The Crack-Up

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Her body was so assertively adequate that someone remarked that she always looked as if she had nothing on underneath her dress, but it was probably wrong.

  A few little unattached sections of her sun-warm hair blew back and trickled against the lobe of the ear closest to him, as if to indicate that she was listening.

  A square-chinned, decided girl with fleshy white arms and a white dress that reminded Basil domestically of the lacy pants that blew among the laundry in the yard.

  He saw she was lying, but it was a brave lie. They talked from their hearts—with the half truths and evasions peculiar to that organ, which has never been famed as an instrument of precision.

  “I look like a femme fatale.”

  After a certain degree of prettiness, one pretty girl is as pretty as another.

  Shimmering with unreality for the fancy-dress party.

  Popularly known as the “Death Ray.” She was an odd little beauty with a skull-like face and hair that was a natural green-gold—the hair of a bronze statue by sunset.

  He rested a moment on the verandah—resting his eyes on a big honeysuckle that cut across a low sickle moon—then as he started down the steps his abstracted glance fell upon a trailer from it sleeping in the moonlight.

  She was the girl from foreign places; she was so asleep that you could see the dream of those places in the faint lift of her forehead. He struck the inevitable creaky strip and promptly the map of wonderland written on the surface of women’s eyebrows creased into invisibility.

  His brisk blond sidelocks scratched her cheek while a longer tenuous end of gold silk touched him in the corner of his eye.

  She wore the usual little dishpan cover.

  She was small with a springy walk that would have been aggressive if it had been less dainty.

  Her mouth was made of two small intersecting cherries pointing off into a bright smile.

  What’s a girl going to do with herself on a boat— fish?

  The girl hung around under the pink sky waiting for something to happen. There were strange little lines in the trees, strange little insects, unfamiliar night cries of strange small beasts beginning.

  Those are frogs, she thought, or no, those are crillons— what is it in English?—those are crickets up by the pond.— That is either a swallow or a bat, she thought; then again, the difference of trees—then back to love and such practical things. And back again to the different trees and shadows, skies and noises—such as the auto horns and the barking dog up by the Philadelphia turnpike. . . .

  Her face, flowing out into the world under an amazing Bersaglieri bonnet, was epicene; as they disembarked at the hotel the sight of her provoked a curious sigh-like sound from a dense mass of women and girls who packed the side-walk for a glimpse of her, and Bill realized that her position, her achievement, however transient and fortuitous, was neither a little thing nor an inheritance. She was beauty for a hundred afternoons, its incarnation in millions of aspiring or fading lives. It was impressive, startling and almost magnificent.

  Half an hour later, sitting a few feet from the judgment dais, he saw a girl detach herself from a group who were approaching it in threes—it was a girl in a white evening dress with red gold hair and under it a face so brave and tragic that it seemed that every eye in the packed hall must be fixed and concentrated on its merest adventures, the faintest impression upon her heart.

  Women having only one role—their own charm—all the rest is mimicry.

  If you keep people’s blood in their heads it won’t be where it should be for making love.

  Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known.

  Her air of saying, “This is my opportunity of learning something,” beckoned their egotism imperatively near.

  A frown, the shadow of a hair in breadth, appeared between her eyes.

  The little fourteen-year-old nymph in the Vagabonds.

  Wearing a kimono bright with big blue moons, she sat up among the pillows, drawing her lips by a hand-glass.

  He had thought of her once as a bubble and had told her about it—an iridescent soap-blown bubble with a thin delicate film over all the colors of the rainbow. He had stopped abruptly at that point but he was conscious, too, of the sun panning gold from the clear brooks of her hair, of her tawny skin—hell! he had to stop thinking of such things.

  She was eighteen, with such a skin as the Italian painters of the decadence used for corner angels, and all the wishing in the world glistening in her grey eyes.

