The Paris Wife (24 page)

“See, Hadley. I have to be very dour around Kitty or she gets impatient with me.” He pulled a face and Kitty laughed, showing her nice teeth. “And sometimes,” Harold went on, “she surprises me utterly, the dear girl.”

“It’s why you keep me around.”

“That and your ankles, sweetheart.”

By the end of the afternoon I was quite taken by Harold and Kitty both, and happily accepted when they invited Ernest and me to dinner the next evening, at the Nègre de Toulouse.

“It’s a wonderfully secret local place,” Kitty said. “You won’t find it in the guidebooks.”

“I swear not to breathe a word of it,” I said, and then began to wonder what on earth I could wear. I was still at a loss the next evening when it was time to leave for the restaurant. It had been five months since I’d had Bumby. My maternity clothes swam on me now, but I couldn’t yet squeeze into anything from before.

“No one really cares,” Ernest said. “You could go in sackcloth and still charm everyone.”

“I could not. You might not give a whit about clothes.” I gestured at his patched jacket and sweatshirt, the uniform he wore day and night, without any regard to fashion or even decorum. “But people generally do take care and want to make a good impression.”

“You’ve already made one, obviously. But if you like, I’ll tell them I’ve listened too carefully to Gertrude, who’s always said to buy pictures instead of clothes.”

“She does say that, but we don’t buy pictures, do we?” I frowned at myself in the mirror.

“Don’t fret, Tatie,” Ernest said, coming behind me to plant a kiss on the back of my neck. “No one’s as lovely and straight and simple as you.”

I met his eyes in the mirror. “You’re awfully sweet, aren’t you?”

He kissed me again and then pushed me firmly out the door.

In the end the restaurant was so dimly lit, I found I wasn’t self-conscious after the first bottle of wine. While the men talked of Princeton, where Harold had gone to school, and scratch starts at first novels (Harold was working on his just then), Kitty and I had a surprisingly intimate conversation about her first marriage, to Skipwith Cannell, a poet who’d apparently made her miserable, then refused to divorce her.

“How terrible for you. How will you marry again?”

“I’d
never
marry again, dear. Thank goodness Harold and I are in agreement about that much. But I’d rather not be chained to Skip forever. It was hard enough to bear when he was nearby. Now he clinks and clanks and bedevils me all the way from London.”

“It’s freedom you want, then.”

“Good God, yes. Don’t you?”

“I don’t know. I want to be happy I suppose.”

“Happiness is so awfully complicated, but freedom isn’t. You’re either tied down or you’re not.”

“Blaming marriage doesn’t solve it. As soon as you love someone, you’re bound up with them. It’s unavoidable—unless you swear off love.”

“Even
I’m
not that hard-nosed.” She laughed and raised her glass. “To love, then.”

Harold turned to us with a quizzical look. “What’s going on here?”

“Hadley’s turning me into a romantic,” Kitty said.

Harold chuckled. “Fat chance, sweetheart, but it’s a very nice idea.”

“Only one romantic per table,” Ernest piped in. “There’s a sign at the door.”

After a vast dinner, they came back with us to the sawmill apartment for a nightcap, and though they pretended to be gracious about how dark and tunnel-like our apartment was, I could see they were unaccustomed to common living. The baby was asleep in the next room, so we crowded around the kitchen table.

“I figure I’ll be done with this novel within a month,” Harold said, “and then I’m going for broke. I want an American publisher, an advance, and a slew of good notices.”

“You forgot dancing girls,” Ernest said, smirking.

“They’ll be in the contract,” Harold said. “Seriously, though, I’m shooting for Boni and Liveright. Ford says they’re the operation to watch in New York.”

“They publish Sherwood Anderson,” Ernest said. “They’ve treated him well, and he says they’re committed to contemporary American writers.”

“That’s me,” Harold said. “You, too.”

“You should send your stories, Tatie. Sherwood would put in a word for you,” I said.

“Maybe,” Ernest said. “I’ve thought about it.”

“Now that’s settled,” Kitty said, “please let’s talk about something interesting.”

“Like hats, Kitty dear?” Harold said.

“Maybe.” She turned to me. “I’d love to take you shopping. You could be my pet project.”

“Oh, brother,” Ernest said.

“What? Everyone likes nice things,” Kitty said. “I promise not to drape her in pearls or meringue.”

