The Removable Feast
by Claire Splan
Then there was the heat. It cooked San Francisco, turning my brief vacation into a week-long steam bath. I wandered from neighborhood to neighborhood in search of a cool breeze and a bit of the fog that, if you were to believe Mark Twain, never vacated the city. But Mark Twain was a liar and there was no sign of relief from the oppressive temperature.
On my second afternoon in town I got on a BART train, not particularly caring where it went or where I’d end up. The train was air-conditioned and, cool at last, I pulled my dog-eared copy of the Nick Adams stories out of my backpack and flipped through it before settling in to read a few pages. But only a few. It was my favorite collection of stories, but now it felt stale. I had worn out Hemingway. I’d studied him, taught him, written about him. Familiarity had bred contempt of a literary nature. I knew all his tricks now and he had nothing more to offer me. Nevertheless, in two weeks I’d be back in Humboldt in one of my cramped classrooms in the claustrophobic woods, the eyes of thirty wearisome undergraduates trained on me, wondering why Hemingway was the greatest American writer. I’d stand before them, trying to sound convincing, but all the while I’d be scratching my beard and wondering if I still believed it myself.
After a half hour of riding and reading, I looked up to find the train approaching the Glen Park station. From the train window, the neighborhood looked more suburban than the rest of the city, but there appeared to be a small stretch of stores and a park, so I got off the train and set out to wander. The stores looked small, nothing terribly interesting, until I came upon one called "Sylvia Beach & Co." I went in.
The heat was just as bad inside as out, permeating the place, crumbling the paper inside the books to dust. The bookstore was larger than it appeared outside, crammed with rows of neatly filled bookshelves. It was clean—something I consider very important in a bookstore. There was a mezzanine with more of the same and a glass-walled corner office, which I assumed to be for the store owner. The door bell chimed as I entered and an old man peeked out of the cubby and nodded at me below.
"Can I help you?" He eyed me suspiciously, but I guess I sized him up as well. He was in his late 60s or early 70s, possibly younger. He had the look of a man who’d lived harder than he should have, as though he’d taken a beating in life but the wounds were mostly self-inflicted. His nose was a swollen strawberry, his stocky, grizzled appearance fit more for a pub than a bookstore.
"Just browsing," I said. "Can you point me towards the baseball books? And the 20th century fiction," I added, thinking of my area of academic expertise only as an afterthought.
"Baseball is on your far right, against the wall. Modern fiction is up here—the whole mezzanine."
The man continued to look me over as he spoke, but then turned quickly back to his office as though he’d interrupted an important task to deal with me.
I briefly scanned the baseball books, but found nothing compelling. I trudged up a narrow flight of stairs to the mezzanine and perused the shelves. The store may have been clean, but I couldn’t say the same for the books. Most were tired-looking used books, covers dirty and torn, spines cracked and peeling, inside pages cocked and dog-eared. What they lacked in appearance, however, they made up for in breadth and depth of selection. This place should make Barnes & Noble weep in shame, I remember thinking to myself.
Almost reluctantly, I sought out the Hemingway section, where I found three full shelves of his works, everything from tired paperbacks scarred with highlighting and students’ scrawled notes to a few nearly pristine first edition hardbacks. I picked up a copy of The Old Man and the Sea, a first edition missing its dust jacket, thereby making it affordable. I didn’t much care for the book, the one so many considered to be his seminal work. It seemed to me to be Hemingway at his macho worst. I put it back and picked up Men Without Women. This was more to my liking. Smart little stories, some of them among his best. There was a first edition of Green Hills of Africa, another of For Whom the Bell Tolls, each costing several hundred in their crisp, bright dust jackets.
And then I picked up The Moveable Feast. For a Hemingway scholar, this book is a literary gold mine. It’s Hemingway’s own version of the events that shaped not only his early writing career, but the writer he became for all time. It’s his memoir of living and writing in Paris in the ‘20s, before he’d sold many stories, before he’d published his first and perhaps best novel, The Sun Also Rises. The book was a favorite of mine and my own copy, well, let’s just say it was long-gone. This copy was a hardback, but a later printing, so within the budget of an academic. After a few more minutes of browsing, I went to the windowed cubby where the owner sat huddled over a mass of papers. I tapped on the glass and pointed to the book.
He looked up and, seeing me with the book in my hand, got noticeably flustered. He began to shuffle the pages in front of him and move stacks of books onto the piles of papers.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out a $20 bill. "I’d like to buy this," I said.
