Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald (21 page)

During that week of crossing the Atlantic, I encouraged Scott to spend his time doing whatever he liked. “Go socialize,” I told him over a lunch of poached salmon and boiled potatoes. The water goblets were crystal, the tablecloths white linen as clean and bright as fresh Minnesota snow. I urged him to write, to read—he’d brought the entire
Encyclopaedia Britannica
and claimed he was going to read the whole thing during transit—and I would indulge myself and my sweet girl, now two and a half years old, with uninterrupted togetherness.

“Go, Daddy,” Scottie said, having piled her potatoes into a pyramid.

“There
is
a fellow on board I’m hoping to meet, an editor with some French magazine; Fowler told me to look him up.”

Scottie and I saw Scott for meals, but otherwise our days were wondrous explorations of all kinds of things, like the elaborate designs woven into the carpeting, the colorful leaded-glass windowpanes, the filigreed wrought-iron railings, the labyrinthine paneled hallways, the fields of tables and chairs in the dining rooms and solariums and decks. A ship, for Scottie, was a planet.

I drew her pictures of zebras and elephants and giraffes and lions and made up little stories to go along with them. She slept beside me at night, knees and forehead pressed against me, little thumb resting against her little bow lips.

22

From our Paris hotel, I rang the Murphys’ house and spoke to Sara III, whose cultured voice matched Esther’s promise. “Come tomorrow for cocktails and dinner,” she said. “We’ve assembled some truly lovely people who’ll want to meet you both, I’m certain.”

“We’ve got our two-year-old daughter with us,” I told her. “No nanny as of yet.”

“Oh, bring her! We have three wee ones of our own, and a wonderfully competent nanny. I’ll give you the name of the agency we used, if you like. You’ll need someone who’s got good English, to start, and good references.”

“Thank you! I’m already so glad that Esther put us in touch.”

Still, when we arrived at the arched, gated entry to 3 rue Gounod in Saint-Cloud, an arrondissement that was just outside of Paris proper, my first sight of the house worried me. We’d known that Esther and Gerald Murphy owed their fortunes to their father’s luxury leather-goods company, called Mark Cross. And thanks to shipboard gossip, we now also knew that Gerald’s wife Sara’s family had an ink-manufacturing company in Ohio, which gave Sara a small fortune of her own. Though this house wasn’t a mansion, not in terms of what we’d seen on Long Island, it was three majestic stories of stone and wrought iron, set inside a little walled park. Our new life in France was going to be Great Neck all over again, I thought. There would be too much everything and not enough anything, and then where would that leave us?

There was no time to worry further, as the butler was showing us into the main salon and a handsome woman was saying, “I’m Sara, and
you
must be the famed miscreants of Manhattan and Long Island. Not you, of course,” she said to Scottie, bending down and shaking Scottie’s hand.

I looked over at Scott and mouthed,
Famed miscreants
. He winked.

Scottie, ever accustomed to meeting her mama and papa’s friends, wrapped her arms around Sara’s neck. “Mama told me to say
bone swohr
.”

“And you did it so well,” Sara said.

The house was spacious and luxe, done up in fine furniture and draperies and heavy-framed paintings of great variety, from classical nudes and still lifes to unidentifiable modernist compositions of colorful lines and shapes and spots. Several fashionably dressed people were already mingling, drinks in hand—though no one here wore anything like my Parisian dress from New York. This was not, I quickly knew,
that
kind of occasion, and I was glad I’d chosen a black and sage-metallic print dress that went on like a robe, with chiffon sleeves and a clasp and tie at the left hip. It covered everything but my calves. A slender man in a slim-cut tuxedo sat at the piano and played cheerful tunes for two dark-haired women who I guessed were in their thirties. The room smelled of money, refined.

My first impression of Sara: capable, classy, beautiful in an understated way. She had a great shock of chestnut-brown hair above a delicate, round face that was porcelain-pale and powder-smooth. She wore a white-trimmed, gray silk-and-chiffon dress, gray high-heeled shoes, and two long strands of white pearls. I guessed she was around my sister Marjorie’s age, not quite forty. She smoothed a curl from Scottie’s cheek, then stood and turned toward the drawing room and announced, “Everyone, meet Scott and Zelda.”

