by Paula McLain
“Go back to Paris?”
“That would be worse, wouldn’t it?”
“I don’t think I can bear Christmas Day feeling like this. Everything’s such a bust. Maybe it’s time we think about going home.”
“Stateside? And admit failure? Are you trying to kill me?”
“I’m sorry. It’s just hard to know how to go on.”
“Yes,” he said. He picked up his Corona and carefully nestled it in its black case before snapping the case closed. “It certainly is.”
When we arrived at Chamby, the town was the same. Our chalet was perfect and exactly as before, as were the snow-covered mountains and our proprietors, the Gangwisches, who greeted us as if we were long-lost family members. It was all so welcome after our heavyhearted time in Lausanne that we surrendered completely. Before we’d even unpacked, we put on our skiing togs and caught the last train up the mountain to Les Avants. The sun was fading as we tied on our skis and flew down the powder-laced slope toward the village. With the wind roaring in our ears and stinging our cheeks, we raced along, Ernest just ahead of me, his bad knee bandaged with strong black cloth. He favored it a little, but looked lighter in his body than I’d seen in some time. I was grateful and relieved and sent a small prayer of thanks out to the snowy firs and the creamy sky turning every shade of pink, and Lake Geneva in the distance, flat and polished as glass.
The next day we slept late in our big soft four-poster bed and didn’t even wake when the maid tiptoed in to start the fire. We roused ourselves later, when the room was warm and the porcelain stove purred with the blaze.
“We were right to come, Tatie,” I said and nestled behind Ernest, kissing his neck and the buttons of his spine.
“Yes,” he said. “Let’s enjoy every minute and not think about anything else.”
“There isn’t anything else,” I said. I rolled to cover him, straddling his flat, strong belly. I pushed my nightgown over my hips and then reached to draw him inside of me.
He groaned and closed his eyes, giving himself over completely.
Chink arrived on Christmas Day, and in the end, our holiday wasn’t sad at all. We’d hung stockings for each other and for Chink, and we opened those, and then had a dinner fit for kings. It was only when we sat by the fire late that night, warm brandy in our bellies and more in our glasses, that Ernest brought up the terrible business of his lost manuscripts.
“Oh, kid,” Chink said when Ernest reached the end of the story. “Can you really start over with nothing?”
“I don’t know. I wrote the damned stuff once, didn’t I?” Ernest said. “I have to, in any case.”
Chink nodded seriously.
“I’ve been working like a dog for the Star,” Ernest went on, “and now we have enough to live on for eight months. Eight months, and I’m going to give all of them to fiction. Only that.”
“That’s my Tatie,” I said. Chink raised his glass, and we all toasted Christmas and each other.
But as the days passed, Ernest’s notebooks and pencils stayed packed away. His Corona never left its black case. He said nothing about this and I didn’t either; I knew better. Meanwhile, we skied all day and sometimes well into the evening, when the sun bled through the cloud line and seemed to be showing us something no one had seen before. We enjoyed every moment of Chink’s good company and each other’s, too. We made love every day, sometimes twice a day—that is, until I told Ernest I’d left our usual precautions back in Paris.
We had always tracked my monthly cycles carefully. Ernest did this himself, the way he kept accounts of everything in our marriage. There was a notebook for recording expenses and incoming monies, another for correspondence, another for noting story ideas and how many words he’d written each day. And there was a notebook marked Hadley, devoted to the rising and falling of my fertility each month so we could have unprotected intercourse as often as possible. In the beginning, in the unsafe times, we used the withdrawal method the way most couples did. “Not so very different from Russian roulette,” Ernest used to joke, and it wasn’t. You could get condoms at the chemist’s or the barbershop, but these were thick and coarse, made of rubber cement—uncomfortable at best and sometimes riddled with holes.
When we first arrived in Paris, Gertrude, who could be wonderfully frank this way, asked if we knew about the diaphragm. Without too much trouble, we found a doctor and got me fitted for one, and this is what we’d used ever since. Ernest knew better than I did which were safe and which weren’t. About a week into our time in Chamby, he reminded me we’d come to the end of our window.
