Work Text:
“You can't write a sentence without writing about Paris,” says someone. “Not a sentence.”
Hemingway is drunk.
This isn't worth remarking on.
Hemingway is startlingly drunk, then. Or no, Hemingway is painfully drunk; that's new, different. A bright flake of interest in the thick, slow slide into painless intoxication, or, February.
“A sentence of what?” says someone else.
Hemingway is painfully drunk, and painfully hungry, though this is less unusual and less interesting. He thinks about alcohol swimming through his blood, dissolving the redness of it, about a wound– a shoulder wound, perhaps, a stray shot from one's own trenches– bleeding clear and smooth, pouring out from under the tourniquet. A nurse wrapping the shoulder with a dedication bordering on hysteria. Hospital room stinking of licorice.
It's not his kind of story. “Of anything,” says the first speaker.
Hemingway stands with great effort and wanders away. The conversation had thrown itself towards him without his asking, like a dog. This party has done the same. He doesn't know who invited him. He arrived here somehow. It's possible he'll be allowed to leave the same way.
Wherever he goes he's touching someone. In his ears the noise of conversation is bright, like trumpets. He needs to piss, and he needs another drink.
He does one, pushes back into the crowd, and does the other. His stomach feels like fire. He gets another drink.
He sees her before she sees him.
She's laughing. She's also smoking a cigarette, which is such unbelievable ostentation that he wants to shoot her dead in the street. There are pearls on her neck and glittering lace on her arms and she's smiling. She laughs, again, and reaches blindly out with her left arm, waiting for a figure to settle into it.
Three months ago, was when he saw her last. He'd been drunk, and exhausted. Months before that, hate at first sight had been a fishhook in his lip, unexpected and undeniable. He'd bit.
Here in the hot packed hall, gleaming wood floor smeared with dancing shoes, she leans over, says something into the ear of-
Hemingway expects vomiting to make his stomach settle, which it doesn't. Beneath him the water of the Seine is dark and quiet, and the stones are slick with frost. There isn't enough moonlight to watch his fingers change color by. The glow of the lamps is thin and strange, and never seems to settle on the water. The river is a mass of shadows underneath him.
There's a bench nearby he could be sitting on, instead of the stones of the bank. The stones of the bank are slippery; he could fall as easily as stand.
He thinks about getting another drink.
“Ernest,” says someone, startled. Hemingway thinks to himself that he should keep looking at the river.
“I thought it was you,” says Scott, smiling. Under the skittering streetlamp light his face is white and moon-blue. His mouth is all shadows. “Zelda said she thought she saw you leaving. She says hello.”
Hemingway says, “Hello, Zelda.”
Scott's coat might be tan or ivory or crème. Three months ago, when Hemingway saw him last, it had been eggshell, and his face pink. “Why don't you come back inside,” he says. “Have a drink with us. There's an editor here, come from New York– you ought to talk to him.”
“A close friend of yours?” says Hemingway.
Scott has the good grace to look embarrassed, and the bad manners to be angry, after the embarrassment. “As it happens, he is,” he says.
Hemingway clenches his jaw until he stops shivering.
“You don't have to talk to him,” says Scott. “You don't have to talk to anyone.”
“I don't have to do anything,” says Hemingway.
“Well, you don't,” says Scott sharply. “No one's holding a gun to your head. For God's sake, Ernest.”
The wind comes, hungry at Hemingway's neck and the tips of his ears. A wave in the water catches the light at last.
“It's been a while since I was published,” he says.
Considered in each particular, Zelda is unobjectionable. Her hair is an astonishing triangle at the back of her neck. Her lips are dark red and moued. She is laughing again. Hemingway considers swallowing the ice in his glass, or the pearls around her neck.
“This is the editor, the one I was telling you about,” says Scott, and says his name. His hand is on Hemingway's elbow.
They make conversation. Hemingway says something clever. “Are you all right?” Scott says to him. “What is it? Why are you looking at me?”
“Nothing,” says Hemingway. “Excuse me.”
Instead of pissing, he leans against the grimy wall and lights a cigarette. After the black flakes of the match are in the toilet, he considers running cold water over his fingers, and decides against it; for one thing, it's not his writing hand. For another, the chances it won't be healed by morning are too low to put money on.
The door clicks shut. “Ernest,” says Scott. In the buzzing yellow of the light, the shadows are gone around his mouth, heavy around his eyes. "Honestly."
Hemingway steps forward.
“You don't have to,” says Scott. “You don't have to do anything you don't want to do, no one's going to force you– ah, Ernest–”
He gasps, and keeps gasping. Hemingway can't clench his jaw this time, of course, but he finds he's clenching his fist. He's stopped shivering. If he keeps doing it, he might be able to make himself bleed. The fire in his stomach is hot and hard and wound like thread into a little heavy stone.
Scott jerks and shudders and slumps. Hemingway licks the bitterness away, but Scott catches his shoulder.
“Don't go yet. I'll only be a few–” He wipes his forehead. “Stay here. Just wait a few minutes.”
Outside the door, someone laughs. “Don't look like that,” says Scott. “I keep trying to tell you, you don't have to. Didn't have to. It's only fair for you to get– I'll introduce you to the editor too, Ernest.” He leans up, away from the wall. His lips are cool and dry. His hair is thick, like grass, and his touch is very light and gentle and delicate at first, and then quick, earnest, almost businesslike. When his back hits the wall he sounds like a burst tire.
“For God's sake!” he says.
“Scott, I never wanted an introduction to any fucking editor,” says Hemingway.
On the edge of the crowd, Zelda Fitzgerald touches his arm. When he turns to look at her, she's talking to someone else, artfully posed chin, the curl of her smile, the long lovely line of her throat, her pulse jumping in her neck.
