Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

by Therese Anne Fowler

  “You could take Zelda,” Gerald told his wife.

  “Now there’s a thought!” Sara replied brightly. “Should we plan on it?”

  “Why not?” I said.

  * * *

  The next morning, Scott sulked about not being invited. “I want to see Venice again. I didn’t fully appreciate it the first time. All that history!—you don’t even care about that; you’re only going for the party.”

  “I do care, and I’m going for the performance, and you have a book to finish.”

  “I think I’ll find Dos Passos and see if he’s interested in going to Monte Carlo.”

  “Book,” I said.

  “Or Dick Myers.”

  “Book.”

  “A few days won’t ruin me.”

  “A few days of drinking and gambling—not the best idea.”

  “I deserve some time off. You’re not the only one who deserves to have fun. In fact, you don’t actually deserve it at all; what have you been doing all summer except flirting with those flyboys and lying in the sun?”

  I said nothing.

  “You should try living my life. Locked away all day, sweating blood over how to make this damned plot work. You should try being the one who’s supporting a wife and child and household—that damn cook is cheating us blind, you know. Did you see the grocery bill?”

  I left the table.

  “Where are you going?”

  “For a swim. I wouldn’t want to disappoint you.”

  The morning was cloudy, the water cool. I wanted it colder, wanted it to shock my senses, help me understand what was happening, help me know what to do.

  I hadn’t confessed my feelings to Édouard—though I was certain he knew them. Knew them and returned them; why else was he seeing me alone, edging his mat closer to mine, lying there beside me talking of passion and life and love? What I was less sure of was what might happen next. How far was I willing to go?

  Lying alongside Édouard on the beach that afternoon, I could smell his warm, musky skin, so exotic to me after five years of having only Scott so naked and near. With our eyes closed to the sun, were he and I both imagining the same things? I hoped so. Did he think of kissing my mouth, of stroking my belly, of rolling onto me, insistent with desire? I couldn’t seem to clear these questions from my mind.

  For long, agonizing minutes, I lay rigid with indecision, my breath shallow, my heart racing. When I glanced at Édouard, he seemed a bronzed god to me, and the image overwhelmed my senses. “I’m going over to la voiture de bain,” I said. “Do you want to join me?”

  The little wheeled, wooden building—a “bathing machine,” in English—had been parked permanently and was now used sometimes by tourists who needed to change into and out of their bathing suits. But few tourists came to the Antibes beaches in summer back then, and none were there that day. We would be uninterrupted and unobserved.

  Édouard opened his eyes, then sat up and cocked his head slightly. His irises were so dark they looked almost black. “Yes.”

  “I wouldn’t have asked,” Édouard began, when we were inside the dim, cool shelter. It smelled of salt and cedar and talc.

  “No. I know that. You’re an honorable man.”

  “Not so honorable; I think of you … I think of this.” He kissed me gently, a testing kiss.

  “And more?” I whispered.

  He pressed me against the wall, the whole length of his body against mine. “So much more.”

  We didn’t stay in there long, for the simple reason that the temptation to do so was so strong. While we were there, though, I reveled in every sensation his lips and hands and thighs provoked. He wanted me. I wanted him, or at least I wanted that, and for me at the time it was all one and the same.

  “I could leave him, you know.”

  “For life as an aviator’s wife? It would not be what you’ve had.”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  * * *

  We reenacted the scene a few more times over the next week or so—not only in the voiture but also outside the casino after dark once, while Scott was inside and oblivious. Those moments with Édouard felt perfectly endless, their own vivid, multicolored dream of a world in which I was no longer Mrs. F. Scott Fitzgerald, and I wasn’t Mrs. Édouard Jozan, either; I was becoming Zelda Sayre again. But not the popular Montgomery belle, swept away by a dashing young man who flew his plane in curling loops above my house—no. I was a strange new Zelda Sayre released from all constrictions, drunk with the timeless rhythms of sea and sun and passion, more daring and oblivious to danger than I’d ever been before.

