Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald (6 page)

Desirously—

Scott

Not wanting to think about what awaited him in France, I kept my reply cheerful. I told him I’d begun an oil-painting class at the encouragement of Mrs. Davis, who’d been my art teacher at Sidney Lanier High and thought I’d shown real promise. I wrote, “We spent the entire first day learning to pronounce the technique terms
Grisaille
and
Chiaroscuro,
which don’t exactly roll off the Southern tongue.” I related a tale of how on the previous night I’d had two heavily spiked drinks before a dance at the Exchange Hotel and had subsequently climbed onto a tabletop to demonstrate steps to a sassy Negro dance called the Black Bottom before one of the chaperones pulled me down. I said,

The nice old woman informed me with great seriousness that it’s a
scandalous
dance, and I told her with equal seriousness that she was preventing me from fulfilling my promise. Darling heart, do you think I could be good for anything besides entertainment? I hardly think I want to be—but of course it’s you who I want to entertain most. And so I’m putting my sordid stories in my diary like always, so that you’ll have some good reading when you do get back.

He’d been gone all of three weeks when I came home one Monday to find Mama, all three of my sisters, and Marjorie’s husband, Minor, surrounding Daddy, who was holding a newspaper before him like a trophy.

I shouldered in next to Tilde for a look. “What’s going on?”

“It’s over!” Tilde said, wrapping her arms around me. “The Huns surrendered!”

Daddy tapped the paper with the back of his hand, then turned it toward me. It was an
Extra
edition and proclaimed
PEACE. Fighting Ends! Armistice Signed
. “This morning, Paris time,” he said. “We are victorious!”

Tilde said, “Tony and John and Newman are coming home!”

And Scott,
I thought, awash with relief. He wouldn’t have to sail the rough Atlantic to face the brutal enemy, would never be wrapped in those bandages I and so many others had rolled, would not be mired in muddy foxholes risking injury, infections, parasites, death, while I waited in my own kind of limbo for the war to end.

Home for him, though, would be New York, the city of his dreams. He’d told me how his Princeton friend Bunny Wilson had lived in Manhattan before the war, working as a reporter, sharing an apartment with a couple of men and a great many books, the clamor and attractions of the city all around them. Scott envisioned a life like Bunny’s, not a life like he’d have here in sleepy Southern Montgomery, where the liveliest feature of a hot afternoon was a spinning ceiling fan.

“Aren’t you thrilled?” Tootsie said, giving me a hug.

“Yes, course I am. Who wouldn’t be?”

Scott returned to Montgomery briefly, to help close Camp Sheridan down. We pretended not to worry about where he’d live, spending most of our time together kissing passionately in out-of-the-way alcoves at the Club, or in the back row at the Empire Theater while some picture or other played. We joked about how our romance seemed always to have a musical accompaniment. “I bet that’s how Lillian Gish feels, too,” I said.

On a damp, cold early-February day, we went out for a walk in a stiff wind under scudding clouds just so we could be alone for a while. At the corner of Sayre and Mildred Streets he took my hands and said, “I’ll send for you, would you like that? New York isn’t much colder than it is here today.”

I stared at him in surprise. His face was ruddy, his eyes bright and hopeful. “Is this an actual proposal?”

“I can repeat it in candlelight over dinner, if that makes it feel more official—but, yes, I want you to marry me.” He dropped to one knee. “Marry me, Zelda. We’ll make it all up as we go. What do you say?”

I looked around at my neighborhood, at the familiar homes, at the street sign that bore the Sayre name, at the sidewalks and post lamps and trees that had seen me through years of footraces, bicycling, roller skating, bubble-blowing, tag-playing—and, more recently, strolls with fellas who were as eager as this one to turn me into a bride. I loved Scott with all the enthusiasm of the most ardent eighteen-year-old girl, but did I love him enough to leave my home forever?

He saw the indecision on my face and, rising, said, “You don’t have to answer now. Think it over. I’m yours, Zelda, if you’ll have me.”

*   *   *

When I closed my eyes that night, I saw myself as if I stood at an actual crossroads:

I’m out in the country. The air is still, and all is quiet around me as I wait for Fate’s wind to blow, to push me in one direction or the other.

