Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald (14 page)

“Welcome!” he said, and waved us inside.

Scott shook his hand. “Scott Fitzgerald. It’s such a pleasure to finally meet the man who now gets to say he discovered me. Meet my wife, Zelda.”

“You were so thoughtful to include me tonight,” I said.

“My God, Fitzgerald,” he said, taking my hand but looking at Scott, “you’re good, but I had no idea you were
this
good.” He kissed my hand and asked, “How long have you and the new wonder boy been wed?”

“Three weeks tomorrow.”

“Three weeks! What’s he doing dragging you out to this miserable place during your honeymoon?” He took me by the arm. “I’m so sorry, my dear. Let me get you a cocktail to help you manage your obvious disappointment.”

As George led me away, I glanced over my shoulder at Scott. He looked surprised, but also pleased. I lifted one shoulder,
Who would’ve thought?
and then waggled my fingers,
See you later
.

George said, “Zelda, Zelda. An exotic name for a girl who looks like sweet cream at sunrise. You’re not from here.”

“Nope,” I said, assessing the other guests while he mixed a gin rickey. Scott and I were possibly the youngest people at the party, and just about the only ones who weren’t dressed in black. My ivory georgette dress was about as opposite as you could get, in fact, which made me happy. “I’m Alabama-born, so a transplant here—but I think I could enjoy growing some roots.”

“Then you like what you’ve seen of Manhattan?”

“It’s a grown-ups’ playground, isn’t it?”

“These days. Before the war—before this Eighteenth Amendment Prohibition business, really—most of that playground was confined to Broadway. What you found if you went out uptown were blue bloods with yappy dogs and trailing furs, men and women with their noses upturned at the very idea of adults committing … shall we say
revelries
.”

“I haven’t been uptown much. But I have been to Greenwich and Broadway—a few times, now—”

“So I’ve read. Your husband can’t keep his clothes on, while you enjoy swimming in yours at Union Square—”

“These gossip writers, they don’t miss anything, do they?” I laughed. “They got the bit about Scott paddling in the Plaza’s fountain the other night, too.”

“You two are so obviously noteworthy that I believe they’ve assigned a scout to trail you. Why, I imagine someone here tonight will be tattling on you in print tomorrow.”

“I guess I ought to consider giving people something worth reading about, then.”

George held out one hand to me and gestured to the center of the room with the other. “Shall we get started?”

The evening passed in a blur of new faces, laughter, flirtation, dancing, and liquor. The only time I wasn’t holding a glass was when I was in some man’s arms, moving to the new jazz music of Ben Selvin or Art Hickman’s Orchestra being played on the grandest phonograph I’d ever seen or heard. It had no visible horn and was contained in a finely carved, hand-painted cabinet. George Jean Nathan took all of his interests seriously, that was plain enough.

I hardly saw Scott, until toward the end of the party when he found me in the midst of a conversation with two stage actresses whose primary concerns were cold cream and lice. He took me by the hand and led me over to meet a man he said was “the finest literary mind in the country.”

“Finer than either of those two’s?” I asked as we crossed the room. “I’m not sure that’s possible.”

“The one who was on your left gets three hundred a week.”

“Dollars?”

“Yes—and probably love notes, too.”

“Wait,” I said, pretending I was about to turn around. “I need to get me the name of her cold cream.”

The finest literary mind
belonged to a man with a sober, somber round face that was framed by neatly combed dark hair parted severely in the center. His scalp was
actually white,
I thought, assessing him through a happy gin haze.

He appeared to be close in age to George, but worlds away in
joie de vivre
. He sat sedately in an armchair in the corner farthest from the phonograph, and at this point in the evening, when most of the men had mussed hair and had shed their jackets and loosened their ties, this man was as tidy as he must have been in front of his mirror earlier. He had a serious mouth and serious eyes. I wondered if he had a woman in his life. I wondered if he’d ever had one.

“Zelda, this is Mr. Henry Mencken. He’s co-editor, with Mr. Nathan, of
The Smart Set
.”

