by Naomi Wood
“I’m a mussel come to see you.”
She laughs. “A mussel is the least intelligent living thing in the universe! So that can’t be you, Ernest, not with your big brain.”
He is kissing her; he moves his hand to her breast. Light pleats the shade. The sash of a kimono hangs behind the bed, glossy and green, and books pile on the side tables. A large Chinese cabinet is lacquered in dragons. Sometimes she wonders why on earth she’d want to be anywhere but here, in this bedroom, in this afternoon, far from the retinal light of the beach down below. The linen is fresh; Ernest is here.
He starts to nuzzle her neck in the place he knows is excruciating. “Stop it, Ernest. I can’t … Please!”
“What, Hash? Kitten? What are you saying? Want me to continue, is that it?”
“Please stop!” she says, but she can’t speak for how much she is laughing.
Ernest continues kissing her neck.
“Tell me about mussels and I’ll stop kissing you like this,” he says, “and breathing on you like this,” he says, “and licking you like this.”
“It’s a bivalve!” she shouts. She grabs at his wrists to push him off.
“A bivalve? What does that mean? Double the potency?”
He pins her by the hands to the mattress. “You’re killing me!”
“I’m a little mussel clamped to your neck. What does a bivalve mean?”
“It means it doesn’t even have consciousness!”
Hadley tries to maneuver a knee to his crotch so that he will know he’s in dangerous territory. But he rolls away from her. “And how does it eat?”
“It sucks up things from the water.”
He makes a seal with his lips and sucks at a patch of skin. “Like this?”
She’s running out of air. “It siphons it up.”
“And what do they drink?”
“They don’t drink.”
“No champagne?”
“No champagne.”
“A life without champagne!”
“They don’t have enough brain to imagine life without champagne.”
“No imagination and no champagne. I’d rather not bother without those two.” Ernest rolls off her and props himself up on one arm. Funny that she’s always disappointed when he does as she asks.
“Then you’d be the first suicidal bivalve the world has ever seen. You’d be studied in every lab in America for your complex character never before known in the mussel world.”
“I bet being in the sea all the time would feel swell. You’d feel cool and fresh and think of nothing but water and the next meal and meeting a nice lady mollusk to suck on and that’s about the sum of it.”
Her breathing calms as they lie together. He looks at her face. “If I put a mirror down your nose you’d look exactly the same as you do now, Hash. Your face is exactly symmetrical. A wonder of science.”
“Wide as a Polish plate, that’s what my ma said.”
“Your mother sounded like a bitch of the highest order.”
“She wasn’t winning any awards.”
“That’s why mothers die. So we can go on living,” he says, rather cryptically, since his mother is alive and well. “But you are very, very pink,” he says, moving her hair off her face.
“So would you be after being tortured like that.”
“From the sun, I mean.”
“I should’ve left earlier. Were you out for long?”
“Not long,” he says.
“I can see your strap marks. You’re a lovely color.”
“So are you.”
“I’m a rotten tomato. I wish I weren’t fair. I wish I went tan, Nesto, like you.”
“You haven’t called me that in a while.”
She presses a finger on her arm and watches the print go white then red. The memory comes back to her, looking up at Fife and Ernest, parental and faintly menacing as they stood watching her from the raft. The image is so vivid that in an instant her mood blackens.
Ernest rolls on top again and the breath is pressed from her. He kisses her but she can’t shake the image of them at the raft. Fife, thin as a rail, going after her husband. Her husband giving in. Them kissing on the deck, or fucking by the trees, as she ate lunch alone thinking about that suitcase, and how guilty she still feels about it, the whole damn thing. No.
Hadley maneuvers herself out from under him.
“Come on, Hash.” He looks not a day older than his twenty-six years.
“No, Nesto. You can’t have us both.”
It is as if a gunshot has blasted the room. It’s the first time since their argument in Paris that this has been mentioned explicitly.