Standing there, looking down the long dirt road, I know that if I let Scott go, I’ll most certainly end up married to some nice, proper fella from a good family whose people have deep roots in the South. I’ll be the same girl I’ve always been, only the parties I go to will take place in drawing rooms instead of the Club or the Exchange Hotel. My husband will be, say, a cotton grower who golfs and hunts and drinks fine bourbon with his friends. My children will have colored nurses who mind them while I go to luncheons with my girlfriends and plan all the same kinds of social and cultural events the young me has taken part in over the years. I know this life, can see it clearly, love it the way I love my family, understand it, have no real desire to do anything differently.

Looking down the road in the other direction, I see the life Scott offers me, the life he outlined at the end of our walk. It’s more unpredictable than Alabama’s weather in springtime.

To start, he’ll go to New York City, where he’ll find some kind of writing job that will support us reasonably well, he’s pretty sure, and then he’ll send for me. He’ll find us some place to live—an apartment, which will be old and small, he says, but cozy. Somehow, with my help, he says, he’ll get his novel published and take his spot among the top writers of the day. We’ll socialize with literary people and his friends from Princeton, who he’s sure I’ll find delightful. Sooner or later, we’ll have kids. In the meantime, we’ll be able to gorge ourselves on the kinds of entertainment we both love: music and dancing and plays and vaudeville. It will be an adventure—
adventure:
there’s a word that worked on us both like a charm.

I could easily have chosen either life. But only one of them included the unique fella whose presence lit up a room—lit up
me,
and that was saying something. The question was, could he make it all work out? Which way was the wind going to blow?

I was eighteen years old; I was impatient; I decided,
Never mind waiting for the wind
. Around three
A.M.
I crept downstairs and placed a phone call to Scott’s quarters. When he came to the phone, I said, “You’ll make it worth my while, right?”

“And then some.”

*   *   *

“Look at you,” Sara Haardt said when I arrived at her parents’ house for tea one gorgeous, fragrant afternoon in May. “Could you get any lovelier? You look like Botticelli’s Venus.”

Sara, born “blue” and always a slim girl, was thinner than the last time I’d seen her, and pale as ever. “And you’re Mona Lisa,” I said. “Think of the attention we’ll get if we appear in public together.”

“I can’t imagine you’re wanting for attention, all on your own.”

I wasn’t. Though Scott had sent his mother’s diamond ring and I wore it with pride and pleasure, my social life was going on pretty much as it had before. The local fellas, all home now from France—except for the dozens who would never come home—seemed not to mind my long-term unavailability so long as in the short term I could still do a good two-step, and tell a good joke, and climb onto a chair or table now and then to demonstrate how well the little bit of fringe on my dress collar swayed when I shimmied. Also, Second Sara and I were volunteering as assistant wedding planners with Mrs. McKinney. Also, there was my painting class, where I was on my third pass at perfecting a dogwood bloom. Also, there was tennis. And now that the golf course had greened up, I was working hard on my drive, so as to maybe win the women’s amateur trophy at the tournament next month.

I trailed Sara into the Haardts’ parlor, where the maid was laying out the china tea service on a table near two floral-chintz chairs. Outside the picture window, three fledgling cardinals, their feathers sticking up in tufts, crowded together on a magnolia branch. I could hear their chatter through the glass.

Sara said, “What’s the latest on Scott? No one can believe you’ve actually allowed a man to catch you—and take you off to New York City! What do your folks say?”

“Oh, they had a fit when I announced our plans, but I told them, ‘I adore Scott. There’s no one else like him. I’ve found my prince.’ Daddy rolled his eyes, you can imagine. But Scott’s wonderful is all,” I said with a sigh. “Course, before he can carry me off, he has to do this quest, you know. Hardships must be overcome. Dragons must be slain. Then he can return for me, triumphant.”

“You’ve been reading Tennyson, haven’t you?”

“Isn’t Lancelot marvelous?” I said. Then I leaned back and propped my feet on the table. “I used to think I’d never want to leave here, even for a fella as impressive as Scott, but now Eleanor’s at her sister’s in Canada, and you’re in Baltimore most all the time, and my brother and sisters are away—well, except Marjorie—and, I don’t know, plenty happens, but nothing
happens
.”

