Call Me Zelda (32 page)

“I don’t know if I’m the best judge of this at the moment,” I said. “Everything’s tilting a bit.”

“You’ll be just fine.”

I sat on his couch while he flipped on the light and started music on the gramophone—Gershwin. “Embraceable You,” an instrumental version.

“Very nice,” I said.

He called to me from the bedroom. “I just picked it up for a steal. Isn’t it swell?”

“Yes,” I said. “Maybe I’ll learn to play it, to at least catch up my musical tastes to this century.”

I leaned back on the couch, closed my eyes, and allowed the music to fill my ears. It was slow and sweet, like a long walk on a first date.

In a moment, Will was before me holding up two new suits on hangers—one a double-breasted gray, the other a crisp navy with a thin pinstripe.

“Ooh!” I said. “Where did you find them?”

“City consignment shops have much better merchandise than country shops. All I could find in southern Maryland was a pair of overalls without a hole and one with a hole.”

I laughed and squinted my eyes, trying to decide which suit I liked better. I stood and moved the navy suit in front of him.

“Honestly, I’m having a hard time envisioning you in either with that beard,” I said.

“I know. It’s awful. I’ll shave it tomorrow.”

“No,” I said. “Come on; it’s coming off now.”

I walked into the kitchen and dragged a chair from under the table to the sink.

“Where’s your razor?” I asked.

“In the bathroom,” he said, giving me a strange look. In a moment he disappeared around the corner and returned with a razor, shaving cream, and a towel. I guided him into the chair and placed the towel around his neck. When my hands brushed his skin, I saw goose bumps rise.

“Are you sure you can handle this, Nurse Anna?” he asked, sounding very much like the young, cheeky man from the hospital all those years ago.

“Are you sure
you
can handle this?” I teased, giving him a little shove on his back.

“I’m absolutely aces,” he said. “Though it’s been a long time since a dame’s been so close to me. This isn’t going to embarrass you, is it?”

“Please, I had to shave more than your face in the hospital.”

He laughed. “There’s my Anna.”

I filled the bowl with warm water and placed it on the counter. Then I squeezed shaving cream on my hands and worked it into a lather.

My Anna.

At first his words had passed me by, but once I caught them from the air I realized I liked the sound of them. I also realized that both of us were tipsy and therefore loose with our commentary.

When I touched his face, he closed his eyes and tilted his head. I worked the cream around his cheeks, chin, and mouth, and paused to consider his lips—the little upturned corners, the thin upper lip resting on the full lower lip.

I warmed the razor in the water and began the slow scraping motion down the left side of his face. I didn’t get far before I had to clean off the blade and continue, due to the thickness of his
beard, but it didn’t take long for me to finish the left side, and most of the right.

The record stopped, and suddenly the room seemed very warm and close. He opened his eyes, and in a husky voice said, “Start it over.” I nodded and left the room for a moment. When I returned, his gaze pierced me and I suddenly felt unsure. My confidence seemed to have slipped out through the draft in the front room window. He must have sensed my hesitation. “Do you want me to finish?” His voice was very quiet.

I shook my head.
No
.

I walked back to the sink and rinsed out the bowl. The steam rose around my face and I fanned it away, then returned to him.

“Close your eyes,” I said.

“Why?”

“I don’t want to get any shaving cream in them.”

He gave me a devilish smile, held my gaze for a moment, then very deliberately closed his eyes and again tilted back his head.

As I scraped the razor down the rest of his face, I was suddenly struck by the emergence of the young Will I’d once known, when we had teased, and played, and life was so, so easy. I felt my confidence return, and with it an undeniable desire to kiss him.

Clearing the rest of his face didn’t take nearly as long as I wanted it to, so I took my time. Finally, as I leaned over him to shave the last place on his chin, he opened his eyes. We stared at each other and I reached up with my fingers to clear away a dab of shaving cream under his lips.

“There you are,” I said.

He gently pulled me into his lap and kissed me.

Our kiss was long and slow and sent heat down to my toes. As it intensified, I felt overcome and completely out of my senses.

Until the record stopped.

I pulled back, breathless, and put my hand on my mouth. He
opened his eyes and stared at me with such longing that I had to stand up and step backward to the wall.

In a moment he was before me, his lips on mine again, his body pressing into me. I responded, but then pulled away and walked into the front room. He reached for my arm and brought me close to him, pressing his forehead into mine.

“Anna, don’t go.”

I closed my eyes and allowed myself just a moment of imagining what would happen if I stayed, but then reality, or what I’d made my reality, came pushing in. Peter was upstairs. Will and I weren’t married. But maybe I was still married.

No, I wasn’t. Suddenly I knew that for sure, but all of the other thoughts won and I pulled back.

“I have to go,” I said.

He released my arm and let me walk to the door and halfway up the stairs before he called to me.

“Anna.”

I stopped and gazed down at him, sweet Will, bursting with emotion, and desire, and what I hoped was love, because I knew I felt it for him and I knew it wouldn’t go away in the morning, which made it all the more important to me that I continue up to my apartment.

“Anna, I’m not going anywhere,” he said.

I looked at him for a moment and then felt a smile start. He grinned back, ran his hands through his hair, and groaned.

I turned and continued up the stairs, but when I got to the door I looked down at him and pressed my hand to my lips and then toward him.

He put his hand over his heart.