“Could you make the necessary arrangements?” he said when we were in bed one night. This was his usual code. My role was to say, “Yes sir,” as if I were his secretary, and he’d just asked me to make a lunch reservation or send a telegram. But this particular night, I didn’t laugh and didn’t get up to search my stocking drawer for the case. Instead, I said, “Oh dear.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve left it in Paris.”
I could only nod.
“Your timing stinks.” His face was red. I could tell he was very angry.
“I meant to tell you in Lausanne, as soon as I realized, but that was hardly the time either.”
“What else are you keeping from me?”
“Nothing. I’m sorry. I should have told you.”
“I’ll say.” He threw back the bedclothes, then got up and began to pace the room in his underwear, fuming. “Sometimes I wonder who I married exactly.”
“Please be fair, Tatie. It’s not as if I meant to forget it.”
“No?”
“Of course not.” I crossed the room and stood near enough to see his face in the dim. “I didn’t. And yet I’d also be lying if I said I don’t think a baby would be a wonderful idea.”
“Now it comes out. I knew it. We’ve always said I’d get a really good start on things before we’d even talk about a baby. We agreed.”
“I know we did,” I said.
“I’m just finally getting going. Do you really want to ruin it for me?”
“Of course not,” I said. “But I have worries, too. I’m thirty-one.”
“Just. And you’ve never been crazy about children. You don’t care at all for other people’s.”
“It’s different to want one of your own. I don’t have all the time in the world.”
“I don’t either. Life doesn’t often give you more than one shot. I want to take mine now.” His eyes were clear and challenging, the way they always were when he was asking for loyalty. “Are you for me?”
“Of course I am.” I put my arms around his neck and kissed him, but his lips didn’t soften under mine. His eyes, just a few inches from mine, were open and questioning.
“I suppose you think I’m going to lie down with you now.”
“Ernest! I’m not trying to trap you!”
He said nothing.
“Tatie?”
“I need a drink.” He headed for the door, grabbing his robe as he went.
“Please stay so we can talk about this.”
“Go to sleep,” he said, and left the room.
I couldn’t sleep, though, for all my fretting. He didn’t come to bed at all, and in the morning, I dressed and went down to look for him. He was in the dining room having his morning coffee, already wearing his skiing togs.
“Can we please make up, Tatie?” I said, going to him. “I’m just sick about everything.”
“I know you are,” he said, and sighed. “Listen. We have to be together on this. If we’re not, then nothing’s any good. You see that, don’t you?”
I nodded and leaned into his shoulder.
“If you really want a baby, the time will be right someday.”
“But not now.”
“No, little cat. Not now.”
Chink came into the room, saying good morning. Then he stopped, eyeing us carefully for a moment. “Is everything all right then?”
“Hadley’s under the weather.”
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“Poor Mrs. Popplethwaite,” Chink said tenderly. “You should be in bed.”
“Yes. Go and try to get some rest,” Ernest agreed. “We’ll be up to check on you at lunch.”
They went off to ski alone while I did my best to find some peace. I put on some nice thick socks and my Alpine slippers and then curled up in a chair by the fire to read The Beautiful and Damned. “Fitzgerald’s a poet,” Shakespear had said when she recommended it, just before she and Pound left for several months in Italy. The writing was exquisite, I had to admit, but it was making me sad to read about Gloria and Anthony. They talked prettily and had nice things, but their lives were hollow. I didn’t have the stomach for such a dire picture of marriage, not just now.
I’d put the novel down and climbed into bed to try for a nap when Ernest came in. His hair was damp and crushed from his wool hat, and his face was pink from the cold. He sat on the bed near me and I saw that his eyes had softened considerably. Time away with Chink had done him some good.
“You look very warm,” he said. “Do you mind if I share your cocoon?”
“Of course. If you think that’s a good idea.”
