Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

by Therese Anne Fowler

  I was at the pool one afternoon, writing to Scottie about my earlier trip to the zoo, when Scott appeared. The workday being done, I’d been expecting him and was expecting that we’d then get ready for dinner out with the Van Vechtens, who we’d known since Great Neck.

  Scott sat down in the lounge chair next to mine. “Change of plans. We’re not meeting Carl and Fania tonight, something came up. I have to run and change my shirt. Have dinner here, this place is beautiful.” Then he was off, hurrying toward the bungalows. Over his shoulder he called, “I’ll be back by eleven or so.”

  I watched him go, then continued my letter.

  Daddy is so busy here, with more energy than a bouncy kangaroo. We ought to take a trip to Australia one day, would you like that? The koala bears and kangaroos would all love my little lamby-pie, I’m sure. I miss you dreadfully and wish you’d write to me soon.

  At eleven or so, Scott turned up as predicted—but with his tie loosened, his collar undone, his hair mussed, his lips redder than they could get on their own. Without his saying a word, I knew that somehow little Lois had given her mother the slip.

  “How far did it go?” I asked tersely.

  “What’s that, darling?”

  “You and the teenager—I do hope you didn’t take advantage of her.”

  “You’re crazy,” he said as he headed to the bedroom. “I was with a couple of the fellows from the studio.”

  I followed him, then leaned against the bedroom door frame while he hung his jacket in the wardrobe. All the while, my heart was racing madly. “Then I’ll suppose you dressed up in drag.”

  “What are you talking about? We had dinner at Musso and Frank.”

  “Is that right? So if I pop in there tomorrow and tell them how Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald sure did enjoy his dinner with those fellas from UA, they’ll know all about it?”

  Scott closed the wardrobe door and turned to face me, his arms crossed the way a guilty man’s would be. “You’re a fine one to talk about trust.”

  “I never denied a thing.”

  “No, you just hid the truth until you were ready to throw me over.”

  “So your tactic is, what, obfuscation now, confession later?”

  “All right, if you really want to know, Lois asked me to meet her for dinner; she wants me to write something for her. There’s no money in it up front, of course—she’s not earning all that much yet. But if we can sell it to Fairbanks, it’ll be a perfect next step for her and me both.”

  I might have asked him to tell me why he’d lied to begin with, or whether her mother had been present—except I already knew the answers. I knew the answer to my next question, too, but—call me a masochist—I wanted to hear what he’d come up with.

  “And your lips are so red why?”

  He touched them with two fingers, then went over to the mirror. “Huh. Must be from the wine.”

  “What is so special about her? Why are you bothering?”

  “She’s talented and bright, and she’s doing something about it. I admire that. I want to help her achieve her potential.”

  “You want to be everybody’s hero.” Except mine.

  “I like to help people, what’s wrong with that? She’s so organized and focused. You could learn something from her,” he said.

  We would remain in Hollywood for two increasingly difficult months. Scott would struggle to finish the script he’d been hired to write, fight with me about Lois, fight with the star about the script, spend everything he’d been paid (and more), see Lois ever more frequently, and at the end of it all—well, the end looked like this:

  Scott had been out who knows where and returned to the bungalow late, drunk, disheveled, distraught. He swayed as he stood inside the door. “That bitch hates me.”

  I’d been reading, but now I set the book aside. “Who hates you? Surely not your little Lois?”

  “No, no—the precious star,” he sneered. “She made Fairbanks reject the script.”

  “Serves you right for making her mad.”

  He didn’t have enough energy left to fight with me. All he did was frown. “Pack up, we’re leaving tomorrow.”

  “Good.” I went into the bedroom and locked the door behind me.

  In the morning, I woke to find that he’d piled all the living-room furniture into the center of the room. At the very top of the pile, tacked onto the leg of an upturned chair, was the Ambassador’s bill for all the charges we’d accrued during our stay. In big red letters Scott had written, C/O UNITED ARTISTS.

  He was still in the suit he’d been wearing the night before. When he saw me, he said calmly, “All right, then. Get dressed and let’s go.”

