Mrs. Hemingway (8 page)

“Mr. Cuzzemano, I thank you for your interest in my husband's work, but I think you are grossly exaggerating his place in the world four years ago.” She keeps her voice to a fierce whisper. “Mr. Hemingway had not even been published. We'd barely been in Paris a year! The case was lost. Someone took it by mistake. It's all gone: stories, carbons, novel; the whole kit and caboodle. And I won't forget the horror of it.” She recomposes herself. “Nor will I ever forgive myself. Now if you would kindly let the matter drop. I don't care to spend my evening furthering your enrichment.”

 • • • 

Gerald leaves the jazz and puts on a waltz. Ernest asks her to dance but Hadley wants to listen to the piano. It has taken her some minutes to recover from Cuzzemano's questioning, and now all she wants is to be quiet among this gang who will not quit talking. Brett Ashley is right; all their talk
is
bilge.

Ernest asks Zelda instead. This is a safe choice. No one is under any illusion of the mutual contempt they hold for each other and they dance together in a difficult embrace. Zelda is stiff and unbending, and Ernest moves all of the wrong parts of himself to the wrong parts of the music. He is pigeon-toed and jokey, but Zelda doesn't find it very funny at all. Evidently she doesn't like to be caught in some-thing so dumb and sentimental as a waltz.

The music finishes and Zelda drifts back to the table to reclaim her sherry, but Ernest still has a hold of her wrist. As a faster standard follows he attempts to whirl her around in a quickstep. Zelda looks furious and the drink spills but Ernest still has a hold of her. The Murphys, Cuzzemano, and Fife are laughing but to Hadley it looks as if everything is on the brink of turning sour; she knows Ernest when he is in this mood.

“C'mon, Mrs. Fitzgerald! Or are you only good for a cabaret?”

Zelda disentangles herself but Ernest, for whatever reason makes sense in his drunk head, pulls her over his shoulder in a fireman's hold. “Put me down!” Ernest will not let go. Hadley looks at the scene with disbelief. “You BRUTE, Ernest Hemingway!”

Scott emerges from the double doors, a bowl of fruit in his pale hands. “What are you doing with her?” he says, grabbing the figs at the top of the bowl. “Get off my wife!” he shouts, the ends of the words lost in his chin. “I said: PUT HER DOWN!”

Scott throws a fig which arcs across the garden and smashes on Ernest's blazer. He drops Zelda and has time to duck before the next one flies through the air. Fife has leapt to his aid but then another one of Scott's thrown figs explodes on her hard white skin.

“Oh, Scott,” Fife says. “What did you have to do that for?”

Ernest glares at him as Zelda shuffles back to her chair. Her lips press in a smirk. He takes off his blazer and surveys the damage: two round purple spots where the figs hit. “That wasn't right,” he says.

“For God's sake, Scott,” says Sara. “Why do you
insist
on behaving like a child?”

Fife strides into the kitchen and Ernest follows the sound of the feathers.

Hadley feels as if she wants to kiss Scott. What a fine sense of grievance and possession! How often had she felt like wringing Fife's neck when a dainty slipper had fallen off a dainty foot in their Paris apartment and caught the wandering eye of her husband! Back at the villa over bridge or sherry she had never felt that she could throw a tantrum—never mind fruit.

Zelda toasts Scott his chivalry and Sara looks fit to burst. Scott is too drunk to really notice anything but his feet and the kisses administered by his admiring wife. Then Sara tells him what she's obviously been dying to say all night. She calls him a selfish infant who belongs in a kindergarten. Children, Hadley thinks to herself, children are more civilized than this gang on the sauce.

When she looks back, Fife and Ernest have left the kitchen. The room is curiously formless without their figures in it. “Well,” says Hadley, now that Sara has had her say and Scott sulks in the corner to the overtures of Mr. Cuzzemano, no doubt kissing up to him after the glories of
Gatsby
. “After weeks of no fun at all I think I've had more than I can take.” Hadley pushes back her chair. “Will you excuse me?” She goes into the house to fetch her things.

 • • • 

Gerald has hung her shawl in the bedroom of his two sons. If Sara knew about this she would be livid. Patrick and Baoth sleep curled around each other. They are beautiful, just like their parents, and Hadley wonders what they'll become. Something amazing, she's sure of that: they are of this boundlessly good and clever New England stock. She'd like to kiss them good night, but if Sara caught her she'd be excommunicated entirely. Especially after the debacle with the figs. Though she is not a religious woman, Hadley thinks of a prayer her mother used to say over her at night to keep her safe while she slept. These kids are intensely lovely. They quite take her breath away.

