by Paula McLain
At the end of February, Herr Lent led us up the valley to the Madlenerhaus, an Alpine station that stayed open even in the late winter. It had a good simple kitchen and a dormitory that rocked in high winds like the berth of a great ship. From there, we could hike five hundred meters up the slope and plunge down again along the Silvretta, a pristine glacier, our skis kicking up untouched powder. After skiing all day we’d drop into bed at night exhausted.
“Let’s not ever go back,” I said to Ernest one night as we lay in our bunk in the dormitory listening to snow and wind and nothing else.
“All right,” he said, holding me more tightly. “Aren’t we lucky to be so in love? No one thought we’d make it this far. No one was on our side at all, do you remember that?”
“Yes,” I said, and felt a small chill. We couldn’t hide from the world forever.
After three days, we came back down the mountain to find two telegrams waiting for Ernest. One was from Sherwood and the other was from Horace Liveright and both said the same thing: In Our Time would be a book. They were offering a two-hundred-dollar advance against royalties and were sending a contract soon.
It was an epic moment, one we’d never forget—and somehow the skiing seemed ineluctably part of it, as if we had to trek up nearly to the sky and fly back down to get this news. It was the end of Ernest’s struggle with apprenticeship, and an end to other things as well. He would never again be unknown. We would never again be this happy.
The next day we boarded a train back to Paris.
THIRTY
t rained nonstop that spring, but even in the rain, Paris was Ernest’s smorgasbord. He knew it all and loved to walk through it at night especially, dropping into cafés to see who was there and who wasn’t. He was recognizable everywhere with his long, unruly hair and tennis shoes and patched jacket, the quintessential Left Bank writer. It was ironic to see him become the very sort of artist that had made him cringe two years before, and a little painful for me, too. I missed him and I wasn’t sure I recognized him all the time, but I didn’t want to hold him back. Not when things were finally beginning to hit for him.
If Ernest was changing, Montparnasse was, too. American tourists flooded the scene hoping to get a glimpse of a real bohemian while the usual suspects grew wilder and stranger for the new audience. Kiki was one of the most famous artist’s models around, and Man Ray’s lover and muse. She could often be seen at the Dôme or Rotonde with her pet mouse. It was small and white, and she wore it attached to her wrist with a delicate silver chain. The fleshy redhead Flossie Martin held court in front of the Select shouting obscenities to locals and tourists alike. Bob McAlmon vomited neatly in the flowerbeds of all the best cafés and then ordered another absinthe. That absinthe was illegal deterred no one, and the same held true for opium and cocaine. Ernest and I had always been more than happy enough with alcohol, but there was the very real feeling, for many, of needing to up the ante—to feel more and risk more. It grew harder and harder to shock anyone.
Duff Twysden was one of the wilder girls on the café scene. She drank like a man and told a good, filthy joke and could talk to absolutely anyone. She made her own rules and didn’t give a damn who knew it. When we returned from Austria, Ernest began to see more of her than ever. Sometimes they were joined by her fiancé, Pat Guthrie. Pat was a famous drunk and often wasn’t well enough to leave their flat without causing a scene. I felt some relief knowing Duff was attached and, ostensibly, in love—but then again that didn’t always mean what it should.
Duff was very keen for company at night and so was Ernest, and they naturally gravitated toward each other. I worried about her a lot, but when he finally brought her by the sawmill to spend time with all of us, she crouched right down on the floor in front of Bumby.
“Hullo there. You’re very handsome, aren’t you?”
Bumby laughed and toddled behind me; he’d just learned to walk over the winter, and when he ran, he held his chubby legs so stiffly you thought he’d fall headlong into something.
“How very classic,” Duff said watching him with a laugh. “Why do all the men run away from me? I must be terrifying indeed.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Ernest said.
For the rest of the visit, she sat at my table and made no pretensions about anything. She was well bred but not fussy, and had a broad, raw laugh that moved everything with it. I liked her. I didn’t want to, but I did.
