Mrs. Hemingway (10 page)

Jinny looked dumbfounded, bewildered. “What are you
talking
about?”

“He says he'll leave her.”

“She's his wife!” Jinny banged the side of the sink, and the skillet pans knocked against each other. “And you are a plaything. A bauble for when he's bored at home.”

“That's not true. Why are you on her side?”

“Because she is out of her depth! Because Hadley doesn't have a hope in hell against you. She has no friends. No family. No money. Everything you have, she does not.”

“I'm your sister. Where's your sympathy for me?”

“You have everything!”

“She has everything! She has him!” Fife leapt to her feet and Jinny cowered, as if she thought her sister would hit her. Instead she grabbed the tea-stained hankie and threw it hard against the icebox. It landed against its side then slid slowly to the floor. “Just you watch, Jinny Pfeiffer. I may be his mistress now, but soon I will be his wife!”

A car door slams outside. Through a lemon slice of window she sees it is Ernest, emerging from a cab, directing the driver to the cases. Feathers go wildly around her legs as Fife rushes the stairs. He had said Wednesday; she was sure of it. He would think her mad for being in this dress; Antibes is a memory that they do not speak of.

As she flies into the bedroom she struggles to get herself out of the frock.

“Hello?” His voice travels as the front door opens.

“Coming, darling!”

But Ernest's feet are on the stairs and the buttons seem tiny; her hands are all thumbs. They won't give and the fabric rips as she pulls at it. She's too late. Ernest is opening the bedroom door and he blinks at what he sees before him.

“Fife,” he says. “What are you doing?”

“I . . . wanted to see if it still fit.”

She has ripped a hole in the side of the dress near the buttons. She covers it up with her hand, feeling like such a fool. “I didn't think you were back until tomorrow.” His eyes go to the empty martini glass on the side table. “How was your trip?”

“Fine. The flight to Miami was delayed.” He kisses her hello on the cheek. “But I guess that makes no difference.”

Ernest sits down on the edge of the bed, rubbing his face with tiredness. There are a few moments of silence—it feels strange to have longed for her husband for so long and now she doesn't know what to say to him. She notices a louse crawling out from under his shirt collar. “You've brought back a friend,” she says, and Ernest looks up with confusion, as if she has caught him out. Fife pinches the creature in her fingers and shows it to him. It crawls a way up her pointing finger. “Don't they treat you with a salt shaker on your exit?”

“I met a general last week. Now I find them everywhere.”

“I can't wait to find them on the bedclothes.”

“I stink,” he says, and he peels off his shirt and pads into the bathroom to shower.

In the kitchen she waits till the gridiron is hot before assigning the louse to the flames. It pops when it bursts. As she makes Ernest coffee she admires her best china on display in the kitchen cabinet. They have always avoided throwing her expensive plates.

Upstairs the water begins to run.

The suitcases are piled neatly in the hall. She wonders if she has enough time to search them for traces of Martha. Probably not. He'll be down in a few minutes and then he'll want to eat his dinner and be in bed early with a paperback in their sons' room. She wonders what has hastened his return. With a leap of hope she wonders if Martha and Ernest have had a huge fight and he has left her somewhere in New York, done and dusted with their silly affair.

She lays out slices of ham on stale yellow brioche. What a meal for her Odysseus.

Ernest comes down washed but unshaved, wearing his shorts and a white T-shirt. He looks fantastic. It would be easier if she weren't getting older so much faster than he was. She's forty-two and Ernest looks the same as he did in his twenties. He stares at the sandwich on the table.

“You did say tomorrow.”

“It doesn't matter.”

Fife brings in the newspaper from the garden and notices the toolhouse light on. She must remind the servants again that they are not allowed in there. Ernest is convinced Cuzzemano has bribed them to send him his trash. “How was Spain?” she asks, handing over today's paper.

“Things on either side so bad you come to think both sides stink. Kids dead. Blood in the streets.” He presses the lids of his eyes. “The food was horseshit.”