She's about to take the stairs when she hears a noise from the landing. A bedroom door has fallen open and voices travel. Through the slot between door and frame, she finds a couple standing in the middle of the room. There's nearly no light and their faces are featureless. The woman's bustle comes into view, all spiky feathers tearing down from her waistline. Hadley hears her own intake of air. Ernest's hand goes round between the two wings as if they have dropped open for him, like a swan's downbeat in flight. He kisses her forehead, her eyebrows, the lids themselves. A spot of fig still stains her skin. The feathers begin to tremble. She says, “Two weeks and nothing, Nesto. It's been so hard.” Hadley can feel how much Fife wants him. She can see how little weight is on those legs. Then they fall onto the floor and the feathered skirt falls open. Hadley slams the door as hard as she possibly can.

 • • • 

She sits on the edge of the chess-tiled patio. Sara and Gerald are clearing up in the kitchen and discussing Scott's behavior and what should be done. The Fitzgeralds and Cuzzemano are nowhere to be found. A smell of camellias and oleanders wafts up from the garden. Peonies rise from pots as big as fists. This garden is something else.

So they've done nothing these past two weeks, and she realizes that it is Ernest and Fife who were under quarantine too, not just Bumby and herself. That the whole fortnight has been sexless seems even more depressing. Then the thought occurs that maybe what they have between them is only a sexual thing. She had never felt particularly adventurous in bed. Perhaps, if she could keep them apart, she might draw him off his attraction to Fife and make him see reason. She would be like Emperor Tiberius: give them one hundred days of separation, and then Ernest would come back to her. He hated to be alone for a day or even an hour when the horrors struck; he certainly wouldn't be able to stand a hundred-day quarantine.

While Sara stacks the crockery on the shelves, Gerald sits down beside her. “It will be all right,” he says to her. “You and Ernest . . . you're hitched up to the universe. You can't be parted.” No, she thinks, hitched up to a fresh decisiveness, but Fife and Ernest might.

Ernest comes through the French doors looking sheepish. He places a warm hand on her shoulder. “Did you get the fig off?” she asks.

“Yes. All gone. Time to go?” His voice is cautious.

And she says yes, time to go, and they hardly say a good-bye to the Murphys who seem, suddenly, full of understanding: their features soft with sympathy, as if they had not realized quite how grave the whole thing had become.

The Hemingways set off from Villa America down to the beach. Fife will stay with the Murphys tonight. Hadley imagines there might be tears in both houses. Soon they will reach the end of the beach, weave through town, then arrive at their villa, together or apart.

This thought makes her tread slower on the sand. She feels terribly sad, because she knows that the empty spaces inside her are the same as the empty spaces inside him, because they match, because their geographies corres-pond. He does not match Fife, not like this.

“No seaweed,” Ernest says, and they laugh, because it's funny that Gerald has cleared the beach of its algae—to have gone to so much meticulous effort to please his friends! He spent the whole of April at the task, removing the snaked green strands from the sand. Perhaps they laugh for different reasons: Ernest thinks it's silly; Hadley thinks it's sweet.

The waves leave their foam on the beach. Smells of wet rope and fish hang on the air. Draped over the landed boats are fishing nets, the moonlight crusting scales and shells on the threads. Boat masts lean in the direction of the wind. The night hides the far-off trees and the raft where they dived this morning. Nothing is visible but their limbs going forward, long and brown. “I'm sorry for acting like an ass. I shouldn't have done that to Zelda.”

“It's okay,” she says.

They stop. To carry on walking would somehow make this conversation casual.

Hadley delivers this to the sea, not to him: “When I saw you at the party in Chicago, I thought you were just playing up to me. Interested only for the night. I thought I was going to be a spinster in St. Louis forever. Ernest, you changed everything for me.”

“That night changed everything for me as well. Of course it did.”

Breakers come and go by her feet.

“If you want to go, I accept that. I don't regret any of this. What you have showed me. And what we have done in the five years we have had. It has been another class of marvelous.”

Ernest doesn't say anything.

Hadley clears her throat, committing herself. “Do you love her?”

“I still feel the same way about you.” The expression on his face changes completely. She can't read it. She wonders if it is love. It just might be. “But my feelings for Fife are there.”

“Are they very strong?”

A pause, then: “Yes.”

“Strong enough to end us?”

