Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald (12 page)

Scott thought for a moment, then shrugged. “Who can say?”

12

We’d invited Scott’s friends to meet his bride in the Biltmore’s Palm Court. Dressing for this date was no different from dressing for any party or dance back home, yet I was anxious. Without Montgomery’s humidity, my hair didn’t quite know how it should behave. Without Montgomery’s context, I didn’t know quite how
I
should behave.

Except for Ludlow Fowler, these men knew me only from whatever Scott had told or written them. I was accustomed to being assessed only for my
actual
actions—I had control over what I did and with whom, and once I’d made up my mind to act, I was happy to let the dust settle however it would. But God knew what things Scott had said after our breakup; to any or maybe all of them, I might be a fickle speed of a girl who’d led Scott on and then dashed his hopes and then roped him in again and finally caught him. Everybody knew of couples like that, where the poor man was obviously in over his head and miserable for it. If that was the Princeton pack’s impression of me, I couldn’t allow it to stand. Nor would I stand for them seeing me as Rosalind. That was fine for strangers, but these men were like brothers to Scott.

I’d be my most charming with them, and plainly affectionate with Scott, and I’d let him shine in his well-deserved limelight. They’d see, then, that what Scott and I had—regardless of anything he might have said before—was genuine love and mutual respect. I’d make Sara Haardt proud.

My dress was a navy-blue chiffon number that Scott had spotted in a shop window. He said everything I’d brought from home looked provincial when contrasted with what New York women were wearing—even I could see that. So, odd as it was to take fashion advice from a man, I’d had to admit that if I was going to be a famous author’s wife—his apparently notorious wife—I needed to look the part. Gone were the simple cotton blouses and casual skirts that had been my everyday wear. Now I had finer cotton, and silk! My skirts and dresses showed my lower calves. I had smart hats and soft leather gloves and shoes in four different colors.

In truth, it had been awfully nice to walk into a shop and buy the thing I’d decided I wanted. No debating with my mother over color or style or length, no wheedling required, no discussion of sticking to Daddy’s budget. Scott had peeled off ten-dollar bills and given them over to the shopgirl while encouraging me to buy more, if I liked.

Now Scott stood behind me at the mirror while I applied my lipstick and put on my hat. “Aren’t you a wonder?” he said.

I smiled at his reflection. He wore a new striped tie that made his eyes silvery sage. His cheeks still had a rosy glow from our Central Park outing. He’d parted his hair in the center and combed it smoothly back, which made him look polished and confident. I said, “You aren’t too bad yourself.”

“In all the nonsense that will come from this lot tonight—and it’s likely to be an arcane mix of football and poetry and literary journals and publishing and bourbon and war and girls—I want you to know that you, my dearest, darling wife, are the center of my universe.”

“In that case,” I said, turning to face him in person, “I might let you stay.”

*   *   *

There were too many of them to keep straight at first. That first night, I hardly tried. It was enough to greet each of them in my new role, then sit among them as though I were an anthropologist who’d been drafted into a strange tribe.

Ludlow Fowler was easy to remember, having been at the wedding. “Mrs. Fitzgerald,” he said, taking both my hands and kissing my cheek. In his tailored suit and with freshly cut fine blond hair, he smelled like old money and somehow also of gardenias, as if his mother might still be sending him milled French soaps and he was still inclined to use them. Straightforward and confident in the way that born-rich men so often are, Ludlow reminded me of some of the well-off fellas back home.

The other five—who I’d later know as Bunny, Biggs, Townsend, Alec, and Bishop—I would have to study a bit, except for Edmund Wilson, the misnamed
Bunny,
who I’d heard so much about. He looked something like the reporter, Ellis, but Bunny’s clothes fit better, and it was clear right off that Bunny fit better in the world. He likely belonged to the first type of men, the ones who believed they were entitled to a chance at any girl who enticed them—though I was certain that Bunny’s tastes were very particular.

