by Sally Koslow
My expectations calcify to a veneer of disillusionment.
“Do you know what the bitch did? Tried to get me committed. She’s the devil, that one. Untethered and dangerous.” Inside, Scott sucks on a cigarette as if it’s oxygen he needs for life support, and while it’s still lit, lights another, as he paces in circles.
The sense of romance that for the last twenty-four hours wrapped me in a wedding veil has blown out the window, through which I would like to hurl Scott. “Our conversation?” I ask. “Are you getting a divorce or not?”
“Damn right, I am. I’ve had it this time. I’m done. My marriage is dead. R.I.P. to the saddest family in America.” He makes the sign of the cross.
“What did Zelda say when you told her?”
With dead eyes he stares over my head.
“Does Zelda know you’re divorcing?”
Plans to leave Zelda may have crossed his mind—I will give him that—but there is no separation in the works. I am a child whose birthday cake has been snatched and trampled and yet he doesn’t notice.
“Back in a minute,” he says, and runs to his car.
I could pick up the paperweight on my table and throw it at the back of his head, but my internal brake is still on.
“Baby, I’m glad to see you,” Scott says when he returns with a bottle in his hand and gives me a sloppy kiss. “You have no idea.”
I squirm out of his embrace. “Oh, but I do.” I know the crush of disappointment and the swell of anger. “I have the idea that you’ll never get another job in this town if people know you’re drinking again.”
“Don’t tell a soul,” he says dramatically.
“Get out of here.” I dismiss Scott in the voice of Matron Weiss. “Go home and sleep it off.”
“But Sheilo,” he says. “It’s you I love.”
What does that matter? “Go home. Go home. Go home.”
He does.
At two o’clock in the morning, the doorbell rings. Of course it is Scott. His car has announced him. He bangs on the door and yells my name as I get out of bed and throw on a wrapper.
“What now?” I ask peeking over the chain lock.
“My shoulder—I think I broke it.”
There is a story I can’t follow about a brawl in a parking lot. “Get in my car, now,” I say and drive to the nearest hospital, run by an order of nuns who could make a general cower. Scott’s shoulder is only sprained, and he is discharged.
“Take me to your bed,” he begs.
“Not on your life. I don’t want to see you till you’ve stopped drinking. You’re a brilliant man. How can you do this to yourself again? It’s degrading, and it’s not only to you, it demeans me as well. Do you think at all of how your behavior makes me feel?” I cross my arms over my bosom and won’t avert my eyes until he answers.
“I can quit, you know.” His voice is barely a murmur.
“So you say.”
“It’s hell, but I’ll dry out. I’ll get a doctor. Nurses.”
“You should copyright that speech.”
We drive to the Garden of Allah, the twenty-four-hour cocktail party that is the last place Scott should live. I’m not fully listening as he describes the cure, though the words “vomit” and “intravenous feeding” escape.
A week later, the inevitable flowers arrive with a note of apology. Scott begs me to visit. I refuse. More flowers. More apologies. Days pass. I have two choices, love him—which truly isn’t a choice—or leave him. But I think of a third option and agree to visit.
Scott is wobbly and pale, though he has made an effort. Sober Scott always makes an effort. When I arrive he’s in a bow tie and a pink shirt. Like a sentencing judge, I spell out my terms.
“If you want to see me, not only must you stay sober, I want you to move to a cottage I found at the beach, in the movie colony.” I exalt Malibu’s advantages as if I were a real estate agent. “It’s cheaper than your flat, three times as big, only a forty-five-minute drive to the studio, and the housekeeper—Flora—is willing to stay for fifty dollars a week.”
With its green shutters and clapboard, the shack could have been transplanted from Long Island, albeit not anywhere near West Egg. If Scott has a late evening, I tell him he can stay with me on King’s Road. Instead of smoky rooms with clinking ice cubes, he’ll be surrounded by fresh sea air while he, ever the observer of human nature, can take notes on movie stars enjoying illicit assignations. I’ll visit often and we’ll walk on the beach, swim, soak up the warmth, and go to sleep to the lull of waves crashing against the rocks. Nothing, to me, is as vitalizing as the ocean. I refuse to believe its soothing powers can’t restore Scott Fitzgerald.
