Fiction Ruined My Family (30 page)

She basically says she'd rather be institutionalized than conventionally married:

The thing just gets more and more interesting and zingy and, well, fun. I can understand why my father is drowning in the Fitzgeralds; they are wild and talented and fascinating. His discoveries about Zelda's gynecological history and how Scott destroyed her could be major. He's definitely onto something, I'll give him that.

When my uncle Jim died in St. Louis recently, my father's reaction was fairly stoic, which wasn't that much of a surprise; they were not on speaking terms for most of my life, but at the end, when both their wives were gone, I think they found some empathy for each other. My dad was there for Uncle Jim when Aunt Ann died, and Uncle Jim had been giving Dad some money before he died, “for the Fitzgerald project.”

When my dad got back from the funeral, I called and asked him how it was, and he was perfunctory; he gave the names of the cousins who were there and who had a good line and who was sullen, and then he jumped back to the project.

“Jean-Joe, I'm off to Rockville, Maryland, this weekend to copy the diaries of a secretary of his, Laura Guthrie Hearne. He met her in Asheville, North Carolina. She was a fortune-teller who then went to Columbia and became his secretary. Oh, he paid her some miserable sum, but anyway, her diaries have a year of working for Scott in there, and I'm going to head down and photocopy the diary. Fitzgerald's downfall was he liked to drink with these people who were keeping detailed records of their time with him. My book should really be called
Don't Drink with Diarists
.”

His obsession is charming when you're talking to old friends who know him and think he is a lovable eccentric father; it's downright dangerous when you're driving to Connecticut on Christmas Eve in the freezing rain and can't roll a window down to let out some of the words that are coming at you in an endless stream, threatening to use up all available car oxygen; and it's maddening when you want him to be fucking normal for five minutes, that is, when you want him to be a person who can understand the difference between an unsavory literary obsession and conversation. Someone who can understand why you might be rankled that this topic seems more important to him than anything and anyone including his daughters, including his wife. My solo show ran about an hour, me talking for sixty minutes, but that doesn't mean I'm going to perform it without an intermission if I get you alone in a car on the Merritt Parkway.

“Who gives a shit about Zelda?” I want to shout, occasionally, when I can't take it anymore, when I miss Mom, when I can't see why she had to die just because these two couldn't seem to face up to some truths in life: that people need money to live and just might have to work from time to time and that if something like booze is killing you, you might have to give it up. Your only brother just died. Who cares about Zelda, Dad. Mom slept with mice running over her bed. And I have a son.

It can only be some kind of literary defense mechanism located in the prefrontal cortex, perhaps one that the psychiatrists and neurosurgeons have yet to discover. A part of the brain that says, “You! You, grief! You, fear! You, sadness! You, loneliness! Have you read
Tender Is the Night,
grief? Did you know that the Divers are based on my friend Honoria's father and mother, Sara and Gerald Murphy? Did you know Honoria and I were going to take a trip to Europe to find some of Gerald's lost paintings? Come over here, it's much more interesting over here, no one will find you over here, peacefully reading in this cozy part of the brain.”

WE LOVE OUR BABY. But sometimes it seems like this might be the only thing we have. We don't see anything the same. Whenever I pull out anything of my mom's he acts like I'm trying to set the table with silverware from the
Titanic
. I think silver oyster forks and long mint julep spoons are fun, but then destruction doesn't scare me—it's part of me—whereas for him it's just too weird and frightening. I'm dragging him down. This is why he stopped painting, traded it for real estate, so he wouldn't have to live like this, and now look what I'm doing. Crazy mom! He picks at me constantly about my writing—which I'm trying to turn into a book. Working on a book—yeah, right. Killing my credit score is more like it.

 

 

 

When I was doing
Sally on the Mount
in Los Angeles, Marisa Tomei came to the show, and naturally she thought I was a genius and took a bunch of us out afterward to a hotel rooftop where we enjoyed seriously preferential treatment, and a large man from the hotel stood by our table for unknown reasons.

Now, a year and a half after that night with her, Nick feels, is quite insistent, that I send my book to Marisa Tomei.

“You're not even trying to get published! I don't know why you don't send that thing to Marisa Tomei.”

“Well, for starters, she's not a publishing house, babe, she's an actress.”

“Oh, gimme a break. You see? You don't even want to sell your book!”

“I can't . . . I just can't explain it to you, can I? Marisa Tomei is not going to publish my book.”

“People don't take over two years writing a book! Why don't you send it in?”

“It's not ready.”

“That's what publishers do, Jeanne. They figure out the ending. Just send it in. They'll finish it.”

 

 

 

 

HUDSON AND I GO BACK to New York whenever we can, increasingly without Nick. He doesn't seem to want much to do with New York or anyone there anymore. We go out for ice cream with my dad one night. He's seventy-eight and a sub in Brooklyn public schools. He wouldn't consider teaching when we were kids, and now he's subbing in high schools. But the thing is, he really likes it. He told the black kids in school that his mother was black, telling them stories about Ella Voss, his nanny. I can't imagine what kids think of him, what they think of him saying his mother was black. I think it's hilarious but also I can't believe schools actually employ him. I ask him if Grandma Darst and Ella Voss got along. He says they did, and for the rest of the conversation refers to Grandma Darst as “your white grandmother.”

