Mrs. Hemingway (14 page)

“How's Gerald?”

“Oh, coping.”

“Is he still painting?”

“He does what he can. I think depression gets in the way a lot.”

“It's understandable. That he'd feel like that.”

“Of course our grief is very
understandable.
” Sara fixes her robot head to the boxed trunk. “Doesn't make it any easier, of course, knowing it's so very understandable.” Sara steps back to survey her work. “Gerald paints,” she says as she's chopping a can in two, then fixing the halves as eyelets to the box, “for a week or so, then he gives up. It's not a question of talent; it's more a case of seeing the purpose in doing it at all. I try to encourage him but there's little point if he draws no pleasure from it. What's the point in art no one else is going to see if it's not even fun to make? Might as well not bother. Look at Zelda. I think art can do very bad things to a woman's head. Just look at what it does to men.”

“I think Zelda would have ended up there with or without her writing,” Fife says. Neither of them says
sanatorium.

Sara puts the finishing touches to her robots, which sit like two little kids themselves. “Scott always thought money was a great immunizer. But look where it's gotten him. It's ruined the Fitzgeralds. If they'd had half the money they would've had double their luck. Absolutely.”

Sara sips from her drink. “Scott was always a deeply intelligent idiot. That week in Switzerland, when we all thought it was the end for Patrick, I counted them up. There were four novelists in the room that day. And I was sure that no one would ever write of it. They were too cowardly to write about what was real.” She pauses and her voice sounds near to cracking.

“And yet it was like something out of a story. The ice melt on the mountains. The light on the snowcaps, the smell of pines. It was so quiet. I remember hearing a tree come down and wondering how far away it was. What the sound of timber might be like if you got your ear close. You know, I just wanted to be out in the cold. To get away from my dying son. How awful: to want to be away from your child. But part of me couldn't stand it anymore.”

Sara picks up her brush and composes herself as she paints. She gives Fife a small, ironic smile. “Well. Good fortune harasses us all, does it not?”

 • • • 

When the costumes are nearly complete and Fife has fixed up a couple more cocktails, Sara says: “And so, dear Fife, what news of the Spanish Front?”

“I was afraid you were going to ask that.”

“Oh dear.”

Fife goes into the house to fetch what she has found this past week. When she returns, Sara looks up, one arm around her chest as if these European memories have made her cold.

“What do you have here?” Sara leafs through the pages of Martha's book. “We knew she'd written this.”

“Look at the photograph. Clipped to the back.”

Sara reads the inscription. “Oh,” she says flatly, closing the book, laying her thin hands on the dust jacket. “Where did you find it?”

“In his work case. The one I'm not meant to fuss with to avoid a Hadley-style disaster. The date is the day they docked.”

“Oh, Fife.”

“Then I found the dedication for the play he's writing.”

“It's for Martha?”

Fife flinches. “
Marty
—that's what he calls her. And it's made
with love
.” Sara sighs and puts the book to one side. Her robot men stand behind her like sentries. “I remember when I had some say in this. I went to Paris last Christmas thinking I could find out what was going on. When I went to Sylvia's she couldn't cover up the fact that she'd thought me out of the scene. Sylvia knew about them, just as she'd known about me and Ernest before anyone else.”

“You can't extrapolate the end of your marriage from a thrown look of Sylvia Beach. You do realize Sylvia probably hadn't seen you in a decade? Maybe she didn't recognize you.”

“I told Ernest at the hotel where he could shove those books. I even offered to throw myself off the balcony if he didn't propose to
do
something. But nothing's changed. And now we're all in the same fucking jam as six months ago. Hell, let's call a spade a spade. We're in the same jam as Hadley and I were in a decade ago.”

Sara crosses her legs. On the chair she looks as neat as a folding knife. “It's ridiculous for him to continue with Martha and be with you at the same time. You must give him an ultimatum.”

Fife leans forward. She attempts to be as precise as possible. “Hadley gave Ernest an ultimatum that night of the party. I heard them from my room. She forced him into making the decision. And look what happened to them.
I
didn't win Ernest;
Hadley
lost him. Sara: I won't make the same mistake.”