  Wherever she was became a beautiful and enchanted place to Basil, but he did not think of it that way. He thought the fascination was inherent in the locality, and long afterward a commonplace street or the mere name of a city would exude a peculiar glow, a sustained sound, that struck his soul alert with delight. In her presence he was too absorbed to notice his surroundings; so that her absence never made them empty, but, rather, sent him seeking for her through haunted rooms and gardens that he had never really seen before.

  The glass doors hinged like French windows, shutting them in on all sides. It was hot. Down through three more compartments he could see another couple—a girl and her brother, Minnie said—and from time to time they moved and gestured soundlessly, as unreal in these tiny human conservatories as the vase of paper flowers on the table. Basil walked up and down nervously.

  Life burned high in them both; the steamer and its people were at a distance and in darkness.

  What was it they said? Did you hear it? Can you remember?

  She was a thin burning flame, colorless yet fresh. Her smile came first slowly, shy and bold, as if all the life of that little body had gathered for a moment around her mouth and the rest of her was a wisp that the least wind would blow away. She was a changeling whose lips were the only point of contact with reality.

  Came up to him taking his hand as though she was stepping into the circle of his arm.

  The tilted shadow of her nose on her cheek, the point of dull fire in her eyes.

  Mae’s pale face and burning lips faded off, faded out, against the wild dark background of the war.

  The copper green eyes, greener than the green-brown foliage around them.

  She gave him a side smile, half of her face, like a small white cliff.

  Flustered, Johanna fumbled for an apology. Nell jumped up and was suddenly at the window, a glitter of leaves in a quick wind, a blond glow of summer lightning. Even in her state of intimidation, Johanna noticed that she seemed to bear with her, as she moved, a whole dream of women’s future; bore it from the past into the present, as if it were a precious mystery she held in the carriage of her neck and arms.

  A girl who could send tear-stained telegrams.

  The lady was annoyed, and so intense was her personality that it had taken only a fractional flexing of her eyes to indicate the fact. She was a dark, pretty girl with a figure that would be full-blown sooner than she wished. She was just eighteen.

  Hallie Bushmill was young and vivid and light, with a boy’s hair and a brow that bulged just slightly, like a baby’s brow.

  Sat a gold-and-ivory little beauty with dark eyes and a moving childish smile that was like all the lost youth in the world.

  He bent and kissed her braided forehead.

  Helen Avery’s voice and the drooping of her eyes, when she finished speaking, like a sort of exercise in control, fascinated him. He had felt that they both tolerated something, that each knew half of some secret about people and life, and that if they rushed toward each other, there would be a romantic communication of almost unbelievable intensity. It was this element of promise and possibility that had haunted him for a fortnight and was now dying away.

  Standing at the gate with that faint glow behind her, Dinah was herself the garden’s last outpost, its most representative flower.

  Lola Shisbe had never wrecked a railroad in her life. But she was just sixteen and you had only to look at her to know that her destructive period was g
oing to begin any day now.

  He saw now, framing her face in the crook of his arm, her resemblance to Kay Phillips, or rather the genus to which they both belonged. The hard little chin, the small nose, the taut, wan cheeks—it was the way actresses made up to play the woman wronged and tubercular: a matter of structure and shadows of course, for they had fresh cheeks. Again, in Dinah the created lines were firmness—in Kay they had an aesthetic value alone.

  Your eyes always shining as if you had fever.

  Passing within the radius of the girl’s perfume.

  Then for a moment they faded into the sweet darkness so deep that they were darker than the darkness, so that for a while they were darker than the black trees—then so dark that when she tried to look up at him she could but look at the wild waves of the universe over his shoulder and say, “Yes, I guess I love you, too.”

  Nymph of the harvest.

  She was the tongue of flame that made the firelight vivid.

  “Sometimes I’d see you in the distance, moving along like a golden chariot.” After twenty minutes of such eloquence, Alida began to feel exceedingly attractive. She was tired and rather happy, and eventually she said: “All right, you can kiss me if you want to, but it won’t mean anything. I’m just not in that mood.”