“I stopped at the chemist’s in the village,” he said, and took the little tin of condoms out of his trouser pocket.
“I’m surprised. You always say you hate them.”
“Not as much as being away from you.”
I looked at his trim belly and flanks as he undressed. “You’re very beautiful,” I said.
“So are you, Tatie.”
As he climbed into bed, his skin chilly against mine, it began to snow outside. We pressed ourselves together in a crush on the featherbed, his hands wonderfully rough, his hip bones sharp against my thighs. Later I would see plum-colored bruises there, and the skin on my face and breasts would be chapped and pink from where he hadn’t shaved, but for now there was only wordless desire and a feeling of return. He’d left me for a time. He’d doubted me, but now he was mine again and I wanted to keep him here in a tangle of limbs and bedsheets until I’d quieted every last voice and we were only right again.
After three weeks at Chamby, when we were well fed and sun chapped and had parted ways with Chink, we headed off to Rapallo, on the Italian Riviera, where the Pounds had a rented villa.
“Ezra thinks he’s discovered the place,” Ernest said on the train. “Though Wordsworth and Keats had a go at it before him.”
“Ezra thinks he’s discovered trees and the sky.”
“You have to admire the guy anyway, though, don’t you?”
“I don’t have to, but I will, I guess. For you.”
After traveling south for a full day and more, we were finally near Genoa, where the countryside grew ever more springlike and lovely.
“This is heaven,” I said. “I had no idea it would be so beautiful.” Through our window I caught glimpses of the sea, quick bursts of frothed blue, then dark rock again, then the sea. “Aren’t we lucky to be so happy, Tiny?” I said, just as we entered a mountain tunnel.
“Sure we are,” he said and kissed me. The sound of the train bounced against black rock, roaring in our ears.
When we arrived at Rapallo, I thought the town was charming, with its pale pink and yellow hotels on the shoreline, its quiet empty harbor. Ernest disliked it on sight.
“There’s no one here,” he said when we got to our hotel.
“Who should be?”
“I don’t know. It just doesn’t seem to have any life, this place.” He stood at the window in our room that faced the shore. “Doesn’t the sea seem a bit spineless to you?”
“It looks like the sea,” I said, and came up behind him and put my arms around him tightly. I knew it wasn’t the place that was troubling him. During our last week at Chamby, I had woken several mornings to find him at the small desk in our room, the sharpened pencil lifeless next to his hand, his blue cahier open but empty. He still wasn’t working, and the longer that went on, the harder it would be to start again. He was utterly determined to do it. He would do it. But how?
We played tennis every day in Rapallo and had long lunches with the Pounds in their terraced garden. Another couple arrived to join us on holiday, Mike Strater, a painter friend of Pound’s, and his wife, Maggie. They had a delicious-looking baby girl, with wisps of yellow hair and gray eyes. I liked to watch her exploring the world just beyond her blanket, plucking fistfuls of grass and staring at her hand intently, as if it held the secret to something. Meanwhile, Ernest and Mike ducked and lunged in a boxing match on the nearby flagstones. Aside from being a very good painter, Mike was athletic and game for a good deal, and I could tell Ernest liked him immediately. Mike was a much better physical match for Ernest than Pound, who tried very hard in his blustery way but had a poet’s delicate hands.
February was a changeable time in Italy. Some days were hung with mist, blotting out the hills behind the town until we felt very remote. The palm trees dripped and the swallows hid away somewhere. Sometimes the air was humid and drenched with sun. We could walk in the piazza or along the promenade to see fishermen on the concrete pier, dangling their poles out into the tide. The village was famous for its lace, and I liked to scan the shopwindows looking for the best pieces to send home as gifts while Ernest took long walks into the rocky hillside with Ezra, talking about Italian troubadours and the questionable virtues of automatic writing. Ernest liked to say he didn’t want his mind shut off when he was working because it was the only thing he had going for him. True enough, but when he was through for the day, he couldn’t turn his thoughts off without a glass of whiskey, and occasionally not even then. When he wasn’t writing at all, like now, it was often more than he could take. This was hard to watch and I worried about him.