Malibu is my fantasy, not Scott’s, but the man is too weak to object. The next Saturday, I help him move his meager possessions to 114 Malibu Beach.
We fall into a gentle rhythm. I spend every weekend there along with one or two weeknights. From what I can tell, he takes to the tranquility of the sun and surf, praising Flora’s fried chicken and reporting that he is positive he saw Errol Flynn skinny-dipping with a girl who couldn’t be older than sixteen.
Chapter 31
1938
Scott is switched to Clare Boothe Luce’s Broadway hit The Women, yet another exploration of adultery, which lately—perhaps I’m hyperaware of this, being the poster girl for the topic—seems to be Hollywood’s pet subject. It’s a comedy of manners that reflects the viewpoint of females, on which Scott considers himself an authority, though I’d say he idolizes women far too much to truly understand us. Were Scott on the project alone, it could be a good fit. But boo-hoo. Donald Ogden Stewart and Anita Loos are collaborating as well, and Scott has proven he doesn’t play well with others, especially if they’re friends with top-flight screenwriting track records. “Nothing is as obnoxious as other people’s luck,” he complains. My role of consoling him is wearing me down. To distract both of us, I suggest luring our friends to Malibu for a beach party.
He has orchestrated the afternoon as if he were planning a military campaign: volleyball, relays, boxing matches, a tug-of-war, and a Ping-Pong tournament, for which Scott compiled teams, handicaps and all. There’s plenty of beer and lemonade, though Scott promises to drink only ice water.
It’s a fine day with a light breeze scattering clouds that rise like small soufflés. Flora and I have set out her deviled eggs, fried chicken, and macaroni salad along with watermelon and chocolate chip cookies. Our friends start arriving at noon—Dorothy and Alan, John O’Hara, Jonah, Eddie, Nunnally Johnson and his wife, Marion Byrnes, and about a dozen others.
Scott greets each arrival like the lord of the manor, oozing charm as if he were Dick Diver at the start of Tender Is the Night.
“Hey, old man.”
“Looking fetching.”
“No party without you, my friend.”
“Watch out, O’Hara, you rank amateur.”
He wraps one arm around my waist and I think how there are times when a hug means far more than a kiss. I am standing next to my beloved, the sun bouncing off the sea as if it is reflecting my happiness. Though it’s common knowledge that Scott and I are together, this is our first party. I feel like a bride. I wear a white eyelet sundress trimmed with ruffles, a broad straw hat, and a proud smile. I want everyone to have a good time, Scott especially.
About an hour after the guests arrive I point out two children peeking over the fence that separates our property from the next. The girl has long blond plaits; the boy is a towhead with curls and freckles. They must be about eight and ten.
“Come along,” Scott says to them in a friendly voice. “Join the party.”
I have never seen him with young children. He pulls a deck of cards from his pocket and begins to do tricks. “Here’s one I learned from a murderer at San Quentin,” he stage-whispers. “Now watch carefully.” He shuffles the deck, closes his eyes, and pirouettes three times. “Abracadabra.” Four kings appear.
When Scott wills it, magic surr
ounds him. I close my eyes and wish the children were ours.
The afternoon flits by and my ringmaster showers the same attention on our friends that he shows the children. More card tricks. Jokes. Songs. Also an odd prank played on a writer named Charlie, who is recovering from back surgery. Scott asks to speak to the man’s date in private. “I hate to be the messenger of bad news, but your Charlie is suffering from syphilis. Hence the brace. Without it he’d fall apart.”
The girl shrieks and demands that someone give her a ride home, abandoning Charlie. “You haven’t said anything to offend her, pal, have you?” Scott asks him, all innocence and nectar.
I take Scott aside. “The joke’s gone too far. You owe the poor guy an apology and tomorrow, you better send that woman a flower arrangement bigger than her head.”
“Mind your own fucking business,” he snaps, and as the verbal blow lands, I know. That isn’t water in his glass. Whatever brio has carried Scott along since noon has turned to reeling intoxication. It is also too late to hope that no guest heard his disrespect. As if on cue, people gather their partners and possessions, heading for cars.
