Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

by Therese Anne Fowler

  Probably, I had my answers. And yet I was no happier than I’d been before.

  45

  A Saturday in early July: I was with three of my ballet classmates at a café when Pauline rolled her pram up past our table and parked it beside a broad ivy arch. Even in her Patou suit, Pauline looked harried. Motherhood hadn’t otherwise changed her, not visibly at least; possibly she’d made a connection between Hadley and motherhood and Hemingway’s roving eye. Predictable though it seems now, she didn’t know—none of us knew—that it wouldn’t matter a bit what she did or tried to do to keep that eye focused on her. She was trying to be his best wife, the same aspiration all of us had been taught to aim for. Which didn’t mean I liked her any better.

  “Hi,” she said. “I saw you here and thought I’d just stop over and see whether you and Scott will be at Sara’s latest Dinner-Flowers-Gala next week, before everyone runs off for the summer.”

  “That’s our plan.”

  “What are you going to wear? I just bought this sweet little shift, Drum said it’s darling on me, but I don’t know—it’s rose-colored linen, with a nice contrasting—”

  “Sounds perfect. I don’t know what I’m wearing; I guess I’ll decide that day.”

  Pauline said, “Sure, I know you’re so busy these days with your dance lessons. You look fantastic; I just know that everything you could wear will look gorgeous on you. And of course Sara will wear something très élégant, and the apartment will be all decked out with flowers, and there’ll be a fine band, and, well, you know Sara, nothing halfway.”

  I nodded. “Yep.”

  The baby started fussing. Pauline stood, saying, “Just like his father, he hates to sit still. I’m off to the market, then.”

  I ignored the invitation in her voice, the longing for me—or someone, anyone—to join her. If she was lonely, well, she’d made that bed for herself when she ended her single-girl-at-Vogue life while stealing another woman’s husband.

  * * *

  I visited with Tom Eliot and Jean Cocteau at Natalie’s salon that night, along with a group that included two women journalists who both were engaged and told me they intended to keep their jobs after marriage.

  “It can be done,” one said. She was tall and solid, with brown eyes that dared anyone to argue with her—about anything, I suspected. “You just have to set the ground rules up front.”

  “Women couples are doing it,” said the other. She was petite, and as thin and pale as Sara Haardt. “They don’t put restrictions on each other’s work.”

  “And there are plenty of married women working in factories or as domestics,” said the first. “Sure, it’s because the family needs the cash, but so what? Their husbands accept this. Mine will, too.”

  I said, “I envy you two, getting married now. Ten years ago when I was engaged—well, I was in the American South, so there’s that—but still, we were just getting around to having such high-minded ideals.”

  Leaving them, I went to find Natalie, thinking, Women couples. They seem to have all the answers.

  How funny, I thought, that Natalie was a lesbian, and Romaine was, and Djuna Barnes, and Sylvia Beach, and this didn’t bother me at all. Yet I’d twisted myself up into knots wondering about Scott and Hemingway, thinking that if they were lovers, it would be a disgusting, horrible thing. How could I have one standard for the women and a different one for men? Or maybe it wasn’t different for all men; I liked Bob McAlmon just fine, and I adored Cole—though we had been startled when Sara told us, somewhat reluctantly, that, yes, the rumors were true, he preferred fellas in bed. At the moment, he was doing a poor job of hiding a new affair with some young man, almost as if he didn’t care whether everyone knew.

  Homosexuality did seem unnatural, and puzzling, too, but to each his—or her—own, that’s the way I’d thought of it. Maybe my standard was just different for the one man who was supposed to be mine.

  Leaving all of that aside, I saw Natalie and followed her into the kitchen, where I told her about having seen Pauline earlier that day. I said, “She seems stuck, if you ask me. Stuck, and a little desperate.”

  Natalie refreshed her drink, saying, “It’s a matter of making a full commitment to one’s life—and if you can take an honest assessment without hating me for it, I’d like to observe that you, my dear, seem stuck, too.”

  “Me?”

  “Are you a dancer? Are you a writer? Are you a painter, a mother, a wife?”

  “Yes.”

  She smiled. “And Pauline right now is several things, too. But look around us: when you see any of these people, don’t you identify them by one label—the one they themselves have chosen? Me: poet. Djuna: journalist. Sylvia, there: book vendeuse. We are all other things as well, but these are us foremost.”

  “I guess I see what you mean. But you all don’t have to worry about husbands.”

  “Maybe you should stop worrying about yours. What are you doing to help refine yourself?”

  “Well, my dance company had a recital last week, a small one, and Madame gave me a featured role. Representatives from all the top European ballets were there.”

  “So you hope to dance professionally despite your marriage, yes? This is good. Be a model for other wives. Lead.”

  “I’m too selfish to lead, don’t you think? Scott won’t have it anyway, and I can’t afford to leave him. I don’t want to have to leave him. I want him to quit being so stubborn.”

  Natalie winked. “You may as well ask him to quit being a man.”

  * * *

  That night I lay in bed alone, sleepless, restless. Scott was out who knew where doing who knew what with who knew whom. I shoved that thought away, and in its place came bits of my conversations from earlier:

  You know Sara, nothing halfway.

