Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald (33 page)

When I saw Scott next, he was attempting to juggle three glass ashtrays and was managing pretty well until some man I didn’t recognize called out, “Say, Fitzgerald, when are
you
ever going to write another book?” Scott threw one of the ashtrays at the offender, grazing the man’s head.

“Enough!” Gerald hissed. He took Scott’s arm and led him toward the door. “You might have killed him. Christ almighty, Scott, go home and sleep it off.”

Scott’s eyes brimmed with tears. “I’m sorry.” Gerald turned from him and Scott clutched his hand. “I’m
sorry
. Please, don’t make me leave.”

I had to intervene. “Scott, darling,” I said soothingly, “your aim is a little off, yet. Let’s go back to our place and practice a little by chucking some rocks into the water. We can come back later.”

His bleary eyes lit up. “Yes! Grand. That’s just what we’ll do,” he said, and I led him out of the casino wondering how I was ever going to survive the summer.

*   *   *

There were so many people at the Riviera that year, and Scott was making it his business to befriend every one of them. In addition to those of us attached to the Murphys, there were theater and film people like Rex Ingram, whose film studio in Nice was a sort of second Hollywood, and playwright Charlie MacArthur, and actresses like Grace Moore—we’d first seen Grace in a musical during our honeymoon in New York—plus a number of those playboy types who enjoyed being wherever the actresses were.

Scott was forever meeting people at casinos and cafés and bringing them home with him, staying up until all hours, and then the whole lot of them would pass out wherever they happened to be when drink got the better of them. Mornings, I’d sometimes lead Scottie past a snoring man draped over a chair; or we’d see some actress, her eyeliner now raccooned around her eyes and lipstick bleeding around her mouth like a clown’s, sprawled in a garden chaise, undisturbed by the raucous
gatah-gatah!
calls of the pintail sandgrouse out for their morning drink.

To save my sanity, I tried to give most of my attention to painting. My head was still full of Larionov and his abstract work, his passion for rejecting conformity and realism in favor of works that
expressed
. My new oil would feature my impression of a young girl in a swaying orange dress, and a cheerful little dog as her companion—
if
I could get it right. With all my new education, my ideals had grown far loftier than my talent could accommodate.

The other problem was that Villa St. Louis, while ordinarily beautiful and serene, was the last place I wanted to be. Hemingway was there almost daily—and though I couldn’t know for sure, I suspected he was feeding Scott a steady diet of advice on how to manage a “crazy” wife like me. One evening during cocktail hour, Hemingway had said in front of everyone, “A woman who knows how not to be a distraction to her husband’s work and career is a good and fine and honorable woman.” He apparently had two such women, and if Scott took his advice, Scott might yet have one, too.

*   *   *

Though my colitis had improved a great deal since I’d taken the cure in Salies-de-Béarn, new twinges of pain made me scared that a relapse was imminent. Fear dragged me down and stole my appetite. I woke almost every day in a fog of dread that took an hour or two to shake off. Everything was bad, I thought, and getting worse. When I learned that Sara Mayfield was coming to Antibes for her summer holiday, I actually cried with relief.

We met at a tiny café in the old-town section of the city, in view of the Marché Provençal, a covered outdoor market where vendors hawked fresh beans, parsley, carrots, berries, scores of spices, hundreds of cheeses, ropes of dried peppers and garlic. There were bunches of lavender, buckets of roses, baskets of turnips, potatoes, squash. Alongside all of this were silk scarves dyed in colors even rainbows hadn’t thought of, tied like nautical flags along a length of clothesline and waving in the sea’s breeze.

We’d hardly ordered our shrimp cocktails before I started in about Hemingway’s latest insult. “They go out drinking all the time, and he knows Scott will be useless in every way afterward. He encourages Scott’s bad habits and then blames the effects of them on me.”

Sara said, “There’s something not right about him.” She was quiet for a few seconds. “I’ll guess you don’t know what Bob McAlmon has been saying. I wasn’t goin’ to tell you, but—”

“Saying about what?”

“About
who;
Scott and Hemingway, that’s who. McAlmon says that something scandalous happened between himself and Hem a while back, and that now it’s Scott who’s caught Hemingway’s eye, if you know what I mean.”