  Long white gloves dripping from her forearms.

  Her eyes shone at Bill with friendly interest, and then, just before the car shot away, she did something else with them—narrowed them a little and then widened them, recognizing by this sign the uniqueness of their relationship. “I see you,” it seemed to say. “You registered. Everything’s possible.”

  Emily, who was twenty-five and carried space around with her into which he could step and be alone with their two selves.

  She was a bundle of fur next to Caros Moros, and he saw the latter drop his arm around her till they were one mass of fur together.

  He took them each in one arm, like a man in a musical comedy, and kissed the rouge on their cheeks.

  Her low voice wooed him casually from some impersonal necessity of its own.

  It was fine hearing Nora say that she never looked behind.

  A woman’s laughter when it’s like a child—just—one syllable, eager and approving, a crow and a cry of delight.

  She took it to the rocker and settled herself to a swift seasick motion which she found soothing.

  Her voice seemed to hesitate after consonants and then out came resonant and clear vowels—ahs and ohs and joyful ees lingering on the air.

  Her hair was soft as silk and faintly curling. Her hair was stiff fluff, her hair was a damp, thick shiny bank. It was not this kind or that kind, it was all hair.

  Her mouth was (different things about her mouth, contrary things, impossible to reconcile—and always with:) It was not this kind or that kind of mouth, it was all mouths.

  Also nose, eyes, legs, etc., same ending.

  Always a glisten of cold cream under her eyes, of wet rouge on her lips.

  Griselda was now unnaturally calm; as a woman becomes when she feels that, in the man, she has fulfilled her intuitive role and is passing along the problem to the man.

  Her lovely straggled hair.

  She felt nice and cool after a dip in the lake, felt her pink dress where it touched her, frothy as pink soda water, all fresh in the new wind. When Roger appeared, she would make him sorry for his haughtiness of the last twenty-four hours.

  He had once loved a girl with a blight (describe) on her teeth, who hid it by reaching down her upper lip when any emotion was in sight—laughter or tears—and laughing with a faint bowing of her head—and then, being absolutely sure she had not exposed her scar, laughing quite freely and exposing it. He had adopted the mannerism, and, to get on with what happened and why, he was still doing the same thing, etc.

  * * * *’s gay, brave, stimulating, “Tighten up your belt, baby, let’s get going. To any Pole.” I am astonished sometimes by the fearlessness of women, the recklessness like * *, * *,* *. In each case, it’s partly because they are all three spoiled babies who never felt the economic struggle on their shoulders. But it’s heartening when it stays this side of recklessness. In each case, I’ve had to strike a balance and become the cautious petit bourgeois, after, in each case, throwing them off their initial balance. Yet consider * * * *, who was a clergyman’s daughter—and equally with the others had everything to lose and nothing to gain economically. She had the same recklessness. It’s a question of age and the times to a great extent . . .

  * * * * looks like a trinket.

  Some impressions of the Carnival. What made everyone walk all through the train to get out; the boys smashing baggage at the station; the high snowdrifts; the girls’ faces in the car windows drifting ghost-like past the watchers; the yell of recognition as a last watcher found some last girl; the figures in the dark passing the frat houses on their way to the carnival. The comparative bareness of the scene where the queens were chosen. How did some of those girls get there—some must have been accidents or at least chosen by pull or the wrong girl tapped—they weren’t the twenty prettiest girls there. Some pretty girls must have ducked it.

  A young woman came out of the elevator and wavered uneasily across the lobby.

  Myron Selznick’s, “Beautiful—she’ll lose that pudgy baby fat.”

  Beggar’s lips that would not beg in vain.

  * * * * is still a flapper. Fashions, names, manners, customs and morals change, but for * * * * it is still 1920. This concerns me, for there is no doubt that she originally patterned herself upon certain immature and unfortunate writings of mine, so I have a special indulgence for * * * * as for one who has lost an arm or leg in one’s service.

