Beautiful Fools

by R. Clifton Spargo

  “Not now,” he said, leaving hope he might join her later. “I need that nap you promised me, now that we’re newly set on keeping our promises to one another.”

  “Yes, and we have so far,” she said with satisfaction. “We’re all the way up to two. Before you fall asleep, though, I want you to watch me walk to the water and observe my lazy crawl into the tides. While I toss in the current, you in the sun, let’s think each of the other the whole time. Later you can tell me whether my body still pleases you.”

  At the water’s edge she accepted the warm lapping of the waves, her toes sinking into the claylike sand, which molded itself to her feet. She tugged on her bather’s cap, tucking stray curls of hair up over her ears, pulling the plastic flaps taut over the lobes. The afternoon was brilliant along the surface of the water as she squinted, looking out over the straits, several small sailboats on the horizon, a freighter or some kind of navy ship farther out. Someone had told her that German U-boats had been discovered in these waters. She did not look behind her to check if Scott was watching but instead lifted her legs to hold her soles, one foot at a time, on top of the warm, thick water, depressing them into a tide so gentle there was almost no break. Waves ebbed into her knees, rolling on past her toward the shore.

  She walked still farther out, water swelling up her thighs into the crease of her bathing suit, dolloping her groin like a patient lover’s tongue. Now raising hands above her head, she threw herself into a dive, and there was the pleasure of lying supine on the salty ocean, arms folding and unfolding, a mere seal’s kick to keep herself afloat, easeful, rocking in the waves’ slow rhythm, then torquing her torso also like a seal to twist and roll onto her back, her mind as empty as the sky above her, striated here and there in thin bands of white.

  “Oh, I want to dive off of something,” she said, standing over him, dripping onto the blanket, shaking her body and sprinkling his forearms before bending for a towel.

  “Zelda,” he said, floundering away from her, flopping onto his side with displeasure.

  “Okay, I’ll be quiet. It’s just I thought you would be awake by now. I swam all the way out to a boat and flirted with several sailors and kicked my tail at them as I swam away.”

  “That’s nice,” he said. “I hope they were on our side of the war.”

  “We’re not at war, Scott.”

  “Not yet,” he said, “but wait until Hitler takes a country we care about, such as France.”

  “Well, my soldiers were Americans,” she said, and laid her body beside him on the blanket, her wet suit skimming his leg so that he jerked away reflexively. “At least that’s what they told me. Aren’t you even a little bit jealous?”

  “Were they real?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so. In which case, yes, I’m very jealous. I find imaginary rivals so much more intimidating, since I always endow them ahead of time with such wonderful capabilities.”

  “In a manner of speaking they were real,” she said. “You see it was a military ship with an American flag and I swam out toward it, but it was miles away and it was going to take such a long time to get there and I had to turn back because I didn’t want to leave you all alone getting sunburned on the beach. Would you have been jealous if real soldiers had flirted with me?”

  “I was trying to sleep here,” he said.

  “I know, but do you think you could wake up and solve the problem of finding something for me to dive off?”

  “What if we save that pleasure for tomorrow? We’ll find a beach that has a promontory where the water is deep enough for you to throw yourself off and risk breaking your neck, as you’re so fond of doing.”

  Now she drew the tote bag to her, looking through it for something to read, warning Scott that his legs—the only part of his body exposed to the sun—were turning red and perhaps he should sit in the chair for a while. She found her copy of Rachel Field’s novel All This, and Heaven Too, one of last year’s biggest sellers, folding it open to the page where she’d left off. Scott sat up and moved to the chair as instructed, casting his shadow over the book.

  “Does that mean you disapprove?”

  “About the diving?” he said. “Would it make you happier if I disapproved?”

  “Oh, probably. But I meant this novel. You sat down and there was a mini-eclipse and it was hard to see the words.”