Among
everyone
that evening were Gerald Murphy (naturally); singer-composer Cole Porter and his divorcée, high-society wife, Linda; painter Pablo Picasso and his wife, ballerina Olga Khokhlova; artist, poet, and novelist Jean Cocteau; and aspiring musician Dick Myers and his wife, Alice Lee; along with a few women who seemed to have been added for color. None of the names meant a thing to us before that night, mostly because either we hadn’t had enough exposure to their work, or because their best work was still ahead of them.

Gerald, square-faced, square-shouldered, tall, with kind eyes, strode over to shake Scott’s hand. “Esther telegraphed, calling you ‘the Golden Boy,’ and said you used to write lyrics at Princeton. Cole here got his start doing the same thing at Yale.”

“It’s true,” Cole said. He’d swung around so that he sat with his back to the keyboard. “‘Bulldog! Bulldog!’ The fight song, don’t you know,” he said in a voice that was as slight as he was. “There’s ten minutes’ work that will bring a lifetime of infamy.”

Scott nodded and said, “‘Fie! Fie! Fi-Fi!’—just the lyrics, though. I’ll venture that you write the tunes, too.”

What followed was the most charming night of lighthearted conversation and music and laughter, uncorrupted by the heavy drinking we had been so accustomed to. It was as if the Murphys not only didn’t behave like crass drunks but weren’t even aware that one could.

Russian-born Olga, who’d danced for Sergei Diaghilev’s incomparable Ballets Russes, intrigued me. She and Pablo met when he’d designed the costumes and set for the ballet
Parade,
which Jean had helped to write. “Gerald, here, ’as done the art for Sergei as well,” Jean said in melodic French-accented English.

Olga said, “It is, what you say, a club with them.” She sounded unhappy about this.

“Do you still dance for Diaghilev?”

“No, I do five years but give it up when I meet Pablo. I am not so good to be missed.”

“It must have been something, though, dancing with that company,” I said, careful to pronounce my
g
’s for this group. “I was always hearing about the Ballets Russes in New York. They don’t have ballet, you know, so everyone has to come to Europe to see really great dance or to be a real dancer, isn’t that silly? I love ballet.”

Scott and I both were awed by how
cultured
all these folks appeared to be, how
intact
they all were. For a change, Scott listened more than he talked. They spoke of painting and music and dance—their own work as well as other artists’—with knowledge and candor and passion. If they felt rivalries, they expressed the situations as challenges, not jealousies. It wasn’t a fraternity party, or a night at a cabaret, or a gauche demonstration of wealth; my worries eased a little. The Murphys’ three children and the Myerses’ daughter took to Scottie like she was a favorite cousin, while Gerald and Sara felt to me like older siblings I’d somehow forgotten I had.

We lunched with the Murphys the next day, on a sunny stone patio surrounded by ivy-covered walls, and Gerald told us, “Cole’s persuaded us to try the Riviera for the summer—we’re thinking Antibes; you’ll have to come see us there.”

Scott and I glanced at each other, and I could see that he felt the same way I did: we’d passed an important first exam. Could it be that we were saved after all?

*   *   *

After interviewing nannies at the agency Sara suggested, we again hired the one Scott thought best matched his ideal of what a nanny should be. With this new one, Lillian, in place, we went on to Hyères to find someone who could find us a house.

Lillian, a homely young British woman who’d been raised by nuns, stepped right into her role, showing all the authority and discipline we were paying her for—which made me a little sad. But life was in motion again, and if I wanted anything to turn out to my liking, I had to get involved, scout for houses, set things up—which I couldn’t easily do if I was also trying to give Scottie the attention she deserved.

As with our search four years earlier, Scott and I had to survey all the prospective towns and rentals before making up our minds. We visited Nice, Monte Carlo, Cap d’Antibes, Cannes, and Saint-Raphael; Saint-Raphael turned out to be “it,” for the moment anyway. No longer did I imagine that any place we lived would become permanent. The only question was how long we’d stay.

Saint-Raphael is a quaint and picturesque spot on the Mediterranean coast of France, not far from Cannes. We knew no one there—had chosen it for exactly that reason, so that Scott could settle down and work. It was not a fashionable place in 1924, not in the least. It was serene, though, with a rocky, verdant, slowly crumbling beauty that made me itch to try painting again. Having spoken with Pablo at the dinner party about his art—using Gerald, humorously, as translator—and having seen what Gerald was doing with his painting, too, I was suddenly aware of how much I hadn’t learned yet and how much I
wanted
to learn, and how nice it would be to dabble some more myself and see what came of it.

