“Do you know big-name stars?” Matéo asked as he returned to the table.
“So many,” Zelda said, bragging for him.
“Not so many,” he said, “but more than a few.”
“Oh, do tell them about Joan Crawford,” she said, pleased that they were taking pleasure in each other’s company, in shared history, in stories of his life and hers volleyed back and forth. “Tell them about her marvelous weakness. Someday my husband must write an exposé, he is so satiric and gentle and yet full of terrifying insights about the superlative egos of the glamorous. You would read such a book, wouldn’t you, Mr. Cardoña?”
“If written by Mr. Fitzgerald, why, of course.”
“Will you tell us the story, Scott?” Zelda said, trying to get a read on him, begging ever so sweetly. He was flattered by her flirtations, no matter how transparent.
“I begin with the sad part,” Scott said. “It is about a wonderful film I wrote for Joan Crawford that has been put on hold, as so many great projects in Hollywood are. It was perhaps a little too spicy for the censors, since it featured a story of adultery in which the sinners don’t end up groveling for mercy from the gods. Of course, everybody knew the risk going in, it would have been groundbreaking, the celluloid Madame Bovary, an honest, hard-hitting look at passion and betrayal and their consequences without easy moralizing. Just people as they really are, suffering for their mistakes, not all that regretful about them. No one was more eager for the story than Joan herself.”
“Well, after all,” Zelda said, “you might have been writing her biography. First, that horrible, abusive marriage the papers paid so much attention to, then the affair with Clark Gable, so steamy and notorious the studios had to put a stop to it.”
“When she heard I was to write the script,” Scott said, “she approached me at a party and said, ‘Write hard, Mr. Fitzgerald, write hard.’ I told her writing is always hard, but I would exert all my talent and time and energy to produce a script she could be proud of. She was convinced, of course, that the very idea of writing for her ought to be enough to make me write well.”
“I should think so,” said the general.
“And why do you think this?” Scott asked. “Because she is such a special talent?”
“Well, a great beauty certainly,” the general said. “Do not all Americans revere their Joan Crawford? I have it on authority from my nephew who fights for liberty in Spain that a band of yanquis quarrel many weeks for the right to name their battalion after Joan Crawford, the marvelous actress whom they all revere, but it was not allowed. She is a very good actress also, I think, no?”
Zelda began to laugh, anticipating the punch line of a story she knew in all its versions, relishing any anecdote about the vapid personalities of Hollywood.
“Well, no, not exactly,” Scott said. “I’ll speak in candor if all present swear a pact not to pass my story on. It’s not the best of strategies for obtaining work in Hollywood to run down the stars you write for. So do I have your word, gentlemen, lady?”
“Of course,” Matéo’s friend said.
“Swear,” Scott said.
“I swear, I swear,” Zelda chimed.
But Matéo hesitated. “I am insulted that you ask me such a thing.” Alluding to the events of the weekend, he added, “I am a model of discretion. Is this not clear by now?”
“Never in question,” Scott said, reaching for the Cuban’s forearm, feeling in his element, master of the situation. “It was a mere formality, a pact to illustrate my point. I don’t share these stories with just anyone.”
Matéo acknowledged the gesture, extending his hand over Scott’s, clasping the knuckles, then releasing them to say, “Now you must continue. You were about to tell us that Joan Crawford, named by LIFE magazine as queen of the movies, is less than talented.”
“Well, as your friend and mine reminds us,” Scott said, pausing, nodding respectfully at the general, “she is beautiful, but as for talent—”
“Oh, never mind about her beauty,” Zelda interrupted. “I’m not entirely sure why bug eyes have become all the rage.”
“Because of Joan Crawford,” the general said with sincere detachment.
In the late twenties while Joan Crawford’s star was on the rise and Scott still the voice of the Jazz Age, he had declared her in an interview the supreme flapper, smartly dressed, dancing at clubs until the daylight hours, eyes larger than life, larger even than the fast life she was taking in all at once; and the remark stung Zelda. It was during the years of their long falling off that he came to see how cruel it was to have said what he said. To strip Zelda of her title as the quintessential flapper, a title he bestowed on her but she had procured by rights as model for all those brave, reckless, winning heroines he wrote of. To take what was Zelda’s and give it away to a Hollywood actress—that ranked high among his crimes against her.