  An illusion, as I said.

  Inside that illusion was a bachelor’s small apartment, its shades closed to the midday heat. Inside that apartment was a man, naked atop cool sheets on a low bed, his hand extended in welcome.

  24

  I couldn’t wait any longer for resolution.

  Scottie was fast asleep. Lillian was in her room—probably doing another set of knee-bends while reading George du Maurier’s titillating Trilby. The cook and maid had gone for the day.

  “Join me on the terrace?” I asked Scott, who sat at a little table in the room we called the library, his hair sticking out in all directions, books and papers spread out in front of him. A single gaslight lit the table; the rest of the room was dark. A glass filled with ice and some clear liquid sat sweating near Scott’s left elbow.

  He finished whatever he was writing, than glanced up at me. “I’m working. It’s too warm in the cottage tonight.”

  “How long will you be?”

  “I’ve just had an idea about getting Tom and Myrtle to the Plaza—and a dog, I think. I’m arranging my thoughts, so I’ll be a while yet. I won’t wake you.” He began to write again.

  “Now would be better.”

  “What would be better now?” he asked without looking up.

  “Scott. I need to talk to you.”

  He set down his pencil and looked up at me. “If this is about Venice, never mind. Just go on, have fun, see if you can charm Diaghilev a little; I have some thoughts about a future production that could involve the ballet.

  “Picture this,” he went on, leaning back in his chair. “Our heroine is a showgirl, a shimmy dancer from a rotten upbringing who always yearned to be a ballerina, and—”

  “I don’t want to do this anymore,” I said, shaking my head. “No more plays or books or schemes. I want to get divorced.”

  Scott stared at me while my words displaced the story he’d been framing. “What did you say? I couldn’t have heard you right.”

  “No, you did.”

  Panic flickered in his eyes. “What have you been drinking?”

  “Ginger ale. Come out to the terrace.”

  “Zelda—”

  I walked away, giving him no choice except to follow me outside.

  “What is this?” he asked when we were outside with the doors closed behind us. We usually weren’t shy about airing our disputes in front of the servants. This time, however, I didn’t want Lillian to hear.

  I went and stood at the rail, facing the sea below. Not until I opened my mouth to speak did I know what I intended to say.

  “It was all a mistake. We shouldn’t have gotten married in the first place. I should have waited to see how things might go. It just … it just seemed like we were embarking on a great adventure, but that adventure turned into a party we couldn’t resist, a five-year-long party, everybody in sparkling gowns and tuxedos with satin lapels, bottomless glasses of champagne … But that’s not a marriage, that’s not a way to live. Real life has to happen sometime.”

  “Since when did you want a so-called ‘real life’? You’ve been living the life of a princess and loving every minute. Shoes, gowns, furs, this”—he swept his arm to indicate the house, the hills, the view—“who has a better life than you?”

  “I want a husband who cares about me more than anything else, except his children maybe. With you, it’s always the next stor
y, play, novel, movie, the unending pursuit of some stupid critic’s approval, an obsession over some magical number of copies sold, a terrible need for assurance that you’re the finest living writer on the planet and every thinking man will worship your books forever!”

  Scott stared at me, mouth open. Then, “The pursuit of meaning!” he yelled. “The pursuit of excellence! That’s what I’m about. These things aren’t about me at all. You—do you hear yourself? Do you hear how selfish you are? You’re the one who wants to be worshipped.”

  I shook my head. “Not worshipped, just loved. I’m alone all the time. With you, I have nothing in my life.” In the back of my throat trailed the words I am nothing in my life.… These I swallowed, and immediately I felt nauseated.

  “Oh, and some other husband, some worthy man, he’d spend his entire day with only you, showering you with attention, is that it? I guess he’d have to be a wealthy man—a captain of industry, maybe—no, the captain’s playboy son. A prince! That’d be perfect for you, princess, that’s the man you need.”

  “Not at all,” I said in a calm, low voice, hoping to keep the nausea at bay. “Édouard is only an army officer, but what counts is he prizes me above everything. And he’s not striving all the time. He’s living a good, regular life.”

