the studio, locking the door behind me, and walked out into a little courtyard, where a stone bench sat flanked by coppery mums. The walls to each side were hung with ivy. This was what Ernest would see when he gazed out the studio’s window-a new view that had nothing whatever to do with me. I tried not to let this terrible thought chink away at my thin resolve as I climbed into a cab bound for the Hotel Beauvoir on the avenue de l’Observatoire. This was the first place I thought of because it was right across the street from the Closerie des Lilas and I’d looked up at it a thousand times and admired its simple and well-made wrought-iron grille and its pots of geraniums. I would find a way to live through this. I would rent two rooms, one for me and one for Bumby. Marie Cocotte would return from Brittany with him the following week, and I’d write to tell her to bring him there. We could breakfast every morning at the Lilas. He could see his father often there, and other friends, too, and it would all be very familiar, and that would be important now.

As the cab moved slowly against traffic, I closed my eyes and tried not to think of anything except the cafe creme I would have very soon. I would make that last and then do what came next, whatever that was. All of my things were at the sawmill and they would have to be dealt with. I would ask Ernest to do it or hire someone, because I knew I couldn’t go back there. I wouldn’t. I didn’t. I never did again.

FORTY-FOUR

Ernest once told me that the word paradise was a Persian word that meant “walled garden.” I knew then that he understood how necessary the promises we made to each other were to our happiness. You couldn’t have real freedom unless you knew where the walls were and tended them. We could lean on the walls because they existed; they existed because we leaned on them. With Pauline’s coming, everything had begun to tumble. Nothing at all seemed permanent to me now except what was already behind me, what we’d already done and lived together.

I said all of this to Don Stewart one night at the Deux Magots. He and Beatrice were back in Paris and he had looked me up, worried for me and sick about our breakup.

“I hate to be morbid,” I said, “but next week is our fifth anniversary. Or would be. His timing truly stinks.”

“You could fight for him, you know.”

“It’s much too late for that. Pauline’s pushing him to ask for a divorce.”

“Even so, what will you do later if you do nothing now?”

I shrugged and looked out the window where a very pretty woman in Chanel was waiting for someone or something on the corner. She was a slender black rectangle with a button of a hat, and she didn’t look fragile at all. “I don’t know that I can actually compete.”

“Why should you have to compete? You’re the wife. He rightfully belongs to you.”

“People belong to each other only as long as they both believe. He’s stopped believing.”

“Maybe he’s just terribly confused.”

He walked me back to my hotel and kissed me gently on the cheek, and it reminded me of that dangerous summer in Pamplona with Duff and Pat and Harold, when everything boiled over and grew ugly. But even then, there were small stabs of happiness.

“You’ve always been good to me, Don,” I said. “That sticks more than you know.”

“Forget what I said in the cafe if you want. I don’t mean to tell you what to do with your marriage. Hell, I’m only just married myself. But there must be something. Some answer.”

I said good night and walked slowly up the stairs to the third floor, where Bumby was well asleep and Marie was folding Bumby’s clothes in perfect stacks with her very sure hands. I sent her home and finished the folding myself, thinking about what I still might do to make any kind of difference with Ernest. And the thing I kept coming back to was how if Pauline weren’t nearby and he couldn’t see her, he might come out of his fog and return to me. He still loved me; I knew it. But the real presence of the girl was like a siren’s call and he couldn’t fight it.

The next day, feeling very resolved about a new decision, I walked to Gerald’s studio at the rue Froidevaux, through the little courtyard, which was still a battlefield of plaster body parts, and found Ernest working at the stiff little table. I didn’t sit down. I couldn’t.

“I want you and Pauline to agree not to see each other for a hundred days.”

He was silent and surprised. I’d definitely gotten his attention.

“I don’t care where she goes-she can board a ferry for hell, for all I care-but she has to go away. You can’t see her and you can’t write her and if you stick to this and are still in love with her after the hundred days, I’ll give you a divorce.”

“I see. And how did you come up with this brilliant scheme?”

“I don’t know. Something Don Stewart said.”

“Don? He’s always been after you, you know.”

“You’re hardly in a position to judge.”

“Yes, all right. So one hundred days? And then you’ll give me the divorce?”

“If that’s what you still want.”

“What do you want, Tatie?”

“To feel better.” My eyes were wet and I struggled to keep more tears from coming. I handed him the piece of paper where I’d written out the agreement and signed it. “You sign it, too. I want this to be clear and straight.”

He took it solemnly. “You’re not trying to punish me, are you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore.”

He took the agreement to Pauline and told her the scheme and, strangely, she agreed right away. I guessed it was her very strong Catholicism that brought out the martyr in her. She might have thought my asking for three months was a reasonable request for a jilted wife, but she also might have felt she hadn’t yet suffered enough for