Four Days with Hemingway's Ghost (15 page)

The events of my days with Ernest Hemingway came back to me slowly.  No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t bring them all back at once.  I’d remember an incident or two that occurred in Key West, as well as the other three places, but it wouldn’t all come back in one tidy package.  It was nerve-racking. 

Every day, as things came back to me, I told Blanche about them.  But she wouldn’t buy any of it.  On top of that, Doctor Salazar told me I shouldn’t go back to work at my landscaping business for at least a month.  And that didn’t help matters.  With the house seething with tension, we would have been better off being apart for a good part of each day.  Blanche did return to her secretarial job at
Luberdoff
and
Ackerly
Accounting, but six weeks before my accident, they were forced to cut her hours.  Thankfully the company was good enough to continue paying for our medical insurance, but now Blanche was only working four hours each morning.  We were together all the rest of the time.  Under normal conditions that would have been fine, but there was that tension.  And it was pulling tighter and tighter.

Money was getting tighter as well.  We were working-class people and didn’t have all that much money put aside.  That, too, did nothing to ease our anxiety.  Neither did the first time I heard Blanche whispering into the telephone.  I’d been in the spare bedroom trying to work on the computer, and she didn’t hear me making my way up the carpeted hallway. 

In a low tone that sounded both desperate and conspiratorial, she said, “This isn’t easy to take.”

Freezing in my tracks, I listened.  She was sitting in the living room just beyond the archway.

“I’m sorry.  What did you say?”

Then a moment of silence passed before she spoke again.

“He’s still delusional.  He won’t let go of this damned Hemingway fantasy.  I don’t know how much longer I can take it.  It’s like I’m living with a stranger.”

She then listened to whoever was on the other end.  I just stood there listening to nothing.  It took all the willpower I could muster not to storm in there, grab the phone, and ask who the hell was on the other end.  But I didn’t. 

“Thanks for listening to me,” Blanche finally said.  “I needed to talk to someone.” 

Then she hung up.

“Who in the hell was that!” I demanded, stomping into the living room. 

“Nobody.
  Just . . . just Susanne, Susanne Santos, from work.  What were you doing anyway?  Hiding in there?  Spying on me?  You scared me half to death barging in here like that. 
Don’t ever do that again.”

“You’re going to tell me what to do?” I said, widening my eyes and standing over her now.  “
You’re
talking to God knows who, and
I’m
the one sneaking around?  I don’t think so.  Now who the hell was that?”

Rising to her feet now she shot back, “I told you.  Now get out of the way.  And don’t you stand over me like that
ever
again!”

Storming toward the kitchen then, she bumped my shoulder with hers.  She picked up her purse from the table, came back out, and dug her eyes deep into mine as she rushed for the door. 

Blanche came back a short while later.  Needing to get out of there, she just went for a ride.  But we didn’t talk for the rest of the evening and half of the next day.

After I returned to work, things didn’t get much better.  And during the next two months, there were many more trying scenarios.  Sometimes, even when things seemed to be going a little better, the smallest spark would set one of us off.  Either Blanche or I would explode.  The other would retaliate.  Then one of us would either take off or go to a separate room.  Either way, we’d both stew for what seemed like an eternity. 

None of it was healthy for our marriage. And to make matters worse, I still hadn’t written a single word.  Not only that, but I was beginning to doubt myself as well.  I didn’t doubt as much as Blanche did, but I was allowing myself to think that just maybe the whole Ernest thing had been a dream after all.  Maybe she was right.  Maybe I never did meet Desiree and Doctor Salazar.  Maybe, when I’d gone comatose, my mind simply led me to believe that I’d lived the entire experience.  I was no doctor.  I was no shrink.  What did I know about how valid someone’s memories are after they snap out of a coma?    

