by Naomi Wood
More than not wanting to dive, she doesn’t want to be outdone. If she’s going to be outperformed at the party tonight, she might as well make a decent attempt at this. The beach shines ahead of her. Fife stands close. Hadley grips the edge of the raft with her toes. All she can think of is each stud popping from her spine like pearls coming loose from one of Sara’s necklaces. The raft keeps jerking as the chain gets to the end of its reach. She’s scared it’ll throw her off before she’s ready.
Fife holds Hadley’s hands up above her head. “Arms up. Higher, Hash, yes. Now imagine yourself ”—Fife’s hands follow her words—“your head, your stomach, your hips, and then your legs, following the line of your arms.” Her touch is gruesome and delicate and Hadley wonders how Ernest bears to have it on him. If only to flee, she jumps.
Hadley’s stomach hits the water first in a perfect belly flop, but at least she hasn’t broken anything. She stays a while under the sea, where it’s quiet and warm, and where Ernest and Fife cease to exist. Her hair spreads around her as if it were long again, no longer cut in this unflattering flapper style, which Ernest likes and she detests. She stays unmoving for a while under the sea: suspended, outstretched, blank.
When she comes up for air, the salt smarts her eyes so that the features of the couple blur. Hadley blinks and they become clear: they’re both smiling and looking down at her, brightly encouraging. The memory of the baby carriage surfaces again, and Ernest and Fife grin mawkishly like two proud parents.
Hadley climbs up onto the raft and stands dripping over Ernest. She kisses him and surprises him with her tongue. He’s probably always wanted her to be a bit more reckless. “Not bad,” he says.
“The dive?” she says, “or the kiss?”
“Both.” He smiles, gazing up at her. In the corner of her vision she sees Fife flinch and look to the beach.
“I’m hungry,” she says.
“Have you not had breakfast?” Fife asks, still facing away from them.
“Get something later,” Ernest says and his hands trace Hadley’s spine as if he, too, were remembering her injury. “I’ll go back with you soon.”
They don’t speak for a while. They sit there, all three, as if waiting for something to happen. In the distance the trees on the bank seem to shrink away like dye in an old photograph. Then Fife stands and dives. Once again it’s perfect. As soon as she returns to the raft, her long legs take her back to the sea.
She dives again and again, enjoying her skill, but Hadley knows the performance is misjudged. What Fife can’t hear, or doesn’t notice, is that Ernest lets out a louder sigh each time the raft rocks. He’ll want to sleep off his hangover, she thinks, and will find this cute spectacle maddening.
Wickedly, because she knows he does not want to be left alone with Fife, Hadley says she has a headache and will swim back. Sometimes, she sees Ernest wearing a phony smile, as if he is not quite sure of his mistress, whether or not he likes being alone in her company.
“What about lunch?” Fife says, water dripping off her in a puddle around her painted toes. “Won’t we get it in the village?’
“You two go on without me.” She smiles at Ernest. “See you at home.”
Hadley descends on the ladder and begins her swim toward the beach.
“Will you be at the party tonight?” Fife shouts from the landing.
Hadley turns, treading water, and replies, “Of course! End of quarantine! Hurrah!” She waves and gives them her best smile.
At the road she stares down at the sea: the raft is a spot of brown, unmoving. She squints, trying to make out the two figures on the deck. Perhaps they have gone swimming. Perhaps they have climbed up on the bank to make love and feel the sun’s rich heat on each other’s skin. Hadley can feel Fife’s ache for Ernest as strongly as if it were in her own body.
When she wrote Fife, asking her to come, she was banking on the pressures of Paris transferring to Antibes. She thought this vacation would break their attachment to each other. But it has turned into a boring game of treading water. Their legs keep churning under the surface while their heads nod and smile above it. And she did not take into account how often Fife would be in a bathing suit. Oh no; she did not think of that.
6. ANTIBES, FRANCE. MAY 1926.
Hadley sent off Fife’s invitation calmly one day: as if inviting his mistress to vacation with them were a matter of ordering a dress from a catalogue.