I sat down on his chair’s arm. “I sure do appreciate you taking such a shine to Scott’s stories. He’s awfully good, isn’t he? It’s so nice that people are finally taking notice and paying him so well for all his hard work. It’s important that artists get recognition
and
money, don’t you think? Otherwise, how else can someone like Scott afford to buy his wife a dress like the one I’m wearing?”

“I don’t disagree,” Mencken said, looking amused. “The trouble for the artist lies in the temptation to mistake the public’s tastes—and thus their money—as a measure of actual value.”

“So then, whose tastes matter?” I asked. Scott put his hand on my shoulder.

“The intellectual’s. Someone who understands art—the history of it, its meaning to mankind.”

“By ‘mankind’ you mean intellectuals,” I said. Scott’s grip tightened.

Mencken nodded. “I sound like a snob, I realize. Bad habit. I don’t even have the formal education of this fellow, here.” He indicated Scott.

“Princeton didn’t give me much—”

“Except fodder for your novel, not to mention your newfound fame,” Mencken quipped.

I said, “A thing can be popular
and
good. Scott’s book proves it.”

“How old are you?” Mencken asked.

“Almost twenty.”

“Let’s have this debate when you’re thirty,” Mencken said.

Scott took my arm and practically pushed me up onto my feet. “Mr. Nathan supplied some really fine gin tonight, didn’t he? Come, darling, dance with your husband.”

*   *   *

“What’d you think of Mencken?” Scott asked me in the morning. Or possibly it was afternoon; I wasn’t sure.

I got up and shuffled to the bathroom. My mouth was dry. My eyeballs were dry. Dull, thick pain crept through my head.

“He seems kinda scary if you ask me,” I said from the toilet. “I like George a lot better.”

“And George likes you. Everyone likes you,” Scott called. “Bring me some aspirin, would you?”

“Long as
you
like me, I don’t care about everyone.”

When I returned, Scott was sitting up in bed. He had a cigarette in one hand and a pencil in the other. A notebook was open on his lap. “There’s not a finer man alive than Mencken, I mean that. He’s got the keenest eye in literature—he’s a natural. Taught himself everything he knows.”

I gave Scott the aspirin bottle. “That’s all well and good but he’s so damn
serious
. Didn’t it seem like he’d rather be most anywhere else than at a party?”

“Nathan says Mencken’s anti–New York, only comes up when he begs him to. Says he tells Mencken there’s no way he can get the pulse from his place in Baltimore. I told Mencken I’d send him a book, and he said he’s
got
a copy, isn’t that something?”

“And?”

“He hasn’t read it yet. He thinks, though, that he’ll have a look at it soon, and he wants me to send
The Flight of the Rocket
when it’s out for review next winter.”

“Doesn’t that scare you?”

“
Scare
me? A review from Mencken … it’s what writers
live
for. The honor of getting even an evisceration—”

“He wouldn’t do that to you. He admires your work, if not your wife.”

“Oh, I think he admires you—your fearlessness, at least. He’s right about art, though. The most important work is too erudite for the masses.”

“And for me, too, apparently, since I don’t know what
erudite
is.”

“Which is quite all right.” Scott caught my hand and tugged me onto the bed. “You have other charms.”

15

April 27, 1920

Dearest Second Sara,

I was delighted to get your high school graduation announcement. Soon you’ll be free as a lark! And it’s no surprise to me at all that John Sellers has taken a shine to you—he sees what we’ve all seen in you all along: you’re sweet and clever and have as much innocent sex appeal as three Lillian Gishes. Mind you, there’s no need to rush into anything. Do like I did and wait until you know you’ve found your one true love.

New York is the most astonishing place, I must say, and Scott’s popularity increases daily—it’s truly impressive to behold. I’m just amazed, and so proud of him. He gets at least a dozen fan letters every week, from readers all ’round the country. And reporters are now starting to want to talk to
me
, can you imagine? What will Montgomery say about Tallu and me both being famous? You’ll have to let me know, ’cause I’m sure Mama will refrain from telling me anything that might swell my head.

