Mrs. Hemingway (2 page)

Perhaps she should have seen more in her friend's letters. There was that rich woman's sense of entitlement: of deserving a particular object only by virtue of desiring it, whether it was a bicycle or a Schiaparelli dress or another woman's husband. How effortlessly Fife charmed others—and how charmless it made her feel. Hadley started forgetting to reply.
Hadley, mon amour
, Fife wrote that spring, asking why the letters from her quarter had dried up, and dried up quite so precipitously.

Stay away from my husband
, Hadley wanted to write or even say; but she did not.

 • • • 

The letter that gave them away was no bigger than a memo.

Ernest had put it in one of his exercise books with the rest of his correspondence. Since the incident with the suitcase, Ernest knew Hadley wouldn't look in this drawer. At first she didn't even recognize it as her friend's hand: Fife always used the typewriter loaned from
Vogue
. But this note was big and scrawled, boldly penned. She knew instantly what it meant without even reading it: because it was addressed only to Ernest. When Fife wrote, she always wrote to Hadley or to Mr. and Mrs. Hemingway; the letters were never for him alone.

Cher Ernest,

Didn't you think Seb looked SWELL at the club? I must admit I find him ENTIRELY agreeable.

Fife

How he would have loved Fife so nakedly stoking his jealousy. He always wanted to know that he was desired. Was this evidence that they were having an affair? Or was she reading a subtext that was not there?

Ernest called out to her from the living room. “Hash?”

Her hand shook as she replaced Fife's letter back in his notebook and shut the drawer. In the living room Ernest was pooled in the light of the gas lamp, and he had that frown which meant deep concentration. He wore mittens while writing: they couldn't afford any more heating until he was paid for his articles. She sat opposite him on the only other chair they had. She could ask him. Just ask him straight if something was going on between him and Fife.

Instead, outside, evening came to Paris. Ernest worked, gazing up at her occasionally, giving her a smile, lost in his world of words. And she wondered how they had come to be like this: two unhappy parents, with the possibility of a mistress between them.

Even at nine o'clock, the sand scorches and their feet burn if left too long on the shale. They're alone: not an umbrella or a picnic or a string of pearls in sight.

Ernest and Hadley splash out into the water and make for the raft, a hundred yards or so from the shore. “Race you,” he says, and when he gets there before she does, he offers her a hand from the deck. But when she reaches up he quickly retracts his arm and she drops down again into the sea. Hadley goes under with a mouthful of seawater. She kicks water up at him; he laughs and dives into the splash. Underwater, he pulls her by her ankle. As she fights against him, they are awash in bubbles. Legs jackknife against each other. Finally she uses his head as leverage, pushing him down so that she can come up for air.

Ernest surfaces, gasping for breath and smiling so much that wrinkles arc down his cheeks. She gives him her salty mouth and feels the prickles of his wet mustache against her lips. They're the same height in the water.

They swim over to the bank where the trees shadow the sea. Ernest pulls himself onto the rocks while Hadley stays kicking in the warm green water. They have perfected this dive over the past week. “Is here all right?”

“Come closer.”

Hadley fixes her gaze on the horizon. Antibes is broken in two like an egg: one half sky, the other sea. She hasn't much liked this game but she goes along with it. Ernest's preparations can be heard in the slap of his feet against the rocks. That he is nervous only makes her more so. “Ready?”

“Yes.”

And he says, “Ready,” too, to let her know he is about to go.

Ernest dives and she can feel his body whistling past, just over the top of her head and into the spot beside her.

“Well done!” she says, when he emerges from the sea exultant. She loves the way he looks when she praises him. There's something catlike in his pleasure—as if her words were a scratch behind the ears.

“I didn't touch you, did I?”

“No. Half an inch or so away.”

“Your turn,” he says mischievously.

She smiles. “You always try, don't you?”

He doesn't push her. “Back to the raft?”

She makes her way back before him and swings her legs under the pontoon so that her feet poke the barnacles under the wood. The soft parts she flattens with her toes. The sun is hotter now on her head.

The raft sinks an inch with the weight of them when they stand up on the deck dripping. He pulls her toward him in another of these Antibes embraces.