He doesn't answer. Hadley walks on a little farther and he follows her. They come to a brightly painted canoe with big red letters: D
AME DE LA
F
RANCE
. The warm waves come over her feet and she leans on the boat's body. She will be the one, then, to set out the terms. “This is what we will do. We will go back to Paris. You will move your things out of the apartment. You can marry Pauline, if that is your wish.” Ernest looks horrified and relieved all at once. “But only after a hundred days of separation. No more, no less. If you want to be with her after that, then you have my blessing. I will grant you a divorce. But you have to prove to me and to yourself that this isn't a passing affair.”

“Hash.” The tide reaches his feet then pulls away. She rises from the canoe and walks up to the end of the beach. He follows, walking over the sand slowly behind her.

The trees sound out into the night. They walk back to the villa, tracing the same steps they made early this morning when they came out to the raft to swim, to play their game by the rocks, and to hope, while they held their silence, that things could always just continue as they always had been.

Near the lavender, at the villa's porch, she says: “I'm doing this for us. A hundred days, Ernest. It won't be long. You'll work out what you need after that.”

Behind him their three bathing suits hang in the breeze. Upstairs, with the window open, is Fife's room. They tread quietly into the house alone.

Fife's house is splendid. Heads stud the walls: impala, kudu, oryx; their long horns magnificent and as hard as bark. When the shutters are open a breeze comes into the house from the Gulf carrying in the scent of tamarind, frangipani, banana.

Sometimes it feels as if the house is all moving air.

To either side of a divan or dressing table are matching spiked plants and lamp shades. Oriental rugs are just the right side of fraying and where there are no rugs the floorboards cool her bare feet. Ernest's books—he has written so many here—sit in the cabinets under the chandeliers of split glass. Copies of old issues of
Vogue
pile on the secretary.

Nearly ninety years ago, slaves built this house. Seven years ago, the Hemingways moved in, with boxes of manu-scripts filling the hall; plaster dust falling onto baby Gregory's crib and his brother Patrick running through the corridors causing mayhem; shutters falling off the balcony; and Fife and Ernest sharing their first kiss under a nest of two birds where the dining room ceiling had fallen in. Her first job was to renovate the gardener's toolhouse so that her husband could get to work. Writing, Fife knew, would keep her husband going straight.

 • • • 

Fife sits in the garden with a newspaper and a martini. A map of Europe on the paper's front page has dotted lines and arrows that show spheres of influence, occupying pressures, sovereignties displaced. Europe chews itself like a child with its fist in its mouth.

What she searches for is something written by Ernest from Spain. Fife scans all of the pages. Nothing, not a single article.

Her garden, around her, is a zoo: a spray of feathers might be a peacock or a flamingo, and cats stretch and crawl over everything—she keeps it this way for the boys. During her husband's foreign correspondence this past year, the garden has flourished. Every time Ernest has gone to Spain—and this is his third assignment—Fife has attacked with great energy the weeds and roots of un-wanted things. Now the garden has an unnerving bloom. But she'd let it go to pot if only Ernest might spend a little more time with her in it.

Fife calls out to the servants. Ernest returns tomorrow and she wants the food perfectly fresh for his arrival: she has planned meals of crawfish and avocado salads with chipped-ice daiquiris. Each time he comes back she convinces herself that this is her husband finally returned to her. But months, sometimes weeks, into his stay he soon announces he's going back again to cover the war in Spain. It is a world, he has told her, of oranges and shoelaces, a city where there is nothing—and she looks around at this house of splendor and wonders about his need for Madrid. But she knows Madrid has nothing to do with why he goes back.

And yet it seems so pointless for her to be in Key West without him, where they live so that Ernest can go out to fish after a morning at the desk. All Fife wants to do is boat out somewhere on
Pilar
, eat tuna steak, and swim in the coves as they did in the early years of their marriage, with the sun glittering on the sea top and the both of them half-cut on martinis. She longs for their old cherished life as newlyweds.

Closer to the servants' quarters Fife spies a silhouette in the window though no one answers her calls. She wonders if the help dislike her. Somehow, they seem to know when they've been summoned for company, even though all she does is read them the menu for the week. She can bear the look of pity from the grocer over the plantains, but she can't take it from her own servants.

At least, in Antibes, there were the three of them. Hadley had her; Fife has no one. Here, in this jerkwater island, right at the bottom of the entire country's landmass, she doesn't even have his mistress for company. This morning she went to the hair salon just to feel someone's hands on her.

