Beautiful Fools

by R. Clifton Spargo

  “You hold yourself responsible.” Maryvonne spoke slowly in English, choosing her words carefully. “There are people who never forgive themselves for the misfortunes of loved ones.”

  “I should have read the signs earlier,” he replied. His glinting steely eyes made him seem stubborn but not altogether hard. “Maybe then it wouldn’t have been so bad.”

  “You have done much. Even I can see this from outside, from the way she speaks of you with gratitude. Also never forget how strong she is. It is the experience I have when I find Aurelio wounded.”

  Thankful for her kind words, he feared he was saying too much, his tongue loosened by sun and worry, but also by the exultation of having been spared the worst yet again. His self-accusations felt formulaic. He’d said these things too many times: to Bunny Wilson, Gerald Murphy, and others who could remember Zelda from better days. But such friends were few and far between, and he saw them rarely. Instead he confided in strangers, incanting for some woman who reminded him of Zelda the grim play-by-play of the past decade, typically over drinks, sometimes as a prelude to bedding her. The new woman might console him, her pity permissible, even desirable, but as soon as she started in on Zelda, saying, “Poor dear,” or “It must be awful,” barely skimming the surface of his wife’s sufferings, he recoiled in disgust. He vowed a dozen times never to speak of it to anyone again, and when sober stuck admirably to his resolution, stiff lipped, withdrawn, stoical.

  “Please, no more talk of our history,” he said to Maryvonne. “Sometimes I think she could leave it all behind if there was no one to remind her of it.”

  “By which you mean yourself.”

  “Yes,” he said, admiring her astuteness. “I suppose I do.”

  They held the horses in a trot, riding beyond the church into the small square where hours earlier there had been the bustle and squalor of a market, but now they encountered only lonely stalls, stray crates of produce stacked in the dirt lanes waiting to be loaded into the bin of a rusted pickup truck parked in the shade of a banyan tree. After dismounting the mare, he stood below Maryvonne, offering his shoulder. Her foot in the stirrup, she swung the other leg over the arch of the palomino’s hindquarters, then shuffled her hand from the saddle to Scott’s shoulder, freeing herself from the stirrup to swing pendulum-like into him as he caught her by the waist, her cheek brushing against his chin.

  Zelda came running toward them.

  “Isn’t it exciting?” She pointed to Aurelio in front of a hut, towering over the small elderly woman from earlier that day. “She wants to read my cards, but here’s the weird part. We rode into town straight for the church, and she was at this post calling to us that she knew I’d be passing at this hour. Isn’t that wonderful?”

  “It is what she might say,” Maryvonne suggested, “even if she, how does one say—”

  “Happened to be there by accident,” Scott said.

  “I expect this from you, Scott,” Zelda said, before rotating in a dancer’s quarter turn to cast reproach on the Frenchwoman. Now she inserted her arm into the nook of Maryvonne’s folded elbow, the sleeve of her dress dragging so that the naked skin of their forearms touched. “But you and I agreed to this plan, Maryvonne.”

  “I am not disagreeing now,” Maryvonne said amicably. “For all I know, it is a meeting with providence, vraiment, truly.”

  Like many lapsed Catholics, Scott was uneasy about the occult. In Asheville he had enjoyed the companionship of a palmist named Laura Guthrie. It was Laura whose words he had been remembering earlier, it now occurred to him, in response to Maryvonne’s compliment, Laura, head wrapped in a turban, set up in a corner of the Grove Park Inn to read the fortunes of wealthy guests and predict the good things that lay ahead, declaring as she held his wrist and ran a finger along the lines of his palm, “It’s true your adversities have been many, but I can assure you of this. There will always be women, many women drawn to you for years to come. It will sometimes be hard for you to choose.” More flattery than divination, her words gave off the scent of practiced flirtation. Her inability to pick up on Zelda’s illness or his devotion to her convinced him that Laura’s otherworldly insights amounted to nothing more than parlor tricks, so he had returned in the evening to ask her to dine with him.

