Mrs. Hemingway (3 page)

 • • • 

Hadley was waiting with dinner ready and a bottle of muscadet when Ernest came home that evening. Over the meal he was very sweet and inquisitive about the trip and how she had enjoyed the company of the Pfeiffer sisters in Chartres. Bumby played by their feet, looking thrilled to have both
Maman
and
Papa
finally at home again. At the end, after putting Bumby to bed, she told him what she knew.

Ernest looked shamefaced and then angry that she had brought it up. She knew this would be his response; she knew he'd somehow try to pin the blame on her—as if by voicing it she had become the architect of the affair. “What would you have me do?” she asked him. “Hold my tongue?” She took the plates and rinsed them in the kitchen and came back into the room. “Fine,” she said, feeling a kick in her temper—and enjoying it. “On the proviso that you will sort out this mess I will not mention it again. But you must promise to sort it out.”

Ernest promised. And the silence opened up between them.

The day is reaching its hottest. The raft drifts as far as it can before the chain jerks it back to the beach. At the bank the insects are getting louder, upping their pitch as if they are being slowly squeezed. The trees' shadows pour onto the water like vinegar into oil.

Hadley is sunning herself on the pontoon and Ernest is practicing his diving when they hear a long whistle from the beach. A swimmer is approaching. Though the figure is far away enough to be faceless, Hadley knows it to be Fife. A lacework of waves follows the swimmer and her strong stroke. The Hemingways watch her steady progress.

Fife pulls herself onto the raft and smiles. She waits to catch her breath then says, with a trace of a mock English accent: “Hello, chaps. You both woke early.” The woman shakes the water from her short hair. She is clear-eyed and vigorous. “The shopkeeper in Juan said it's unseasonably hot. Unseasonably, he said,
ce n'est pas de saison
. Or does that mean ‘out of season'? I don't know. He said these aren't June temperatures.”

Hadley was about to leave—her skin is fair and easily burns—but now she must stay as her husband's chaperone. The three of them sit on the raft with their legs dangling into the water. Her husband wears that scowl which Hadley hadn't seen before they came to Antibes. She catches his mistress steal an agonized look at Ernest's chest. He is bronzed and lovely from this dangerous summer.

“I felt a little worse for wear this morning,” Fife says, returning her eyes to Hadley. Last night they drank and talked till late, gossiping about their mutual friends with an unkindness they knew was directed at each other. Zelda, Scott, Sara, Gerald; anyone was fair game.

“We all drank too much,” Hadley says. “I don't know why I woke so early.”

“My wife is on a mission to deprive me of my sleep.”

She watches her pale feet in the sea. “Eight o'clock is hardly the break of dawn.”

“I was never an early riser,” says Fife, fiddling with some ribbons on the shoulders of her bathing suit. “That was always Jinny.”

Light buckles on the waves that make a pleasant hollow sound as they hit the underside of the raft. Ernest removes himself and lies down at the back of the deck. Hadley watches him—within minutes she can tell he's about ready to drop off to sleep. How easily her husband takes his exit from this strange world of his own making! Though she has to admit that this jam is her own fault too. After all, she was the one who invited Fife here in the first place.

Ever the
Vogue
correspondent, Fife chatters about a pair of white leather gloves she found in Juan-les-Pins yesterday. “Well, they cost no more than a loaf of bread, so I think I shall have them. I'll telephone the shopkeeper to put them aside for me. I hate to lose anything.”

The two women often gaze at Ernest for as long as they can manage, before one risks being caught by the other. It looks like you could lick the salt right off him.

 • • • 

Fife stands and touches her fingertips above her head—Hadley sees the curveless shadow behind her—and dives into the water. There is only a very small splash where the water breaks. “You know, I bet you could dive, Hash,” she says as she pulls herself back up onto the deck. Seawater leaks distractingly down her inside leg. “You just have to try.”

Fife sits close enough for Hadley to feel the
maillot
against her skin, the wool of it a little rough. Despite the warmth, Fife's skin is goosefleshed. Hadley notices that when she stoops, it's as if she's breastless. How can Ernest love her, this boy-child?

“I don't want to. I'm scared.”

“Of what?”

“Of breaking something. My back. My neck.”

“You won't. I promise.”

The memory of her fall comes back to her. She remembers how the handyman waved up to her from the garden in St. Louis; the noise of the chair hitting the floor as she lost her footing; her hands failing to catch the window's hasp and then the terror of falling through the air and her jaw knocking shut against the brick wall, the taste of blood in her mouth. She had been six years old. Wheeled around for months in a stroller to keep her spine still, she felt as if she had been in a stroller like that all of her life. Her whole life spent in the killing blandness of St. Louis! Then Ernest had arrived, at a party one night in Chicago, unexpected, uninvited, and the world had ripped open with its riches.

“I've just never learned.”

“Everyone can dive, silly.”

“My back. I've always been worried about it.”

“All you have to do is put your arms up, bend from the knees, aim for a spot, and go in head forward.” Fife goes into the water at a perfect angle and emerges, wet and adorable. Hadley is thankful Ernest's eyes are closed. “Try it.”

The one thing Hadley does not want to do is dive. She can feel how heavy her body is next to Fife's, which is as thin as a strap. She can feel the fall: her jawbone smashing, the taste of rust as her tongue split. Madly she imagines the dive breaking her back, and Ernest and Fife wheeling her around Antibes in a baby carriage.

“Go on, Hash,” Ernest says, and the two women turn, thinking he had been asleep. He shades his eyes with a hand so that they cannot see his expression. “Give it a try.”

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.

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.