The Paris Wife: A Novel

by Paula McLain

  “Maybe. Or maybe I’m my own Hadley.” We could see the stippled arch of the Hotel La Perla and the tangled wall of bougainvillea. I stopped and turned to him. “Why aren’t you all bound up with Duff, too? Everyone else is.”

  “She’s a dish, all right, and it would be easy enough to give in. She’s asked me to take care of her bill at the hotel, you know, since she can’t ask Harold now. Maybe she’s asked Hem, too.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “Are you and Hem all right? He wouldn’t be stupid enough to throw you over for that title in a nice-fitting sweater, would he?”

  I flinched. “Maybe we should have a drink.”

  “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said it. I think the world of you two. If you guys can’t make it, what chance do the rest of us have?”

  “You really are a peach, Don,” I said, and moved forward to kiss him on the cheek. His skin was shaved clean as a baby’s and he smelled clean, like tonic.

  “You might be the best girl there is,” he said with feeling, and returned the kiss. His lips were dry and chaste on my cheek, but then he moved ever so slightly and kissed me on the lips. When he pulled away, his eyes were moist and questioning. “I don’t suppose you love me, too, just a little?”

  “I wish I did. It might balance things out.” I put my arms around his neck and held him close for a moment, feeling the sadness and confusion, all mixed up together in him. “This place has us all going crazy.”

  “You’re not angry with me?”

  “No,” I said. “We’re better friends now, I think.”

  “Isn’t that a nice way to say it? I knew I wasn’t wrong about you.” He pulled away and brushed the hair out of my eyes. “I hope Hem knows what he has.”

  “Me too,” I said, and went into the hotel. Inside, the señora was placing a cloth over her songbird’s cage.

  “He doesn’t like the rockets,” she said as she settled the blanket more closely around the bars. “They make him tear at his own feathers. Have you seen this?”

  “I have, Señora.” I passed her on my way to the staircase. “Can you please send brandy up?”

  She looked behind me to see who might be coming along, so I added, “Just one glass.”

  “Is the señora well?”

  “Not very,” I said. “But the brandy will help.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  hen I woke the next morning, Ernest was already up and gone. I’d heard him come in late in the night, but I didn’t stir and didn’t speak to him. By seven I was washed and dressed and down in the hotel’s small café where Ernest was finishing his coffee.

  “I’ve ordered you oeufs au jambon,” he said. “Are you hungry?”

  “Starved,” I said. “How’d it end last night?”

  “Good and tight,” he said.

  “Good and tight, or just tight?”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Like hell,” he said. “Why don’t you say it?”

  “I haven’t even had coffee,” I said. “Do we really need to quarrel?”

  “We needn’t do anything. There isn’t time anyway.”

  Bill came downstairs then and pulled up a chair. “I’m starved,” he said.

  “That’s going around,” Ernest said. He signaled the waiter over and asked for another plate for Bill and café au lait, and then signed the bill. “I’m going to arrange for our tickets. I’ll see you up there.”

  When he was gone, Bill looked sheepish.

  “What really happened last night?”

  “Nothing I want to remember,” he said.

  “Don’t tell me then.”

  “I don’t know all of it, anyway. Harold said something to Pat, and then Hem flared up and called Harold something terrible. It wasn’t pretty.”

  “I would guess not.”

  “Don showed up and tried to straighten things out, but it was too late. Harold had called Ernest out in the street to settle it.”

  “Harold did? It wasn’t the other way around?”

  “No. And that was something, really.”

  “Is Harold all right?”

  “Right as rain. They never touched each other.”

  “Thank God.”

  “Apparently Hem offered to hold Harold’s glasses for him and that broke the spell. They both laughed and felt like stupid bastards for even starting it up.”

  “What’s wrong with all of us, Bill? Can you tell me that?”

  “Hell if I know,” he said. “We drink too much for starters. And we want too much, don’t we?”

