Paula McLain: The Paris Wife

“Caught behind enemy lines and all that,” she said.

“How is it I’m the enemy when she’s the other woman? That seems very unfair, doesn’t it?”

“When Harold and I split, you’d think I’d fallen into the pissoir for all people cared for me. It takes time. Things will shift back your way after a while. Just breathe through it, darling.”

One afternoon I thought Bumby was napping, but he must have heard me crying at the dining table, my head in my arms. I didn’t know he was in the room until I heard him ask, “What are you worrying about, Mama?”

“Oh, Schatz, I’m fine,” I said, drying my eyes on my sweater.

But I wasn’t fine. I was lower than I’d ever been and finding it harder and harder to rally. It was early November and fewer than sixty days into the hundred when I asked Ernest if he’d watch Bumby so I could go away for a bit to think. He agreed to give me the time, and at the eleventh hour, I asked Kitty to go with me. I had chosen Chartres and told her that, without her good company, I wouldn’t be able to appreciate the châteaux and the lovely countryside, but in truth I was afraid to be alone.

We checked into the Grand Hôtel de France just before sunset, and though it was a little chilly, Kitty suggested we take a walk around the lake before dinner. The air was crisp and all the trees seemed sharply etched.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about my wedding vows,” I said to Kitty when we were halfway around. “I promised to love him for better or worse, didn’t I?”

“Worse has definitely arrived.” She frowned. “Honestly, I had a hard time choking down my own vows. The way I see it, how can you really say you’ll love a person longer than love lasts? And as for the obeying part, well, I just wouldn’t say it.”

“I didn’t say that part either, but strangely I’ve managed it anyway.”

“When I met Harold, he’d lost his faith in marriage, too, and so we made our own private pact. We would be partners and equals as long as things were good, but when love ended, we’d end, too.”

“It’s an admirable idea, but I can’t believe it can ever be that civilized. It wasn’t for you two.”

“No,” she said. “Lately I’ve wondered if maybe I’m not meant to have love-the lasting kind, I mean.”

“I’m not sure what I’m meant to have. Or be for that matter.”

“Maybe this break from Ernest will give you a chance to find out.”

“Maybe it will.” I looked up to find we’d made it all around the lake while we talked and now were back, exactly, at where we’d started.

After a week at Chartres, my head finally began to clear. One morning, I sent Kitty off to explore alone and wrote: Dearest Tatie, I love you now more than I ever have in some ways and though different people view their marriage vows differently, I meant mine to the death. I’m ready to be yours forever if you must know it, but since you’ve fallen in love and want to marry someone else, I feel I have no choice but to move aside and let you do that. The one hundred days are officially off. It was a terrible idea and it embarrasses me now. Tell Pauline whatever you choose. You can see Bumby as much as ever you like. He’s very much yours and loves and misses you. But please let’s only write about the divorce and not talk about it. I can’t quarrel with you anymore and I can’t see you much either, because it hurts too much. We’ll always be friends-delicate friends, and I’ll love you ’til I die, you know. Ever yours, the Cat.

I was crying hard when I mailed the letter, but felt lighter for it. I spent the rest of the morning staring into the fire in my room, and when Kitty came back from sightseeing alone, I was still in my pajamas and robe.

“You look different,” she said, and there was a great deal of kindness in her eyes. “Are you through with it, then?”

“I’m trying to be. Will you help me by opening us a very good Château Margaux?”

“I’m sure Hem’s been just as miserable waiting for a decision from you,” she said, uncorking the wine. “Although I don’t know how I could still have a stitch of sympathy for him after that damned novel of his. He was even crueler to Harold. He’s going to lose all his friends, you know.”

“He might very well,” I said. “I still don’t know why he needed to write it that way, stepping on bodies as he went, but you have to admit it’s a brilliant book.”

“Do I? You’re not in it at all. How do you forgive him that?”

“The same as always.”

“Right,” she said, and we lifted our glasses silently.

Kitty and I drove back to Paris several days later and it was there I received Ernest’s reply:

My dearest Hadley-I don’t know how to thank you for your very brave letter. I’ve been worried for you and for all of us because of this terrible deadlock. We’ve drawn things out so painfully, neither of us knowing how to move ahead without causing more damage. But if divorce is the next necessary step, then I trust that once we start, we’ll begin to feel stronger and better and more like ourselves again .

He went on to say that he wanted me to have all the royalties from Sun and that he had already written Max Perkins telling him this, and finished by saying:

I think you’re a wonderful mother, and that Bumby couldn’t be better off than in your very lovely and capable hands. You are everything good and straight and fine and true-and I see that so clearly now, in the way you’ve carried yourself and listened to your own heart. You’ve changed me more than you know, and will always be a part of everything I am. That’s one thing I’ve learned from this. No one you love is ever truly lost .

Ernest

We called Paris the great good place, then, and it was. We invented it after all. We made it with our longing and cigarettes and Rhum St. James; we made it with smoke and smart and savage conversation and we dared anyone to say it wasn’t ours. Together we made everything and then we busted it apart again.

There are some who said I should have fought harder or longer than I did for my marriage, but in the end fighting for a love that was already gone felt like trying to live in the ruins of a lost city. I couldn’t bear it, and so I backed away-and the reason I could do it at all, the reason I was strong enough and had the legs and the heart to do it, was because Ernest had come along and changed me. He helped me see what I really was and what I could do. Now that I knew what I could bear, I would have to bear losing him.

In the spring of 1927, Bumby and I sailed for the States for a nice long break from Paris and all that still could drag on us there. We lived in New York for several months, and then got on a long slow train across the country that dropped us, finally, in Carmel, California. I rented us a house close to the beach in a grove of pines. The sky went on forever there, and cypresses stood twisted by the wind, and the sunshine made me feel stronger. It was there I learned that Ernest and Pauline had married, in a small Catholic ceremony in Paris. Somehow he’d managed to convince the priest that he was Catholic, and as such, since his first marriage had been presided over by a Methodist minister, it didn’t count. I read this news on a rare cloudy day in May, while Bumby dug a trench in the sand with his shovel. Seawater spilled over the sides, dissolving the sand walls even as they were being built. It made me want to cry just watching, so I took the letter and walked to the water’s edge. Beyond the breakers, the waves bled from gray to white and the horizon was white, too, everything melting into everything else. Out past all that water, Ernest and Pauline were building a life together. He and I had already had our time, and though it was still very close and real to me, as beautiful and poignant as any place on the map, it was, in truth, another time-another country.