“Zelda, your mind’s too quick for me just now. Please slow down. Did you write me a note, and if so, when? While we were in the church? Are you aware that you never gave it to me?”
She laughed, twisting her head so that he could see the pleasure she took in his confused ignorance. She was eager for questions. This appetite for mystery or whatever it was alarmed him.
“Now that we’re on a beach discovered by me, ready to have a picnic lunch, we really are living so idyllically, don’t you think.” She was trying to get everything back at once. “There’s no reason for it to change, unless, of course, you spoil my day by not remembering the note.”
“Zelda, you never gave me a note.”
“How can you be so sure?”
Then he understood—she had passed the note to him in secret somehow. He began to search the outer pockets of his sport coat, rifling through the torn wrappers of chocolate bars, fumbling through pills, moving the search to inside pockets, plumbing his fingers down along the sides of the flask, unable to extract it for fear Zelda might notice, almost certain, though, that there was nothing else in the pocket. When he started in on his trousers, she let out a wicked laugh and he began to retrace his steps. His journal, of course. He pulled the Moleskine from the opposite breast pocket, cracking the binding to the most recent entry, where he discovered a piece of green stationery neatly creased in squares. He unfolded the stationery—her Salud de Schiaparelli floating up, that fragrance she’d asked him to procure for her only last year—to reveal a bold, unruly script, the rolling loveliness of the alphabet under her sway.
“Not here,” she said, and he looked up to see Maryvonne and Aurelio striding up the beach toward them, the Spaniard still nude. “Please, Scott,” she implored him, “you can’t read it in my presence—have you no sense of etiquette?”
“Apparently not,” he said. “Otherwise I’d most certainly be naked by now.”
“That would be delightful,” she said. “But don’t say anything to make him self-conscious.”
Aurelio stood before them, dangling his shorts from his fingers, lamenting that they had forgotten towels. Maryvonne ran back to one of the horses to grab the blanket, asking where she should spread it for the picnic.
“Near the trees,” Zelda said. “We could use some shade after all the riding.”
Scott wished the Spaniard would put some godforsaken clothes on. His skin was grayish white in the sunlight, his wine-blue veins running like dark rivulets beneath the surface of his fine limbs. Scott couldn’t help but lower his eyes to the man’s privates, the stem thick, purplish, and dormant, dangling over testicles that rounded into a bulbous pouch, the genitalia resembling nothing so much as a heart and an aorta, the body’s most essential muscle exposed. He couldn’t look away—that is, until he noticed the mangled right thigh, the bone-white, ridged lines where the shrapnel had torn into flesh and muscle, the scar in the shape of a country such as Chile, widening in the middle but narrowing again at the tips. Only when Aurelio detected Scott gaping at the scar did he turn away and walk up the beach; and, thankfully, by the time he rejoined the party on the blanket under the tree, he wore shorts that mostly covered his wound.
They lunched on salt-cured olives and baguettes onto which Zelda and Maryvonne laid slices of chorizo or cured Cuban ham, topped with a pungent local cheese. Scott could stomach no more than a few bites of his sandwich. No surprise there. He could rarely eat anything until evening. He was grateful, though, for the wine. It was a Torres dry white, which Aurelio retrieved from the shaded rivulet where he’d stashed the bottles on arrival, the wine cool and crisp, fruity and apple-heavy, its texture soft on the palate. Apparently, it was the only Spanish wine worthy of mention, the owner of the winery loyal to the Republican Army. Both Aurelio and Zelda praised the sandwiches, Aurelio devouring a second made for him by his wife, Zelda picking at Scott’s after finishing her own. When the Spaniard fell asleep on the blanket, Maryvonne expressed the desire to take a stroll along the beach and explore the crag, asking if Zelda or Scott cared to join her.
“You go ahead, Scott,” Zelda said. “I’ve seen it and will only want to dive off again.”
“What will you do?”
“Sit in the sun and read my novel.”
So he walked up the white-sanded beach with the taciturn Frenchwoman, feeling Zelda’s eyes on him, fearful lest she get it in her head that he’d planned for any of this.
