The Paris Wife (37 page)

Anyone looking on from nearly any vantage point would have believed that Pauline and I were friends. She might have believed it herself. I never really knew. She certainly worked hard to stay cheerful, inventing errands for us in the village to secure freshly picked figs or the very best tinned sardines.

“Wait until you try this olive,” she would say, or whatever it was—strong coffee or pastry or nice jam. “It’s heaven.”

I must have heard her say “It’s heaven” a thousand times over that summer, until I wanted to scream. I didn’t scream, though, and that became one of the things I grew to regret.

We had two rooms at the hotel, each with a double bed and heavy bureau and shuttered windows that opened onto the coastline. Ernest and I occupied one, and Pauline kept to herself in the other—at least at first. For a week or ten days, when Pauline and I came back from bicycling or swimming, she’d excuse herself to change for lunch, but then went to Ernest’s studio instead, passing through the hotel to where a second entrance lay unmarked, as inconspicuous as a broom closet. They likely had a secret knock. I imagined that and so much more, though it made me sick to do it. When she came to lunch an hour or so later, she was always freshly showered and impeccably dressed. She’d sit down, smiling, and begin to praise the lunch or the day extravagantly. It was all so modulated and discreet I wondered if she took a certain pleasure playing her role, as if in her mind a film reel was spinning and she was a great actress who never fumbled a single line.

I wasn’t nearly so clever. More and more I found myself at a loss for words and didn’t want to hear other people talking either. Their conversations seemed false and empty. I preferred to look at the sea, which said nothing and never made you feel alone. From my bicycle, I could watch the boats moving in blue chop, or focus on the bright green scrub growing out of the ramparts with great tenacity. Somehow it stayed rooted, no matter how the wind or waves attacked, immovable as the dark moss on the rocks below.

One morning after a storm had raged for hours the night before, Pauline was intent on pointing out every sign of demolition—overturned dinghies and fallen pine boughs, the tangle of umbrellas on the beach. I tried to escape her chatter by pedaling faster until I could only hear the rush of momentum, the purr of my wheels on the road. But she wouldn’t be thrown off.

“I’ve been trying to talk Drum into going stateside in the fall. You know my parents have land in Arkansas. The living is so cheap there you’d save a fortune.”

How I hated her using nicknames for him so casually. That was our language. Our dance. “You can save your breath,” I said. “He’d rather cut off his arm than go home.”

“Actually, he thinks it’s a fine idea.”

“Arkansas?”

“Piggott. It’s rustic, of course, but you like rustic.”

“I like our life here. What are you trying to do?”

“I’m sorry. I’m only thinking of you. You’re bound to run out of money soon in Paris. He should be starting a second novel and worrying about nothing but that. You can afford nice new things in Piggott. Surely that means something to you.”

“No,” I said. “It doesn’t.”

For the rest of our ride, I fought back both incredulity and tears. I didn’t want to let Pauline see either, and so stayed well ahead, riding faster and faster. Some of the turns were perilous. If I had lost my balance even for a moment, I might have pitched out over the stone precipice and onto the jagged boulders below. I wobbled at times but kept my course, and it was a kind of sharply edged euphoria I felt, heading back to confront Ernest. My heart was flooded with adrenaline and my mind raced. What would I say? What could he say to defend himself?

When I reached the hotel I was in such a state I left my bicycle sprawled in the gravel and hurried into the hotel, breathless and covered with a fine film of sweat. I planned to burst into his studio, but of course the door was locked.

“Who is it?” he said when I knocked.

“Your wife,” I said, my voice thick with anger.

When he opened the door I could see he was very surprised to find me there. This was Pauline’s time or nearly so. He’d probably begun to anticipate her with growing desire.

“You can’t think I’d go to Arkansas,” I spat out before he’d even closed the door.

“Oh,” he said. “I was going to tell you soon. If you could think reasonably, you’d see it’s not a bad scheme at all.”

“We’d live with her parents?” I laughed shrilly.

“No, she’d find us all a house together, maybe in town.”

I could scarcely believe what I was hearing. “You want us to live all together.”

“We’re doing that now, aren’t we?”