A week into our stay in Rapallo, I had something new to unsettle me, however. I woke feeling dizzy, with a strange roaring in my head. I tried to eat breakfast but couldn’t stomach it, and returned to bed.
“It must have been the mussels we had last night,” I said to Ernest, and stayed in our room until midday, when the feeling passed.
The next morning, when the same symptoms hit at precisely the same time, I forgave the mussels and began instead to count the days forward and back. We’d arrived in Chamby just before Christmas and a few days after my monthly bleeding. It was now February 10, and I hadn’t had another period. When Ernest left the room to meet Ezra, I found his cache of notebooks and studied the one in particular that could illuminate my situation. Sure enough, for the last year I’d never been late by more than a day or two. This was a week at least, maybe ten days. I felt a small thrill of excitement, but didn’t say anything to Ernest. It wasn’t a certainty yet, and I was too afraid of what he would say.
I couldn’t keep my secret forever, though. I could hardly stand the sight of food and even the smell of whiskey or a cigarette turned me green. Ernest was thankfully content to blame the exotic food, but Shakespear was growing suspicious. One afternoon as we sat at a table in the garden watching Ernest and Mike practicing tennis serves at one another, she looked at me with her head cocked and said, “There’s something different about you these days, isn’t there?”
“It’s my newly revealed cheekbones,” I said. “I’ve lost five pounds.”
“Maybe,” she said thoughtfully, but there was a strange clarity in her look that made me think she’d guessed the truth.
I tried to ignore it and said, “You seem to be reducing, too, my dear. You’re fading away.”
“I know. It’s this business with Olga Rudge,” she said with a sigh.
She’d long since told me about Olga, a concert violinist who’d been Pound’s mistress for more than a year. “What’s happened?” I asked. “Has something changed?”
“Not really. I expect him to be in love with half a dozen women, that’s simply who he is, but this one seems different. The affair’s not waning for one thing. And she’s appearing in the Cantos, well disguised in myth, of course. But I can see her.”
She shook her pretty head as if to clear the image. “She’s dug in. I wonder if we’ll ever be free of her now.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “But it seems to me you’re awfully tolerant of him. I don’t understand marriage this way at all. I suppose I’m a Puritan.”
She shrugged gracefully. “Mike Strater’s in the middle of something now, too. An actress, I hear.”
“Oh, God. Does Maggie know?”
“Everyone knows. He’s gone off his head.”
“He doesn’t look it.”
“No,” Shakespear said, “but they never do. Men are stoics when it comes to matters of the heart.”
“You seem very stoic to me, too.”
“Yes,” she said. “But I work impossibly hard at it, darling.”
Ezra was famous for his roving affections; I expected nothing less from him. But the news about Mike Strater had thrown me, because he and Maggie looked so solid. I’d been watching and admiring them and their daughter, and stitching a fantasy about how our child—mine and Ernest’s—could squeeze in naturally at ringside and change very little about our lives or Ernest’s work. Now that dream was punctured. This baby was almost certainly coming, but into what?
Marriage could be such deadly terrain. In Paris, you couldn’t really turn around without seeing the result of lovers’ bad decisions. An artist given to sexual excess was almost a cliché, but no one seemed to mind. As long as you were making something good or interesting or sensational, you could have as many lovers as you wanted and ruin them all. What was really unacceptable were bourgeois values, wanting something small and staid and predictable, like one true love, or a child.
Later that afternoon, when we went back to our room at the Hotel Splendide, it began to rain hard and looked as if it wouldn’t ever stop. I stood at the window and watched it, feeling a growing worry.
“Mike Strater’s in love with some actress in Paris,” I said to Ernest from the window. “Did you guess?”
He sat on top of the bedclothes reading W. H. Hudson’s Green Mansions for the hundredth time. He barely looked up. “I don’t think it means anything. Ezra says he’s quite the philanderer.”