Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

by Therese Anne Fowler

  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.”

  “Is that so?” I said, still annoyed.

  “It is so. Greatest of my generation, and the top second-rater of all time.”

  Top second-rater. I had to laugh, and just like that my annoyance was gone. I said, “It’s good that you’ve got it all in proper perspective.”

  I tried the wine; it had a dark, velvety flavor, like blackberries and vanilla and ancient hillside moss. Bats swooped past above the olive trees, keeping those bloodthirsty mosquitoes at bay. A church bell tolled in the distance. Nearer to us, a dog barked halfheartedly. The scent of lavender floated up the hillside from where it grew among the rocks at the sea’s edge.

  Scott said, “This is the place where we make it all happen. I can feel it.”

  “Well, I do have to say it’s nice to hear you sound so certain again.”

  “It’s nice to feel certain. It’s been a tough couple of years.”

  “We did pretty well, though,” I said. “There were some good times.”

  “Too many. I’m a wreck. Spongy”—he pinched his stomach, which did have some rolls now—“lazy, and my production is way, way off. Do you realize that for two years—more than two years, in fact—I hardly produced anything? One failed play, half a dozen stories, a few reviews, and a few articles. That was it, before I locked myself up and did those stories over the winter. This novel should’ve been finished a year ago. I’m twenty-seven years old. Time is running out.”

  “Running out how?” Stars had appeared now, and the moon was sneaking out from behind the distant mountains.

  “I told you, it has to happen before I’m thirty.”

  “What has to happen?” I knew he didn’t mean the book getting done; that had to happen before the money ran out.

  “Immortality. By thirty, a writer’s vitality is gone, and his unique vision with it. Anything he’s got to say about the world has to be seen through his youth, his unjaded—or less jaded—eyes. Remember that article I wrote, ‘What I Think and Feel at Twenty-five?’ To the me who wrote Paradise, I’m already an old man.”

  “You’re forgetting people like George. He’s got lots of sharp thoughts and observations, and he’s forty-two now.”

  “He doesn’t write fiction.”

  “If you’re so worried, I don’t know what you’re doing out here with me wasting your time. Get to work.”

  He stood up, and I thought he was going to do just what I’d said. But he took my hands and pulled me up from my chair.

  “What I’m doing out here”—he put his arms around my waist and held me against him—“is reminding myself why it is I asked such a beautiful and impressive woman to follow me to and from—what was that list you made?—all those places, and making sure to thank her sincerely for doing so.”

  23

  The first time I lost track of myself, truly lost all trace of me, the girl I’d been, the woman I thought I was becoming, would happen there in Saint-Raphael, while I was wrapped in the benevolent warmth of a Mediterranean summer.

  The romantic ending to our night on the terrace was a romantic ending, period. With Scott shut away all day working in what would ordinarily have been Villa Marie’s servant’s cottage, and Lillian in charge of Scottie, and no cooking or housework for me to do—which I did poorly anyway, it’s true—there was a very big hole in my day, every day. A big hole in my life, really, seeing as how this would be our routine indefinitely, and I had no friends at hand. Days longer than whole months crawled by. Though I read some and painted a little, restlessness was like a mosquito always buzzing about my head.

  Lillian had firm ideas of what should constitute a toddler’s day. I wrote to Mama,

  She makes Scottie eat all her fruits and vegetables and has begun teaching her the alphabet forwards and backwards both. They have morning exercise and afternoon exercise and bath and tea and what Lillian calls “the lesson period.” If I interrupt, Lillian scowls at me. I want to let her go, but Scott says—wisely, I suppose—that with the way I eat and my devil-may-care approach to the day, I’m no kind of teacher for a young child. He says Scottie needs structure and discipline or she’s bound to turn out like me, and we wouldn’t want that, would we?

  And Mama wrote back,

  In matters regarding the nanny, I would have to agree with Scott. We never did give you enough discipline in your early years, which resulted in some very trying times in your adolescence. I believe the Judge is still tired from raising you. The English are supposed to be superior nannies—though our old Aunt Julia was wonderful in her way—so my advice is that you find productive uses for your time. Write to your sisters; they worry about you, as do Daddy and I. But then, that habit will never leave a parent no matter how the child’s life proceeds.

