Beautiful Exiles

by Meg Waite Clayton

  He stood there in his shorts and sandals, with his chest tanned from the time on the boat and the shirt still in his hands. “Just keep writing, Mook, and don’t think about it when you aren’t writing. If you think about it, you lose the thing you’re writing before you can go on with it the next day. Don’t write until you’re empty; leave a little bit inside you at the end of the day, and then come play tennis with me or swim, and drink and make love to me, and let the well refill while you sleep.”

  “Just write and enjoy the writing.”

  “And don’t forget to get the weather in the book.”

  I put paste on my toothbrush, saying, “The weather is important, I know,” thinking of the difference it had made in Finland, three million Finns trying to defend their homeland against one hundred and eighty million Russians with the cloud cover hiding the Russian planes until they were right on top of Helsinki. In the end the Finns had had to give the Russians what they wanted and then some in exchange for peace.

  “Bug,” I said, “when I was in Washington, I tried to get the president to clear the way for us to cover the war.”

  “But I’m fighting the war, Mookie. Isn’t fighting the war better than just writing about it?”

  “But I’m not, Bongie. I’m just arranging menus and playing tennis.”

  I turned to see him sitting on the bed, looking happy enough, still, his shirt beside him and his sandals still on his feet, which were dirty with the day.

  “You’re hardly back from your submarine and bauxite tour of the Caribbean and you want to leave me again already?” he said lightly.

  “I didn’t see anything there. I didn’t see a damned thing.”

  “But we went to China for you, Mart. Is that what you want again? To go off and get the China Rot? You were miserable that whole damned trip.”

  “I wasn’t, though, Bug. And that was almost two years ago.”

  “I went on the damn Indian country tour and missed the award ceremony and the Sinclair Lewis speech for you, and still it’s all about what you want.”

  “For me? That trip wasn’t for me.”

  “I sure as hell didn’t skip out on hearing Sinclair Lewis laud me for my own sake.”

  “You did, though, Ernest. I don’t know why, but you did.” I knew I shouldn’t say what I’d so often thought, that I should stick the damned toothbrush in my mouth, but I was so tired of being blamed for his skipping out on that speech, tired of his carping about how no one had cared enough to transcribe Sinclair Lewis’s praise of him. “Because as happy as you are to praise yourself, you’re awkward at hearing others do it?” I said. “Because the award you were being given was beneath you turning up to accept it? I sure don’t know, Hem, but I said a thousand times that we should go to New York, and you’re the one who insisted on sticking to the travel plans, and what the hell does it matter anyway? Before the damned trip was over, we were at war.”

  “Well, that’s revisionist history if I ever heard it.”

  I slammed my toothbrush against the sink edge in frustration, the paste flying into the sink and onto the vanity and the mirror. “You’re not even going to be here; you’re going to be off submarine hunting. What the hell does it matter where I am if you’re not here?”

  “You don’t think it’s a bit of a distraction to have my goddamned wife getting her goddamned tush shot all to hell?”

  “Is that the problem, Hem? You’re worried you’ll have to climb into bed every night with something with no lips to kiss, like that kid back in Spain?”

  “Christ, Marty!” He pulled his shirt on again and headed for the door and town and his drinking pals, turning to say on his way out, “For God’s sake, Mart, you’ve just started a fine new novel. There’ll be plenty of war left for you after your book is done.”

  After the front door closed behind him, I went to the drinks cart and poured myself a big glass of booze, and I sat by the pool in the steamy darkness, wondering how a good conversation about the writing had turned so bad, and how I’d ever imagined I could tell him about trying to enlist the president to help me get accredited. Help us, I’d said, but Ernest could be accredited in five minutes with no more effort than picking up the phone.

  “I wouldn’t hold you to loving me if I got myself blown up, Ernest Hemingway,” I said to the clean water in this swimming pool I’d retrieved from sludge. I tried to remember that, how happy I’d been to find this place, how much I’d wanted to spend my days making a home. “I’m smart enough to know you’d be no good at loving a girl you no longer found beautiful.”

