Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald (41 page)

“You might deliver that last line again, ’cause you don’t sound a bit convincing.”

“I
want
to be convinced, but, well, you have to quit doing things like trying to run away, or refusing your medications—you
have got to
be more cooperative. I’m paying a thousand dollars a month for you to be here, Zelda, so every delay—”

“I’m sure sorry to have done this to you.” I pulled away from him. “How thoughtless of me—get it? Thought-less? Meaning mindless, empty-headed, vacant, and what’s worse,
expensive
.”

“Darling, come on, I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s
awful
here. Sure, it looks like this beautiful lakeside hotel, but the treatments—I feel like one of the undead,” I said. “Half the time I’m sick to my stomach, just all muddled and bloated … and no one here speaks decent English, and you know my French is below par, and for God’s sake, when I tried to leave, they sedated me and
tied me to my bed
—”

“Don’t you want to get better, Zelda?
Cooperate
. Admit how damaging it is for you to compete with me. Agree to give up dancing. They’ve told you that all of this is necessary to your getting well.”

They had. And I was learning to weave some fine baskets, too.

He said, “Scottie misses you dreadfully. We just want you home. There’s no need for you to be a professional dancer, writer, anything. Be a
mother
. Be a
wife
. I’ve made a good life for you, Zelda; stop rejecting it.”

“And then what?”

“And then your mind will mend itself. The split will heal. The doctors will put you back in balance here, if you’ll let them.”

The therapies I’d undergone in my three months here had diminished the terrors, the delusions—
psychosis,
they called it—and I was grateful for that. In their place, though, was this sticky, bleary bleakness. I’d tried to describe how I felt: “Pas de couleur,” I told one of my doctors,
No color
. His solution: a watercolors paintbox, an easel, and paper, all of which I appreciated greatly without being able to tell for sure whether he’d understood my meaning.

“What I meant was, what will I
do
?”

Scott looked at me blankly.

“With all my time,” I said.

He pushed his fingers through his hair. “You’ll just
enjoy
yourself. Christ.”

*   *   *

The first of the torturous patches began as a red spot on the right side of my neck. A mosquito bite, I thought. The spot, though, became an area. It grew scales. It itched. It wept. It throbbed. It crept along my skin until my neck was covered and my face became a dragon’s, all scabby from my clawing, all oily from creams that had no effect. I breathed fire at my nurses and my doctors, demanding some kind of relief.

I felt like my head and neck had been dipped and floured and were continuously frying in hot oil. Dante would have adapted this torturous rash—
eczema
is its innocent name—to the
Inferno
with glee, and Dr. Forel would have devised a special circle of hell for women who, like me, resisted reeducation.

Wrapped in salve and gauze and waiting for my next dose of that old savior morphine, I wrote to Tootsie,
Emma Bovary wouldn’t have hung around for this
.

49

One of the Swiss doctors had written in his notebook, in English, “A jazz-age train wreck in slow motion.” I pointed and asked, “Est-ce le vôtre?”
Is that yours?

He tilted the notebook so that I couldn’t read from it. “Madame Fitzgerald, veuillez répondre à la question.”
Please answer the question.

“I’m tired this morning; can we do this in English? And call me Zelda, won’t you? It’s been nearly a year, after all. I think we’re acquainted.”

The doctor and I were seated in armchairs that had been upholstered with dense brown silk. Here were polished maple shelves filled with medical volumes; damask draperies framing the kind of bucolic view Wordsworth and Coleridge and Shelley wrote about so eloquently; a carved desk holding a tooled-leather blotter, silver inkwell, silver-framed photographs of three perfect blond children and a perfectly conservative-looking blond wife. Bland wife, in fact. No flapper, no party girl, no dancing
artiste
for this doctor, who looked only a little older than Scott’s thirty-four years. This doctor was without question a sensible man.

“Madame Fitzgerald, the matter of evaluating your progress—”

“’Cause that sentence sounds like Scott,” I said, reaching over to tap the notebook. “That’s his term, you know.
Jazz age.
From
Tales of the Jazz Age,
his second story collection, in 1922. Have you read his books?”

The doctor’s gaze was level, expressionless. If he was judging me, he didn’t let on. But I had to wonder if Scott had persuaded them that I was the one who’d derailed our life, the same way his letters had tried to persuade
me
. We’d both written reams of recriminations over the past year, purging ourselves of all the feelings we’d held inside for so long.

“Let us continue,” the doctor said. His name was Brandt, and I’d seen him three or four times before. He said, “Yes, you have been with us for eleven months, so we evaluate your progress once again.” He glanced at his notebook. “How do you feel presently about Mr. Fitzgerald’s success in relation to your own failed attempts?”

“Sorry?”

“Ah, you feel remorse.” The doctor wrote something in the notebook. “You realize now that a wife must first tend to
domestic
matters. Good. This is paramount to every woman’s happiness.”

“No, I mean I don’t understand the question.
Failed
attempts? How did I fail, except in having the stamina to continue?”

He looked at me blankly. “You are not sorry? Do I misunderstand? Préféreriez-vous parler en français?”

“No, God—it’s bad enough trying to do this in English. I
mean,
I don’t think I’ve failed, not in the way you seem to be saying. And Scott, well, he hasn’t been all that successful in the past few years. And he sure wasn’t tending to domestic matters either, and I’d say
that’s
paramount to a woman’s happiness.”

When the doctor said nothing, didn’t even blink, I added, “Maybe my stories and essays aren’t as fine as Scott’s, but who says I have to be just like him? I’m not him. No writer should be the same as another, that’s not art. My articles and stories have been published in lots of places. Ask him, he’ll tell you I’ve succeeded on my own.”

