Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald (45 page)

“Maybe I could substitute golf and massage for writing, then.”

He smiled wanly. “Here’s my concern, Mrs. Fitzgerald: your illness was at its outset preceded by a rise in ambition—”

“That’s not what this is,” I said. “Probably my husband hasn’t mentioned this, but he’s heavily in debt. I was thinking I could sell some stories, maybe an essay or two, maybe some of my artwork—but only to help pay for my treatment. Think of it as the equivalent of a woman taking in sewing to help meet expenses. I can’t sew worth a damn, but I can draw and paint—and write—well enough to earn what I would with piecework or alterations. I really need to be able to help out in what ways I can.”

“Yes, well, admirable as that is, your husband was quite clear about his expectation that we continue the restriction. You yourself have told me that your greatest battles with him have been about your wish to write another book.”

“Because he’s wrong, and the other doctors were wrong; I feel
better
when I write.”

“But inevitably you’re disappointed in the outcome and feel
worse
. The drawing and painting are clearly therapeutic; pursue that as your economic contribution and all will be well.”

“Will it?” I asked. And then I threw myself into the effort with all the determination I’d once put into my dancing.

*   *   *

“‘Parfois la Folie Est la Sagesse,’” I said, reading from one of the brochures the gallery had printed for my exhibition.
Sometimes madness is wisdom.
Scott and I were alone in my room on an afternoon when most of my fellow residents were having massage. “It looks real good, Scott. Real professional.”

“It does. This just might be everything you’ve waited for, darling. Finally you’ll get all the recognition you’ve longed for and deserve.”

The art gallery, a space in uptown Manhattan, would show my work for the entire month of April. We’d met the gallery’s owner in Antibes years earlier; he’d been wild about my
Girl with Orange Dress
and always believed I ought to have a showing. Scott had seen to most of the details, as enthusiastic about this as he’d been about the Junior League production we’d done back in St. Paul.

I went to the window. All of winter’s dun colors had given way to the brilliant, blissful green of new leaves and new grass. Cows dotted a distant hillside beneath wispy white clouds. “I don’t know, Deo … I’d rather not get my hopes up.”

“Hope is one thing you deserve to have more of,” he said, coming up behind me. When I turned, he kissed me, kissed me tenderly, kissed me with all the passion and desire we’d used to take for granted.

Then he eased back, and I said, “Well then, I hope you’ll kiss me like that again.”

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

He shut my door and complied. We made love then, with quick, sweet urgency, certain we’d get caught, laughing one moment, breathless and desperate the next.

“God, I miss you,” he said when we’d finished and were buttoning up what we’d unbuttoned. “I miss us,
this
us—where do these two people live? Why is it so difficult to find them?”

I looked into those Irish Sea eyes. “I’m awfully sorry” was all I could think to say.

*   *   *

For the exhibit, I would show eighteen drawings and seventeen paintings in all. Some were whimsical expressions of the seventeenth-century French art I’d studied during our time at Ellerslie. Some were tortured-looking ballet dancers—I wanted to show the dancers’ impressions of themselves, not the audience’s impression of the dancers. Some were linear fantasies inspired by Braque and Pablo. I’d painted huge flowers, and lactating mothers. I’d painted Scott with feathers for eyelashes, his head encircled by a piercing crown of thorns.

For the opening, I was allowed to leave the hospital with a nurse as my travel companion; Scott made sure she had a separate room from us at the Plaza. He had invited every single person we’d ever met plus any and everyone he came across in his daily treks. The Murphys turned out, and Max, plus my doctors, Dos Passos, Dottie Parker, Gilbert Seldes, Bunny, and Henry—who brought the news that Sara was in the hospital with a lung infection, but sent her love.

Some members of the press were there, too, but few strangers came. The ones who did seemed unsure what to make of such a hodgepodge collection. “What is she?” they murmured, unable to figure out which label to apply. Six or eight things sold, most of them for almost no money at all, then I went back to Craig House.

Time
magazine ran a review and had found a label for me:
Work of a Wife,
read the headline, and despite the praise that followed in the body of the review, I felt myself deflating.