  Which wasn’t fair—I told myself that as I drained the drink and set the empty glass at the edge of the pool, and stood and pulled off my nightclothes, and dove into the water. But anger and frustration do that, and I wasn’t any fairer in my anger and frustration than Ernest was.

  After Christmas, I went to St. Louis to visit Matie, who was sixty now and facing the seventh anniversary of Dad’s death. Ernest and I, with all the distance between us, wrote apologetic letters and resolved to love each other better. We did love each other. We did know that, and that was the hard part. The rest of it was just sorting out how to live together, the two of us each temperamental in our own way, sure, but we wrote so well together, and we were passionate about the same things, and we loved to fish together and shoot and play tennis and cover war. The rest of it couldn’t possibly matter as much as it sometimes seemed.

  I headed home to see him before he set off on his first official patrol in the Pilar—a patrol in which they were pretending to be a scientific expedition but were in fact, essentially, bait to draw German submarines up out of idle curiosity to see what this little boat was. I was caught in a snowstorm at the airport in Chicago, unable to get back to Cuba in time to see Ernest before he set off. When I did finally get home, I was relieved to find that Ernest’s patrol allowed him to come and go. What he was doing scared me to death; it made me crazy with worry, the way, I could see now, the madness had come over him when I went off on my little potato boat. Of course he’d been crazy with worry all that summer, and so crazy with relief when I came home that I got the brunt of that as well. I resolved to try to keep that in mind, to forgive him for it and to forgive myself too, and to try not to let my worry make me as crazy as his made him.

  The Finca Vigía, San Francisco de Paula, Cuba

  APRIL 1943

  Ernest and the Pilar had only just returned for repairs and supplies when a U-boat hit a Norwegian freighter off the Atlantic Coast and, two days later, sank an American tanker—all while we went out drinking with the pelota players. I began again to badger the gang at Collier’s to send me to England. The Caribbean wasn’t where the war was; it was where some little drop of the war had splashed. The Germans appeared to have given up bombing the British Isles to smithereens, but still they were a good bit closer to the war than Cuba, and I knew they wouldn’t send me closer.

  The Pilar went back out on May 20 in what Ernest was now calling Operation Friendless in honor of one of the cats. I was left to write out the weekly menus and supervise the gardener, lest the great hunks of flowers in my trees and my blooming lilies be chopped to pieces in a drunken rage. But I was left, too, to the quiet of my story that was too long for a story and too short for a book, and which was going gloriously well. I didn’t know it myself, but Ernest told me so, and he had told me often enough that my stuff stank when it did that I knew to believe him. I sent him the new chapters as I finished them, and he critiqued them the moment he got them and sent them right back. He wrote me letters almost every night too, delivering them and the manuscript pages to the mail boat each week when it came by Cayo Confites, where the Pilar was based, so that they reached me in bulk.

  In June, Ernest was involved in a hunt for a U-boat off Cayo Fragoso, a sixteen-hour patrol. They gathered information for planes dropping depth charges and “mousetraps,” with the end result so much flotsam and oil that there was little doubt the submarine had been destroyed. The
channel went silent—no more late-night German chatter. Still, when one of Ernest’s crew came to collect Patrick and Gregory, at the Finca for their summer visit, I could hardly believe it.

  “Don’t be foolish; they’re only boys,” I said in a whisper and well out of their earshot, wanting to remain the good Marty.

  “Ernest’s boys,” he answered with a certainty that left me sure Ernest had anticipated my objection and would brook no disagreement.

  “Gigi is only ten!” I insisted. “Even Patrick is only fourteen!”

  I might have slept at their door to keep those boys safe, but they would have climbed out the window and swam half the Caribbean to be with their father.

  In the quiet of having the Finca to myself, I finished my novel. June 27, 1943. It was a thoroughly respectable ninety thousand words after all, wanting only a title. I was enamored of “Share of Night, Share of Morning” from an Emily Dickinson poem. Ernest wrote suggesting Ecclesiastes and Proverbs, and worried how readers would take to a mulatto protagonist now that it was so thoroughly done as to be impossible to change.

