by Paula McLain
“I say, Gerald, old chap. How about you chuck an oyster at a fellow? I’m famished.”
Gerald looked at him coldly and turned away to speak to Sara again.
“Sara,” Scott said, trying to draw her attention away from her husband. “Sara, please look at me. Please.”
But she wouldn’t and that’s when Scott picked up a cut-glass ashtray from the table and pitched it well over Gerald’s shoulder at an empty table behind. Sara flinched. Gerald ducked and barked at Scott to stop. Scott grabbed another ashtray, which hit the table dead center and then ricocheted off with a loud clang.
Zelda seemed set on ignoring him entirely, but the rest of us were appalled and embarrassed.
“C’mon, Prince Charming,” Ernest finally said flatly. He went over to Scott and took his elbow, helping him up. “Let’s have a dance,” he said, and then led Scott right off the terrace and down the steps to the beach. Everyone stared after them except for Zelda, who was looking intensely at the hedges.
“Nightingale,” she said. “Was it a vision, or a waking dream?”
Archie MacLeish coughed and said, “Yes. Well.” Ada touched her marcelled hair lightly, as if it were glass, and I looked out to sea, which was black as the sky and invisible. Years and years later, the waiter brought the check.
I slept late the next morning, knowing Bumby was in Marie Cocotte’s capable care. When I came downstairs, Scott and Ernest sat at the long table in the dining room with a sheaf of carbon pages laid out before them.
“Scott’s just had a momentous idea,” Ernest said.
“Good morning, Hadley,” Scott said. “Very sorry for last night and all that. I’m a proper ass, aren’t I?”
“Yes,” I said, and then laughed lightly, with the affection I truly felt. When he was sober, as now, he was sane and sound—as refined as anyone you’d ever want to meet. I went to get some coffee and came back to the table to hear about the scheme.
Ernest said, “In the first fifteen pages of Sun, we get Jake’s autobiography, we get Brett and Mike’s backstory, but all of that we also get later, or it’s explained enough anyhow. Scott says we lop it all off, right at the head.”
“I think it will work,” Scott said very seriously, nodding into his café crème.
“It’s what I’ve always said about the stories, that you get by with as little explanation as possible. It’s all there already or it’s not. The exposition slows it and ruins it. Now’s my chance to see if it will work for something as long as a novel. What do you think, Tatie?” His eyes were very bright and he looked so young and like the boy I’d met in Chicago that I had to smile no matter what else I felt.
“I think it sounds brilliant. You’ll make it work beautifully. Get the knife.”
“That’s my girl.”
Don’t forget that, I wanted to say. I’m still your best girl.
I took my coffee to the terrace and looked out past the rooftops of the little town to where the sea stood bright blue and uncompromised by anything. Not a seagull, not a cloud. Behind me, the men had bowed their heads again and were back at work, talking it through meticulously because it was heart surgery and they were the surgeons, and it was as important as anything they’d ever done. Scott could be a terrible, painful drunk. Ernest could shove cruelly against everyone who’d ever helped him up and loved him well—but none of that mattered when the patient was at hand. In the end, for both of them, there was really only the body on the table and the work, the work, the work.
For a solid week after Ernest arrived from Madrid, we followed a routine that seemed very nearly sustainable. Every morning, we had sherry and biscuits on our terrace at Juan-les-Pins, just like they did at Villa America. At two o’clock, we went over to have lunch with the Murphys or the MacLeishes, while Bumby napped or played with Marie Cocotte. At cocktail time, our driveway would fill with three cars and much laughter as we went back on the quarantine and tried to make it stick, passing good food and liquor through the grillwork of the fence.
Ernest wrote very hard for the first few days, but then realized it was impossible to be really alone—and that maybe he didn’t want to be alone. Scott tried to get back on the wagon but failed miserably. He and Ernest spent a great deal of time talking about work, but they didn’t do any of it. They sunned on the beach and soaked up praise from the Murphys as if they could never get enough.