"The Moveable Feast?" he asked, as though he still didn’t quite understand the transaction.
"It says $12 inside. Is that right?"
"Sounds right. It’s a wonderful book. You’ll enjoy it."
"Oh, I know. I’ve read it many times. My ex-girlfriend took my copy. She liked the parts about Gertrude Stein." I shrugged. "I should’ve known a Stein scholar and a Hemingway scholar couldn’t live together."
"You’re a Hemingway scholar?" He stopped in the middle of counting out my change.
"That’s right."
"What’s your name?"
"Burton Allan."
"I’m William Ford," he said, and he shook my hand. "Where do you teach?"
"Humboldt State."
"Have you published? I don’t believe I’ve come across your name."
I cringed as I always do at that question. I hadn’t published anything for a long while and it was not implausible that in a few years I’d succumb to the rule of "publish or perish." I hated this question.
"Not recently."
"Too bad. I guess Papa’s not as popular as he once was. Not since the feminists got a hold of him. But for my money, no one ever wrote cleaner or truer."
"I agree. But you know how it goes. Literary fashions change. And he’s been studied so much. There’s the sense that there’s nothing new to discover about him. It’s all been said and analyzed and picked over before."
"Ha!" Ford laughed. "That’s what they think."
"You don’t think so?"
"I know so." He looked like he was about to say more, but stopped himself.
"Tell that to the head of any English Department in this country."
"I don’t need to. They’ll know soon enough." And he chuckled as he trudged back up the stairs to his nest.
* * *
I searched in vain that evening for an affordable French restaurant, but in the end I settled for a German deli called Spechmann’s. I vaguely recalled Hemingway’s description of eating at Lipp’s, a German cafe in Paris, and I tried to re-create his order.
"Potato salad and a beer." I ordered. "And some kind of sausage. What do you recommend?"
The red-cheeked, middle-aged frau who was my waitress brought me a bratwurst, a plate of oily potatoes, and an icy stein of beer almost as big as my head. I smeared the bratwurst with a grainy brown mustard and ate it between bites of the potato salad, swallowing long drafts of the beer to get it down. It was not my favorite sort of food, but if it was good enough for Hemingway, well...
When the food was gone and I still had half a mug of beer left, I leaned back in my chair and pulled out The Moveable Feast. I opened it up and moved right in. I didn’t need French food to transport me to Paris. Between the pages I was already there.
This time, the familiar tales felt fresher. I found nice bits and turns of phrase I hadn’t noticed before, as if, now that I had fed Hemingway, he was feeding me.
I loved this book. Every time I read it I was touched by something different. This time, Hemingway’s wife Hadley captured my attention. She was the kind of spouse every writer should have, unfailingly supportive, adoring even, willing not just to ride out the lean years, but to make an adventure of it. Everyone should have a Hadley. So where the hell was mine?
It certainly hadn’t been Karen. We latched on to each other in grad school and didn’t let go until six months ago, when we both acknowledged that passion had long since been replaced by aggravation. At some point we’d stopped being hot for each other and only became hot at each other. And when things cool, they tend to contract. Our life together got cold and small and hard. We still had literature in common, but we had opposite views on everything.
"No, you’re wrong," she would say, whether the topic was Hemingway or Gertrude Stein or Norman Mailer or even Danielle Steele. "You have no understanding of the matter whatsoever. Let me explain."
And there would follow an intellectual monologue as long as you please, making it clear in no uncertain terms how far off the mark I was. It was the same with sex. The only way I could tell the difference was that her sex lecture was delivered while she was naked and horizontal.
* * *
I fell asleep that night reading the chapter on how Hemingway and Hadley spent a season going to the tracks, betting money they couldn’t afford to lose, relishing the heat of the race and the thrill of the finishes. I awoke the next morning knowing that I had to go to the tracks, that very day, right then. I couldn’t afford Paris, but I could afford Bay Meadows. I could already hear the beat of the hooves, the roar of the crowd.
I was there for the first race, but didn’t bet. Walking through the gates, I was hit by a wave of rational thought that convinced me my budget for discretionary spending was not large enough to cover gambling. I decided to kick back and watch, just enjoy the ambiance of the track. The first two races were won by the favorites, causing a guy in white pants and white shirt next to me to slap his program against his hand and loudly mutter "Shit." He caught me watching him and his expression eased.