  With the book finished, I was lonely. The first thing I did was write Ernest a long letter, one I worried would make him angry because I tried to explain myself to him, which really was meant to be an apology for how hard I was to live with, how I complicated his life. I wrote it at night, and maybe I should have written it in clean daylight, but I wanted him to see inside me, to know how thoroughly I abhorred the woman I had become. I needed to shuck off all the safety and the earned wisdom and be a fool again, rid of the brutalizing influence of being married and owning a home and having to keep my edges polished and my voice low. I needed to be young and poor and loving him like I had in Madrid.

  At least I had a visit from Matie to look forward to, and, as I hadn’t seen her in six months, I was keen to be with her and love her and be loved by her. I threw myself into getting the Finca in the finest condition it ever had been so it would be the pleasantest place on earth and she would never want to leave. I had the house painted a scrofulous smoky pink, her room fixed to maximum coziness, and the pool cleaned extra specially so that it looked like the fountain of youth. I imagined us taking long walks together, reading poetry and having picnics like we did in Creve Coeur Park, but without the overhang of having to go back to the St. Louis dulls.

  Ernest responded to my letter, asking me not to give up on him. He was dreaming of sleeping with silver bears, and surely that meant he ought to come home. After he sank one more submarine, he’d help me get wherever I wanted to go in the war.

  The permit for the Pilar expired July 4, and on the ninth, Ernest received coded orders telling him his patrol was over even though he hadn’t ever gotten his last sub. He limped home with Patrick and Gigi to join Matie and me, and if it was crowded with all of us in our little house, it was such a happy crowded that I wondered if I would ever want space again.

  Ernest promptly ordered a new marine engine for his patriotic little boat, and he read my finished manuscript and, finding it far short of commas, took to adding them for me. He was a good new Bongie after his submarine hunting, so nostalgic for all the friends he’d taken to bits over the years that he even wrote some of them to apologize. He really was trying to be nonrighteous and nonbragging. After some long talking, he even saw the sense of me going off to be a war correspondent with Collier’s. We settled it that, if Collier’s could fix it, after he got his new engine and his new orders for the Pilar, I would go to London. I let my editor know, and for good measure I wrote Ginny too, asking her to keep me in mind if the ambassador meant to hire anyone else.

  Patrick and Gregory and I, with the help of the embassy crowd, put together a party to celebrate the Pilar’s return and Ernest’s birthday, his forty-fourth. We gathered at the Club Cazadores del Cerro to shoot the most bizarre assortment of pigeons, quail, dead guinea pigs, oysters, and one huge moro crab, which we saved for Ernest’s last shot. After the shooting—and a fair amount of drinking to go with it—we returned to the Finca for a pig roast and more drinking, but not so much that we got more than happy drunk.

  With no patrols to go on and no writing done in well over a year, though, Ernest quickly grew sour. With my own book done and a war to be covered that I couldn’t yet get to, despite Collier’s efforts to get me accredited now, I grew sour as well. We did our best, but our best often ended in tussles over money and housekeeping, the cats, the self-aggrandizing, and the booze.

  Ernest and I went into Havana for dinner one night, with Ernest drinking beforehand in a way that even Gigi had mentioned to me. Gigi was trying to sort out this drinking thing as his father, inexplicably, had begun to allow the boys to drink with us. That night, I suggested we let our chauffeur drive us to dinner so we could have a nice drunk and get home without any new dent in the car.

  “I never drink so much that I can’t drive, for God’s sake,” Ernest said.

  “We could stay home and have something here,” I suggested. “It would be cheaper.” He was always on me about the money I spent.

  “You’re such a fool about the money,” he said. “You watch every penny, and then you spend a fortune polishing the floors.”

  “Replacing the floors, Bug. Tree roots were coming up in the middle of the living room.” Never mind that while I was writing pieces for Collier’s to earn a decent living, he’d dug a great big financial hole with his submarine hunting and his expensive new engine for the Pilar. But you couldn’t talk sense with a man who was sure his sailing excursions, whatever the cost, saved the free world. So he drove us into town himself.