“Yes, and it’s awful. It makes me sick to my stomach to know you’re making love to her.”

“I’m sorry, Tatie. But maybe that’s because the situation is new and we don’t know how to do it well.”

“Do you really think it
can
be done well?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to lose you.”

“And if I don’t agree?”

“Please, Tatie,” he said, his voice low and anguished. “Just try. If it works and we all start to feel good about it, we’ll head for Piggott in September. If it doesn’t, we’ll go back to Paris.”

“Alone?”

“Yes,” he said, though I could hear some kind of hesitancy or hedging in his voice. He wasn’t sure about any of this.

“I think it’s a mistake. All of it.”

“Maybe, but it’s too late to go back. There’s only what’s ahead now.”

“Yes,” I said sadly, and left the way I came.

Over the next few days, I began to wonder if Ernest’s proposal was a new idea, an attempt at some solution out of the mess at our feet, or if he’d intended it all along. For years we’d been surrounded by triangles—freethinking, free-living lovers willing to bend every convention to find something right or risky or liberating enough. I couldn’t say what Ernest felt watching their antics, but they seemed sad and even tortured to me. When we last heard from Pound, his mistress, Olga Rudge, had given birth to a daughter, though they agreed not to raise her. Nothing in Pound’s life invited a child and neither one of them wanted to feel compromised, apparently. They gave the baby to a peasant woman in the maternity ward where Olga delivered. The woman had miscarried and was only too happy to take her.

I was stunned that anyone could hand over a child so easily, but doubly surprised when we heard in another letter that Shakespear was pregnant. It wasn’t Pound’s child; in fact, she wasn’t saying a word about who the father was, only that she was keeping the baby. Her behavior was obviously retaliatory. That’s what terrible, sordid situations did to you, made you act crazily, against your own truths, against your self.

One afternoon when Ernest and I were napping in our room, Pauline came in on cat feet, making no noise whatsoever. I’d been having a dream in which I was being buried under tons of sand. It was an image of suffocation, and yet strangely not a nightmare. The sand felt warm and sugary, and as it crushed me slowly, I kept thinking,
This is heaven. This is heaven
. I was feeling so languid and so drugged, I didn’t even know Pauline was in the room until she’d slipped under the sheets on Ernest’s side of the bed. The afternoons were hot, and we slept naked. I knew what was happening, and I also didn’t want to come awake enough to feel it. I never opened my eyes. My body wasn’t mine exactly. No one spoke or made any noise that would shake me out of my trance. The bed was sand, I told myself. The sheets were sand. I was still in the dream.

In the morning, when the sun pried its way through the slats of the plantation shutters and fell on my face, I knew the day had come whether I wanted it or not, and I opened my eyes. A breeze pushed the cream linen curtains so they swayed. Light fell in oblong swatches along the dark wood floor, and I yawned and stretched and pushed the sheets back. Across from the bed was a long mirror and I saw myself in it, brown as can be and solid and firm from all the swimming and bicycling. My hair had lightened in the sun until the only red left was just a hint of ginger, and my eyes were clear and bright and I looked very well. I’d already stopped being surprised by this—how I could look strong and healthy when I was dying, really.

At our hotel, there were three of everything—three breakfast trays, three terry-cloth robes, three wet bathing suits on the line. On the crushed rock path along the windward side of the hotel, three bicycles stood on their stands. If you looked at the bicycles one way, they looked very solid, like sculpture, with afternoon light glinting cleanly off the chrome handlebars—one, two, three, all in a row. If you looked at them another way, you could see just how thin each kickstand was under the weight of the heavy frame, and how they were poised to fall like dominoes or the skeletons of elephants or like love itself. But when I noticed this, I kept it to myself because that, too, was part of the unwritten contract. Everything could be snarled all to hell under the surface as long as you didn’t let it crack through and didn’t speak its name, particularly not at cocktail hour, when everyone was very jolly and working hard to be that way and to show how perfectly good life could be if you were lucky, as we were. Just have your drink, then, and another and don’t spoil it.

