Mrs. Hemingway by Naomi Wood

Author:Naomi Wood [Wood, Naomi]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Picador

MARTHA

23. PARIS, FRANCE. AUGUST 26, 1944.

The Pig, they say, has liberated the Ritz.

In an altogether different hotel, Martha lies in bed, imagining Ernest on his favored bar stool ordering martinis for his troops. He’d be thinking, no doubt, about his life here in the twenties, when he was poorer and happier, a man only once married. His Paris life is a memory Ernest loves to slide over and over until the place is smooth and cool with his affections. Today he would surely be longing for the sawmill apartment and his lost Saint Hadley: a woman all the more exquisite for her generous retirement of the title Mrs. Hemingway.

A title Martha has come to hate.

Martha has always felt more affection for the Mrs. Hemingway she robbed. At least Fife had the guts to hate her; she had no time for Hadley’s mousy surrender. To be so good seemed a calamity visited upon the poor woman. Apparently Hadley and Fife are even pals still: by Ernest’s accounts his two ex-wives chat regularly on the telephone, talking of children and the proper care of Ernest. Martha and Fife have never spoken since that vacation in Key West. Why would they? She has a proper respect for the rules of this game.

Ernest cradles the memory of Hadley as he would a baby. Fife he castigates as the devil. After today, Martha wonders which one she will become.

In bed she tends a bottle of whiskey; the alcohol keeps her straight-thinking. Her journey to Paris yesterday was not an easy one and she feels a pain in her chest—it might be a broken rib. When she arrived at the Hotel Lincoln this morning, typewriter, knapsack, and bedroll in hand, the concierge had told her with great enthusiasm the story of her husband’s escapades when he saw the name in her passport. Apparently, Ernest had liberated the Ritz with a troop of soldiers, sending the men from the Luftwaffe and their whores scurrying from their beds.

None of this should be a surprise to her: Ernest loved being in the limelight wherever he went. Boxer, bullfighter, fisherman, soldier, hunter; he can’t go anywhere without playing the hero. Often, over the course of these years, she has longed for the plain friend she made in Spain.

More of the whiskey helps her nurse her outrage. Martha hates the way he throws himself around a city with all the swagger of a warlord. She hates, too, that other people can’t see past his phony heroism. So he has liberated the Ritz! Of course he would.

The Pig knew it was the one place that wouldn’t have run dry.

But today Martha will show him he can’t trick everyone. Today she will be the one to rip open his idea of himself, and she will do it with claws. Because today they are done and through, and she will throw away the name Mrs. Hemingway with as much gusto as his ex-wives slavered over it. Today, Martha will leave him.

The air in her hotel room is insufferably warm.

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