Skeptical, I shook my head. “I never heard this.”

“Who would tell you—besides me?”

“He thinks Hemingway’s a
fairy
?”

“If you believe ‘it takes one to know one,’ then I’ll guess he
knows
that’s the case.”

“
He’s
a fairy?”

“They say he goes both ways. Could be our mighty Hem does, too.”

“I don’t know…” I said, thinking of that night outside the Dingo bar. “He propositioned me once—and now he’s got two women tangled up with him. I wrote you about Hadley and Pauline, didn’t I?”

She nodded. “He tried to rope
you
into his sordid circle? What did you say?”

“That he’s got nothin’ on Scott. You can bet he didn’t like hearing that.” The recollection chilled me. “Scott doesn’t know. No one does, so don’t say anything.”

Sara reached for my hand. “He’s a shit, Zelda. You should give Scott an ultimatum: his pal Ernest, or you. Pick.”

“And if he doesn’t choose me, then what do I do, run home to Montgomery like some whipped dog?” I couldn’t imagine it. Montgomery, compared to Paris?

“Of course he’ll choose you. He’s crazy about you. You have a daughter together. You’re his muse.”

“Yes, well, he doesn’t need a muse if he’s going to spend all his time working on someone
else’s
book.”

Our food arrived. I picked at mine and said, “I just can’t imagine what the appeal is; they’re about as alike as parsnips and pachyderms.”

“Maybe it’s this,” Sara said. “
Scott
thinks he’s
being
the hero, while Hemingway thinks Scott’s
worshipping
the hero.”

I nodded and sighed. “Sounds about right. Do you really think McAlmon is telling the truth?”

Sara speared a shrimp. “Why would he say it otherwise?”

“Why do any of them do the strange things they do?”

“The real question is, what are
you
goin’ to do?”

“Wait it out, I guess.”

37

The first time I’d seen a doctor about my stomach troubles, I’d been reluctant to describe all the symptoms. It’s so much more embarrassing to talk about such disorders with a man than with, say, a girlfriend—more embarrassing, even, than discussing fertility troubles, with those intimate
how-often, what-position, do-you/does-he
questions. I’d done it, though, and that doctor, who was old and pleasant and sympathetic, made it as easy on me as it could be made.

The prospect of going through it all again with a stranger made me reluctant to seek care when the pains came back and refused to leave. For days, I put off taking action, staying in bed while Scott took off for his adventures and Lillian took Scottie off for hers. The so-blue sky and sea outside my window taunted me,
Here we are, here we are,
so I closed my eyes and slept … until I was awakened one afternoon by a strange man standing at the foot of my bed beside Scott.

He had beady eyes and thin, firm lips and dealt with my assessment real matter-of-factly, which I appreciated. Even so, I was mortified the whole time.

“The pains are where?… You see blood every time or only sometimes?… Describe the stool’s consistency…”

At least his English was good.

After the exam, he administered some morphine and pronounced, “Until we get in there and see it, we can’t know for certain whether it’s the ovary, the uterus, the colon, or the appendix. We’ll schedule a surgery and see if we can excise the thing that’s troubling you. It may not be possible, you understand.”

I understood all too well.

Scott was worried that the Antibes hospital was too far behind the times and insisted I have the operation at the American Hospital in Paris. I let him worry to his heart’s content, let him take over the planning, let him step back into his role as my protector, all the while secretly pleased to have wrested his attention from Hemingway. Fate was intervening to give me back my husband, at least for a little while. Before we left for Paris, I told Sara, “If things get out of hand again, I guess I can always have my tonsils out.”

The Paris doctors removed some scar tissue and my appendix and pronounced me cured, which I was willing to believe without reservation. I hardly cared that my lower belly was now and would forever be a map of scars; I was luxuriating in Scott’s attentive presence at my bedside throughout visiting hours every day. He read to me, we played cards, we wrote letters, we talked …

Apparently, though, it was the pain medication that made me so dreamy and content, because when my last day approached and I said I thought we should stay in Paris and send for Scottie, Scott said, “Stay? God, no. I’ve just finished writing a full evaluation of Ernest’s manuscript. There are some things he really has to address before we let Max have a look at it.”