After I dressed and bathed, I went downstairs to the little garden terrace and there was our breakfast on the table in the sun. Three
oeufs au jambon
with lots of butter and pepper, three steaming brioches, three glasses of juice. Ernest came out from where he had been working, in the little room off the terrace.

“Good morning, Tatie. You’re looking very well.”

“Yes,” I said. “And so are you.”

He wore tan canvas shorts and a black-and-white-striped fisherman’s sweater from Grau-du-Roi and his feet were bare. I was dressed similarly, and when Pauline came out onto the terrace, she was freshly washed with her dark hair combed back straight from her face and she, too, wore the striped fisherman’s sweater. We all looked just the same as we said good morning to one another and ate our breakfasts hungrily, as if we’d never eaten before.

The sun was already very bright on the beach, and it struck everything evenly. The sand was almost white with it. The water flashed it back blindingly.

“Our swim will be good today,” Pauline said.

“Yes,” Ernest said, breaking his brioche in half so that the steam rose prettily. “And then we’ll have Madame bring the Bollinger, very chilled, and some of the sardines with capers. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” he said, turning to me.

“It sounds perfect.”

After breakfast, I went to tell Madame what we’d planned for lunch and then packed a small bag for the beach. I found my shoes and walked down the lane to the bungalow, where Bumby was playing in the yard.

“Hello, little boy-bear,” I said, scooping him up to nibble his ears. “I think you’re taller today. You seem very large to Mama.”

He was pleased to hear this, pushing his shoulders back and jutting out his round chin.

Marie said, “No coughing at all last night, madame.”

“Aren’t you very good?” And when he nodded proudly, I said, “Come then, boy-bear, we’ll go for our swim.”

At the small moon of beach at the other end of the road, Ernest and Pauline had already set up the blankets and umbrellas and were lying in the sand like tortoises with their eyes closed. We sunned on the beach all in a row while Bumby and Marie played in the surf and made little patterns with shells in the sand. When the sun grew too hot, I went into the water, which always hit you cold and was wonderful that way. I ducked my head and then surfaced, and swam out several hundred yards, where things were still. I treaded water and let the swells buoy me. At the top of one, I could look back at the beach and see them small and perfect, my husband and child and the woman who was now more to us than we could manage. From that distance, they all looked equal and serene and I couldn’t hear them or feel them. At the bottom, in the trough of the wave, I could see only the sky, that high white place that seemed not to change much for all of our suffering.

As a kind of experiment, I stopped swimming and let my arms and legs fall, my whole weight fall as deep as it would. I kept my eyes open as I sank down and looked up at the surface. My lungs began to sting, first, and then burn, as if I’d swallowed some small piece of volcano.

I knew if I stayed there and let the water come into me, come through every door of me, some things would be easier. I wouldn’t have to watch my life disappear, bead by bead, away from me and toward Pauline.

The little volcano in me burned, and then something popped, and I knew that even if I didn’t want to live this way anymore, I also didn’t want to die. I closed my eyes and kicked hard for the surface.

Back on the beach, Pauline rose and greeted me. “Let’s try and dive, shall we?”

“I don’t think I’d be very good at it.”

“I’ll teach you. I’ll be the diving instructor today and Hem will watch and give you your marks.”

“Please, not that,” I said, trying to laugh.

“Some practicing first, then.” She turned and led the way up the little path along the beach where the brown stones were piled higher and higher. They were very dark and riddled with crevices and looked as if they’d been made by some god with clay and then baked in the sun over the millennia. The rocks were hot under our bare feet and we climbed them quickly until we stood nearly at the top.

Pauline looked over the edge to gauge the tide pushing and falling back fifteen feet below. “When you hear the rushing sound, that’s when you jump,” she said. Then she straightened and pointed her arms very gracefully over her head and long neck. She waited, and then, with the scalloped whoosh of the tide, she pushed from her lean legs and was out, hanging in space, and then rocketing down very straight and tall. The water closed over the place where she’d been and there was nothing, just water like the flat skin of a drum. Then she surfaced, pushing her hair back and squinting. “Good, then,” she shouted up. “Now you.”

“It looks too easy to be easy,” I called back, and she laughed.