  39

  See us living in a columned behemoth of a house called Ellerslie, a plantation, almost, in the Delaware hamlet of Edgemoor. Three full floors of great, square, high-ceilinged rooms defy me to furnish them sufficiently. We pay only $150 a month to rent this twenty-seven-room Greek Revival home on a hill overlooking the Delaware River, though we’ll spend nearly that much each month in winter to heat it.

  Beyond our royal lawn, the river flows past, broad and brown and silent, unconcerned with the little party gathered at its bank on this afternoon, the twenty-first of May. It’s 1927, but could be a hundred years earlier or a thousand or three; the river doesn’t know or care. It doesn’t care, either, about the dramas playing out among the people at this picnic, or about the one taking place in the sky far to the northeast, where Charles Lindbergh is attempting to cross the Atlantic Ocean to Paris with a single engine in a single flight.

  If the river has a soul, it’s a peaceful one. If it has a lesson to impart, that lesson is patience. There will be drought, it says; there will be floods; the ice will form, the ice will melt; the water will flow and blend into the river’s brackish mouth, then join the ocean between Lewes and Cape May, endlessly, forever, amen.

  Who’s listening, though? See us on the river’s bank, our picnic blankets outspread on the clover. Here are Scott’s parents, Molly and Edward, looking amazed at what their boy has acquired; here are Carl and Fania Van Vechten; here is a fellow Southerner, critic and novelist James Boyd; here are Lois Moran and her mother—who are the fêted guests because we have been away from Hollywood for two entire months and Scott is badly in need of a fix-up, a dose of the girl whose “absolutely platonic affections” have for him become paramount. Does anyone besides the two of them and me know this is the case? The river says, Who cares? but I’m too distracted to pay it any mind.

  The blanket is checkered in a picnic-proper red-and-white design. The ice bucket is kept filled by a pair of colored women, who Edward eyes with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion. His world has always been white. We are post-sandwiches and pre-dinner, so our time is occupied with gin martinis and croquet.

  Lois wears gingham and acts the innocent, as if the floorboards outside her bedroom don’t creak mere minutes after I wake in the night to an empty bed.

  Scott is in a Brooks Brothers poplin suit that’s far sharper than the man inside it, the man who, only a few days earlier, wrote his agent that his novel, still only two chapters long, will be finished in July. This is the same man who, when July arrives, will interrupt his wife at the ballet barre she installed against his wishes to say, in a trembly panic, that he is on the verge of something horrible—either nervous breakdown or death. This he’ll do three times before August ends, and then to prevent further frights he’ll switch to a lower-nicotine cigarette and forswear the gingham girl. He’ll try to quit drinking and will succeed for two days, until he declares that the world is far too raw and bright for him to be able to settle down and work—he needs a little something to soften it and steady him. A new bad habit will be born, along with a series of stories for the slicks and lots of letters to his great good friend Ernest—but no novel. In winter, he’ll attempt to give a speech at Princeton, but will appear at the podium drunk and mute; he’ll arrive home—where his sister-in-law Tootsie is visiting
—still crying tears of mortification, then fight with his wife about her breaking the liquor cabinet’s lock, and bloody her nose in the process.

  My dress for this picnic is as brown as the river. As much as I’m succeeding in imitating the river’s appearance, I haven’t been able to assimilate its wisdom—and won’t, not until years later. Right now I’m the woman who, in an attempt to escape her husband’s life, has begun taking ballet lessons three days a week. She’s not needed at home; her husband directs the maids and the cook and the governess that both she and her daughter despise. And so the woman studies books about art and works on paintings in between dance lessons, then works on essays and stories when her painter’s eye is spent, and if any hours remain between these activities and sleep, she passes those hours in as thorough an alcoholic haze as can be achieved without ending up horizontal. Guests will come and go and come and go. Her husband will do the same. She will dance and paint and write—and many remarkable things will come of her efforts: beautiful painted furniture and lampshades that delight her daughter; publication, interviews, opportunities, acclaim. These are the good things she’ll hold on to later, when she’s in the thick morass of the bad.

