Mrs. Hemingway (9 page)

“I think this has been some time in the making.”

“How long?”

“Last year. Well, the Christmas before it. He brought her to a dinner party, both drunk off their heads. I had to sit there all evening while he talked to this girl hauled in from Sloppy Joe's. Sara and Gerald were so embarrassed. Then, what do you know, they both end up covering the Spanish war.”

“And have you talked to him?”

“We had a blazing row about a year ago in Paris. He said he would deal with it when I offered to throw myself over the balcony. I thought that meant it was over.”

“And was it?”

“I think it just meant it was confined to Spain.”

“Well. Europe makes fools of all Americans.”

“Sounds like something Scott would say.”

“Sorry, I didn't mean to sound facetious. Just that I think people behave a little more responsibly when they're back home. God knows we all acted badly in France.”

Fife lets her silence acknowledge this as truth.

“Every time he's billeted to Madrid they're there together. Jinny told me they don't even bother having separate hotel rooms anymore. I torment myself imagining them: jaunting around Madrid acting like man and wife.”

“How does Jinny know that?”

“Jinny! Jinny somehow knows everything. Oh, Hash, I don't know what to do!” She composes herself but holds on to the telephone with just as much grip. “I'm scared I'm losing him.”

In the background there is a man's voice. Paul, Hadley's husband, is a fine man: kind and quiet and, it seems, enviably unchangeable. Since their marriage, Hadley has rather blossomed, as if all she needed was someone gentle to bring out the bolder parts of her. They had met each other while Paul was still married; in Paris they went around as a three: Hadley, Paul and his wife. None of them, not even Hadley, were innocents anymore.

Hadley sighs. “I can't think I'd be the best person to advise you. I lost him, after all.” There is only an admission of fact here: as if she is explaining a bad business decision made in her youth. “Maybe the only thing to say is: he'll grow out of it. During the hundred days, I saw how much in love you were. That's why I called it off. Because I saw how much you meant to Ernest—how much it was killing him that he couldn't be with you. This thing with Martha, it sounds like an infatuation. When the Spanish war finishes it will finish off Martha too. She's someone to get him through the war, that's all. He'll not be a man of many wives.”

“I'm his second.”

“Well, sometimes we need a false start before we get it right.”

Fife takes a deep breath. “You're a saint, Hadley. And a true friend. To us both.” She is about to hang up when she realizes Hadley is trying not to laugh. “What is it?”

“I don't know if I should say. It's rather crass.”

“You have to.”

“The one thing I do know about Miss Gellhorn. Her father was a gynecologist in St. Louis. In fact, Dr. Gellhorn used to be my gynecologist.”

“You're joking.”

“All rather Freudian, don't you think? Just imagine Martha's father staring up Ernest's first wife's undercarriage.”

“Is it a good sign or a bad one?”

“Very bad, of course! The affair has been damned from the start.”

Fife laughs: fully now, with heart. “You've cheered me up incalculably, Hash. Though I'm not sure how.”

“Me neither. Good-bye, Fife dear. Take care. And try not to worry. It will all blow over. Believe me.”

Fife hangs up and sinks the last of the martini. She sucks at the tangy green olive, spitting the pit back in the glass. This is what her passion for Ernest feels like: she wants to have him all the way down to the stone.

All fall Fife had meant to leave him to his wife. Her friend, kind Hadley. That October she did try to stay away. But she couldn't conceal the elation when Hadley invited her over to their apartment. And as it grew cooler, Mrs. Hemingway's invitations only increased.

Now every night Fife would leave the office to see them: her chaps. If she'd known her friend had felt uncomfortable, she wouldn't have gone; but the invitations
were
always from Hadley. And she couldn't say no: it was only in their apartment—when she saw Ernest with a manuscript balanced on one knee, his face lit by the coal fire—that a stillness came to her. All day at
Vogue
she positively vibrated with her own nerves, but as soon as she stepped into the Hemingways' tiny apartment she felt herself hit like a tuning fork, sounding out the right and perfect note.

