Mrs. Hemingway

by Naomi Wood

  “Is that you need a drink? Me too.” He sounds jovial but when she watches him pour the second glass she sees his hand shake.

  “How much are you drinking?”

  “I pour champagne over my cereal in the morning and spike my tea with gin.” Ernest massages the temples of his head under the bandage. “I don’t want to fight about this now.”

  “All we’ve done,” she begins, “is fight these past few years.”

  He hands over the drink. “Because we’re the same guy. Because we’re both writers.”

  “That’s not a good enough excuse. Seventeen days I spent on a boat loaded with dynamite and you cruised over on a plane. You could have got me a ticket.”

  He throws back the glass nearly finishing it in one. “I didn’t want you here,” he says. “Why would I pay for a ticket when I didn’t even want you here in the first place?” Martha leaves her glass untouched and picks up her satchel. She feels just about done with his dreary selfishness. “I don’t—”

  “Marty.”

  He pulls her back with the strap of the satchel so that she sits on his knee. He holds both her hands, playing his thumbs into her palms. “Rabbit. Remember Spain. We need war so that we can feel the force of each other. Let’s not go back to Cuba. We’ll follow the Front if that might bind us better. There’ll always be a war for us to go to. We’re a team; we’re helpless against each other. Decency can’t set us apart.” His thumbs are still pressed into her hands. “You talk as if it’s already bitched. But will you think about it? Whether we might start again?”

  A gun fires. There is the sound of clogs running. Doors bang. Parisians retreat inside. “Not so different from Madrid,” she says, and smiles sadly for all that has been lost since then.

  “We’re safe as long as we’re not.”

  “I don’t know if I want that to be true—even if it is. Ernest?”

  “What?”

  She looks at his scarred hands and bandaged head and stands. She must get away from him or she will never say the words. “I don’t think we’re good for each other anymore.”

  He looks blindsided. “I love you,” he says, almost bitterly, “like a fucking dope.” Ernest gets up, but only to finish off the glass she hasn’t drunk. “Just consider what I’ve said. A fresh start, Marty, and we can live wherever you want us to live. We can live in a trench if that would make you happy, Rabbit.”

  She tells herself to say no, to tell Ernest that she has done all the considering she can do, but instead Martha nods, because she is a sucker for the love of Ernest Hemingway, and it is all she has known for these past seven years.

  She kisses him on the cheek and nearly knocks over his drink. It reminds her of when their plane had taken a nosedive on their Chinese honeymoon, and he had made the other correspondents laugh when the plane righted itself and he said, “See, didn’t spill a drop!” Only afterward did he look around to check she was all right. She had stared out of the plane window, as all the correspondents around her laughed, wondering just who it was that she had married. Alcohol; she is some mistress indeed.

  Martha gathers her things and makes her way to leave, passing the huge bathroom with its twin sinks and a bidet big enough to wash a dog. She is at the door when a gust of wind comes into the room, knocking the maps from the table. The long roll of lavatory paper she spied before falls and bounces on the carpet, unrolling everywhere.

  “Ernest!” she says, almost laughing.

  Martha bends to pick it up and it is then that she notices there is writing on the paper. It is Ernest’s handwriting, in black ink, set out on six squares of the toilet tissue. “Here,” Ernest says, his voice tight with alarm. “Let me see to that.”

  But Martha has already seen what he has tried to conceal. Written down the length of paper is a love poem. There are black holes in the tissue where the ink has liquefied the paper. Martha reads until the end while the curtains flap around Ernest at the window.

  The poem, Martha sees, is called “To Mary in London.”

  “What’s this?” she asks. “Who’s Mary?”

  “She’s a correspondent for Time.” He says it plainly and without guile.

  Martha slowly folds the tissue back on the table. So that explains Sylvia’s look this morning: the look hadn’t meant she had forgotten about her, only that she thought Martha had been replaced. Perhaps Sylvia may have even met this Mary, whoever she is. Martha stares at the paper, unable to take her eyes from the ludicrous poem. “I don’t understand you. You say you can’t bear to lose me, but all the while you’re writing poems to another woman?”

