The Paris Wife: A Novel

by Paula McLain

  In the meantime, Ernest was working better than ever. The pressure he felt after escaping Toronto for Paris seemed to have been absolutely essential in stirring him, because he was writing strongly and fluidly, with almost no second-guessing. The stories were coming so well he could barely keep up with them.

  He continued to do editing work at the Transatlantic, and though he was still full of criticism for his boss, Ford went on championing Ernest’s work just the same. When Ernest told Ford he was worried it would take years and years to get his name established, Ford told him that was nonsense.

  “It will happen for you very quickly. When Pound showed me your work, I knew right away that I’d publish anything of yours. Everything.”

  Ernest took the compliment rather abashedly and tried to be kinder about Ford, particularly since he was trying to get him to publish The Making of Americans, a novel of Gertrude’s, which had been languishing in her desk since 1911. Ford finally agreed to publish the thing serially, and Gertrude was ecstatic. The review was gradually becoming more important and widely read among their set, and it would be her first major publication. In the April issue, her work would appear alongside a selection from Joyce’s new work in progress, the book that would later become Finnegans Wake, several pieces from Tristan Tzara, and a new story of Ernest’s called “Indian Camp,” which gruesomely detailed a woman giving birth and her coward husband slitting his own throat because he couldn’t stand hearing her cries. He was very pleased with it because he’d been able to take a memory from his childhood, like watching his father deliver an Indian woman’s baby, and stitch it to another thing he’d seen, the refugee couple on the Karagatch Road, and make a single powerful story.

  “Joyce knows this trick,” he said to me late one afternoon after returning from work on the issue. “He made Bloom up, and Bloom’s the best there is. You have to digest life. You have to chew it up and love it all through. You have to live it with your eyes, really.”

  “You talk about it so well.”

  “Yes, but you can talk and talk and not get it right. You have to do it.”

  The April issue also contained the first important reviews of his Three Stories and Ten Poems, which were generally rapturous about Ernest’s talent and style. He was inventing something new, they said, and was a writer to watch. I was so happy to see his reputation growing finally. Everywhere we went it seemed people wanted to be near him. Walking the boulevard with him at night, past the thrum of talk and tinny music, we would hear someone call out his name and we’d have to stop and have a friendly drink before moving on to another café where the same thing would happen. Everyone had a joke for him or some bit of news, and our circle of acquaintances was increasing day by day.

  John Dos Passos, whom Ernest had met just after he began working for the Red Cross in Italy, was back in Paris, riding the wave of his literary success and always ready for a good time. Donald Stewart showed up around this time, too. He was a humorist who would one day go on to be famous for screenplays like The Philadelphia Story, but for the time being, he was just a funny guy standing near the bar in a very smart cream-colored suit. Ernest was proud of his slovenly writer’s uniform, but I could occasionally be caught admiring crisply pressed trousers. Don’s were perfect. He was also nice looking in a boyish, clean-shaven way, with clear blue eyes that became very animated when he laughed.

  When Ernest introduced us, Don was wonderfully familiar with me right away. “You have beautiful hair,” he said. “What an unusual color.”

  “Thank you. You have beautiful clothes.”

  “My mother liked clothes. And etiquette.”

  “And ironing boards?”

  “I have a mean way with an iron, I must admit.”

  We talked a bit more, and I was having such a pleasant time, it took me a good half an hour to realize that Ernest had settled himself at a table nearby. I didn’t recognize anyone he was with, including the beautiful woman sitting by his side. She was slender and lovely, with very close-cropped dark-blond hair. Her body seemed slim and boyish under a long sweater, but somehow her hair passed her beyond boyishness, making her all the more feminine. The instant I saw her, I felt a sharp chill run through me—even before Ernest leaned over and whispered something to her. She laughed throatily, arching her long pale neck.

  “Are you quite all right?” Don said. “You’ve gone white.”

  “Oh. Quite fine, thanks.”