“Ernest?” He doesn't say anything.

In Paris, they were always more playful, so that Ernest could note the angles of elbows, knees, and necks for his stories. They would get it all exactly right so that he could write it up for his scenes. After a first draft they would set up their bodies again only to end up collapsing and laughing at the impossibility of what he had written: squashed arms, dead legs, a blunt foot breaking imagined lines. Sometimes it seemed to her foolish that he should go to such lengths to put it all down only to cut it all out. But this, he insists, is his method.

Ernest is not writing in Antibes; this in itself is dangerous. His imagination is not well kept when it is not focused; it tends to wander, tends to look for excitement where it should not. She wishes he could be enraptured, now, by a new novel or story, ignore Fife—ignore his wife, for God's sake—if only that writing might prove an antidote against that woman.

Hadley lies down on the raft and puts her head on the soft bit of his thigh, where the hair is worn from the roughness of his pants. On his right calf a scar bursts open like a firework: a mortar wound from the war. Ernest won't talk about the moment itself but only the time afterward: how the doctors kept a bowl next to his hospital bed and filled it with the nuts, bolts, screws, and nails removed from the leg; how he let favorite visitors take home a piece of shrapnel as a lucky charm. His biggest achievement, he said, was not getting over the nurse he'd fallen in love with, but persuading the doctors not to saw his leg off.

Sometimes it still wakes him in the night: the fear that he's about to be buried in mud, bleeding out in an Italian trench. Ernest wakes cold and sweating: frightened out of his mind. She fetches him water and when he drinks his hands shake. She hates that she cannot help him. She hates that these nights of terror sink him for days afterward.

Absentmindedly she has been tracing his scar and he moves her hand away.

“God, I was drunk last night,” he says, looking away and squinting at the beach. He winds a lock of her hair around a finger.

“I'm just starting to feel it,” she says. Her bathing suit has begun to dry in the heat. She feels dulled from last night's alcohol and tired from the swim.

Ernest traces a line from her brow to her chin and yawns. He is wearing the bathing suit with the double white lines across the chest; Fife may have encouraged him to buy it. Hadley thinks the suit a little flash but it's probably something approved by
Vogue
.

He pulls the straps down and rolls the suit to his waist. “Ernest!” she says, “Someone will see!”

He laughs at her and chucks her on the chin. “No one's here, kitten,” he says. “You should do the same.” She nudges him in the ribs but not hard; after all, she has heard of women sunning themselves half-nude on the Paris rooftops in the summer. But these are women with poetry careers, women with girlfriends, not thrifty women like her from the Midwest who keep the home accounts.

Rocking on the raft with the sun on her face, Hadley is full of a sudden fury to have him all to herself. He is her husband; she is his wife. She curls an arm around his neck and lifts herself to his mouth. “I love you,” she says forcefully. Yes, she would do anything to save her marriage: even invite her husband's mistress on vacation with them. “You know that?”

“I know it.” He says it oddly, as if he is pretending to be a character in one of his stories, rather than her husband, Ernest Hemingway. The hollow reply makes her falter. She wonders then, not if she is losing him, but if he is already lost.

A pain shoots through her skull, perhaps from last night's alcohol. The raft rocks her into troubled sleep.

Hadley let Fife's sister into the apartment. She watched Jinny pick her way around Bumby's toys, strewn across the floor, taking a while to find somewhere to sit. Jinny looked much less at home here in these
ambrosial
surroundings than her sister. Finally, she chose the seat by the window, a Montparnasse steeple rising behind her shoulder.

Hadley was embarrassed at the gamey waft coming in from the kitchen. Often, Ernest went to the Jardin du Luxembourg and, when the gendarme turned his back, he would choose the fattest pigeon and strangle it in the park, then smuggle the bird out in Bumby's carriage. One time he had brought a bird home and it was still alive. There was a whiff of it now from the stove. She had grown tired of roast pigeon that winter.

There wasn't enough space for a sofa in this room, only for two threadbare chairs: one Ernest's, one Hadley's. There was no third chair.