 • • • 

The telephone sounds from the house. Fife drops the wig and goes into the hall where Gerald had so robustly defended her two years ago.

“Pauline. Hello.”

Her skin crawls when she hears his voice. “Mr. Cuzzemano. I've told you to stop bothering us.”

“Pauline—”

“No one calls me that. Please stop.”

She is about to put down the telephone. “Mrs. Hem-ingway, I am not calling about the suitcase.” Something about Cuzzemano's voice makes her still her hand. “I am calling about a different matter altogether.” There is a pause on the line, a crackling. She remembers what he said to her, at the party at Villa America, when no one was listening:
Miss Pfeiffer: I know you are fucking Mr. Hemingway
—in an attempt to blackmail her of Ernest's things. Fife had laughed and said, “Darling, you wouldn't find a person around this table who
doesn't
know I'm fucking Mr. Hemingway. Even his wife is on very familiar terms with that fact.”

“Mrs. Hemingway,” Cuzzemano says, with oily delicacy. “If there's any way, any way at all, you might procure any of the . . . aftereffects of Miss Martha Gellhorn, I would be able to pay you handsomely. Handsomely! Or any letters written by your husband to his . . .” He clears his throat with theatrical poise. “Affinity. Just look in his drawers, in his correspondence, for any of their love letters. You'd be anonymous: no one would even know—”

“Good-bye, Mr. Cuzzemano—”

“Know that I am here if your situation changes, and if my proposition becomes more attractive—”

The telephone rattles in its cage.

 • • • 

Sara has clipped back her bangs and her head is at full tilt to the sunshine. She is in the company of her robots, one of whose arms has fallen off and with it some of the paint, revealing the
TOASTED CORN FLAKES
lettering on its side. She opens one eye. “Who was it?”

“The grocer. We're late on a bill.”

Fife makes daiquiris for them both. She thinks, as she stabs at the ice, of giving Harry Cuzzemano just what he wants. A small part of her wants to revel in her husband's ruin if Miss Martha Gellhorn is still around. She thinks again of the inscription. Those words.
Nesto. Be mine forever
. What did
forever
mean to that woman?

Ernest comes home with Gerald and Honoria that evening, tired, the stink of fish on them, zinc still on their noses. Fife imagines herself as one of his sailfish, hooked in at the mouth. He'll let the line out, let it slacken for a while. He will do this once, twice, three times, letting the fish go, as if it were free, before reeling it in and gaffing it on the boat. What a strange dance it is, until she comes in bleeding, reeled in by the nickel-plated rod.

They eat in the dining room that evening: her and Ernest, Sara and Gerald. Martha is their fifth guest at the table: invisible and mute but loud as hell.

They arrive at the Thompsons' party gorgeously dressed. Sara and Gerald make the most perfect robots. No one in Key West high society—if there is such a thing on this Floridian backwater—has ever dreamed of such costumes. The locals are dressed as pirates or sailors, mermaids or Hawaiian girls; nothing like this mechanized couple from up north.

Sara and Gerald are all silver boxes and geometrical shapes, with tin cans on their heads for goggles. They have a wobbling gait when they walk; Honoria screeched in pleasure when they had clomped down the stairs, but still declined the invitation to join them.

Ernest and Fife are Bottom and Titania. Fife wears flowers in a wig of blonde crimped hair; painted flowers climb her chest and ivy wraps her arms. She wears a bra of shells and a grass skirt; she is half mermaid, half fairy of the woods, but they did well for making it all yesterday.

Ernest's donkey's head is stuck with fur; tufts of it hedge his eyes. They should have made the eyelets bigger: Ernest complains that his lashes scratch his eyes. His lids are at constant blink, as if he is trying to send a message to the world in code.

The guests at the party are a little more understated. There are white Key West fisherman who have painted themselves darker to look Cuban: with their loincloths they look more like a group of oversized Gandhis than dockyard Cubanitos. Peacocks and cats roam among them.

An Adolf Hitler marches past with a little mustache. He seems a bad-tempered man; it turns out later he is one of the Thompsons' cousins from Jacksonville. “Give us a goose step, Adolf,” says Ernest.

“Or a
Heil Hitler
, at least,” says Gerald.