  He’d followed my eyes to Ernest and the woman. I’m sure everything was quite plain to him, but he smoothly deflected the moment. “That’s Duff Twysden,” he said. “Lady Twysden, actually. They say she married some British count. Count or viscount or lord twice removed. I can’t keep royalty straight.”

  “Yes, well. Who can?”

  I looked over at Ernest just as his eyes came up. The briefest crackling of suspicion passed between us, and then he got up and came over.

  “ ’Scuse me, Don. I see you’ve met my wife.”

  “Charmed,” Don said, before Ernest took my elbow and led me to the table where Duff sat expectantly.

  “Lady Twysden,” he said, making the introductions. “Or do you prefer Smurthwaite these days?”

  “Doesn’t matter as long as it’s Duff.” She half stood, extending a hand. “How d’you do?”

  I was just collecting myself to say something pleasant when Kitty appeared out of the crowd. “God, I’m glad to see you,” she said. “Come let’s get a drink.”

  Harold was just behind her and looking not at all well. He was pale and his upper lip was damp.

  “Has something happened?” I asked, when we were nearer the bar.

  “Harold’s leaving me.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “I wish I were.” She lit a cigarette and stared at the tip for a moment before inhaling in short stabs of breath. “Some restlessness has come in and taken him over. We always said we’d give each other every freedom. Funny, though, when it comes you don’t want it.”

  “Is it someone else?”

  “Isn’t it always?” She sighed. “It’s probably the new book, too. He wants to reinvent everything. I’m going to London soon. I wanted you to know.”

  “Oh, Kitty, really? Is it as bad as all that?”

  “Looks like it,” she said. “I have some things for you I can’t bear to pack. I’ll come over to the house.”

  “I don’t care about the dresses. I don’t need them.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “You know what Ernest will say.”

  She huffed, blowing out smoke. “Yes, but he hasn’t a clue how hard it is to be a woman.” She tossed her head in Duff’s direction. “It’s brutal out here, isn’t it? The competition isn’t just younger. They care more. They throw everything they’ve got into it.”

  I didn’t quite know what to say. Kitty was one of the most poised and self-confident women I’d ever known, and here she was knocked off her feet and set spinning. It made me want to break Harold’s neck.

  “Do you want to go home?” I asked.

  “I can’t wither like a schoolgirl and have everyone feeling sorry for me. I’d die first. Let’s have champagne,” she said, putting on her bravest face. “Lots and lots of champagne.”

  I stayed by Kitty’s side for the rest of the evening, but kept one eye on Ernest, too. This Duff character was just too lovely and too familiar. She and Ernest talked so freely you’d think they’d known each other for years, and I felt newly vulnerable after hearing Kitty’s news. The worst events always have the thrust of accidents, as if they come out of nowhere. But that’s just lack of perspective. Kitty was blindsided, but Harold had likely been plotting his escape for months. I couldn’t help but wonder if this could happen to me, too. Just how long had Duff been in the picture, anyway?

  Sometime after midnight, when I just couldn’t stay awake another moment, I excused myself from Kitty and got Ernest’s attention. “It’s time to get your poor wife to bed,” I said. “I’m nearly falli
ng over.”

  “Poor Cat,” he said. “Go on home, then. Do you want me to find someone to walk with you?”

  “You want to stay?” I asked sharply. Duff turned politely away.

  “Of course. What’s the matter? I’m not the one who’s beat, right?”

  My voice left me altogether, then, but Kitty appeared to save me. “I’ll mind your wife, Hem. You stay and have a good time.” She challenged him with a steely look, but he didn’t bite.

  “That’s a good chap, Kitty. Thanks.” He stood and squeezed my arm in a brotherly way. “Get some rest.”

  I nodded in a kind of trance while Kitty grabbed me firmly by the arm and led me away. When we were outside, I started to cry quietly. “I’m so embarrassed,” I said.

  Kitty gave me a firm, buck-up sort of embrace. “He’s the one who should be embarrassed, darling. Her, too. They say she has to keep scores of men around because she can’t pay her own bills.”