  She was a ripe grape, ready to fall for the mere shaking of a vine.

  The sunlight dodged down to her hair through bright red maple and bronze eucalyptus leaves that bent down low to say to the young men: “See, we are nothing beside her cheeks, her russet hair.”

  One of those girls who straighten your necktie to show that in her lay the spirit of the eternal mother.

  A girl who thought the whole thing was awfully overestimated.

  She’s all tied up in knots, that girl.

  Anything added to beauty has to be paid for—that is, the qualities that pass as substitutes can be liabilities when added to beauty itself.

  The car was gay with girls, whose excited chatter filled the damp rubbery air like smoke.

  Women are fragile that way. You do something to them at certain times and literally nothing can ever change what you’ve done.

  Your voice with the lovely pathetic little peep at the crescendo of the stutter.

  * * * * comes up to people when she meets them as if she were going to kiss them on the mouth, or walk right through them, looking them straight in the eyes—then stops a bare foot away and says her Hello, in a very disarming understatement of a voice. This approach is her nearest to Zelda’s personality. Zelda’s was always a vast surprise.

  She kissed him several times then in the mouth, her face getting big as it came up to him, her hands holding him by the shoulders, and still he kept his arms by his side.

  Among the very few domestics in sight that morning was a handsome young maid sweeping the steps of the biggest house on the street. She was a large simple Mexican girl with the large simple ambitions of the time and the locality, and she was already conscious of being a luxury—she received one hundred dollars a month in return for her personal liberty.

  Who with every instant was dancing further and further off with Caros Moros into a youthful Spanish dream.

  At [her] voice full of husky laughter his stomach froze.

  Josephine’s lovely face with its expression of just having led the children from a burning orphan asylum did the rest.

  She admired him; she was used to clasping her hands together in his wake and heaving audible sighs.

  She wore a blue crepe-de-chine dress sprinkled with soft brown leaves that were
the color of her eyes.

  Instead, she let the familiar lift and float and flow of love close around them, pulling him back from his far-away uniqueness.

  It was a harvest night, bright enough to read by. Josephine sat on the verandah steps listening to the tossing of sleepless birds, the rattle of a last dish in the kitchen, the sad siren of the Chicago-Milwaukee train.

  She saw through to his profound woundedness, and something quivered inside her, died out along the curve of her mouth and in her eyes.

  Their hearts had in some way touched across two feet of Paris sunlight.

  Of a despairing afternoon in a little speakeasy on Forty-eighth Street in the last sad months.

  Crackly yellow hair.

  A girl with a bright red dress and a friendly dog jumping at her under the arcs.

  Her face was a contrast between herself looking over a frontier—and a silhouette, an outline seen from a point of view, something finished—white, polite, “npolished—it was a destiny, scarred a little with young wars, worried with old white faiths . . . And out of it looked eyes so green that they were like phosphorescent marbles, so green that the scarcely dry clay of the face seemed dead beside it.

  The white glints in her eyes cracked the heavens as a diamond would crack glass, and let stream down a whiter light than he had ever seen before; it shone over a wide beautiful mouth, set and frightened.

  Looking for a last time into her eyes, full of cool secrets.

  Pushing a strand of indefinite hair out of her eyes.

  They swayed suddenly and childishly together.

  Mae Purley, without the involuntary quiver of an eyelash, fitted the young man into her current dream.

  For some years there had been the question as to whether or not Boops was going to have a nose. There was a sort of button between her big dark eyes, eyes that were round at the bottom, half moons hinting that half a person lay undivulged—but at eleven the button was still rudimentary and so unnoticeable that of a winter her elders were often driven frantic by its purls and mutterings, its gurgles, hisses and back-firings, before it occurred to them to say, “Blow it.”

  He had passed the wire to her, to a white rose blooming without reason at the end of a cross-bar on the edge of space and time like a newly created tree.