The Paris Wife (12 page)

“We were reading Yeats a little in school, sprinkled in with the Robert Browning and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Ernest showed me ‘The Second Coming’ in a magazine. We were both very struck by it.”

“ ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity,’ ” she said. And then added, “I wonder how Uncle Willy would feel about all the passionate intensity around here?”

Over in their shadowy corner of the studio, Ernest was literally crouched at Pound’s feet while the older man lectured, waving a teapot around as he talked. His ginger-colored hair was growing wilder all the while, and I could see why Lewis Galantière would compare him to Satan—not just because of the hair and his Satyr-like wiry goatee, but also because of his natural vehemence. I couldn’t hear individual words, but he ranted in a volcanic stream, gesturing constantly and rarely sitting down.

I thought the two were a funny match, with Dorothy so elegant and reserved, and Pound so vociferous, but she claimed he’d been very important in her work. She was a painter, and as we talked that afternoon she pointed out some of her canvases to me. I thought they were lovely, with colors and forms as soft and gauzy as Dorothy’s own voice and hands, but when I began to ask her questions about them, she quickly said, “They’re not to be shown.”

“Oh. Well, you’re showing them here, aren’t you?”

“Only incidentally,” she said, and smiled a beautiful smile, looking like something out of a painting herself.

At the end of our visit, after Ernest and I said our farewells, we made our way down the narrow staircase and out onto the street.

“I want to know everything,” I said.

“He’s very noisy,” Ernest said. “But he has some fine ideas. Big ideas, really. He wants to start movements, shape literature, change lives.”

“Then he should be a good person to know,” I said. “Watch that you don’t aggravate him, though. You’ve been warned about redheads.”

We laughed and walked to the nearest café, where Ernest told me more over squat glasses of brandy and water. “He’s got some funny ideas about women’s brains.”

“What? That they haven’t got any?”

“Something like that.”

“What about Dorothy? How’s he feel about her brains?”

“Hard to say—though he did tell me they both have leave to take lovers.”

“How forward thinking,” I said. “Do you suppose this is how all artists’ marriages go in Paris?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“It’s hardly something you could force on someone. You’d have to agree, wouldn’t you?”

“Are you feeling sorry for her? What if she likes it? What if it was all her idea?”

“Maybe, but more likely the other way around.” I drank from my brandy, eyeing him over my glass.

“In any case, he’s going to send some of my poems to Scofield Thayer at the
Dial.
”

“Not stories?”

“I don’t have anything good enough yet, but Pound said I should write some articles for them about American magazines.”

“Well, that’s flattering.”

“This has to be the beginning of something,” Ernest said. “Pound says he’ll teach me how to write if I teach him how to box.”

“Oh, God help us,” I said, laughing.

Our next major introduction came a few weeks later, when Gertrude Stein invited us to tea. Strangely, it went much the same way our encounter with Pound and Dorothy had. There were two corners here, too, one for the men—in this case, Ernest and Stein—and one for the women, with no crossover whatsoever.

When we arrived at the door, a proper French maid met us and took our coats, then led us into the room
—the
room, we knew by now, the most important salon in Paris. The walls were covered with paintings by heroes of cubism and postimpressionism and the otherwise highly modern—Henri Matisse, André Derain, Paul Gauguin, Juan Gris, and Paul Cézanne. One striking example was a portrait of Stein done by Picasso, who had long been in her social circle and often attended her salon. It was done in dark browns and grays, and the face seemed slightly detached from the body, heavier and blockier, with thickly lidded eyes.

She seemed to be somewhere between forty-five and fifty, with an Old World look to her dark dress and shawl and to her hair, which was piled in great skeins onto her beautiful head. She had a voice like rich velvet and brown eyes that took in everything at once. Later, when I had time to study her, I was struck with just how like Ernest’s her eyes were—the deepest and most opaque shade of brown, critical and accepting, curious and amused.

