The Paris Wife

we start, we’ll begin to feel stronger and better and more like ourselves again.

He went on to say that he wanted me to have all the royalties from Sun and that he had already written Max Perkins telling him this, and finished by saying:

I think you’re a wonderful mother, and that Bumby couldn’t be better off than in your very lovely and capable hands. You are everything good and straight and fine and true-and I see that so clearly now, in the way you’ve carried yourself and listened to your own heart. You’ve changed me more than you know, and will always be a part of everything I am. That’s one thing I’ve learned from this. No one you love is ever truly lost.

Ernest

FORTY-SEVEN

We called Paris the great good place, then, and it was. We invented it after all. We made it with our longing and cigarettes and Rhum St. James; we made it with smoke and smart and savage conversation and we dared anyone to say it wasn’t ours. Together we made everything and then we busted it apart again.

There are some who said I should have fought harder or longer than I did for my marriage, but in the end fighting for a love that was already gone felt like trying to live in the ruins of a lost city. I couldn’t bear it, and so I backed away-and the reason I could do it at all, the reason I was strong enough and had the legs and the heart to do it, was because Ernest had come along and changed me. He helped me see what I really was and what I could do. Now that I knew what I could bear, I would have to bear losing him.

In the spring of 1927, Bumby and I sailed for the States for a nice long break from Paris and all that still could drag on us there. We lived in New York for several months, and then got on a long slow train across the country that dropped us, finally, in Carmel, California. I rented us a house close to the beach in a grove of pines. The sky went on forever there, and cypresses stood twisted by the wind, and the sunshine made me feel stronger. It was there I learned that Ernest and Pauline had married, in a small Catholic ceremony in Paris. Somehow he’d managed to convince the priest that he was Catholic, and as such, since his first marriage had been presided over by a Methodist minister, it didn’t count. I read this news on a rare cloudy day in May, while Bumby dug a trench in the sand with his shovel. Seawater spilled over the sides, dissolving the sand walls even as they were being built. It made me want to cry just watching, so I took the letter and walked to the water’s edge. Beyond the breakers, the waves bled from gray to white and the horizon was white, too, everything melting into everything else. Out past all that water, Ernest and Pauline were building a life together. He and I had already had our time, and though it was still very close and real to me, as beautiful and poignant as any place on the map, it was, in truth, another time- another country.

Bumby came over to where I stood and pressed his damp salty face into my skirt.

“Should we make a boat?” I asked.

He nodded yes, and I folded Ernest’s letter, creasing and squaring the edges until it seemed sturdy. I gave it to Bumby and together we waded out into the surf and let the boat go. It bobbed and dipped, words on water, and when the waves gradually took it, I only cried a very little, and then it was gone.

EPILOGUE

Bumby and I returned to Paris after our summer in Carmel. He missed his father terribly and, honestly, I didn’t know where else I should go.

After a few months there, I became involved with Paul Mowrer, an old journalist acquaintance of Ernest’s. Paul was the foreign editor of the Chicago Daily News and a good poet in private as well. He and Ernest had worked together in Lausanne, and I’d met him a few times back then. Not long after Ernest and I separated, I ran into Paul at a tennis club and he invited me out after my game, for a beer at the Cafe de l’Observatoire. He was interested in me, and made that gently clear, but I needed time to think. So much of me still belonged to Ernest, I wasn’t sure I could ever really love anyone else. But Paul was incredibly kind and patient, too, and he had these wonderfully clear Mediterranean-blue eyes. The longer I looked into them, the longer I wanted to go on looking into them. There was nothing complicated about Paul. He was solid and even and had that wonderful stillness all the time. I knew he would love me forever and not ruin me, not even a little. I just had to let it happen.

In the spring of 1928, Ernest and Pauline left Paris for the States. Pauline was five months pregnant at the time, and they were headed to Piggott and then to Key West, where Dos Passos had promised the best tarpon fishing in the world. Pauline would buy a house for them and make everything wonderful because she knew how to do all of that-where to buy the best furniture and how to get pictures framed the right way and which friends to cultivate. She could care for him better than I had, maybe. Or maybe not.

In the end, Ernest didn’t have the luck I did in love. He had two more sons, both with Pauline, and then left her for another. And left that one for another, too. He had four wives altogether and many lovers as well. It was sometimes painful for me to think that to those who followed his life with interest, I was just the early wife, the Paris wife. But that was probably vanity, wanting to stand out in a long line of women. In truth it didn’t matter what others saw. We knew what we had and what it meant, and though so much had happened since for both of us, there was nothing like those years in Paris, after the war. Life was painfully pure and simple and good, and I believe Ernest was his best self then. I got the very best of him. We got the best of each other.

After he left for the States, I saw him just twice more in my very long life, but I watched from a distance as he became, very quickly, the most important writer of his generation and also a kind of hero of his own making. I saw him on the cover of Life magazine and heard about the wars he covered bravely and the other feats-the world-class fishing, the big-game hunting in Africa, the drinking enough to embalm a man twice his size. The myth he was creating out of his own life was big enough to take it for a time-but under this, I knew he was still lost. That he slept with the light on or couldn’t sleep at all, that he feared death so much he sought it out wherever and however he could. He was such an enigma, really-fine and strong and weak and cruel. An incomparable friend and a son of a bitch. In the end, there wasn’t one thing about him that was truer than the rest. It was all true.

The last time we ever spoke was in May of 1961. He called out of the blue around lunchtime on a cool afternoon when Paul and I were in Arizona, vacationing at a ranch we returned to every few years for the fine fishing and the views. I took the call alone while Paul invented an errand because he knew I needed this. I didn’t have to ask. We’d been married thirty-five years, and Paul knew me better than anyone. Almost.

“Hello, Tatie,” Ernest said when I picked up the receiver.

“Hello, Tatie,” I said back, smiling to hear our forty-year-old nickname again.

“Your housekeeper told me how to find you. I hope you don’t mind.”

“No, I’m happy you called. I’m happy it’s you.”

I told him quickly about the ranch Paul and I were staying at, because I knew he would approve of it. It wasn’t prissy or too comfortable. In the cabin, there were dark silky places on the wood paneling from eighty years of good fires, and all the furniture was rugged and plain and felt real under you. The days were long and open. The nights were full of stars.

It had been ages since I’d heard from him, and now he was calling to talk about a new book, a memoir. He wanted to share stories about our time in Paris.

“Do you remember the whores at the bal musette, and the accordion music and the smoke and the smells?”

I told him I did.

“Do you remember that Bastille Day when musicians played under our windows for nights on end?”

“I remember it all.”

“You’re everywhere in the book,” he said, and his voice dipped. He was working hard to stay cheerful, but I knew he was sad and low and haunted. “It’s been something, writing that time and living it all again. Tell me, do