“I heard awful reports. I was worried.” She pours him coffee with a slug of condensed milk straight from the can.

“I can't tell you what it's like not to be surrounded by sandbags. I keep waiting for the sounds of shelling. And there isn't any.”

“How's the writing?”

“The play's nearly done. But I need something big. A novel.”

“You've never had a book that didn't sell thousands.”

“But the critics—I want one they'll like.”

Fife takes a seat opposite in her black feathered dress. She is an odd companion to an odd meal. Ernest hasn't yet touched his sandwich. “You might as well be writing for dogs as trying to please critics.”

“I don't understand why they hate everything I write now.”

“A handful of conceited people compared to the millions that love the books.”

“I want
them
to like it.”

“I'll like it.”

“I know, I know. Oh, Fifey. Ever faithful.” The way he says it—it's as if the word
faithful
means shoddy. It vexes her. In fact, she feels a certain recklessness—if Ernest didn't care about this marriage, then perhaps she didn't either. Fife leans over and takes a bite of his untouched sandwich. The ham is delicious even if the bread is hard.

“Hey!” he says, but she can see how he enjoys her mischief.

She takes another bite. “Hey
what
, Mr. Hemingway?”

Ernest tries to grab at the sandwich but she holds it from him and makes her face seductive. “It tastes so good.” Ernest rolls his eyes. “Oh, I'm just a starving reporter who hasn't had piggy in months. What have you had these past few weeks, hmm? Cabbage and broth?”

He leaps up but she runs away: she darts left around the dining table and he goes right; she goes right, he goes left. They're like the cats she saw playing by the birdbath this morning. As she runs to the garden the feathers on her dress make a mad sound and the cats scatter as they come. Her feet slap the pool tiles as Ernest grabs at the sandwich but Fife takes the last bite and it's gone. Ernest shakes his head. “I've had nothing for months!”

“Serves you right for abandoning me.”

They stand close. He puts one hand between her legs in the feathered dress. “I remember this dress, Fifey. You killed me with this dress.” He goes up farther. She smiles at him; he smiles back. She wears no underclothes. “Just like France,” he says, his eyebrows raised.

She thinks this—this!—is the joy of her husband returned to her. Ernest grabs her wrists. “Now, what do we do with the boys when they've been up to no good?”

“No, Ernest.” She grins. “Don't!”

But he has already swung her into the pool.

The cook exits the servants' quarters right on cue. “Mr. Hemingway. Hello, sir.”

“Hello, Isobel. Mrs. Hemingway has been a very naughty girl,” he says. Fife wonders what she must look like, a bird drowned in its bath. “Don't mind us.”

Isobel shakes her head as if she will never understand rich people and the stupid things they do. The cook goes back into the carriage house.

“You're soaking wet,” Ernest says, when Fife climbs out of the pool. The feathers drip onto the tiles. He pulls at the bow of the black ribbon she still wears in her hair. He does it very gently, as if he were skinning fruit. “My little boy.” The corners of his lips rise, acknowledging it. “How long are the kids away?”

“The month.”

“So we have the whole house to ourselves.”

Fife wants to say: be rid of Martha first, then you can have your wife. She wants to tell him he can't have the both of them. Instead she lets out a long breath as he kisses down to the hollow bit of her neck and he says, “I have been thinking about fucking you all the way home from Miami.”

Since his return from Spain, Ernest has been working in the mornings, then fishing or swimming in the afternoons; the evenings they spend together. There are no telegrams delivered at odd hours, no phone calls to St. Louis, no dispatches from Madrid. China sits un-thrown in cabinets. Dusk is no longer the signal to begin the hot assaults that both have perfected in different parts of the house during the long warm days. Ernest hasn't been like this since he began his trips to cover the Spanish war.