Sara nodded. “I’ve been to some of the most interesting lectures recently. Have you heard about this new subject, sexology?”

“Don’t let your mother hear you say that word.”

“She went to one of the lectures! I was so proud of her.” Sara poured our tea. “Sexology is concerned with women’s power within the intimate relationship, and about understanding our unique physiological qualities so that we aren’t shamed by our desires. We live in historic times, you know. Women are going to get the vote when Congress comes back into session and finishes ratification.”

“Sounds like a witch’s spell.
Ratification
—turns you into a rat.”

Sara swatted me. “It’s going to turn us into actual persons with rights,” she said. “Women will be able to choose our next president.”

“Right now, I’ve chosen me a husband,
if
he stops promising and actually comes through. He sold one story this spring, to some fancy magazine called
The Smart Set,
then spent the whole thirty dollars they paid him on a feathered fan for me and flannel pants for him. He can’t find work he likes—he’s writing advertising copy for ninety dollars a month and living in some terribly depressing apartment near … what did he say? Harlem? Some place kind of in the city but not really. He
hates
his job, but he keeps saying,
Soon,
and I have to tell you, the more he says it, the less I believe it. How long is soon? It isn’t days, or weeks, or a season. It’s a placeholder is what it is, no measure at all.” I leaned toward Sara. “Do you think I’m foolish to marry him? Tell me. I trust your opinion.”

“Does he love you—and I mean genuinely, for the special person you are and not just some idealized feminine object?”

“He does, but—”

“But what?”

“If he doesn’t succeed, he’ll be miserable. I’d have a miserable husband and a miserable apartment. Romantic as I am, I’m pretty certain love does not conquer all. Plus I haven’t had a letter from him in
two weeks
. He’s got this whole other life. Other friends.”

“So do you, from his perspective,” Sara said. “Give him a little more time. If he regards you the way you say he does, he’s a rare man, Zelda. Even in times as modern as ours is becoming, most men don’t see any reason to get well acquainted with more of a woman than her vagina.”

“Why, Sara Haardt,” I said admiringly. “Goucher’s given you quite the vocabulary.”

“Are you
ever
serious?”

“You’ve known me my whole life.”

“Right.” She laughed. “Most women hear things like I just said—and I don’t mean only that word—and want to put their fingers in their ears. ‘What about romance?’ they say. ‘What about love?’ We can have romance, love, sex, respect, self-respect,
and
fulfilling employment in whatever interests us, if we like. Motherhood doesn’t need to be our whole lives—it can be one feature in a woman’s broader life, the same as fatherhood is for men.”

“You really think so?”

“If we had easy, legal ways to prevent pregnancy—other than the obvious one, I mean. Those are coming, too, thanks to women like Margaret Sanger.”

And to women like Sara, who’d led the Montgomery campaign for women’s rights. I said, “You are impressive, Sara Haardt. I really ought to at least try to be more like you.”

“What fun would that be?”

“That’s the problem in a nutshell, isn’t it?”

*   *   *

In late May, I got bronchitis with a cough so severe that it kept me housebound. While I waited for the fever and cough to break and for Scott to report back on a lead he’d gotten for a newspaper job, I read. First was
Meditations
by Marcus Aurelius, which Daddy had given me. “Some food for thought,” he said, “now that you have to sit still for a spell. See if it doesn’t open your eyes about your future.”

That
wasn’t the book for the job; that one amounted to a dry bunch of Stoic platitudes everyone had heard before but no lively person actually wanted to observe. “Do not act as if you were going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over you. While you live, while it is in your power, be good.” The man was a killjoy. Clearly, joy-killing was Daddy’s intention, too.

The eye-opener was
Plashers Mead
by Compton Mackenzie, which Scott had sent. Its protagonist, Guy Hazlewood, resembled the romantic poet Scott said he saw in himself, and its heroine, Guy’s fiancée, Pauline Grey, was a passionate woman Scott said reminded him of me. These characters were older than we were, and their circumstances were different from Scott’s and mine, yet in reading the story I felt as if I was living a version of it. It was the strangest thing.