All this time alone might have turned anyone’s head. Only occasionally was the quarantine broken by visits from the Villa America pack: Scott and Zelda, Gerald and Sara, when they brought eggs and butter and cakes of Provençal soap. Scott sometimes brought flowers, which always made Hadley smile, and they would talk over the fence posts about Bumby’s progress.
Sara always stood at the back of the group. She had a fear of germs, and her eyes darted over Hadley as if the coqueluche might jump like a flea from her clothes. As soon as Sara had learned of Bumby’s whooping cough, it had been no uncertain banishment from Villa America. Hadley’s exile only underlined the fact that Mrs. Murphy held her, not in contempt, but with something approximating indifference. Though Sara paid the doctor’s bills and had her chauffeur drop by regularly with provisions, Hadley had always thought Sara behaved toward her with a certain chilliness. If Fife had had children, Hadley was sure the treatment to her would have been different. She wouldn’t have faced this banishment.
At the end of their visits the group would hand over the basket of supplies and then, like a school of fish come to observe the goings-on on the other side of the pond, they would depart back to Villa America, their silver-flecked skin and fishy scowls flashing in the hot light of midday. Scott was always the merriest, shouting joyous good-byes as he walked down the gravel path, already drunk despite it not yet hitting noon. Hadley would watch them until they were out of sight: imagining the exquisite conversations back in Villa America, where one dressed for dinner and did not always undress in one’s own bed.
The gang came to relieve the quarantine every few days or so, but it wasn’t like having somebody to talk to. The rest of the time, Hadley was alone. She watched Bumby while he was bedridden and burned eucalyptus for his chest. She watered the roses in the garden and waited for the Villa’s next arrival. She tried hard to read the cummings novel but didn’t understand it. The replies from Ernest came in slowly. He was busy writing so much in Madrid that she didn’t want to disturb him. If it was going well he had to apply himself for as long as he could manage, because who knew when it would go well again? He needed to write, and they needed the money. In the days her thoughts looped around the same thing: the matter of her friend, her husband, his mistress.
Behind the invitation was a muddled reasoning. Hadley had seen, in Paris, how the trio made him feel awkward: flummoxed as to what he should do. Long April days spent in the company of wife and mistress would always make Ernest rush back to her in the evenings, as if he could finally see his wife’s merits next to Fife’s empty dazzle. Fife was rich and blowzy and urbane, but Ernest wanted a wife, not a showgirl. Hadley had asked him to sort this thing out after Jinny’s revelation—but what it had meant was a moratorium on speaking about it, and Hadley was pretty sure things between Fife and her husband only continued.
And so she thought that she could perhaps break the affair by setting them up like this, so that the pressure of three would reduce them again to two. In Antibes, there would be none of his little exciting adventures across the Pont Neuf with Fife alone. Nor could there be the intimate walks down to the Seine with his wife to watch the barges and fishing boats. No, they would be a three again, all the time, and she had banked on Fife’s presence here making the spindles of this triangle snap.
With a coldness to her thoughts that morning, a fortnight into the coqueluche confinement, Hadley wrote to her husband’s lover and invited her to Antibes. Wouldn’t it be fun, she wrote, if we vacationed down in Juan this summer; all of us—un, deux, trois?
And when she put down the pen Hadley had even felt triumphant. She wrote Fife’s address on the front, and the envelope’s glue was bitter on her tongue. That afternoon she gave the letter to Scott through the grill when he came, on his own this time, to deliver food and telegrams. In return she handed over the note for Fife to her fashionable Paris address. Scott gave her a strange look, over the shaker he carried of martini, as if asking her if this were a good idea.
And so Fife had come with her Riviera stripes and her fisherman’s hat and her talk of chaps and everything being ambrosial or indecent and her kid-leather gloves. They had tried not to talk about Ernest, or Paris, or Jinny, or Chartres. Instead they sunbathed and ate well and played with Bumby, and the two women waited, as May turned to June, for Ernest to arrive.