Sara was a natural beauty, with a thick, tawny bob and clear, piercing eyes. Scott and Ernest both longed for her attention, and Zelda couldn’t stand the competition. She grew edgier and bolder by the day, but she wouldn’t direct any ire at Sara. They were friends and confederates, after all—so she reserved her sharpest barbs for Ernest.
Zelda and Ernest had never liked each other. He thought she had too much power over Scott, that she was a destructive force and probably half mad to boot. She thought he was a phony, putting on macho airs to hide an effeminate center.
“I think you’re in love with my husband,” she said to Ernest one night when we were down at the beach and everyone had had too much to drink.
“Scott and I are fairies? That’s rich,” he said.
Zelda’s eyes were hard and dark. “No,” she said. “Just you.”
I thought Ernest might hit her, but she’d laughed shrilly and turned away, beginning to take off her clothes. Scott had been talking intently to Sara, but he came to full attention then. “What on earth are you doing, dear heart?”
“Testing your nerve,” she said.
To the right of the small beach was a towering cluster of stones. The highest point stood thirty feet or more above the waves, and the current below was always choppy, swirling over hidden jagged points. This is where Zelda headed at a steady swim while we all watched with a horrible curiosity. What would she do? What wouldn’t she do?
When she reached the base, she scaled the rocks easily. Scott stripped and followed her, but he’d barely reached the outcropping when she let out an Indian cry and plunged off. There was a terrible moment when we wondered if she’d killed herself, but she bobbed to the surface and gave an exhilarated laugh. The moon was very bright that night and we could easily see the shapes their bodies made. We could also hear more wild laughter as Zelda clambered up to do it again. Scott had a go at it, too, both of them drunk enough to drown.
“I’ve seen enough,” Ernest said, and we went home.
The next afternoon at lunch on the terrace, things were quietly strained until Sara finally said, “Please don’t scare us like that again, Zelda. It’s so dangerous.”
“But Sara,” Zelda said, batting her eyes as innocently as a schoolgirl, “didn’t you know, we don’t believe in conservation.”
Over the coming string of days, as Pauline lobbed her letters at us first from Bologna and then from Paris, I started to wonder if Ernest and I believed in conservation—if we had it in us to fight for what we had. Maybe Pauline was tougher than we were. She wheedled her way in, complaining that she felt so very far away from all the good action and couldn’t something be done to fix that? She wrote that she wasn’t afraid of the whooping cough because she’d had it as a child, and couldn’t she come and share our quarantine? She sent this in a letter to me and not to Ernest, and I was struck, as I often was with Pauline, by her intensity and single-mindedness. She never ever dropped her pretense that she and I were still friends. She never gave up an inch of her position.
Pauline arrived in Antibes on a blindingly clear afternoon. She wore a white dress and a white straw hat, and seemed impossibly fresh and clean, a dish of ice cream. A widening sunspot. Another woman might have felt self-conscious arriving on the scene this way, when everyone knew or at least suspected her role as mistress—but Pauline didn’t have an ounce of self-consciousness about her. She was like Zelda that way. They both knew what they wanted and found a way to get it or take it. They were frighteningly shrewd and modern and I was anything but that.
“Isn’t it nice for Hem,” Zelda said one evening, “th
at you’re so agreeable all the time? I mean, Hem really runs the show, doesn’t he?”
I’d flinched and said nothing, assuming she’d said it out of jealousy over the boys’ closeness, but she was right, too. Ernest did run the show and run me over more than occasionally, and that wasn’t by chance. He and I had both grown up in households where the women ruled with iron fists, turning their husbands and their children into quivering messes. I knew I would never be that way, not at any price. I’d chosen my role as supporter for Ernest, but lately the world had tipped, and my choices had vanished. When Ernest looked around lately, he saw a different kind of life and liked what he saw. The rich had better days and freer nights. They brought the sun with them and made the tides move. Pauline was a new model of woman and why couldn’t he have her? Why couldn’t he reach out and claim everything he wanted? Wasn’t that the way things were done?