  The sight of one of the maids standing on the porch and waving a dish towel gets our attention. “It was on the radio!” she calls. “Mr. Lindbergh just landed his plane in Paris!”

  We foolishly look up at the sky past the treetops, as if we can see the plane, see it descending lower, lower, then disappearing from our sight. It is the end of an astonishing journey, I think. All done now, nothing more to see.

  40

  Carmel Myers was a lovely, dark, sultry woman, a real beauty with hooded eyes and lips that were shaped in such a way that her mouth was always slightly open. When we ran into her in the lobby of our Genoa hotel in late March 1928, she said, “You’ve got to come meet Fred and me tonight for dinner.” Who could turn her down?

  Fred was Fred Niblo, who’d directed Carmel in Ben-Hur. He was twice Carmel’s age, and married, not that it mattered. For all we knew, the two of them being in Genoa together was as coincidental as our seeing them there while en route to Paris for a visit.

  “Excellent to see you again!” Fred said as we joined them at the hotel’s restaurant. He pointed to a name on the menu. “Have you ever tried this brandy? It’s an experience, I’m telling you. Four glasses,” he told the waiter in English, holding up four fingers and then indicating all of us. “Four glasses, two bottles,” he tapped the brandy’s name on the menu, then made a V with his fingers. “Doo-ay. To start.”

  Carmel said, “We’ll toast to your return visit to Europe—how exciting to be spending the summer in Paris! How was the journey? Don’t you love traveling by ship? It’s so intimate, so romantic, don’t you think?”

  Scott and I glanced at each other. Our answers, unsaid, were both Hell no. The weather had been terrible—rough seas, cold rain—and all we’d done for the first two days was argue about my intention to continue dance lessons when we got to Paris. Tiring of that, we spent the next seven days ignoring each other entirely, reconciling somewhat only on the last day, when relief at the sight of land gave us something in common again.

  A small orchestra performed dance tunes I recalled from my childhood. Dinner was some kind of fish, some kind of vegetable—nothing special, and I didn’t eat much. The brandy, though, was memorable; I sipped it with pleasure, enjoying the little bit of escape a good drink can provide. Fred and Scott finished a whole bottle between them before dessert arrived.

  Scott’s was a tart that looked richer than my stomach would be able to handle gracefully, so when he said, “It’s fantastic; here, try a bite,” I demurred.

  “You go ahead. I’m full.”

  He looked so disappointed. “But you can’t miss out on this, it’s delicious.”

  “I’ll have a bite,” Carmel said, and she held those lips of hers open a little wider than usual.

  Scott stared at her mouth, just stared like he was hypnotized, paralyzed, like that crimson O was the answer to all of life’s problems, or maybe just his prayers. I kicked his shin to break the spell, which worked; he blinked, then ate the bite himself as if he’d never even offered it to anyone at all. I looked frankly at Carmel; her expression was innocently amused.

  There are women whose whole selves are engaged in being a public commodity, and Carmel was one of these. Every gesture she made, every syllable she uttered, the tinkle of her laughter, the way her dress’s fabric draped over her breasts, all of it was self-conscious and deliberate, designed to elicit admiration in women, desire in men. This isn’t to say I held any of that against her. Not a bit. I liked her, in fact. The way I saw it, she was a kind of living work of art, and funny and thoughtful besides. Was it her fault if she, as had happened to me, sometimes provoked the basest feelings in a man?

  Scott and Fred made short work of that second bottle of brandy while Carmel’s and my glasses still held our initial pour. I’d found that drinking very much of any kind of alcohol still did bad things to my stomach. Carmel might have found that it did bad things to her self-preservation; I know that if I looked like her, I’d never let down my guard.

  Fred entertained us with an ongoing routine of self-deprecating jokes about why Jews (like himself, and Carmel) were so prevalent in the entertainment world. Carmel rolled her eyes a lot, that perfect-O mouth open to express mock disapproval. The more brandy Scott drank, the less he was able or willing to tear his eyes from that red O—until I finally slapped the table and said, “All right, that’s it!”

