The Paris Wife by Paula McLain
I stared out the window at nothing.
“You said you’d never do this, you know.”
He was right. Over and over I’d sworn I’d never stand in the way of his work, particularly when we were just beginning, when I saw his career as my own and believed it was my role or even my fate to help him carve a way. But more and more I understood that I didn’t know what those promises really meant. Part of me wanted him to be as unhappy as I was. Maybe then he’d give in and stay.
But he didn’t. We didn’t speak or touch for three days, and when he left, on September 25, he was so hurt and angry I could barely stand to look at him. I stood at the door and watched him struggle with his bags on the stairs. Toward the bottom, he dropped the valise holding his Corona. It fell hard, bounced with a sickening clatter, and then fell again. He kicked it angrily before he picked it up. When he got to the door at the bottom of the stairs, he kicked that, too, and then I heard nothing.
EIGHTEEN
t might be malaria breaking through the quinine, but everything is strangely yellow. The long road is a tamped and stark ocher color and the mountains in the distance are darker. There’s a river, the Maritza, and it’s running high and fast because it’s been raining for five days and the rain, too, is yellow.
He hasn’t slept well since he left Paris, and this makes the rain harder to walk through. There isn’t an end to any of it, the rain or the walking. Columns of refugees surge and spill onto the Karagatch Road. They’ve loaded their carts with everything they can’t bear to leave behind, the ones who have carts, and the rest are strapped to bundles and carry other bundles or carry children. The children carry what they can and cry when they get too tired or scared. Everyone’s scared and wet and the rain keeps coming.
He is here to bear witness, he understands that, and so makes himself see everything and not look away from any of it, though much he sees gives him a sick feeling in his stomach. It’s his first taste of war since he was inside the war, and that alone started a terrible shaking in him the first two days. The shaking is gone now. He’s forced it back and now can do what he came to do.
Along the Karagatch Road, he talks with many who’ve come from Smyrna and seen the fires there and worse. A man with a bright red face watched his sister run down to the quay screaming and alight to the tips of her hair. Another man is bandaged from his hand to his shoulder, the cloth filthy and sodden, and even in the rain you can smell the gangrene, a sweet smell like roasting almonds. The man speaks through an interpreter and says he hid under the pier at Smyrna for most of a day and a night, the water up to his chest sometimes. It was the mussels on the footings of the pier that cut his hand and arm when the tide came in and pushed him against the hard shells.
“There were searchlights in the harbor,” the man says. “And you didn’t want to see the things floating there, all around you.”
In the end he came out of the water and found his family and took to the road, like so many others. He was cut deep in several places but he wasn’t bleeding. He had thought the salt would cure his wounds and that he’d be fine without a surgeon.
“You can see I’m not fine,” the man says through the interpreter, and keeps walking.
“Yes, anyone can see that,” Ernest says.
They walk next to a cart pulled by a single great ox streaming with rain, and in the cart the man’s wife is in labor. The bedding in the cart is wet through, and there’s another blanket, tented and dripping, that two of her children hold over her as she bears down. An old woman crouches between her knees while the children try to look away, and it makes Ernest sick to see this and to hear her screaming, which won’t be helped until the child is born, and maybe not even then.
The man is still walking and looking ahead through the rain and says, “My wife knows I’m a coward. I hid under the pier. I meant to leave them all.”
Ernest nods and looks up to see they’re coming to a bridge over the river, a wooden structure that looks slick but sound for all the weight on it, carts and oxen and camels, the bodies packed in and no one moving forward or back.
In the distance, over the heads of the living, he sees the fine white spires of a mosque, minarets rising out of the yellow muck, detached from the very real things happening on the road, the mud and the screaming and the cowardice and the rain. In the pocket of his jacket there’s a blue notebook folded in half and two pencils. The paper’s drenched through, he knows it without having to check, but he couldn’t write any of this anyway. He’ll send a dispatch from the hotel tonight, if it hasn’t floated off in the rain. For now, all he can do is make himself see everything and not shake and not look away.
A week passes but it feels as if he’s never been anywhere else. It’s one of the things war does to you. Everything you see works to replace moments and people from your life before, until you can’t remember why any of it mattered. It doesn’t help if you’re not a soldier. The effect is the same.
He sleeps on a cot in a hotel in Adrianople wrapped in a dirty blanket and covered with sores from the lice. He spends his days talking to refugees and writing and sending dispatches to the Star and to the INS under the name John Hadley. Sometimes he’s too tired and sends the same story twice. He could give a damn; let them fire him. They’ll have to find him first and he’s nowhere.
When night falls, he goes to a bar where a very dark Armenian girl with deep shadows under her eyes wears a colored dress that ties at the waist. He can see the shape of her breasts under the cloth and wants to touch her, and it all becomes very simple. Another man comes along, a British soldier, and puts his hands on the girl’s waist and she smiles. That’s when Ernest flares forward and punches the soldier. He hasn’t meant to do it exactly. He just knows he needs to move if he wants the girl. They never come to you, and why would you want them to? He feels his fist connect with the soldier’s jaw and the jaw springing loose. He doesn’t feel anything yet himself. The soldier drops to one knee, and then comes up again fast, his eyes bright and very wide. He lunges, but isn’t quick or low enough. Ernest hits him in the gut this time, and feels the man’s breath collapsing around his hand.
