Mrs. Hemingway (15 page)

The New England robots are sitting on the other side of the enclosure's wall, laughing and pointing at the food: turtle stew, jewfish, plantains. Fife watches her friends pile their plates, then she catches Ernest slip through the crowd. He turns back momentarily with a watchful look then walks down the side of the house. Fife follows him, dodging around the guests whose faces are rosy under the red bulbs.

Ernest is in the back garden, talking to a woman in a black dress. She wears a cat mask with perfectly pointed ears. Her hair is done up in a neat chignon, and the string leaves a shadow line where it cuts her golden hair. When Ernest goes to pull the woman's mask, she bats him away.

Is this why he didn't want the Murphys here? Because he'd invited his mistress to vacation with them?

Her mother had told her once that even when she was a baby Fife could be left alone on a chair and would never fall off. “Like an angel on a pinhead,” her mother had said. And Fife wonders what's wrong with her; why she is sitting so still, watching events unfold and doing nothing. She must do something; she cannot sit still forever.

Ernest and the woman laugh as they shelter under the eave until the woman says something and looks ready to leave. Ernest watches her walk away, but his stare is one of accomplishment, as if, later in the night, he will come to possess what he appears to be losing now.

Fife moves, knowing she has to be bold to get this right. She sees Ernest warning her off but she catches up and with one movement she pulls the woman's mask so hard she can hear the elastic give. She is all ready to confront the face she'd found at the dinner party, and in the photograph, but it's not her. It's not Martha. The mask sits on the woman's head like a hat. And Fife feels like such a fool. “What are you doing?” Ernest says.

This unknown woman gives an edgy laugh.

Fife stares at them, incredulous, before turning on her heel and running from them both.

 • • • 

Gerald and Sara's eyes are on her as she bolts through the party. She heads for the beach, letting the air fill her lungs. A car swerves to avoid her. On the beach she feels the sand fill her shoes but she won't stop until she reaches the shore.

Yards from the waterline, she comes to a stop, watching the black water turn white as the breakers reach the sand. She hears Ernest coming after her. “What's gotten into you?”

“Oh for God's sake.” She rips off the wig. Her scalp has been itching all night and she wishes now she had claws so she could scratch with a deeper trawl. “I found your dedication, Ernest.
For Marty with love
, is that it? I saw what she wrote to you in her book. Why did you bother coming back here, and being so nice, if you were still writing love notes to each other?”

Back at the house featureless faces stare down at them on the beach.

“Fife, don't make a scene.”

“I will do what I want. Since that's what you do all the time, isn't it?”

“No.”

“You're pathetic. You're worse than pathetic. You're a psychopath!”

“Fife!”

“Why toy with me as you have the last two weeks?” She stops, genuinely interested as to what the answer could be. “It's made the god-damned disappointment so much worse.” Fife bites into her lower lip. “You have broken my heart, Ernest, over and over again. At least, while we were enemies this past year, you couldn't do that anymore. But this couple of weeks, even while everyone was warning me; Sara, and Hadley—”

“You brought Hadley into this?”

“Surprisingly enough she could empathize with the situ-ation.” Fife puts up a hand. “If you leave this marriage, Ernest, you'll marry Martha and then you'll find you just want another one. You always love at the beginning, when it's easiest to love. And if you go through life like that you'll never get past the start.” Fife waits for him to say something but Ernest stares morosely at his boat shoes. His hands hang unmoving.

“I can't have three people in this marriage. At least tell me you're in love with her. Be brave. Or are you a hero only in war?” Waves break mournfully by their feet. Fife counts each breaker. Ernest doesn't say anything. “Are you in love with her?”

“I don't know.”

Something in her collapses. What is it? Dignity perhaps. “Please don't leave me,” she says, though it breaks her heart to have to beg him like this. But she adores him. She has never loved a man more than she has loved Ernest; she knows she never will again. “Stay with me.”

Ernest looks back up at the house. The partygoers have gone back inside. He looks back to her. She thinks he may relent. “I can't,” he says at last.

Fife suddenly feels very tired. She remembers the song. Well. She will not let Ernest Hemingway take every last piece of her.

“I won't divorce you, Ernest. Not for a long time, if that's what you're hoping. You can go to hell, for all I care. I won't let you marry that woman.” Fife spits out her name at last. “Martha Gellhorn. If we hadn't had this week, I would let you go much more easily. But you gave me grounds to hope. And you'll be punished. I swear it.”

Ernest makes a grab for her, and Fife—not quite consciously—socks him on the jaw. The shock of it—because it can't be the power—makes him stumble into the surf. “You chickenshit coward!” she screams. “I could kill you!” And for a moment she thinks she might just take his neck and hold it under the surf. She would rather kill him than have him be the possession of a woman who is nowhere near her equal. This is why her love is better than Hadley's, better than Martha's. No one, ever, will love him like this: enough to see his brain smashed into rock or his lungs fill with brine. Ernest picks himself up, nursing the jaw, and brushes the sand off his pants.