After the initial polite questions directed at me, who they surely saw as an odd new appendage that Scott had somehow acquired along with his new celebrity status, the men moved quickly into a hearty discussion of
This Side of Paradise
. Most of them had read it and had already offered Scott their critiques and their praise. What they wanted to know now was what it was like to be scrutinized so publicly, to be the latest literary sensation.

“You don’t
look
famous,” one said.

“Except that you seem to be wearing Fowler’s suit,” said another, a tall, blue-eyed, blond man who had a friendly smile.

Scott said, “That’s what selling a story’s film interest will do for a man; it’s got nothing to do with the book.”

“It’s the book that made them look at the story.”

“It’s George Nathan that made them look at the story.”

I followed the banter, amused.

“No,” Scott said, “that story, ‘Head and Shoulders,’ went to
The Saturday Evening Post,
not
The Smart Set
. My agent, Harold Ober, got it to the movie people.”

“
My agent
. Gad. He says it as if to the manor born.”

“I still say it was Nathan. He’s got a crush on you, Fitz.” This was from the dark-haired, young-looking one.

Ludlow Fowler nodded toward me. “But we needn’t worry about our boy’s manhood now.”

“Do we know any other fairies?”

The dark-haired one again: “I was in Greenwich not long ago and met a pair—that is, they weren’t a
couple,
that is, they were two. Edna Millay and Djuna Barnes.”

“Lesbians aren’t fairies,” Bunny Wilson said. “Christ, call yourself a wordsmith?”

Scott said, “Nathan’s no fairy.”

“Edna Millay is a lesbian?”

“I’ve seen her with men.”

“I saw her with a woman.”

Ludlow said, “Never mind that. How many stories have Nathan and Mencken taken from you now, Fitz?”

“Six. And
The Saturday Evening Post
’s taken four.”

“Paying…?” asked the dark-haired one.

“The Post?”
Scott said. “Four hundred for one, four-fifty for the next two, and my agent’s got them to five hundred for the new ones.”

This stopped the conversation for a moment as all except Bunny and Ludlow stared at him, agog.

“And
The Smart Set
pays…?”

“Thirty,” Bunny answered, his voice as crisp and authoritative as three new ten-dollar bills. “Which won’t cover much more than his room here tonight, but the literary cachet is invaluable, isn’t that right, Fitz?”

Scott rubbed one hand over his hair and smiled.

The discussion went on for a time. Several of the men had brought flasks, which now began to appear more frequently; this then prompted a debate about the effectiveness of last October’s Volstead Act, and alcohol’s correct place within intelligent society. Did a thinking man need it? Did it hinder or enhance a writer’s productivity?

Bunny turned to me. “Zelda, what do you think?”

“I believe it makes most men better dancers,” I said, and held out my hand for his flask.

He complied, laughing. “I’m afraid that even liquor can’t help me much there.”

Scott caught my eye. His smile was one of gratitude. I had done something—perhaps everything—right.

*   *   *

This group, and this bookish world in which they lived and were simultaneously creating, was a collegiate literary circle puffed into wide proportions by the New York magazines and papers; that’s how I saw it before long.

Before their reign, before a smart, young writer named Dorothy Parker said too much too well and was fired for it, before Scott’s success, before people everywhere had been ravaged by war and flu, there’d been little glamour in the literary world. To be a writer then was to be a drab little mole who thought big thoughts and methodically committed them to paper, hoping for publication but not courting it, and then burrowing back into the hole to think again for a while.

With this group, though, and their counterparts from Yale, and the postwar push for life, for fun, for all the things Scott and I were seeking and embodying, the literary world put its foot into the circle of the entertainment world’s spotlight. Not far; far enough, though, for the public to see the polished, well-cut shoe and wonder to whom it might belong.

It belonged to the Princeton boys who’d made a happy circus of what had once been considered the ultraserious Princeton journal
Nassau Lit
. It belonged to Scott.