"Almost had it," he shrugged. The gold chains hanging round his neck and massively jeweled rings on his fingers told me he’d somehow survive the loss. "You win?"
"No, I’m sitting out the first few."
He took an appraising glance and must have concluded that I could use a good tip.
"You might not want to sit out the fifth race. I have it on good authority that number seven is a sure thing."
I looked at my form and saw that number seven was named Eau-de-vie. I flashed on Hemingway’s account of sitting in Gertrude Stein’s sitting room, being offered eau-de-vie by Alice B. Toklas.
Two bucks on Eau-de-vie in the fifth, I thought. What could it hurt? But standing in line at the mutuel booths, I saw that the Daily Double was the fourth and fifth races. I scanned the form for the fourth race and couldn’t believe what I saw. The number six horse in the fourth was named Papa’s Boy. By the time I got to the betting window, I was deeply into a moment of temporary insanity.
After I placed my bet, I went to the bar for a whiskey. I took a swallow to feel the burn searing through my stomach and considered the fact that I had just placed a bet that was beyond my means. I was traveling on a shoestring. My budget barely covered food and lodging, let alone gambling.
But before I had time to work myself into a real stew about it, the fourth race started and I moved out into the midst of the crowd. Papa’s Boy bolted from the gate and led the entire race, finishing by a neck ahead of the next-best. I felt a surge of relief. I was halfway there, and yet I knew it wasn’t that simple.
I glanced over at the man who’d given me the tip.
"Eau-de-vie, right?" I said.
Absolutely, I wanted him to say. I heard it from the horse myself. But he simply smiled and shrugged as if to say "We’ll see."
I maneuvered further into the crowd, down toward the track. I was beginning to feel the whiskey and it made me want to pace. But I found a spot at the fence and wrapped my hands around the bar. I felt like the horses must as they’re squeezed into the cubbies at the gate, all pent-up energy and sweat, ready to break out. They pranced and shifted nervously and I did the same.
I’d only intended to bet $2, I swear to God that was all. But at the better’s booth, I’d opened my wallet and taken everything I had. $235. If I lost it all, I’d have no money to finish out my vacation. I tucked $35 back in my wallet—I’d need it for gas to drive home. And I bet the rest on the Daily Double—Papa’s Boy in the fourth, and Eau-de-vie in the fifth.
The fifth race was ready to start. The horses were at the gate, restless and snorting, pushing forward. The gates opened and they were off, tearing up the track. Eau-de-vie was last out of the gate, but he surged forward to second place, then fell back again to last. In the final stretch, he poured it on, streaking past the other horses, taking third place, then second, finally sliding up next to the first place horse and holding on to a photo finish.
I sweated out the final results, mentally calculating what my winnings could be and what I would spend it on—new tires for my aging car, a new sofa to fill the hole in the living room Karen left me with, or another vacation—maybe this time to Vegas, since I was feeling lucky.
And as I waited I became aware of sensations I hadn’t noticed in recent history. My heart beat faster. My skin tingled. My brain lost its doughy consistency and I could feel synapses firing like an AK47. This is what it’s like, I remembered—being alive.
Then the results flashed up on the screen. Eau-de-vie won by a nose, putting over thirty-seven hundred dollars in my pocket. And suddenly I knew that I would be heading back to Sylvia Beach & Co. and taking home one of those lovely first edition Hemingways.
* * *
When I got to the bookstore, it was locked with a sign in the window saying "Back in 20 minutes." I wandered up and down the street, enjoying the weight of the wad of bills in my pocket. I stopped in a liquor store. A bottle of eau-de-vie might be just the thing for a private celebration later on, so I selected a bottle of Poire William. By the time I returned to the bookstore, the sign was down and I went in.
The owner was holed up in his cubby again and I wondered if he spent all his time there, taking only scant moments to venture out for food and bathroom breaks. Heading straight to the Hemingway section again, I perused the now familiar selection and quickly narrowed the choice to three: In Our Time for $650, Winner Take Nothing for $850, and To Have and Have Not for a hundred more.
As I stood there, weighing the options, Ford suddenly appeared.
"Back again, eh?"
"I had a windfall and felt obliged to share some with Papa."
I told him the whole story of Papa’s Boy and Eau-de-vie. The old guy looked so tickled, so completely caught up by the story that I offered to share a drop of the Poire William with him.
"Well, I don’t really partake anymore." He hesitated, rubbing his jaw. "Maybe just a quick one—in honor of Papa."