Work of a wife
.

That was it,
W-I-F-E,
my entire identity defined by the four letters I’d been trying for five years to overcome.

Why was it that every time I finally
chose,
every time I
did,
my efforts failed—
I
failed—so miserably? Why was I so completely unable to take control of my own life? Was there any point to it, for me? I’d thought it was Scott I’d been fighting against, but now I wondered if it was Fate.

When I was young, I’d believed that it would be awful to try and try and try at something only to find that you could never succeed. Now I knew I’d been right: I was not a sufficient dancer, or writer, or painter, or wife, or mother. I was nothing at all.

Send me someplace cheaper,
I wrote Scott.
I don’t need all of this and only feel worse staying here knowing I will never be able to offset the expense. Didn’t Hemingway tell you that I was worthless and you ought to save yourself? He was right.

Upon swallowing this black, bitter truth, I began to shrink, and before long grew so tiny within the world that I

very …

nearly …

disappeared.

53

Blackness had poured into my head like hot tar. What came afterward is mostly lost to me, though here’s what I’ve since been told:

Scott was out of money, so I moved to a grim sanitarium called Sheppard Pratt Hospital in May of ’35. The doctors tried to thin that tar with insulin therapy, or scare it off with electroshock treatments, or blast it from me with pentylenetetrazol, a compound that provokes brain seizures. Still the blackness remained, and I began to see and converse with God.

Poor Scott had nothing but debt to show for all these efforts to get me well, yet the doctors insisted that the only way
out
was
through,
so he consented to more of the terror. He wrote stories when he was able to—but most got rejected or brought far less money than he used to command. He borrowed from the few friends who would still see him, and tried to find his own escape with a lot of liquor and a few women.

At some point someone told me that, unimaginably, Gerald and Sara had lost their oldest boy, Baoth, to meningitis. Then my sweet Sara Haardt got it, too, and between that and the tuberculosis, she’d given up her fight. Then poor Patrick Murphy succumbed to his tuberculosis two years later. Death was everywhere. Tootsie, bless her, saw that I had become eighty-nine pounds of incoherent despair, so she bullied Scott into breaking me out and moving me to a hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, where one of Newman’s cousins had been treated with good results. Scott had been spending time in the area off and on—for lung treatments, that’s what he said—but meantime hunting hounds with his friend James Boyd, or luxuriating in the rustic elegance of the Grove Park Inn. If North Carolina was a suitable escape for him, he’d reasoned, maybe it would do me good as well.

Highland Hospital was no luxury mountain resort. They had their regimens of drugs and shocks and reeducation. When I was finally capable of noticing my surroundings, I hated myself for being a burden to Scott, who insisted on living in the area in order to see me as often as he could, and too often still drank himself into oblivion in between times. He’d turned forty and, in his pathetic, diminished state, had given an interview to the
New York Post
that persuaded all who read it that he was absolutely ruined.

Highland did something right: in time, I gained back the weight I needed, played a great lot of volleyball, went hiking in the hills, and started painting again. When Scott got an offer to work in Hollywood once more, the money and I both persuaded him to go. “You can do this,” I assured him, praying I was right.

By early ’38, I was stable as ever, and I stayed that way. I also stayed there at Highland because the doctors insisted that the improvement was temporary. They told Scott I needed to stay put indefinitely—for careful monitoring and control, they said, while Tootsie and Mama were saying what I thought: that for Highland, just as it had been for Prangins, it was all about the money. Scott, though, was terrified by the prospect of having to tend me when he was barely in control of himself. He elected to believe the doctors.

With my ability to see and think and feel restored, what I saw was that even in Hollywood Scott was still stuck—and growing desperate. He was drinking often but working only intermittently, had no money at all, couldn’t sell what little fiction he wrote, hardly saw Scottie, had few friends, little hope, and, during a catastrophic trip we took to Cuba in April last year—he got so sick and so drunk that I had to take him to the hospital in New York afterward—the saddest eyes I’d ever seen except in my mirror. “I’ll never leave you, Zelda,” he said.