“Well, fair enough,” Scott said, raising his glass. “To Joan Crawford, the champion of the stunned, wondrous, eye-popping gaze. Let me tell you something, though. She is interpersonally charming, charismatic, and some of that quality is what translates onto the screen, but I find her beauty forced.” He did not look at his wife, but he was certain she delighted in what he was saying. “Never mind, though, because we were talking about talent. So when I realized Joan was to star in the film I was writing, I made a study of her past performances, watching her in almost everything, asking the studio to screen them for me day after day, films such as Possessed, Grand Hotel, Chained, Forsaking All Others.”
“Fine work if you can get it,” the general said. “I would not be sorry to be paid to watch Joan Crawford movies.”
“Writing for the movies is hard work,” Scott replied. “It’s good to know whether an actress can carry off the lines you write for her. So I studied Joan’s films and soon realized that she has one glaring weakness. She can’t change emotion mid-scene. In every movie, every scene, she’s all one thing, then she’s altogether something else. No in-between. No gradations. Ask her to change emotion over the course of a scene, ask her to shift gears, and she freezes, strains, puts a hand up to her face like a mime and runs it down from forehead to chin so as to wipe away the old expression and put on a new one.”
“Oh, she struggles so sincerely as she moves from sadness to mirth to wrath,” Zelda joined in, “that it’s impossible not to overhear her thinking, ‘Now I’m supposed to be blasé’ and ‘Now I’m supposed to be stunned by terror.’”
“Or she turns her face from the camera, on the supposition that the present emotion is too much for her,” Scott said, smirking as the picture became clearer in his mind, “and she looks up and there’s the new expression, she found it somewhere down by her shoes.”
“Surely you exaggerate,” Matéo said.
“Possibly,” Scott replied. “But go back and watch her films sometime and you’ll start to see what I mean. Of course, directors and cameramen have all kinds of tricks to distract you, moving another actor into the foreground, panning the camera away for a few seconds, but if Joan has to carry the scene on her own, and there are two emotions to be enacted in relatively short order, well, all I’m saying is, in that scenario, I’ll take the mime.”
“So what good does it do for a writer to know such things about an actress?” the general asked. “I would think you would find it paralyzing. What am I to do with such limits?”
“That’s quite perceptive of you, General,” Scott said. “But in reality a writer can help out a director quite a bit if he understands the actor’s strengths and limits. Use minor characters to push her through transitions. Make sure much of the emotion occurs—as Aristotle recommended one should always do with violence—offstage. The strength of film as a medium is sometimes also its weakness. We want to read everything on the character’s face, but just as in real life, there are so many ways to see a face and not see what is happening there.”
7
FROM THE PORT BEYOND MORRO CASTLE, WHERE THE F
ERRY DOCKED shortly after dawn, Zelda and Scott traveled by car through the countryside up along the northern face of the island into the province named for the seaside city of Matanzas. For anyone else in her condition, the adversity of the last two days might have proven too much, but that was the thing about Zelda. All who met her at her best spoke of this quality—the quickness of mind, almost too quick, her way of racing ahead to the next adventure until you could feel it pressing down on you like an already existing event, as though the future were written in advance, needing only to be deciphered. Always this eagerness to conquer life, this resilience with which she met adversity: she was inexhaustible, buoyant, expectant.