Stein’s companion, Alice Toklas, looked like a tight string of wire in comparison. She was dark in coloring with a sharply hooked nose and eyes that made you want to look away. After a few minutes of general conversation, she took my hand and off we went to the “wives’ corner.” I felt a twinge of regret that I wasn’t a writer or painter, someone special enough to be invited to talk with Gertrude, to sit near her in front of the fire, as Ernest did now, and speak of important things. I loved to be around interesting and creative people, to be part of that swell, but for the time being I was removed to the corner and interrogated by Miss Toklas on current affairs, about which I knew nothing. I felt like an idiot, and all the while we had tea and more tea and tiny, artfully arranged cakes. She did needlepoint, her fingers moving endlessly and efficiently. She never looked down and never stopped talking.

Meanwhile, Ernest was sharing a glass of some sort of gracefully tinted liquor with Gertrude. I think I half fell in love with her that day, from a distance, and Ernest did, too. When we walked home he had much to say about her taste, which was innovative and impeccable. He also admired her breasts.

“What do you think they weigh?” he asked. He seemed to seriously want to know.

I laughed. “I couldn’t even wager a guess.”

“How about them living together? Women, I mean.”

“I don’t know. They have such a life.”

“The paintings alone. It’s like a museum in there.”

“Better,” I said. “There are cakes.”

“And eau-de-vie. Still, it’s strange. Women together. I’m not sure I buy it.”

“What do you mean? You don’t believe they can get anything substantial from one another? That they love each other? Or is it the sex you don’t buy?”

“I don’t know.” He bristled defensively. “She said women together are the most natural thing in the world, that nothing is ugly to them or between them, but men together are full of disgust for the act.”

“She said this?”

“In broad daylight.”

“I suppose it’s flattering she was so open with you.”

“Should I give her an earful about our sex life next time?”

“You wouldn’t.”

“I wouldn’t.” He smiled. “She might want to come watch.”

“You’re horrible!”

“Yes, but you love me for it.”

“Oh, do I?” I said, and he swatted me on the hip. Two weeks later, Gertrude and Alice accepted our invitation to come to tea in our dreary flat. What they thought as they climbed the dim and ramshackle stairwell, past the pissoir and the ghastly smells, I could hardly bear to guess—and yet they were gracious and accommodating, behaving as if they came to this quarter of Paris all the time. They drank our tea out of the wedding-gift china teapot
—that
at least was nice—and sat on the mahogany bed.

Gertrude had offered to look at some of Ernest’s work, and now she asked for it, reading quickly through the poems, a few stories, part of a novel set in Michigan. Just as he’d done in Chicago, when I read his work for the first time, Ernest paced and twitched and seemed to be in pain.

“The poems are very good,” Stein said finally. “Simple and quite clear. You’re not posing at anything.”

“And the novel?”

I thought he was very brave to ask or even show her the pages, because he was newly in love with it. So protective was he, he had shown me next to nothing.

“It’s not the kind of writing that interests me,” she said finally. “Three sentences about the color of the sky. The sky is the sky and that’s all. Strong declarative sentences, that’s what you do best. Stick to that.”

As Stein spoke Ernest’s face fell for a moment, but then he recovered himself. She’d hit on something he’d recently begun to realize about directness, about stripping language all the way down.

“When you begin over, leave only what’s truly needed.”

He nodded, lightly flushed, and I could almost hear his mind closing in on her advice and adding it to Pound’s. “Cut everything superfluous,” Pound had said. “Go in fear of abstractions. Don’t tell readers what to think. Let the action speak for itself.”

“What do you think about Pound’s theory about symbolism?” he asked her. “You know, that a hawk should first and foremost be a hawk?”

“That’s obvious, isn’t it?” she said. “A hawk is always a hawk, except”—and here she raised one heavy eyebrow and gave a mysterious smile—“except when the hawk is a cabbage.”

“What?” Ernest said, grinning and game and clearly perplexed.

“Exactly,” Gertrude said.

Over the coming weeks, Ernest took Gertrude’s advice and pitched out most of the novel to begin from scratch. During this time, he came home whistling and famished and eager to show me what he’d done. The new pages crackled with energy. It was all adventure, hunting and fishing and rutting. His character’s name was Nick Adams and he was Ernest but bolder and purer—as Ernest would be if he followed every instinct. I loved the material and knew he did, too.