  “Jozan?” Scott was incredulous. “You’re in love with Édouard Jozan? That’s what this is about?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes? You don’t even deny it?”

  “No, of course not. Why would I? I’ve fallen in love.”

  This silenced him for a moment, because for all that he might argue that I was selfish, he believed, as I did, that we are helpless to resist or influence what our hearts are bound to do.

  “You can’t do this to me now, Zelda. You can’t leave. For Christ’s sake, have you no mercy at all? I’m trying to write a book—the most important book of my life!” He began to pace the terrace. “How can you … how can you be so disloyal? This is not possible. I love you, for God’s sake, of course I do. I love you so much that I can’t even see straight sometimes, can’t breathe. I’m so afraid that something might happen to you, or to Scottie. Why do you think I work so hard?”

  “I hear what you say, but I also see what you do—and don’t do.”

  “Don’t do? What else can I possibly do? I started with nothing, Zelda, and look at what I’ve given you!”

  “And look at how you’ve told your flapper stories for so long now that you’ve got me confused with all those selfish girls you invented! I agreed to marry you before you had one material thing to offer me.”

  His mouth opened, then closed, and he blinked a few times, fast. “I—that’s true. So why did you marry me, then? Was it for the novelty? Was it … was it rebellion against your father? Did you ever really love me, or was it a lie all along?”

  “No! God, of course I did. I do. It’s different now, though. We never … Manhattan was supposed to be a honeymoon, and then sure, things happened that we didn’t expect, and we had all these doors opening to us.… Even with the baby, we just couldn’t resist. Parties and work, those seem like your priorities.” I drew a deep breath, then let it out. “We’re bad for each other, Scott. Mama and Tilde were right in saying we’d wear each other out.”

  His hands gripped the rail, knuckles pale and knobby in the gray moonlight. I thought of the calluses on his right hand, formed from years of holding a pencil, and hated them.

  “I try so hard,” Scott said in a low, strangled voice. “I want to give you and Scottie the best of everything. I want to succeed in whatever I do, so that I make you proud. I want people to see us and say, ‘Those Fitzgeralds have it all figured out. Who wouldn’t want to be them?’ It’s a juggler’s act, I know—but I’ve been a pretty good juggler up to now. I thought I’d been.”

  He had been a pretty good juggler. Even there in the midst of my belief that there was nothing worth salvaging, I could feel the truth of his words. Our circus act, begun in the Biltmore Hotel four years earlier, had mostly been a success.

  To admit as much, though, would be to undermine my argument. He would take the admission and twist it around in some way that would make him the victim and me the villain. I couldn’t say what I knew: that I was the villain, too.

  After a quiet minute, he went on, “Some days, though … I don’t know if you understand how it’s all I can do to face myself in the mirror, let alone sit at my desk and spin words into gold. There are days when I’m certain that everyone loathes me, that I’ll never write another word worth a damn, let alone a dollar. There are times when I see you, you with your confidence and your fearlessness and your discipline and your beauty, and I’m terrified that it might all end up—well, like this.”

  I had no words.

  “Please, Zelda, give me another chance.”

  I thought of Édouard, of my chance.

  “You always said our love was everything to you, that you couldn’t imagine life without me, wouldn’t want it, would rather die. If you love me even a little—”

  “Let me think about it,” I said, knowing that if I let him continue, I might be lost forever.

  INTERLUDE

  When I met Scott, the first thing I knew about him, beyond his physical appearance, was that he was an army officer. Then I learned that he was a Yankee, and a writer. Initially, the first two matters seemed capable of sinking us. The third one, his being a writer, was the one I put all my faith in, as he’d done, too—and yet that third matter was the solid center of our crumbling world, not its beating heart but a cannonball.