We went into his little office and he moved piles of books around to clear a place for me to sit and a corner of the desk to serve as the bar. The rest of the desk still held stacks of papers which he quickly shoveled into boxes and moved out of the way. I tried to help, but he barked a "no" and I backed off. I opened the bottle and poured us each a shot into two dusty mugs rescued from the back of a desk drawer.
"So you came back for another look at the old man, eh?" I wasn’t sure if he was talking about Hemingway or himself, so I just sipped my drink. The brandy had a good clean burn and the scent of pears filled my nose.
Ford drained his mug in a single gulp and looked longingly at the bottle. I nudged it forward and he poured himself a generous three fingers more.
"Yep," he continued, pushing back in his chair with a satisfied smile, "don’t ever give up on the old man. Believe me, he’s still got one or two surprises in store."
"Really? You think he’s giving dictation from the grave?"
He chuckled. "Hell, writers write so many things in the course of a lifetime. And even with the masters, there are things that haven’t found their way into print yet. But you never know, they may turn up eventually."
"If you’re talking about the unpublished papers in his estate, I’ve seen them. They’re at the Princeton Library in a special collection. They’re mostly scraps, ideas that he never got off the ground. There are some interesting bits and pieces, for sure, but nothing publishable."
"But are you sure that’s everything?"
"That’s everything the estate is supposed to know about."
Ford took another deep swallow of the brandy and then a hard gulp of air before leaning back in his chair, studying me. I thought perhaps he was sizing me up as a Hemingway scholar, trying to determine if I knew enough for him to bother continuing the conversation. I’ve seen the look before. Whether they love him or hate him, everyone thinks they know Ernest.
Ford leaned forward in his chair, rubbing his hand over his jaw. "Do you remember that part in The Moveable Feast where Hemingway talks about his wife and the stolen suitcase?"
I did remember. Hemingway was in Lausanne, working on some journalism pieces and Hadley came to join him. As a surprise, she packed all of his manuscripts—everything he’d written so far, except for two short stories that were with other people at the time. She brought them, carbons and all, for him to work on, but then at the train station her suitcase was stolen. Every time I’d ever read that passage I’d imagined how crushed Hemingway must have been when he’d discovered what happened, how, even though he loved her so much, he must have wanted to wring Hadley’s neck.
"Well," Ford said with a crooked smile, "those manuscripts must’ve gone somewhere."
"Sure, probably the nearest trash bin the thief could find."
"Maybe not. Maybe they just got stashed away in some Parisian garret. Maybe for years, the thief didn’t realize what he had."
"Then why would he keep them?"
Ford shrugged.
"Well, it’s a nice thought," I told him. "But until someone speaks up and says they have a suitcase of pinched manuscripts, there’s not much point in speculating."
"But just think about it. Think! What would you give for a chance to see those manuscripts—if they existed? What would you do for even a glance?"
He’s talking to the wrong man, I thought. He should’ve been talking to me as I was ten years earlier, before a decade of teaching and academic bureaucratic bullshit had absorbed my passion like a stale sponge. I remembered the euphoria I felt when I was working on my dissertation and thought I’d stumbled across a single uncataloged letter in the Hemingway collection at the Knox College Library in Illinois. For a day or two I walked around like I had a direct connection to Ernest’s ghost. And then I found out that the letter had already been discovered by some guy from the Sorbonne. I got mightily drunk that night as I was just beginning to realize that I’d probably never find anything new on Hemingway, never have a truly original thought about his writing.
But Ford still had passion to burn. Passion enough to chase pipe dreams. He leaned back now in his chair, tapping his empty mug on a stack of papers with his right hand while his left hand methodically clenched and unclenched. His face flushed just dreaming of those manuscripts. He waited for my answer but I had none. I shrugged and nudged the bottle towards him again. He poured himself another drink. And in exchange, it seemed, he pushed the stack of papers toward me.
The pages were yellowed with age, ragged around the edges, but still crisp and clear. The typescript was old, with the telltale jumps and stutters of an old manual typewriter. Some were carbon copies, but most were originals. They bore handwritten proofing marks and a few pages had scribbled revisions in the margin. There were short stories, close to a dozen of them, and at the bottom of the stack, a novel—all carrying the byline "by Ernest Hemingway."
My first thought was that the poor sonofabitch had been scammed and I told him so.
"Not a chance. I’ve had the handwriting analyzed and authenticated. They’re the real thing all right."
