Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald (38 page)

I pushed the switch, lighting the hallway. To my right, Delplangue was at Scottie’s door. I nodded to her, then went left, toward Scott, who had pitched face-first over a table and onto the Oriental rug. Beside him was a ceramic lamp, now in pieces.

“Are you all right? Get up.”

He groaned and lifted his head slightly, then let it drop forehead first against the rug. “I ’it the lamb,” he mumbled. “Goddamn lamb.”

Lamb? Oh—
lamp
. “Yes, it’s damned for sure. Now,
come on
.”

“Ernest.” He rolled onto his side and then blinked at the light from the hallway. He squinted at me. “Oh. ’M I home?”

“Lord knows how you made it here, but, yep, you’re home, and you need to get to bed before your daughter sees you like this.”

“Whyza lamb there?” he said sorrowfully.

“Never mind. Up.”

An eternity seemed to pass while he gathered himself sufficiently to get onto his knees, then his feet. Once up, he swayed to one side, then the other, and then his knees began to buckle. I barely caught him by putting myself in the path of his fall. “Holy Christ, Scott, how much did you drink?”

He swung his arms wide-open, saying, “’Smuch,” and knocking us both against the wall.

I pushed him upright, my teeth clenched with the effort. “
When
are you going to learn?”

“’E said ’s okay.”

“What?”

Scott peered hard at me and didn’t answer.

I helped him to the bedroom, silently promising to pay Delplangue extra if she managed to invent a convincing story to explain the commotion to Scottie.

In bed again a while later, I couldn’t sleep. Scott was as bad as I’d ever seen him, and I was worried about alcohol poisoning. We’d all heard the stories about bums found dead in the gutters, having literally drunk themselves to death. One young fella, an artist who’d come over from Wales, had done it, too. With him it had been a drinking contest against a Frenchman twice his size. I could all too easily imagine a similar contest between Hemingway and Scott.

Lying on his stomach, Scott snored then stopped, snored then stopped, mumbled, snored, mumbled, snored. After a good while of this I grew more annoyed than worried, and finally I gave him a shove.

“Come on, roll over.”

“Mmmm,” he moaned, stretching one arm up past his head. “No more, baby, I can’t…” His tone was half-protest, half-pleasure. “’S so good but ’s
wrong,
” he mumbled. Then he chuckled this throaty, low chuckle and moaned again, more quietly … and then nothing, just sleep-heavy breathing.

My heart was thumping hard. No question about it: wherever he thought he was, sex was involved. I waited for him to say more. And waited. And waited. Then I got tired of waiting, and my thoughts started to drift like thoughts do when you’re not quite asleep in your bed in the dark middle of the night.

Just as I was beginning to slide into another of my dreams about flying, Scott shifted and moaned a little, waking me. He muttered, “C’mon, Ern, no…,” and then gave a sigh of pleasure.

All my senses snapped to attention, heart galloping, eyes wide. C’mon,
Ern
?

*   *   *

So there was that. And then there was this, a few nights later:

After having dinner together at Prunier’s pub, Scott and Hemingway went to the American Club, where Morley and Hemingway were going to square off. They gave Scott a stopwatch and told him to time the rounds: three minutes per round with a one-minute rest in between. The fighters stripped down, donned their gloves, climbed into the ring, and went at it.

The first round was mostly a warm-up, neither opponent prevailing, and Scott called time right at three minutes.

One minute rest.

Round two: now Hemingway was getting aggressive—more aggressive than he’d been when they’d sparred before, Morley later reported to Loretto; he wondered whether that wasn’t because Scott was there.

Morley had some actual boxing training in his past. Hemingway’s talents, such as they were, were proudly self-taught. Hemingway was swinging hard, but mostly missing. Morley blocked and jabbed and circled and dodged, and Hemingway cursed and spat. On it went, and then Morley drew his arm back and really let Hemingway have it. One swift, hard punch to Hem’s head and down he went.

“Oh my God,” Scott cried after looking at the stopwatch. “I let the round go four minutes!”

Hemingway said, “If you want to see the shit kicked out of me, Scott, just say so. But don’t say you made a mistake.” Then he picked himself up off the canvas and went storming off to the showers.

