Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald (24 page)

INTERLUDE

When I met Scott, the first thing I knew about him, beyond his physical appearance, was that he was an army officer. Then I learned that he was a Yankee, and a writer. Initially, the first two matters seemed capable of sinking us. The third one, his being a writer, was the one I put all my faith in, as he’d done, too—and yet that third matter was the solid center of our crumbling world, not its beating heart but a cannonball.

Scott was the first serious writer I’d ever met. By 1924, though, I knew a bunch of them. Bunny and the Princeton boys—all of them serious if not all successful; Edna Millay, George Nathan, Shane Leslie, Dorothy Parker, Sinclair Lewis, Don Stewart, Sherwood Anderson, Tom Boyd, Peggy Boyd, Anita Loos, Carl Van Vechten, Ring Lardner, John Dos Passos, Archie MacLeish, Jean Cocteau, and of course my own beloved Sara Haardt. I’d become a writer myself, somewhat.

There are so many ways to be a writer, but I felt I understood writers in general, inasmuch as I think writers can be understood. We all have something to say, and we require the written word—as opposed to musical instruments, or paint and canvas, or clay, or marble, or what have you—to say it. Not all writers want to be profound (though an awful lot of them do); some want to entertain, some want to inform; some are trying to provoke the most basic, universal feelings using a minimum of words—I think of Emily Dickinson—to demonstrate how it is to be human in our crazy world today.

Yet, of all the writers I’ve heard of or met or come to know (the list has grown even longer since ’24), I’ve never met another who’s anything like Scott.

At the age when I was perfecting my cartwheels and learning to skate backward and stealing my brother’s cigarettes to see what smoking was all about, Scott was writing one-act plays. He was writing poems and lyrics. Not long after that, his plays were full three-act structures with stage direction included. He wrote detective stories and adventure stories and dramatic stories. His plays began to be produced. He wrote more of everything, and then he wrote his novel, and then he wrote it again, and then again, and now he’s written a play for
Broadway
, and a musical revue, and all kinds of movie scenarios and scripts, and so many stories I’ve lost track of them all. When he’s not writing fiction, he’s writing essays and articles and book reviews and letters. He’s making notes and keeping ledgers where he tracks all of his stuff and my work, too.

Oh—I’d forgotten this, until just now:

We were newly married—still staying at the Commodore, I think—and had been out so late that we decided to go over to the East River to watch the sun rise. We were dressed up, still, from having been to a party at the apartment of a friend of one of George’s friends—no one we knew, but we wouldn’t think of refusing an invitation, and everyone there seemed to know us.

We walked from the host’s East Side apartment, somewhere around Seventieth, I guess it was, over to the riverfront in the gray-washed predawn, still feeling tight and gay, me teetering now and then in heels higher than I was accustomed to. I wore Scott’s jacket, and he wore my beaded hat.

The smell of the East River at dawn is dank and oily—though nothing so bad as Venice in August—and you get the sense that fish are decomposing all around you, just out of sight. Still, we found an empty stoop and sat there holding hands, oblivious. We sighed happily about the wonderfulness of being young and in love, of being in such demand simply because Scott had gotten some thoughts in his head and had written them down.

“You’d think anyone could do it,” he said. “Writing sounds so easy. Even
I
think it sounds easy, and I’ve got a hundred and twenty-two rejections that clearly prove it’s otherwise.”

“How do you know if you’re a writer, though? I mean, I’ve had thoughts and written them down—”

“Your diary, you mean—”

“My diary, yes. And I write my weight in letters every month, it seems. And I’ve tried a few story ideas like I told you, but I’m bad at it—”

“You’ll get better.”

“Maybe. What I’m sayin’, though, is I never thought, ‘I’m a writer.’ But you did.
Why
did you? How did you know?”

“It was easy enough to tell: if I wasn’t writing, I didn’t exist.”