The morning so far had passed in a blur. First, the knock at the door in the middle of the night, jolting her from sleep as she cried out, “Scott, Scott,” fearing he’d gone back to his room and left her alone, except he hadn’t, he was there, in pajamas and bathrobe in bed next to her, already awake in the dark. “It’s nothing, Zelda,” he said. “Probably the bellboy with that Coca-Cola I asked for hours ago.” Of course, it wasn’t the bellboy, not at that hour, and she could hear the whispering as Scott cracked the door, the heaviness of the man’s voice in the hallway, heavier for the fact that he was whispering. Almost certainly it was Matéo Cardoña, his bass tones mixing English and Spanish, his use of cognates making the excitable phrases easier to understand. “Traigo noticias del incidente.” He had news of some sort. Scott pulled the door shut behind him and she could hear footsteps in the corridor, trailing off. Now and then, over the rhythmic whisper of the ceiling fan, with her ear pressed close to the doorjamb, she detected the interplay of voices in disagreement down the hall, and after a while footsteps walking toward the room, someone turning the knob, the door cracked in a rusty breath.
“Would it not be simpler,” Scott was asking, “to go to the police, explain what we saw?”
“Except it will not change anything, except we do not know what others think they saw or what they will say, for example, about how the fight started.”
“Well, I appreciate all you’ve done for us, I do, and I’m glad for the bulletin.”
“Then you will do as I advise.”
“If you think there’s no reason to go to the police,” Scott said, “we won’t.”
“And I will call on you tomorrow evening,” said Cardoña, his voice penetrating into the hotel room. Zelda studied her husband’s profile as he closed the door, his robed chest and pensive chin silhouetted by light from the hallway.
“What did he want? I don’t understand why he keeps bothering us. It isn’t over, is it? It’s never over, everything always catches up with us.”
“Zelda, please don’t talk that way,” he said, pacing the room. “Of course it’s over. It has nothing to do with us. Matéo just wanted to tell me what he’s learned about the investigation into the events from the other night.”
“You’re handling me,” she said. “You were always the only person who could calm me. Once I told you that, but you were insulted.”
He halted, as if hunting down a memory in his head. “Not insulted,” he said. “Maybe, though, there are things one would rather be called by one’s lover, other than ‘calming,’ I mean.”
Scott stood with shoulder pressed against the drapes, staring into the night, retreating from the window after a while to rest on the writing desk.
“What are you thinking?” she asked, but he was distracted. Soon he was scratching notes to himself in his journal and she knew better than to interrupt him.
When at last he walked to the bed and laid the notebook on the night table, she ran her palm inside the smooth folded lapel of his robe onto the hardy cotton flannel pajamas, thinking to herself, He is always so cold. Her fingers teased his pectoral muscle through the flannel, sliding down to and encircling the nipple, wandering up over the edge of the collar onto naked skin so that she might nestle her palm against his clavicle and let her nails play dapplingly on his neck. She was not thinking about the day ahead or how much longer they might stay in Havana. Let Scott take care of their itinerary, when they awoke, what they ate and when, what they saw—he loved to be in the world and in control. She would follow his lead, except maybe when it was the two of them alone in a bedroom, where for a while she might take charge, trading parts in the dance, tantalizing him with the qualities he liked so much in a woman: daring, whimsy, forwardness. When things worked well between them, he relished the low rumble of her voice, seductive, wanting what it wanted, the way she took her pleasure on his body. “Would you like to?” she would say, unbuttoning the pajama shirt before plunging her hand down over the smooth skin of his stomach, beneath the elastic waistband of his pants.
Before them on the road the sky now brightened. Off to their left, groves of trees rose and fell and rose again, then tumbled downhill like bowling pins into the Gulf. The car rode up high over a clearing, only grass and low brush between them and the coast, the shallow skin of greenish blue along the sea’s surface dissipating into thin bands of morning light. Observing trees strung with red flowers Zelda aligned them in rows of garlands, as if there were a pattern in everything she saw.
“I find it so exhilarating when you take care of things,” she said, “when you know exactly what we should do next.”
“I’ll always look out for you, Zelda.”
“Isn’t it a wonderful thing,” she said as if speaking to someone other than Scott, a stranger or perhaps the driver of the car, “to be a man and to know your own mind?”
