The Paris Wife (27 page)

“He asked me that, too, and whether or not I was afraid of water, and if we’d slept together before the wedding. He’s very odd, isn’t he?”

He was odd, and that might have been our last meeting with Fitzgerald if he hadn’t thought to hunt down our address and send a copy of
The Great Gatsby
as a gift. Ernest simply stowed it on a shelf after opening the package, and it might have been forgotten there if I hadn’t been so curious to read it. It wasn’t too bleak, at least not at first. And when things did get very dire very quickly, I was already completely absorbed by the story.

After I devoured it, awfully impressed, I told Ernest to read it, too. He finished it in one afternoon, declaring it a damned fine novel, then sent a note saying as much to Fitzgerald. We all met up a few nights later, at the Nègre de Toulouse. Fitzgerald and Zelda were there when we arrived and were well into a second bottle of champagne. Her edges were already blurred when she stood to shake our hands, and she looked as if she cultivated that—a fine blurriness. Her dress was a pale sheath of filmy layers, one over the next, and they shifted dreamily around her as she sat. Her skin was fair and so was her waved hair, and all of her seemed to be the same color except for her mouth, which was painted very dark red, and cut a straight hard line.

Scott stood up as we approached their table, and Zelda smiled strangely, narrowing her eyes. She wasn’t beautiful, exactly, but her voice was—low and cultivated.

“How do you do?” she said, and then quickly turned to Ernest. “Scott says you’re the real thing.”

“Oh? He says you’re spectacular.”

“Aren’t you just darling, my darling?” she said, running her hand along the side of Scott’s sculpted head. With this gesture, which could have been extravagantly silly, she and Scott slipped behind a private net into their own little world. Their eyes locked and they weren’t with us anymore, or with anyone in the café at all, but only with each other, awash in a long secret look.

Later we watched them dance the Charleston and the effect was the same. They didn’t bounce wildly like the other couples; they were smooth as glass, their arms arcing back and forth as if on strings. Zelda’s dress bubbled up as she moved and every so often she reached to pull it up farther, past the tops of her garters. It was sort of shocking, but it didn’t look as if she meant to shock anyone. She danced for herself and for Scott. They moved in one another’s orbit, incredibly self-possessed, their eyes locked on each other.

“What do you think of her?” I asked Ernest.

“She’s not beautiful.”

“No, but she has something, doesn’t she?”

“I think she’s crazy.”

“Not really?”

“Really,” he said. “Have you looked into her eyes?”

At the end of the evening, they invited us to their flat in a fashionable Right Bank neighborhood off the Étoile. It was a rich building, you could see that right away, but when we got inside, the apartment itself was all chaos, with clothes and books and paper and baby things strewn everywhere. We pushed a great heap aside to make a place for ourselves on the sofa, but Scott and Zelda didn’t seem embarrassed at all. They went on entertaining each other just as they had in the café, but more loudly. Things got so noisy, in fact, that we heard a child’s crying from deep in the apartment, and then an English nanny came out bearing Scottie, their plump daughter. She was dressed in an elaborate bedtime costume with a fat bow listing to the side of her fine blond hair. Her face was prettily rumpled from her pillow.

“Oh, here’s my precious,” Zelda said, rising to scoop the girl up. “Aren’t you just a little lamb stew?” The girl smiled sleepily and seemed pleased, but the moment Zelda sat with her in a gilded but shabby wing chair, she became so preoccupied with trying to catch whiffs of Scott and Ernest’s conversation that the girl plopped right off her lap and onto the floor. Zelda didn’t even seem to notice it happened. The nanny swooped in and spirited the now-wailing Scottie off, and Zelda turned to me and said, “What were you saying?” Her eyes were scattered looking and strange, as if her mind were on another plane entirely. “I’m dying for my Scottie to be a flapper, you know. Decorative and unfathomable and all made of silver.”

“She’s adorable,” I said.

“Isn’t she? She’ll never be helpless. You can see that, can’t you?” Her intensity was sudden and alarming.

“Yes,” I agreed and wondered if Ernest had been right. But who could separate real madness out from the champagne, which was ongoing and everywhere?