Adolf resists. Fife wonders why he chose such a costume if he didn't want to join in. “Go on,” she says. “Tell us how Europe has to be a good boy or else you'll eat it up!”

Sara joins in. “Now, now, Adolf, indulge us! Quick march. Pretend I'm a Czechoslovak ready for a ravaging!”

Adolf squeezes the paper cup, his silly mustache adding to his peevish refusal to join in. “If Herr Hitler is so under-confident he'll never get on in the world,” says Gerald, whose face is so sweaty it's rubbed off the mask's gray paint. His lips are quite pink. “Did mother not love you enough,
mein Führer
?”

“Do shut up, love. The poor man's already lamenting his costume choice.” Sara pulls Gerald by one of the goggles which breaks off from the mask. “Oh, Gerald,” she says warmly, “you do look ridiculous.”

“No more than you do, my dear. Besides you've
ruined
my costume.”

“It was a pile of crap anyway.”

“This was made by the hands of a New England socialite! How dare you!”

“You'll just have to make do.”

“Fife, tell me if you want me to send this coarse old woman home. No wonder I never invited her to meet my mother; I couldn't introduce her to the servants without blushing.”

Gerald kisses his wife handsomely on the mouth.

The sight of them together makes both Ernest and Fife smile. They've not been the best versions of themselves these past few years. Not like Sara and Gerald, the stoics among them. Living well, they insisted, was the best revenge. And sometimes, Fife could almost be convinced that this was true. Later, she watches bashful Adolf in an elegant waltz with a tall woman, perhaps his wife. Perhaps he wasn't shy. Perhaps he just didn't like being bullied by this group of semi-Europeans from up north.

The two couples take turns with husbands and wives; they still drink as much as they did in Paris, though now they marvel at their hangovers. At least, tomorrow, Fife will not think about Ernest and Martha. The four friends will sit by the pool eating, nursing their heads, then go off to bed. The hangover: such a cure, she thinks, for overthinking.

Ernest keeps on adjusting the mule mask. He seems nervy and his eyes look sore. He flings her about the dance floor when it's their turn to dance, and then lets off a donkey's bray that makes the robots and his fairy queen laugh. But he keeps on doing it, won't relinquish the game, until Gerald tells him to shut up, and Ernest walks off. Fife remembers Gerald's words from that dinner party two years ago:
Don't you see how sick everyone is of it?

There has been a request from the floor and the band starts up a slower tune. The piano begins, and the trumpet over it. Couples dance as close as their costumes allow. Sara is taken up by a bald Gandhi, and Gerald takes Fife in his arms. Over his shoulder she sees Ernest in the kitchen, rifling through the cupboards for something stronger.

The singer's voice rasps as she begins “All of Me.” It is a lovely number, so melancholy and blue. The song is so full of sadness, it nearly knocks the breath from her, as the singer offers her lover just about every last part of her to take away with him as he leaves her. The trumpet now begins. The singer pauses to watch him and her hips kick at the beat. Fife wonders whether she grieves for a man she loves, or had once loved.

Other words circle in Fife's mind:
Nesto. Forever. To Marty, with love.

“You look very beautiful with your hair like that,” Gerald says as they dance. At this angle she looks up at his full neck and chin, and she loves Gerald for his middle-aged plumpness.

Fife rests her head against his shoulder. “You're nice to me. You always have been. But then you're nice to everyone.”

“You are funny, sometimes.” They stop. She feels her shoulders give. “Are you all right?” Gerald asks. He leans in to her. “Are you crying, Fife?”

“No, I'm fine,” she says. “Everything's fine.” But she feels as if Ernest is about to take all of her, just as the song says, her heart, her mind, her mouth, every last one of her limbs. As she turns away from Gerald she notices the singer, too, has tears in her eyes as she just about manages to sing, through her tears, the last refrain of the song. It is a requiem, and it fills the night.

 • • • 

Rain comes for the second time that week. The guests—who are hot and disheveled from the Charleston and the hop, with the Cubanitos whiter and the mermaids less scaled—rush under the garden's canopy to wait for the downpour to end. Everyone looks happy and drunk, smeared in each other's face paint.