She's steadily not looking at him. For the first and last time, he likes her enormously.
“Well,” says someone, waving to a taxi, “surely you could say that about anything, couldn't you. You can't write a sentence without writing about night-time. You can't write a sentence without writing about love.”
“Don't be maudlin,” says the other.
Hemingway gives the driver his address, and shuts the door.
Gertrude understands more than anyone wants her to. Hemingway tells her as little as possible, as a rule.
She sits back in her chair. "And then what?"
The daytime is clear and freezing. Gertrude is warming her hands on her cup, and rubbing them together and blowing on them when she's been holding it too long.
"Don't give me that look," she says. "You know better than that."
"I'm not," says Hemingway.
"Since when do you bring me stories where you don't have an ending?" says Gertrude. "Or at least know how the ending goes."
"And then I came here," says Hemingway.
"And then you never saw him again," she says. "And then you went back and did it again that very night. And then he was killed suddenly, and you fled back to Illinois and left all this terrible decadence behind you."
A swallow calls out from the rafters, and is silent. "Don't pretend that last one is tempting," says Gertrude. "That might work on Scott."
Alice pours coffee, a great water-bird stooping over the table. "What you ought not to have done," Gertrude says, "is begin in the middle, if you were going to leave off the rest. Could you tell the beginning of it instead?" She drinks. "I see. Well."
"You know how I work," Hemingway says.
"Yes," says Gertrude, "and I know when you aren't. Let's try something different. You have a story; you have a hero, yourself, for a change. Do you have a villain? Don't scoff, you're in my home, use your manners."
"You've read the sorts of stories I write," says Hemingway.
"I have," says Gertrude. Alice appears in the doorway with the coffeepot again, and with six raisin buns on a plate, and Gertrude catches her by the arm, and says something about bread and eggs and milk, and he hates them both for a second, frozen solid under his breastbone. The crystallized air is cracking under the growing sunlight. Below, the gleaming street is haphazard with tire-stripes, spotted by footprints; a cloud passes, and briefly all the cobblestones are bare, and then sighing sun outward again.
"I thought," says Ernest. "I thought I would stop being so angry at him."
Gertrude says, "That's a story."
He knows better than to discount advice from Gertrude, but he knows better than to swallow it whole. In a cafe at one o'clock in the morning, he gulps gin and smears wet-ink pages with the bone of his wrist. The rains come, collapsing the grey huddles of snow into flat black ice. Women shrug off their coats, red-wax mouths and pale hair standing upright on their arms, and tumble wild and frantic through the shifting yellow light.
For days afterward, he writes, he found himself handling things lightly. A car, settled like a bird beside the river. A cup, lifted with such care that he nearly convinced himself that if he moved a breath faster it would smash like an egg.
He looks at it, crosses out a breath, crosses out lifted with such care that. Crosses out the whole sentence, and then the paragraph above it.
"Take the Greeks," says a bad poet, pink-faced. "Even Homer - ox-eyed Hera, Trojans breaker of horses, wine-dark sea -"
"Wine-faced," says an Englishman. "Oinops pontos," and then something in Latin, which Hemingway doesn't care to make out.
"My point exactly," says the bad poet. "To break from cliche - to sort word from word, grain by grain - a reinvention of English is what's called for, or better, a reinvention of each language by the English poets. A return to the babbling of childhood-"
"Nostimon hemar," says the Englishman, who Hemingway hates.
"But what do you do with all of this reinvented language," says Zelda, "since you can't begin to say anything in it?"
"There's all sorts of reasons to write that don't have anything to do with babbling on about whatever thought crosses your mind, darling," says Scott warmly.
"That might be so," says Zelda, "but there aren't many reasons to read, I don't think."
Scott laughs, says, "Well," and rubs her across the shoulders.
"So," says Hemingway. "We'll all be pulp novelists."
"Will you?" says Zelda brightly.
He has to look away from her. "Hail to the Saturday Evening Post, then," he says, "long live her harem."
"Oh," says Zelda, after the clatter, and dabs at Scott's sleeve with her napkin, "oh, darling, and it was new - someone get him another drink-"
Hemingway doesn't. The other side of the party is darker, quieter, and Zelda is like a moth in her white dress.
"Tell him you hate him," she says. "Or better yet, leave us alone."
"If I left you alone you'd come running after me begging in a week," he says.
She shakes her head violently. "You want him to be miserable. You're so jealous that you want him to be as lonely as you are-"
"Jealous of you," says Hemingway.
“What has he done,” says Zelda, “except manage something that you didn't? What has he done except marry a woman he loves? What has he done except be different with me than he is with you – brighter, and, and more full of color, someone better – happier–”
“As if those were the same,” he snaps.
She stares at him, breathing hard.
“I wish you meant that,” she says. “I wish to God you meant that.”
Outside, fog heaves itself through the thick yolk of the streetlamps. Hemingway turns away instead, shoves towards the wall and through a door, where the room smells of old wood and the floor is stamped with absence of dust where furniture stood. The only light is from the low lamps, spilling under the door. Hemingway shakes out his wrist, watches the ember of his cigarette bob.
“Ernest?” says Scott.
In the low light his fair hair is orange-red, his eyes flat and golden. Ernest closes his eyes, so as not to see him.
There's a shuffling noise. Scott cups his head carefully – one hand on his cheek, one at the base of his skull, like something heavy and delicate – and Hemingway is glad that he's drunk, wonders for a moment if he's going to be sick.
Scott bends forward, and drinks him in. Like salt water, like wind. Like sea-dark wine.