“Isobel!” Her voice comes out shouting.

Light streams through the same kimono she has kept since Paris, which she wore in their first stolen mornings together while Hadley was still skiing with Bumby. What a simpler time it had been, back when Hadley had been Ernest's wife, and she his mistress.

Pink bleeding hearts droop over the terra-cotta, crisped up in the heat. Fife powders the dead leaves in the press of her fingers. A kitten arches its back into her offered palm. It's tiny: nothing but bones and fur and a wet pink nose. It mews, circling her ankle. But when she kicks it her foot finds only air; it has slunk off to the safety of elsewhere.

 • • • 

Martini in hand, Fife climbs the stairs to her bedroom. It feels like her bedroom now; Ernest says he sleeps better alone, especially when he's writing. Miró's
The Farm
hangs above their bed, filched off Hadley in one of the more suspect pieces of divorce loot. Or perhaps it's on some kind of permanent loan—she has never been sure of their arrangement.

Out on the balcony is the smell of curing tarpon. On Whitehead Street the lighthouse looks out onto the Atlantic and the Gulf. Ninety miles away is Cuba, where they sometimes go for drinking and dancing, where Ernest sometimes goes for peace and quiet, as if he can't get enough of that on this four-mile island where nothing much happens.

Their home is the grandest on the street: really the only stable residence in what still feels, to Fife, like a shantytown. It towers over the shacks with their broken balconies and boarding, their frames put together with treenails and pegs. She's seen builders make a house in a day: made from the salvaged wood of wrecked schooners. Were there to be a direct hit their neighbors would be swept away in the winds and the only house left on this lump of rock would be the Hemingways'.

Beyond the high brick wall a woman wheels her icebox, selling slabs of ice for more cents than they're worth. Sailors follow. She hears hollering before they head up Duval Street, probably aiming for Sloppy Joe's. A kid is shouting out his wares: two cents a milk can, probably found in the garbage. In comes a fresh blast of the ripe sewers. Key West: Ernest calls it the Saint Tropez of the Poor. Fife calls it the Rock.

Back in her bedroom she closes the shutters to keep out the stink.

Her wardrobe is still full of her marvelous furs. She'd like to resurrect these coats and bundle up against the metropolitan cold. Fife wants to be with her set and
move
and
talk
and
laugh
; she wants to be
harassed
for her company. The chinchilla skin is right at the back of the wardrobe. She remembers the night she wore it when she first met the Hemingways. She remembers, over tea, how Mrs. Hemingway watched her husband with a certain kind of awe: as if, even within the marriage, Ernest were still a kind of celebrity.

Fife hadn't fallen in love with Ernest at that party. Oh, no. It had been by degrees, over a year in Paris in which his wife slowly bowed out—just as she had always done in bridge.

Now she catches the
click click click
of the dress from the back of the wardrobe. It still gives her a rush of happiness and excitement, as if she were in Villa America all over again. It's not the most expensive of her outfits—there are far costlier samples stolen from the
Vogue
closet—but it is the most cherished.

Without much thinking, Fife decides to try it on. Two children later and more than a decade from Antibes, the dress still fits perfectly: this in itself is a minor triumph. The feathers sound in the breeze. It is a suit of wings.

She would marcel her hair if she had the tongs, just as she had done that Antibes night; instead she paints her lips red. In the mirror's reflection she sees how soft her lids have become with age: the skin feathers the kohl line. She remembers doing all of these things that evening, while she listened to Hadley catastrophically pleading with Ernest for a decision.

Mrs. Hemingway had never exactly blended into their set: she wasn't exactly a wit or
bon viveur
. Sara had said the same thing: Hadley was a wonderful mother and wife, but not quite the companion for a wild party, or, necessarily, a wild author. Fife liked to think Ernest had found that in her. The playmate. The partygoer. Her wealth had also seemed attractive to him. She didn't care what that made her. Or him. Sara said that when they'd married, on that warm May day in Paris in 1927, their group came to look just as it always should have.

Fife remembers wearing this dress on the night she had won him, walking from the French doors to the terrace, where Hadley sat in proper blue serge—a dress Mrs. Pfeiffer would have approved of—appropriate, say, for a child's baptism. As she walked she watched Hadley. And Hadley watched her husband watching Fife.

How hard Scott had thrown the fig hours later; it had felt like a tennis ball hit from a crosscourt lob, and how comic the moons of Zelda's rump had been when Ernest had strong-armed her into a fireman's lift.