Around this same time, Kitty returned from London and wrote to invite me to tea.
“What’s she doing back?” Ernest said. “I thought we were free of that gold-plated bitch.”
“Be fair!” I snapped.
“I am. I know a bitch when I see one.”
I tried to ignore him. He was never going to change his mind about Kitty, no matter what I said or did. It was one of his qualities that most frustrated me, how once you had a black tick in his book, you were pretty much done for. I’d have much rather not had to fight with him about her, but I was going to see Kitty anyway.
Unfortunately, the only nice dresses I owned were ones she herself had given me, and since I wouldn’t turn up in her castoffs, I went in a shabby skirt and sweater. As soon as I entered her apartment, I regretted the choice. She’d also invited two sisters from the Midwest, Pauline and Jinny Pfeiffer, and they were dressed to perfection. Pauline, I quickly learned, had come to Paris to work for Vogue. She was impossibly chic and wore a coat made of hundreds of chipmunk skins sewn painfully together and a pair of champagne-colored shoes that might have been the finest I’d ever seen. Jinny was the prettier of the two with these incredible almond-shaped eyes, but Pauline had something else, an almost boyish exuberance. She was slim through the hips and shoulders, with sharply cut dark bangs falling nearly to her eyebrows.
The two sisters were the daughters of a wealthy landowner from Arkansas, but they’d grown up in St. Louis. Kitty was just beginning to tell me about how close Pauline and Kate Smith had been at one time when Harold and Ernest came in from a boxing workout, sweaty and laughing.
I was surprised to see Harold—were he and Kitty on again?—but she quickly shot me a look that said Don’t ask. Meanwhile, why had Ernest come if not to harass Kitty? You’d think he would have tried to avoid her. I’d wanted an intimate reunion with my good friend, not tension and awkwardness, and definitely not Ernest and Harold sniffing around these striking new women as if they were exotic animals in a zoo exhibit.
As the afternoon wore on, Harold and Ernest both drank with vigor. I followed Kitty into the kitchen for more tea just as Ernest began to flirt with Jinny.
“I say,” Ernest said loudly to Harold. “I think I’d like to take this girl out on the town.”
“I wouldn’t give that a thought,” Kitty said to me in a low voice. “Jinny doesn’t go in for boys.”
“Really?” I said. From where I stood, Jinny was doing a pretty good imitation of a vamp. She’d turned her almond eyes on Ernest and batted them expertly.
“She just likes to hone her skills occasionally. She finds men amusing, I think.”
“It must be nice to be in such control,” I said. “And what about you? What’s happened with Harold?”
“Well, he did follow me to London, after a fashion. I’d all but given up. He says he’s not sure what he wants.”
“But he missed you.”
“Sure he missed me. They always do when you go running. How long can it last, though, now I’m here?”
“Why does everything have to be so complicated?” I said.
“I have no earthly idea,” Kitty said. “But clearly it does.”
Back out in the living room, Harold sat on the davenport alone with his feet up, lighting a thick cigar, while Jinny and Ernest and Pauline stood on the rug in front of him.
“I could take you both out,” Ernest said to the girls. “I’ve two arms after all.”
“Not really,” Harold said noticing me. “Your wife owns one.”
“All right then. I’ll take Jinny—as long as she wears her sister’s coat.”
Everyone laughed, and it was one of those domino moments. That laugh would eventually set off an entire series of events, but not yet. It just stood there in the room, tipping and tipping, but not falling.
Not falling yet. Not quite.
Over the coming months, in the spring of 1925, our circle of friends continued to shift. The change was subtle at first, and each instance seemed to have little to do with the others, but our old set was falling away and being replaced with richer and wilder specimens. Pound and Shakespear had begun spending more and more time at Rapallo and were living there nearly year-round now. Gertrude and Ernest had begun to quarrel about things small and large. He seemed flummoxed about why, but I think he was changing too fast for her comfort.
