“Yes. All right.” His stiff tone meant woundedness. “If that’s the way it has to be.”
* * *
—
In early September, Ernest left for the mainland on Pilar, loaded down with the usual gear. There was a tightness around his mouth as he said goodbye, and I knew he didn’t understand my point of view at all. He’d been sulking for weeks, feeling betrayed, I knew, and it was work, real work, not to give in as he wanted me to and let him have his way.
I would miss him, of course. I always did. But as soon as he was off, I felt lighter. When I got back to the house, it was like a different place without him—not just quieter, but more expansive. The air itself felt changed. I walked from room to room, marveling at the stillness. I stood motionless in a patch of sunlight, my feet bare on the warm floor, and realized that for days on end I didn’t have to think of anyone else’s needs or entertain or compromise or stretch to accommodate. I sent away the cook and the housekeeper and got into fresh cotton pajamas, vowing not to get out of them until I absolutely had to. And it was wonderful. I lay in one place and read, soaking up the peace and stillness, and feeling only a little guilty for being so happy alone.
* * *
—
I was in St. Louis when Max reached me with the very first copy of my new book. I had seen all the plans for the dust jacket and knew what to expect, but the actual book was so lovely and perfectly made I found myself rooted to the spot. The cover was blue and green with the title in artful type, and my name across the top. And everything was beautifully done, from the type to the heft of the spine, to the endpapers.
“It looks awfully grown up, doesn’t it?” I said, showing my mother.
“It’s just wonderful,” she said. “A work of art.”
“I’ve been sick and scared inside,” I admitted, “but seeing it makes me want to be stronger. I like these stories. I’m glad I’ve written them.”
“You should be proud,” she said, handing the book back. “They did a beautiful job.”
“Maybe the only time to truly love a book is before you let it go. Before the critics have their say, or the sales figures come in to surprise or disappoint you.”
“I can only imagine how difficult it is to have something you love be pored over and picked at. But even the worst reviews can’t take your book from you, can they?”
“It’s worse, actually. You start off by being so hopeful and so full of faith, but the clips come in and they whittle away at you. At first you disagree with them or you feel angry, but little by little you begin to believe every terrible thing you read and forget what you ever liked about it. And then your faith is gone. No one has to take your book. You give it away.”
“Oh, sweetheart.” Her look was soft. “Ernest has had some terrible reviews, too. Years’ worth of them, and yet he goes on. Have you asked his advice?”
“I’m not sure he remembers anymore what it feels like to be at the bottom this way. There isn’t a more successful writer in the world right now. And it doesn’t matter that he hasn’t written a word since. He could rest on this one for years and years.”
“That would give anyone amnesia, I suppose. But I know he wants you to succeed.”
“He does. It used to be simpler, though. We used to feel like a team. I think that’s what I’m missing most. I don’t know how to get back to that place. It might already be too late.”
Concern moved over her face like a raft of clouds crossing a blue, blue sky. “Is there anything I can do?”
“Tell me it will all be fine.”
“It will all be fine,” she said. “Oh, Marty. I hope it will.”
57
Everyone thought they knew what would fix him. Max wanted another big novel, immediately if possible. Esquire wanted a long article about the West and the American male of the species. They were willing to pay prettily for it, too. Every time he turned around now someone was throwing money at him in great stinking handfuls, when all he really wanted to do was fish Silver Creek all day and have his wife nearby to talk to in the mornings and at night. His wife, by his side. Was that really so much to ask?
He had seen her independence from the first. In fact, he had liked how strong she was and how brave in Spain. But that was war. Once they’d settled in and built a life together, she seemed to love it as much as he did. Hell, she’d found the house, he hadn’t. She had pushed for all the work and repairs. She’d made a home out of nearly nothing, and made him as happy as he’d ever been, so that he had trusted and believed in what they were doing. Two writers writing under one roof. She had wanted it, too, and reached for it, so why now did she only seem to feel strangled and ready to bolt like a racehorse? This St. Louis trip, to see her mother, made no sense at all when Sun Valley had been planned months and months before. It was their place, together, and he was here alone.
At least the weather was fine and the fishing would be good. He knew this river well now, and it was always better when you did. If you had a map for this fork or that bend or shallow pool in your mind and then returned, the memory of the place and the actual moment merged to form a sharper etching, a deeper map, and also worked to cement you more into your own life. Marty had said they’d seen it all, this place, but that wasn’t true. You could never see everything of any place nor anyone, but the trying of it made all the difference and made you who you were, maybe.
He put his rod case on the bank, settled his fly book in his pocket, and waded into the stream. The water was a notch above fifty degrees, he guessed, and was a good kind of cold against his legs as he felt his way forward with the current, the creek rising around him. Just upstream a big trout broke the surface, feeding, and came down splashing a bright prism of water droplets. He didn’t need to go after that one. The creek was full of them, bigger ones, too, and the day was fine and he was happy in every way, nearly.