Dr. Brandt said, “We have asked him, yes.” He scratched his chin, then said, “Dr. Forel feels that since hypnosis was so helpful with the eczema and you are feeling stronger, it is best for you to write down your recollections and opinions, which we can compare with your husband’s. Monsieur Fitzgerald has been extremely forthcoming.”

“I bet. So I write my thoughts, and then what? You’ll hand down a final judgment like my father would?”

This thought about my father tugged at my heart, making it flutter. The tug was not about Daddy, exactly, but about
home
. Some home.
Any
home. I was well now and had been well for a good while. Several thousand dollars’ worth of while, in fact; continuing to stay here just to perfect my carpentry and volleyball skills was absurd.

I’d said as much to Scott during a recent outing to Geneva, begged him, “Deo, just tell ’em you’re satisfied with the job they did and now we’re going back to Paris.”

Being away from the clinic made me feel wholly human, reminded me that I’d once had a life as real as any of the people we passed on the quai.

Scott took my hand. “These doctors are the finest psychiatric minds in the world. We can’t second-guess their knowledge.”

“But the expense—”

“I’m handling it. Of more concern to me is that Dr. Forel says you’re still resisting some of their suggestions. Even though you
feel
better, you aren’t fully cured.”

“Forel isn’t God. And even if he was, I don’t understand how we can afford—”

“The
Post
has been taking everything I write,” Scott said, quite pleased with himself. “My productivity’s the best it’s been in ages.”

Not only was he pleased, he was
happy
. I was suddenly suspicious. “Are you seeing someone?”

“What? No!”

“Then why don’t you want me out of there?” Then I realized he’d given me the answer already. “Never mind,” I said. “I understand.”

Now Dr. Brandt was saying, “A judgment, yes.”

“Okay then. Let’s get this done. Only—you have to guarantee that Scott doesn’t get to read what I write. No editorial oversight from my husband. No consulting. You can’t even
tell
him. If he knows I’m doing it, he’ll insist on having a look. There’d be no point, if that’s how it goes.”

“Yes, we agree.” Dr. Brandt nodded. “We wish to make the objective evaluation.”

Knowing that was impossible, I said, “I would like that very much.”

He gave me some pages of blank paper and a pencil and left me to it. I started with this:

The Recollections of one Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, as begun on this day, 21 March 1931, at the suggestion of Dr. Forel

You said to begin anywhere, so here is a poem I especially like, by Emily Dickinson:

I know a place where summer strives

With such a practiced frost,

She each year leads her daisies back,

Recording briefly, “Lost.”

But when the south wind stirs the pools

And struggles in the lanes,

Her heart misgives her for her vow,

And she pours soft refrains

Into the lap of adamant,

And spices, and the dew,

That stiffens quietly to quartz,

Upon her amber shoe.

Even from here, from Prangins today, when I haven’t seen my daughter in three months and no one’s willing to say whether I’m truly well or how much longer it might be before I get to leave, I sit bathed in sunshine that streams through the window and feel a sense of hopefulness, of possibility. Spring always did make me feel this way, before. So I think this is progress.

*   *   *

You asked me to say what happened, so I’ll tell you. Scott might tell you a different story about the same things—but then, hasn’t he always?

The world was strange and perilous when I met Scott in 1918, with the Great War in progress and influenza raging across every continent, taking more than fifty million lives by 1919. This horror, along with knowing that fifteen million soldiers and civilians were killed in the war, infected everyone’s spirits if not our bodies. Life seemed more tenuous than ever. But Scott and I were lively and eager, unfettered by conventional ideals. We were sailing at the leading edge of a storm.

Maybe we asked too much of everyone and everything right from the start. Our parents were kids during the American Civil War, you know; their world was a divided one. Scott and I weren’t supposed to even mingle much, let alone fall in love. And to make it worse, Scott wanted to be a professional novelist, which was not really a recognized occupation. We didn’t care. For us, it was a time to make everything up, to create our lives from scratch using unfamiliar ingredients and untested methods—only to now arrive at this unforeseeable result.

Now that the stories about us, about “the Fitzgeralds,” have grown like wild Chinese wisteria past the borders of cocktail party gossip and are starting to encroach on literary myth, I hear that some of my friends have started saying I made Scott the writer he is—and you can imagine how well that goes over with him.
His
friends—and especially one in particular—are saying I’ve held him back, interfered with his talent and his work ethic—which is of course what he has said, too.

Depending on who you ask, you’ll hear Scott’s either a misunderstood genius or a pathetic son-of-a-bitch who never met a liquor he didn’t want to cozy up to. He drinks too much, it’s true, and he has not always been good to me or to himself, but I think he’s broken somewhere inside, and he drinks to try to fill the cracks.

*   *   *

I’ve had a letter from one of my dearest, oldest friends, Sara Haardt, saying that she’s marrying another old friend of ours, Henry Mencken. She’s been frail with tuberculosis for a long while, but that didn’t sway him in the least.

She wrote, “I’m not sure I’ll be any good at marriage, having gone without for so long. Your letters from over the years make a good primer, though; for all the troubles, I’ve never seen devotion such as you and Scott enjoy.”

Sara must have had spies in Annecy, as Scott and my sweet baby girl and I have just returned from the most perfect two weeks there. We danced and dined and it was even better than old times for having Scottie always at my side, her soft hand in mine, and at night, Scott’s reassuring form curled behind me. I wish, oh, you have no idea how much, that I could bottle up those days and then climb inside that bottle too.

*   *   *

Here’s an anecdote, a memory that comes to mind as I’m writing: For our first trip to Europe, in 1921, we sailed on the
Aquitania
. There was a lot of drinking and, when the seas got rough, a lot of nervous humor over the prospect of going down with the ship. That would be the end for us all, everyone said.