  Ernest looks at her beseechingly but says nothing. The net curtain flaps around him as if he is a groom surrounded by his bride’s lace.

  “Mary who?”

  “Welsh.”

  “And who is this Mary Welsh? Is she your lover? Your mistress? Your next wife?”

  Ernest looks about to say something but doesn’t reply. Martha thinks how typical all of this is of him: he wants his wife, he wants his mistress, he wants everything he can get. He is not so much greedy for women as blind to what he thinks he needs and so he grabs at everything. Wives and wives and wives—Ernest doesn’t need a wife; he needs a mother!

  Despite herself, she feels livid. How can he do this to her? Above all things it is embarrassing—embarrassing for everyone to be in yet another public jam of Ernest’s making. “Why beg for me back if you already have someone else?”

  Ernest shrugs. He goes over to the cabinet and pours another drink. More silence now. “Go ahead, Ernest. Drink it down. Forget about it. It’s past noon, so you can have as much as you like; isn’t that your rule?” All she is presented with are his shoulders turned to the window in the direction of the street. “You’re ridiculous. You’re worse than a child. Try and extricate yourself from something before setting yourself up with someone else. It might be a finer way for a man to act. It’s over, do you hear me? I’ve just about had enough of you!”

  Before she closes the door she spies his father’s gun, a dark spot in the room like the cobbled holes in the pitted streets. Ernest still hasn’t turned around to look at her. “Don’t,” she says, as she leaves the room, “do anything stupid.”

  Out on the street, Martha walks toward the ring of women she saw from the bedroom. They are armed, now, with pans and knives. One of them wields a butcher’s cleaver. Between their skirts she sees a mare felled on the cobbles. Its withers are glossy, its mane dark. Plates and burlap sacks are offered around for a leg or hoof or hairy muzzle. Martha stands back as a woman cuts a let into the mare’s throat and the blood flows into the waiting holes of the cobblestones.

  28. HAVANA, CUBA. APRIL 1944.

  The Overseas Service was not, it seemed, going to reach this part of the world. All Martha could get from the box was static and an evangelical church broadcast from Jamaica. The tuning would be driving Ernest crazy, but she wanted news from Europe, and she wouldn’t stop until she got it.

  The Finca had, by now, been made hospitable; the flowers and vegetation held back. The scum of the pool had been lifted; the jungle growth cut back weekly—but housekeeping was not, Martha could admit, her natural forte. And when she was writing it was she the servants bothered, not Ernest; it was she they consulted about menus and marketing. “Go and ask Mr. Hemingway,” she would say, shooing them out of the room as if they were children pulling at her skirts. “I am working.”

  But the bougainvillea needed to be kept in check, the menus needed writing, and the butler needed to be reminded not to suck his toothpick so indolently all day. When the days here were good she felt knocked down by her happiness; but when they were dull she couldn’t cheat their slowness.

  Over the radio static came the sound of chipping ice from the pantry. Earlier and earlier Ernest went to the sauce to let out the pressure of the day. He came into the living room with two coconut cocktails. He looked like any other Cuban bum in his dirty white T-shirt. She was about to admonish him, but rem
embered she had already done so earlier today and held her tongue. Calling him the Pig was now only half a joke.

  Out of the corner of her eye she watched Ernest waiting for her attention. She took her time, still testing the dial. In came fishing news from Florida, a local educational channel in Havana, until she heard the bells and the clipped English of the broadcaster. This is London calling.

  “I’m so happy I bought you that radio,” he said, at last handing over the drink. “There’s nothing like having the news freshly shrieked at us.”

  “It’s either this or four days late on the mail boat.”

  “The Reich soldiers on whether we hear the news or not.”