For my part, I felt utterly stuck and conspired against. This was not my world. These were not my kind of people, and they were drawing Ernest in with every passing day. What could I do or say? He might ultimately fall out of love with Pauline and come fully back to me—that was still possible—but nothing was in my control. If I gave him an ultimatum and said she couldn’t stay, I would lose him. If I got hysterical and made public scenes, it would just give him an excuse to leave me. All that was left for me was a terrible kind of paralysis, this waiting game, this heartbreak game.
FORTY
e didn’t know how love managed to be a garden one moment and war the next. He was at war now, his loyalty tested at every turn. And the way it had been, the aching and delirious happiness of being newly in love, had passed out of his reach until he wasn’t certain he’d ever had it. Now, there were only lies and compromises. He lied to everyone, beginning with himself, because it was war and you did what you had to do to stay upright. But he was losing control, if he ever had it. The lies grew tighter and more difficult all the time. And because there was sometimes more pain than he could properly cope with, he had a black buckram notebook, thick with creamy rag paper, where he put down the ways he’d thought to kill himself if it ever came to that.
You could turn on the gas and wait for the slow fog and the blue and strangled half sleep. You could slash your wrists, the razors were always there, and there were other places on the body that were even quicker, the neck below the ear, the inner thigh. He’d seen knives in the gut and that wasn’t for him. It reminded him of gored horses in Spain, the purplish coil of entrails unzipped. Not that, then, not unless there wasn’t an alternative. There was out the window of a skyscraper. He’d thought of that in New York when he was drunk and happy after meeting Max Perkins and saw the Woolworth Building. Even happy he thought it. There was the deep middle of the sea, off an ocean liner at night, with only the stars as witness. But this was terribly romantic and you had to arrange the ocean liner in advance. There was any swim anywhere if you meant to do it. You could dive down deep and stay there, way down, letting the air slip out of you and just stay, and if anyone wanted you, well, they could come and get you. But as soon as he hit on it, he knew that the only way he would really do it was with a gun.
The first time he’d seriously looked at a gun and thought about pulling the trigger he was eighteen and had just been wounded at Fossalta. He’d felt a lightning rod of pure pain take him over, more pain than he’d known was possible. He’d lost consciousness and when he came to again his legs were mush and didn’t belong to him at all. His head didn’t either, but there he was on a stretcher, waiting to be carried away by the medics, surrounded by the dead and the dying. Overhead the sky went white, a stuttering of light and heat. Screaming. Blood everywhere. He lay there for two hours, and every time he heard the shelling, he couldn’t help himself; he started to pray. He didn’t know where the words came from, even, because he never prayed.
He was blood soaked, open to the sky, and the sky was open to death. Suddenly he saw the gun, an officer’s pistol very near his foot. If he could just reach it. Everyone was dying, and it was so much more normal and natural than this pain. This hideous openness. With his mind, he reached for the pistol. He reached again and failed. And then the medics came and they bore him away alive.
He’d always thought of himself as brave, but he didn’t have a chance to find out that night of the shelling. He wasn’t any closer to knowing now. In the fall, he’d promised himself he’d do it if the situation with Pfife wasn’t resolved by Christmas, and it hadn’t been and he still hadn’t done it. He told himself then it was because he loved her too much and Hadley, too, and he couldn’t cause suffering for either of them—but they all suffered badly anyway.
Now it was summer and things were more and more impossible. He couldn’t imagine living without Hadley and didn’t want to, but Pfife was winding herself more firmly around his heart. She used the word “marriage” and meant it more all the time.
He wanted them both, but there was no having everything, and love couldn’t help him now. Nothing could help him but bravery, and what was that anyhow? Was it reaching for the gun or sitting with the pain and the shaking and the terrible fear? He couldn’t know for sure, but since that first gun, he’d reached for many. When the time came, he knew it would be a gun and that he’d simply trip the trigger with a bare toe. He didn’t want to do it, but if things got too bad—if they got very bad indeed—then suicide was always permissible. It had to be.