He tells me he was working for the Census Bureau but he got fired because twice he was walking home at night and dropped all the papers, the data he had collected during the day. He says he retraced his steps trying to find the papers but never did. We walk to the ice cream place and sit outside on picnic benches across from Prospect Park. His front tooth is missing, fell out a few months earlier, and I can't stop staring at it. It's hard not to stare at a single jaggedy front tooth; it looks like it's protruding outward when it doesn't have another tooth next to it. It's jarring and upsetting. I have my usual mix of feelings when I see him: he's utterly delightful and likable, and he's frustrating. I am trying to figure out how I can help, does he need a social worker now, can my sisters and I pay for his expenses ourselves. My sisters are hurt mostly because his “project” still seems more important to him than their kids. As time goes on, his need to triumph becomes the only way he thinks he can redeem himself or make things right in our eyes. But as time goes on what we want more and more is a father and a grandfather. And the more he focuses on Fitzgerald the less he focuses on us and our children and the angrier Eleanor and Katharine get. I suppose they feel that he doesn't suffer for his art, they do. Their kids do. Maybe as the only one who writes, I'm more terrified for myself, and now for my son. I think, I'm next. I have just fixed two of my own teeth, albeit they were in the back so no one could see, but I was missing two teeth not six months ago. And I wonder if anyone has coined the term “writers' teeth.”

He just talks through all of my thoughts, forging ahead, he's on the abortion, he's on the book, his tooth doesn't even come up. He could care less. As it has always been, his life bothers other people, not him. Hudson is psyched to see his grandpa despite his Dickensian appearance. My dad isn't sure whether he should pick his grandson up or shake his hand. He is affectionate, there is no doubt about that, but not necessarily at ease. He can be awkward with his grandkids, shaking hands with kids who are a little young for it. He's always saying to me and Eleanor and Katharine things like “Never been any damn good with babies.” Which is weird when you are one of his babies.

Nick understands that my biggest fear is that I will become my dad. That I'll be a broke writer-mom with some hideous growth sprouting up from my shoulder, a second head but with no eyes or features, just a head that I brush off in conversation when people bring it up or suggest perhaps seeing a doctor, eager to get back to talking about my latest profile for
The New Yorker.
I think about Crazy Kate and Dagwood, and then my dad and then me, three generations of us, and I look at Hudson eating his chocolate in a cup and think how much Hudson seems like a writer's name.

I recently reread the piece of my father's from
Harper's
magazine called “Prufrock with a Baedecker,” about St. Louis. In it he claims that St. Louisans are forever trying to recapture a past that he believes was never what they thought it was. “Old cities, like old families, obviously shabby, presumptively genteel, sustain themselves on dreams of vanished grandeur and it may be better to leave such dreams intact.” It's a really good piece. The guy can write. I ask him, Do you believe dreams should be left intact? Of course I'm talking about my mother. Of course I'm talking about the fantasies, the dreams, the myths, the delusions, the denial around my mother's alcoholism. Maybe asking, Has it all been worth it? He says he doesn't anymore, that he never did, that he and Lewis Lapham, the editor of
Harper's
at the time, agreed that portraying a city in three or four thousand words was impossible and it was just one way to end the piece. “No,” he says, “the truth should be told. The truth is not just for the young, and particularly in writing, the truth is everything.

“My God, people think fiction is a bunch of made-up flourishes, fanciful play. Fiction can do more than nonfiction, because it is the truth along with the artfulness and craft. If it's not the truth, it simply doesn't work, it won't fly, and the reader will know in an instant, well, this writer simply doesn't know the layout of this town or how a summer night might feel in a certain part of Montana, whatever it is. Fiction allows you to get as close as you want to actual facts, happenings, and then move away from it. There's artfulness and craft in nonfiction, no question, but you can't do what I just mentioned, which is big.”

I can't help feeling that what Dad likes about fiction is the power of it, the power of being, essentially, more beautiful, more charming, smarter, better than, the truth.

“Almost . . . superior?”

He laughs. “Well said, Jean-Joe.”

We talk of two-leveling: writing a story using another story as the base or first level of your story, like Joyce using the
Odyssey
as a first level for
Ulysses
. He hops back to the subject of Zelda and tells me about some new stuff he's gotten for his book from an old
Esquire
piece titled “A Summer with F. Scott Fitzgerald.”

“You don't wreck a life to create a novel,” he blurts. “You don't ruin a woman like Zelda who was a genius in three different directions.” I hear it again. It's not that he thought he should have gotten to my mother's apartment sooner and saved her life. It's that he feels he killed her slowly, over the twenty-three years that they were married and then not married, because of the work he wanted to make, the two novels and everything else, and I think maybe he's doing an upside-down two-leveling: using the story of Scott's work taking precedence over Zelda's mental and physical health to come to terms with or write the story of his own artistic ambition and the unsightly fall of my mother.

 

 

 

 

“ I GOT ONE WORD for you . . . ‘Fitzgerald.'” When Nick says it one day I don't feel all that mad. At the very least it feels premature. He feels this is the cruelest, most powerful thing he can say, tapping into my greatest fear, of being as obsessive and unproductive and impractical as my dad. But articulating someone's biggest worry does not make it true. I am capable of making money, at least enough to survive. I take care of our son and I produce actual writing. Mommy just bought herself two teeth, muthafucka! Scrappiness has seen me through years when I wasn't getting paid. He is right in thinking, What kind of maniac would endure all that just for a shot at the big-time? Or in my case, what kind of jerk would spend months writing a play just to put it on in my living room for one night and have a fantastic time doing it? The very thing that has gotten me here is the thing he despises, the thing he'd rather avoid if he can by not seeing my dad, the thing he lacked to keep going with painting: insanity.

I say my parents lived in the past, but to tell this story, I was, as my husband loved to point out, living in the past. Spending, in other words, every day of
my
life in the past, my past, my parents' past, even my grandparents' past, the past of my hometown, St. Louis, Jesus it never ends, the past! It just keeps going and going and going. I admit it; I'm lured in by stories, telling them, capturing events and people and molding them, making people laugh. And I am like both of them.