In the meantime, he’d discovered Sylvia Beach’s famous Shakespeare and Company on the Left Bank and was surprised to find she’d lend him books on credit. He came home with his arms loaded down with volumes of Turgenev and Ovid, Homer, Catullus, Dante, Flaubert, and Stendhal. Pound had given him a long reading list that was sending him back to the masters and also pointing him forward, toward T. S. Eliot and James Joyce. Ernest was a good student. He devoured everything, working his way through eight or ten books at once, putting one down and picking another up, leaving tented spines all over the apartment. He’d also borrowed
Three Lives
and
Tender Buttons
, two books Gertrude had published to a very small audience. It seemed most of the literary world didn’t know what to make of her strangeness, and neither did Ernest. He read one of the poems from
Tender Buttons
aloud to me: “A carafe, that is a blind glass. A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing.”

He put the book down, shaking his head. “ ‘A single hurt color’ is nice, but the rest just goes right through me.”

“It’s interesting,” I said.

“Yes. But what does it mean?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t
mean
anything.”

“Maybe,” he said, and picked up Turgenev again.

It was April by this time, our first spring in Paris, and the rains fell soft and warm. Since we’d first arrived, Ernest had been supplementing our small income by writing editorials for the
Toronto Star
. One day he received notification from his editor, John Bone, that they wanted him in Genoa for an international economic conference. They would pay him seventy-five dollars a week plus expenses, but there wasn’t any allowance made for wives. I would stay in Paris, the first separation in our seven months of marriage.

“Don’t worry, Cat,” he said as he packed up his beloved Corona. “I’ll be back before you know it.”

For the first few days, I enjoyed my solitude. Ernest was such a
big
person, metaphorically speaking. He took up all the air in a room and magnetized and drew everyone to him, men and women and children and dogs. For the first time in many months, I could wake to quiet and hear my own thoughts and follow my own impulses. But soon enough there was a shift. I don’t know how to describe it, but after the blush of my own company wore off, I became so aware of Ernest’s absence it was as if the
lack of him
had moved into the apartment with me. His shadow was there at breakfast and at bedtime. It hung from the curtains in the bedroom where the accordion music pushed in and out like a bellows.

Ernest had suggested I go to Sylvia’s bookshop for tea, and though I did go once, I couldn’t help but think she was just being polite by engaging me in conversation. She liked writers and artists, and I was neither. I went to dinner at Gertrude and Alice’s, and although I felt they were truly becoming friends, I missed Ernest. His was the company I liked best. It was almost embarrassing to admit how dependent on him I’d become. I tried to stave off depression by going everywhere I was invited and staying out of the apartment as much as possible. I haunted the Louvre and the cafés. I practiced for hours at a new Haydn piece to perform for Ernest when he returned. I thought playing would make me feel better, but in truth it only reminded me of the worst times in St. Louis, when I was lonely and cut off from the world.

Ernest was gone for three weeks, and by the end of that time I was sleeping so badly in our bed I’d often move in the middle of the night to an upright wingback chair and try to rest there, huddled in blankets. I couldn’t enjoy much of anything except walking to the Île St.-Louis to the park I’d come to love and rely on. The trees were flowering now, and there was the thick smell of horse chestnut blossoms. I also liked to look around at the houses surrounding the park and wonder about the people who filled them, what kinds of marriages they had and how they loved or hurt each other on any given day, and if they were happy, and whether they thought happiness was a sustainable thing. I’d stay in the park as long as I could, and then walk home through sunshine I couldn’t quite feel.

When Ernest finally came home in May, I squeezed him hard, my eyes filling with tears of relief.

“What’s this now? Did you miss me, Feather Cat?”

“Too much.”

“Good. I like to be missed.”

I nodded into his shoulder, but part of me couldn’t help wondering if it
was
good to rely on him so utterly. He admired my strength and resilience and counted on it; more than this,
I
liked feeling strong and was uncomfortable knowing that had vanished when he left. Was my happiness so completely tied to him now that I could only feel like myself when he was near? I had no idea. All I could do was undress him slowly while, in the dance hall below us, the accordion wrenched away at a melancholy tune.