“You bastard,” she says, “you don't even know what you've lost.”

 • • • 

Fife starts by pulling books from the shelves, looking for whatever might hurt him the most. She puts them into piles of signed and first editions. She opens the books she thinks are most bankable and starts writing down information: the book's edition, publication city, date. She looks for his marginalia; his graffiti would add another zero to the selling price.

Later on, sounds travel up to the toolhouse. It's the Murphys, returned from the party. They sit by the poolside after Gerald has made tea. Ernest must still be at Sloppy Joe's.

Fife watches them, ginned and alone, in Ernest's study above. Down by the pool they sit in what's left of their costumes: a cereal box here, a spring there; both have lost their eyes. “So it's over? That's it?” This is Gerald. He nurses his mug between his hands. “Why does he have to be such an ass?”

“I think he tries hard not to be cruel. Then sometimes he's so savage, you have to stop excusing him.” Sara starts ripping Gerald's robot costume to shreds.

“What are you doing?” he asks her, laughing.

“I'm finding your heart and leaving my initials there. So every woman around will know you're mine.” Sara has now completely de-robotted Gerald and she kisses him on the chest near his heart.

Fife slumps down by Ernest's desk. It kills her to see this. She imagines how many other women there will be, sitting at their typewriters somewhere in the Midwest, or reading a Hemingway book in their fine English lawn, or on assignment in China, not knowing that they'll be plucked from obscurity to be the next Mrs. Hemingway.

From the pool she hears Sara's voice again: “Promise me you'll never go away.”

“I'm not going anywhere.”

Fife gets up. The pen's bleed has thinned the paper for Cuzzemano. She screws it up in her fist; she cannot do it.

When she leaves the toolhouse she sees Sara and Gerald are asleep on one sun lounger, curled into each other under the Florida night sky, surrounded by the remains of their robots. And around them, walk the peacocks.

The Pig, they say, has liberated the Ritz.

In an altogether different hotel, Martha lies in bed, imagining Ernest on his favored bar stool ordering martinis for his troops. He'd be thinking, no doubt, about his life here in the twenties, when he was poorer and happier, a man only once married. His Paris life is a memory Ernest loves to slide over and over until the place is smooth and cool with his affections. Today he would surely be longing for the sawmill apartment and his lost Saint Hadley: a woman all the more exquisite for her generous retirement of the title
Mrs. Hemingway
.

A title Martha has come to hate.

Martha has always felt more affection for the Mrs. Hemingway she robbed. At least Fife had the guts to hate her; she had no time for Hadley's mousy surrender. To be so good seemed a calamity visited upon the poor woman. Apparently Hadley and Fife are even pals still: by Ernest's accounts his two ex-wives chat regularly on the telephone, talking of children and the proper care of Ernest. Martha and Fife have never spoken since that vacation in Key West. Why would they? She has a proper respect for the rules of this game.

Ernest cradles the memory of Hadley as he would a baby. Fife he castigates as the devil. After today, Martha wonders which one she will become.

 • • • 

In bed she tends a bottle of whiskey; the alcohol keeps her straight-thinking. Her journey to Paris yesterday was not an easy one and she feels a pain in her chest—it might be a broken rib. When she arrived at the Hotel Lincoln this morning, typewriter, knapsack, and bedroll in hand, the concierge had told her with great enthusiasm the story of her husband's escapades when he saw the name in her passport. Apparently, Ernest had liberated the Ritz with a troop of soldiers, sending the men from the Luftwaffe and their whores scurrying from their beds.

None of this should be a surprise to her: Ernest loved being in the limelight wherever he went. Boxer, bullfighter, fisherman, soldier, hunter; he can't go anywhere without playing the hero. Often, over the course of these years, she has longed for the plain friend she made in Spain.

More of the whiskey helps her nurse her outrage. Martha hates the way he throws himself around a city with all the swagger of a warlord. She hates, too, that other people can't see past his phony heroism. So he has liberated the Ritz! Of course he would.

The Pig knew it was the one place that wouldn't have run dry.

But today Martha will show him he can't trick everyone. Today she will be the one to rip open his idea of himself, and she will do it with claws. Because today they are done and through, and she will throw away the name Mrs. Hemingway with as much gusto as his ex-wives slavered over it. Today, Martha will leave him.

 • • • 

The air in her hotel room is insufferably warm. An odor wafts in of scorched wood, of things having been burned. She has left the windows open so that she can hear the cries of the Parisians, but also so that the panes won't smash if the fleeing Germans were to indulge in leftover shells. Gunfire only briefly interrupts the singing of “La Marseillaise.”