  But the old Cuban woman was different. Her irises streaked yellow like Murano glass beads and the taut silver strands of hair pulled beneath a garish headscarf made him wonder if she could access a realm he didn’t believe in and didn’t especially wish to hear from.

  “Zelda, this is silly,” he said as they approached the hut, she on one forearm, Maryvonne on the other. At this angle his wife’s face looked gaunt and austere and he could discern the gentle line of rippled scarring along her jaw from the eczema. She had that faraway look she used to get in Paris, then later at Ellerslie, when she set herself against the opponents of her desire. He was only the most obvious of them, for not believing in her talent for ballet, for not helping her chart a professional course while she was young, and the defeats yielding only slowly to growth might have been easier to bear. There were other opponents of her desire: her family, for underestimating her; any woman (actress, painter, writer) who might be perceived as competition, for presenting as more accomplished than she; lastly, the dance itself, for being alluring and so often beyond her.

  And her willingness to beat up her body until every muscle in her legs was pulled, twisted, or deformed—her thighs reeking of the muscle oil she rubbed into them religiously, those thighs always in such pain that even while she slept her legs twitched and convulsed beside him in bed at night—well, how could you interpret that except as some way of paying him back for his doubts? She would exorcise all the demons of wasted youth at once, memories in which she was the spirit of an era incarnate, beautiful, frivolous, marvelously irresponsible, promiscuous yet loyal, experimental in action and opinion, always full of wit. She would sculpt her fine muscled body until it was an instrument of the dance and nothing else. Hardly sleeping, practicing six to eight hours a day, she spent the rest of her time worrying about mistakes made at rehearsal, what she needed to do to improve, whether improvement was even possible. The ballet not so much art as proving ground. All the many steps and maneuvers still beyond her, the heights she couldn’t attain on her leaps, the latest loving reprimand from her taskmaster Madame Egorova, were obstacles to be surmounted. She talked endlessly about her limits, doubting she could overcome them; and he failed the test every time, saying it wasn’t necessary to surpass any limits, she had no one to prove herself before, no one was watching. “You’re just afraid I might actually have talent,” she would cry out. “You want to harvest my brilliance, charms, and free-associative thoughts for yourself, so you can churn out stories about useless girls with potential, but God forbid one of us gets into the ring with you. Then you have to put me in my place. What you’re really afraid of is that I might be as good as you are.”

  He had never believed in her, she would sometimes say. He had underestimated the diversity of her talents, for painting, for conversation and writing, for dance, riding, and sports of almost any kind. Every criticism he’d ever made of her, mostly while angry and provoked, was an excuse to do whatever the hell she wanted. No regard for his opinion. No worries about the cost to their love affair. Never a pang about the dereliction of her duties as mother or wife. Ballet was an opportunity to rebel against every choice made under the influence of her husband and their disaster of a marriage.

  “Okay, let’s get on with this,” Scott said, distrusting the urgency of his wife’s latest desire but seeing no way to deter her. “It’s not real, though. It’s just voodoo superstition mixed with effrontery, the bravado of performance.”

  “Then what are you so afraid of? Let me have my fun.”

  The levity of her tone made it seem that he was making too much of it. All she wanted, for Christ’s sake, was to consult a palmist or tarot reader and have her fortune told.

  “I go to a clairv
oyant all the time in Asheville, as do several of the other women. I learn all sorts of things about you and your mysterious double life in Hollywood, since you’re so hush-hush about which films you work on, how your new novel is coming, what you do at night with the women who fall in love with you.”

  Modestly, Maryvonne retreated one step, then another, before Scott caught her by the wrist, dragging her forward to demonstrate that he had nothing to hide.

  “Ask her how much for two women,” Scott instructed Aurelio, and the Spaniard, standing in the wings for much of the conversation, now took up negotiations, letting the clairvoyant name a price, then shaking his head.

  “Scott, I wish to go alone,” Zelda whispered, her face averted from the Frenchwoman.