Afterward, when they were cleaning up in the kitchen, Ernest kneeled to wipe the fruit from his dress shoes. When Fife was sure they couldn't be seen, she slipped her fingers into his mouth and the fig began to melt on his tongue. She felt Ernest tense though he wouldn't look at her. Nothing for two weeks. Not even earlier on the raft when they had been all alone. And now Ernest was sucking her fingers and grabbing her wrist: just as he had the first time he had touched her in Paris. This time, however, he held on.

Beyond the glass Sara was berating Scott, Hadley wasn't talking to anyone, and in the kitchen Fife had her fingers in Ernest Hemingway's mouth.

He let go of her wrist and touched her stocking-less ankle. His fingers slipped upward to her knee. She heard his intake of breath as his hand traveled upward. From the garden Sara smiled at her brightly.

“We can't do this here,” Fife whispered.

But Ernest wouldn't stop. She leaned against the sink watching his wife. “Nesto. Upstairs. Now.” It felt right to break the quarantine at Sara and Gerald's.

Villa America, after all, debauched all of its residents.

She should have thanked Scott for throwing the fig, Zelda for being the best histrionic version of herself, the composer of that waltz who had encouraged Ernest to dance with someone for whom he had no tenderness, because after that night nothing was the same. There was never any chance of going back to the time before Antibes. Not for anyone.

 • • • 

Fife worries at the feathers; how lush they once felt! Now she feels an old crow. Born in 1895, what an ancient she feels next to Ernest, who only seems to look younger as the years pass. How easily he attracts women! How they come in droves, unwelcome as moths.

By her feet there are feathers on the tiles where she has in distraction pulled them from the dress. The frock looks as if it has been supper for a tabby cat. Pulled feathers skitter along the tiles. The telephone rings downstairs.

Fife has always hated the telephone; she feels a child of the twenties, at home in the subterfuge of letters and telegrams, not this bawling thing demanding attention. There's no time to drag herself from the dress so she rushes the stairs but still manages not to spill a drop of her drink.

“Hello?” she says, a little out of puff.

“Fife? It's me, Hash.”

Far from Paris, far from Antibes, they are friends once more: it is Hadley's generosity that has made this happen. They gossip for a few minutes. First about Sara and Gerald who will visit next week, then about Harry Cuzzemano who has been calling her again about Ernest's lost novel. “I tell him it was fourteen years ago. That suitcase has either been thrown to a bonfire or is in some attic somewhere. It's silly,” Hadley says, “but I still get upset about it.”

“It was an honest mistake.”

“You know Ernest wouldn't pay 150 francs for an advertisement on the off chance someone might come forward for a reward? We didn't have any money but we would've spent the same on a
ski pass
. Maybe we could have found it. Then maybe we could have moved on.”

Dressed in the very frock that robbed Hadley of him, Fife smiles at the irony. Who, then, would have been Mrs. Hemingway?

“Now I just fob him off with dead ends,” says Fife. “I told him Eve Williams might have some explanation for the case.”

“But she died not long after we all left Paris.”

“I know,” Fife says wickedly, “but it took him far longer to work that out on his own.” Briefly, they talk about Czechoslovakia and Spain and the “lunacy of Europe” as Hadley puts it. They talk about their boys: what a fine young man Bumby is turning into, about how nine-year-old Patrick and six-year-old Gregory are doing at school. They gossip about Scott and Zelda because they are the easiest targets, and somehow, remarkably, their struggles seem the least heartbreaking of their set. Best not to talk about the Murphys. Or the Hemingways, indeed.

Fife asks if it is just a social call. She can hear the hesi-tation in her friend's voice. “I know Ernest has been away a lot,” Hadley says finally.

Should Fife risk asking for help? It makes her feel ridiculous to be asking this of his ex-wife. Even more so to be standing here like an old ginned debutante. But she'd like to tell someone who knows her husband just as well as she does. “Ernest has found himself a new . . . affinity.”

Hadley doesn't say anything. Perhaps this is a fact she already knows. Perhaps even Ernest has told her. They are still firm pals and write each other faithfully. “Her name is Martha Gellhorn. Have you heard of her?”

“Yes, though I've never actually met her.”

“She's from St. Louis,” Fife says. “He must be cursed.”

“How do you mean?”

“Falling in love with all these Midwesterners. Can't be fun for any man.” Fife means to sound droll but her words are a little hollow.

“You think he's in love with her?” Hadley probably means
in love
as opposed to
infatuated
; there have been those kinds of affairs too.