Some of their influence would occur due simply to luck. For example, Bunny was at
Vanity Fair
primarily due to Dorothy Parker’s lack of diplomacy (that’s what got her fired), and their friend John Peale Bishop was there because of Bunny. The literary hub that was
Vanity Fair
and its like-kind associations would soon grow new spokes and turn like a Ferris wheel set in the middle of Manhattan—a good ride, if you could get a ticket. And these Princeton fellas all had one. The wheel might put you off in a prominent book review or an important essay assignment; it might drop you at a party with Florenz Ziegfeld or George Cohan; it might toss you in with the new Hollywood types, and before long you’d be writing for the pictures and making hundreds of dollars a week, or more.

Some of their influence would grow from design—as when Scott had explained to me the publicity game that he saw forming in our future, a game he’d conjured, almost, and wanted the two of us to play. Some grew from our giddy laughter in the Biltmore lobby at two and three
A.M.
, from the singing that emanated from parties in our suite, from the dancing in the hallway, from the polite but firm request from management that sent us to finish our honeymoon in a new suite at the nearby Commodore Hotel. The future would be grander, stranger, and more precarious than any of us knew.

Just then, though, that influential little group was still a bunch of young, ambitious, intelligent men, along with me, a very young woman who hadn’t known there would be this kind of carnival and wasn’t sure she even wanted to ride the Ferris wheel—but was game enough to give it a try.

13

I was just done with my bath when I heard Scott answer the door, and then his friend Alec’s voice:

“Did you see what they wrote about you two?”

“Of course we saw it—Zelda clipped it for her scrapbook.”

“It” was a gossip-column mention of what had gone on the night before during a performance of
George White’s Scandals
. The musical revue was similar to what we’d seen at the
Follies,
except that
Scandals
had Ann Pennington, and Ann Pennington knew how to shimmy. I could shimmy, too, and had, on occasion, during certain Montgomery parties after only a little encouragement and a little booze. The diminutive, dark-haired, wide-eyed Miss Pennington, however, did it while wearing strategically placed silver fringe, onstage, and with a spotlight trained on her. This had a dramatic effect on the audience, which responded with hoots and cheers and whistles and applause.

Amid this, Scott and I, having begun our evening with orange-blossom cocktails and at this point nicely tight, had been sitting close to the stage in the sixth row, talking quietly in each other’s ear about each act and the range of talent and whether either of us might be able to do a better job of it. When it came to Ann Pennington and the shimmy, I’d shaken my head and said, “Lord, I’m pretty good, but I can’t beat that.”

“I’ll bet I could,” Scott said.

“Nah. You? You’ve got moves, sure, but not like those.”

“You don’t think so?”

As the number ended, he stood up and slowly peeled off his jacket. The people nearby us began to cheer. He unbuttoned his vest next and slid it off the way a stripper would. Catcalls and whistles followed, while onstage all action stopped. He loosened his tie, then began to unbutton his shirt. The cheering increased, and then suddenly a spotlight swung onto us. Scott got up on his seat so that more of the audience could see him while he slipped his tie over his head and dropped it into my lap. Then he stripped off his shirt, and the crowd went wild. Scott took his bows as three ushers moved in, and then the two of us—along with Scott’s clothing—were escorted to the lobby and subsequently into a waiting cab.

The article Alec was referring to said,
Celebrated New Novelist Fitzgerald Scandalizes the Scandals
. It quoted theatergoers who’d been present with saying things like they hoped Scott would get a recurring role or at least some compensation, and how surprising it was that an
author
looked so pleasing without a shirt. Others said that New York standards represented a new low for the country; it was one thing to have that kind of activity done onstage in a revue, but when the public began acting out, clearly Prohibition had not gone far enough to curtail the wildness of today’s youth. We’d read the article over coffee and toast, and then Scott had tossed the paper aside and rolled on top of me, with an offer to scandalize me once more before lunch.

“Why, sir,” I’d said, “you may look fine without your shirt, but a lady’s got her standards to consider.”

Scott pressed himself into me. “I’ll give you a standard to consider.”

Afterward, still a little breathless, I told him, “You’re gettin’ awfully good at this.”

“I’d hoped that was the case, and that you weren’t calling out to the Lord for rescue.”

“You were very godlike, I will say. Everybody calls you Fitz, but I think your nickname should be Deo, from the Latin. I’m goin’ to call you that from now on.”