Paula McLain - The Paris Wife

On the rooftop, all the veils fell away, and when there wasn’t a diaphanous scrap of fantasy left, I think I was most surprised by my own desire, how ready I was to have him, the absolute reality of skin and heat. I wanted him, and nothing-not the awkward jarring of knees and elbows as we struggled to get closer, not the sharp jolting sensation when he moved into me-could change that. When his weight was on me fully, and I could feel every bump and contour of the roof against my shoulders and hips through the blankets, there were moments of pure crushing happiness I knew I’d never forget. It was as if we’d pressed ourselves together until his bones passed through mine and we were the same person, ever so briefly.

Afterward, we lay back on the blankets and watched the stars, which were very bright everywhere above us.

“I feel like I’m your pet,” he said, his voice warm and soft. “You’re mine, too, my small perfect cat.”

“Did you ever think it could be like this? The way we’re happening to each other?”

“I can do anything if I have you with me,” he said. “I think I can write a book. I mean, I want to, but the thing is it could all be stupid or useless.”

“Of course you can do it, and it will be wonderful. I’m sure of it. Young and fresh and strong just like you are. It will be you.”

“I want my characters to be like us, just people trying to live simply and say what they really mean.”

“We say what we mean, but it’s hard, isn’t it? It might be the hardest thing of all, being really honest.”

“Kenley says we’re rushing things. He doesn’t understand why I’d want to move in the marriage direction when single life suits me so well.”

“That’s his prerogative.”

“Yes, but it’s not just him. Horney’s worried I’m going to gum up my career. Jim Gamble thinks I’m going to forget the whole point of Italy once we’re hitched. Kate’s not speaking to either of us.”

“Let’s don’t bring her up, please. Not now.”

“All right,” he said. “I’m just saying that no one seems to get that I need this. I need you.” He sat up then and looked into my face until I thought I might dissolve from it. “I hope we’ll get lucky enough to grow old together. You see them on the street, those couples who’ve been married so long you can’t tell them apart. How’d that be?”

“I’d love to look like you,” I said. “I’d love to be you.”

I’d never said anything truer. I would gladly have climbed out of my skin and into his that night, because I believed that was what love meant. Hadn’t I just felt us collapsing into one another, until there was no difference between us?

It would be the hardest lesson of my marriage, discovering the flaw in this thinking. I couldn’t reach into every part of Ernest and he didn’t want me to. He needed me to make him feel safe and backed up, yes, the same way I needed him. But he also liked that he could disappear into his work, away from me. And return when he wanted to.

E rnest pushed off, suspending his body over the lake before he punched through. Coming to the surface again, he treaded water and faced the dock where Dutch and Luman sat and passed a bottle of rotgut back and forth, their voices carrying clearly over the water .

“ Good form, Wem,” Dutch called out. “Can you teach me to dive like that? ”

“ No,” he called back. “I can’t teach anyone anything. ”

“ Do you have to be so stingy about it?” Dutch said with a snort, but Ernest didn’t feel like answering, so he balled himself up like a rock and let himself sink, falling through the lake until he bumped the mossy bottom and drifted there, the moss cool and strange against his toes .

Was it just last summer that Kate and Edgar had been on the dock eating stolen cherries and spitting the meaty pits at him as he bobbed nearby? Kate. Dear old Katy with the cat-green eyes and the smooth strong legs all the way to her rib cage. One night she had said, “You’re the doctor, examine me,” and he’d done it, counting each of her ribs with his hands, following the curve all the way around from her spine. She didn’t flinch or even laugh. When he reached her breast, she pushed the top of her bathing suit down while looking at him. He stopped moving his hands and tried to breathe .

“ What are you thinking, Wemedge? ”

“ Nothing,” he said, working to keep his voice steady. Her nipple was perfect and he wanted to put his hand on it and then his mouth. He wanted to fall through Kate the way he liked to fall through the lake, but there were voices coming down the sandy path toward them. Kate straightened her suit. He stood up quickly and plunged into the water, feeling it burn him all over .

Now Kate was little more than a mile up the road in her aunt Charles’s cottage with Hadley, both of them in the same room in little beds that smelled like mildew. He knew that room well and all the rooms in the house, but found it hard to picture Hadley there or in any of the places he knew best. When he was a little boy, he’d learned to walk on the slope of patchy grass in front of Windemere. And that was just the beginning. He’d learned everything worth learning here, how to catch and scale and gut a fish, how to hold an animal living or dead, and flint a fire and move quietly through the woods. How to listen. How to remember everything that mattered so he could keep it with him and use it when he needed to.

This place had never once let him down, but he felt slightly outside of it tonight. Tomorrow, at four o’clock in the afternoon, he and Hadley would be married in the Methodist church on Lake Street. He felt a surge of panic about it, as if he were a fish thrashing in a taut net, fighting it instinctively. It wasn’t Hadley’s fault. Getting married had been all his idea, but he hadn’t told her how very afraid of it he was. He seemed to need to force his way through it anyway, as he did with everything that scared him terribly. He was afraid of marriage and he was afraid of being alone, too .

Rising up from the cool bottom of the lake on the night before his wedding, he found it hard not to turn away from Hadley or grow confused. He loved her. She didn’t scare him like Kate did or challenge him to touch her with green eyes in the dark, saying, “Go on then, what are you afraid of, Wemedge?” With Hadley, things felt right almost all of the time. She was good and strong and true, and he could count on her. They had as good a shot at making it as anyone did, but what if marriage didn’t solve anything and didn’t save anyone even a little bit? What then?

Now that he was on the surface, he could hear Dutch and Luman again, talking of stupid things, not understanding anything at all. The water felt flat and cool against his skin, holding him and letting him go at the same time. He looked up into the black whorl of the sky and took a single deep breath into his lungs, and then he kicked hard for the dock .

September 3, 1921, dawned clear and balmy and windless-a perfect day. The leaves were just beginning to turn on the trees, but you wouldn’t have known it to feel the lake, which was still warm as bathwater. Ernest had arrived in Horton Bay that morning in a stormy mood after three days of fishing with bachelor friends. He was sunburned along the bridge of his nose and his eyes were lined with exhaustion or anxiety or both.

“Are you ready for this?” I asked when I saw him.

“Damned straight,” he said. He was bluffing, but wasn’t I bluffing, too? Wasn’t everyone dead terrified on their wedding day?

While Ernest spent his last hours as a free man in a cottage on Main Street in Horton Bay, passing a whiskey bottle back and forth with his groomsmen, I took a long swim after lunch with Ruth and Kate, my bridesmaids.