"The Paris Wife"

[fiefoe]

Bad luck can be good luck can be bad luck.

• It’s never anyone but you who does anything, and for that reason alone you shouldn’t be sorry.
• I thought about how I would tell Ernest the work was gone, but I couldn’t imagine it. There were no words.
• I could see him coming into the quiet apartment and discovering for himself that it was all really gone.
• Ernest did this himself, the way he kept accounts of everything in our marriage. There was a notebook for recording expenses and incoming monies, another for correspondence, another for noting story ideas and how many words he’d written each day.
• “So this piece,” he said dramatically, “is all I have left. Just this last thing, like a small piece of the prow of a ship that’s rotting at the bottom of the sea.”
• I actually had a terrible feeling about the way Ernest was tangling up the lost manuscripts with the coming baby in his mind.
• It sounds funny to say it, but for the first time I had my own project.
• “Each would be less a sketch than a miniature wound up and let go.”
• He practiced the dramatically flared passes he’d learned in Ronda and Madrid with a tablecloth in our apartment. He turned parallel to our table, the only bull available for the moment.
• “You really want to go back to the same café and watch me eat?” “Watch nothing. I’m going to have it again.”
• Between fights, I cross-stitched a white cotton blanket for the baby.
• For weeks on end, there was only the pure white predictable crispness of snow.We’d hike for hours, up and up, because what good was it if we weren’t at the very top of something, with no one else around and no tracks or memory of anyone else, anywhere?
• I was the better skier, but Ernest was the better devourer of anything new—new air, new mantle of eggshell snow. We dropped and dropped. We flew.
• It was the end of Ernest’s struggle with apprenticeship, and an end to other things as well. He would never again be unknown. We would never again be this happy.

<<