Hadley goes over to the mirror and wraps herself in her dressing gown. She brushes her hair with firm strokes. If only he weren’t such a boy sometimes, if only he could see what he is doing. In the reflection, Ernest looks at her with disbelief and faint reproach: as if the charges leveled against him were both profane and wearisome. “You seem to have done nothing about this … this situation. I’m sorry to mention it. But I have to.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s impossible to go on any more like this.”
“I didn’t invite her here.”
“Oh, don’t remind me.”
Several more yankings of the brush, the bristles alive on her scalp.
“I don’t see why you had to bring her here. I would’ve—”
A door closes downstairs. Fife’s voice is singsong and light as it travels up the marble stairs. “Chaps!”
Hadley sets down the brush. She can feel the left lid of her eye start its gentle pulse, then the right lid too. God, she thinks, she needs a vacation.
“Are you in?” His mistress’s voice sails up the stairs.
Hadley opens the door and shouts past the curtain. “We’re upstairs.”
“Game of bridge?”
And without knowing why, Hadley shouts, “Down in five minutes!”
“What are you doing?” Ernest says. He looks incredulous.
“We,” Hadley says as she pulls on a dress, “are going to play a game or two of bridge. We’ll talk about this later.”
Fife is already shuffling cards, her neat little head framed by the rose garden. A cigarette sticks from her lips; Hadley doesn’t know how she bears to smoke in the heat. She wears a sailor’s chemise with white shorts. This is practically a uniform in Antibes. Her lean legs are lovely and brown. The comb’s journey is still visible through her hair.
“Did you have a good swim?” asks Hadley.
“It was fine. So hot though.”
She wonders if this woman has just had sex with her husband.
Fife deals, placing the cards in three neat piles.
When Ernest joins them, he is wearing only shorts, and his bare chest and broad shoulders make both women smile. Despite themselves, they share a look. Fife rolls her big eyes, and Hadley shakes her head, as if his vanity is a secret shared between them.
“Hello, ladies. No need to get up.”
“Did you maybe think about a shirt, Ernest?” Fife asks.
“Why deny you both the pleasure?” he says. Ernest looks at Hadley, his eyes challenging: as if to say if you will go ahead and mention it, then so shall I.
Bumby comes from the house, his fat little legs running over to them, followed by the maid. “Excusez-moi, Madame ’emingway. Viens, Bumby!”
Where he has been playing in the garden the boy’s knees are dark with soil.
“Ça va aller.” Marie returns to the house and Bumby climbs onto his father’s knee, clasping his arms around his father’s neck. Ernest nuzzles his son and kisses his fat cheeks. When they’d found out she was pregnant, Ernest had been twenty-three; too young, he said, too young for kids. It had thrown him into a dark mood for weeks—where would be the time to write and go to the bicycle races and stay out all night with a baby in the house?
But now he takes a good breath of his child and turns him so that Bumby sits facing the
group. Bumby’s T-shirt is a little small for him and he sits with his belly out, looking up at the adults, who, unbeknownst to him, are making a general hash of his world. Hadley feels bad for him; even if he can’t understand what’s going on, he’s still witness to it. “Darling boy,” she says, ruffling his hair. “How are you feeling?”
His nose is still a little red from the cold that came with the whooping cough. “Bien,” he says. Hadley rubs his chest.
“You’ve been in the woods, haven’t you?”
Bumby nods and seats his thumb in his mouth.
“I used to do that as a child,” Fife says, and both of them look at her, as if they have forgotten Pauline Pfeiffer even sat with them at the table.
“You’ll win the game for me while I get something from the house?” Ernest puts Bumby on her lap. Minutes later he returns from the villa with a tray of glasses.
“Gin and tonics,” he says, “how could I forget?”
Drinks, now, earlier and earlier. At the stroke of three Ernest is ready to take a spritzer or gin fizz. Hadley throws back the gin and tonic surprisingly quickly. Ernest looks at her with surprise, and, she notices, delight. She sends Bumby back into the house so he won’t get in the way of the game. Suddenly she feels full of the desire to win, to knock Fife down absolutely.