"How the hell did you get a hold of ‘em?"
"I bought them."
"From who?"
"Well, that I can’t tell you. No, I’m afraid that will have to remain confidential. But rest assured, these papers you now hold in your hand are the stolen manuscripts Hemingway wrote about."
"What are you going to do with them?"
"Sell them, of course. Christ, I’ve waited all my life for an opportunity like this. I’ve been working all week on the catalog, writing the descriptions and cataloging the manuscripts. But I’m nearly done."
"Sell them to who? Private collectors? So they can disappear into someone’s personal treasure trove, never to see the light of day again. And never to be seen by the public, by researchers who would benefit from studying them?"
"They won’t all go to private collections. No doubt, some of the major libraries will pick up a few. Not that that will make them any more accessible to the public."
He was right about that. I remembered how hard it was for me to gain access to various libraries’ special collections—and I was a qualified researcher. For the general public, a special collection is about as accessible as the space shuttle.
A sudden door slam downstairs made both of us jump and I watched Ford’s widen. With some effort, he got to his feet and went to look over the railing. He came back looking relieved, but still shaken, rubbing his arm.
"It’s just Teresa, my cleaning lady," he said and we soon heard a vacuum cleaner power up. He sat down heavily.
"You know you’ve really got to turn these manuscripts over to Hemingway’s estate."
Ford just grunted and waved his hand at me.
"They’re stolen property. You really have no right to sell them. No reputable auction house would touch them."
"Like hell they wouldn’t," he barked. He pulled the manuscripts away from me and I could tell he now regretted showing them to me.
"I’m sure the estate would pay you—you wouldn’t lose money. There’d probably even be a finder’s fee of some sort."
"You think I’m going to settle for some pittance? I know what this stuff is really worth." His face went from ashen to crimson then back again.
I felt sorry for him, really. Bookselling is not a business that makes a man rich. These manuscripts were very likely the only retirement fund he’d ever have. But the thought of these pages being spirited away by anyone with deep pockets and a desire to make a solid investment was galling to me, and I told him so.
Then he lost it in a flash of rage. His left arm jutted out spastically, knocking the bottle of Poire William to the floor, and I thought for just an instant that he was trying to hit me. But then he slumped back, his left side seizing up awkwardly. I slowly realized he was having a heart attack.
Generally speaking, scholars are not much use in a crisis. The endless analysis and conjecture of academia is not conducive to either split-second decision-making or lightning reflexes. Slowly, I reached out to help and he seemed to push himself back, but maybe not. Maybe he was just reacting to the pain. He gasped and gurgled slightly.
I remembered Teresa, the cleaning lady, and ran downstairs, yelling "Help" all the way. I found her vacuuming in the aisles of the History section, her Walkman plugged into her ears. I flailed my arms to get her attention and she turned down the volume and said "Que pasó?"
"The old man ... el viejo," I said, lamely excavating my high school Spanish. "Necesita ayuda."
We hurried back upstairs to find Ford gasping and fading and Teresa ran off to call 911.
As I listened to her make the call, I looked at the papers now in a box on the floor, and realized with horror that rivulets of Poire William were circling it, seeping into the cardboard. I grabbed the box quickly before the liquor saturated the bottom.
I was still clutching the box when the paramedics showed up minutes later and vainly set to work on the old man. They pushed me out of the cramped office and shooed me downstairs, further out of the way. While Teresa prayed and Ford died, I cradled the manuscripts.
And then I took them. It made no sense to leave them behind—they wouldn’t do the old man any good now. They’d be safer with me.
I intended to make arrangements the very next day to return the manuscripts to Hemingway’s estate. I even went so far as to make a few discreet phone calls to determine who was the literary executor and how I might get in contact. But then I started reading through the manuscripts page by page, shut up in my sweltering hotel room, ordering room service so I wouldn’t have to leave the papers unattended even for a moment. And I didn’t return them the very next day. Or the day after that, or the day after that. By the end of the week, I’d loaded the manuscripts back into my car and was heading north on Highway 1, back to Humboldt.
* * *
I arrived back home to a late summer storm. Humboldt weather was depressingly predictable. It was nearly always gray and damp; low skies pinned me to the ground and smothered me amongst all those dripping trees. But now the rain felt like camouflage and I felt safe behind the "redwood curtain." I hugged the box of manuscripts to my chest, wrapping my coat around it as protectively as if it was a child, and rushed from my car to my front door. Inside, I found myself shivering and hurried to build a fire. My flat stank of mildew and stale air, but that wasn’t unusual. Everyplace in Humboldt was mildewed.