“Morley said it was like a lovers’ spat,” Loretto told me.

*   *   *

The apartment was empty, a rare event and one I intended to make the most of. I’d waited six days for this opportunity, the chance to pick the lock of Scott’s private trunk and see if proof of Bob McAlmon’s assertion was hiding inside.

With two hairpins and a recollection of instructions my brother had shared with me twenty years earlier, I worked on that tiny steel lock. Outside, taxidrivers blew their horns and vendors called out from their carts and the wind changed direction, blowing the bedroom’s long, gauze curtains in, making them dance over me like ghosts—and still I crouched there, determined to get at the truth. Then the lock clicked open suddenly, and I tipped onto my backside.

Gathering myself, I opened the trunk’s lid and saw, first, the ordinary things I’d anticipated, given that I’d seen Scott using this trunk for years: stacks of journals, cardboard boxes, folders, notebooks, files. His unused overseas cap was in here, along with photo albums and scrapbooks begun when he was a boy.

The most recent journal sat on top. Inside its cover, Scott had written

F. Scott Fitzgerald

14 November 1928—

We’d been at Ellerslie in November. I turned the page and began scanning the scrawled musings for Hemingway’s name.

A lot of what was there concerned Scott’s thoughts on his works-in-progress, along with reminders like
Tell John to try Scribner’s mag
and
Harold: $400 but keep pressing,
and notes such as
’Flu two weeks
. Nothing real deep, and no mentions of his pal, beyond
E’s father suicide $100; Re-reading
in our time
; E $50 for bet, lost Tunney
. There were several other notes about lending
E
money. There were even more about the money Scott had asked Max or Harold to deposit into one account or another. I blinked at these without taking time to calculate.

Tucked along one side of the trunk was a folder of letters from Hemingway. Here, then, would be the evidence. I sat down on the rug with my back to the bed and began to read. The letters—there were dozens—dated all the way back to July of 1925, when Hemingway had gone to Pamplona. It was no surprise that Scott had saved them; inside the trunk were other folders containing all the letters I’d written him, all the letters he’d gotten from his parents and his sister, his correspondence with Max, with Harold, with the Princeton boys, with just about every English-speaking writer on the planet. What surprised me was that Hemingway had written so many.

In that first one, he’d said,

I’ll bet heaven for you would be an unending cocktail party with all the best and powerful members of the best powerful families there. A wealthy and faithful bunch they’d be. Your hell would be some seedy bar that had run out of booze where the unfaithful husbands sit waiting forever for a drink.

Whereas for me heaven has the corrida and my own stream full of trout; nearby I’d have two houses, one with my family and my most loving wife and the other full of beautiful women all seeing to my needs and I’d have all the worthless lit magazines printed on soft tissue and stocked in the toilets.

Most of the letters were like this. They were casual, humorous, and surprisingly personal. Truly, they were the letters of a good friend. Only the more recent ones seemed edgier, critical, moody. The most damning things I found were endearments that might, through a certain lens, seem a little too chummy—but those were plainly in jest, as were the occasional closings like
With salacious sincerity, Ernestine
. A few times Hemingway had said things like
I wish to hell I could see you
—but I’d written things like that to my friends and that didn’t make me a lesbian. On the other hand,
I sure do miss you. I’ve been trying and trying to get down there to see you
concerned me. Did men who weren’t fairies write to each other this way?

Occupied as I was, I hadn’t noticed the shifting daylight, nor did I hear the apartment door open and close. Not until the sound of footsteps right there in the room caught my attention did I even glance up from the letters, which I’d spread on the floor all around me.

“Find what you’re looking for?” Scott asked.

I was too saturated with Hemingway’s words to be startled, I guess, because all I did was look up at Scott and say, “Are you two in love?”

He leaned down and took all the letters and tucked them back into the folder. His hands shook, and I smelled wine on his breath as he said, “He’s my good friend, Zelda. Christ, now you’re after us, too?”

“The other night—”

“What about it?” To my practiced ear, he sounded defensive.

“You were talking in your sleep. About him. And you sounded … amorous.”