  They sat in silence to listen to the broadcast, sharing the sofa but sitting apart. The three books she had written here, in the peace of this house, were lined up next to Ernest’s on the bookshelves opposite: A Stricken Field, The Heart of Another, Liana. It was a good place to write, and a terrible place to be bored, though writing three books in five years was not a bad achievement. Scrambling around for a title one day for that little volume of short stories, she had come across a letter from Fife to Ernest. It had been another bruiser, but it had ended quite thoughtfully, with the words “the heart of another is a dark forest.” It had struck Martha as quite the perfect little phrase, and she had happily lifted it as a title. She wondered if Fife might have chanced upon her book in her local store. It would have been, she imagined, quite the surprise for little Fife.

  When the broadcast ended, Martha went for a shower, leaving her husband on the sofa while a band struck up a salsa number on another station. At one time the tune would have had them both on their feet. Neither of them could dance, but both, once, had loved to dance with the other.

  The shower drowned out the music. As she soaped herself for the second time that day, she reminded herself again that she was happy. What a life this was! Of ice cream in coconuts, gin and tonics on the lawn, saltwater swims in the mornings and tennis in the afternoons.

  But sometimes it felt as if she were being buried. The trellises wrapped themselves around the house. The flowers in the garden looked so big they could swallow a cow. Sometimes she felt as if she were drowning in martinis and flowers. Only yesterday she had found orchids growing out of a tree trunk. Martha had returned with shears, planning to get at the orchid from the root, but it was only then she’d noticed how many there were: whole clusters of them, and bales of silk growing between the fronds. She couldn’t possibly get at it all. That afternoon she had crawled into bed, dreaming of catastrophe in a cold climate.

  She remembered on her first day here how she wanted to let nature in, remembering how Fife had immured Ernest behind the brick wall in Key West. But this was ridiculous; the house was being swallowed whole!

  And Ernest! Ernest acted like one of the servants—a hireling himself. It felt as if he constantly kept on trying to make her happy here: to smooth her out, as if it were a matter of patting down the creases of a dress. He had sent her off to Antigua, Saba, Barbados, to report on submarine warfare; anything that would give her work but keep her close. But all she found were postcard beaches and summer without cease. Only when she had finally escaped to England last year had she felt that familiar feeling; of being in war, and being at home.

  Martha returned to the living room in slacks and a shirt. Ernest was in her study. She was sure that he would lose something, or put something out of order, and she had told him very clearly she did not want him in her office. He was staring at her big map of Europe, with his hands held behind his back as if he were looking at a painting in a gallery.

  Not knowing what else to say, she finally blurted, “You know, I detest being sensible.”

  “Oh, Martha,” he said, at first gently, but then she heard the ironic politeness in his voice. “Where is it you’d rather be? With the dying here”—he jabbed his thumb in the direction of Germany—“or here”—France—“or here?” The last one was London.

  Yes, she thought, London sounded very nice indeed. The broadcaster’s English accent had given her a vision of an apartment in Mayfair: bombs blasting off above her, getting down the copy for a story, perhaps in bathrobe and gas mask.

  Martha left him in her office. In the living room she tried again for the wireless but he caught up with her and turned it off at the dial.

  “I hate being cautious and good and settled,” she said to him, wondering why it was so hot in this room, why the house never cooled down. “This luxury,” she said, looking around at the settled misery of their possessions. “This bolt-hole! Don’t you tire of it?”

  Ernest brought his scarred leg up to the chair. “This is what war does, Marty, it maims; it kills. You think you’re going to find something different, as if you’re special. But you won’t.”

  “Balls! When we first met, you said I should go to war.”

  “And you’ve done it now. Bravo!”

  She went over to the window: outside, the cane fields glowed in the Cuban dusk. “I think you’re holed up where you’re comfortable,” she said to the glass. Her own reflection in the window was indistinct and faint. “I think you’re scared of leaving.”

  “Are you calling me a coward?”

  “What I am saying is I am unhappy here. I don’t want to live as if wrapped in mothballs.”

  “Martha Gellhorn,” Ernest laughed savagely. “War reporter and masochist. You’ve got no fucking clue, girl.”

  Martha opened the front door and went outside to the broad stone steps. She needed air. They’d had this argument over and over. It was her own fault, perhaps, for ever thinking she was going to get the response she wanted. Outside, their cats lay waiting for pigeons. An orchid extended its thin mauve neck. Birdsong went on mindlessly. All around her, Cuba ripened.