That first night back, sitting in front of the fire, I drank a bottle of Zinfandel and finally thought about this contemptible thing I’d done. I thought about the old man and it seemed a damn shame, his being cut down right at the moment of his big score. I remembered his excitement over those crumbling pages and wondered if he took that thrill along with him to whatever came next.
The next day I used part of my winnings from the track to purchase a fireproof safe for the manuscripts. It became a nightly ritual: unlocking the safe, taking the papers out, and working on them for hours at a time, taking notes, learning, writing. Then I tucked them back into the safe, which I kept next to my bed. I slept better knowing the papers were near.
* * *
It didn’t take long for people to notice the change in me. First it was my students, who picked up almost immediately on my fresh enthusiasm for my subject. In the classroom I was transformed from monotonous drone to fascinating, insightful lecturer. I had Ernest practically standing behind me at the podium, whispering in my ear.
And then my colleagues in the department began to recognize it. By January, I had two articles accepted for publication, one in a prestigious academic journal, one in a not-so-prestigious review. But with them, I moved a bit closer to that elusive promised land called tenure. My department chair, a stiff, gray-haired woman with an unnatural fondness for Joyce Carol Oates, began looking at me differently, as though I was no longer something sticky and embarrassing she’d like to scrape off her shoe.
"Well done, Mr. Allan," she said. "That’s the sort of scholarly endeavor we want to see."
Even Karen acknowledged that I was at least doing something constructive, but she hastened to point out that my conclusions, although fresh and curiously perceptive, were entirely wrongheaded. I shrugged and smiled. She couldn’t bother me now, because I’d also stumbled onto another promised land, this one called Grace Fanning.
I found her in a coffeeshop across the street from campus. I was writing, had a good steady flow going, but the sight of her left my pen frozen in my hand. Picture hair the color of amber ale and a creamy Midwestern face. I took her in with one look, and she was mine. I’m claiming you, I thought. You belong to me now. And shortly thereafter, she did.
Grace was a grad student in American Literature. We blended together almost immediately, exchanging ideas, debating. But the debates didn’t freeze me up as they had with Karen. Now the writing flowed from me. The feelings flowed from me. I was split open and healed at the same time.
* * *
I began to think that I might actually be able to put together enough material for a book on Hemingway’s early years as a writer. It was risky—how could I support so many new conclusions and interpretations without revealing the discovered manuscripts? But maybe that was exactly what I should do. I could write the book and at the time of its release, go public with the manuscripts. I could say that Ford had given them to me for research, that he always intended to give them to a library. Not true, I know, but selling to the highest bidder would hardly help the old man now.
I worked on the book at nights, through most of the winter, writing as Hemingway wrote—putting down one true sentence after another, filling notebook after notebook, stopping each night while I was still rolling so that I’d be able to pick it up easily the next day. It worked. Writing had never before seemed so fluid or so painless.
I remembered how writing had been for me in the past—dry and unrewarding, like fishing a barren lake. I’d felt a lot like Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea, going out every day and dropping my line and waiting for the fish that never came. But now I reeled in one after another. I finished the proposal and a couple sample chapters and sent them off to a university press.
In a month the call came. Elliot Redman, acquisitions editor, telephoned to express his interest in the project and we spoke enthusiastically of the thrill of finding a new angle on Hemingway.
"Of course, the clincher," I told Elliot, "will be what I can turn up in Paris."
"Really? When are you going?"
"This summer." In truth, until that moment I had no plans to go to Paris or anywhere else. But as I heard myself saying it, I thought, why not? Grace and I could go together. But I’d need money ... "That is, if I can get an advance on the book."
It took some negotiating—university presses are not known for having deep pockets. But after a few weeks and a few phone calls back and forth, I had a book contract and an advance check for $5,000. As soon as the semester ended, I told Grace, we’d go to Paris.
* * *
As spring came, I considered telling her about the Hemingway papers. I imagined showing them to her, seeing her face light up with amazement. I imagined how reverently she would touch the pages. I reveled in the thought of how impressed she would be with me. I was sure that the mutual guardianship of these papers would cast a glow around our bond, sealing us together.
But I didn’t tell her. I hesitated when the right moment came and hyperventilated when it came again. The closest I came was giving her the combination to the safe so she could store backup disks for her thesis.