  “But I thought the idea was for the two of you to visit the clairvoyant together,” he protested. “Wasn’t that the great secret you were keeping on the beach?”

  Zelda laughed in that way she had of finding her own antics preposterous yet amusing.

  “I also wish,” Maryvonne interjected, “for my fortune to be read.”

  “You can wait your turn and get a reading after me,” Zelda said sharply. “I don’t want anyone listening to my secrets.”

  “But your Spanish is not very good,” Maryvonne said, “and this divining ancient woman will not speak English.”

  It was impossible to argue the point.

  “Then we’ll go together,” Zelda sighed, “but only tell her what I tell you to tell her, and only ask questions when I say so.”

  Scott pulled out his wallet and Aurelio did the same, but Scott waved him off. “No, allow me. It’s my wife’s crazy idea, so the least I can do is shell out the cash.”

  “What if she says something I don’t wish to hear, Scott?” Zelda asked suddenly.

  “Well, that’s easy enough to solve,” he said, shooting her a severe look, trying to get a handle on her state of mind. “You don’t have to go inside in the first place.”

  “Don’t be a high hat, Scott, and don’t be so cowardly. Perhaps my fortunes will have changed,” she said lightly. “Besides, what hazard can a clairvoyant predict that we haven’t already encountered? If she says anything unpleasant, I’ll tell her to move on, a good strategy, don’t you think—I won’t let her say anything I don’t want to hear.”

  Zelda parted the red serge curtains to slip into the old woman’s lair, Maryvonne starting after her.

  “Is it too much to ask you to keep an eye on her?” he said in a hushed voice.

  Maryvonne didn’t reply right away, her chin bowed.

  “Don’t worry yourself about it,” he said, half taking back the request but not quite. “All you must do, please, if the old witch says anything ominous, water it down in translation.”

  “What is ‘water down’?” Maryvonne asked.

  “Tell a lie, dire un mensonge,” he said, raising his thumb and index finger as if holding a delicate pearl between them. “A few small lies, kindnesses really.”

  Flipping through his billfold, he extracted a wad of American dollars, reminding himself of the exchange rate, knowing the amount he held was too large and trying to whittle it down. In the midst of his calculations, the old woman snatched the cash from his fingers.

  “Sí, sí, el dinero americano es bueno,” she said and their negotiations came to an end. The extra money, Scott decided, might motivate her to tell a kinder fortune.

  Showing a full set of sandstone-colored teeth, the clairvoyant identified a ramshackle bodega beyond the market, saying “Una hora” several times amid a warble of Spanish words, alternately eyeing each man, then flapping her wrists out from the waist to chase them off.

  “She say we can wait over there. The drinks are good, she promise us,” Aurelio said, “and they will be on me.”

  The old woman put her hand on Maryvonne’s waist, herding her into the hut.

  Scott foresaw the tall glass of Bacardi rum waiting for him at the bodega. He was exhausted, as though he’d spent a long day under deadline on the studio lot, running between his office and that of some director who kept arbitrarily reversing course on a script. Only he wasn’t at work, he was on holiday, and you weren’t supposed to feel this worn out by the pursuit of leisure.

  Not twenty feet down the road, Aurelio at his side, Scott heard the scuttle of footsteps behind them. Before he could turn she put her warm, soft hand to his neck, thanking him—for his patience, for doting on her impulses. “I know I’m taking advantage, but I’m having a lovely time and you’re so tolerant. Scott, this year is going to be different,” Zelda said. “It’s going to be a good year for us, for money, for so many other things. I just need to hear the clairvoyant say it, then I’ll know it’s true.”

  “But Zelda, dear, don’t put too much trust in—”

  “That’s not why I ran back, though,” she said. “While riding on the beach earlier, while outracing everyone, I was flooded by memories and I almost forgot to tell you, it couldn’t wait until after. About the dollhouse I made for Scottie that one Christmas, a perfect replica of our house at Ellerslie, curtains in all its windows sewn from the same fabric as the curtains hanging from the windows of that three-storied, high-ceilinged Greek Revival mansion we were living in, do you remember, also, the furniture carved from fine woods with seats wrapped and stapled in leather, the bookshelves in your tiny study made from oak, the perfect miniature of your writing desk, also the figurines for each of us, me, you, Scottie. Did you forget about that?”

