Paula McLain - The Paris Wife

When I woke the next morning, he was asleep next to me and the bedding was warm around us. I pressed my body against his back, grazing his stomach with my palms until he was awake enough and we made love again. In some ways, it was as if nothing had changed. Our bodies knew each other so well we didn’t have to think about how to move. But when it was over and we lay still, I felt a terrible sadness come down because I loved him as much as I ever had. We’re the same guy , I thought, but it wasn’t really true. He’d always been emphatic over the years that we were essentially alike. We did grow to look like one another, with our hair short, our faces tan and healthy and round. But looking alike didn’t mean we weren’t alone, each of us.

“Does this mean anything?” I asked, careful not to look at him when I said it.

“Everything means something.” He was silent for several minutes and then said, “She’s ripping herself apart, you know.”

“We all are. Did you see Schatz’s face last night? He was so happy to have you here. He must be very confused.”

“We’re all bitched for sure.” He sighed and rolled over and started to dress. “You know, Pfife thinks you’re very wise to do all of this and to try to make some order out of the mess we’ve all made, but she’s falling to pieces over it and so am I.”

“Why are you telling me this? What am I supposed to feel?”

“I don’t know. But if I can’t tell you, who should I tell?”

A s soon as he mentioned the split to the Murphys, Gerald had become so accommodating. Why was that? He’d pulled the studio out of a hat and money, too. He could draw on Murphy’s bank .

“ This isn’t just about marriage,” Gerald had said when he made the offer, just the two of them sharing a drink in private. “I don’t know what I’d do without Sara, but you’re different and so the rules are different, too. You can have a place in history. You do already. Your name’s there on a card, and you only have to turn one way and not the other. ”

“ What do you have against Hadley? ”

“ Nothing. How could I? She runs at a different speed is all. She’s more cautious. ”

“ And I’ll have to be cutthroat. Is that what you mean? ”

“ No. Just determined.”

“ She’s seen me through this whole while. ”

“ Yes, and she’s done it beautifully. But what comes next, that’s all new. You need to be looking forward now. I know you see that. ”

He had often felt that Gerald overflattered him, but now with Sun behind him and so much ahead, he did feel as if there was so much more required. He didn’t know what, exactly, only that it would take everything he had .

Pfife was full of ideas for the future. She’d already organized the marriage ceremony and had likely been planning it from the beginning. That was how she made a deal with God or her own conscience .

“ Tell me you love me,” she had said the first time, when he was still inside her .

“ I love you.” She was muscular and strong and it was interesting to have her in bed, strangely adversarial, with a wildness and a toughness that was nothing like Hadley .

“ More than you love her? Even if it’s not true, I want you to say it. ”

“ I love you more,” he said .

She pushed him over with her long firm legs and straddled him. Her hands on his chest. Her dark eyes boring into his intently. “Tell me you wish you’d met me first,” she said driving hard against him .

“ Yes,” he said .

“ I would be your wife now. Your only wife.”

Her expression was utterly removed and fierce all at once, and it unnerved him a little. Maybe she had to invent a life for them in her head, or else how could she live with herself and be Hadley’s friend? At Schruns, he had watched them side by side in front of the fire, talking and laughing. They had their legs crossed in the same direction, wearing the same socks and the same Alpine slippers. They weren’t sisters; they were nothing alike. He was the only thing that really joined them .

He wasn’t sleeping well and his nightmares were back. Sometimes, in the still middle of the night, he thought about the women he’d loved. He remembered trying to please his mother, and how awful that was. He called her Fweetee and invented songs for her, and when she took him to Boston on the train, alone, when he was ten years old, he remembered how proud he was to sit with her in the dining car and eat crab salad with a three-pronged silver fork, hushed white linens all around. But shortly after they returned home, another baby had come and then another, and he was too old to be so desperate for her anyway. He killed the desperation off slowly and deliberately by remembering how changeable and critical she was, under the tenderness, and how he couldn’t trust her .

This trick didn’t always work. Sometimes a woman stayed mysterious and unmanageable, like Kate, and sometimes she got down into the core of you and stayed there, no matter what. Hadley was the best woman he knew, and far too good for him. He’d always thought it and kept thinking it even when she lost the valise with his manuscripts. He tried never to let himself dwell on that day. It had been the most terrible thing he’d ever lived through. Being wounded was one thing. That had broken up his body and awakened him to fear and terror. It was still with him, like the shrapnel buried deep in the tissue of his muscles. But his work, that was him. When it was gone, he’d felt entirely empty, like he might simply recede and become air-a hurt place and a feeling around nothingness .

He still loved Hadley afterward. He couldn’t and wouldn’t stop loving her, maybe ever, but she’d killed something in him, too. He’d once felt so anchored and solid and safe with her, but now he wondered if he could ever trust anyone. That was the real question and he didn’t have an answer. Sometimes it felt as if there were a flawed keystone at the center of him, threatening everything invisibly. Pauline was his future. He’d made his promises and was committed to giving her all he had. But if he was honest with himself, he knew he didn’t trust her either. That part of love might be lost to him forever .

In the middle of October, Ernest came around with a copy of The Sun Also Rises , which had just been published in the States. He made a great ceremony of unwrapping it from the brown paper and string and handing it to me shyly. Just inside the flyleaf, the book was dedicated to Bumby and to me. He’d changed it since we separated to include my name.

“Oh, Tatie. It really is a beautiful book and I’m so proud.”

“You like the dedication, then?”

“I love it. It’s just perfect.”

“Good, then. I wanted to do this much for you at least. I’ve made such a wreck of everything and there’s so much damage, now, all around.”

“Yes,” I said, very moved. “But look at this.” I held up the book. “Look what you can do. You made this.”

“It’s us. It’s our life.”

“No, it was you from the beginning. You must have known that, writing it.”

“Maybe so.” He looked at the book in my hands, and then turned away to the window.

I did my best to try to break out of old habits and see friends. There were a few people from the old days who wanted to help. Ada MacLeish called round to take me to dinner and get my mind off things. Gertrude and Alice invited me to tea, but I thought it would be a bad idea to rekindle that friendship and risk Ernest believing I was choosing Gertrude over him. Loyalty was a dicey game, and it was tough to know whom I could safely turn to. Kitty was torn. Pauline was her friend but so was I; she’d never liked Ernest at all and didn’t trust him. She came to the apartment a few times but asked me not to pass on to Ernest that I’d seen her.