The Paris Wife (14 page)

“Then the field hospital,” I said. “And the train to Milan.”

“Yes,” he said. “Every time that train stopped, flies streamed through the open windows and covered my bloody bandages. I was two days on that train.”

I nodded. It wasn’t years behind him at all, but right there in his face and in his eyes, the way he’d come to Milan like a broken doll. Not a hero, but a boy who might never truly recover from what he’d felt and seen. It gave me a sharp kind of sadness to think that no matter how much I loved him and tried to put him back together again, he might stay broken forever.

“You must be thinking about Agnes today,” I said after a while.

“Only a little.” He covered my hand with his. “I’m glad we can do this together.”

“Me too.” I knew he was telling me the truth, but I also knew that if it were possible, he would have preferred to have me and Agnes both there—his past and his present, each of us loving him without question—and the strawberries, too. The wine and the sunshine and the warm stones under our feet. He wanted everything there was to have, and more than that.

I slept and read at our hotel the next afternoon while Ernest arranged for an interview with Mussolini. He’d recently been elected to the Italian Chamber of Deputies, and this fascinated Ernest. The man seemed to be a mass of contradictions. He was strongly nationalistic, and wanted to bring Italy back to its former glory by reaching into its Roman past. He seemed genuinely invested in the plight of the working class and of women, all of which he’d laid out in
The Manifesto of the Fascist Struggle
. And yet he also managed to endear himself to the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, guaranteeing their continued existence. He seemed to want to be all things to all people, traditional and revolutionary, loved by the military, the business class, and the liberals. The National Fascist Party was gathering steam so quickly it all seemed terribly inevitable.

“Are you nervous?” I asked as he was organizing his notebooks and preparing to leave.

“Of what? He’s just a big bully, isn’t he?”

“I don’t know. Some say he’s a monster.”

“Maybe, but monsters don’t always look that way. They have clean fingernails and use a knife and fork and speak the King’s English.”

I buttoned his coat and brushed the fabric over his shoulders with my hands.

“You’re fussing, wife. Take a nap, and don’t worry.”

He was gone for two hours, and when he came back to the hotel to type up his notes, he seemed all too pleased to tell me he’d been right. “The man’s up to here with bluff,” he said, gesturing to his neck, “and nothing on top.”

“Was he wearing his black shirt?” I asked, very much relieved.

“He was, they all were.” He sat down at the desk and put fresh paper in his Corona. “He’s bigger than you’d guess, too, with a wide brown face and very pretty hands. A woman’s hands, really.”

“I wouldn’t write that if I were you.”

He laughed and began to type rapid fire in his usual way, his fingers stabbing quickly with very little breaking or breathing. “I’ll tell you what else,” he said without looking up, “there was a beautiful wolfhound pup with him in the room.”

“So the fascist monster is a dog lover.”

“Maybe he planned to eat it later,” he said, grinning.

“You’re terrible.”

“Yes,” he said, his index fingers poised for another violent attack on his machine. “That was a fine dog.”

The next day we boarded a bus to Schio, where Ernest wanted to show me the mill and the wisteria and every part of the town that had managed to stay so fine in his memory, no matter what else had happened around it. But on the way, the sky dimmed and grew gray. It began to rain and didn’t stop. When we finally arrived at the town, Ernest seemed surprised. “It’s so much smaller,” he said.

“Maybe it’s shrunk in the rain,” I said, trying to lighten the mood, but quickly realizing that it wasn’t going to be possible. For the whole visit, Ernest wrestled with memory. Everything had changed and grown dingy in the four years since he’d last been here. The wool factory—closed down during the war—spewed black muck into the swimming hole where Ernest and Chink had bathed on so many hot afternoons. We walked up and down the winding streets in the rain, but everything looked dull and lonely, the shopwindows full of cheap dishes and tablecloths and postcards. The taverns were empty. We went into a wine shop where a girl sat carding wool.

“I can barely recognize the town,” Ernest said to her in English. “So much is new.”

She nodded and continued with her work, drawing the paddles back and forth, the white fibers becoming long and smooth.

“Do you think she understands you?” I said to Ernest quietly.

“She understands me.”

“My husband was here during the war,” I said.

“The war is over,” she answered without looking up.

