Mrs. Hemingway (4 page)

With a coldness to her thoughts that morning, a fortnight into the
coqueluche
confinement, Hadley wrote to her husband's lover and invited her to Antibes.
Wouldn't it be fun
, she wrote,
if we vacationed down in Juan this summer; all of us—un, deux, trois?

And when she put down the pen Hadley had even felt triumphant. She wrote Fife's address on the front, and the envelope's glue was bitter on her tongue. That afternoon she gave the letter to Scott through the grill when he came, on his own this time, to deliver food and telegrams. In return she handed over the note for Fife to her fashionable Paris address. Scott gave her a strange look, over the shaker he carried of martini, as if asking her if this were a good idea.

And so Fife had come with her Riviera stripes and her fisherman's hat and her talk of
chaps
and everything being
ambrosial
or
indecent
and her kid-leather gloves. They had tried not to talk about Ernest, or Paris, or Jinny, or Chartres. Instead they sunbathed and ate well and played with Bumby, and the two women waited, as May turned to June, for Ernest to arrive.

Noon light blankets Antibes. Today is shadeless, and everything, even the walls, even the bathroom tiles, is warm to the touch. Even the grayest of the olive branches sparkle as the sun catches them.

The maid has closed the shutters and the inside of the villa is dark at the peak of day. From up in her bedroom Hadley can hear the insects whir on the roses and in the fruit trees, as if all their cogs were motoring along in constant motion.

She dumps the beach bag on the chair and pulls off her bathing suit. She has burnt out on the raft and feels stupid for having let her jealousies get in the way of her exit. She pulls on a robe, washes the suit, and wonders what it is they are doing now.

Hadley steps out into the day and hangs her suit on the line. When she comes back inside it's as if the villa has been thrown in ink. Only slowly do the forms of things emerge. She calls out to Marie, the maid, but she doesn't answer. Perhaps she and Bumby are in the backyard, or out in Juan celebrating the end of quarantine. The house is still; there is a sense that everything has been here for centuries. She calls for Marie again. Nothing.

Hadley makes her own lunch in the kitchen: a salad of leaves, tomatoes, rolled ham, and olives. The French dresser is very fine, as are the long oak counters with baskets of purple onions and papery garlic. She has always admired expensive things, but, unlike Ernest, she has never coveted them for herself. Their Paris apartment is so bare that she knows all the other expatriate women must laugh at her and yet, until this spring, she didn't much care what they thought of her. They have been very poor, but not without the promise of things getting better. That was all she had needed. In fact, she always thought herself lucky, since it was she among them who could call herself Mrs. Hemingway.

Hadley eats alone at the round table where their books sit on the shelf above. Ernest's first book of short stories,
In Our Time
, sits alongside Scott's new novel,
The Great Gatsby
. She remembers one of Ernest's stories. The images are still so cool and fresh they resurface as vividly as if they were her own memories—how the fish broke the surface of a lake and the sound of them landing was described as gunpowder hitting the water. Hadley could picture everything in that story: the boat out in the bay, the boyfriend and girlfriend trolling for trout, the old sawmill that was now a ruin. But then it came, that moment when the boyfriend tells the girlfriend how it just isn't fun anymore—none of it is fun, he tells her, desperate; none of it's going to work. She wonders how much it was about them. The story is called “The End of Something” after all.

And now Ernest has finished his debut novel, known only to their gang as
The Sun
. The novel in which all of their friends appear: everyone down to the English tourists in Pamplona and the roughnecks who sleep outside their house. Slowly, this year, Hadley has watched her name edited out of the pages—there is no room for her among the sauced sluts and the rich and the fags and the
bons viveurs
. The people in
The Sun
all talk suspiciously like Fife—always ready with a cute answer, always on hand for another glass of champagne. Did no one ever have a hangover?

Denying her a place in the novel: it is punishment for that day, when she had packed three or four of Ernest's stories and his first novel into a small leather suitcase. She had made sure to pack the carbons on top so that he could correct those too. Ernest went loopy without something creative to work on.