He released his line and felt it run out cleanly in an arc, making the corrections in the air so that it dropped just where he thought it should. He had always enjoyed knowing how to do a thing well. The cold pressed and eddied against his legs, and the smooth river stones shifted under his planted feet, and downstream, just under his line, a big fish was rising to the surface like a secret, every possible color along its rippling flesh.
If he let the rest go, this moment felt as good as anything he knew. But could he? Could he manage the thing inside him? That was the real question. He kept wanting to bring Marty closer, feeling worried that he could lose her. But the problem wasn’t that she didn’t love him enough. No, the problem was he loved her too much.
The American male of the species indeed, he thought. That was rich.
But this creek was perfectly itself. Each fork and tributary had a name, and the ones he hadn’t learned yet, he meant to. He meant to learn the Silver again and again, one cutthroat at a time, making notes in his fishing log to build his map. If everything else went south, he would have that tucked safely away. He would know where he’d been, and where he was going, because they were the same thing.
58
In November, The Heart of Another launched into the world, and with it came the early notices, sent on to Idaho by Max.
“I don’t think I even want to read them,” I told Ernest. “It’s the business of the writer to write, not to care what people think.”
“You know you care.”
“But I wish I didn’t.”
“They’re going to be wonderful, because the book is wonderful.” He slit open the packet and began scanning the clips while I lit a cigarette shakily.
“Well?”
“This one from The New Yorker calls your stories ‘affecting and intelligent.’ ”
I exhaled a cloud of smoke, feeling a little lighter. “That’s all right, isn’t it?”
“It’s wonderful. And The New Republic says you have heart and substance.” I
saw his eyes moving farther down the notice, but he didn’t read out anything else, only folded the clips back into the envelope.
“Is that all?”
“Pretty much.”
“Ernest.” I reached for the packet.
“I thought you didn’t want to read them.”
“I don’t, but you’re shielding me.” I held out my hand more forcefully, and though I could see it pained him, he finally relented.
“Please don’t take it too much to heart, Marty. What do those assholes know anyway?”
“Nothing. They know nothing, and they have all the power.”
I took the packet and made myself read every word of the four clips inside. To be fair, there were nice comments in each of them. Kirkus might have been the best of them, calling my stories “more sparse and emotional” than my earlier work, and “more tuned to the agonies of unexpressed emotion.” But in each of the others my style was compared to Ernest’s. The Yale Review critic said she wished I’d lose my “pronounced but not incurable Hemingway accent.” The New Yorker critic wrote, “She’s read too carefully the works of Mr. Hemingway…an amiable trait in a wife but dangerous for a writer of fiction.” She’d gone so far as to call Ernest my “Svengali.”
“This is ridiculous,” I told him, a cold flicker of rage wavering inside me. “I’m the same writer I was before. No one compared me to you before we were married…they’re looking to say this sort of thing just for the copy.”
“Exactly. Just ignore them, Rabbit.”
“I can, but what about everyone else? People read these damned things, you know. They’ll pick up my book looking to see if it’s true. Or they won’t pick it up at all, thinking they’ve already read you and that I’m nothing but your shabby mirror.”
“Marty…” I watched his face twist. He didn’t know what to say to me, or how to help me through these waters.
“Oh, the hell with it,” I snapped, suddenly exasperated. “I’m proud of this book and I won’t have anyone ruining that for me.”
“That’s my girl.” He reached and pulled me close in against his chest, where I could feel my heart fluttering, a small loved bird caught and held. I was his girl. There was no changing that. Try as I might, there was no stepping out of his shadow.
* * *
—
When new reviews came, I fed them into a yellow envelope with a sigh. I was trying to write again, sitting at the desk in our hotel room for a few hours each day, but each time a sentence came to me, I would find myself reading it over again as soon as it was on paper, while an insidious voice slipped into my head to ask if the words were really mine, or counterfeit. I grew weary and snappish and even more critical of the company at the lodge, even of the Coopers, whom I mostly liked.
“I can’t sit through one more dinner,” I told Ernest. “These people are embalmed.”
“Be fair.”
“I’m being more than fair. You know Hollywood is killing Scott.” Everyone had heard the gossip and understood he couldn’t go on this way, pawning his talent for studio executives. He was no kind of writer anymore. He was unrecognizable.
Now Ernest’s face grew still. He couldn’t argue with me. “It’s just a few more weeks.”
“I won’t make it.”
“You don’t think you’re exaggerating just a little?”
“Is that what you think? I wouldn’t be here at all if not for you, you know.” I was shouting at that point and doing a pretty good impression of a grade A bitch. But I didn’t care. “Do you really just assume everyone wants exactly what you want, at the moment you want it?” I didn’t wait for a reply, just stormed out of the room, slamming the door loudly behind me. He didn’t follow, and that was fine with me. All I wanted—all I wanted in the world at that moment—was to be alone.