  “What is it we want exactly?” I said, feeling a stir of melancholy and confusion. I wondered how Bill was making sense of the way Ernest was throwing himself so obviously at Duff. What could he think? What could he say?

  “Everything, of course. Everything and then some.” He scratched his chin and then tried a joke. “My headache today proves it.”

  I studied him for a moment. “If this is a festival, why aren’t we happy?”

  He cleared his throat and looked away. “We shouldn’t miss the amateurs, right? Hem says it’s the best show for your money and that I should get right in.”

  I sighed. “You don’t have to prove anything to him. You didn’t seem to go in for the running.”

  “No,” he said, seeming slightly ashamed. “But I’m ready to give it another go. I’m not dead yet.”

  “Why does everyone keep saying that?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s just one of those things.”

  The amateurs had long been Ernest’s favorite element of the fiesta. For years he’d been practicing veronicas with everything from the curtains to my old coat and getting good at them. Now he could bulldog the bulls, spinning away at the last moment. Afterward he’d be high and happy and practice some more in our room at the hotel with the cape he’d bought from a shop well off the square that didn’t cater to tourists. The cape was heavy red serge with simple black braid as a border all the way around. He had started collecting corks for the bottom of it, because it was the corks that allowed the matador to really control the cape and swing it well and wide.

  When it was time for the amateurs that morning, he took the cape with him as he climbed down into the ring with several dozen eager men and boys all ready to test their wits. Bill went, too, but Harold stayed put for the moment, a few seats down from Duff.

  “Pat’s still pretty green this morning,” Duff said when I took my seat beside her. “It was a long night.”

  “So I heard.”

  “We missed you, you know. Everything’s more fun with you along.”

  I gave her a sharp look, thinking she was putting me on, but her face was open and warm. That was the thing about Duff; she was a wreck with men, but a good chap all the way around, and she had her own code. I didn’t believe she’d actually sleep with Ernest even if he’d wanted to—because she liked me and knew being a wife was hard business. She’d been married twice already and was set to marry Pat if they ever pulled together the money for it. She told me once that she’d never been very good at marriage but that she didn’t seem to be able to stop giving it a go.

  Down in the ring, the picadors had pretty good control of things, so the action seemed light and fairly harmless. There was only one bull in the ring at a time, and this first was caramel colored and slow moving. It came along and shoved its foreleg against Bill’s rump, and he fell to one side like a character in a cartoon. It had everyone laughing. Ernest was just getting into the spirit of things when Harold climbed past us and got down into the ring, too.

  “Oh, Harold,” Duff said to no one in particular because he looked like a caricature of a rich and helpless American in his pale yellow Fair Isle sweater and snow-white sneakers. We both watched him. “I’ve told him there’s nothing between us, you know.”

  “I’m not sure he hears it,” I said, trying to be as delicate as possible.

  “Men hear what they like and invent
the rest.”

  Once Harold had reached the ring, he looked up to where we were and smiled broadly. The caramel bull was near him and getting nearer, and Harold dodged to one side to avoid the horns, as everyone did. The bull trotted past and then whirled to come again, and that’s when Harold grabbed onto the horns and let the bull carry him for a few paces. It was like watching a well-rehearsed circus act. Harold had to be as surprised by his success as much as anyone, but when the bull set him down again, light as a feather, he turned back to us, looking jubilant.

  “Hem doesn’t like this one bit,” Duff said. My eyes followed hers to where Ernest stood in the ring watching Harold. His expression was grim. A picador passed within a foot of him, but he didn’t even seem to notice.

  “He can’t stand another man besting him,” I said, but Duff and I both knew that Ernest had been angry with Harold all week, ever since he found out about the lovers’ tryst in St.-Jean-de-Luz. It was bad enough that Harold got to have Duff when Ernest was hampered with a wife and child, but then Harold had spent every day in Pamplona following Duff around like a poor sick steer, making an ass out of himself. It was all too much.