  “Duff,” I said. “Who calls themselves such a thing?”

  “Exactly. I’d bet good money that even someone with as little sense as Hem wouldn’t leave a woman like you for that number. C’mon. Chin up.”

  “You’ve been so good to me, Kitty. I can’t tell you how much I’ll miss you.”

  “I know. I’m going to miss you, too, but what choice do I have? All I can do is run off to London and hope Harold chases me.”

  “Will he?”

  “I honestly don’t know.”

  • • •

  When I got home, Bumby was awake and gumming tearfully on a small rubber ring.

  Marie looked at me apologetically. “He had a terrible dream, I think. Poor dear. He wouldn’t let me soothe him.”

  “Thank you for staying so late, Marie.” When she’d gone I tried to settle Bumby, but he was whiny and fitful. It took me more than an hour to get him back to sleep, and by the time I fell into bed myself, I was so tired I felt delirious—but I couldn’t rest. I’d been feeling so strong and content with our life, but Kitty was right. The competition was getting fiercer all the time. Paris was filled with enticing women. They sat in the cafés with their fresh faces and long lovely legs and waited for something outrageous to happen. Meanwhile, my body had changed with motherhood. Ernest claimed to love my fleshier hips and breasts, but with so much else to look at, he could easily lose interest in me. Maybe he already had—and what could I do about it? What did anyone do?

  When Ernest came home some time later, I was still awake and so tired I began to cry. I couldn’t help myself.

  “Poor Mummy,” he said, climbing into bed beside me and holding me close. “I didn’t know you were so worn down. Let’s get you a nice long break.”

  “God yes,” I said, feeling a flood of relief. “Someplace very far from here.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  ur “someplace very far” was the little village of Schruns in the Austrian Vorarlberg. We arrived just before Christmas 1924, and from our first day, we felt more at home there than we could have imagined. For less than half of what we spent each week in Paris, we had two comfortable rooms at the Taube Hotel and a nanny, Tiddy, to take Bumby around. There were thirty-eight kinds of beer and red wine and brandy and kirsch and champagne. The air was champagne. Bumby could breathe better at Schruns; we all could. Tiddy would pull him through the village on his wooden sleigh while Ernest worked, or tried to, in our room when the breakfast was done, and I practiced downstairs at the piano, which was there all for my having in the warm room. In the afternoons, after hard cheese and sausages and heavy bread and sometimes oranges, we’d ski.

  We did a lot of skiing. A retired professional skier, Walther Lent, had opened a school, and we were his students. For weeks on end, there was only the pure white predictable crispness of snow. We’d hike for hours, up and up, because what good was it if we weren’t at the very top of something, with no one else around and no tracks or memory of anyone else, anywhere? Skiing this way took strength—incredible strength and stamina. There weren’t any lifts or trams. We carried our skis on our shoulders and anything else we’d need in rucksacks. To my great surprise, I could actually do it. Leaving Paris had been the best thing for me. I was sleeping well, I had help with the baby, and the fresh air and exercise had made me feel stronger and more fit than ever. On our slow climb up the long valley we’d see ptarmigan and deer and marten, sometimes a white Alpine fox. On the way down, we were aware only of virgin snow; the plunge and flight of glacier runs, great clouds of powder rising from our skis. I was the better skier, but Ernest was the better devourer of anything new—new air, new mantle of eggshell snow. We dropped and dropped. We flew.

  If you leaned from our second-story window at the Taube, pushing the top of your body out and holding on to the stucco walls with your fingertips, you could see no fewer than ten Alps dipped in snow.

  “How do you like that?” Ernest said the first time he tried this trick and then stood aside for me.

  “I like it very much,” I said. By then he’d come and pressed himself against me, his arms coming full around until it was really him holding me there in case I should want to fall. “I like it very much,” I said again, because I had two strong arms and ten Alps in sight. He pulled me into the room and we lay down on the featherbed and made love. And I was reminded of what was best about us. How very easy and natural we could be as bodies, with no sharp angles or missteps and no need for talking. How in bed, as nowhere else, he was my favorite animal and I was his.