Constantly I thought about this.  As I labored in the torturous Florida sun—whether I was cutting people’s grass, trimming bushes, or installing
Xeriscapes
—my mind ceaselessly turned the same heavy weight over and over.  It was the same deal in my free time.  All I thought about was whether or not I’d really been with Ernest.  Like a closely balanced scale, my mind kept tilting this way and that.  It happened; it didn’t.  It happened; it didn’t.  Then one Saturday afternoon it all started coming back to me. 

Being an early riser I liked to take short naps on weekend afternoons.  I would lie down for an hour, and if I fell off that was okay.  If I didn’t, that was alright too.  Either way I’d get up feeling refreshed.  On this particular day, I had just cleared my mind and was about to doze off when suddenly, out of nowhere, forgotten scenes from my days with Ernest began to appear.  Rather than me bringing them back, it were as if they’d been delivered to me by some strange force.  And all that passed in front of my mind’s eye was highly cinematic.  Clear as the moment it happened, I saw myself with Ernest at the wall of his Key West home.  I saw all of what went on in Cuba, New York, and Idaho as well.  Everything up to our departure in Ketchum was there again.

I sprung up out of that bed, slipped my denim shorts back on and high-tailed it into the kitchen.

“Blanche!” I blurted as she was finishing a hummus sandwich. “I’ve got it!  Everything has come back!  I can remember it
all
now!”

“Oh come on, Jack,” she said, wearily lowering the sandwich to her plate, “let’s not go there again.  Not today.” 

“No, please, listen to me,” I said sliding the chair next to her out and plopping into it.  “I know now that it all happened.  I’m positive.  It’s all come back.”

Dropping her elbow heavily onto the table she wearily massaged her temples.

“Just listen to this, honey.  Let me tell you just one thing that happened.  Please!”

Without looking at me and her eyes still on the Formica table, she said as if exhausted, “Alright, just one incident, Jack.  One last damned incident.  Then I don’t want to ever hear about it again. 
Please!
”

I told her about the
Pilar
.  About the tempestuous storm Ernest and I had gone through in the Bermuda Triangle.  I brought back every sight, sound, smell, and feeling.  As I told my story it
were
as if we were actually there.  I painted that ink blue sky and the massive waves that crashed down on Ernest and me.  I felt the electrical charge of the lightning cracking all around, the seawater over my ankles, and the unadulterated fear that had enveloped me.

And so could Blanche.

“Oh my god,” she slowly said when I was done.  “Jack . . . this is
scary
.  I think I’m actually beginning to believe you.  Honey, you could never have made up such a story.  And . . .  and the way you tell it, it’s as if you were reading the scene out of a novel. 
A classic.
  I didn’t know you could do that.”

“I didn’t either.  That’s part of it, too,” I said excitedly while bouncing my palms in the air.  “I was there with Ernest because
He
thought I had a gift. 
He
thought I had the talent to write a book about Ernest. 
He
thought I should get to know him personally so I could show the side of Hemingway that few people realize existed.”

“What was he like . . . Ernest Hemingway, I mean?”

“He actually had a soft side, Blanche, a very soft side.

Everybody today seems to only think of him as this burly, swaggering, hard-shelled bully.  But that’s all it was, a shell—a thin layer that was always tough enough to conceal the biggest part of him—the good part.  He was a great guy, hon.  There was more tenderness and benevolence inside that man than you’d ever imagine.”

Weighing all this in her mind now—dissecting it, examining it, letting it sink in—Blanche said nothing for a moment.   As she looked at me in the silence, I watched the face I’d known and loved for so long begin to return.  Right there at the table and right before my eyes, the hard, scared, angry look she’d been wearing for two solid months disappeared.  It was replaced with compassion.  Knowing she was now with me on this, I was the one to break the silence.

“Thank you, Blanche.  Thanks for believing me.”

“Why did he do it?” she asked referring to Ernest’s hard exterior again.