  The next bull in the ring was slimmer and quicker. He moved like a cat, loping first toward one wall then another, changing direction on a dime. One local with a dark shirt got too close and was shoved to his knees. The bull reared his head around, and the man fell farther and was trampled. Everyone hurried to distract the bull. Ernest had him for a moment by swinging his cape wide to one side. Other men waved their arms and called out, but the bull returned to the man who hadn’t yet risen and pushed him with his head. The man’s legs came over his own head just as the bull jerked to one side, his right horn moving into the man’s thigh just under his buttock and zipping down to the knee. He cried out sharply, and we saw his thighbone flash white, and then blood running freely before the picadors rushed the bull and forced him first to the wall and then behind the fence where he would wait nine hours and then be killed.

  That was the end of the amateurs. The ring emptied quickly, and Duff and I climbed down to meet the boys. We hadn’t spoken a word to each other since we saw the goring. When we got to them we saw they were silent, too.

  Out on the street, we made our way to a café.

  “I’ll be damned,” Bill said as he walked beside me. His face was flat and white. His shoes were covered with dust. We found a table and had just ordered a round of the thick beer we liked to have with lunch when the gored man was taken past us on the street on a stretcher. A bloodied sheet covered him from the waist down.

  “Toro, toro!” someone in the café yelled drunkenly and the man sat up. Everyone cheered, and then a young boy ran over with a glass of whiskey, which the man drank and then threw back empty to the boy, who caught it well with one hand. Then everyone cheered again.

  “It’s a hell of a way to live, isn’t it?” Duff said.

  “I can think of worse,” Ernest said.

  Our beer had come and we got to it. The waiter brought gazpacho and good hard bread and some nice fish poached in lime, and though I didn’t think I would be able to eat after the sight of the goring, I found I was hungry and that it all tasted very good to me.

  Harold stayed to one side of the table, well out of Ernest’s way, but when Pat finally showed up with Don, he was pale and irritable, and Harold seemed not to know where to move or whom he could speak to safely. And for the rest of the lunch our table was like an intricate game of emotional chess, with Duff looking to Ernest, who kept one eye on Pat, who was glaring at Harold, who was glancing furtively at Duff. Everyone was drinking too much and wrung out and working hard to pretend they were jollier and less affected than everyone else.

  “I can take the bulls and the blood,” Don said to me quietly. “It’s this human business that turns my stomach.”

  I looked from him to Ernest, who hadn’t spoken to me or so much as glanced at me since breakfast. “Yes,” I said to Don. “But what’s the trick for it?”

  “I wish to hell I knew. Maybe there is no trick.” He drained the last of his beer and signaled the waiter for more.

  “Sometimes I wish we could rub out all of our mistakes and start fresh, from the beginning,” I said. “And sometimes I think there isn’t anything to us but our mistakes.”

  He laughed grimly, solemnly, while on the other side of the table, Duff was whispering something in Ernest’s ear while he cackled roughly, like a sailor. I turned my chair at an angle away from them where I didn’t have to see them at all. As soon as I did this, I had the clearest memory of Fonnie and Roland a hundred years ago in St. Louis, and how she couldn’t stand to look at him because she thought he was weak and detestable. Their story had always been full of sadness and misery. Roland had returned home from the sanitarium, but hadn’t recovered any sense of peace. He and Fonnie led utterly separate lives now, though staying in the same house on Cates Avenue, for the sake of the children.

  What was happening between Ernest and me was nowhere near as dire, I hoped, but he was hurting me with every whisper and look in Duff’s direction. And I found myself feeling differently about marriage, and about the damage lovers could do to one another, irreparable damage sometimes, and almost without thinking.

  “How sad and strange we all are,” I said to Don.

  “That’s what had me so maudlin yesterday. I’m sorry about that, by the way.”

  “There’s nothing to be sorry for. Let’s just be good friends who know these things but don’t have to say them.”

  “All right,” he said, and looked at his hands, and drank some more of his beer, and the afternoon wore on this way until it was time for the corrida.