  She began to explain the plot of the book to him. Bedlam, she maintained, couldn’t get enough of stories about people who are insane. Everyone at the Highland was in a tumult about the imminent release of Wuthering Heights starring Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier as Catherine and Heathcliff. It was likely she would return to a house full of hubbub about the film, but no matter, half of the women would be up for seeing it again. As for Field’s novel, it featured an insanely menacing duchess who plagues her duke until, poor man, he must confide his miseries to his children’s governess. “That movie actress with whom you had an affair years ago, what was her name, Lois Moran, the once-aspiring homewrecker, she might be perfect for the part, if only they’d made a movie of this book while she was still young and attractive enough.” Scott ignored the taunt, failing to defend his old lover as he might have in years past. Even Zelda couldn’t feel the prick of her own words, that original betrayal no longer hurting as it once had, the newer, fresher ones (women whose names she didn’t even know) stinging less still. None of his infidelities could reach her here in Cuba. Even after a history of fights, threats, and fallings out, she still felt her advantage over every rival for Scott’s affection.

  In the novel the duchess turns up dead, Zelda continued, and naturally the dupe of a duke is accused of the murder.

  “Did he do it, did he bump her off?”

  “Of course not, or at least I don’t think so, but he’s in the midst of committing suicide in vague, ineffectual remorse,” Zelda said. “I’m sure it was the governess, and what’s worse, she’ll get away with it and live the rest of her life pretending to be innocent.”

  “I’m not sure why you read such tripe.” Scott sounded genuinely offended by his wife’s fondness for pulp novels about the insane.

  “And why do you care so much that I do?”

  He sighed. When she read a book just because everybody was reading it—they’d been over this before, did she really want him to repeat himself?—it was an insult to every writer who tried to make a name for himself by writing well.

  “Pardon me, but didn’t we live off of what everybody was reading for a while?”

  He said nothing.

  “Scott, my tastes aren’t to blame for the poor reception of your tender novel about an insane heroine who just happens to have lived much of my history. Sometimes people read books to distract themselves. I too once wrote a serious novel on insanity, and believe me, I can sniff out fraudulence.” Here she held the novel by Field over her head, finger between its pages as she waved it like a flag, saying, “Fraudulent, fraudulent.” Maybe that was why she read such books, in order to figure out how it was possible that easy clichés about madwomen who cling unjustly to husbands they don’t deserve were so popular.

  “You see,” he said, “that’s exactly what I mean by tripe. I don’t wish for you to become bothered by stupid popular notions that don’t help with your recuperation.”

  “Always looking out for me.”

  Well, she could read what she wanted, he said, whenever she wanted. What had she brought for him?

  For Scott she’d chosen their old friend Joseph Hergesheimer, the novel Java Head from 1919, still his most acclaimed. The exoticism of the prose, the splash of the Orient dousing puritanical New England, the lurid approach to miscegenation and its consequences—all of Joe’s old Anglo anxieties made for good beach reading. Secretly, she chose Hergesheimer because she knew Scott had a hard time reading anyone whose star was on the rise. In Hergesheimer, her husband could enjoy the company of another literary light precipitously fallen from on high. Once the most popular w
riter in America—only a decade ago still outselling everybody, except possibly Sinclair Lewis—Hergesheimer, like Scott, hadn’t published a novel since 1934.

  From the west end of the beach a couple approached, walking along the perimeter of damp sand onto which the thin milky foam of dying waves reached with ever greater frequency, the weak tide rolling in. With the sun at their backs, most likely guests at the resort, they showed no sign of breaking stride or turning in toward the row of stone cabins, instead continuing on up the beach and passing maybe ten feet in front of Scott and Zelda. “Tout ne tourne pas autour de toi,” the woman was saying in perfect French, and the man, attempting to placate her, asked what she thought they should do. Zelda studied the two of them, the woman especially, her thin, spry mouth, the wilting jawline and long slant nose, her slender body sporting a cream one-piece, shoulders draped in a wrap of reds and oranges, her sorrel-brown hair knotted in a scarf. The man, whose face Zelda caught in profile, angling evenly from forehead to the knobbed tip of his nose, was darker in complexion. He was square, sturdy. He reminded her of a foot soldier among the Catalans of Spain, someone whose body testified to its capacity for bearing hardship without speaking of it. “I would like to know both of you,” Zelda said under her breath, surprised by her response to them. Unless Zelda misunderstood—parts of their conversation were in French, parts in Spanish—the woman was arguing her right to accompany him to a cockfight.

