Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald (25 page)

At her right, Dick Myers reached over to Scott next to him and thumped him on the back. “One can hope.”

“Have I exhausted your talents?” Scott asked.

“Prob’ly their patience,” I said fondly.

“When he has exhausted yours,” Pablo told me in heavily accented English, “you must come to mi estudio en Paris, sí? I will exhaust you all about art.”

Sara put her hand on mine. “You must. And visit Gerald’s studio, too. But see Rome’s art first, then bring them every question that comes to mind. You won’t find better mentors than this pair.”

*   *   *

It was while standing in front of the Temple of Vesta that I first had the pain, a funny twinge low in my pelvis, near my right hip. Women get pains of this sort often enough that I paid it little mind, and it dutifully disappeared—for a while. Later that night it was back, and worse. Then it faded and was gone for a few days, only to return again.

The discomfort went on this way for five weeks. Sometimes I was cranky but functional, and we’d go out. We met up with some of the cast and crew of
Ben-Hur
during this time—who knows how Scott met them, to start? We were always being introduced to someone who knew someone whose husband was or brother was or great old friend was connected to someone or something we simply
had
to see. This happened so often that I’d stopped paying attention to the connections and concerned myself only with the results.

Too often, I spent half the day in bed clutching a water bottle to my hips like a lover. If you’re thinking pregnancy was the culprit, well, you can join me in being wrong about that. One night in December, just as Scott led Scottie in to read a book with me in bed, he found me doubled over and in so much pain that I was wishing I could trade that pain for labor, for amputation, for anything that would be better than the aching, burning ball in my gut. Everything around me—my whole field of vision—seemed edged in white. “Take her and call a doctor,” I gasped.

When Scott scooped her up by her middle, Scottie didn’t protest being whisked away. She thought he’d begun a game. “Bye, Mama!” she called. I could hear her laughing as Scott carried her off. “Make me fly, Papa, I want to fly!”

The Italian doctor who arrived an hour later spoke no English and had French about on par with mine. He looked in my mouth and nose and eyes, he put his stethoscope on my belly, he pressed and prodded, asking, “Ici? Ici?” while I gritted my teeth and either flinched or didn’t flinch in response. When he was done, his expression was grave, his words sober as he pronounced his conclusion, in French.

Scott, on the other side of the bed, looked panicked. “What’s he saying?”

I told the doctor, “Yes.
Oui
. Fine, I don’t care what you need to do, just make it stop.”

“L’hôpital Murphy,” he told Scott, as he took a needle and syringe from his bag. “Tout de suite. Comprenez-vous?”

“Zelda, for God’s sake, what’s he saying?
What
about the Murphys?”

I winced when the needle pierced my hip, a small but welcome pain that, within moments, delivered some miraculous something that allowed me to unclench my teeth enough to translate. “He thinks there’s probably a water ball on my tube, which will require a knife to resolve. They have good knives at Murphy Hospital; we should go there now.”

“A
what
?” Scott’s eyes were wild as a scared horse’s.

“A cyst,” I said, translating further as the drug continued to dull the pain. The white edges began to recede from my vision. “On my ovary, I think.” The pain faded, and faded, and I could breathe again.

Optimistically I asked the doctor, “Mais je me sens mieux. Est-ce que l’hôpital est nécessaire?” which was supposed to mean
I’m feeling better now; do I really need to go to the hospital?

The doctor scowled and unleashed a string of Italian curses—or so it sounded to me. Then he said in French, “L’hôpital ou la mort.”
Go, or die
.

The idea of submitting to surgery was only slightly less terrifying and undesirable than death, so I went.

*   *   *

Afterward, the pain wasn’t gone so much as it was altered and muted. Recovering, first in the hospital and then in our hotel,
I
felt altered and muted. To a person who has hardly been sick in her life, sudden illness feels like a betrayal.

The doctor hadn’t been able to assure us—not in Italian or French or English—that I would still be able to get pregnant now that one ovary was gone. When I translated this for Scott, he looked at me accusingly and asked the doctor, “Could medications for ‘feminine troubles’ have caused the problem?”

“Eh? Médicaments?”

I knew what Scott was talking about, even if the doctor didn’t.