9. ANTIBES, FRANCE. JUNE 1926.
Bridge has ended, as it always does these days, with one of them pushing back their chair and striding into the house in barely suppressed dismay. This time it was Hadley: unable to watch, when it was Ernest and Fife’s time to partner up, how implicitly they read each other’s bids, how easily they banked on her losing out to the stream of cards in the dummy seat. Ernest followed her up to the house trying to mollify her. But fury—hot and sure and so seldom felt—rises in her as she climbs the stairs toward their room.
“You’re the one who invited her here!” Ernest snaps.
“And I regret the day that I did!”
“Well she’s here now. We can hardly turn her away.” “No we can’t, and it seems like you can’t stop gadding about with her either!” Hadley slams the bedroom door. “How long did you need to stay out on the raft? And how long did you play tennis with her yesterday? I am your wife! Not her. Need I remind you of this?”
“I didn’t even want her here.”
“I invited her because I was lonely. Because none of your friends would even come inside the house! She was the only one who’d had whooping cough.”
“Bullcrap. I don’t know why you did it, Hash. It makes no sense.”
Hadley’s head swims because he is right: it didn’t make any sense. Why invite his mistress here; here, where they could have started to patch things up? What a foolish stratagem it had proved: to reconstitute the two of them by becoming a three again!
Ernest sits by the pillows, his fingers pressing his eyelids, one knee drawn up to his chest. “You’re the one who bitched the vacation,” he says with his eyes still shut. “Just as I try and stay away from her, you invite her to Antibes!”
“Oh, and aren’t you good, Ernest? Aren’t you brave? What a brave man to do that rather than get rid of her altogether!” Hadley wants to throw the hairbrush at his head. “You didn’t want her here because you love her. Because it’s too damn complicated.” He doesn’t say anything. “Be a man, for Christ’s sake. Maybe this is why I invited her—so you could tell me you’ve fallen in love with her. Then you can leave me and live with her, and we can all get on with our sorry little lives! Do you love her?”
There’s a majesty between them now that those awful words have been said. They stare at each other impressively but neither speaks. The hairbrush is still grasped in her hand. Afternoon light feathers the blinds. A shutter bangs mournfully downstairs.
Ernest looks at the ceiling. He says: “My God, I’m miserable, you know that,” as if this were an answer to her question.
“Well so am I. But the difference between us is that you enjoy it.”
“I hate this,” he says, his eyes softly resting on hers. “I hate this.”
“Liar. You revel in it. This is nothing more than material for you. You’ve made your hell and now you intend to live in it, and you’re forcing me to live in it too. I want to go home.” Her voice becomes gentler. “With you. And Bumby. To Paris. And I want to drink Tavel and eat in our café and walk along the river.” She lays the hairbrush on the dressing table. She does not throw things. She would never do that. Not at him, not at her darling Ernest. “The truth is I don’t know if you want to do that anymore. At least I don’t know if you want to do that anymore with me.”
“Of course I want that.”
“But you want her too.”
Hadley sits by the dressing table with the crystal-cut perfume bottles. They give out an ancient scent near their stoppers. Their glass planes flash.
“We’re acting monstrously,” she says. “This summer is shabby as hell.” Hadley would like to put her head down to sleep, so that she might forget how easily she has let this woman steal her husband. She had let them court each other last year with all the appetite of adolescents. Why couldn’t she have more backbone? Why hadn’t she done something earlier?
“I can’t continue like this.”
“Can’t we just stay as we are?” but from the hollowness of his voice, he knows, and she knows, that he hasn’t put his heart into it.
“You have to decide.” She hears herself say those words and watches herself in the mirror, like a jilted woman would do in a movie, ginned and tearful. “If you want to be with Fife, then fine. I understand she is very much in love with you. I don’t know if you’re in love with her, or if you’re merely flattered. But by tomorrow I want to know if it’s her or me. None of us, and I include her in this matter, can stand much more of this.”