  Everyone jumped, and I went on, “Why are men so taken with women’s mouths? Is it just … you know, what they wish that mouth would do to them?”

  Scott said, “Zelda!”

  “What? You’re the one who’s fixated.”

  Fred said, “No, no, it’s so much more than what you think. Consider: The mouth is the only bit of erotic landscape visible when a woman is dressed. It is the symbol of every moist cavern a woman possesses, which all men are bound to seek out, we have no choice.”

  Scott looped his arm around Fred’s shoulders and said, “You see? You are an artist!”

  “Who doubted it?”

  This set the three of them off into a discussion about whether filmmaking was a legitimate art form and who thought so and who thought not, and whether talkies like last fall’s The Jazz Singer were going to alter Hollywood forever.

  I’d resigned myself to waiting out the remainder of the night, my mind already wandering to subjects of more interest to me—Natalie’s salon; ballet with a serious, European teacher; brioches from my favorite boulangerie—when I noticed that Scott was staring at me.

  “What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

  He stood up and offered his hand. “Dance with me. It’s a waltz.”

  I listened to the band; sure enough, they were playing “Kiss Me Again,” which I’d heard on the radio and loved.

  “Go on,” Carmel said, nudging me. “Dance with your husband. Or I will.”

  But Scott shook his head as I reached for his hand. “No one but Zelda for me.”

  41

  June 27, 1928

  My dearest Second Sara,

  It’s been three very full months in Paris. We’re staying at 58 rue de Vaugirard—the Left Bank, this time. I meant to write sooner, but as usual I’m burning my candles from both ends.

  Scott meant for us to be close to you-know-who, and was disappointed when we arrived to find out that the great man’s new wife was with child and wanted to give birth on U.S. soil—any minute now, I’m told. So she shuttled them off to Key West, Florida, which I think is a perfect out-of-the-way spot for them to settle. His last letter to Scott was all about conquering man-sized fish.

  I am conquering age and gravity with a new ballet teacher, Lubov Egorova, who came recommended by the Murphys—Honoria takes lessons at her studio, and now Scottie’s going, too. Egorova is also Princess Nikita Troubetska, isn’t that wo
nderful? And even better, she is a formidable teacher and the most lovely and lyrical of ballerinas. When I grow up, I want to be her.

  Things are otherwise much the same, though Paris is not—there are hardly any French people left here. Every boulevard is packed with Americans whose mispronunciations make me sound like I’m native. Scott and I had a row last weekend and haven’t spoken since—but as we are going to Sylvia Beach’s dinner for James Joyce tonight, I’ll once again have to put on my Mrs. F. Scott costume and try to play nice with him and the other children. Whose life is this, anyway? Only when I’m sweating rivers perfecting my pliés in the studio do I feel like a whole and real person. Is this how you felt when you were reaching the end with John?

  Enough of that. Pray tell, when do you return to Paris? We’re here until September, then back to Ellerslie for the winter, during which Scott may or may not finish his novel.

  Yours as ever—

  Z~

  * * *

  Plus!

  Etirez-vous!

  Plus haut!

  Encore!

  A ballerina’s training looks nothing like the result of her work, her performance. In training she is bludgeoned repeatedly by words that have every bit the impact of a cudgel, if not more. She’s a prisoner, a slave by choice. She asks to be tortured; she tortures herself. More! Stretch! Higher! Taller! And at the end of every series of commands comes the most dreaded one: “Encore!”

  Do it again!

  In Madame Egorova’s studio, I spent my hours lined up at the barre next to fourteen other women, all of them clustered at the cusp of twenty years of age. The day my twenty-eighth birthday came, I observed it silently except for the huffs and grunts and sighs that corresponded with my motions. The other girls all knew I was older than they were, that I had a husband and a child. But if my arabesques looked like theirs, if my jetés were executed as crisply, if I could turn, and turn, and turn, and turn, and turn, and turn, and turn, I wouldn’t be bullied more than anyone else was, and I’d be allowed to stay.