  The young matador Cayetano Ordóñez was a boy, really, but he moved so naturally and with such grace it seemed as if he were dancing. The deep red serge of his cape was alive with even the slightest flick of his arms. He had a way of planting his feet and leaning forward slightly, facing whatever came and urging the bull to charge him with the slightest gesture or glance.

  Ernest had been in a foul mood when we entered the ring for the corrida but was starting to come awake as Ordóñez moved. Duff got up to sit nearer to him, seeing the change.

  “My God, but that’s a fine man,” Duff said.

  “He’s the real article all right,” Ernest said. “Watch this.”

  Ordóñez was leading his bull in, turning one veronica and then another tighter one with his cape, drawing the bull magnetically. The picadors had backed off because they knew Ordóñez had him and was in complete control. It was a dance, and it was also great art. His knowledge was primal and ancient and he carried it so naturally and easily for one so young.

  “Some are just going through the motions,” Ernest said. “It’s pretty, all right, but it doesn’t mean anything. This hombre, he knows you have to get near enough to die. You have to already be dead really in order to live and to conquer the animal.”

  Duff nodded, taken over by his enthusiasm, and, God help me, I was too. Ernest’s eyes, as he spoke, were suddenly nearly as alive as Ordóñez’s cape. The intensity bubbled up from a deep place in him and came into his face and his throat, and I saw the way he was connected to Ordóñez and the bullfight, and to life as it was happening, and I knew that I could hate him all I wanted for the way he was hurting me, but I couldn’t ever stop loving him, absolutely, for what he was.

  “Now look,” he said. The bull came in low, his left horn pushed forward, his neck twisting. Ordóñez’s thigh was inches from the bull’s powerful legs, and he leaned nearer, so that when the bull’s head lifted, searching for the cape, he just grazed Ordóñez’s belly. We could almost hear a whisper as the horns passed the cloth of his silk jacket. A gasp went up in the crowd, because this is what they had come to see.

  “You’ll never see it done better than that,” Ernest said, throwing his hat to his feet in respect.

  “Goddamned beautiful,” Duff said.

  We all sighed, and when the b
ull had been broken and was on its knees, bowing, Ordóñez ran the sword in clean. Everyone stood, cheering, the whole crowd moved and taken over by the spectacle and the mastery. I stood, too, and applauded like crazy, and I must have been standing in a particularly bright ray of sun because Ordóñez looked up at me then, up and into my face, and his eyes took in my hair.

  “He thinks you’re muy linda,” Ernest said, following Ordóñez’s eyes to me. “He’s honoring you.”

  The young matador bent over the bull, slicing off its ear with a small knife. He called a boy over from the stands and sent him to me with the ear cupped in his palms. He delivered it shyly, barely daring to look at me, but I could tell he felt it was a very great privilege to carry it for Ordóñez. I didn’t quite know how to accept it, what the rules were for such things, and so simply held out my hands. It was black and triangular and still warm, with only the faintest trace of blood—the strangest thing I’d ever held.

  “I’ll be damned,” Ernest said, clearly very proud.

  “What will you do with it?” Duff asked.

  “Keep it, of course,” Don said, and handed me his handkerchief so I could wrap it inside and also wipe my hands.

  Still standing, I held the ear in the handkerchief and looked down into the ring where Ordóñez was being buried in flowers. He glanced up at me, bowed low and deeply, and then returned to being adored.

  “I’ll be damned,” Ernest said again.

  There were five more bullfights that day, but none matched the beauty of the first. When we went to the café after, we were all still thrumming with it, even Bill, who couldn’t stomach most of the day, particularly the way two of the horses were gored and went down and had to be killed quickly while everyone watched. It was all terrible and terribly intense, and I was ready for a drink.

  I passed the ear around the table so everyone could admire it and be horrified in turn. Duff got drunk very quickly and began to flirt openly with Harold, who was too surprised and pleased to be discreet about it. The two disappeared at one point, which had Pat furious. When an hour or more had passed, they wandered back in a very jolly mood, as if nothing were amiss.