With all her doubts clearing away like parting clouds after a turbulent storm, her interest was piqued.  She couldn’t get enough.  She wanted to know all about Ernest and everything that had happened.  I told her all of it.  And after answering her very last question, I told her what Ernest had said about the difficulties of being a man—how all through a man’s life he instinctively keeps his guard up and how once his life is over and he faces immortality none of that matters and how only in the hereafter can a man finally be his true self.

We talked until late in the afternoon; and after I’d told her every last detail, she took my hand and led me into our bedroom.  For the first time since I’d fallen off the lawnmower, we made love.  With our passions fueled by immense joy and relief, we made Adam and Eve’s first encounter seem like dull, casual, humdrum sex.  It was fantastic, better than ever.  And when we finished, our bodies still entwined, we lay there for a while. 

Five minutes must have passed before Blanche whispered in my ear, “I want you to write that book, Jack.  I want you to start first thing tomorrow.”

Chapter 1
8

Although I knew nothing about the writing process and although for two full months I hadn’t come up with a single sentence, when I sat down that Sunday morning, my fingers couldn’t tap the keys fast enough.  With Blanche now behind me and with my entire four-day experience sorted in my mind, I was flooded with ideas.  All I had to do was arrange them in their proper sequence and bang away.  Not being a good typist, I had to go back and correct mistakes in almost every sentence, but that didn’t matter.  Those ideas, words, sentences and paragraphs just kept coming and coming.  And they were good.  Damn good.  When I reread certain parts, I couldn’t believe my eyes.  Some of it seemed so good it actually scared me.  There were passages that to me sounded like they’d come from the pages of a literary masterpiece.  And I wasn’t the only one who felt that way.  There were times when Blanche was absolutely stunned by some of the passages I read back to her. 

She said more than just that once, “Oh my God, Jack.  That sounds like you read it right out of a book!” 

Crinkling my forehead as if I were already some kind of big time author, I’d tell her, “I hope so.  That’s what I’m trying to do . . . write a book.”  But inside
I
was aglow with a feeling of self-worth that I’d never felt before.  I was so proud of myself.  I thought that Jack Phelan—underachiever, Joe average, community college dropout—just might have found his niche.

As I am doing right here, I wrote about my four days with Ernest.  But I did it differently.  I went deeper into my beliefs of why Ernest had done the things he had.  I gave
my
take on how certain events in his lifetime molded him into who he was.  I told what I thought had made him tick, react, and become the legend and myth he is today.  Sure, many before me had done the very same thing, but I had information none of them had.  I
knew
the real Ernest Hemingway.  And I decided that would be the title of my book—
The Real Ernest Hemingway
. 

During the five months it took to do the first draft, Blanche continued to cheer me on.  She was into the book every bit as much as I was.  And she believed everything I wrote was true.  I worked all weekend every weekend and a couple of hours after work each night.  I even slept with a pad and pen on my nightstand.  When those fleeting, golden ideas came to me, I scribbled them down so they wouldn’t be lost, just like F. Scott Fitzgerald had told me to.  I say the ideas “came to me,” but each time one suddenly popped into my mind, I couldn’t help but think they’d really been
given
to me.  I don’t know.  Maybe my mysterious inner mind did think them up.  But to be honest, every time I’d later type those thoughts from the pad onto the computer, I couldn’t help but feel I was only a middleman relaying a higher power’s messages.         

Yes, the book was coming along, but not everything else was going so well.  Our financial situation was quickly worsening from bad to dire.  Blanche was still only working mornings.  I’d missed that month’s work after the accident and then only eased my way back after that.  Our bills were stacking up.   

Although Blanche and I had never made a whole lot of money, we’d always managed to stay on top of our debt.  Somehow we always maintained an excellent credit rating.  But things were changing fast.  And for the first time ever, we were being forced to subsidize our income with credit cards.  We had to make the minimum payments each month rather than paying them in full
as we always had.  Those balances were growing quickly.  And about the time I finished the first draft of
The Real
Ernest Hemingway,
things became worse yet.