  Behind the hotel there was a low hill where I practiced my skiing in the new snow while Ernest tried to work without much success. For the work alone he was missing Paris, the busyness of the city and his routine. Generally, if the work wasn’t good, nothing was, but at Schruns there was a softer bunting around the day. I could ski on the hill and know that he was looking out over the pasture, the farms and fields, and feeling tight in his head but not unhappy. And sometimes he was watching me race straight down the hill, low on my skis, coming fast at the hotel and turning sharply at the last minute.

  Ernest grew a fierce black beard that winter and looked magnificent in it. The work wasn’t coming, but there were rounds of bowling and poker by the fire in the evenings and schnapps, made from mountain gentians, that felt hot and tonicy and blue on your tongue and in your throat, just what you’d think drinking violets might be like. The hotel’s dining room was thick with smoke in the evenings. After dinner, I’d play the Bach or Haydn I’d practiced earlier in the day. Ernest would read Turgenev in his chair by the fire or play poker and smoke or talk about the war with Herr Nels, our proprietor. The wood smoke and the wool, the snow and the lovemaking—all of it warm and winding about us, building the good winter.

  The only thing that wasn’t perfect during this time was Ernest’s worrying about his career. It didn’t reassure him that all his friends were convinced of his talent, or that the reviews of Three Stories and Ten Poems had been nearly ecstatic. It was a little book, not at all on scale with his big dreaming. He’d sent his family several copies hot off the press, and they’d been returned with a chilly letter from Ernest’s father saying he and Grace weren’t comfortable having such material in the house. It was vulgar and profane at best. They wanted great things for him and hoped he would someday find a way to use his God-given talent to write something with strong morals and virtues. Until he did, he shouldn’t feel compelled to send anything he published home. The letter stung Ernest to the core. No matter what he said, he still deeply wanted his family’s approval.

  “To hell with them, anyway,” he said, but he kept the letter, folding it carefully and putting it in the drawer where he stored all of his important correspondence. Families can be vicious, he was fond of saying, and I could see what he meant clearly now. I could also see how he used the damage, pushing against it, redoubling his efforts to show them he didn’t need their love or endorsement. He would keep fighting until he had Vanity Fair and the Saturday Evening Post. Until an American editor took a ch
ance on him and he had a book, a real one, published the way he’d always dreamed.

  It didn’t help his mood that things were taking off for Harold. He’d finished his novel when he said he would, sent it directly off to Boni and Liveright. And they’d taken it. We got the news just before we left for Schruns. Harold had come to the apartment fairly bursting with excitement. “What do you know, Hem. Did you ever think it would hit for me?”

  “Sure, why not?” Ernest had said. He was seething with professional jealousy, of course, but he held his tongue and behaved, opening a bottle of brandy and bringing the siphon over. “Anderson’s been trying to get me to go with Liveright, too. I have a handful of good stories, and I’m thinking of sending them off with the sketches I’ve been doing, the miniatures.”

  “They’re just the place to do it,” Harold said. “What are you waiting for?”

  “I don’t know. There are other fish in the sea, right? What about Scribner’s? Or Henry Doran?”

  “Wherever you land, you’ll do what’s best. It’s all going to happen for you, too. You’ll see.”

  I knew with a certainty that Ernest would have leaped at the chance to have any major publisher do the book, but with a lot of cajoling from me and Harold and Sherwood too, Ernest finally mailed the manuscript to Boni and Liveright just before Christmas. He’d settled on the title In Our Time because he’d tried to get to the heart of life at this very moment, with all its violence and chaos and strange beauty. It was the best work he’d done, and he felt good about having sent it off into the world, but the wait for a response was torturing him. When forwarded mail arrived for us at the Taube, Ernest raked through it impatiently looking for one thing, an acceptance letter. It was all he’d ever wanted.