Not more than three hours ago they lay in a hotel bed, her hands inside his pajamas, but he was stirred without being aroused, too tired or drunk or maybe too agitated by Señor Cardoña’s interruption at their door to concentrate on what she was doing. “I’m sorry,” he said, excusing himself for the fact that he wasn’t ready to return to her yet. It was okay, she assured him, there was time. But she worried it was false comfort: what if the news from Cardoña was bad, what if they had to leave town? In the next instant Scott announced, “We’re departing for the beach this morning.” She didn’t question him as he threw off the covers and changed into street clothes, pulling his jacket on, the hour still shy of four. “I’ll go downstairs to see about a car.” Minutes later he was bursting through the door, his energy having the inverse effect on her, making her head sink into the pillow.
“I’ve ordered a driver to come for us in an hour,” he said. “It will take us to a ferry that leaves for the other side of the harbor at dawn.”
Now she really was irritated. In an hour? Why hadn’t he asked her first?
“Scott, I’m so tired, what’s the sudden hurry?” she asked. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”
A small V-shaped inlet revealed bungalows with burnt-sienna roofs in a Mediterranean style. They rode through sleepy towns where children kicked footballs at the side of the road, the curtains of the bungalows drawn, here and there a man in a doorway staring out into the street as if searching for an event that would tell him to start his day. Zelda asked how long the drive to the resort would take and Scott promised to have them checked into the Club Kawama by early afternoon. He instructed the driver to pull over at the next filling station so that he could use the bathroom. As they drew up to the pump, Scott snatched a bag at his feet, and when she asked what was in it, he said it was nothing to worry about, just something he’d meant to throw away back at the Ambos Mundos. She could tell he was lying. Maybe he planned to sneak a drink while in the toilet, but that didn’t make sense of the bag, which was too light and in the wrong shape to contain a bottle. It hung from his arm, bulging at the bottom like the mouth of a bell, a scrap of ivory fabric peeking out from the top. When he returned to the car, he no longer carried the bag.
“Part of me resents myself for being happy when you take care of things, it’s so very Southern of me,” she said as they resumed the drive. “But I’m not going to think that way on this vacation, no zealous modern women in this car. I’ve decide
d to let myself be appreciative that my own Deo is watching over me again, protecting me should anything go wrong.”
She sat close to him in the backseat, inside his personal space, in the way of a woman wishing to send out the signal that she is receptive, her scent, energy, and entire being part of the signal.
“I still consider you my best friend,” he said.
“I always let you help me.”
They were in different places, caught up in different rhythms of thought.
She resolved not to be saddened by the dashed dreams of recent years. Several times she had declared, “Scott, I can feel it, I’m almost well. The doctors say I’m making progress and I’m stronger than I’ve been in years, mentally, physically, emotionally, as happy as I’ve been since the early days of our marriage.” But the business of getting him to take a chance on her, a full-time chance, of persuading him to let her move to California so the two of them might start over, well, that was an altogether daunting proposition. It required a perfect trip, several days to drain the stored-up acrimony, bile, and censure, days in which they might learn how to be good for each other again. Everything fell on her shoulders because she was the one who, while persuading him to let her back into his life, was at the same time begging for her freedom. She had to be careful not to slip up, so damned careful.
He placed his hand on the back of her head as he sometimes did when she was sleeping. She could remember the gesture from years past, waking to the soft pressure of his hand, then closing her eyes again.
“You’ve held up brilliantly,” he said. He was thanking her, in code, for not making a fuss about their hasty departure from the hotel. While she dressed he had packed her bags and composed a note for Matéo Cardoña. “I’ll just leave my address at MGM, don’t you think?” he called out while she was in the bathroom, and she suggested the address at Scribner’s would serve just as well. “It all depends,” she said. “I can’t decide whether we’re trying to give him the slip or whether you really want to see him again.” She walked to the threshold of the bathroom to see if her words stirred anything, but Scott was all business, head tucked low, pen to the page, shouting over his shoulder, not seeing how near she stood, “Five minutes.” On their way out of the hotel room, at the last minute, she discovered his journal on the night table by the bed. He might have left it, the entire vacation a casualty to that one mistake. She slipped it into her own bag, wanting credit for its recovery, vowing to return it only once he realized it was missing.
Beautiful Fools Page 14