He wants her, now, all the time: Ernest wakes her by kissing her and they go to bed having taken off most of their clothes downstairs. It reminds her of the early years of marriage when things had been so marvelous. On their honeymoon they had gone to the south of France to walk the salt marshes and swimming beaches. Magical; to be living for the first time like man and wife after so much time sneaking around, and Ernest told her how cockeyed in love with her he'd been these past few years. There was a Gypsy festival in the nearest town that week and she had stained their faces with berry juice and they had swigged red wine from pigskins. At home that night it was as if the dark masks freed them, and they had done some strange and wonderful things to each other in bed. Appetite—that's what they had for each other—and it had always felt, to Fife, as if they had it in abundance.

Now it feels like their second honeymoon. In the first few days of Ernest's return, they are never out of the pool. Guava trees and weeping figs crowd the decking. The sapodilla leans in, its rich bark leaking gum. Fife perfects her dive, remembering with shameful pleasure that flop Hadley had committed to the waves in Antibes. Ernest practices a dead man's float.

His scars are pinker in the water. There is the gash on his forehead from Paris, his calves shot up from gaffing for sharks, the burst on his knee from the war. She has never met anyone so prone to accidents, to cocked guns and roads swerved down.

Mostly Ernest stays in the shallows, watching as the water lifts around her. The adrenal feeling of hitting the water keeps her going; Fife has always loved the sensation of diving. She remembers the day out on the raft in Antibes, diving only for his pleasure. But she remembers, too, when she had asked him to go up to the rocks once Hadley had left. He had looked at her strangely, as if he were a character in a book and he was thinking of what his character would do next. Then he had said no. The moment had been profoundly depressing: Ernest, evidently, could take her or leave her. She, on the other hand, wanted him always. He had once told her that love was never about the powerful and the powerless. But Fife can't think of what else might constitute a marriage.

 • • • 

On her last dive she swims over to him in the shallows. She thinks about knocking him over so that water will surge up his nose. Instead she pushes his ankles apart and blows bubbles that rise on his skin. Ernest pulls her up by her shoulders only to push her head back down.

“Water's gone up my nose,” Fife says, as she surfaces, in a cartoonish voice.

She pulls herself to the decking as the sinus thump begins to ease. Ernest watches her. Those marvelously seeking eyes: as if once again she's an object of fascination. What has she done to make her husband come back to her?

“Your mother wrote. She wants to come down and see the boys.”

Last night, they had talked to the kids on the telephone and both Patrick and Gregory had jostled with each other to talk to their father. Whenever one was speaking the other was speaking too, and Ernest had put his hand over the mouthpiece, laughing, saying to her: “I can't understand a damn thing either one of them is saying!” And then he turned back to the telephone: “Boys!” he said. “One at a time now!”

Wrapped up so much in each other, neither one of them had been as attentive to the kids as they might have liked. She had always just assumed, because they were boys, that she could leave them to do their growing up in private. It wasn't like daughters, where you had to school them in how to behave, and tell them what not to do. In their first few years Patrick and Gregory had been prac-tically raised by their nursemaid, or Jinny, while she had gone off wherever Ernest wanted to go: Spain, Wyoming, safaris in Africa. She could manage being away from her sons, but not her husband.

It's not that she doesn't love them; it's just that there is always so much to do: editing Ernest's work, instructing the servants, restoring the house; then there were the trips with Ernest when he wanted to go quail shooting, or deep-sea fishing, or to the bullfights in Spain. She was his wife; it left little time for her to be a mother as well.

“My mother doesn't want to
see
the boys. She wants something else. Money. More money. She can go to hell.” Ernest swims over to her and he pulls at her suit so that it snaps against one warming buttock.

“Nesto.”

“I'm not allowed to touch my wife?”

“Not that. Your mother. I think she's lonely without your father.”

“Maybe that's her fault.”

He rests his head on her belly. Fife traces water from his ear. “Do you really think she could've stopped him?”

“No. Doesn't mean she didn't drive him to it.”

“He's the one that pulled the trigger.”

“And he was a son of a bitch for doing it. A chickenshit coward.”

Ernest's weight drops down again to the water. When he emerges on the other side she says: “He was ill. People don't kill themselves over nothing.”