“Alice has never liked me,” he said one evening when we were leaving their salon. “And now she’s trying to turn Stein around to her thinking.”
“Nonsense. Alice loves you.”
“Then she has a fine way of showing it. She all but called me a careerist tonight. My head’s growing too fast apparently.”
“Gertrude loves you, too. She’s just worried.”
“I don’t need her chastising, and why is she the great teacher anyway? I mean, what has she done really?”
It made me sad to think about the professional wedge growing between these two very good friends, and I wasn’t sure what it meant for me. The new set was made up of very wealthy artists who were utterly focused on living well, having the very best of everything. We were still squeezing by on less than three thousand a year, and although it seemed to me we had nothing in common with these people, they were interested in us, or in Ernest at least.
Pauline Pfeiffer was one of these. She was a working girl, ostensibly, drawing a paycheck from Vogue—but she had a trust fund on top of this, and it no doubt helped to keep her in the clothes she wore so well. This was Chanel’s heyday and Pauline had written about her new collection for Vogue with a fervency that bordered on obsession.
“Chanel has changed the silhouette for good, you know,” she said to a group of us one night at the Deux Magots. “We’ll never be the same.”
All the other women at the table nodded as if Pauline had predicted the Second Coming, but I was left cold by fashion. My clothes never behaved, and I felt that no one could change my silhouette unless I stopped eating altogether.
Kitty had known Pauline for ages and was very keen for us to be friends. I didn’t think we’d have the slightest thing in common, but the first time Kitty brought her over to our apartment, I was pleasantly surprised to find that she was awfully bright and funny. She also seemed eager for me to like her.
“Kate Smith has said lovely things about you for years,” she said. “It’s so good to finally meet you.”
“When did you and Kate meet?”
“At the University of Missouri. We both majored in journalism.”
“I’m afraid Kate had her hooks into me far earlier,” I said. “When we were nine she got me sick to the gills on stolen cigarettes.”
“Sounds like my girl. She would have been hard pressed to find ways to corrupt me. I was pretty far gone already.”
As we laughed I heard Ernest clear his throat from the bedroom. I was embarrassed that he wouldn’t join us and tried to make excuses for him.
Pauline frowned a little at the door. It was only slightly ajar, but he was visible on the bed—not indisposed at all, just disinterested in joining our party. “I know all about husbands,” she said. “I’ve studied them from afar for years.”
“No near brushes yourself?” I said.
“Very near, actually,” Kitty piped in.
“It doesn’t matter. I’m free now,” she said. “Swimmingly free, and it’s lovely.”
“Don’t talk to Hadley about freedom.” Kitty laughed. “She has all sorts of theories and lectures prepared.”
I flushed and tried to explain myself, but Pauline changed the subject quickly and easily. “Kitty says you’re a whiz on the piano,” she said. “Don’t you have one here you could play for us?”
“Sadly, no,” I said. “I’m not a professional.”
“What does professional mean except that you play for others instead of yourself? Have you given concerts?”
“Not since I was in my twenties, and I didn’t have the stomach for it even then.”
“It’s important to test your nerve occasionally,” she said. “It keeps you young.”
“You should play a concert,” Kitty said. “It would be awfully good for you. Everyone would come.”
“I could get ill just thinking about it,” I said, laughing the idea off. But later that night, when we were lying in bed just before sleep, I told Ernest that I wanted a piano of my own. “I didn’t think I’d miss it so much,” I said. “But I do.”
“I know, Cat. I’d love for you to have one. Maybe when the advance comes.”
“That’s such a fine word, isn’t it?”
“Yes, and ‘royalty’ is another one, but don’t go spending either just yet.”
“No, Tatie, I won’t.” But I went to sleep happy just the same.
• • •
On a night in early May, Ernest and I were having a night out on our own at the Dingo when Scott Fitzgerald came over from the bar and introduced himself to us.