7. ANTIBES, FRANCE. JUNE 1926.
Noon light blankets Antibes. Today is shadeless, and everything, even the walls, even the bathroom tiles, is warm to the touch. Even the grayest of the olive branches sparkle as the sun catches them.
The maid has closed the shutters and the inside of the villa is dark at the peak of day. From up in her bedroom Hadley can hear the insects whir on the roses and in the fruit trees, as if all their cogs were motoring along in constant motion.
She dumps the beach bag on the chair and pulls off her bathing suit. She has burnt out on the raft and feels stupid for having let her jealousies get in the way of her exit. She pulls on a robe, washes the suit, and wonders what it is they are doing now.
Hadley steps out into the day and hangs her suit on the line. When she comes back inside it’s as if the villa has been thrown in ink. Only slowly do the forms of things emerge. She calls out to Marie, the maid, but she doesn’t answer. Perhaps she and Bumby are in the backyard, or out in Juan celebrating the end of quarantine. The house is still; there is a sense that everything has been here for centuries. She calls for Marie again. Nothing.
Hadley makes her own lunch in the kitchen: a salad of leaves, tomatoes, rolled ham, and olives. The French dresser is very fine, as are the long oak counters with baskets of purple onions and papery garlic. She has always admired expensive things, but, unlike Ernest, she has never coveted them for herself. Their Paris apartment is so bare that she knows all the other expatriate women must laugh at her and yet, until this spring, she didn’t much care what they thought of her. They have been very poor, but not without the promise of things getting better. That was all she had needed. In fact, she always thought herself lucky, since it was she among them who could call herself Mrs. Hemingway.
Hadley eats alone at the round table where their books sit on the shelf above. Ernest’s first book of short stories, In Our Time, sits alongside Scott’s new novel, The Great Gatsby. She remembers one of Ernest’s stories. The images are still so cool and fresh they resurface as vividly as if they were her own memories—how the fish broke the surface of a lake and the sound of them landing was described as gunpowder hitting the water. Hadley could picture everything in that story: the boat out in the bay, the boyfriend and girlfriend trolling for trout, the old sawmill that was now a ruin. But then it came, that moment when the boyfriend tells the girlfriend how it just isn’t fun anymore—none of it is fun, he tells her, desperate; none of it’s going to work. She wonders how much it was about them. The story is called “The End of Something” after all.
And now Ernest has finished his debut novel, known only to their gang as The Sun. The novel in which all of their friends appear: everyone down to the English tourists in Pamplona and the roughnecks who sleep outside their house. Slowly, this year, Hadley has watched her name edited out of the pages—there is no room for her among the sauced sluts and the rich and the fags and the bons viveurs. The people in The Sun all talk suspiciously like Fife—always ready with a cute answer, always on hand for another glass of champagne. Did no one ever have a hangover?
Denying her a place in the novel: it is punishment for that day, when she had packed three or four of Ernest’s stories and his first novel into a small leather suitcase. She had made sure to pack the carbons on top so that he could correct those too. Ernest went loopy without something creative to work on.
At the Gare de Lyon she left her suitcases in the stateroom and stepped out for some water. Later, when forced to retell the story, she admitted she’d bought a packet of cigarettes but had only smoked one by the time she came back on board. Back in the carriage she unpinned her hair and felt the tension leave her scalp. She imagined the train gaining the platform at Lausanne, Ernest growing in perspectival haste, and then rushing from the carriage to kiss him where he stood. Already in retrospect she savored the thought of their reunion.
Not quite out of the daydream Hadley reached for the case on the luggage rack but her hands touched only air. She figured it must have slid down, but there was nothing at the end either. Hadley stood on the bed opposite so that she was level with the shelf. Only dark space. A light terror seized her. His novel. The stories. Everything Ernest had ever written. Surely there had been some mistake with the other passengers; the case must have been put in another room.
In the other carriages round faces looked up at her. No one offered any help. Hadley went into the adjoining staterooms. Each face was a blank coin. Je ne l’ai pas vue. She didn’t know whether she spoke English or French. Oddly she thought how like peasants everyone looked—not the smart sophisticates of their Paris set—people who wouldn’t understand the loss of a novel to someone like Ernest.