“That’s crazy.” He closed and locked the trunk, then turned to leave the room.

I followed him into the hallway. “You were drunk—do you even recall coming in and breaking that lamp?
Sloppy
drunk.” Throat tight, the pressure of tears behind my eyes, I said, “Maybe even drunk to the point of unedited honesty.”

Scott turned. “What did you say?”

I was crying now, couldn’t seem to help it. “I
said,
maybe McAlmon isn’t the ‘goddamned liar’ you two call him.” Scott’s eyes widened. “Maybe you’re both …
fairies,
and, and”—I drew a breath as his eyes widened even farther—“and it could be you just hide the truth in plain sight the way so many of the other fairies try to do.”

Scott shook his head as if to clear it. “You really are insane. You don’t have one shred of evidence—”

“You said his name a couple of times, and you said, ‘No more, baby,’ and you were moaning, and you’ve been just, my God,
consumed
with him and his career—”

“Stop it.” He grabbed my upper arm. “Do you hear me? I am
not
a fairy.
Ernest
is not a fairy. If I ever…” He paused, then swallowed and said, “If you ever so much as even accuse us in your
thoughts,
let alone suggest such a thing to anyone, I swear I will take my daughter and you’ll never see her or me again.”

“I’m
sorry,
” I cried. “It just seemed like … I mean, you don’t want
me
anymore.”

He released my arm. “What man would want a woman who thinks he’s a secret homosexual? Not to mention all you talk about is ballet and artists and—Jesus, Zelda—”

“What?”

“Nothing,” he said, his voice swollen with disgust. “I’m going out.”

He left me standing there in the hallway, the whole encounter spinning in my head. I had to brace my hands against the walls, could barely walk a straight line to the sofa.

When my emotions finally settled, though, I thought I understood what was probably true: When it came to Scott’s affections, I’d been displaced if not replaced and had only made the situation worse by confronting him. Probably, Scott loved Hemingway truly but platonically. Probably, he couldn’t see that Hemingway’s feelings weren’t so clean. That was the thing with Scott: if he loved you truly, he had trouble seeing your flaws.
What a gift,
I thought.
What a curse
.

Probably, I had my answers. And yet I was no happier than I’d been before.

45

A Saturday in early July: I was with three of my ballet classmates at a café when Pauline rolled her pram up past our table and parked it beside a broad ivy arch. Even in her Patou suit, Pauline looked harried. Motherhood hadn’t otherwise changed her, not visibly at least; possibly she’d made a connection between Hadley and motherhood and Hemingway’s roving eye. Predictable though it seems now, she didn’t know—none of us knew—that it wouldn’t matter a bit what she did or tried to do to keep that eye focused on her. She was trying to be his best wife, the same aspiration all of us had been taught to aim for. Which didn’t mean I liked her any better.

“Hi,” she said. “I saw you here and thought I’d just stop over and see whether you and Scott will be at Sara’s latest Dinner-Flowers-Gala next week, before everyone runs off for the summer.”

“That’s our plan.”

“What are you going to wear? I just bought this sweet little shift, Drum said it’s darling on me, but I don’t know—it’s rose-colored linen, with a nice contrasting—”

“Sounds perfect. I don’t know what I’m wearing; I guess I’ll decide that day.”

Pauline said, “Sure, I know you’re so busy these days with your dance lessons. You look fantastic; I just know that everything you could wear will look gorgeous on you. And of course Sara will wear something très élégant, and the apartment will be all decked out with flowers, and there’ll be a fine band, and, well, you know Sara, nothing halfway.”

I nodded. “Yep.”

The baby started fussing. Pauline stood, saying, “Just like his father, he hates to sit still. I’m off to the market, then.”

I ignored the invitation in her voice, the longing for me—or someone, anyone—to join her. If she was lonely, well, she’d made that bed for herself when she ended her single-girl-at-
Vogue
life while stealing another woman’s husband.

*   *   *

I visited with Tom Eliot and Jean Cocteau at Natalie’s salon that night, along with a group that included two women journalists who both were engaged and told me they intended to keep their jobs after marriage.