“You’re Hemingway,” Fitzgerald said. “Ford showed me a story of yours a few weeks back and I said, ‘Well there it is, isn’t it? He’s the real article.’ ”
“I’m sorry I haven’t read any of your books,” Ernest said.
“That’s all right. I’m not sure I write them anymore. Since my wife and I have come to Paris it’s been a thousand parties and no work at all.”
Ernest squinted at him through the dim light. “You can’t finish anything that way.”
“Don’t I know it? But Zelda loves to dance. You should meet her. She’s spectacular.” His eyes turned to the dance floor where several couples were in the midst of a sinuous-looking tango. “I do have a novel just out. The Great Gatsby.”
“I’ll look for it,” Ernest said. “How are you holding up, waiting for the notices?”
“That’s not so difficult for me. Not near as tricky as getting it down in the first place. And once I have it all, I can’t seem to move on. Like this Gatsby. I know him so well, it’s as if he’s my child. He’s dead and I’m still worried about him. Isn’t that funny?”
“You’re not working on anything now?” I asked, wondering if I could drum up the nerve to tell him I’d read one of his books. “Apart from the dancing, that is?”
He flashed his lovely teeth at me. “No, but I will if you promise to admire every word extravagantly. Tell me, what do you think of me so far?”
An hour or so later, Ernest and I poured Scott into a taxi.
“I don’t like a man who can’t hold his liquor,” he said when the car had pulled away. “I thought he might pass out on the table.”
“He did look very green, didn’t he? And he asked the most alarming personal questions. Did you hear him ask if I’d ever been in love with my father?”
“He asked me that, too, and whether or not I was afraid of water, and if we’d slept together before the wedding. He’s very odd, isn’t he?”
He was odd, and that might have been our last meeting with Fitzgerald if he hadn’t thought to hunt down our address and send a copy of The Great Gatsby as a gift. Ernest simply stowed it on a shelf after opening the package, and it might have been forgotten there if I hadn’t been so curious to read it. It wasn’t too bleak, at least not at first. And when things did get very dire very quickly, I was already completely absorbed by the story.
After I devoured it, awfully impressed, I told Ernest to read it, too. He finished it in one afternoon, declaring it a damned fine novel, then sent a note saying as much to Fitzgerald. We all met up a few nights later, at the Nègre de Toulouse. Fitzgerald and Ze
lda were there when we arrived and were well into a second bottle of champagne. Her edges were already blurred when she stood to shake our hands, and she looked as if she cultivated that—a fine blurriness. Her dress was a pale sheath of filmy layers, one over the next, and they shifted dreamily around her as she sat. Her skin was fair and so was her waved hair, and all of her seemed to be the same color except for her mouth, which was painted very dark red, and cut a straight hard line.
Scott stood up as we approached their table, and Zelda smiled strangely, narrowing her eyes. She wasn’t beautiful, exactly, but her voice was—low and cultivated.
“How do you do?” she said, and then quickly turned to Ernest. “Scott says you’re the real thing.”
“Oh? He says you’re spectacular.”
“Aren’t you just darling, my darling?” she said, running her hand along the side of Scott’s sculpted head. With this gesture, which could have been extravagantly silly, she and Scott slipped behind a private net into their own little world. Their eyes locked and they weren’t with us anymore, or with anyone in the café at all, but only with each other, awash in a long secret look.
Later we watched them dance the Charleston and the effect was the same. They didn’t bounce wildly like the other couples; they were smooth as glass, their arms arcing back and forth as if on strings. Zelda’s dress bubbled up as she moved and every so often she reached to pull it up farther, past the tops of her garters. It was sort of shocking, but it didn’t look as if she meant to shock anyone. She danced for herself and for Scott. They moved in one another’s orbit, incredibly self-possessed, their eyes locked on each other.
“What do you think of her?” I asked Ernest.
“She’s not beautiful.”
“No, but she has something, doesn’t she?”
“I think she’s crazy.”
“Not really?”
“Really,” he said. “Have you looked into her eyes?”