So that night at Villa Marie, after I told Scott that I needed some time to think, I went inside for a pillow and some blankets and then made myself a bed on a chaise in the garden. There, on that July night beneath the lemon trees, I had a sort of conversation with myself about right and real, and wishes and truth.

Édouard was a good, dear man. We had chemistry, yes, and we had those outside-of-time Mediterranean days, and we had the excitement of doing something unusual and fraught, which itself appealed to people like us—risk-takers, you know. What else did we have, though? My French was still rudimentary and his English only a little better; when I thought it through, I recognized that our communications were quite basic. And while plenty of people had gotten married with even less in common, I’d already determined that such a marriage wasn’t for me.

Here’s what I figured: Édouard was less a man than a symbol for me, a symbol of my yearning for something I couldn’t yet name. If I’d heard of Amelia Earhart at the time, I might have been as willing to follow her lead as I was Édouard’s.

I wasn’t in love with him, not really. Édouard was a symbol. Édouard was a symptom. Scott, for all his shortcomings, owned my heart.

*   *   *

By the time I went inside, the dew had settled; I tracked into the bedroom with wet feet. Scott was sitting up in bed. The end of his cigarette glowed.

I stripped off my damp clothes, then took the cigarette and put it aside.

“You’ll stay?”

“Yes.”

“No more beach, no lunches, you won’t go anyplace without me while he’s here.”

“All right.”

Neither of us said another word for the rest of that night—a remarkable thing by itself. That night, we kept quiet so that our truth could be heard, and seen, and felt, in the ways we touched each other’s skin, the ways we sighed or gasped, our tentative glances, the press of my forehead to his.

When I didn’t return to the beach for a week, nor send a note to Édouard, nor place a call, he stopped looking for me there. At the casino, he asked after “the Fitzgeralds” and got nothing more than a shrug. All this Scott learned from René, who’d said he was loath to reveal anything at all to Scott, but out of respect for the friendship they’d developed during those months, he thought it only right that Scott know what had almost happened.

Scott told me, “René says Jozan is heartbroken and confused and may never get over you.”

“He will.”

“Perhaps. Though if he doesn’t, I won’t be surprised. I said to René, ‘Tell your friend that he’s now a member of a very prestigious club.’”

25

October: Scott found me in the Villa Marie garden taking in the inspiring Mediterranean view for what would be one of the last times that year. “Here.” He handed me a piece of paper that read,

Trimalchio

High Bouncing Lover

Among Ash Heaps and Millionaires

Trimalchio of West Egg

Gold Hatted Gatsby

On the Road to West Egg

Under the Red White and Blue

The Great Gatsby

Our lease would end when the month did, and then we’d migrate elsewhere the way the birds and our friends were all doing—most to Paris, some to Venice, or London, or Berlin. I’d persuaded Scott to tour Rome and Capri so that I could see a lot of the art and some of the artists that I’d been hearing about from the Murphys during our visits with them. After the tour, we’d get a place in Paris and—we reassured each other—be even more responsible about the partying and drinking and our marriage than we’d been here.

In Paris, we’d await and then celebrate his third novel’s publication; he was more certain than ever that he’d accomplished everything he’d set out to do with this book, and at the same time he was terrified that he hadn’t.

“What do you think?” he asked now. “I’m torn. I’ve been leaning toward one of the
Trimalchio
titles, but Max thinks the association’s too obscure. I could make more of it in the book, I suppose—but I hate the thought of spoon-feeding my readers. God, I do too much of that for the slicks as it is. Still,
Trimalchio of West Egg
is a great title; it might be worth Nick making a little narrative sidestep in order to share the background.”

This being my third go-round with Scott and his novels in prepublication madness, I knew there was no shortcut out of the anxiety; we both had to endure it the way you endure the headache, nausea, and malaise of a hangover.

As was now our tradition, I’d read his draft—had just finished the new one, in fact—and had been gathering my thoughts while I sat there. “Before we get into titles,” I told him, “I have to say that there’s something still kinda blurry about Gatsby. I can see Tom and Daisy, and Myrtle’s poor husband! And even Nick is clear enough.… Maybe it’s that Gatsby’s
history
is murky. Wouldn’t people know
something
about him? Or think they did?”