  Whereas I did everything in my life halfway, or worse.

  You, my dear, seem stuck, too.

  And I was. What did I commit to absolutely? In my heart I was fully committed to Scottie, sure, but in my days I was, at best, ten percent. Everything else—Scott, painting, writing, dance, friendships, family—got less of my heart by far, even if I did give it more of my time. How did Sara manage nothing halfway? Was it built into her character? Or something she’d aspired to when she was younger, maybe? Something she’d worked at and then achieved? What chance did I have? Surely Sara had been born perfect.

  For days, while at my morning and afternoon dance classes, while I ate, while I bathed, while I tried but failed to sleep, I considered how I might become more like the women I respected and admired. Surrounded as I was by such ambitious, accomplished women, I couldn’t ignore the little voice in my head that said maybe I was supposed to shed halfway and do something significant. Contribute something. Accomplish something. Choose. Be.

  I was a Sayre, after all; a woman, yes, but still a Sayre; my life was intended to mean something beyond daughter-wife-mother. Wasn’t it?

  Oh, just let it go, a different voice urged me. What difference could your puny achievements possibly make?

  All the difference, the other voice answered.

  Which of my many possible lives did I want to define me? Which one could I have?

  And the question that troubled me most: Was it even really up to me?

  46

  September, Cannes—so that Scott could do research for the novel and try, again, to write it. He’d been shoring up his eroding confidence with stories that now brought an astonishing four thousand dollars apiece, but always there was the novel, the novel, he needed to write the novel. And it had to be phenomenally good, he said; critics would expect a masterpiece, given that more than four years had elapsed since Gatsby.

  We had come to Cannes in July. To keep up my training, I took lessons with ballet master Andre Nevalskaya, who’d worked for the Nice Opera. I’d done three recitals in Cannes and Nice, earning no money but a lot of admiration and praise. At each performance’s conclusion, I faced the applauding audience and thought, I am
a dancer.

  This day, I’d just finished class and returned to our lovely rental, Villa Fleur des Bois, to find an intriguing envelope awaiting me. Like the villas we’d rented on the Riviera before, Villa Fleur was a spacious collection of marble-floored rooms with pretty millwork and ironwork and wide French doors. There were twice as many rooms as we needed, most of which sat unused. We never economized; the very word economy was abhorrent to Scott’s thinking. I’d once heard him tell Gerald, “Truly big men spend money freely. I hate avarice, but I hate caution even more.”

  The letter’s postmark read Naples, Italy, but it was the sender’s name, Julie Sedowa, that got my attention.

  23 Sept. 1929

  Mrs. Fitzgerald,

  Having seen your July recital in Paris and last month’s in Nice, it is my distinct pleasure to write you this morning with an invitation to join the San Carlo Opera Ballet Company as a premier dancer and soloist. We first wish to offer a very worthwhile solo number in Aïda, and think you would find our theater to be a magnificent venue in which to perform regularly.

  Should you decide to join us for the duration of the season, we can offer you a monthly salary which we will discuss. It cannot be a tremendous amount unfortunately, as we do not have a budget such as the Ballets Russes, but the experience would be of great value itself, and also, Naples is inexpensive. One can find good lodging and board for only 35 lire a day.

  Please advise soonest as to your disposition in this. We would be most pleased to have you.

  Sincerely,

  Julie Sedowa

  Director, San Carlo Opera Ballet Company

  I sank into a nearby chair for support and then read the lines again. Here it was, just handed right to me, my chance to be a professional dancer. This offer had to be fate.

  How, though, to tell Scott? His routine since we’d come to Cannes was not so different from the way he’d been doing things for a long while, except that now he drank vodka before, during, and after his afternoon writing sessions, when he’d shut himself away in the villa’s tiny maid’s quarters and work until about eleven at night. He went out afterward and usually didn’t return for a day or sometimes two. We hardly saw each other—even when we were in the same room.

  Scottie and her governess came in and found me still sitting in the hallway. “Mama!” my girl said, and wrapped her arms around me. She wrinkled her nose and pressed it to mine. “You smell like salt and apples.”

  “You’re making me hungry.”

  She sat down on my lap. “I told Mam’selle that I should have sailing lessons, and she says I need to ask my papa. Is he home?”

  “I’m not sure, I just got in. Sailing lessons?”

  “And un petit bateau.”

  “Mais oui.”

  “Will you ask him?” she said.

  “Your chances are better if it comes from you.”

  I waited until after Scottie had sought him, found him, and softened him with her charms and her charming request before going to talk to him myself. Besides the obvious advantage of finding him in a better mood, I needed time to frame my more unusual request, see if I could put things in such a way as to make him think that my joining the San Carlo ballet would only benefit him, and in ways he might not have considered before. Something like I can be your wife and a dancer, both. We’ll be leaders, Deo, we’ll be relevant, modern, we’ll set the trends again.

  Scott was sitting on a sofa in the little conservatory, his feet up on the cushion, a neat pile of handwritten pages resting on his thighs. The doors stood open to the stone-paved courtyard, where red bougainvillea competed with honeysuckle and purple clematis for space and glory.