  Scott was the first serious writer I’d ever met. By 1924, though, I knew a bunch of them. Bunny and the Princeton boys—all of them serious if not all successful; Edna Millay, George Nathan, Shane Leslie, Dorothy Parker, Sinclair Lewis, Don Stewart, Sherwood Anderson, Tom Boyd, Peggy Boyd, Anita Loos, Carl Van Vechten, Ring Lardner, John Dos Passos, Archie MacLeish, Jean Cocteau, and of course my own beloved Sara Haardt. I’d become a writer myself, somewhat.

  There are so many ways to be a writer, but I felt I understood writers in general, inasmuch as I think writers can be understood. We all have something to say, and we require the written word—as opposed to musical instruments, or paint and canvas, or clay, or marble, or what have you—to say it. Not all writers want to be profound (though an awful lot of them do); some want to entertain, some want to inform; some are trying to provoke the most basic, universal feelings using a minimum of words—I think of Emily Dickinson—to demonstrate how it is to be human in our crazy world today.

  Yet, of all the writers I’ve heard of or met or come to know (the list has grown even longer since ’24), I’ve never met another who’s anything like Scott.

  At the age when I was perfecting my cartwheels and learning to skate backward and stealing my brother’s cigarettes to see what smoking was all about, Scott was writing one-act plays. He was writing poems and lyrics. Not long after that, his plays were full three-act structures with stage direction included. He wrote detective stories and adventure stories and dramatic stories. His plays began to be produced. He wrote more of everything, and then he wrote his novel, and then he wrote it again, and then again, and now he’s written a play for Broadway, and a musical revue, and all kinds of movie scenarios and scripts, and so many stories I’ve lost track of them all. When he’s not writing fiction, he’s writing essays and articles and book reviews and letters. He’s making notes and keeping ledgers where he tracks all of his stuff and my work, too.

  Oh—I’d forgotten this, until just now:

  We were newly married—still staying at the Commodore, I think—and had been out so late that we decided to go over to the East River to watch the sun rise. We were dressed up, still, from having been to a party at the apartment of a friend of one of George’s friends—no one we knew, but we wouldn’t think of refusing an invitation, and everyone there seemed to know us.

  We walked from the host’s East Side apartment, somewhere around Seventieth, I g
uess it was, over to the riverfront in the gray-washed predawn, still feeling tight and gay, me teetering now and then in heels higher than I was accustomed to. I wore Scott’s jacket, and he wore my beaded hat.

  The smell of the East River at dawn is dank and oily—though nothing so bad as Venice in August—and you get the sense that fish are decomposing all around you, just out of sight. Still, we found an empty stoop and sat there holding hands, oblivious. We sighed happily about the wonderfulness of being young and in love, of being in such demand simply because Scott had gotten some thoughts in his head and had written them down.

  “You’d think anyone could do it,” he said. “Writing sounds so easy. Even I think it sounds easy, and I’ve got a hundred and twenty-two rejections that clearly prove it’s otherwise.”

  “How do you know if you’re a writer, though? I mean, I’ve had thoughts and written them down—”

  “Your diary, you mean—”

  “My diary, yes. And I write my weight in letters every month, it seems. And I’ve tried a few story ideas like I told you, but I’m bad at it—”

  “You’ll get better.”

  “Maybe. What I’m sayin’, though, is I never thought, ‘I’m a writer.’ But you did. Why did you? How did you know?”

  “It was easy enough to tell: if I wasn’t writing, I didn’t exist.”

  So that night at Villa Marie, after I told Scott that I needed some time to think, I went inside for a pillow and some blankets and then made myself a bed on a chaise in the garden. There, on that July night beneath the lemon trees, I had a sort of conversation with myself about right and real, and wishes and truth.

  Édouard was a good, dear man. We had chemistry, yes, and we had those outside-of-time Mediterranean days, and we had the excitement of doing something unusual and fraught, which itself appealed to people like us—risk-takers, you know. What else did we have, though? My French was still rudimentary and his English only a little better; when I thought it through, I recognized that our communications were quite basic. And while plenty of people had gotten married with even less in common, I’d already determined that such a marriage wasn’t for me.