Scott crossed his arms. “These people don’t care about how he made his money, they only care that he’s rich and throws insanely great parties.”

“You wanted my opinion.”

“I did, I know.” He uncrossed his arms. “Thank you.”

“For titles, I like
The Great Gatsby
.”

“You do?” He looked disappointed. “Really?”

“Really.”

“That’s the one Max wants, too.”

“Remember when you revised the end of
Beautiful and Damned
?”

Scott sighed. “I’m too close to the work, that’s what you’re saying.”

“That’s what I’m saying. So listen, the Murphys are just about to pack up and head back to Saint-Cloud. While you’re stewing over edits and titles and such, let’s take Scottie over to see Patrick—she’s been asking forever—and we can celebrate her birthday a little early. I was thinking I’d make a circus set for her—like paper dolls but the dolls will be animals. Camels, horses, tigers, elephants, lions, and a mistress of ceremonies who looks just like her. Maybe I’ll add a unicorn, too.”

“That all sounds marvelous, and I’m sure you’ll do a bang-up job of it.
I
was thinking it might also be nice to give her a brother.”

“Were you, now? All on your own?”

“With some help from the stork, of course.”

“The stork’s going to need more than seven weeks, you know.”

He said, “Hm. I suppose that’s right.”

“But I guess we can
confer
with the stork. Place the order, you might say.”

“Are you ready for that?” he asked.

“I believe I am.”

I rested my head against his shoulder and we watched the sun set, just like you might see in the movies. We’d worked hard to create this lovely, new domestic bliss, and before
Gatsby
’s publication, right up until the book was printed and put into the hands of both the reading and the reviewing public, it looked as if we might actually succeed.

Wait: if I leave it at that, it’ll sound like the novel’s disappointing performance is to blame for the disaster we made of our lives, and that’s not really so. Ernest Hemingway is to blame.

26

Sara Murphy looked sad as we all filed into the dining room for the season’s final Dinner-Flowers-Gala, as she called these more formal events. The men were in tails, the women in slim, ankle-length summer gowns in all the colors of a Mediterranean summer. Sara stood next to her chair and sighed. “One final gathering—”

“Before the next one.” Gerald kissed her forehead and took his seat at the opposite end of the table.

Present in this, their rented Antibes home, were Scott and me; Dick and Alice Lee; Pablo without Olga—they were on the outs; Pauline Pfeiffer, a friend of Sara’s who worked as a writer for
Vogue
magazine; Dottie Parker; and Linda without Cole, who, she said, was “traveling.” She said it like that, with quotation marks in her voice; no one asked her what she meant.

The weather had been perfect for us all week: clear skies, hot afternoons, the sea still warm enough for the children to spend all day splashing and playing. We’d toured the grounds and house that were slowly becoming the grand estate that the Murphys would name Villa America. In the evenings, the adults gathered for charades and bridge and a game Scott invented, whereby I sat at the piano while he named a theme, and then each of us had to ad-lib a story and sing it to one of the half dozen tunes I could play by heart. Every time I opened the keyboard, I apologized in advance: “Y’all will forgive me for not being Cole.”

“And forgive me as well,” Scott would say, but I knew he preferred it this way. Without Cole, the spotlight was all his.

Gerald’s invented cocktails were a real help with our game, which Linda named “The Terribly Witty Ditties.” Gerald poured the drinks while Scott exhorted everyone to come up with ever-more-creative rhymes. Then, when our imaginations could no longer meet the challenge, Scott would single out one or another of the group for Twenty Questions, which, depending on how much he’d had to drink, might go on well past twenty and into the night. His subjects always cooperated; who doesn’t love being found unendingly interesting?

Now Sara sat down at the table across from Gerald, saying, “It might be
months
before we see these friends again.”