Ernest
. Again.

I said, “Can he not just leave you be? Have you heard what Bob McAlmon’s been saying about you two?”

“McAlmon’s still seething over having lost Ernest to Boni and Liveright—who are now very sorry to have lost him to Scribner’s.”

The doctor came in then, and Scott said, “I’d like to take her back to Antibes. Don’t you agree that it would be better for her to avoid the city—the germs and filth and such—when she’s in this condition?”

“Quite right,” the doctor said. “I could do with a summer at the coast myself.”

And so to the Riviera we went, where Scott could return to the thick of the drama, the place in which he felt most at home. Surely this, not Hemingway, was what was truly drawing him back.

*   *   *

Late one night in July, Scott woke me by switching on the bedside light and shaking my shoulder.

“What? What’s the matter?” I said, immediately awake and certain that someone must have died—until I saw Scott’s face.

He looked giddy. “What do you get when you mix three different alcoholics together?”

Hemingway and the others had gone off to Pamplona a week earlier. Citing my delicate post-surgery condition, I’d refused to go, which made it easy for Scott to pretend that he
would have
gone, if not for me. The fact was, he had no stomach for the bullfights or for anything gritty or brutal beyond its presence in photographs or inside the pages of a book. He’d taken up, then, with Charlie MacArthur and playboy Ben Finney.

Scott and his new friends played all sorts of pranks on hapless waiters and musicians. Once, they persuaded a pair of waiters to come out for a ride with them, then drove to a cliff and acted as if they intended to kill the young men. They claimed to have been so convincing that one of the fellows wet himself before they confessed the joke, and then they took the pair out for a steak dinner and fine bourbon to make up for the trouble they’d caused.

Now I wanted to punch Scott. “I was
sleeping
. That’s what people do this time of night. Shut that light off.”

“Don’t be such a poor sport. Come on, tell me, what do you get when you mix three alcoholics?” He reeked of bourbon, and cigar smoke.

“Don’t you mean
alcohols
?”

“No—
alcoholics
. I am a wordsmith, you know. I always,
always
choose le mot juste.”

“If I answer, will you promise to bathe before you come to bed?”

“Sorry, madam, you’ve taken too long. You get
Love’s Betrayal, or A Simple Story of Incest
.” He leaped off the bed and began loosening his belt. “I’ve just finished the screenplay, and we’re shooting it over at Grace Moore’s villa, starting tomorrow.”

“Tell me I didn’t hear you right. Y’all are making a movie about
incest
?”

“Don’t scowl like that, it puts the most unattractive lines across your forehead.” He dropped back onto the bed still half-dressed and leaned against his pillow. “Oh, God, is it going to be funny. Grace will play Princess Alluria, the most wicked woman in Europe—”

“I don’t need to know any more. Turn the light off so I can get some sleep.”

“And we’re going to paint all the title cards right on the walls, to save the trouble of cutting them into the film.”

He held his arms out the way a director might when framing a scene. “‘Her tits were perfect halves of peaches, firm and ripe and golden from the sun.’”

“I said I don’t want to hear this. Just keep it to yourself.”

“‘These she displayed at any urging. But her juices she saved for only those she favored most.’”

I got out of bed, grabbed my pillow, and left the room.

*   *   *

In mid-August, Scott returned from a luncheon at Villa America. “Hadley’s given up.” He said this as if it was Hadley we should blame; the old girl was obviously deficient in some way. “They say they’re getting a divorce. Ernest’s just a mess over it.”

“Is he, now?” I was on the terrace at my easel, trying to perfect the shades of orange in my dancing girl’s dress.

“You don’t sound sympathetic in the least.”

“I have great sympathy—for Hadley. If you see her before I do, tell her I said, ‘Good riddance.’”

The marriage wasn’t over yet, though. Hem being Hem, he would prolong the agony when they got back to Paris, acting the innocent while letting his marriage bleed for months, until he’d tortured Hadley sufficiently for her to finally put the sword between the bull’s shoulder blades herself.

*   *   *