I’d spent the night reading Ernest Hemingway.
I was pleased to find him struggling in his manuscripts just as I was, with his voice. Sounding too much like the news reporter he mostly still was. Too much the authority who already knows what’s what. Explaining the big things when it’s the details that carry a story.
Almost at once he appeared in the café, recognizable even in silhouette in the doorway. He spotted me and came and sat before me.
“Deux Calvados,” he told the waiter.
He looked beside the table, at the valise on the floor. “I am eternally grateful, Kit,” he said, and he leaned down and dragged the bag over beside his chair. “Ezra confessed in a series of cables to me.”
I was glad not to have to explain.
He said, “We’ve decided never to speak of this, the two of us. Will you go along with that?”
“I will.”
I noticed that it was just the three of us he singled out. I said, “I’m sure Hadley is relieved.”
“I haven’t told her.”
He read the surprise in my face. He said, “Her mistake is the same, no matter who the thief. And there’s a complication.”
Our drinks arrived and Hemingway waved off any further conversation.
We drank and he savored, while I drank and wondered and waited. But when he spoke again, it was about Lausanne and what a bluff and blowhard Mussolini was and what a mess the Allies were continuing to make of the peace.
Finally, when our drinks were finished, I said, “And the complication?”
“Come with me,” Hemingway said.
He paid for the drinks, picked up his valise, and led me out of the café, into the twilight, and onto the Pont Neuf, heading in the direction of the Left Bank. As we walked above the Seine, he said, “Ezra also made his case in those cables. I’ve been learning how to punch but I still can’t fight. I’m too conscious of what I’ve been doing. I see that now. If you want to throw a straight right, don’t meditate on it beforehand. Just throw it. You know what I mean?”
I looked at him. “I do,” I said. Ezra the thief.
He said, “Things are already as they should be between Hadley and me.”
I had no standing to question that.
He said, “Every writer needs a myth.”
Hemingway stopped now.
We were halfway across the bridge. The light was just about gone. “There’s just one thing left to do,” he said.
And he turned, held aloft the valise that contained every copy of his novel and all his stories, and he threw it over the balustrade and into the River Seine.
That night I made love to Louise, vowing silently never to treat her the way Hemingway was treating his wife, and when she was sleeping, I rose and lit the gas jet above my writing desk. I placed my novel manuscript on my desktop, removed the title page—The Hot Country by Christopher Marlowe Cobb—and laid all the rest of it on the floor beside me. I would place it in the trash in the morning. I looked at the postcard leaning against this morning’s coffee cup. Me from behind, walking on the street in Vera Cruz, with dead Mexican snipers lying nearby and I’m passing them without a glance. I rolled paper into my Corona Portable Number 3, and I began my novel once again.
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Copyright © 2018 by Robert Olen Butler
Cover design by Amanda Shaffer
ISBN: 978-1-5040-5562-8
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The Hemingway Valise Page 5