Nunnally and his wife are walking out of the house with their bag when Scott yanks him by the arm and shoves him back inside and into the front bedroom, which—strangely—locks from the outside, making me wonder if our landlord routinely kept prisoners.
“Open that door at once,” I shout to Scott.
“Listen boy, get out of Hollywood before you’re ruined,” he yells to his hostage. “I can’t see you sell your soul.”
“What the hell?” Nunnally barks, pummeling the door. “Let me out.”
“Let him out!” I echo.
“In a pig’s eye. Not till you promise to do as I say, Nunn. Hollywood sucks the blood from every decent writer. If you have talent, it will kill it.” Scott begins to list all the writers who he believes have been destroyed by writing perfunctory plots for movies. Anita Loos, Donald Ogden Stewart, and Ted Panatere make the list, though, curiously, he himself does not.
“I’d be a chump to give it up,” Nunnally bellows from his jail cell. “I earn more here than anywhere. Good God, why would I run away?”
“To preserve your gift, my friend.”
“You’re a literary lion—” I hear a facetious tone, but Scott nods, taking the praise as his due. “I don’t have a special gift. I’m a penny-a-line guy who needs the work. A drudge.”
“Sweetheart, no. You’re much better than that,” wails Marion, his wife.
“Darling, I’ll handle this,” Nunnally says, his voice muffled yet irate. “Now let me out, Fitzgerald, for Chrissake.”
“He’s right. Let him out,” I say for the umpteenth time. I cannot fathom why Scott fails to grasp that Hollywood writers are mere hired hands, expected to bootlick. They stick together not because they like one another—though occasionally they do—but to share grievances. None of them actually roots for the next guy.
“Sheilo, stay out of this.”
“You’ll not speak to me that way, Scott.”
“Listen to Sheilah,” Nunnally says.
“Please, Mr. Fitzgerald,” Marion moans.
Perhaps it’s the “Mister” that makes Scott say, “I’ll open the door, you sorry sonofabitch, so long as you give me your word you’ll make plans to return to New York and protect your talent.”
“I promise, I promise.” Nunnally’s voice is hoarse and frantic.
Scott unlocks the door. Nunnally and Marion make for his car like greyhounds, with Scott—slower, drunker—in pursuit. He bangs on the car door. “You’ll never come back here. Never.”
“Nunnally, we hope you and Marion will visit again soon,” I say and feel the eyes of the other guests, though I’m long past embarrassment.
“No, he’ll never come back because it makes him sick that I live here with my paramour,” Scott hisses, and turns to the few people who remain, “and all the rest of you feel the same way. You’re disgusted that I’m living in sin with Sheilah”—he looks me up and down—“in her ridiculous virginal dress.”
“Sheilah, ignore the bum.” Dorothy turns to Scott and adds, “For fuck’s sake, shut up, you jackass.”
But Scott repeats “paramour,” a word from an era of less forgiving morals. I slap him, hard, across his face, for this unforgivable coda to my storybook afternoon. He stands still, mumbling, “What the hell?” while the guests who remain pile into cars. I send them off with hasty goodbyes, summoning a residue of dignity. Then I turn to Scott. “Why can’t you behave like a gentleman?” But I don’t wait for the answer. I run to the ocean.
Scott is a beast. Scott has an illness he cannot control. Scott is a childish mess on whom God made a grave error when He bestowed on him talent of staggering proportions. Scott is infected by Zelda’s craziness. Scott made Zelda batty. Scott hurts those he loves and drags them down with him.
I hate Scott. I love Scott. From the distance, I see him peel away in his car. I believe he is exceeding his twenty-mile-an-hour speed limit.
I muster my equanimity and help Flora clean the cottage before I send her home. The air is turning cold, but I return to the beach and let the waves drown out a new wave of sobs. I’m standing at the water’s edge when Scott returns with a fresh bottle of gin, and walks toward me. I expect an overweening apology, but he continues on as if I don’t exist, into the ocean, fully clothed.
Scott has chosen tonight for his inaugural swim in Malibu.