Worry knotted her stomach. The train would be leaving in five minutes or less. She spoke in English to the train guard: “My husband’s work case has gone missing! It has everything in it. Please help me!”
The train guard asked the porter to check the carriages. A woman who was selling blankets and flasks of cognac came on board to help. The big station clock showed only minutes remained before the train should leave. The guard ran over to the ticket office. By now Hadley was in her carriage alone, stricken with fear, pacing back and forth.
An announcement said the train to Lausanne was about to depart and she heard the final shout, “All aboard!” The woman selling cognac was talking to another seller and pointing at Hadley’s carriage. A man pushed a trolley, trailing a sickly smell of beignets. The guard came up to the window and he shook his head. “It has not been found, Madame.”
Hadley sat down, winded.
“Do you want to stay?” The train’s whistle sounded. “Madame, you have to decide now if you will stay or go. The train—it is about to leave.”
His young blue eyes didn’t move from hers.
“No. I will go,” she said. The final whistle sounded. Novel. Stories. Carbons. Everything. She had made the job complete.
And there Ernest was the next morning: standing just as she had imagined him in the cold white light, in front of the logs piled up on the platform for winter. As the train drew closer she saw Ernest scanning the carriages. She came off the train and stood still and empty-handed. When he saw her, not walking toward him, his face went pale.
She wished Ernest could have been angry. She wished he might have shouted at her. Instead he had packed his bag and caught the return train to Paris. When he returned to Lausanne without the case, he said he didn’t want to talk. It was over. There was nothing to be done. Everything had been lost.
Hadley pinches a dead leaf from the vase. The roses are on the turn; the leaf powders in her hands. She finishes what’s left on her plate and rinses the china in the big stone sink.
She climbs the marble stairs. The stonework is exposed in the central stairwell; it’s always the coolest place in the house. The fig trees are perfectly in line with the top window: Ernest told her that butterflies get drunk off their milk in high summer and they fly around crazily, liquored up on the fruit. Not so different from the strange family that stays here.
In the bedroom Hadley pulls off her robe so that she can nap with her skin on the sheets. The thought occurs to her that perhaps Ernest’s novel will not be a roaring s
uccess. Perhaps he will not find the fame and riches he hungers for. But she cannot imagine him as any less famous than Scott.
The lampshades sway above the bed in the breeze. For the first time that day when her eyes close, there is no hot glassed light pressing on her lids. It is dark in here, and quiet. She listens to her own breath as she waits for sleep.
They retire to bed when the day is at its hottest: Ernest calls it the killing time. Days ago they had fallen asleep together listening to Bumby play down in the rose garden. An hour later Hadley woke up, feeling herself observed.
The room was empty, but when she lifted her head she found Fife, not a foot away, her dark eyes observing them. She grinned, just as she had done at Chartres, and Hadley wondered if she were about to crawl into bed with them. There were three in the bed and the little one said … Seconds or minutes passed and then Fife slipped from the room.
Her feet made no sound as she went but Hadley heard the brocade curtain swing as the woman passed by it, and she tried to record this sound: to remind herself that the vision had not been a dream.
That evening neither woman mentioned anything. They ate pork with sage. Fife fussed: praising her for her culinary skills, which was just another way to insult her. “I haven’t an ounce of knowledge about the kitchen,” Fife said, with a flashed look toward Ernest, already nicely toasted on his third martini. “You are good at all of this, Hash,” she said, gesturing with her palms toward the neatly laid table.
That night they played three-handed bridge and Hadley lost. But when Mr. and Mrs. Hemingway made love that night, Hadley made sure to scream out as loudly as she could, and the next morning over a breakfast of sherry and toast, Ernest’s mistress was quieter than usual.
8. ANTIBES, FRANCE. JUNE 1926.
Ernest wakes her an hour or so later. He’s left his suit in a puddle by the bed and where he is damp he is cool. “Ernest, you smell as if you live in a shell.”