Do come see us this summer. I think we’re going to take a place in the country so that Scott can get his next book done. Much love in the meantime,

Z~

*   *   *

Scott spotted her first: “Oh, darling, there she is: she is
the one
.”

If we were going to live in the country, we would need a car. The beauty that caught his eye, here at the downtown sales lot, was a 1917 Marmon, a sleek, convertible red sports coupe. Scott waved to a salesman, then climbed inside.

While he talked to the salesman from the driver’s seat, I examined the car’s spoked wheels and wide running boards and the keen, leaf-patterned hood ornament. Then I got inside the red-leather-dressed interior next to Scott. He was holding on to the wooden steering wheel with one hand and stroking the wooden dashboard with the other. Nickel-plated gauges and levers and buttons filled the dashboard.

The salesman said, “Her first master was a Manhattan playboy. I’ll let her go for the same price as a new, sedate 1920 sedan—how about that?”

“Let me just talk it over with the missus.”

The salesman nodded and left us alone.

“It all comes down to materials,” Scott told me. “The rich know this. Sure, we can get a newer car for the same price, but it won’t look or drive like this one.”

“We can afford it, right?”

“Our great friend Myra Harper’s going to pay for it,” he said, referring to the money he’d just gotten for selling movie rights to another of his short stories, “Myra Meets His Family.”

I ran my hand across the sun-warmed seat tops. “Wow, our very first car. It’s almost like we’re grown-ups.”

*   *   *

After a week of motoring about the countryside looking at houses for rent in a half dozen towns between Rye and Bridgeport, we fell in love with a gray-shingled house in Westport, Connecticut, about forty miles from Manhattan.

The house had a wide, deep front porch that reminded me of home, and sat on a road a few hundred feet away from the ocean—a happy fact that fascinated me to no end. I’d never seen the ocean before then, never seen any body of water larger than a big lake. Not much farther away was the Beach and Yacht Club, where we would get a summer membership. We thought it was the perfect setup for both of us: Scott would have the space and peace he needed for work, and I would have the beach, the club, and the ocean, and miles of old country roads to explore on foot or by bicycle. We told the real estate agent we’d take it through September, then we returned to Manhattan to pack our trunks.

On our first night in the house, we pulled two weathered rockers close together and sat outside on the porch, wrapped in blankets and drinking champagne by candlelight. The air smelled of salt, and cool, damp earth. We could hear the rhythmic boom of the surf.

“I always imagined the war would sound like this,” Scott said. “Like heavy guns firing in the distance. Back then, even as I was sure I was going to war, I never saw myself in the action—and then I never
was
in the action.”

“And a good thing, too.”

“Maybe—but Bunny made it back. And Bishop, and Biggs.”

“Well sure, but with no
B
in your name, you’d’a been in trouble.”

“There you go, reminding me yet again why I love you,” Scott said.

“The sound makes
me
think of Mama’s story about when her house in Kentucky got shelled by Union troops. She was five years old, and the war was almost over but not quite. They had to hightail it to someplace in the country, and then they went to Canada, where her daddy was living so’s not to get arrested for his Confederate activities.”

“He left his family there in Kentucky?”

“They had a great big tobacco plantation, and a bunch of iron furnaces, and he needed my grandmama to keep an eye on all the business goings-on.”

“Did he own slaves?”

“He did, sure. The plantation had six slave houses, Mama said—she and the other kids weren’t allowed inside ’em, though. It’s funny, ’cause I was
always
in old Aunt Julia’s house, and the only difference was that we paid her for workin’ for us.”

“Which reminds me: Fowler said he’ll phone you with the name of some agency out here where you can find a housekeeper.”

“Thank goodness for that!”

“He’ll know who’s best—the Fowlers have only a little less money than God.”

“What is it his family does?”

“Investments.” Scott explained to me about bonds and stock and trading and interest, all of which I followed earnestly and then forgot immediately, retaining only the thought that none of that would ever intrigue me in the least.

“Anyway,” he said, picking up the thread of our prior topic, “all respect due your grandfather, I can’t imagine ever leaving my family the way he did.”

“It turned out fine. After President Grant pardoned him—”