  As Ernest kept drinking and drinking at the restaurant, I discreetly signaled the waiter to shut off the booze. The good man got the message, but after Ernest’s glass sat empty for a minute and a half, he stood and called to the waiter, “Where the hell is the service here?”—leaving the poor fellow no choice but to bring him another.

  As we were leaving the restaurant, walking out the open doors into the warm air of the street, I said quietly, “I can drive, Bongie. Would you like me to drive?”

  “I’ll drive,” he said.

  The valet hopped to fetching the Lincoln as people on the street turned to gawk. People always turned, because Bug was Ernest Hemingway and they knew that now, even here in Cuba. I was careful in public to call him Bug or Bongie or Rabby rather than Ernest or Hem, but still there was never a place where we weren’t Mr. Hemingway and his wife.

  “You ought to let me drive, Bongie,” I whispered.

  “You think I can’t drive?”

  “We’ve had a nice time, haven’t we, Bug?” I said in my most soothing voice, although we hadn’t. “I’m happy to drive. I don’t mind driving, and I haven’t had quite as much to drink as you have.”

  “You think I can’t hold my drink?”

  The people who had been looking turned away, embarrassed to overhear.

  “Of course you can,” I said gently. “I just think you ought to let me drive.”

  “I sure as hell can drive my own fucking car.”

  “All right,” I said. “All right.”

  When the valet pulled the car up, Ernest just stood looking at the thing, too drunk to recognize it as his car or to remember that he had to climb in if he wanted to go anywhere. The valet held the door and looked to me rather than hurrying around to open the passenger door.

  I climbed into the driver’s seat, saying, “Come on, Bongie. Let’s go home and cuddle in bed.”

  “Get out of my fucking car!” he shouted. “Get out of my fucking car, you dry, little cunt!”

  People turned toward us again, but there wasn’t the awe or the respect that was usually in the faces of the people who so often gaped at us. There was horror, and there was judgment.

  Someone said, “¿Necesita ayuda?” Did we need some help?

  I said quietly, “Come on, let me drive us home, Scrooby.” Scrooby, with the suggestion of sex—Mr. Scrooby—that so often appeased him.

  W
hen he didn’t respond, and still with all those people watching, I said, “Sweetheart.”

  His eyes narrowed in that way they did, that moment when what might still have somehow been saved as a happy drunk gave way to the darkness. I saw it coming, but I didn’t turn away. I don’t know why I didn’t, except that it seemed important for me to keep looking at him; I thought if I just kept steady, he would see what a pig he would be if he carried it through, a public pig, and he never was that. He could be cruel in private now, when he was drinking, but he was never less than charming when there were people to see him, to judge.

  “You’re drunk, Bug,” I said quietly, keeping my gaze fixed on his, sure that if I kept my pride and kept facing him, he would see how much it would humiliate me for him to hit me in public, how much it would humiliate him too, and he wouldn’t do that to me, he would love me more than that, he would care about me and about us more than that. “Come on,” I said gently, “let me drive us home.”

  He cocked his arm back.

  Still I didn’t look away. Maybe I could have. Maybe I should have. Maybe I should have backed down and scooted over and given him the wheel. But it seemed if I did, it would be letting go of the last scrap of me that I had. And it all happened so quickly anyway. He slapped me. A fierce whack across my cheek that stung like hell.

  I turned the key and shifted into gear without taking my gaze from his. I didn’t say anything. I just kept looking at him, and I took my foot from the brake, and I put it gently to the accelerator, and I drove his precious Lincoln Continental slowly but surely forward.

  As the bumper and the front hood hit the tree, I tried to fix the sound of it in my mind, like the rong cararong rong rong of the machine guns. Not crunch, exactly, but something like that. Runch? The chrome of the bumper folded in toward the metal of the car body and the venting grates and the beautiful whitewall tires Ernest so admired. Not hiss, but just an almost-silent ssss as the radiator collapsed toward the engine block, the car not warmed up enough to produce much steam.