“Yes … to regulate cycles, and so forth.”

The doctor looked to me for translation. “C’est rien,” I said. “Il ne sait pas ce qu’il dit. Il est tout simplement inquiet.”
Never mind. He doesn’t know what he’s saying, he’s just worried.

“Ce médicament permettra de remédier à la douleur,” the doctor said, nodding, and he wrote down a prescription for pain relief.

I told Scott, “He says no, it wasn’t the pills, and this medication is our best bet.”

*   *   *

For the next few weeks, I was tired and uncomfortable and crabby, and antisocial because of it. What I wanted was
home
. What I got was an assurance that we’d leave Rome soon for sunny, mild Capri. And in the meantime, Scott had written three new stories, then reviewed the
Gatsby
proofs, made corrections, and shipped the proofs back to New York. With that done, he grew bored. He went out a lot, then would turn up late in the evening glassy-eyed and pink-cheeked, often cheerful but sometimes belligerent.

“Suppose you can’t get pregnant,” he said on one of those nights. “Suppose that your abortion”—he spat the word—“got rid of my son. When
Gatsby
makes me an American literary legend, who’s going to carry on my legacy, my name?”

“What, now you’ve decided that a daughter’s not good enough? If you did have a son, I guess you’d name him Francis Scott Fitzgerald the Second—and what would you call
him
? Junior? Or would you take Scottie’s name away from her and call her Fran or something?”

“You don’t want another child,” he accused.

“
You
didn’t want what we thought would be the first one.”

He slumped into the chair in the corner of the bedroom. “Women never understand this,” he said, ignoring my point. “To you, every baby is just another child, no matter the sex. Men need
sons,
it’s built into us, an imperative.”

I knew he was anxious about
Gatsby,
not to mention inebriated, and enervated by everything we’d been through. But I was
tired
. I said, “What men need is to grow up.”

27

Capri is an island, a big, gorgeous, rocky chunk of dirt and limestone that appears to have broken off Italy’s southeast coast and lodged in the Tyrrhenian Sea. Sun-drenched and ancient, the island is an enclave for the young, the strange, the beautiful, the rich—heirs and heiresses to fortunes built wholly by their ambitious forebears and managed by teams of accountants and advisers. The beneficiaries dressed themselves in linen and silk and sat beneath striped awnings talking about polo, and travel, and how hard it was to find good help these days. But in that winter of 1924–25, it was an artists’ haven, too—and I was intent on becoming an artist.

My incision was well healed, and the discomfort I’d suffered those weeks following the surgery had diminished enough for us to carry on as usual. While Scott went out, paying calls to writers like his old hero (and mine) Compton Mackenzie, I took Esther Murphy’s advice to look up a woman named Natalie Barney and, through her, get acquainted with the artists’ community here. Esther hadn’t written much about Natalie, only saying,
Just meet her. She knows everyone.

We met up at an outdoor café near the marina. Crying gulls skimmed overhead as a dark-eyed young woman seated us. She kept glancing shyly at Natalie but said nothing at all.

“So, Zelda Fitzgerald,” Natalie said when we sat down, “the prettiest half of literature’s Golden Couple. I’m glad to finally meet you.”

She was handsome, tall and thin and dressed in a smartly tailored white shirt above a long split skirt of blue linen. Her lack of makeup surprised me—not that she needed it. The soft lines near her eyes and the glow of her skin gave plenty of character to a face that looked proud of its forty-plus years.

I said, “The feeling’s mutual, I promise, but the truth is, I don’t really know anything about who you are or what you do. Esther insisted I find you here is all.”

“Well, when I’m not here amusing myself and seeing friends, I write poetry and plays and host a salon in the Latin Quarter in Paris.”

“A salon?”

“You don’t know salons? A ritual gathering place, a standing date, an open house for any and all artists, writers, thinkers. Do you know T. S. Eliot? Mina Loy, Ezra Pound?”

“Some of the names ring a bell,” I lied; only Eliot’s did, and only because Scott had insisted I read Eliot’s strange “Prufrock” when we were en route to Rome. “You have all these people coming and going in your house all the time?”