  To pass my time, I reverted to my Westport habits of wandering the surrounding countryside during the cool mornings, and swimming at the beach in the afternoons. Oh, it was heaven to
dive into the warm, so-blue waters at our little stretch of beach and swim until I was exhausted. The last of my stubborn post-baby fat disappeared, melting away into the sea, and my skin absorbed the sunshine and begged for more. Now and then I’d persuade Lillian to include beach time in Scottie’s exercise periods, and now and then Scott would break from his work and join us, and we’d get a visitor for an afternoon or an overnight once in a while. Mostly, though, I was on my own.

  I’d taken to bringing sketchbook and pencil and books to the beach with me. On a wide reed mat, I would lie in the sunshine like a sleek otter after a swim, and then I’d pass the day drawing anemones, reading James or Kipling or Ford Madox Ford and Colette’s provocative French romance Chéri, which I’d selected to help improve my understanding of the language, but which may have seeded my brain for trouble. I might jot down story ideas or write to my sisters or my friends. Entire days could disappear this way, and did.

  The aviators we knew from the casino also began to come to the beach, three in particular, Édouard, René, and Bobbé. Their schedules had them training at night. They would arrive in their white, white beach clothes and put their mats down near mine, and we’d talk, them with their iffy English, me with my slowly improving French. They thought Scott and I were so cosmopolitan, so glamorous; they wanted to know everything about New York and literary fame.

  The men were, all of them, lean and handsome and inquisitive and good-natured. Édouard Jozan, though, had the keenest mind, the softest manner. On the occasions when we’d seen him in the casino, he and Scott and I had debated things like nationalism and heroism and the question of art versus action.

  “To write the book—eh, novel—it is all very good, yes. Mais the young man must demonstrate the thought, not represent it in words. If he does not, there will be no change, no resistance. Anarchy will rule.”

  “What gives the acting man the instruction for what to do and how to do it, though?” Scott replied. “Books do! And novels do this best of all. They present the situation and model the hero so that you and your friends can emulate him—or not emulate him, as the case may be, dependent of course upon the story.”

  “This result we can achieve by discussion, though.”

  “The spoken word is fleeting. That’s why novelists are so essential: we record everything we see, we dissect and analyze and reproduce the essence of what matters, for posterity.”

  “Too much time!” Édouard said, shaking his head. “This writing and the reading, it is wasted time, when things could instead get done. Zelda, don’t fear your misguided husband, tell me, what is it you believe?”

  “Surely there are times when there’s too much thought and not enough action, and times when there’s too much action without enough thought. What I really think, though,” I continued, “is that somebody here had better take some action and dance with me before I run off and find somebody who will!”

  I saw so little of Scott during my endless weeks, and even less of him solo. If he wasn’t writing the book, he was thinking about it, or talking about it, or we were with Scottie or a friend, or we were out. In bed at night, he put off my affections: “I’m already exhausted. Making love will ruin me, Zelda. The energy I’d spend, well, I have to keep it stored and waiting for the book.”

  * * *

  Édouard was a year older than me, and something in the way he listened so carefully made me think he valued me as more than just an amusing American. As June rolled into July, he began to show up to the beach without René and Bobbé. He’d put his mat right beside mine and then ask me to tell him about the South, and my childhood. “Tell everything, s’il vous plaît; your voice, it is my delight.”

  I had already sensed the attraction between us—it was apparent from the first time we met—but that sort of attraction was so usual that it didn’t rate serious attention, let alone concern. When the attraction turned into something that smelled and tasted like substance, though, that was when things got complicated.

  A married woman will first deny to herself that anything improper is going on. She’ll make excuses for her eagerness to see the man in question. She likes his sharp mind, for example, or his fresh views or the stories he tells about his experiences, which are so different from her own. She’ll dismiss as mere amusement her mind’s tendency to wonder where he is and what he’s doing and whether he’s thinking of her. She might even avoid the fella for a day or two, to test herself: if she doesn’t see him and she feels fine about that, she’ll know there’s no cause for concern. The test is false though, too, because she’s lying to herself to make sure she passes the test, which will then justify her choice to see him again, often.