  “He’s not disciplined enough,” Scott was saying, “our old friend Joe. Still, he’s really not a bad writer at all. It’s a disgrace that the public has turned its back on him so absolutely. There are so many fine sentences in this book. He has a talent—sometimes used as a crutch—for measuring people by their eccentricities. I do hate it, though, that he and I are mention—”

  “How would you describe the couple that just passed us?”

  Scott admitted he hadn’t paid them any attention.

  “Well, I’m glad about our search for high places tomorrow,” Zelda said. “That and the swim have made this a perfect first day of our vacation. Only now that we’ve found a beach does the vacation really begin, in case you’re logging days. And that counted as a promise, yes?”

  “Which part?”

  “The promontory, the diving tomorrow.”

  “Sure, I promised we would look, though I don’t know the geography of this peninsula.”

  “That’s enough for me,” she said. He was silent again, eyes lowered to the page but waiting (she could tell) for what else she might say.

  “I just need there to be a next chapter. I’m someone who needs to look forward to things.”

  8

  IT WAS THEIR BEST DINNER IN CUBA SO FAR. SHE HAD ENJOYED THE PARGO frito, a blue snapper indigenous to Cuban waters, garnished with mango and scallops and served with a creamed plantain soup, while Scott managed to swallow a few oysters and to pick unambitiously at the large crab on his plate. The town was small, not a great many dining options, but she delighted in this quiet restaurant overlooking a lagoon, several dunes and a nearby bank of trees separating them from the ocean, the surf audible whenever the winds relented and a hush fell over the otherwise chattering pines and palms.

  “What are the chances? I wish you would invite them to join us for a drink when they finish their meal.”

  “Are you still talking about those two Europeans?”

  “I didn’t question your taste in friends back in Havana.” He was about to challenge this assertion when she amended the statement: “At least not until I’d given them a chance.” Then also added: “And I’ve said nothing about the Saturday trouble those friends got us into.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “It’s my turn, that’s all.”

  At the table nearest to them sat the very couple she’d spotted earlier on the beach. As the waiter cleared plates, Scott glanced at her to assess whether her heart was truly set on this latest whim.

  “It is, Scott,” she said. “Let me plot this little piece of our adventure.”

  “We’ll order another round while I think about it,” he said, but she could always tell when he was going to give in. It had been a good day overall. He hadn’t taken a drink until they sat down to dine. Their conversations had been even and cooperative, neither of them allowing a desperate pitch to enter their repartee. He appreciated the ocean almost as much as she, its soothing effect.

  “But don’t think about it too much, Scott. The worst that can happen is they say no.”

  “And you’re sure it won’t bother you, that you won’t feel rejected?”

  He raised his hand to catch the waiter’s attention so that he might order another rum over mint leaves and sugar, a Cuban specialty neatly suited to his insatiable appetite for liquor and sweetness. The waiter offered to replenish Zelda’s half-full glass of wine from the carafe in front of her, but she lifted her hand to say no.

  “Also, por favor,” Scott said as the man turned to leave, “we would like to buy the couple at the next table a bottle of wine. Your house favorite.”

  Zelda rested her fingertips on Scott’s forearm, applying gentle pressure.

  “Don’t you love the smell of this place,” she said. “Don’t you love how modest and unassuming everything here is. It’s like Cap d’Antibes all over again, right after the Murphys discovered it and invited us for the summer—nothing’s gone wrong yet, no crazy people, no dead children. Poor Patrick, I wept so long for Gerald and Sara when I heard. The losses of those two lovely children are always with me and I pray for them almost every night.”

  Scott expressed dutiful sympathy, but he didn’t like to talk about the death of children, especially poor Patrick, who had lost an eight-year battle with tuberculosis.

