For eight or nine hours each day, I trained with the other girls, forcing my body to defy time and gravity and metabolic needs. I shredded my muscles and taped them back into place and went on throwing myself across the worn wood, eyeing my reflection in the wall of mirrors with admiration and loathing. I needed to jump higher. I needed to be thinner. My body’s lines were still a little off. Failli, cabriole, cabriole, failli … thirty times. Fifty. Afterward I went home, ate a brioche, had a bath, and went to bed. My sleep was deep and it was dark, bottomless, empty, cold. The next day I awoke and repeated the routine.
On the weekends, I practiced in the studio on my own, then went home in the afternoon to paint and to write.
A Millionaire’s Girl
Twilights were wonderful just after the war. They hung above New York like indigo wash, forming themselves from asphalt dust and sooty shadows under the cornices …
Scott was writing, too, claiming progress on his novel. Life became calm if not happy. Stagnant is a better word; that’s how I felt when, for example, I followed Scott to “an important gathering” at Gertrude Stein’s on a Saturday in December and sat at the tea table with Alice and Pauline while the people who mattered—Scott, Hemingway, Ford Madox Ford—talked Art with Miss Stein. The woman I’d been at twenty would have tried to shake things up; the woman I was now, at twenty-nine, was, instead, inert.
“You look awfully wrung out,” Pauline told me. “Don’t you agree, Alice? Drum says you spend all your time at lessons and Scott’s awfully cross about it—you should spend more time at home if you don’t want to lose your husband.” She leaned closer and added, “Zelda, I say this as your friend: you really do need to gain some weight. Your clothes, well, they’re hanging on you. It’s not flattering.”
“What do you know about Scott or me or ambition or purpose?” I said. “You gave your life away just to be Hemingway’s whore.”
Pauline jerked back as if I’d slapped her. “Suit yourself.”
In February, the nuisance cough I’d been trying to ignore turned into a hacking cough, with fever. I coughed my way through my morning routine and through my lessons and through the evening and through the night. Everyone around me urged me to go to the doctor, go to bed, do something—and a part of me understood that, yes, I should, yet I went on this way for two weeks, dazed, unable to exist in the world if I didn’t persist.
Scott stopped me at the door one morning. “We’re going to Africa. Just the two of us. You’ve got to take a break and get away from this climate before I get a call from Egorova saying you’re dead.”
“Africa?”
“Some new ground. It’ll be good for us, don’t you think?”
I just blinked at him. Apparently no, I didn’t think, not very clearly or very well.
* * *
Algiers, Biskra, camels, beggars in white sheets; black ants, Arabs, desert, strange cries in the night. All of it as if experienced through a haze of black gauze. No conversation. No love. No sex, even. Why did we go? I had no idea.
* * *
See me post-Africa: dancing again, little food, sometimes vodka—to help me finish “A Millionaire’s Girl.” The vodka is a writing technique I’ve borrowed from Scott.
Harold somehow mistakes the story as Scott’s and sends it to the Post. They love it! he reports by cable, and says they offer the now-usual four thousand dollars. “If it runs under Scott’s name only,” Harold tells us, after I make Scott phone him about the mistake. Scott says, “We need the money, Zelda, and what’s the difference? You know the story’s excellent or they’d never take it. That’s what counts.”
“Is that what counts?” I ask Gerald, who sits beside me in a movie house. Sara is on my other side. It’s an April afternoon, a day in a week in a month in which I’ve felt agitated all the time, and two beats off the rhythm of everything around me. Scattered. Fearful. Restless.
I’ve ignored this, excused it, chalked it up to sleep deprivation, to irritation with Scott, to the pressure of new recitals that might yet land me a new offer, a new chance to get my way.
“I danced beautifully last night,” I tell Gerald. “I could support myself that way, you know.”
Gerald, trying to pay attention to the movie, whispers, “Sorry, what?”
“Money. I could make my own money.”
“What are you talking about?” He’s frowning at me, a strange, long, exaggerated frown.
“Sorry. I was thinking of something.”
“Could you think quietly?” he says kindly.
I love you, Gerald, I think. Watching him, I feel strange, bleary. Is his mouth misshapen? Something is happening to his face—or is it just the theater’s darkness, the strange light bouncing off the screen?
When I turn back toward the screen, it’s difficult to focus. I blink at the shapes, which seem to be forming into something large, something solid, something with long legs—tentacles? An octopus, it’s an octopus, it’s propelling itself off the screen! I dive to the floor, sure that the beast will snatch me up and haul me off. “Help me,” I whimper.
Sara’s voice comes from far away: “Zelda, darling, Zelda, it’s all right. Is she taking medication?”
“How should I know?”
More voices:
—What’s going on?
—Should we send for a doctor?
—Is that woman drunk?
—We ought to get her home.
The floor is cold under my hands and knees. I’m shivering. I let Gerald help me upright while I cast about for signs that I’m safe. “The octopus—”
“What octopus?” he says.
I risk a glance at the screen. A man and woman are speaking. I recognize them from a movie poster for Hold Everything.
“Hold everything,” I say, feeling muddled, dazed.