FORTY-ONE
long the Golfe-Juan a white road cut into the cliff side. You could ride a bicycle there for five or ten or fifteen miles, looking out at the bright boats in the quays, the rocky beaches and pebbled beaches, and sometimes a shoal of impossibly soft-looking sand. Bathers napped beneath gaily striped red-and-white umbrellas looking as if they belonged in a painting. Everything did, the fishermen in dark caps releasing their nets, the stone ramparts that sheltered Antibes from the weather, and the red rooftops of the village stacked one on the other in terraced clusters.
Pauline and I often bicycled together after breakfast while Ernest worked. It wasn’t my idea, but we were there in paradise, after all, and had to do something. The lease at Villa Paquita ran out in early June, and so we rented two rooms at the Hôtel de la Pinède in Juan-les-Pins. Bumby and Marie Cocotte were nearby, in a small bungalow surrounded by pine trees. The cure for his whooping cough had at last begun to work, and he felt a little better every day. His color had returned and he was sleeping well, and our worrying about him was almost entirely gone. The quarantine was over, but we kept to ourselves in the daylight anyway, forming our own island, while just a few miles across the peninsula at Villa America, the Murphys and the Fitzgeralds and the MacLeishes carried on as before, drinking sherry with biscuits at ten-thirty sharp and Tavel with caviar and toast points at one-thirty and playing bridge at a gorgeous blue-and-green mosaic table that had been set up on the beach for this. The image on the tabletop was of a siren with flowing hair. She balanced on a rock and gazed into the distance. At Villa America, everyone loved the siren because she seemed to be a symbol of something. They loved her the way they loved their sherry and their toast points and every moment of every ritual that wound around them like clock springs.
At the Hôtel de la Pinède, we had our own rituals. We breakfasted late, and then Ernest went off to work in a small studio off the terrace while Pauline and I rode bicycles or swam and sunned at our little beach with Bumby. After lunch we had siesta, then bathed and dressed for cocktail hour either at Villa America, in one of the terraced gardens, or at the casino in town, and no one raised even an eyebrow in our presence or said anything that wasn’t in good taste because that was the contract.
Anyone looking on from nearly any vantage point would have believed that Pauline and I were friends. She might have believed it herself. I never really knew. She certainly worked hard to stay cheerful, inventing errands for us in the village to secure freshly picked figs or the very best tinned sardines.
“Wait until you try this olive,”
she would say, or whatever it was—strong coffee or pastry or nice jam. “It’s heaven.”
I must have heard her say “It’s heaven” a thousand times over that summer, until I wanted to scream. I didn’t scream, though, and that became one of the things I grew to regret.
We had two rooms at the hotel, each with a double bed and heavy bureau and shuttered windows that opened onto the coastline. Ernest and I occupied one, and Pauline kept to herself in the other—at least at first. For a week or ten days, when Pauline and I came back from bicycling or swimming, she’d excuse herself to change for lunch, but then went to Ernest’s studio instead, passing through the hotel to where a second entrance lay unmarked, as inconspicuous as a broom closet. They likely had a secret knock. I imagined that and so much more, though it made me sick to do it. When she came to lunch an hour or so later, she was always freshly showered and impeccably dressed. She’d sit down, smiling, and begin to praise the lunch or the day extravagantly. It was all so modulated and discreet I wondered if she took a certain pleasure playing her role, as if in her mind a film reel was spinning and she was a great actress who never fumbled a single line.
I wasn’t nearly so clever. More and more I found myself at a loss for words and didn’t want to hear other people talking either. Their conversations seemed false and empty. I preferred to look at the sea, which said nothing and never made you feel alone. From my bicycle, I could watch the boats moving in blue chop, or focus on the bright green scrub growing out of the ramparts with great tenacity. Somehow it stayed rooted, no matter how the wind or waves attacked, immovable as the dark moss on the rocks below.
One morning after a storm had raged for hours the night before, Pauline was intent on pointing out every sign of demolition—overturned dinghies and fallen pine boughs, the tangle of umbrellas on the beach. I tried to escape her chatter by pedaling faster until I could only hear the rush of momentum, the purr of my wheels on the road. But she wouldn’t be thrown off.