“I’d love to go,” I said. “Let’s set a date soon.” But after they’d gone, I saw it was a mistake to have accepted Kitty’s offer.

“She only wants to humiliate you, don’t you see?” Ernest said.

“She’s trying to be nice. I won’t take any charity, if that’s what’s worrying you.”

“It’s not that. She wants to lure you in and make you think you’re being treated badly.”

“I’d never think that.”

“Just wait. If she keeps whispering in your ear, you’ll begin to hate me for how shabbily we live.”

“You’re being awfully extreme, Tatie. We’re talking about shopping, for heaven’s sake.”

“No, we’re not,” he said grimly, and went off to pour himself a drink.

While Bumby napped at home under the care of Marie Cocotte, who’d been enthusiastic about returning to work for us, even with the additional nanny duties, I took to meeting Kitty once a week. We’d have tea somewhere or pop into antique stores when she had time. I loved to look at the jewelry, particularly the cloisonné earrings that were popular just then, and though Ernest and I had no money to spare for such indulgences, I enjoyed watching Kitty move through the shops and hearing her appreciative remarks. She had an eye and seemed to know, instinctively, what would hold its value and what was lovely but temporary. Sometimes she tried to press a gift on me, and I would feel pangs about declining. She really was just being nice, but Ernest had his pride, and I didn’t want to risk stirring anything up.

Try as I might to convince Ernest of Kitty’s virtues, he was intent on disliking her. She was too decorative, he said, and bent on her own comfort, but I wondered if he was actually threatened by her independence. She had a job as a fashion and dance correspondent for several magazines in the States, and though Harold paid for her charming apartment on the rue de Monttessuy, it was because he insisted on their having separate living quarters, and he was dripping with family money on both sides. Kitty had inherited money, too, and could have supported herself. She was also incredibly confident, with a way of moving and talking that communicated that she didn’t need anyone to tell her she was beautiful or worthwhile. She knew it for herself, and that kind of self-possession unsettled Ernest.

I fought for my afternoons with Kitty, even though this created tension at home, because it was the first time since St. Louis that I’d gained a friend who was exclusively mine. Gertrude and Sylvia had always belonged to Ernest. He was unapologetically territorial about them. With Alice and Maggie Strater and even Shakespear, I couldn’t quite seem to move beyond the realm of artist’s wife. Kitty was connected to Harold, whom Ernest now saw often, but she also very much had her own life. And she had sought me out.

“You’re a very
American
girl, aren’t you?” she had said on one of our first outings.

“What? You’re American, too,” I said.

“Not like you. It’s in everything you say, how direct and simple you are.”

“Egads,” I said. “You’re just finding a polite way to notice how I don’t fit here in Paris.”

“You don’t,” she said. “But that’s good. We need your sort around to tell us the truth about ourselves.”

Besides Ernest’s grumbling, the only difficulty in my friendship with Kitty was the way she continued to offer me gifts, even after I tried, at length, to explain the complexities of Ernest’s pride.

“It’s just a trifle,” she pressed. “Why would he mind?”

“He simply would. I’m sorry.”

“It sounds like caveman stuff to me. If he keeps you in animal skins, tending the cook fire, no other man will see you, let alone want you.”

“It’s nothing so brutish as all that. We have to economize. It’s not such a great sacrifice.”

“All right, I understand. But that’s my beef with marriage. You suffer for
his
career. What do you get in the end?”

“The satisfaction of knowing he couldn’t do it without me.”

She turned from the beaded handbag she was admiring and fixed her pale blue eyes on me. “I adore you, you know. Don’t change a whit.”

It was shockingly unmodern—and likely naïve, too—but I did believe any sacrifices and difficulties in our life were worth it for Ernest’s career. It was why we’d come to Paris after all. But it wasn’t easy to watch my clothes falling to threads and not feel embarrassed, particularly since women were dressed so chicly just then. But I honestly don’t think I could have kept up with them, even if we hadn’t been strapped.

Our apartment was cold and damp, and I often had a dull ache in my sinuses. We kept Bumby’s crib in the warmest corner, but he fell ill anyway. We passed a crouping cough back and forth for weeks that spring, which troubled his sleep. He woke crying, wanting to nurse. Feeding him could be a joy in the daylight when I was well rested, but at night it drained my energy away. It was at these times I most needed my outings with Kitty, or walks in the thin sunshine with Stella Bowen and Julie, who were also becoming good companions.