Martha wears her pajamas, the same ones she wore when she was evacuated from a Helsinki hotel five years ago. She had asked Ernest if he would come with her to cover the Finnish war, thinking it might be good for them to re-create the dangers of Spain. But Ernest said he wanted to shoot duck in Sun Valley. Funny that it had been Ernest who had first lit her interest in the battlefield while his wife brought them cocktails in the shade of mimosa trees and banana palms, and now it was Ernest who wanted to make house while she went off to war.

Martha rises from the bed. Flags drape from the op-posite building and boys cock about the pavements with carbines, as if they had single-handedly driven
les boches
to the gates. Well, good for them. The recriminations will come later—who colluded, who resisted—but not today. Today everyone is jubilant.

In the bathroom the washbowl faucet creaks with the old plumbing. Her hair could do with a wash; the Jeep's fumes are still in it from last night, but instead she rolls the curls to her neck. She pulls on a white shirt and her army jacket with the “C” for correspondent. Martha uses some black-market lipstick she bought in London and wonders where she will find her husband. Who knows? Perhaps he is planting a flag at the Arc de Triomphe. She wouldn't be surprised to hear Ernest has freed the whole City of Light single-handedly.

In her satchel she gathers her things—notebook, purse, and hotel key. For luck she takes an extra shot of the whiskey. She will watch how Paris frees itself: take notes, heed its guidance. Fleeing the shadow as the wife of one of the most famous writers in the world: is she mad to leave him? Her father would have thought her mad—but then her mother had thought her mad for marrying him in the first place.

 • • • 

The concierge gives her an oily smile in the lobby. He looks desperate to talk more but Martha hurries on through the revolving doors. As she steps into the iced light of Paris she is immediately kissed on the lips. The man—he is rather handsome and tall—says, “
Vive la France!
” before strolling toward the crowd on the Champs-Élysées.

People kiss and drink on every corner. Perhaps each family saved a bottle of something good ready for this day. Men, as always, are first on the streets. A man released, she thinks, is worse than one imprisoned, and she does up the top button of her shirt. Spiked on their own glory, they eye her with an abandoned look; it might scare her, had she not seen it all in Spain. Kids hide in the shade by tanks and women wear the most enormous hats, the size of buckets. It seems quite the perfect day for her own liberation. Martha sets off into the city to break the news to Ernest Hemingway.

Martha went to Key West to meet her hero, not marry him. In fact, the island had been rather an afterthought that Christmas holiday of 1936, somewhere to go after they'd run out of things to do in Miami.

All she wanted to do was talk about books with him. Perhaps pick up some tips. In her own writing she tried hard to manipulate the words so that they were cool and dry—just like his—as if worked by a mason from hard stone. She had even included a quote from
A Farewell to Arms
in her first novel: “Nothing ever happens to the brave.” But if she weren't brave, she thought, as the Gellhorn family disembarked the ferry, surrounded by mangroves, sea grapes, and the most enormous palms, then she definitely would not meet him. And so she had worn the little black dress that her mother had said showed her off in the very best light.

They spent the day walking the key. As she walked around the island she formed a vague outline for a travel piece about the persistence of the Depression here though it was nearly a decade after the crash. Raw board hung from the houses and everything looked in need of paint. Chickens roamed the streets, and the smell of garbage and the sewers was everywhere. Bordellos did a brisk trade and nobody seemed to mind. Everywhere there was abundance: banana, lime, coconut—fit to burst off the trees with a snap of the fingers. No wonder the Depres-sion hadn't left: without work you could just as well eat by shaking down a tree. Still, the kids looked about as happy as they did in any other American backwater.

When they passed the Hemingway home—it had to be his, it was the biggest and richest-looking house on the whole key—Martha spied prowling cats and a water feature behind the high brick wall and locked gate. Her mother read aloud from the tourist map; the Hemingway home was on the attractions list. From what Martha could see, the garden was piercingly neat and well kept. The house was grand, its shutters open to the breeze coming off the Gulf. A woman's voice traveled over to them from inside the garden. “Fetch the scissors will you, Sara? I'm going to attack this poinsettia.”

Mrs. Gellhorn looked up from her map and gave Martha a bright smile as if they had overheard something deliciously secret. “Oh, Martha, it's Mrs. Hemingway!”

Martha led her family onward; she thought them super-ior to the tourists come to gawk at the author's private quarters. Perhaps, she thought later, she should have knocked and introduced herself there and then. Perhaps, if she had met his wife first, things might have turned out a little differently.