As near as I could tell, the party never stopped for those two. Less than a week later, they showed up at the sawmill apartment at six o’clock in the morning, still drunk from their night out. We were sound asleep when they started banging on the door and singing our names out loudly. They didn’t seem to care that we were in our pajamas. We made coffee, but they didn’t drink it. They laughed, and swore allegiance to some ballet artist they’d met in the café the night before but that we’d never heard of.

“Zelda’s very sensitive to art, you know,” Scott said. “She’s not really of the earth at all, my girl.”

Zelda’s face grew dramatically stricken. “You’re not going to tell them, are you?”

“Maybe we should, darling. They’ll guess anyway.”

“Well, then.” Her eyes widened. “A short time ago, I fell very much in love with another man. It nearly killed me and Scott, too.”

Scott stood over her and made a motion as if he was smoothing her hair without actually touching it. “It nearly killed us, but it
did
kill the fellow. So horrible. It was in all the papers. You must have read something of it.”

I shook my head and said, “I’m so sorry you had to go through all of that. It does sound awful.”

“Yes, well,” Zelda said, snapping out of the moment as if an invisible director had called
Scene
. “The man did want to die for me. And it’s made Scott and me so much closer.”

Ernest flinched and stared into his coffee cup, saying nothing. I could tell that he hadn’t quite made up his mind about these two. They certainly didn’t seem our sort, but I wasn’t sure I knew what our sort was anymore. The rules seemed to be changing all the time.

“I knew she was off her cracker,” Ernest said once they’d gone, “but now I wonder about him, too. She’s sucking him in. As if she’s some sort of vampire.”

“She does seem to have Scott on a very short leash,” I said.

“I wouldn’t stand for it.”

“You wouldn’t have to,” I flared defensively.

“Now, Tatie. I didn’t mean anything. You’re not at all like Zelda. She’s so jealous of Scott’s work I think she’d be happy if he never wrote another word.”

“They couldn’t afford it if he stopped writing.”

“He told me they spent thirty thousand dollars last year, just swam through it all.”

“They live on thirty thousand and we live on three. It’s absurd.”

“I think we live better, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said emphatically.

From the other room, Bumby began to make stirring noises. I put down my coffee cup and stood to go and fetch him when Ernest said, “I wouldn’t want their life, but it’s hard to see so much money simply wasted when we haven’t got any. What if I borrowed from Scott for our trip to Pamplona in July?”

“Do you think we know them well enough for that?”

“Maybe not. We’ve got to get there somehow. Maybe Don Stewart?”

“He’s a good egg.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’ll tell you what, though. Everyone seems to want in on this trip. It’s getting very complicated.”

“It’s still weeks away. How complicated could it be?”

“You don’t want to know.”

In the railroad yard, the bulls came off the cars lowing and twisting and panicked, their eyes rolling back in their heads. They didn’t know where to go, and it was hard to watch because we knew that by the end of the day they’d be dead. It was morning and quite cool for July. The dust rose up from their hooves and into the air, stinging our eyes as Ernest pointed out the hunched and muscled place between the shoulder blades where the sword had to hit just right.

“Yes, sir,” said Harold Loeb. “That’s the moment of truth.”

Ernest’s face turned sour. “What would you know about it?”

“Enough, I guess,” Harold said.

Just then Duff came up and put her hand in the crook of Ernest’s arm. “It’s all wonderful, isn’t it?” She looked at him like a child about to get everything her own way, her eyes crinkling and her smile wide. “It makes a chap hungry, though. Who’s going to feed me anyway?”

“Oh, all right. Sure,” Ernest said, still sour, and the two of them led the way to the café. Ernest wore his beret and a navy sweater and white pants, a dark scarf knotted at his throat. Duff was perfect as ever with her long cotton sweater and Eton collar in pale green silk. Her hair was brushed back from her forehead and she walked straight and tall. Ernest matched her stride, his chin set in a proud way. He was probably still fuming at Harold, though trying to swallow it. From the back, the two of them together looked as if they belonged in a fashion magazine, and I saw Duff’s fiancé, Pat Guthrie, noticing this, too. Everyone noticed, and poor Pat had been looking pained for days.