At the Gare de Lyon she left her suitcases in the stateroom and stepped out for some water. Later, when forced to retell the story, she admitted she'd bought a packet of cigarettes but had only smoked one by the time she came back on board. Back in the carriage she unpinned her hair and felt the tension leave her scalp. She imagined the train gaining the platform at Lausanne, Ernest growing in perspectival haste, and then rushing from the carriage to kiss him where he stood. Already in retrospect she savored the thought of their reunion.

Not quite out of the daydream Hadley reached for the case on the luggage rack but her hands touched only air. She figured it must have slid down, but there was nothing at the end either. Hadley stood on the bed opposite so that she was level with the shelf. Only dark space. A light terror seized her. His novel. The stories. Everything Ernest had
ever
written. Surely there had been some mistake with the other passengers; the case must have been put in another room.

In the other carriages round faces looked up at her. No one offered any help. Hadley went into the adjoining staterooms. Each face was a blank coin.
Je ne l'ai pas vue
. She didn't know whether she spoke English or French. Oddly she thought how like peasants everyone looked—not the smart sophisticates of their Paris set—people who wouldn't understand the loss of a novel to someone like Ernest.

Worry knotted her stomach. The train would be leaving in five minutes or less. She spoke in English to the train guard: “My husband's work case has gone missing! It has everything in it. Please help me!”

The train guard asked the porter to check the carriages. A woman who was selling blankets and flasks of cognac came on board to help. The big station clock showed only minutes remained before the train should leave. The guard ran over to the ticket office. By now Hadley was in her carriage alone, stricken with fear, pacing back and forth.

An announcement said the train to Lausanne was about to depart and she heard the final shout, “All aboard!” The woman selling cognac was talking to another seller and pointing at Hadley's carriage. A man pushed a trolley, trailing a sickly smell of beignets. The guard came up to the window and he shook his head. “It has not been found, Madame.”

Hadley sat down, winded.

“Do you want to stay?” The train's whistle sounded. “Madame, you have to decide now if you will stay or go. The train—it is about to leave.”

His young blue eyes didn't move from hers.

“No. I will go,” she said. The final whistle sounded. Novel. Stories. Carbons. Everything. She had made the job complete.

And there Ernest was the next morning: standing just as she had imagined him in the cold white light, in front of the logs piled up on the platform for winter. As the train drew closer she saw Ernest scanning the carriages. She came off the train and stood still and empty-handed. When he saw her, not walking toward him, his face went pale.

She wished Ernest could have been angry. She wished he might have shouted at her. Instead he had packed his bag and caught the return train to Paris. When he returned to Lausanne without the case, he said he didn't want to talk. It was over. There was nothing to be done. Everything had been lost.

 • • • 

Hadley pinches a dead leaf from the vase. The roses are on the turn; the leaf powders in her hands. She finishes what's left on her plate and rinses the china in the big stone sink.

She climbs the marble stairs. The stonework is exposed in the central stairwell; it's always the coolest place in the house. The fig trees are perfectly in line with the top window: Ernest told her that butterflies get drunk off their milk in high summer and they fly around crazily, liquored up on the fruit. Not so different from the strange family that stays here.

In the bedroom Hadley pulls off her robe so that she can nap with her skin on the sheets. The thought occurs to her that perhaps Ernest's novel will not be a roaring success. Perhaps he will not find the fame and riches he hungers for. But she cannot imagine him as any less famous than Scott.

The lampshades sway above the bed in the breeze. For the first time that day when her eyes close, there is no hot glassed light pressing on her lids. It is dark in here, and quiet. She listens to her own breath as she waits for sleep.

They retire to bed when the day is at its hottest: Ernest calls it the killing time. Days ago they had fallen asleep together listening to Bumby play down in the rose garden. An hour later Hadley woke up, feeling herself observed.