  “I hadn’t thought of it in a long while,” he admitted, looking to his left to gauge whether Aurelio was listening.

  “You see,” she said. “You never remember my charming qualities. But you won’t forget that story again, will you, Scott?”

  “Never,” he said.

  “Is it gone?”

  He wasn’t sure what she meant.

  “The dollhouse? Is it gone?”

  He thought it might be in storage in Baltimore. If she wished for him to do so, he would check someday soon.

  She smiled, pleased to have their disagreement resolved so simply. She didn’t want there to be any hard feelings between them, not when she was about to allow the old fisherwoman to trawl her soul and see what the future held.

  Maryvonne wasn’t sure what Scott’s request required of her. Did he mean for her to betray Zelda’s trust? She didn’t think she could dupe this savvy woman even if she tried. Also, it felt like a favor you might ask of a friend of many years, not someone you had met a day ago. Slowly she had begun to reconsider her early impressions of this dazzling, presumptuous, and desperately isolated couple.

  “If God came down and gave him the choice tomorrow,” Zelda ruminated, expecting Maryvonne to translate, “which would my husband choose: a long life by my side in which we could finally make each other happy or a bestselling, Pulitzer Prize–winning—oh, never mind, I know the answer to that.”

  Maryvonne stopped mid-translation, holding a finger up to the divining woman, telling her to wait a minute, that wasn’t what they wanted to ask after all.

  “Zelda,” she said in English, “you need to go slowly, please, and decide what you want to know. We are confusing her.”

  “Is she a gypsy?”

  “You want me to ask her that?”

  “I suppose not,” Zelda said. “But what’s your opinion?”

  The woman handed Zelda the deck of cards and instructed her to shuffle them. Zelda cut the deck, nervously folding the two halves into each other until they merged, then splitting and joining them again, no longer chatting, no longer asking questions. Maryvonne took mental notes: the shifts in mood, the sudden lapsing from childish exuberance to dread. Receiving the deck from Zelda, the divining woman began to flip cards face up and lay them on the table, while Zelda, chattering nervously once more, also nibbling on her nails, strained to follow the hands of the old woman rather than the cards on the table, as though policing a poker player she suspected of dealing from the bottom of the deck. T
he old woman looked up and spoke sharply.

  “She say the questions will come later,” Maryvonne explained.

  “Let her do it her way, then,” Zelda said, “but I don’t want to yield all control.”

  The divining woman flipped nine cards onto the table, structuring them in a V facing herself, a mountain peak from the perspective of Zelda and Maryvonne sitting opposite her.

  “Is the card upside down according to whether it’s facing me or her?” Zelda asked.

  Maryvonne recognized the major arcana cards right away, the Fool in first position, the Death card reversed in the third position, the Hermit and the Lovers also reversed. Though no expert in tarot, she knew enough to discern that the minor arcana cards weren’t much more promising. Zelda cursed the Fool. Also she didn’t approve of the card in the far corner nearest to her, the shrouded figure, familiar from past readings. She always got dealt that card. No matter what she did, he shadowed her.

  The old woman closed her eyes and moved her hands in the air over the deck. She demanded complete silence, and when she opened her lids halfway, you could see her eyes rolling from side to side like marbles in a confined space, until at last she began to incant the lessons of the spirits, her cadence monotonous and solemn like that of monks saying matins.

  “She say you are far away from most people you care for and you have closed your heart. So much spirit and energy and confusion. It is for many years, all this confusion, she has rarely seen so much confusion in a deck. You have known great sorrow, sometimes greater joy, which you need to let come again because sorrow, she is winning.”

  “When can I ask questions?” Zelda whispered, but the woman did not lower her eyes, continuing in a steady drone.

  “She say the cards speak of travel, many trips. Do you want me to interrupt her?”