Deflated, we gave up on sightseeing and went to check in at the Two Spades, but it had changed, too. The bed creaked, the linens were worn and sad looking, and the lightbulbs were filmed over with dust.

In the middle of a tasteless dinner, Ernest said, “Maybe none of it happened.”

“Of course it did,” I said. “I wish Chink were here. He’d find a way to cheer us up.”

“No. He wouldn’t be able to take it either.”

We slept badly that night, and when morning came the rain went on and on. Ernest was still determined to show me Fossalta, where he’d been wounded, and so we found a driver who would take us as far as Verona and then boarded a train to Mestre, where we had to find another car and driver. On and on, all day, and for the whole of the trip, Ernest studied maps and tried to match up what he saw in the countryside to what he remembered seeing years before. But nothing was the same. Fossalta, when we finally arrived, was worse than Schio because there wasn’t a single sign of ravage. The trenches and dugouts had vanished. The bombed houses and buildings had been changed out for new. When Ernest found the slope where he’d been wounded, it was green and unscarred and completely lovely. Nothing felt honest. Thousands of men had died here just a few years earlier, Ernest himself had bled here, shot full of shrapnel, and yet everything was clean and shiny, as if the land itself had forgotten everything.

Before we left, Ernest combed the hedgerows, and finally came away with a single rusted shell fragment, not much larger than a button.

“Chasing your past is a lousy, rotten game, isn’t it?” He looked at me. “Why did I come?”

“You know why,” I said.

He turned the fragment over in his hand a few times and I guessed he was thinking about our talk with Chink, and how the war in his head couldn’t be counted on any longer. Memory couldn’t be counted on. Time was unreliable and everything dissolved and died—even or especially when it
looked
like life. Like spring. All around us, the grass grew. Birds made a living racket in the trees. The sun beat down with promise. From that moment forward, Ernest would always hate the spring.

He didn’t return to Paris until late in June, and before long the Bastille Day celebrations had begun, and there was dancing and singing in the street at all hours. It was hot and noisy, and we shouldn’t even have tried to sleep. I could see Ernest’s restless outline in the dark, one arm over his eyes.

“It will be our anniversary soon,” I said.

“Should we go away?”

“Where would we go?”

“To Germany, or maybe to Spain.”

“We wouldn’t have to,” I said. “We could stay home and get very drunk and make love.”

“We could do that now.” He laughed.

“We could,” I said.

The clarinetist outside our window played a series of low notes, waiting for accompaniment, then fell silent again. Ernest turned on his side and reached to stroke my bare shoulder. His touch gave me a delicious run of chills, and then he pulled me toward him and rolled me over onto my stomach without saying anything, covering my body with his. He was heavy and warm, and I could feel his lips and forehead against my neck.

“Don’t move,” he said.

“I’m hardly breathing.”

“Good.”

“I like it slow this way.”

“Yes.” His arms were bent to each side of me so he wouldn’t crush me completely, but I wanted to be crushed a little.

Afterward, as we lay in the dark, the same laughter rose from the street, and the music was louder, if anything, and more chaotic. Ernest grew very quiet again, and I wondered if he was thinking about Schio and all that wouldn’t be found there, and of the sadness he’d carried home with him.

“Should I get up and shut the window?”

“It’s too hot, and it won’t help anyway. Just go to sleep.”

“Something’s on your mind. Do you want to tell me?”

“Talking won’t do a lick of good either.”

I could hear that he’d fallen into a very low place, but I believed, naïvely, that I could help if I could get him to talk about it. I continued to gently press and finally he said, “If you really want to know, it’s making love. There’s something about it that makes me feel emptied out afterward, and lonely too.”

“How awful,” I said, feeling the sting of his words. We’d just been so very much with each other, or at least I’d felt that way.

“I’m sorry. It’s nothing you’ve done.”

“The hell it’s not. Let’s not ever do it again. We won’t have to. I won’t care.”

“We do, though. You see that. I know you do.”

“No.”

He pulled me closer then. “Please don’t worry, just tell me you love me.”

“I love you,” I said, and kissed his hands and eyelids and tried to forget what he’d said. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t forget anything he’d ever said to me. That’s how it was.

“Go to sleep now.”