  He had a glass of something clear in his hand and a tender smile on his lips. “I told her she can have the lessons,” he said when he saw me, “but that the boat will have to wait until she’s proven her mettle.”

  “That’s both generous and fair.” I lifted his feet and sat down in their spot, then let them rest on my lap. This was the most intimate we’d gotten in months. “Now I have something to ask. You know how you’re always saying I just dabble at my interests? Well, I’m a dabbler no more: I’ve been invited to dance with a Naples company, and I want to take the job.”

  I handed Scott the letter. His lips tightened as he read. Then he sighed and handed the letter back. “It’s flattering, I’m sure, but you can’t run off to Italy to become a dancer.”

  “I thought we would go—you see where she says it’s cheap to live there. It’d just be for a year. Not even a whole year. Eight months, I think the season is.”

  He was shaking his head. “Our life is in France. And I hate the Italians—remember our first trip to Rome, when they tried to arrest me for stealing a bicycle?”

  “You did take it without permission. Who cares about that anyway? That was Rome eight years ago, this is Naples now.”

  “I have a book to finish. I don’t have time to find another apartment and another set of servants and another governess if Delplangue won’t go, all while you’re off playing ballerina for at most a couple thousand lire a month.”

  “‘Off playing ballerina’? It’s a professional position—they’re offering me a solo. I’m good, Scott, and I want to make something of my life while I’ve still got this”—I indicated my body—“to work with. And besides, if we do this, we’ll be trendsetters again. We’ll be—”

  Scott pulled his feet off my lap and got up. “Oh, you want to ‘make something’ of your life, do you? Scottie and I, the Fitzgerald family, all that is nothing to you—I see. Just one more thing you dabbled in on your way to your serious, professional life in the ballet.”

  “What is wrong with you?” I said, my temper rising. “I have trailed you all over this continent and back and forth across an ocean and across another continent besides, all so that you can chase movie stars and drunken friends while you drown yourself in liquor, and fuss about your sad circumstances, and pretend you’re going to write another book. And now I ask you for one thing that matters, one thing that’s about my ambitions, something that could also put you at the forefront again, and this is what I get? You hate that I might succeed while you … you rot away from the inside out!”

  Scott pointed at himself. “I am in charge of this family, Zelda. If not for my blood, my sweat, my—my—my determination, you’d be nobody special, just another aging debutante wasting away the years somewhere in Alabama, getting fat off of biscuits and preserves. It’s my life that made yours worthwhile! And yet all I get is selfish ingratitude.”

  We glared at each other then, with the kind of hatred that comes from being deliberately wounded in one’s softest, most vulnerable places by a person who used to love you passionately.

  “So that’s your position.” I rose to my feet. He nodded, so I said, “All right. Don’t come to Naples, but I’m going. I’m sure I can find a place that will suit Scottie and Del—”

  “Scottie’s not going. You’re not going to abandon me and take my daughter with you.”

  “Abandon you? It’s a few months apart, so that I can maybe become the kind of person every thinking woman these days would expect F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘First Flapper’ to be.”

  “Then they’re as misguided as you are. All of that flapper business was just to sell books. When are you going to understand that what I want is for you to get your priorities straight?”

  Translation: Worshipping me should be your only desire.

  I said, “When are you going to become someone who deserves to be my priority?”

  * * *

  After making some discreet inquiries, I learned that the law, being less progressive even than Scott, would favor him in all matters relating to Scottie’s custody. If a woman left the marriage, the father kept the children—unless he chose otherwise, and Scott never would.

  I wrote back to Julie Sedowa with my regrets.

  47

  My short story “The Girl with Talent” was written just before we left Cannes
in October—right before we learned that, back home, the stock market had crashed. What’s more, Bunny had checked himself into the Clifton Springs Sanitarium in upstate New York because of a nervous collapse.

  Scott’s face was bloodless as he laid down Bunny’s letter. “He says it’s ‘alcohol and panic attacks and a complete inability to work.’ God.”

  “Bunny, really?” I said. It seemed so out of character, and he’d seemed so … Bunny-like when we’d seen him the previous winter—but then what did we know about him and his life, really? We hardly understood our own.

  As for the markets, well, if you’d never managed to invest, you had no money to lose.

  Harold got me eight hundred dollars for my story, which, in Paris again, I used for the coming winter’s lessons with my beloved Madame Egorova. Dance now became a different, more obsessive escape for me. My hopes of being a first-rate professional persisted—I might yet get on with a company here in Paris, which would make it harder for Scott to protest. But I also couldn’t stand to be still.

  My mornings began with one poached egg and one small cup of coffee. I dressed in my tights and leotard, my leggings, my sweaters, my skirt, my boots. I bound up my hair, then wrapped myself in my coat and scarf. Instead of taking a taxi, I walked through the Parisian winter mornings, sometimes stopping to buy a scarf or a book to give to Madame, who had become the shining light that powered my world. Madame understood me, she encouraged me, she made me believe I had every reason to continue striving for perfection.