I also tried to slip out of the house for at least an hour each day to practice piano. We couldn’t afford to buy or even rent one as we had before, so I played a badly tuned upright in the damp cellar of a music shop nearby. I had to light a candle to see the sheet music, and my fingers often cramped with cold. Sometimes it didn’t seem worth the effort, but I kept it up anyway, because I wasn’t ready to let this part of myself go.

In the meantime, Ernest was working better than ever. The pressure he felt after escaping Toronto for Paris seemed to have been absolutely essential in stirring him, because he was writing strongly and fluidly, with almost no second-guessing. The stories were coming so well he could barely keep up with them.

He continued to do editing work at the
Transatlantic
, and though he was still full of criticism for his boss, Ford went on championing Ernest’s work just the same. When Ernest told Ford he was worried it would take years and years to get his name established, Ford told him that was nonsense.

“It will happen for you very quickly. When Pound showed me your work, I knew right away that I’d publish anything of yours. Everything.”

Ernest took the compliment rather abashedly and tried to be kinder about Ford, particularly since he was trying to get him to publish
The Making of Americans
, a novel of Gertrude’s, which had been languishing in her desk since 1911. Ford finally agreed to publish the thing serially, and Gertrude was ecstatic. The review was gradually becoming more important and widely read among their set, and it would be her first major publication. In the April issue, her work would appear alongside a selection from Joyce’s new work in progress, the book that would later become
Finnegans Wake
, several pieces from Tristan Tzara, and a new story of Ernest’s called “Indian Camp,” which gruesomely detailed a woman giving birth and her coward husband slitting his own throat because he couldn’t stand hearing her cries. He was very pleased with it because he’d been able to take a memory from his childhood, like watching his father deliver an Indian woman’s baby, and stitch it to another thing he’d seen, the refugee couple on the Karagatch Road, and make a single powerful story.

“Joyce knows this trick,” he said to me late one afternoon after returning from work on the issue. “He made Bloom up, and Bloom’s the best there is. You have to digest life. You have to chew it up and love it all through. You have to live it with your eyes, really.”

“You talk about it so well.”

“Yes, but you can talk and talk and not get it right. You have to do it.”

The April issue also contained the first important reviews of his
Three Stories and Ten Poems
, which were generally rapturous about Ernest’s talent and style. He was inventing something new, they said, and was a writer to watch. I was so happy to see his reputation growing finally. Everywhere we went it seemed people wanted to be near him. Walking the boulevard with him at night, past the thrum of talk and tinny music, we would hear someone call out his name and we’d have to stop and have a friendly drink before moving on to another café where the same thing would happen. Everyone had a joke for him or some bit of news, and our circle of acquaintances was increasing day by day.

John Dos Passos, whom Ernest had met just after he began working for the Red Cross in Italy, was back in Paris, riding the wave of his literary success and always ready for a good time. Donald Stewart showed up around this time, too. He was a humorist who would one day go on to be famous for screenplays like
The Philadelphia Story
, but for the time being, he was just a funny guy standing near the bar in a very smart cream-colored suit. Ernest was proud of his slovenly writer’s uniform, but I could occasionally be caught admiring crisply pressed trousers. Don’s were perfect. He was also nice looking in a boyish, clean-shaven way, with clear blue eyes that became very animated when he laughed.

When Ernest introduced us, Don was wonderfully familiar with me right away. “You have beautiful hair,” he said. “What an unusual color.”

“Thank you. You have beautiful clothes.”

“My mother liked clothes. And etiquette.”

“And ironing boards?”

“I have a mean way with an iron, I must admit.”

We talked a bit more, and I was having such a pleasant time, it took me a good half an hour to realize that Ernest had settled himself at a table nearby. I didn’t recognize anyone he was with, including the beautiful woman sitting by his side. She was slender and lovely, with very close-cropped dark-blond hair. Her body seemed slim and boyish under a long sweater, but somehow her hair passed her
beyond
boyishness, making her all the more feminine. The instant I saw her, I felt a sharp chill run through me—even before Ernest leaned over and whispered something to her. She laughed throatily, arching her long pale neck.