Paula McLain: The Paris Wife

Ernest once told me that the word paradise was a Persian word that meant “walled garden.” I knew then that he understood how necessary the promises we made to each other were to our happiness. You couldn’t have real freedom unless you knew where the walls were and tended them. We could lean on the walls because they existed; they existed because we leaned on them. With Pauline’s coming, everything had begun to tumble. Nothing at all seemed permanent to me now except what was already behind me, what we’d already done and lived together.

I said all of this to Don Stewart one night at the Deux Magots. He and Beatrice were back in Paris and he had looked me up, worried for me and sick about our breakup.

“I hate to be morbid,” I said, “but next week is our fifth anniversary. Or would be. His timing truly stinks.”

“You could fight for him, you know.”

“It’s much too late for that. Pauline’s pushing him to ask for a divorce.”

“Even so, what will you do later if you do nothing now?”

I shrugged and looked out the window where a very pretty woman in Chanel was waiting for someone or something on the corner. She was a slender black rectangle with a button of a hat, and she didn’t look fragile at all. “I don’t know that I can actually compete.”

“Why should you have to compete? You’re the wife. He rightfully belongs to you.”

“People belong to each other only as long as they both believe. He’s stopped believing.”

“Maybe he’s just terribly confused.”

He walked me back to my hotel and kissed me gently on the cheek, and it reminded me of that dangerous summer in Pamplona with Duff and Pat and Harold, when everything boiled over and grew ugly. But even then, there were small stabs of happiness.

“You’ve always been good to me, Don,” I said. “That sticks more than you know.”

“Forget what I said in the café if you want. I don’t mean to tell you what to do with your marriage. Hell, I’m only just married myself. But there must be something. Some answer.”

I said good night and walked slowly up the stairs to the third floor, where Bumby was well asleep and Marie was folding Bumby’s clothes in perfect stacks with her very sure hands. I sent her home and finished the folding myself, thinking about what I still might do to make any kind of difference with Ernest. And the thing I kept coming back to was how if Pauline weren’t nearby and he couldn’t see her, he might come out of his fog and return to me. He still loved me; I knew it. But the real presence of the girl was like a siren’s call and he couldn’t fight it.

The next day, feeling very resolved about a new decision, I walked to Gerald’s studio at the rue Froidevaux, through the little courtyard, which was still a battlefield of plaster body parts, and found Ernest working at the stiff little table. I didn’t sit down. I couldn’t.

“I want you and Pauline to agree not to see each other for a hundred days.”

He was silent and surprised. I’d definitely gotten his attention.

“I don’t care where she goes-she can board a ferry for hell, for all I care-but she has to go away. You can’t see her and you can’t write her and if you stick to this and are still in love with her after the hundred days, I’ll give you a divorce.”

“I see. And how did you come up with this brilliant scheme?”

“I don’t know. Something Don Stewart said.”

“Don? He’s always been after you, you know.”

“You’re hardly in a position to judge.”

“Yes, all right. So one hundred days? And then you’ll give me the divorce?”

“If that’s what you still want.”

“What do you want, Tatie?”

“To feel better.” My eyes were wet and I struggled to keep more tears from coming. I handed him the piece of paper where I’d written out the agreement and signed it. “You sign it, too. I want this to be clear and straight.”

He took it solemnly. “You’re not trying to punish me, are you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore.”

He took the agreement to Pauline and told her the scheme and, strangely, she agreed right away. I guessed it was her very strong Catholicism that brought out the martyr in her. She might have thought my asking for three months was a reasonable request for a jilted wife, but she also might have felt she hadn’t yet suffered enough for the relationship. The separation would help with that. She wrote to me that she admired and trusted my decision, and then she took a leave of absence from the magazine, and booked a passage on the Pennland for the States.

Within eleven days of my writing out the agreement, Pauline was out of Paris, if not out of the picture.

“Can I write her while she’s still on board her ship?” he asked. “Is that allowed?”

“All right, but then the hundred days don’t really start until she arrives in New York.”

“You’re like some sort of queen, aren’t you? Handing down the rules.”

“You didn’t have to agree.”

“No, I guess that’s true.”

“I’m not trying to be nasty,” I told him gently. “I’m trying to save my life.”

Ernest hated to be alone and always had-but Pauline’s absence had left him more than alone and very vulnerable. Within a very few days, he showed up at my door at the dinner hour. He’d just finished writing for the day and had that look behind his eyes he always got when he’d been in his head for too long and needed talk.

“How’d the work go today, Tatie?” I asked, inviting him in.

“A little like busting through granite,” he said. “Can a fellow get a drink here?”

He came into the dining room, where Bumby was eating bread and bananas. He sat down and I could feel each of us, even Bumby, exhaling into that space. Just to be at the same table.

I brought out a bottle of wine and we had that, and then shared a very simple dinner.

“ Scribner’s Magazine is paying me a hundred and fifty dollars for a story,” he said.

“That’s a lot of money, isn’t it?”

“I should say. Maybe you ought not read it, though. It’s about our train ride back from Antibes with the canary woman. It won’t be very pleasant for you.”

“All right, I won’t,” I said, wondering to myself if he’d put the burning Avignon farmhouse in the story, as well, and the caved-in smoldering train cars. “Do you want to do the baby’s bath?”

He rolled up his sleeves and got out the washtub, then squatted on the floor beside it while Bumby played and splashed.

“He’s almost too big for the tub, isn’t he?” I said.

“He’ll be three in a few weeks. We should give him a party with hats and strawberry ice cream.”

“And balloons,” Bumby said. “And a little monkey.”

“You’re a little monkey, Schatz,” Ernest said, and scooped him up in the big towel.

Afterward, I put him to bed, and when I came out of his room and closed the door, Ernest was still at the table.

“I don’t want to ask if I can stay,” he said.

“So don’t ask,” I said. I flicked off the lamp and then went over to the table and knelt in front of him. He cupped the back of my head in his hand tenderly and I buried my face in his lap, breathing in the coarse fabric of his new trousers-ones he’d bought with Pauline’s help, no doubt, so she wouldn’t be embarrassed to parade him in front of her Right Bank friends. I pushed harder, and then flexed my fingertips along the backs of his calves.

“Come on,” he said, trying to stand, but I didn’t rise. I suppose it was perverse, but I wanted to have him right there, on my terms, and keep him there until the hot, sick feeling in my stomach went away. He was still my husband.