“All right,” I said.

He rose and dressed. It must have been three o’clock in the morning, or maybe four.

“You’re not going to work now?”

“Maybe not,” he said. “But I’m going to try.”

I heard him leave, his steps on the stairs, all the way down, and then fell asleep for a few hours. When I woke up he was still away working, and it was already hot and close in the apartment. I kicked the bedsheet away and put my robe on and went into the kitchen to make the coffee. Musicians from the night before were still in the street and it made me feel tired just to hear them. I didn’t know how they managed to keep playing. Did they sleep standing up in doorways? Did they sleep at all?

After breakfast, I washed and dressed and sat at the piano for a few hours, but it wasn’t satisfying work. The day was too hot and I was too distracted by the night before. I lay down again, and then heard Marie Cocotte in the kitchen, clearing dishes. We’d gotten her name from the concierge in our building, and now she came in every morning as our
femme de ménage
, taking care of all the washing and cooking for two francs an hour. Marie was childless and nearing middle age, petite and sturdy, with quick and competent hands. She’d earned her nickname,
cocotte
, which was French slang for “wench,” from a dish she made often and beautifully for us,
poulet en cocotte
. Several days a week, she returned in the late afternoon to prepare our dinner, and because she made everything so well, I’d asked her to teach me French cooking. But now that it was high summer, I didn’t want to be in the kitchen at all and was happy to eat fruit or nothing until Ernest was finished with his work. Then we’d go to a café for an aperitif when it was dark and much cooler and felt right again to eat and be hungry.

“Good morning, madame,” Marie Cocotte said, coming into the bedroom where the curtains were still open from the night before. We’d never closed them.

“Will the music ever stop?” I asked in my still-graceless French, pointing to the window.

“Not today,” she said, laughing.

“I think Bastille Day will last forever,” I said, and she laughed again.

“That is how we like it,” she said.

The summer stretched on this way, becoming several summers in a row, with time not moving at all. The days grew harder to fill. I felt my headaches coming back, and though I knew I shouldn’t resent Ernest’s working or try to keep him from it, I was always happiest when he woke up and said he wasn’t going to try to write at all that day, and that we should go to the boxing matches instead, or drive out to the country to see the bicycle races.

One afternoon Gertrude and Alice invited us to lunch at their country house in Meaux. We went out all together, in Gertrude’s Model T, and had a picnic feast with two kinds of eggs and potatoes and roast chicken. We drank several bottles of chilled wine and then three-star Hennessy, and everything was beautiful—the valleys and bridges, the charming house and its flowering trees. After lunch, we lay in the grass and talked and felt free.

Ernest had taken to showing Gertrude all of his work, and reading hers as well. Though he’d felt put off by the difficulty of her writing at the beginning of their friendship, he’d grown to appreciate the strangeness of it and was becoming more and more interested in what she was doing. She even began to influence his style, particularly the habit she had of naming and repeating concrete objects, places, and people, not trying to find variation, but reveling in how any word took on a striking power when you used it again and again. In some of the new Nick Adams passages, I saw how he was doing this, too, with the simplest language and things—
lake, trout, log, boat
—and how it gave the work a very distilled and almost mythic feel.

Ernest’s connection to Gertrude was obviously very important to them both, and I loved that we were all becoming good, easy friends with one another, though there was still a persistent pairing off when we met. Ernest and Gertrude were the artists, and when they talked, their heads close together, they seemed almost like siblings. Alice and I were the wives, even without the four walls of the salon to define us, and she seemed content with this. Was I? Ernest utterly supported my playing and often referred to the piano as my “work,” as if I were an artist, too. I loved to play and felt it was very much a part of my life, but I wasn’t at all convinced I was special, as Ernest was. He lived inside the creative sphere and I lived outside, and I didn’t know if anything would ever change that. Alice seemed to feel easier in her role as an artist’s wife, throwing herself wholly behind Gertrude’s ambition, but maybe she’d just been doing it longer and could hide her jealousy better. I gazed into my glass of brandy—at the kaleidoscope it made on the pale blanket, which was some kind of Irish wool. We were here together now, I told myself. Everything was lovely and fine. I should just know it and hold on to it and be happy. I would. I would try.