“You and your wife are lovers still, yes, no, sometimes?” the young woman asked in French. He found the question strange but did not let on. It was only that sometimes, she explained, he and Zelda acted like strangers or newlyweds, not like people who’d known each other a long time. He became winded during the ascent, felt his heart aching, a hollow pain in the center of his chest, and she studied him with a concern steeped in the knowledge of illness.
“Ah, the Caribbean Sea,” she exclaimed, stopping short to take in the view to the south, letting him rest. It was magnificent, she said, the first time ever she had laid eyes on it.
When they started again she lost her footing and he caught her elbow, preventing her from falling.
“You are a man loved by many women,” she said.
He couldn’t figure out why she said it, but he remembered another woman uttering that same phrase—not Zelda, not Sheilah, who was it who’d spoken those very words to him?
“So you and your wife are lovers, yes?”
Again, there was more to the question than the simple if wildly inappropriate interest in how often he had sex with his wife.
“She is everything to me,” he said in clean, pithy French.
“Le monde entier,” she said, repeating his phrase. “But of course, this is never in doubt.” She returned to French for emphasis. “Cela n’a jamais eté en doute.”
Now they were on the tip of the promontory, and as the wind rose and fell he removed his hat. When it was up, the wind whipped her words out to sea, and all he could hear was the flap of her blouse or his jacket lapels. Wisps of his thin hair fell into his eyes, and the young woman flushed above the line of her narrow, elegant jaw, her eyes tearing and bright, the color of the sky itself. He hadn’t realized until that moment that he was attracted to her.
“It is pride,” she was saying, à propos of nothing, referring to Aurelio’s conduct earlier. “The wound is una vergüenza,” she continued. “In French the feeling is not so strong as in Spanish. What does English say for this? Dishonor?”
“Shame,” Scott suggested.
“It is also a strong word?”
“It can be pretty strong,” Scott said.
“And what must one do to become free of shame?”
“It is a losing battle,” Scott said.
He looked into her eyes, full of understanding, and believed she was someone he might take into his confidence, as he’d done with any number of women over the past decade, always in intense episodes, in liaisons dependent on drink, charisma, confession. She too would fall for him if he let her, the nurses always did, always trained nurses and actresses. He couldn’t remember why he grouped them, but in his experience women from either profession found his story hard to resist: invalid on the mend, sinner in remission, someone fearless in the face of indignity. With nurses, he supposed, it was that having seen men so often in distress, the facade of manliness crumbling, they were drawn to vulnerability again and again.
As they headed back along the shoreline for the blanket, he worried that Zelda might detect a change in him. He kept watch on his wife in her broad-rimmed straw hat as she pretended to be lost in the pages of a novel, now and then lifting her chin to glance up the beach toward Scott and Maryvonne, whose hand rested on his forearm.
“You were gone a long time,” she said, eyes on the page, too immersed in what she was reading to extricate herself just yet.
“He sleeps the entire time?” Maryvonne asked, eyeing her husband.
“Unless he’s faking,” Zelda said.
“I am awake
,” Aurelio said from the blanket, his hat pulled down over his brow and nose so that the brim danced ever so slightly on his lips as he spoke.
“I had no idea,” Zelda proclaimed, springing to her feet, recoiling from the blanket. “Were you awake the whole time?”
It was impossible to gauge how disturbed she was by the idea of his lying there feigning sleep while she read. She drew close to Scott, resting her hand flat against his chest.
“Dearest Dodo,” she whispered to him, “was the walk invigorating?”
“The wind was strong on the promontory, but otherwise it was quite relaxing.”
“She’s good company,” Zelda said softly, gesturing toward the Frenchwoman. “Don’t I choose well? May I borrow her for a few minutes?”
“I didn’t know we were rationing.”
“Don’t be that way,” Zelda said, her breath heavy on his cheek as she hooked Maryvonne by the arm while still addressing Scott. “Do you remember the interview you granted that newspaper in Kentucky oh so many years ago, the first to tag me the original for your flappers, what you told the journalist when he asked you to describe me?”