  Imagine languorous days with no responsibilities. Loneliness and Dismay are your regular companions, but they’re muted by soft sand, a sun-filled sky, and warm blue water, the sight and feel of which makes you drunk. Imagine your body is youthful, firm, a pleasure to live inside of—and you’re wise enough already to know that this is fleeting, this body and its condition. It won’t last. None of it will last. And because it won’t, you allow the beautiful person who seeks you out to become as much a part of your day, a part of this place, as the poppies that grow beside the rocky paths you follow to get here. You allow affections to develop and grow as if they, too, are poppies. You let it happen because all of it is illusory anyway, that’s how it feels, and that’s what you believe.

  This lovely illusion, though, this romantic fantasy, will begin to seem real if given a chance, every bit as surely as delusions are real to a person suffering a breakdown.

  A week into July, I was sure I’d fallen in love.

  * * *

  At the open-air, beachfront café, Scott sat at the table across from me. Gerald was to my left, Sara to his left. The children ran about the beach, with Lillian and the Murphy children’s nanny keeping watch. Lillian had dressed Scottie in a celery-colored jumper and a little straw hat; the hat hung down her back by its ribbons; the ribbon’s ends blew about in the breeze. She and little Patrick, who was her same age almost to the day, held hands, even while running. She has her little beach-love, too, I thought.

  “How do you feel about Venice, Zelda?”

  “Sorry, what?”

  “She’s been terribly distracted lately,” Scott said.

  If that’s not the pot calling the kettle black …

  Gerald repeated, “We’re contemplating a trip to Venice. Cole’s doing a tremendous gala of some sort in this extravagant villa he and Linda found. Extravagant palace, rather. Forgive me for being gauche enough to say this, but they’re paying four thousand a month in American dollars for the place. I find it hard to support that behavior.”

  “You know Linda’s well-off,” Sara told Scott and me. “Her first husband had to compensate her substantially when they divorced. But Cole came into a great deal of money of his own last year, and he seems determined to use it like water.”

  Gerald said, “His grandfather was J. O. Cole, of Indiana—whose money was in mining and timber. Well, it was in speculation, Cole says. Calls him ‘the richest man in Indiana!’ in that way he has, you know.”

  Scott said, “How rich is rich?”

  “He didn’t name a figure, and I didn’t ask, of course, but how’s this: he’s hired Sergei Diaghilev and the entire Ballets Russes for entertainment.”

  The word ballet finally centered me on the discussion. “What’s this about Diaghilev?”

  Sara said, “We’ve all been close to Sergei for years; he’s tireless, and so talented. Last year he put on Gerald and Cole’s production, Within the Quota. Gerald did all the costume and set designs. It was a remarkable experience.”

  “I wish we’d seen it. I used to dance,” I said.

  “The man hired an entire ballet company to perform at a party?” Scott said. “The whole company?”

  I thought we’d seen enough displays of wealth on Long Island that Scott would take another one in stride. Apparently not. This was, for me, yet ano
ther sign of why Édouard would be so much better for me than Scott had become. Édouard wouldn’t sit there gaping at the idea of what Cole was doing. Édouard wouldn’t care, except to express pleasure at the idea of this unusual presentation of fine performance art. “For the expression of life’s truest agonies and beauty,” he’d said to me, “nothing can exceed the dance.”

  Everything Scott said rankled; everything Édouard said reigned. I was a woman possessed.

  Gerald was frowning at Scott. “The whole company, yes.”

  “His place there is that big, really?”

  “He says it’s quite large.”

  “Four thousand, you say?”

  “Scott,” I said, “quit bothering Gerald with all that.”

  “I’m just curious. In the book, see, I’m trying to work out the details about this wealthy character—”

  “Let’s stay on Gerald’s subject, all right?”

  Scott reached for one of Sara’s hands and one of Gerald’s. “Forgive me. My enthusiasm and curiosity sometimes overcome my good sense.”

  “Not a bit,” Gerald said. “At any rate, we’re not sure whether we should go. We’ve got so much to do, what with the renovations to the new villa starting; I don’t feel we can get away.”

  I said, “For a ballet performance like this? Of course you can!”

  “You say you danced?” Gerald asked.

  “She was first-rate,” Scott said. “In fact, the first time I laid eyes on her, she was performing a ballet solo.”

  His reminder of that long-ago night, the romance of it, the treasure it had once been in my memory, was a thin, sharp knife’s thrust to the gut—but it was over so quickly that I could almost decide it hadn’t happened at all. Scott hadn’t seen it; Sara and Gerald couldn’t tell.