TWENTY-FOUR

I awoke to rain, but it did not oppress my spirits. It felt fresh and cleansing, so I opened my window and inhaled the pure smell of spring.

Peter had awoken early and left a note.

Swing low, sweet chariot, a taxi came to taketh me home. Come by anytime to practice for your big church debut. I love you and I think you should marry Will.

All my love,
Peter

I laughed and hummed my way through breakfast, acutely aware of the man occupying the space in the apartment below me, and somewhat surprised by how eager I was to see him. I was not at all embarrassed about our kiss. How different I would have felt this morning if I hadn’t left his apartment when I did.

Or maybe not.

I bathed and washed my hair, and looked forward to a day of
organizing my apartment, writing a letter to Zelda, though I knew it would go unanswered, and practicing the piano, when I heard a knock at the door.

I went to greet who I was sure was Will, but when I pulled it open, I was shocked to see Scott standing before me, wet and sobbing, his skin the color of weathered slate. He stumbled in, and I nearly had to carry him to the couch. I went back and shut the door and returned to him.

He buried his face in his hands and continued sobbing, and I could feel myself recoil. I’d been reaching out to the Fitzgeralds for so long that it was a strange sensation to want to pull away, but I thought that might have something to do with the warmth that had been in my apartment before he’d come in with his terrible coldness.

I recalled that Peter had warned me about how famous people had a way of absorbing others into themselves, and not to allow myself to be swallowed by the Fitzgeralds. It was presumptuous for Scott to find me at my apartment and bring his troubles to my door. Of course, I’d been nearly begging him to let me help with Zelda for so long, I could see why he’d do it. Clearly he needed me, and yet here I was resenting the intrusion and wishing to soak in my own joy without disturbance. I forced myself to sit next to him on the couch.

“I can’t do it anymore,” he said. “I can’t support her.”

“What’s happened?” I said.

“
Tender
isn’t selling enough. My best work yet—my soul splayed open for all to feast upon—and the readers simply do not care.”

I nearly laughed aloud.
His
soul? I could not find any words to answer him.

He looked up at me and then stood as anger flashed over his face.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “It’s
her soul
—her
soul that was used. But don’t you see? Her soul is my soul, and not because it belongs to me but because we share it.”

His notion was a romantic one, but I worried that he, too, would succumb to madness with thoughts like these. I decided to steer the conversation to the book, since I could not speak of their souls, joint or separate.

“Scott, low sales are a factor of the depression, not your work.”

He shook his head.

“Is the situation so dire that Zelda cannot stay at Craig House?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “If I didn’t have Scottie’s school tuition to pay, I could keep her there a bit longer. Zelda begs me to send her to a less costly establishment, but I can’t bear to stick her in a state institution. She’s better than that. She deserves more.”

He crumpled again on the couch and renewed his sobbing. I was alarmed at the condition of his emotions and his inebriation, and felt real panic rising up at the thought of Scott sticking Zelda in a state-run mental institution. At least he knew she didn’t belong there. We would figure something out.

There was a knock at the door. I stood and went to open it, only to find Will before me with a massive bouquet of daffodils. His smile froze when he saw the wet, sobbing man inside.

“Is now a bad time?” he asked.

I slipped into the hallway, closing the door behind me, and kissed him. Then I pulled away and whispered, “Yes.”

“Who is that?”

“It’s Scott Fitzgerald.”

Will made an O with his mouth. “So I should come back later to take you to lunch in the rain, instead of breakfast?”

I smiled at him. “Yes.”

“Are you okay with him in there?” Will suddenly narrowed his eyes. “He’s not trying anything with you, is he?”

I nearly laughed aloud. “No. Not at all. But I do fear for his health, so I’ll have to fill you in later.”

Will wrapped his arms around me and pulled me close for another kiss that took my breath away. When I pulled back he put his lips to my ear.

“You are going to drive
me
crazy, Anna,” he whispered. “But then maybe that would be good so you could take care of me all the time.”

“I would like that very much,” I whispered back.

I reached for his smooth face, again marveling at the transformation. He kissed me one last time, pressed the flowers into my hands, and left me on the stairs.

Once my heart rate returned to normal I walked back into my apartment, quickly put the flowers in water in the kitchen, and entered the main room to find Scott at my piano. He had composed himself and was looking at pictures of Katie and Ben. He gave me the saddest smile.

“I have to apologize,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because you have a whole life outside of me and Zelda, and I know nothing of it,” he said. “Who are they?”

Taken aback by his notice, I hesitated a moment.

“I’m sorry to interfere,” he said, placing the photographs back on the piano.

“No,” I said. “It’s okay. I was married to him, to Ben, but he never came home from the war. Katie was my daughter, but she died at five, of pneumonia.”

“Oh, Anna,” he said. “I’m so very sorry.”

I looked down at the floor, suddenly wishing with all of my heart that he would leave. He felt like an illness, and I did not want him to infect me.

“And here I am, giving all of my problems to you,” he said. “I should go.”

He started toward the door, but stopped when he got to me.

“I just have one more request,” he said. “When it’s time for me to move Zelda, wherever that is, will you help me escort her?”

“Yes, Scott, of course.”

“Thank you.” He hugged me, overwhelming me with his embrace and the odor of gin. Just as I felt I was about to suffocate, he pulled away and was gone.

TWENTY-FIVE