“That you were charming, the most charming person I’d ever met.”
“It’s true,” she said, brushing a leaf slowly from the front of Maryvonne’s blouse. “That’s what he said, and yet when the journalist asked my husband to continue, when I said go ahead and tell the readers what you really think of me, he wouldn’t say anything else. He couldn’t list any examples of my reputed charms. Imagine that—if somebody’s supposed to be the most charming person in the world, you’d think you could name a few of her charming traits.”
“Not everybody finds the same things are charming,” Maryvonne reasoned. “Perhaps your husband, he finds you charming no matter what you do.”
“Didn’t I tell you we would like her, Scott,” Zelda boasted, turning now to confide in Maryvonne. “Scott is hard and slow to please, but I can see from the way you two were promenading, arms interlinked, that we’ll all soon be fast friends. Let’s you and I walk in a direction no one else has gone.”
By the time Maryvonne and Zelda returned from the walk, something had been decided. Zelda spoke of the day’s itinerary as incomplete. Next she claimed the gelding for herself, announcing that Maryvonne would ride with her, a change in the rotation.
If that’s all there is to the secret, Scott said to himself, I’ll consider myself fortunate.
“The only question is who takes the old nag this time,” Zelda said.
“Stop calling her that, would you?” Scott said, rubbing the nose of the black mare, aware that he sounded annoyed and was in fact annoyed, though not so much about the horse.
“It’s decided, then,” she said, handing the reins of the palomino to Aurelio. “My husband is incurably romantic, always taking the side of the downtrodden.”
Immediately Zelda and Maryvonne rode ahead, prodding the gelding into a full trot.
“Should we chase them?” Aurelio asked.
“They won’t get far.”
“Are you sure?”
“One is never sure with Zelda, which is how she prefers it.”
Most likely Aurelio wanted to see if he could get the palomino to outrun the gelding, but was holding back to be polite.
“I do not know that I have met a woman so daring. She would daunt many soldiers beside which I fight in Spain.”
From time to time the bay gelding would gallop toward them, its triangular head bobbing in perfect syncopation, the small heads of the two women tucked low behind it, Maryvonne peering over Zelda’s shoulder so she too might enjoy the rush of wind, the horse pulling up in a din of snorts and hoofbeats, Zelda looking down at Scott from the taller horse.
“Remember the wisteria in Montgomery? How you said it always reminded you of me wherever you were, also the sycamores and the gothic willows by the river, the one which drooped so low with branches and foliage thick like stage curtains? I suggested we might spend a whole day inside there kissing and doing whatever we wanted and no one would ever find us, but still it was exciting to think they might, if they tried hard enough.”
“I was enchanted,” Scott said.
She rode off and when next she returned she brought up one of her thousand witticisms. Though it was difficult to remember her own words exactly, she could summarize the basic idea. It involved an especially stunning riposte offered to John Peale Bishop or Edmund Wilson.
“I believe that’s already in a story,” he replied.
“Oh, yes, well, I’ll think of others.”
He was still trying to track the first episode of which she spoke. For the life of him he couldn’t remember when it had taken place. It stirred in him a desire to kiss her beneath a willow tree. Most likely she had wished for it to stir in him the desire to kiss her beneath a willow tree.
His wife turned the gelding sharply and Maryvonne yelped involuntarily, but Zelda steadied the horse without event, again heading off down the beach, this time with Aurelio giving chase. Zelda cocked her head over her shoulder, light glancing off her auburn hair as she crouched low to welcome the competition. Scott made a few halfhearted attempts to get the mare to pick up her pace, but she wasn’t in a hurry and neither was he, in all honesty, so he settled for keeping the others in view.
After they disappeared on the horizon, he begin to lose track of time. The beach stretched monotonously before him. His head swayed from too much alcohol and activity, his thoughts heavy like the rhythmic footfalls of the horse, the sand beneath him dizzying as it ran uphill into palms, brush, and timid forest. He let the mare wander down to a dune sprouting grass, and only after she stooped to feed for several minutes did he jerk the reins to lead the horse along the shoreline and enjoy the splash of kickback as she trod through softly rolling peaks of breaking tide.