"What’s all this?" she asked, touching the stack of folders next to her disks.
"Research," I said vaguely. She didn’t push but I could tell she was curious. There is an innate respect that scholars have for a colleague’s work in progress. They know there will be plenty of time to turn it into hash after it’s published. But Grace seemed to know, as I did, that when the right time came, I would reveal all to her. I was that certain that my two passions would inevitably be linked.
* * *
On June 1st, we arrived in Paris just in time for a Metro strike and a heat wave. Charles de Gaulle Airport was a frenzied tangle of tourists and Parisians made more surly by the transportation inconveniences. I left Grace to claim the bags while I searched for a phone to confirm our reservations at a quaint hotel in the Latin Quarter.
Minutes later, I found Grace at the baggage carousel, trembling and holding back tears.
"What is it?" I asked.
She swallowed and spoke in a whisper. "It’s gone."
"What’s gone? One of our bags?"
"Yes."
"Damn. Well, damn." I shrugged. "But, you know, we’ll manage. They’ll probably find it in a few days and it’ll catch up with us."
Tears slid down her cheeks. "The airlines didn’t lose it. It was stolen. I’d already claimed everything. I just turned my back for a split second, I swear, Burton. I’m so sorry."
"Well, don’t cry. It’s just clothes and things—it can all be replaced."
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. "No. It’s your papers."
It didn’t even begin to penetrate my brain what she could really mean.
"Your manuscripts. It was supposed to be a surprise. I packed them all up and brought them with us. I thought you’d like to work on them while we’re here."
Impatient travelers bumped and jostled us as I stood there, struggling to understand.
"I brought them in my carry-on bag. I was so careful with them, Burton, really, and then I just turned away that one moment. It was so stupid. I’m so sorry!"
The news slowly flooded my system like a lethal drug. If the papers were gone, I had no book to write, no research papers to publish, nothing to teach. Even the short stories that had begun to pour forth—I could already feel them drying up like a riverbed.
I could even feel Grace slipping away. But it wasn’t really her that was slipping away, it was my feelings for her. I told her it was all right, that it didn’t matter. But it was feigned forgiveness. I wanted to cry and rage and hurl my suitcases into the crowds. I wanted to leave Grace and hold Grace and hurl her into the crowds too. I put my arms around her, but it did no good. Everything I felt for her was draining away and I’d lost the plug to hold it back.
We made a police report, but the gendarmes who took the information made it clear that we were silly to have brought anything with us that we weren’t willing to donate to the republic at large. Defeated, we waited in what passes for a line in France until we could get a taxi. Packed into the tiny Fiat with what was left of our luggage, we rolled down the windows over the loud objections of our driver and headed into town.
Grace was silent next to me, hoping, I suppose, that I would say something to make the horrible moment pass.
"I should have held on to it," I said finally.
"No, it’s my fault. I should have held on to it," she whispered, not understanding all that I meant.
The drive took over an hour, but as we got closer to the center of town, I began to search out landmarks mentioned in The Moveable Feast. I was finally in Hemingway’s Paris but it felt hollow. We arrived at our hotel, an time-worn building about a block from the Place Contrescarpe. I paid the driver and shuffled all the bags into the hotel, then told Grace I was going for a walk. She didn’t object, but I knew she would spend the time crying until I returned.
I stepped back out into the narrow street and turned towards the square. In a few steps I was facing the hub that had been one of Hemingway’s regular footpaths. Across the street was La Chope, one of his haunts.
I stepped inside and ordered a cafe-au-lait. The clientele seemed to be a mix of tourists, locals, and students. I sipped my coffee and wondered where the manuscripts were and how many years would pass before they surfaced again, if they hadn’t already met their fate in an incinerator or at the bottom of the Seine. They’d proven to be elusive, having slipped away from Hemingway first, then Ford, and now me.
But for a time they’d been mine and I tried to comfort myself with that thought. It did little good. I pulled out paper and a pen and attempted to write, but no words came. I let my coffee cool and slumped back in my chair in the corner of the cafe.
In a while a short, dark-haired woman who’d come in with a large group asked if she could take the extra chair from my table.
"Or you are perhaps expecting someone else?" she asked in beautifully accented English.
"Go ahead," I told her. "Take it. I don’t think he’s going to show."
Claire Splan's writing has appeared in Rosebud, Firsts,
and The San Francisco Chronicle. This is her first published fiction.She lives in
Alameda, California.
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