The girl says something he doesn’t understand, but it sounds like “Enough.” He takes her hand and they leave. There’s a taxi outside and they go to her room without saying anything. Behind the door, she unties the dress, and then reaches for his belt. He pushes her hands away. He’ll do it all himself, though his right hand is bleeding. He sits on a small wooden chair and pulls her down on top of him and feels how rough and silky she is straddling him. He is the one moving her, as if she’s a doll, and he knows it has to be this way because it makes him feel that he won’t die, at least for tonight. He groans when it’s over, and it’s over quickly the first time. He stays with her in her filthy bed, and in the morning, he leaves the address of his hotel on a sheet of notebook paper and also two American dollars. He thinks he probably won’t see her again, but that it would be all right if he did. He has more money to spend, and maybe if he saw her again, he wouldn’t feel so sick, like he does now, and maybe it will be better and maybe it will fix something.
He goes into the street, where it’s still very early and cool and hasn’t yet started to rain again. He walks back to his hotel thinking, You’ve done it now, haven’t you? It’s too late to take anything back and you wouldn’t anyway. You need to remember that later, when you see your wife and want to die for hurting her. Remember no one made you do anything. It’s never anyone but you who does anything, and for that reason alone you shouldn’t be sorry.
Now it is raining again, a very fine drizzle that seeps into the fabric of his shirt and trousers. He feels the small buildings push toward him along the muddy road, and there is the very real thought, again, that there isn’t any other world. What does it matter if you know your being with another will kill your wife, if you have no wife? You don’t have Paris, either, or anything else. You might as well see the dark girl again. You might as well bring yourself down a
NINETEEN
hen he was gone, I felt sad and guilty, hating myself instantly. I looked at the whiskey bottle on the shelf and even held it for a moment before putting it back. Not before lunch. I would never make it through that way. So I made some coffee instead and peeled an orange and tried not to think about him on the train. He would be two days traveling, at least, and then he’d be in another world, and a dangerous one. All I could do was hope that he’d be safe, and that the thread that bound us was strong enough to weather the damage done.
Except for two scribbled postcards sent before he was over the border into Turkey, I didn’t hear from Ernest when he was gone and I blamed the cable service for it because I didn’t want to think what else his silence might mean. I read his first story in the Star when it arrived two weeks later, but thinking too specifically about what was happening there—not just violence but disease, too, apparently, cholera and malaria in epidemic proportions—only made things worse, so I burned the paper and went for a walk.
Marie Cocotte came every afternoon. “You need to get out of your bed,” she said, and brought me an apron to tie around my robe. Together we made boeuf bourguignon and blanquette de veau and cassoulet, and it was all lovely, though I couldn’t make myself eat it.
Lewis Galantière came by and sat at the terrible dining table and tried to drag me out to Michaud’s.
“James Joyce has apparently fathered six more children just this week. They’re all there, eating an enormous mutton and spouting milk out their nostrils. Tell me you don’t need to see it for yourself.”
I made myself smile and then dressed, putting on my coat and my least unfashionable shoes. “Let’s go around the corner, though,” I said. “Not Michaud’s tonight, all right?”
“I’m your humble servant, madame.”
I didn’t tell Lewis or anyone else how bad things had gotten between us. I was too embarrassed. In the mornings I wrote letters and lied, telling Grace and Dr. Hemingway that all was fine and well. I explained how smoothly Ernest’s work had been going for the Star, how promising his career looked. I didn’t say he’d recently decided to break his exclusive contract with them and file stories under a pseudonym for the International News Service. All of this had been negotiated in secret and meant lying and stickiness when something for INS hit the wire before his “exclusives” for the Star did, but he’d claimed it was worth it for the money. He’d work it out with his own conscience. I had a harder time with this dishonesty, because it seemed to speak of something larger. The way he was always out for himself, whatever the cost.
But thinking this way got me nowhere. Nowhere but back to the whiskey, that is, so I put my thinking down with the stack of letters and walked to the Musée du Luxembourg instead, to visit the Monets. I stood and looked into the brightest patches of his lilies and the lovely purpling in the water and tried not to see anything else at all.
At the end of October, in the very early morning, Ernest stepped off his train at the Gare de Lyon looking as if he’d been in a terrible battle and lost. He was weak and exhausted and feverish with malaria. He’d shed twenty pounds or more, and I hardly recognized him. He moved into my arms and collapsed there, and then we went home where he leaned over the basin and let me shampoo his head, which was crawling with lice.
“I’m so sorry for everything, Tatie,” I said when his eyes were closed.
“Let’s not say anything about it. It doesn’t matter now.”
I took up the scissors and cut his hair very close to his head and picked the rest of the lice out one by one, bringing the lamp over so I could see everything. Then I rubbed his body all over with cream and helped him into fresh clean sheets where he slept for twenty-four hours. When he woke up, I brought him eggs and toast and ham and mustard, and he ate this all gratefully, and then he slept again.