Ernest does nothing, then he nods. Hadley comes to sit by him on the bed. She hears his sigh. Roughly he pulls her into his arms. One of those Antibes embraces. His smell and his warmth: they are magnificent. It feels as if her heart is breaking. “No,” she says, and she pulls herself out of his grasp and manages to walk away so that he cannot see her tears.
Under the stoop, lavender bobs in the sea breeze. Bees gather around the shoots: they buzz so heavily, and move so little, that they look as if they are barely flying. A big hornet emerges from the terra-cotta pot—she must tell Bumby never to touch one. A headless frieze of the goddess Victory hangs behind the table. Ahead of the sculpture their cards lie folded, still in three separate piles. One hand lies open; the other two are facedown. Hadley checks Fife’s hand. An ace. So she wasn’t bluffing.
She hangs Ernest’s bathing suit on the clothesline. Fife’s is there, black and long and raw. Pinned to the line, all three suits sag obscenely at the crotch, dripping with water onto the French tiles. Upstairs, Hadley hears Fife singing, readying herself for tonight’s party at the Villa America.
10. CHICAGO, ILLINOIS. OCTOBER 1920.
Hadley squeezed past a group of men and headed over to the piano. The blue serge dress was rather tight and she warmed when she felt their gazes rest on her backside. But after months of caring for her mother, watching her decline as Bright’s disease made holes of her cheeks, she felt she deserved to be the object of attention for a night or so. She was no longer her mother’s nurse. Here was liquor and men and tonight Hadley wanted to get very drunk. But still she blushed a little when they looked at her; the hem of her dress barely reached her knees.
She couldn’t find the friend she’d come with. The cocktail was a little strong, but she’d have to drink it until someone asked her to dance. Maybe it was distilled from corn; it was rotgut, really, and she wondered where they’d got it. Prohibition seemed to mean nothing to this set.
Hadley tried to be less fascinated by what the dancing couples were doing on the makeshift dance floor between the sofas. She didn’t even have the language to name what the steps were and she felt old enough without drawing attention to herself by gawking. Behind the
piano a man’s voice addressed her but she didn’t catch what he’d said.
“I’m sorry?” she said, turning.
“I said could I get you a drink?”
Hadley waved her cocktail glass. “I’m already well furnished, thank you.”
“We haven’t met.”
The man came round to her side of the piano. She offered her hand. “Hadley.”
“Your Christian name?”
“Yes. My grandmother’s surname.”
“I’m Ernest.”
“An earnest Ernest?”
He winced. That was a stupid thing for her to have said. “I hate my name.”
“You shouldn’t. What’s the next part?”
“Hemingway.”
“Ernest Hemingway. That’s a man’s name.”
The squad of dancers had broken up and a young man in tails was looking for another record. It was nearly midnight but Hadley didn’t feel remotely tired, even after the long train ride from St. Louis. The room was so warm that the windows were steamed up and some of the men had loosened their bow ties. Even some of the women were smoking. A slower record started, and a couple began to dance. Something about the way they held each other, tenderly but not intense, suggested they were friends rather than lovers. “That man,” Hadley said. “He’s not wearing shoes.”
“The sockless hop. A Midwest specialty.” They watched the couple for moments longer. “You can always trust a man by his shoes,” he said.
“He’s not wearing any.”
“Exactly.”
They made it over to the liquor cabinet. At one point she lost her footing and Ernest steadied her at the hips. “Maybe you shouldn’t have another one,” he said, with a grin. She’d heard that people go up to the roof at these parties. She wondered if Ernest Hemingway would invite her up there: he looked strong as a butcher. She wondered why a man like this would be talking to a woman like her. “How old are you?” she asked.
“That’s bold.”
“I think you’re younger than me, that’s all. I was trying to guess by how much.”
“I’m twenty-one.”
“Oh,” she said. “You seem older.”
“Everyone says that.”