In the evenings the three of them talked books and gossiped about the writers they knew. While she read his work, and he waited for her thoughts, he spat clementine seeds into the fire and watched them flame blue.

She prayed to God to put in her way a more suitable husband.

When she should have been at
Vogue
she helped Hadley with the dishes, the cleaning, the changing of the bedclothes, encouraged her friend at her pursuits with the piano. Anything to be in his space and have her hands on his things. When Hadley needed to sleep off her cold, Fife took care of Bumby, and Hadley would pat her on the arm and say what a dear she was. She felt wretched and knew she was being hateful, but she did not desist.

With Ernest, she felt that she could only worship him. She praised his work and told him every night how famous he was going to be, how stinking rich, how admired as a writer and almost as a philosopher. She meant every last damn word and she loved to see him grin, ear to ear, when she told him these things.

One evening, she caught him looking at her. It had been one of those evenings when they read rather than talked and Hadley was in the bedroom, nursing the cold. On these nights her imagination often strayed from the story: Fife wondered what it might feel like if he were to kiss her. Or what might happen if she innocently sat on his knee, or what it would be like to go to bed with him.

And when she looked up from this daydream, with her legs swung over the ratty armchair just as she had always sat reading as a schoolgirl, this time she found Ernest observing her. It made her feel self-conscious, as if she had been discovered bathing.

He put down his manuscript and came toward her. The fire behind him darkened his face so that she couldn't find his expression. He picked up her hand and looked about ready to snap it, but instead he pressed his mouth to the button of her wrist and held his lips there. Hadley coughed in the bedroom behind the wall, and Ernest went back to his chair and gazed into the fire, looking scared and alone.

They sat for a long time like that, no one saying much. Then Fife began talking in a hushed voice about the mystery of the lost suitcase, and Ernest admitted how sorely he still grieved for his wife's mistake. Oh, yes: Fife knew there was a special place in hell for women who did this to other women.

 • • • 

It was Sylvia Beach who mentioned it first. Not to her, but to Jinny. The two women were huddled into their coats at La Rotonde, surveying its patrons with much indifference until one of their set walked in. All afternoon they had been gossiping about Sylvia's customers at Shakespeare and Co.: whom she liked and whom she didn't, who didn't pay their dues on time and who was to be tipped as the next big thing. Sylvia knew just about everyone.

Fife had been up to fetch drinks when she caught the tail end of what Sylvia was saying. “—is Ernest Hemingway in any way involved?”

Several people in the café looked around when Fife came to a standstill, hidden by the curtain at the café door.

Her sister blushed. “Why do you say that?” Her face rose perfectly from the mink that Ernest had so admired above her own half a year back.

“You've no idea how indiscreet people can be: they think a shelf of books is as good as soundproofing. Harry Cuzzemano calls them the
Hemingway Troika
. It's just rumors, of course. But I wondered whether they had any basis.”

“And what do these rumors say?”

“Just that wherever Hadley goes, there Fife tends to be.”

“They're best friends.”

“All three of them?”

“I mean Hadley and my sister.
They're
best friends.”

Sylvia dropped a sugar cube into her coffee, one gloved hand stirring the cup. “Ernest has started borrowing love poetry. Walt Whitman, of all people.”

“So?”

Sylvia sank her coffee. “Trust me: he's just not Ernest's usual tastes, that's all.” She kicked at a couple of pigeons pecking at the crumbs of a madeleine on the sidewalk. “You know the Hemingways have absolutely no money. It's none of my business, Jinny, but I can see your sister's allure to a man without means.”

A waiter in an apron tried to get around her to the terrace, and Fife was forced out into the wintry air. At the table she pretended she'd heard nothing and put down the drinks. She thought of Sylvia's words about her money, and how exotic she sometimes felt in a dress borrowed from
Vogue
in the tiny apartment of the Hemingways. So what if Ernest found her wealth attractive? Money was attractive—it meant travel, and fine wine, and good food. Above all, it meant opportunity.