What I thought when I saw him being wheeled off was
He’s such an extraordinarily brilliant person that it would be terrible if he let himself do nothing in the end.

What I felt was that same terrible lump in my throat that I’d felt in 1919 right before I’d cut him loose.

Knowing what I had to do, I found a way out of Highland myself. If it involved coercing a certain Dr. Carroll, whose own crimes against certain patients were far worse than my little blackmail plan, well, that was between the doctor and myself. For the first time in a decade, both Scott and I were free.

And now, I wait.

DECEMBER 21, 1940

Montgomery, Alabama

Tootsie is here for the holidays. She and Newman are staying at Marjorie’s, so as to keep things simple for Mama and me. We sit together on the porch swing while Mama naps; this is the most pleasant time of day, we agree. I’ve just filled her in on what’s happening with Scottie, and Scott. “I’m hoping he’ll wire me money for a trip to see him,” I say. “Maybe I’ll move out there. Maybe I’ll try my hand at scripts.”

“Hmm” is her reply. “Well, I can’t help noticing how relaxed you are. You sound good, you look good—though a decent haircut would improve the whole package. Do you feel as serene as you look?”

I knock my head with my fist. “Shock therapy. Calms the wild beast.”

“It’s more than that. Without Scott, you’re—”

“Balanced?” Tootsie nods and I say, “I know. I figured that out a good while ago, at Highland.”

“Then why ever would you want to change anything? Life here is just about perfect.”

“Scott’s remade, as much as I am. I think all the chemicals we’ve put through our systems have finally washed the devil out of us both. It’ll be different from now on.”

Tootsie looks skeptical. “If
you
believe that’s true, I’ll try to do the same. But I have to tell you, I’ve never forgiven him for abandoning you at Sheppard Pratt. When I found you there”—she shudders—“you were nearly dead, Zelda. Do you remember any of that?”

“Not in any linear way, but I have impressions.”

She takes my hand. “What was it like?”

“Do you recall the African river Aunt Julia used to talk about, the one she’d learned of from some tale her granddaddy told?”

Tootsie shakes her head, so I tell her what I remember from Aunt Julia’s story, which she told like this:

“In the deep, wet, tangled, wild jungle where even natives won’t go is a mystical, dangerous river. The river’s got no name because naming it would make it real, and no one wants to believe that river be real. They say you get there only inside a dream—but don’t you think of it at bedtime, now, ’cause not everyone who goes there be able to leave!

“That jungle canopy, it so leafy true daylight can never break in. The riverbank, it be wet muck thick with creatures that eat you alive if you stay still too long. To miss that fate, you gots to go into the black water. But the water be heavy as hot tar; once you in, it bind you and pull you along, bit by bit, ’til you come to the end of the land, and then over the water goes in a dark, slow cascade, the highest falls in the history of the world ever.

“There be demons in that cascading water, and snakes, and wraiths that whisper in your ears. They love you, they say. You should give yourself to them, stay with them, become one of them, they say. ‘Isn’t it good here?’ they say. ‘No pain, no trouble.’ But also no light and no love and no joy and no ground. You tumble and tumble as you fall, and you try and choose, but your mind be topsy-turvy and maybe you can’t think so well, and maybe you can’t choose right, and maybe you never wake up.”

“It felt like that,” I tell Tootsie, “even after you got me out and Scott moved me to Highland. I couldn’t choose. I couldn’t shut out the wraiths.… But you would say, ‘Hang on, sweetie,’ and Scottie would say, ‘I miss you, Mama,’ and Scott would hold me, just hold me and say nothing at all.”

Tootsie snorts. “Scott was useless the whole while.”

“Scott was in the river, too.”

*   *   *

Today is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. The light’s already fading when I go to the closet for my coat. “I need some exercise,” I tell Mama, who’s got the radio on and is listening to news about the Germans bombing Liverpool again. This new war makes me heartsick. What is wrong with the world? Isn’t there enough trouble, sadness, injury, death, in everyday life?

“Where will you go?” Mama asks. “It’ll be dark soon.”