Sara takes my arm. “Yes, that’s right—but we’ll come back to see the rest, maybe tomorrow. You feel clammy, darling; we’re going to get you home and make sure you’re not coming down with something.”
“Yes, good, thanks.”
Outside, the muddled feeling eases a little amid the evening traffic, and by the time we get to my apartment, I’m more exhausted than terrified. Or rather the terror has seeped into my skin, making my entire body buzz with the knowledge that I am no longer in full control of what’s going on inside my head.
“I’m fine, honest,” I tell the Murphys. “Tired, but fine. I must’a been half-asleep, is all.”
“A bad dream,” Sara says, nodding. “Get some rest.”
But I am coming down with something, something I’m too frightened to talk about, something I persuade myself will go away if I just work a little harder to get my leaps high enough, my turns sharper, my lines a little cleaner.
I dance mornings, I dance afternoons, I roam the streets in search of … nothing. Colors all look wrong to me, too bright. Music lives in my head like a ferret running on a wheel. My dreams are of ballet moves: soubresaut, sous-sous, rond de jambe, relevé; it doesn’t matter that there’s no sense to it, no logic or flow. I don’t even notice now. It’s all one with my waking dream, with the echoing voices rising from flower stands, the undulating pavement beneath and around me, the desperate desire for Madame’s attentions, caresses, adoration—Please, someone must love me—and the horrible sensation, just before my collapse, that the world is running out of oxygen.
I can’t breathe, can’t breathe, can’t—
PART V
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’” Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’”
“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument,’” Alice objected.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.�
��
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. “They’ve a temper, some of them—particularly verbs, they’re the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!”
—Lewis Carroll
48
“Schiz-o-phren-i-a,” Scott said in a soft, careful voice, as though verbally tiptoeing around broken glass.
He was seated across from me at a little wooden table in the sunny salon of Les Rives de Prangins, a Swiss hospital on the shore of Lake Geneva. A chessboard sat between us, carved ivory pieces all in place and waiting for battle orders. He’d brought it from the apartment he’d taken in nearby Lausanne, where he intended to live for the duration of my stay here. Scottie was in the care of her governess in Paris.
I’d arrived in May after a short stint at the aptly named Malmaison clinic in Paris. The doctors there had directed me to rest and eat; I did, and then as soon as I’d regained my energy, I bolted. Back to the dance studio I went, desperate to make up for the time I’d lost. Unfortunately, I brought my terrors with me and was soon a true nervous wreck—a nervous disaster, practically the Titanic—all over again. Confused, angry, exhausted, skinny, sick, scared, and broken-down, I’d agreed to come here to Prangins. I would have agreed to anything that promised relief.
I said, “Yes, that’s the diagnosis they’ve settled on. It means ‘split mind.’”
Scott put his fingers atop a rook, tracing the toothlike surface. “Yes, I know, Dr. Forel told me.” This was Dr. Oscar Forel, the renowned psychiatrist and Prangins founder the inmates—two dozen women, all well-off, all “nervous cases” like me—secretly called The Warden.
“And they won’t let me dance, not at all, not even the exercises. Ballet is a trigger, they said.” I swallowed my resentment, tried to ignore the pull of a desire still as strong as the most addictive drug. “How about you? How was Paris and your visit with Scottie?”
“Oh, she’s well enough. Busy with her friends.”
My heart clenched. “Does she miss me? Did you give her my drawing?”
“Yes, she loved the princess—wants you to do her as a paper doll if you can. And this was great: I met up with a writer Max has taken on—Thomas Wolfe, from North Carolina. He’s got a novel called Look Homeward, Angel. I brought it.” Scott leaned down to take the book from his satchel. “His writing is like Ernest’s but with this soft vitality … he’s hugely impressive, I think you’ll love the book.”
I looked at it without enthusiasm. “Maybe, if I ever get my concentration back.”
“You will. You will.” He reached for my hand. “Dr. Forel says it’s your ambitions that drove you to the breaking point, but you’re here now. There’s every reason to believe you’ll be fine.”
“You might deliver that last line again, ’cause you don’t sound a bit convincing.”
“I want to be convinced, but, well, you have to quit doing things like trying to run away, or refusing your medications—you have got to be more cooperative. I’m paying a thousand dollars a month for you to be here, Zelda, so every delay—”
“I’m sure sorry to have done this to you.” I pulled away from him. “How thoughtless of me—get it? Thought-less? Meaning mindless, empty-headed, vacant, and what’s worse, expensive.”
“Darling, come on, I didn’t mean to—”
“It’s awful here. Sure, it looks like this beautiful lakeside hotel, but the treatments—I feel like one of the undead,” I said. “Half the time I’m sick to my stomach, just all muddled and bloated … and no one here speaks decent English, and you know my French is below par, and for God’s sake, when I tried to leave, they sedated me and tied me to my bed—”
“Don’t you want to get better, Zelda? Cooperate. Admit how damaging it is for you to compete with me. Agree to give up dancing. They’ve told you that all of this is necessary to your getting well.”
They had. And I was learning to weave some fine baskets, too.