  Ernest came out to the veranda with a drink. He handed it to her without a word and then sat down on the cane lounger. There was a wheezing sound, then a snapping, and the chair collapsed into nothing more than kindling. With his knees thrust up around his ears he looked like a child. His face looked thunderous, until he saw her laughing.

  “Piece of good-for-nothing junk,” he said, and he picked up a bit of the chair and threw it to the garden to the comical screeching of a cat. Martha laughed again. “Now tell me why you’d want to be anywhere else?” Ernest said, gesturing at the Finca—their sumptuous ruin.

  He sat down by her; his T-shirt smelled of the cocktail. “What can I do for you, Marty?” His words were gentle now. Poor Ernest. He had never loved another more than he himself was loved.

  She put her arm around him. “Let’s go to Europe.”

  “I’m an old man.”

  “You’re forty-four. You’d flourish again.”

  “It’ll be cold. The food will be terrible. I’ll be used up and no good.”

  He took a sip from her drink and handed it back.

  “You’d be of use to me.”

  “I can’t be your maid, Marty. I can’t be your governess.”

  “Then be a reporter again.”

  “I don’t want to, Martha. If you stay here we could start a family. Try for a daughter.”

  The thought of children only made her flinch. Last year, she had terminated another pregnancy. Ernest tried to persuade her to keep it, having gotten it in his head that it would be a girl. But she told him she’d be no good as a mother. She had not been—and never would be, she felt— in the mood for mothering. “Not that again. Please.”

  Ernest scooted in front of her and put his hands on her knees. Please, she thought, let him not be loving. She could handle him as boorish and bullying, but not gentle and meek. “Rabbit. I know we’ve worn each other down. I know we haven’t been the best version of ourselves always, but God never promised an easy life to two writers trying to live together. Rabbit, please.”

  Martha looked at his soft pleading face but held her nerve. She took a big draft of the drink. The gin was flat and strong. “I have to go.”

  “Fi
ne.” He stood up. “Take your weltschmerz and go find the pulse of misery elsewhere. The war will look as fucking miserable as it always has, you spoiled little bitch.”

  So here it was: Ernest’s return to fine form.

  He picked up his drink and went into the house, kicking the rest of the collapsed chair over the stoop. “You writer bitch!” he said from the house, his voice loud with vehemence. “You can make your own damn way to England, then!”

  Martha unpicked a curl of soap from the diamonds of her engagement ring and flicked it over the side. She watched two birds nesting in the tree above and downed the drink in one. The rapid night fell on Cuba. Not for her the life of the writer’s wife. She was off to war.

  29. PARIS , FRANCE. AUGUST 26, 1944.

  Martha leaves the Ritz and heads back to the Champs-Élysées. Was that it? Was that her grand removal from the Hemingway camp? This morning she had imagined her liberation as glorious as the Parisians’ today. Instead, as she heads west to the Tuileries, what keeps coming back to her is that poem, spooling over the side of the bureau like the loop of a dream. A poem for Mary, whoever she is. Why did Ernest have to do it like this? This big strapping man stomping about the city—and yet he couldn’t seem to spend a week, a day, even an hour on his own. Between divorcing his ex-wife and marrying her he’d left thirteen days; it seemed he was a man who couldn’t bear being alone.

  At the Tuileries the flower beds are empty, the plants probably eaten. A scorched tank still smokes. Martha stops at the park café for lunch where she spoons down a bowl of thin broth and orders a coffee, though when it arrives she realizes it’s not coffee but toasted chicory and a few grains of saccharine. As she sits outside in the bright light she lets this morning’s full derangement slowly become clear: in the same day that he was begging her to stay, he was writing love poems to his mistress. It really shouldn’t surprise her, since Ernest without a woman would be a writer in want of a wife. But she feels betrayed by Mary’s unexpected entrance, as if her carefully rehearsed script has been snatched by a troop of fools intent on making this day a farce.