He didn’t leave the bed for a week, and sometimes I just watched him sleep and knew by the look of him that he’d suffered in ways he wouldn’t be able to talk about, not for a long time. The breach between us had been terrible and the silence, too, but his time in Turkey had come to outshadow all of that. And maybe he was right that it didn’t matter. He was home now, and we were together again, and maybe it would all be all right as long as we didn’t think about it or give it any room or air.
After a week, he could get out of bed and bathe and dress and was almost ready to see friends. He went to his duffel bag and moved the notebooks aside to bring out presents rolled in newspaper and layers of cloth. He’d brought me a bottle of attar of roses and also a heavy amber necklace with big, rough beads that were threaded with black coral and silver.
“It’s as beautiful as anything ever,” I said, holding up the necklace.
“It belonged to an extremely important Russian diplomat who’s now a waiter.”
“I hope you paid him well for it.”
“I did, and got him drunk to boot,” Ernest said, nearly himself now.
I waited for him to say more about it all, but he just sat at the table and drank his coffee and asked after the newspapers.
I knew he loved me again; I could see that. No matter what each of us had felt or thought about the other in our weeks apart, that time was over now. I opened the bottle of attar of roses, which was a deep yellow and smelled like pure rose, the absolute thing. Somehow, without finding or fixing any words to it, the next part of our story had begun.
TWENTY
areful now,” Ernest said. “You know you’re inviting the devil in.”
“Am I?”
“You know you are.”
“He can come then, as long as he comes this way, all in green vapor.”
We were at the Select with Pound and Dorothy, whom we’d taken to calling Shakespear. Pound had just taken on the editorship of a new literary press called Three Mountains and was keen to publish something of Ernest’s. We were all in high spirits that night, and I’d only meant to have the one glass of absinthe, to celebrate.
“You must go more slowly,” Pound said.
“Must I?” I said, but he wasn’t talking to me at all, but to the waiter pouring water over a sugar cube into the drink, which was going from a wickedly clear yellow-green to a cloudy white as the water dripped in. Absinthe was illegal in France and had been for years. So was opium, but you could find both everywhere in Paris if you knew where to look. I loved the delicate licorice taste and the way the ritual of the cube and specially perforated spoon made raindrops, sugar drops. Our waiter was doing it beautifully, I thought, but Pound grabbed the pitcher with force, taking over.
“You’re drunk, darling,” Shakespear said to him in her civilized whisper.
“I’m trying to picture you drunk,” Ernest said to her. “I’m betting you never spill a drop.”
She laughed. “If I don’t, it’s because I won’t touch absinthe.”
“It’s licorice candy and smoke,” I said.
“You’ll wish it were only that tomorrow,” Ernest said.
“Maybe, but it makes everything easier now, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, it does,” Ernest said, touching my glass with his. “So have it and to hell with tomorrow.”
“Hear, hear,” said Pound leaning forward in his rumpled tweed jacket and putting his elbows on the table. I was growing to like him more all the time—but I was generally liking everyone. I thought I might be in love with our waiter. He had the prettiest mustache, un-waxed and pure and fresh as flowers. I wanted to touch it or eat it.
“You should grow your mustache like that,” I said to Ernest, pointing not at all subtly.
“I am, dear. It’s just the same.”
I looked at him square. “So it is,” I said. “Where have you been?” And we all laughed.
Later, when we’d moved on to the Dôme, Pound started talking about the States.
“I’d never return to the Middle West,” he was saying, “I renounce i
“Oh, that old story,” Shakespear said in her low perfect whisper.
I looked into the long smoky mirror and touched my face, then the glass. “I can’t feel anything,” I said to Ernest. “Isn’t it wonderful?”
“Have another, Tatie,” Ernest said. “You’re very beautiful.”
Shakespear smiled at us with her curved mouth and her eyes smiled, too. “Look at our pretty lovers,” she said to Pound.
“Indiana’s always been an intellectual wasteland, mind you,” he said, and then blew a smoke ring that circled before being swallowed by the rest of it, the blue halo that was everywhere, blending and blurring. All of us breathing it in and out.
“All they have is the moral high ground,” he went on. “There’s nothing else within reach. I was useless teaching at Wabash. What did those young people with cornhusks between their ears want to hear me rant on about? Not Yeats, that’s for certain. Not poetry.”
“The actress was a small bit of poetry,” Shakespear said.
“The most scrumptious knees I’ve ever seen on a woman,” Pound said.
“Do go on,” Ernest said. “I’m getting hungry.”
“There was rain that night—it’s always raining in Indiana, intellectually speaking, you understand—and the actress … what was her name?”
“Bertha,” Shakespear said.
“Not Camille?” Ernest said.
“No, no. She wasn’t consumptive. Just didn’t want to get her hair damp. She had lovely hair. I’d suggested we go out to dinner, but then there was the matter of dampness.”
“One of my favorite problems,” Ernest said.
Everyone laughed and then Pound said, “When word got out I’d entertained her in my room, you’d think I’d murdered the girl instead of roasted a chicken.”
“Poor Ezra,” Shakespear said. “They fired him next day.”