He said, “Scottie misses you dreadfully. We just want you home. There’s no need for you to be a professional dancer, writer, anything. Be a mother. Be a wife. I’ve made a good life for you, Zelda; stop rejecting it.”
“And then what?”
“And then your mind will mend itself. The split will heal. The doctors will put you back in balance here, if you’ll let them.”
The therapies I’d undergone in my three months here had diminished the terrors, the delusions—psychosis, they called it—and I was grateful for that. In their place, though, was this sticky, bleary bleakness. I’d tried to describe how I felt: “Pas de couleur,” I told one of my doctors, No color. His solution: a watercolors paintbox, an easel, and paper, all of which I appreciated greatly without being able to tell for sure whether he’d understood my meaning.
“What I meant was, what will I do?”
Scott looked at me blankly.
“With all my time,” I said.
He pushed his fingers through his hair. “You’ll just enjoy yourself. Christ.”
* * *
The first of the torturous patches began as a red spot on the right side of my neck. A mosquito bite, I thought. The spot, though, became an area. It grew scales. It itched. It wept. It throbbed. It crept along my skin until my neck was covered and my face became a dragon’s, all scabby from my clawing, all oily from creams that had no effect. I breathed fire at my nurses and my doctors, demanding some kind of relief.
I felt like my head and neck had been dipped and floured and were continuously frying in hot oil. Dante would have adapted this torturous rash—eczema is its innocent name—to the Inferno with glee, and Dr. Forel would have devised a special circle of hell for women who, like me, resisted reeducation.
Wrapped in salve and gauze and waiting for my next dose of that old savior morphine, I wrote to Tootsie, Emma Bovary wouldn’t have hung around for this.
49
One of the Swiss doctors had written in his notebook, in English, “A jazz-age train wreck in slow motion.” I pointed and asked, “Est-ce le vôtre?” Is that yours?
He tilted the notebook so that I couldn’t read from it. “Madame Fitzgerald, veuillez répondre à la question.” Please answer the question.
“I’m tired this morning; can we do this in English? And call me Zelda, won’t you? It’s been nearly a year, after all. I think we’re acquainted.”
The doctor and I were seated in armchairs that had been upholstered with dense brown silk. Here were polished maple shelves filled with medical volumes; damask draperies framing the kind of bucolic view Wordsworth and Coleridge and Shelley wrote about so eloquently; a carved desk holding a tooled-leather blotter, silver inkwell, silver-framed photographs of three perfect blond children and a perfectly conservative-looking blond wife. Bland wife, in fact. No flapper, no party girl, no dancing artiste for this doctor, who looked only a little older than Scott’s thirty-four years. This doctor was without question a sensible man.
“Madame Fitzgerald, the matter of evaluating your progress—”
“’Cause that sentence sounds like Scott,” I said, reaching over to tap the notebook. “That’s his term, you know. Jazz age. From Tales of the Jazz Age, his second story collection, in 1922. Have you read his books?”
The doctor’s gaze was level, expressionless. If he was judging me, he didn’t let on. But I had to wonder if Scott had persuaded them that I was the one who’d derailed our life, the same way his letters had tried to persuade me. We’d both written reams of recriminations over the past year, purging ourselves of all the feelings we’d held inside for so long.
“Let us continue,” the doctor said. His name was Brandt, and I’d seen him three or four times before. He said, “Yes, you have been with us for eleven months, so we evaluate your progress once again.” He glanced at his noteboo
k. “How do you feel presently about Mr. Fitzgerald’s success in relation to your own failed attempts?”
“Sorry?”
“Ah, you feel remorse.” The doctor wrote something in the notebook. “You realize now that a wife must first tend to domestic matters. Good. This is paramount to every woman’s happiness.”
“No, I mean I don’t understand the question. Failed attempts? How did I fail, except in having the stamina to continue?”
He looked at me blankly. “You are not sorry? Do I misunderstand? Préféreriez-vous parler en français?”
“No, God—it’s bad enough trying to do this in English. I mean, I don’t think I’ve failed, not in the way you seem to be saying. And Scott, well, he hasn’t been all that successful in the past few years. And he sure wasn’t tending to domestic matters either, and I’d say that’s paramount to a woman’s happiness.”
When the doctor said nothing, didn’t even blink, I added, “Maybe my stories and essays aren’t as fine as Scott’s, but who says I have to be just like him? I’m not him. No writer should be the same as another, that’s not art. My articles and stories have been published in lots of places. Ask him, he’ll tell you I’ve succeeded on my own.”
Dr. Brandt said, “We have asked him, yes.” He scratched his chin, then said, “Dr. Forel feels that since hypnosis was so helpful with the eczema and you are feeling stronger, it is best for you to write down your recollections and opinions, which we can compare with your husband’s. Monsieur Fitzgerald has been extremely forthcoming.”
“I bet. So I write my thoughts, and then what? You’ll hand down a final judgment like my father would?”
This thought about my father tugged at my heart, making it flutter. The tug was not about Daddy, exactly, but about home. Some home. Any home. I was well now and had been well for a good while. Several thousand dollars’ worth of while, in fact; continuing to stay here just to perfect my carpentry and volleyball skills was absurd.
Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald Page 31