  “Excuse me,” the man from the next table interrupted, addressing Scott. “Right now for me is very, very nice feeling, this gift you bring us, and I wish somehow to say thank you.”

  “Oh, please.” Zelda rolled forward in her chair, twisting to face the stranger. He was even more striking now that she saw him up close, with a strong equine jaw and deeply inset brown-black eyes. “You must come sit with us and tell us all about yourselves.”

  “It’s not required,” Scott said. “It’s merely an invitation. You’re free to keep the wine either way. But my wife would like to meet you, if you’re in no hurry to be off for the night. She thinks you make a handsome couple.”

  “No, nothing secret, nothing magic,” the Spaniard said. “I will implore my wife.”

  The couple, Scott and Zelda soon learned, were newlyweds on honeymoon at the resort, but after a glass or two of wine they admitted to being exiles, he a refugee by necessity, she by choice, her choice predicated on love for him. The man was in his late thirties, the wife roughly a decade younger. He had fought in the Spanish Civil War, wounded above the knee in battle, already knowing that his unit of gudari must soon surrender to the Italians, he among the first wave of refugees to cross into France even as his fellow Republicans fought well into the present year, refusing to lay down arms until this past month. But for him the war had ended long before that. Detained on French soil, in Camp Vernet in the Pyrenees, imprisoned for weeks in squalid conditions, he remembered a distant cousin near Lyon whom he’d met only once before while she was still a child and he a young man touring Europe, visiting relatives en route to Paris, aware even at the time of the impression he made on an altogether impressionable girl. In letters mixing Spanish and French, he invoked the memory of his long ago visit and chronicled his forsaken revolutionary aspirations, his love of his country, and the squalid conditions of the camp. Appealing to her fine sensibility and good-heartedness—she was known as a nurse and a humanitarian throughout the extended family—he asked if her parents might vouch for him and get him released into their custody in France. It was too risky to return to Basque territory, he wrote in sincere French, and she memorized his words—“Ce n’est pas prudent pour moi de retourner dans ma patrie”—rig
htly intuiting that his life was in danger.

  Since hers was not a wealthy family, nor one with contacts in government, she made the only move left to make, all for a man she’d met once in her entire life. Already working in Lyon as a Red Cross nurse, she petitioned to get herself assigned to Camp Vernet.

  “This was a big fortune for me,” said Aurelio Lopez. “I feel all pain in my leg, but I don’t know what is the problem yet. Seems like it was in the muscle first, then in the bone, which means I was pushing hard when I walked and always it gets worse and worse; so I was able to continue, but it will depend, I tell myself, on whether cualquiera de los santos, if just one of the many saints, you understand me, watches out for me.”

  “Instead it was me,” Maryvonne said modestly.

  “Better than a saint,” he said, smiling.

  Zelda sipped her glass of wine, newly poured from the bottle Scott had purchased for the couple, her own carafe still three-quarters full, as she studied her husband, pleased to find that he was entranced by the tale.

  “Tell me about the conditions of the camp,” he said.

  “Il n’y a pas de mots pour ça,” Maryvonne replied. Simply beyond words. Men slept in the open, without tents, huddled in small circles around fires, only their blanket capes to cover them. They ate carrion, they ate dead mules, once in a while they ate a rabbit someone caught or a smuggled-in chicken to stretch their meager rations of canned food. All of them far too thin, worn down to the bone. The trees on the rocky hills long ago ravaged of leaves and branches for use in bonfires. It was a landscape not unlike Armageddon.

  “Of course, she never see the wars,” Aurelio said, interrupting. “If it rains, if the rain is there and the day is cloudy, and then it rains many more days without stopping, the hills turn to mud and there is no place to sleep. Everything is water, everything is mud. This is life in the hills, this is life in the camps often also, only no more bombs tearing up the countryside. Now it is only hunger and disease and injuries that will never heal. Sometimes it is very bad, but I am thankful not to be in the war. We lose this war and I lose my country, this breaks my heart, but also I do not wish to fight anymore. If this is the will of God, I cannot say what is wrong or right. I do not have nothing against him. It was nothing against him.”