She laughed. “It sometimes feels that way, but no, officially it’s only on Saturday evenings. You’ll have to come if you ever get to Paris.”

“We’re going this spring, in fact.”

“Lovely! So now, when you phoned, you said you paint a little; tell me about your art.”

“Well, I do oils, mostly, but I tried watercolor once—it’s too risky, if you ask me. One mistake and that’s it, you have to start all over.”

“Who are your influences?”

“I was afraid you were going to ask me that. I’ll tell you what I told Gerald. Where I grew up, pretty much all the art depicts the Glorious Confederacy. I like nature, so I guess you could say that was my influence, so far.”

“You had lessons?”

“Sorta. Years ago, in the States, I took a class from a crusty old man who thought Michelangelo was modern.”

“Well then, you must study with someone here. And in the meantime, we will expand your knowledge of what the art world has to offer. Tell me where you’ve traveled so far, and I’ll tell you what you’ve seen.”

*   *   *

The next week, Natalie took me to meet a painter friend of hers named Romaine Brooks. Romaine’s studio was a vivid white square of a building hanging on to a cliff, nothing but the sea outside its windows. The natural light inside was incredible. Even more incredible was what I saw in the corner of the studio, what Romaine, who was a whippet-like woman with a serious brow and short, dark hair, had created while existing in that light: a portrait of a woman of such austere beauty that you wanted to pull up a chair and start a conversation with her, find out what was behind those knowing eyes.

I said as much, and Romaine replied, “Ah, yes; well, perhaps if I’d known the answers myself, she would not have left me.”

Natalie nodded toward the portrait. “This was one of her lovers. They’ve just split up.”

The woman in the painting had been Romaine’s
lover
? Had I actually heard this right? Trying to mask my surprise at hearing her speak so plainly about something Montgomery folks wouldn’t dare even whisper about, I said, “Oh. Gosh. I’m real sorry.”

I didn’t mask it well; the women looked at each other, and then Romaine changed the subject with “Why don’t you describe the painting you’ve done. What subject matter do you like?”

*   *   *

When I repeated the story to Scott in bed that night, he said, “Mackenzie’s got the strangest group of friends, too, I have to say. Fellows dressing in white linen pants and pastel-colored sweaters and talking about … about
pillows
—about fabrics and silk braid and bric-a-brac. And they’re so clean, you know? Not a shadow of whiskers … sideburns
so
precise, back of their necks freshly shaved…” He rubbed his own fuzzy one. “In a way, they made me think of Cole—the mannerisms, that is. Except that these couple of guys, well, they just about said outright that they’re fairies.”

“Mackenzie’s married, though, right?”

“He is. In fact, his wife, Faith, was just telling me that she’s related to the Fowlers through some common distant cousin or something. I’ll bet half the people on this island know the Fowlers. Imagine being heir to millions of dollars—and they don’t appreciate what they’ve got, most of them. Wealth is wasted on the rich boys—”

He reached for his notebook and pencil, then repeated the phrase while writing it down. After he put the notebook back on the bedside table, he said, “The rich live an entirely different life from the rest of us, you know. That entitlement—it colors everything. If I didn’t like Ludlow so well, I’d hate the bastard.”

Scott spent the next several days drafting a story he called “The Rich Boy,” then set it aside and returned to his routine of having cocktails with those very same types.

Staying in Capri that winter offered more than mild weather and exposure to people whose money or sexuality puzzled and, to be honest, intrigued us; it brought me Nicola Matthews, a petite, graying, tremendously knowledgeable artist who had the time, interest, and patience to teach me all about form, composition, technique, style—and all about life as she understood it.

In her tiny studio in the hills above the harbor, as I practiced sketching, brushstrokes, paint-mixing, Nicola spoke of a kind of feminism that was about developing women’s natural tendencies to exist in groups with other women and with children, rather than in traditional marriages. Men would be used primarily for procreative sex, but weren’t otherwise needed. She talked about Sappho, and Lesbos, and sexual attraction being variable for some people while inflexible for others.

“Women are formed for love, yes, but also for purpose, and the highest state for a woman—for all humans, in fact—comes when one discovers and then achieves one’s ultimate purpose.”