The room was empty, but when she lifted her head she found Fife, not a foot away, her dark eyes observing them. She grinned, just as she had done at Chartres, and Hadley wondered if she were about to crawl into bed with them.
There were three in the bed and the little one said . . .
Seconds or minutes passed and then Fife slipped from the room.

Her feet made no sound as she went but Hadley heard the brocade curtain swing as the woman passed by it, and she tried to record this sound: to remind herself that the vision had not been a dream.

That evening neither woman mentioned anything. They ate pork with sage. Fife fussed: praising her for her culinary skills, which was just another way to insult her. “I haven't an ounce of knowledge about the kitchen,” Fife said, with a flashed look toward Ernest, already nicely toasted on his third martini. “You are good at all of this, Hash,” she said, gesturing with her palms toward the neatly laid table.

That night they played three-handed bridge and Hadley lost. But when Mr. and Mrs. Hemingway made love that night, Hadley made sure to scream out as loudly as she could, and the next morning over a breakfast of sherry and toast, Ernest's mistress was quieter than usual.

Ernest wakes her an hour or so later. He's left his suit in a puddle by the bed and where he is damp he is cool. “Ernest, you smell as if you live in a shell.”

“I'm a mussel come to see you.”

She laughs. “A mussel is the least intelligent living thing in the universe! So that can't be you, Ernest, not with your big brain.”

He is kissing her; he moves his hand to her breast.

Light pleats the shade. The sash of a kimono hangs behind the bed, glossy and green, and books pile on the side tables. A large Chinese cabinet is lacquered in dragons. Sometimes she wonders why on earth she'd want to be anywhere but here, in this bedroom, in this afternoon, far from the retinal light of the beach down below. The linen is fresh; Ernest is here.

He starts to nuzzle her neck in the place he knows is excruciating. “Stop it, Ernest. I can't . . . Please!”

“What, Hash? Kitten? What are you saying? Want me to continue, is that it?”

“Please stop!” she says, but she can't speak for how much she is laughing.

Ernest continues kissing her neck.

“Tell me about mussels and I'll stop kissing you like this,” he says, “and breathing on you like this,” he says, “and licking you like this.”

“It's a bivalve!” she shouts. She grabs at his wrists to push him off.

“A bivalve? What does that mean? Double the potency?”

He pins her by the hands to the mattress. “You're killing me!”

“I'm a little mussel clamped to your neck. What does a bivalve mean?”

“It means it doesn't even have consciousness!”

Hadley tries to maneuver a knee to his crotch so that he will know he's in dangerous territory. But he rolls away from her. “And how does it eat?”

“It sucks up things from the water.”

He makes a seal with his lips and sucks at a patch of skin. “Like this?”

She's running out of air. “It siphons it up.”

“And what do they drink?”

“They don't drink.”

“No champagne?”

“No champagne.”

“A life without champagne!”

“They don't have enough
brain
to imagine life without champagne.”

“No imagination and no champagne. I'd rather not bother without those two.” Ernest rolls off her and props himself up on one arm. Funny that she's always disappointed when he does as she asks.

“Then you'd be the first suicidal bivalve the world has ever seen. You'd be studied in every lab in America for your complex character never before known in the mussel world.”

“I bet being in the sea all the time would feel swell. You'd feel cool and fresh and think of nothing but water and the next meal and meeting a nice lady mollusk to suck on and that's about the sum of it.”

Her breathing calms as they lie together. He looks at her face. “If I put a mirror down your nose you'd look exactly the same as you do now, Hash. Your face is exactly symmetrical. A wonder of science.”

“Wide as a Polish plate, that's what my ma said.”

“Your mother sounded like a bitch of the highest order.”

“She wasn't winning any awards.”

“That's why mothers die. So we can go on living,” he says, rather cryptically, since his mother is alive and well. “But you are very, very pink,” he says, moving her hair off her face.

“So would you be after being
tortured
like that.”