 • • • 

By the afternoon they were hot and tired, and Mrs. Gellhorn suggested a drink. It was dark inside Sloppy Joe's and the bar looked like something salvaged from a boat wreck. Fans did little to move the air. As the Gellhorns sat themselves at a table, Martha had a memory from some magazine article that this might be the author's haunt, that Mr. Hemingway might even be here, killing the hottest part of the afternoon alone.

Because she'd imagined him being here, she had assumed he would not be. But there was Hemingway, looking older than the photograph of him she had tacked up on her college wall, coming directly from the pool table and seating himself at the bar. He was scruffier too. He wore a dirty T-shirt and basque shorts with a rope tied at his waist. Barefooted, as well. The barman, whose dark hands had been juicing limes, put a glass of greenish liquid in front of Mr. Hemingway without him even placing an order.

“
Un highbalito
,” he said, and the author smiled and read his mail.

Martha straightened her back and cocked her head in a posture of listening to her mother while the scent of the limes spilled into the air. From the bar she felt herself observed.

Her mother was deciding volubly on the relative merits of a daiquiri or a gin twist in a louder voice than Martha would have liked when the penny dropped. “Oh!” her mother said, barely trying to temper her excitement or lower her voice. “Mr. Hemingway is at the bar, dear!”

Mrs. Gellhorn then looked up above Martha's shoulder. He must have come over. Martha willed the heat to leave her face. When she turned, she was as bold and as richly voiced as she could muster. “Mr. Hemingway,” she said, standing, and put out her hand before he put out his. “I'm Martha Gellhorn. A pleasure to meet you, sir.” She tilted her head; she had decided her beauty was best at this angle. And indeed he seemed pleased by the look of her.

Martha introduced her mother and brother, and Hemingway pulled up a chair to join them. “What are you drinking?” he asked Mrs. Gellhorn. “Have you had one of these?” Her mother took the offered glass and sipped at the drink. “I call it a Papa Doble.”

“That's going to knock me sideways for the rest of the afternoon,” Mrs. Gellhorn said. “I'll have one.” She passed it to Martha.

Her mother was right: the drink was strong as hell and delicious.

“Skinner,” he said. “Papa Dobles for everyone.”

“Thank you, Mr. Hemingway,” her mother said.

“Only the IRS calls me Mr. Hemingway. Please call me Ernest. Or Papa.”

Though he might be a decade or so older than Martha, there was no way she was going to call him Papa. Ernest would do just fine.

They talked at first about Key West and what they had seen and what they thought. Ernest admitted he thought her brother was her husband and laughed when he found out he was not. Everyone was quickly drunk by dusk and Martha thought it wonderful that they all were sitting there in the presence of a genius.
The Sun Also Rises,
A Farewell to Arms, Death in the Afternoon—
as well as all of the short stories that writers studied for the inner trick of them. But there was no trickery: only the plain words put there as if they had always been there—like pebbles cooled in a river.

Martha, at twenty-eight, had only one book she was proud of; the rest of it, she thought, was the foulest
crotte.
She wanted to ask Hemingway questions without sounding like an ingénue: how does one edit one's work and know what was good and what was bad if one thought the whole thing, invariably, was rotten? When should one soldier on, and when should one just throw it to the trash?

They ordered more drinks and Skinner continued to work at the limes. At one point the barman shot her a meaningful look. Perhaps Ernest was expected at home by Mrs. Hemingway.

 • • • 

Later, when her mother and brother argued about the best route back to the hotel, Ernest addressed her privately. “Are you in love, Miss Gellhorn?”

Martha took a sip of her Papa Doble and laughed. “Why do you ask?”

“You look flushed. And happy.”

“No,” she said. “I am not in love.”

“But you have been?”

“Of course.”

“Who was he?”

“A Frenchman.”

“Did you leave him or did he leave you?”

Martha drained the last of the drink. It really did taste wonderful. “I am not a woman apt to be left,” and then she laughed at her absurd words. “I left him.”

“I see.” When he smiled he looked more like that college photograph. “Why did it end?”

“He wanted to marry me.”

“And you didn't want to marry him?”

“No. His wife didn't want him to marry me.”

“Ah,” he said. “Wives are apt to feel like that.” He finished his drink. What number was it for him? The man could drink like a fish. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-eight,” she said.

“By that age I'd married my second wife.”

“And how'd your first wife feel about that?”

“Not very pleased.”

“Ah, wives are apt to feel like that.”

“Touché,” he said, then he stared at her for longer than was polite. Maybe because she was drunk Martha went ahead and stared right back until it was Ernest who looked away and she swore she caught Skinner, now done juicing the limes, roll his eyes.

“Why are you wearing your shorts like that?”

The frayed rope belt flopped on one side of his pants, like a snake sunning itself. “Because I like to.”