Sylvia pushed the glass of Pernod over to Jinny. “Got to dash! Will you have mine?” she asked, looping her scarf around her. “Adrienne's cooking for an American book collector tonight. So rich he stinks!” Sylvia kissed them both and walked away in her quick brogued stride. The pigeons flew about her shoes like mud from under a car's wheels. As they watched her go, Fife tried to talk about something else but Jinny immediately cut her off.

“There's nothing going on between you and Ernest, is there?”

“No,” Fife said. And it wasn't a lie.

 • • • 

On the night of the heavy rain Ernest invited her over to his apartment. They had spent all Christmas as a three on a skiing trip where no one had done much skiing. In the evening they read by the fire, or drank sherry and played billiards or three-handed bridge. As a joke they called themselves the harem. Fife slept in the room next to theirs.

Now Hadley had stayed on, and Ernest had come back to Paris for business. And soon enough, the invitation arrived from the Left Bank. Could she look over something new he had written on the train home?

Fife walked instead of getting a cab that night. She thought she might be able to exercise from herself her bad thoughts.
Be good
, she urged herself, as she walked over the Pont Neuf,
be good, you foolish girl.
But she could think of nothing but him.

When she arrived Ernest stood in the doorway: pale and tired. He greeted her almost as if she were an unwanted guest. Fife waited for him to show her the manuscript, but instead they talked about his trip to New York. They sat by the fire. All evening he seemed distracted and grouchy.

When she made to leave he idled by the door as if he did not want to let her go. She started to talk about some piece of gossip Jinny had told her when he shoved his knee between her legs and grabbed at her breasts under her coat. She struggled against him at first, meaning to stop it, remembering her words to herself on the bridge. But she collapsed into him and they made love by the fire without Ernest even taking off his pants. It was exciting as hell. Afterward he sat propped against his armchair and she against hers, still dressed in their clothes. She had desired him, in this very spot, for what had seemed like years.

 • • • 

Writing might prove, that spring, an absolution. Fife wrote letters and letters to Hadley, as if in writing to his wife she could absolve herself of guilt—but it was no good. Sometimes she got so excited about what was going on with Ernest that she forgot to tone it down even in her letters to his wife. Drunk one afternoon she slipped up and wrote a letter only to Ernest about a friend of theirs she had been flirting with, scrawling it out on a piece of notepaper and sending it off, imagining the delight on his face when he opened his private mail.

After their strange little trip to Chartres cathedral Jinny had stayed on at the Hemingway apartment for tea. Now she stood in their house on the rue Picot and peeled off her hat.

“
Ça va, mon homme?
” Fife asked her sister.

“I've been at the Hemingways'.”

The newspaper fell from Fife's lap. “Was Ernest there?”

Jinny looked about their home as if newly sensitive to how much space the sisters kept. She seemed wound up. “I am frozen. Their apartment is tiny, and cold, and smells of dead birds. I don't know how that woman stands it. Or him, or you, or herself! You're all ridiculous.”

“You're tired from the drive. Let me get you some tea.”

“Oh, I don't want any more tea!”

Still in her coat, Jinny pulled out a stained handkerchief and went to the kitchen. “Barely room for two people to sit,” she said to the faucet's running water. “Where does everyone
go
when you're there? Or do you just jump into bed with each other to keep yourselves warm?”

“For God's sake, stop washing that damned hankie!”

Jinny swiveled around to face her. “She asked me.”

Fife felt her whole face flush. Nothing had ever been said. Not by Hadley. Not by Fife or Ernest, not even to each other. All three of them labored for everything to be always unsaid. “And what did you say?”

Jinny's gray eyes looked out of the window then back at her. “I told her you were very
fond
of each other. She seemed to get the picture.”

“Wonderful.”

“I confirmed only what she already knew.”

“You had no right.”

“I saw you praying at Chartres,” Jinny said. “Are you not afraid of what you're doing? There's Hadley to consider, and Bumby too. And what about the state of your soul?”

“To hell with my soul; he is my soul! I love him, why can't you see that? I need him and he needs me. We are the same guy.”