A property agent helped us locate Villa Marie, an old but remarkable little compound high up on a hillside above the sea, with garden walls and a big stone house all draped in luscious pink bougainvillea—all this for only seventy-nine dollars a month!

Following Scott’s
Post
essay about money, I’d managed to get him to tell me what sort of budget we were working from: we had seven thousand dollars, and no debts. We would have the villa, a nanny, a cook, and a housekeeper, all for one-fifty a month. We would buy a car. Scott would stay entirely sober, saving us a considerable amount of money on booze. The seven grand would be more than enough to see us through until the novel changed from an extensively outlined idea to a bound-and-wrapped fact. This was our plan.

We hired the servants, and I turned the villa into a version of home. One of our first orders of business was to explore the social scene, the cafés, the restaurants. As ever, Scott quizzed everyone he met, made copious notes about things, tried all the foods, taste-tested cocktails and offered bartenders his critiques. We liked to go to a little beach casino, where the festive crowd included a bunch of French aviators who were serving at an air station in nearby Fréjus. At that time, my French was more or less limited to understanding the phrase “J’aimerais danser avec vous si cela ne dérange pas votre mari.”
I’d like to dance with you if your husband won’t mind
—and replying, “Mais oui, dansons!”

Scott grew a mustache and read Byron and Shelley and Keats, all in preparation, he said, for the task ahead of him. How the mustache would help him write I couldn’t say, and I don’t think he could, either. And although his start was slow—it was early June by now, and he wasn’t writing much and he hadn’t given up alcohol yet—well, maybe that was how things needed to be. Becoming expatriates required a big adjustment.

Scott joined me on our terrace one evening where, after tucking Scottie in, I liked to sit and watch the sky darken and the stars appear, and to study the moon if it was around. The timelessness of nightfall comforted me. I was not quite twenty-four years old, and for all that I’d seen and done, when things quieted down I was still the old me, the Alabama girl who was as likely to swim in a moonlit creek as to dance a night away.

“Hi,” I said as Scott sat down. “I had a letter from Sara Mayfield today—she’s going to marry John Sellers. You remember John, he’s one of the fellas I went with before I knew you. Never seriously, of course; he had a kind of an edge I just never quite warmed to—but I bet that’s long gone now, if Sara’ll have him.”

“I’m ready,” Scott said. “I’m restarting the book tomorrow. I’ve had a look at the draft, I know what needs to change—I can see it all like a vision before me.” He set a pair of goblets and a wine carafe on the iron table between our chairs. “I can’t even describe how marvelous it’s going to be.”

“You’re going to write tomorrow after drinking tonight? Do you think that’s a good idea?”

“Wine’s not booze, dearest. Restaurants serve it with every meal.”

“It is too booze. It’s got alcohol in it, that’s a fact, and you can’t disbelieve a fact.”

“Children drink wine here,” he said.

“Maybe. But it doesn’t prove your case.”

“Are you planning to take over your father’s seat on the court?” he said as he filled both glasses and handed me one.

“See, this is how you get when you know I’m right.”

“This is how
you
act when you’re determined to sabotage my work.”

The remark surprised me. “That’s right,” I said, “I
want
you to fail at everything. That’s why I followed you to New York, and Westport, and St. Paul, and Great Neck, and now France—all in, what, four years? Yes, I gave up my family in Montgomery, gave up my house and my friends and everything that was so good about our Great Neck life, in order to follow you halfway across the earth and then
sabotage you
.”

He squinted at me, scratched his head, bit his thumbnail. “Poor word choice. Sorry. I’ve sampled the wine, maybe a bit too liberally?”

“I’ll say.”

“It’s going to be a damned masterpiece, you know.”

“The wine?”

“The book.”

“That’s quite a prediction.”

“Everything I’ve sketched out so far needs to be rewritten, but, Zelda, I’m finally going to live up to my potential with this one. I’m going to
surpass
my potential. This book’s going to prove that I’m the greatest writer of my age.”