* * *
—
The next morning I woke to an absolute horror of a hangover, the old-fashioned kind, with roiling waves of nausea, a crucifying ache between my temples, and a shuddering feeling everywhere else. I wanted to bury my head under the pillow and sleep forever, but Ernest had been waiting for me to rouse. He sat on the side of the bed wanting to talk, so I rolled over, wincing, and propped myself up on the pillow to listen.
“I’m an ass. We can go whenever you want. I should have thought of you.”
“You are an ass, but you’re my ass.” I tried to smile, still green and queasy. “I do need to be out of here, and someplace where there are no parties, and no one’s fashionable, or showing off or trying to be clever.”
“The moon, then. Or Arizona.”
“Oh, I’d love that. It won’t be as much fun now that the boys are away, but let’s do it. We can drive all the way down through Nevada and into the Mohave, and bake ourselves silly in the sun and get really and truly lost.”
“All right.” He was nodding, but there was some sort of sadness lurking in his gaze, a shadow of a mood I didn’t fully understand. Maybe he didn’t either. We were both straining to bend and compromise for the other. But that was what marriage was about, wasn’t it?
We shoved things into suitcases and put Sun Valley behind us, heading south and ever more south, through tiny nowhere frontier towns, past gas stations and diners the size of telephone booths, and great spans of lion-colored desert that stretched and stretched, swallowing everything. Finally I began to feel I could breathe again.
We had the radio on and the windows down, stopping to see pockets of Indian country and little bars with no one in them, and talking to almost no one but each other. I had a no-frills Brownie camera and snapped funny-looking signs and billboards and other things no one cared about but us. Nothing was slick or sanitized, and nothing wanted too much of our attention until we’d cleared Arizona and half of New Mexico and were crossing the border into Texas at El Paso. We’d stopped at a cantina on the side of the road—a weathered and browbeaten thing with a tin roof and an erratically blinking COLD BEER sign. Ernest had just started instructing the bartender on how to make a very cold daiquiri with no sugar and plenty of lime when the door to the saloon fell open with a loud crack and a small Indian boy came in. He had bare feet and a red-twisted bandanna around his neck, like a Spaniard. His arms were full of newspapers.
“Con la guerra,” he announced with a hoarse little voice that made me think he’d been shouting for some time. “Con la guerra, la guerra,” he said over and over, going table to table as everyone turned to watch him, recognition growing.
While we’d been driving and thinking of nothing, free as dust in the wind, the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. America was finally at war.
Part 6
A SEASON OF RUIN
DECEMBER 1941–JUNE 1944
59
The attack hadn’t come from nowhere. Nothing ever does. Through the summer and fall, tensions had mounted dangerously. Roosevelt had sent warnings that the United States would be forced to “take steps” if Japan attacked neighboring countries. Japan had sent warnings back, saying it would be forced to take steps of its own if the United States wouldn’t let up on the economic blockade. We’d all been preparing for the worst for some time, which was why Roosevelt had moved the Pacific Fleet and all those bomber planes to Pearl Harbor in the first place. Ernest and I had seen them for ourselves when we passed through Hawaii on our way to the Orient. Eight battleships, three cruisers, three destroyers, and nearly two hundred planes had all been lined up and waiting like sitting ducks. Our richest military arsenal, and the clearest target imaginable.
Simultaneous attacks were launched on US-held areas of the Philippines, Guam, Malaya, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Wake Island. It was absolutely sickening to think of the lives lost, and even more sickening to think ahead. Roosevelt had finally made the call to arms. Tens of thousands of young men were being recruited as soon as they turned twenty. Bumby wasn’t old enough yet, but would b
e soon, and it was something we could barely stand to think about as we made our way back to the Finca for Christmas with the boys.
“I’m not afraid,” Bumby said.
“I’m afraid enough for all of us,” I told him. “And your poor mother.” I shook my head and lit a cigarette. Nothing could happen to this glorious boy. It just couldn’t.
“Maybe it’ll be over before we know it.” But I could see he didn’t believe it for a moment. No one did.
“Just go back to school and stay in school, all right?” I said, as Ernest came into the room.
“What’s going on here?”
“The Mart is worried about me.” There wasn’t the smallest bit of irritation in Bum’s voice. “It’s all right. I don’t mind. She’s my other mother.”
Without any warning, tears sprung to my eyes. I turned so Ernest couldn’t see them, surprised that I could feel so much. But the truth was I couldn’t feel any more for each of these three boys than I did. They were rooted in my heart now, and that was that.
* * *
—
Later that evening, after the boys had gone to bed and the house was relatively quiet, Ernest came to me where I was reading. I could tell from the look on his face that he was wrestling with something. “Maybe now’s the time to start a family. We’re always saying we will.”
“With the nation at war? It couldn’t be a worse time.”
He sat down hard in the chair next to me. “When then?”
“I don’t know, Rabbit. We shouldn’t be talking of it. You’ll only feel worse.”
“That’s right, I will. And why shouldn’t I?” His voice had an edge I knew well by now. He was angling for a fight, just to release the pressure. I did it myself all the time, but I wasn’t going to bite, not with him tensed up this way. I’d never win.