As if it were a spear, I throw the first item I can find, a rotted oar. My tennis arm refuses to fail me, and the oar smacks Scott’s shoulder as he bobs in the surf. “Are you trying to kill me?” he shouts.
I head for my car and drive back to Hollywood, hoping he drowns.
The next afternoon, the roses arrive. A note dripping with contrition follows, and then calls that would plead for forgiveness did I not hang up, again and again. I have made sure I do not have an empty evening looming by planning a dinner with Robert Taylor. It’s a work-related engagement that I initiated, but I dress in a raspberry pink, form-fitting cocktail suit. Robert escorts me to his Cadillac, where his driver waits. Halfway down the block, Scott is parked, stalking me.
All Robert seems to have in common with Scott, who is fifteen years older, is chain smoking. Though it’s nothing like the bond I feel with Scott, I sense a frisson of electricity with Robert, whose version of indigenous midwestern American appeal is entirely his own; the man does not allow his emotions to hang out like shirttails. “In Nebraska,” he says, “should a feeling come up, we shoo it into the barn and lock it up.” It’s a night sealed by a more than pleasant kiss shortly past midnight. By that time, Scott’s car is gone, but at ten in the morning he calls.
“Looking for your paramour?” I ask.
“That slur was unforgivable, Sheilo,” he says. “You know it was the gin talking. I’m so very sorry.”
“But why were you drinking?” My voice rises. “Your promises are hollow. Tell me, what was the point of suffering through your cure?”
“I realize even my friends think I’m a dissipated carcass. I was trying to be an impresario, a natural-born host, like Gerald Murphy back in the day. I couldn’t, not without liquid to blur the lines.”
“You’re stronger than that.”
“I’m not, evidently. I’m fallible, a flawed fellow who loves his Sheilah. Do you love me?”
I remain angry. “That’s never been in question. The point is, you hurt me.”
“I’m so sorry—I will say it a thousand times. Hurting you hurts me. Please, Presh. Another chance.”
“Why?” My voice rises. “You’ll only hurt me again. I need you to promise you’ll never do that.”
“I won’t. I adore you.”
Do I dare believe him? I want to, but I’m afraid. “I also need to know, do you drink to find yourself or to lose yourself?”
He pauses before he answers. “I honestly can’t say. Probably both, and it’s always a mistake.”
>
I am familiar with mistakes. I have made a tradition of them.
My mind ticks off an inventory of Scott’s best qualities: gentleness, kindness, humor, self-deprecation, generosity, myopic devotion—is there anything I have ever said to him that the man doesn’t recall? —and his willingness not to blame anyone but himself for his shortcomings. Apart from the drunk lives the real Scott, an entirely different man. There are two Scotts, and I apparently can’t have one without the other.
I can now chart the cycle of our reconciliations. Biblical indignation. Disappearance. Flowers and apology. Then it gets to the dangerous part, where I fall in love all over again, never failing to expect that the high will be higher than the last low.
Inevitably, with Scott, this brew leads to reconciliation, his Puritan temporarily locked away in the closet. We reunite, insatiable.
Scott is addicted to alcohol, and I am addicted to the only man who has ever truly seen me. “Sheilo, only you can figure me out,” he has claimed. That works both ways. Others have admired my appearance, even temperament and charm, but he alone penetrates beyond these attributes to love me for my intellect, my heart, and my character. We are each the answer that completes the other’s crossword puzzle.
Scott responds to me as no one has before. He listens and takes me seriously, and it has been this way since the moment we met. The minute he breaks into a smile, tilts his head, looks at me a certain way, and calls me “Presh” or “Sheilo,” I’m there, adoring him, ready to spontaneously combust.
Speaking to Scott now reminds me of how much I miss kissing him and being kissed. My resolve begins to wash away like a sandcastle crumbling at the beach. I want to strip off his shirt, bury my head in his chest, and savor the salty smell of his sweat mixed with his citrusy aftershave. I’m willing to overlook a wide swath of ghastly behavior to have that again with the closeness it brings. No other man will do. I want the real Scott. I cannot give him up. Why am I torturing myself?
“We’ll give it a try,” I say.
