The Paris Wife

the relationship. The separation would help with that. She wrote to me that she admired and trusted my decision, and then she took a leave of absence from the magazine, and booked a passage on the Pennland for the States.

Within eleven days of my writing out the agreement, Pauline was out of Paris, if not out of the picture.

“Can I write her while she’s still on board her ship?” he asked. “Is that allowed?”

“All right, but then the hundred days don’t really start until she arrives in New York.”

“You’re like some sort of queen, aren’t you? Handing down the rules.”

“You didn’t have to agree.”

“No, I guess that’s true.”

“I’m not trying to be nasty,” I told him gently. “I’m trying to save my life.”

Ernest hated to be alone and always had-but Pauline’s absence had left him more than alone and very vulnerable. Within a very few days, he showed up at my door at the dinner hour. He’d just finished writing for the day and had that look behind his eyes he always got when he’d been in his head for too long and needed talk.

“How’d the work go today, Tatie?” I asked, inviting him in.

“A little like busting through granite,” he said. “Can a fellow get a drink here?”

He came into the dining room, where Bumby was eating bread and bananas. He sat down and I could feel each of us, even Bumby, exhaling into that space. Just to be at the same table.

I brought out a bottle of wine and we had that, and then shared a very simple dinner.

“Scribner’s Magazine is paying me a hundred and fifty dollars for a story,” he said.

“That’s a lot of money, isn’t it?”

“I should say. Maybe you ought not read it, though. It’s about our train ride back from Antibes with the canary woman. It won’t be very pleasant for you.”

“All right, I won’t,” I said, wondering to myself if he’d put the burning Avignon farmhouse in the story, as well, and the caved-in smoldering train cars. “Do you want to do the baby’s bath?”

He rolled up his sleeves and got out the washtub, then squatted on the floor beside it while Bumby played and splashed.

“He’s almost too big for the tub, isn’t he?” I said.

“He’ll be three in a few weeks. We should give him a party with hats and strawberry ice cream.”

“And balloons,” Bumby said. “And a little monkey.”

“You’re a little monkey, Schatz,” Ernest said, and scooped him up in the big towel.

Afterward, I put him to bed, and when I came out of his room and closed the door, Ernest was still at the table.

“I don’t want to ask if I can stay,” he said.

“So don’t ask,” I said. I flicked off the lamp and then went over to the table and knelt in front of him. He cupped the back of my head in his hand tenderly and I buried my face in his lap, breathing in the coarse fabric of his new trousers-ones he’d bought with Pauline’s help, no doubt, so she wouldn’t be embarrassed to parade him in front of her Right Bank friends. I pushed harder, and then flexed my fingertips along the backs of his calves.

“Come on,” he said, trying to stand, but I didn’t rise. I suppose it was perverse, but I wanted to have him right there, on my terms, and keep him there until the hot, sick feeling in my stomach went away. He was still my husband.

When I woke the next morning, he was asleep next to me and the bedding was warm around us. I pressed my body against his back, grazing his stomach with my palms until he was awake enough and we made love again. In some ways, it was as if nothing had changed. Our bodies knew each other so well we didn’t have to think about how to move. But when it was over and we lay still, I felt a terrible sadness come down because I loved him as much as I ever had. We’re the same guy, I thought, but it wasn’t really true. He’d always been emphatic over the years that we were essentially alike. We did grow to look like one another, with our hair short, our faces tan and healthy and round. But looking alike didn’t mean we weren’t alone, each of us.

“Does this mean anything?” I asked, careful not to look at him when I said it.

“Everything means something.” He was silent for several minutes and then said, “She’s ripping herself apart, you know.”

“We all are. Did you see Schatz’s face last night? He was so happy to have you here. He must be very confused.”

“We’re all bitched for sure.” He sighed and rolled over and started to dress. “You know, Pfife thinks you’re very wise to do all of this and to try to make some order out of the mess we’ve all made, but she’s falling to pieces over it and so am I.”

“Why are you telling me this? What am I supposed to feel?”

“I don’t know. But if I can’t tell you, who should I tell?”

FORTY-FIVE

As soon as he mentioned the split to the Murphys, Gerald had become so accommodating. Why was that? He’d pulled the studio out of a hat and money, too. He could draw on Murphy’s bank.

“This isn’t just about marriage,” Gerald had said when he made the offer, just the two of them sharing a drink in private. “I don’t know what I’d do without Sara, but you’re different and so the rules are different, too. You can have a place in history. You do already. Your name’s there on a card, and you only have to turn one way and not the other.”

“What do you have against Hadley?”

“Nothing. How could I? She runs at a different speed is all. She’s more cautious.”

“And I’ll have to be cutthroat. Is that what you mean?”

“No. Just determined.”

“She’s seen me through this whole while.”

“Yes, and she’s done it beautifully. But what comes next, that’s all new. You need to be looking forward now. I know you see that.”

He had often felt that Gerald overflattered him, but now with Sun behind him and so much ahead, he did feel as if there was so much more required. He didn’t know what, exactly, only that it would take everything he had.

Pfife was full of ideas for the future. She’d already organized the marriage ceremony and had likely been planning it from the beginning. That was how she made a deal with God or her own conscience.

“Tell me you love me,” she had said the first time, when he was still inside her.

“I love you.” She was muscular and strong and it was interesting to have her in bed, strangely adversarial, with a wildness and a toughness that was nothing like Hadley.

“More than you love her? Even if it’s not true, I want you to say it.”

“I love you more,” he said.

She pushed him over with her long firm legs and straddled him. Her hands on his chest. Her dark eyes boring into his intently. “Tell me you wish you’d met me first,” she said driving hard against him.

“Yes,” he said.

“I would be your wife now. Your only wife.”

Her expression was utterly removed and fierce all at once, and it unnerved him a little. Maybe she had to invent a life for them in her head, or else how could she live with herself and be Hadley’s friend? At Schruns, he had watched them side by side in front of the fire, talking and laughing. They had their legs crossed in the same direction, wearing the same socks and the same Alpine slippers. They weren’t sisters; they were nothing alike. He was the only thing that really joined them.

He wasn’t sleeping well and his nightmares were back. Sometimes, in the still middle of the night,