I felt sorry for Pat, though I wouldn’t have wanted to live with him. He drank too much and could be a terrible bother when he did. Each afternoon he would start out sunny and pleased with everything. He liked to talk about popular music and could sing and dance with great energy and enthusiasm, but after three or four cocktails, something turned in him and he became snide and superior. If he kept on with it and Duff didn’t send him away, he changed again, growing sullen and morose. I wondered how she kept up with his moods—or how he himself did. When he woke up, did he feel disgusted for the way he’d twisted one way and then another? Did he remember any of it?

“What do you say we drink through till dark?” Harold said, coming up beside me.

I smiled and took his arm, wanting to make him feel better, if only for a moment. Maybe if we stuck together, he’d try to make me feel better, too. God knows I needed it.

The trip had started badly in Burguete, the week before, when we went to fish in the Irati—one of Ernest’s favorite rivers in the world—and found it all ruined. The landlady at our hotel had tried to warn us that the good fishing was gone, but Ernest had laughed her off. The loggers had been there for the beech and pine, and when we got to the river we found it full of trash and floating debris. Dams had been broken through. Dead fish littered the banks and clogged the small pools. It was almost too much to take in, but we stuck it out, anyway, for several days, trying to go farther out to the smaller streams. No one took a single fish.

Bill Smith, one of our old friends from Chicago, was with us, having been lured over by Ernest’s reports of world-class fishing, and of the bullfights that would follow. We hadn’t seen him at all since the days of the Domicile. When Kenley and Ernest had their falling-out, tension trickled through all of our connections to the Smith clan, but we’d since picked up a fairly regular correspondence with Kate, who was back in Chicago, working as a journalist. And when Bill arrived to meet us in Paris, we were happy to find that he was the same as ever, full of lively stories and game for anything. He’d brought with him every surefire fly he owned for the trip to Spain—all the old winners from summers fishing the Sturgeon or the Black up in Michigan—and I thought Ernest was going to cry when Bill opened his tackle box to show Ernest the flies, because they were useless.

In Pamplona, we still felt the wrongness. We had lots of friends around and it should have been jolly, but it wasn’t. In Paris, Ernest and Duff had done their dance around each other, but it had seemed harmless for the most part. Something had come in to change it, though, and that something was Harold. He’d fallen hard for Duff and swept her off for a week at St.-Jean-de-Luz. When Kitty told me about the affair, she said Harold had been so strange of late she’d suspected something like this was coming. I’d never understood the arrangement Harold and Kitty made of love. Now I felt equally baffled and more than a little upset by the way Ernest was reacting so extremely. He had no rights to Duff—none of this should have mattered at all to him, but it did, and suddenly everyone knew it.

The morning the fights began, we all woke up at dawn to see the running of the bulls through the streets. The first time I’d watched, the summer I was pregnant with Bumby, it seemed to pass so quickly I couldn’t remember what I’d seen. Now Bumby was safe in Paris with Marie Cocotte, and though I had wanted and needed a break from constant mothering, I didn’t know quite how to feel as a free agent.

The streets were slick that morning. A light rain had fallen before dawn, and you could see the bulls struggle for traction against the cobblestones. One went down and struggled, craning its thick neck, its eyes rolling to white, and the whole thing seemed to pass in slow motion.

We were standing just behind a low wall, close enough to smell the animal sweat of the bulls and the excitement of everyone watching. Though some didn’t watch or couldn’t.

“The bulls are almost prehistoric,” Ernest had told Bill in the café the night before. “They’ve been bred for six hundred years to do what they do, to make this run to the arena, to gore what they can on the way to their own certain death. It’s goddamned beautiful is what it is. Just wait till you see it for yourself.”

“I’m ready for it,” Bill said, but on the street with a clear view of everything, his conviction seemed to waver. While we watched, one of the young men ran too close to a thick bull and was shoved into the wall, just twenty feet away from where we stood. We could hear his arm snap at an angle behind his back. He cried out and tried to scramble up the wall, and the fear on his face was ugly to see.

“Too much for you, old boy?” Ernest said when he saw Bill look away.

“Maybe,” Bill said.

Ernest was standing near Duff, and his color was very high. “See there, now?” He pointed to the way the bull was coming at the young man, its square head ducked low. “The bull’s sight is very bad, but it smells him, and it’s taking its time. Look at him now. He’s coming, by God.”