After a while he came upon a mansion in the Spanish Colonial style so popular in the Caribbean basin, with high white stucco walls and green-tiled roofs, their extended eaves creating shadowed overhangs. The molding above the main floor served as the balustrade of a balcony decorated with symmetrically rounded forms reminiscent of an old mission. It was straight out of the sudden proliferation of architectural styles along the Great Neck waterfront during the 1920s boom, the exact kind of estate in which his Gatsby (if only he were still alive, or real, for that matter) would choose to live. Scott couldn’t remember having passed the building earlier. From Hicacos Point to Club Kawama was more or less a direct line, there was no way to have gone so far astray, and yet somehow he’d done just that.
His head was swimming: how was this possible, goddamnit?
The very thought of pivoting and trekking back in search of his mistake exhausted him. Sweating in the sun, he could feel beads trickling along his chest and belly, his vision bleary. He simmered with low-order rage at Zelda. Why did she always have to turn everything into an adventure? He pulled the reins taut, riding on for several minutes, preparing to turn the mare around and retrace his route, when he caught sight of the palomino underneath a date palm a few hundred yards on, the Frenchwoman alone in the saddle. Why was she on the palomino instead of her spouse? And where were Zelda and the bay gelding?
He dug his heels into the mare’s ribs, pulling up on the reins at the same time, and she neighed and reared, but when he instead slapped the reins on the withers, she fell into a gallop for the first time all day, Scott now sprinting toward the emergency that was always awaiting him, the latest episode in a long history of catastrophes. Maryvonne called to him across the beach and he knew what she would say, that Zelda had been careless and injured herself, that she had wildly attempted to clear a hurdle of some sort and been thrown forward off the gelding as it jumped, crashing to the ground and breaking her neck. Except if that were true, why was Maryvonne unharmed? He tried to fit the pieces together, factoring in Zelda’s talent for soliciting her own ruin. Meanwhile, a Frenchwoman he’d met only yesterday, with whom he’d flirted during a walk on the
beach earlier this afternoon, was shouting at him, her voice like orchestral timpani above the percussive trollop of hooves so that at first he couldn’t make the words out. Those sibilant, strung-together sentences sounding like mere babble, until he realized that she was calling to him—“Slow down,” she cried in French. “Scott, slow your horse,” she exclaimed. “No need for urgency, there’s no misfortune here. Zelda is fine.”
10
WITH HER ALMOND-SHAPED EYES NARROWED, HER WIDE, SENsuous mouth wearing an expression of concern, Maryvonne asked, “She is unwell?” He was glad it was she who used that word, not him, still shamed by the panic of seeing this strange woman alone under the date palm as he rode toward her on the black mare.
Zelda and Aurelio had gone ahead into the village in search of the old gypsy woman, Maryvonne choosing to wait on Scott in case he couldn’t locate the road from the beach, though Zelda assured her it was unnecessary. Her husband would know where to find her. He was like a bloodhound, she couldn’t shake him if she tried. Still, Maryvonne decided, if she were on a slow horse, left behind by her party, she would want someone on the lookout for her.
Riding beside this handsome man with his wispy golden locks splayed on a sun-reddened face, with his thin lips and diamond-shaped jaw, their horses funneling between the low cabins and thatched-roof cottages, she didn’t pry into his dread thoughts, but asked only, “How long?”
“Since the first breakdown? Ten years.”
“It is difficult on you.”
“The costs you mean? Not insurmountable,” he said, downplaying the history of illness, finding composure in his gravity. “It’s put a strain on our livelihood, but I could never place her in less than capable hands. Once she asked me to stow her in a public asylum because she was afraid she was ruining everything she touched, myself, our daughter, our future but also our past—it was one of those periods when she couldn’t fight the illness—but I got her out of hospitals in New York and Baltimore, away from doctors who were only making matters worse, and I found her the best care I could, down South, in warm weather where she could be outdoors year round. Sometimes over these last two years it has seemed as though we might win, as though she might come all the way back.”
Beautiful Fools Page 20