The cloche hat was thrust so low that very little could be seen of Jinny's eyes save a flickering under the brim's shadow. She had on the mink coat that Ernest had commented on when he'd first met the two sisters at the party. Jinny kept on chewing her lips; she probably knew why she had been invited inside.

Fife, Jinny, and Hadley had just returned from a motoring trip to Chartres. Since the discovery of Fife's secret letter to Ernest last month, Hadley had not said a thing to anyone. Now that Jinny was here alone, she was determined to extract the truth.

“Where's Ernest?” Jinny asked. She leaned and her knees edged forward over the tops of her brogues, with her hands placed neatly on her lap.

“I imagine he's still at the studio. He'll be back in an hour or so.”

The light was beginning to go and it made the apartment seem more dismal than usual. The dust from the sawmill below settled on their things like a fine layer of hair. Hadley had long since given up on keeping it from the house. “Sorry it's so cold in here; Ernest must have been scrimping on fuel.” Hadley lit the stove and warmed her fingers near the flames. “We've had a lovely time getting to know you and your sister this year,” she began, in a script she had rehearsed as they'd made their way from Chartres to Paris in Jinny's tin-can Citroën. “Odd to think there was ever a time when we didn't know each other. But there were years before that, when it was just Ernest and me . . . and then Bumby came along. I can't really imagine life without you two girls.”

Jinny looked ready to say something but Hadley continued. “We have become good friends, your sister and I. As have Ernest and Fife.”

In the window, slopes of Paris roofs went on as far as the eye could see. Pigeons—dinner—perched on the eaves. Wouldn't she prefer not to know? To go on in ignorance? But it was as if the discovery of that letter had amplified her senses. Hadley had begun to see shared looks at the market and to hear gossip behind bookshelves, people talking of the Hemingways at parties. That was the most hateful thing: feeling like she was the one person in the dark about the state of her own marriage.

Jinny hadn't yet taken off the mink. Hadley poured two cups of tea and placed them on the table. When she sat down, her knees bumped against Jinny's. “Fife was strange in the car when we left Chartres.”

“How do you mean?”

“She hardly said anything.”

“I suppose not.” Jinny didn't take her eyes from the tea.

“She was like that for the whole trip, though. Talking and talking, then silence for hours.”

“My sister has always been prone to moods.”

“It wasn't moodiness.”

It wasn't so much the letter but Fife's behavior at Chartres cathedral that had made Hadley determined to ask. In the church, she had caught Fife praying. Even from far away, she could see how tightly the white ball of her fingers was held above her head. Fife was desperate for something; that much was clear, since the hands didn't slacken once in the minutes she sat there. What could Fife be praying for, what did this woman lack, in any way, but a husband? What would be the words of the prayer but
Please, God, let me have him
. Then Fife's hands unfurled and she looked straight at Hadley. There was little sacred in that look.

The light outside was bright after the dark of the cathedral. Somehow, Fife had beaten them to it as she and Jinny came out from the church. Fife sat smoking by the entrance, with her shapeless man's coat and aggressively euphoric eyes.

 • • • 

“Look, I better go,” said Jinny, standing up quickly and knocking over the tea. “Oh God, sorry. Let me get a cloth.”

“It's fine.”

“Please.”

But when Hadley returned Jinny was already dabbing at the floor with her own browning handkerchief. “These moods of Fife's,” Hadley ventured, on her hands and knees like a housemaid as she mopped up the spill. “Is Ernest in any way involved?”

Jinny's slender weight rocked back onto her heels. Her mouth gave a joyless smile. “I think they are very fond of each other, yes.”

She said it slowly and quietly, as if they were once again in the cathedral.

Hadley stood and squeezed the tea from the handkerchief at the sink. She noticed her wedding ring turn greasily as she wrung the hankie out to dry. “I know this doesn't make any sense,” Jinny said, joining her in the kitchen, “but Fife is very fond of you. As am I. What's happened . . .” Jinny looked around the room as if trying to find a way of making this sound less absurd. “It's accidental. She didn't mean for it to happen. I think Ernest has that effect on women. She just . . . she couldn't help herself.”