Paula McLain - The Paris Wife

“I’m not sure any of us are,” Ruth said, measuring salt and tossing some over her shoulder for luck. She had wonderfully strong hands, and I found myself watching them and wishing I could be more like her. She turned to face me and gave me a wry smile. “But what else is there? If we give up now, we’re done for.”

“I might just crawl under my bed and not come out until I’m old and doddering and can’t remember feeling anything for anyone at all.”

She nodded. “You want to, but you won’t.”

“I won’t.” I moved around the small table, setting the plates and second-best silver, smoothing our two napkins. “I’ll try very hard not to.”

I was desperate to get to Chicago again and see the big old room at Kenley’s-the piano, the Victrola, the knobbly rug pushed aside for two people to dance. I wanted to look into a pair of impossibly clear brown eyes and know what that beautiful boy was thinking. I wanted to kiss him and feel him kiss me back.

In the middle of January, my friend Leticia Parker and I cooked a plan to get me there. I’d be her guest for a week. We’d stay at a hotel and go shopping, and I could see Ernest as much as I wanted. But then, two days before our scheduled departure, Leticia phoned to cancel. Her mother was ill, and she simply couldn’t be away for so long. I told her I understood; of course I did. My own mother had been ill for months, and I knew those demands well, but I was also crushed. Everything had been set for weeks. Ernest would meet the train, and that moment alone I’d worked through in my imagination a hundred times or more.

“Now what?” I railed to Ruth later that day.

“Go,” she said.

“Alone?”

“Why not? These aren’t the dark ages, you know. Didn’t you go alone last time?”

“I wasn’t attached then. Fonnie would hate it.”

“All the more reason to go,” Ruth said, smiling.

The evening I left for Chicago, Roland drove me to the train station on the north side of St. Louis in his new Peugeot, a bottle-green coupe that made him feel proud and more masculine, I think, while sending Fonnie into near-apoplectic levels of anxiety. I liked Roland but also felt sorry for him. His situation was very like my father’s. He peeped only when Fonnie gave him leave to; it was pathetic, and yet he could also be very charming, in a bookish, infinitely apologetic way. I felt we were allies in the house, and hoped he felt so, too. Though he could easily have left me at the curb, Roland parked and walked me to the platform where he handed my suitcases off to the porter. Then, as he was saying good-bye, he cocked his head to one side, one of his most annoying and endearing tics, and said, “You look beautiful, Hadley.”

“I do?” I felt suddenly shy with him and smoothed the skirt of my pale gray traveling suit.

“You do. It just occurred to me you might not know this about yourself.”

“Thank you.” I leaned in to kiss him on the cheek, and then boarded my train, taking new pleasure in my traveling clothes-my soft wool hat and buttery gloves, my tan suede T-strap shoes. The seats and couches were plush and inviting, and Fonnie’s puritanical voice, telling me I shouldn’t enjoy it, was suddenly very far off. This was the Midnight Special, and I tucked myself into my Pullman berth, behind deep green curtains.

When I arrived at Union Station the next morning, I was well rested and only slightly nervous until I saw Ernest on the platform, almost exactly where I’d left him in November-and then my mouth was dry as cotton, my stomach full of bees. He was gorgeous in a charcoal peacoat and muffler, and his eyes were bright with cold. As I came off the train, he picked me up off my feet with a squeeze.

“Nice to see you, too,” I said when he’d put me down, and we both grinned, embarrassed to be together suddenly. Our eyes met and fell away. So many thousands of words had thrummed between us. Where were they now?

“Are you hungry?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said.

We rubbed noses and then walked off through the icy morning to find breakfast. There was a place he liked off State Street where you could get steak and eggs for sixty cents. We ordered and then sat in the booth, our knees just touching under the table.

“The Saturday Evening Post just rejected another story,” he said as we waited for our meals to arrive. “That’s the third time. If this doesn’t take off, I could spend my whole life writing junk copy or someone else’s story for magazines. I won’t do it.”

“You’re going to see your stuff in print,” I said. “It has to happen. It will. ”

He looked at me levelly, and then raised the toe of his shoe to press it firmly against the inside of my calf. Holding it there, warm and insistent, he said, “Did you think you wouldn’t see me again?”

“Maybe.” I felt my smile fade. “I could be a real fool for you, Nesto.”

“I’d like it if you could love me for a little while at least.”

“Why a little while? Are you worried that you can’t stick it out for very long yourself?”

He shrugged, looking nervous. “You remember my talking about Jim Gamble, my Red Cross buddy? He thinks I should follow him to Rome. It’s cheap there, and if I saved enough beforehand, I could just write fiction for five or six months. This sort of shot might not come around again.”

Rome . I felt my chest contract. I’d just found him, and he was going to run off overseas? My head was spinning, but I knew with absolute certainty that to even try to hold him back would be a mistake. I swallowed hard and set each word down carefully. “If your work’s the thing that matters most, you should go.” I tried to meet his eyes squarely over the table. “But a girl would miss you.”

He nodded seriously but didn’t say anything.

The rest of the week of my visit was filled with concerts, plays, and parties, every evening finishing up in Kenley’s long living room with wine and cigarettes and heated conversations about great books and paintings. Everything was very much as it was in the fall, except that Kate was persistently absent.

Just before I left St. Louis, I put a letter in the mail to her. I wasn’t sure it would reach her before we ran into each other in Chicago, as we inevitably would, but I couldn’t not write and at least try to gently pave the way. Nesto and I have become quite close , I wrote. We’re truly good friends and you’re my good friend too, and I hate to think this could come between us. Please don’t be angry for long. Your lovingest, Hash .

Kenley insisted she was simply busy with work, saying, “You know Kate. She takes on too much and then can’t get free. I’m sure we’ll see her before too long.”

But we didn’t see her, and as the days passed, I wished more and more that I could talk about the situation with Ernest. It wasn’t like me to be duplicitous, but I’d painted myself into a corner by not ever divulging how Kate had warned me away from him. I had plenty of reasons not to. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, for one, and also didn’t feel it was my place to step between them and create bad blood. As my visit drew to a close and Kate’s silence grew thicker, I wondered if any element of this lopsided triangle could end well. It was entirely possible she’d stop trusting me altogether. It was possible-even probable -that Ernest would go off to Rome to work on his fiction, leaving me in the lurch on two counts.

It was dangerous to leave my heart on the line with Ernest, but what real choice did I have? I was falling in love with him, and even if I didn’t feel at all brave about the future, my life had unquestionably changed for the better since I’d met him. I felt it at home in St. Louis and at Kenley’s, too. At the beginning of each evening, I was nervous and shy, worried that I had nothing to contribute to the group, but then I’d settle into my skin and my voice. By midnight, I would be part of things, ready to drink like a sailor and talk until morning. It was like being born over each night, the same process repeated, finding myself, losing myself, finding myself again.