Beautiful Fools

by R. Clifton Spargo

  On the beach he listened to the rhythmic wash of waves, the predictable break and roll. He had lived regularly with the prospect of her death for a decade now. Only let her not suffer, he said to himself. Here he was, a man who hadn’t prayed for anything in years, rubbing a medallion between his fingertips, imploring a saint to whom he’d never given a moment’s thought for help as he headed down shore toward the main island.

  “Saint Lazarus,” he whispered, “she needs looking after more than I do.”

  Into the sky’s extravagance of color he strode, the luminous glow of orange, red, and fuchsia reflected on the sea’s surface like parade banners, his eyes welling from the brilliant sun. Whenever he imagined her gone from the world, everything else melted away. What did squabbles and recriminations, rivalries and sexual infidelities matter? How could drunken brawls and shouting matches hold any importance in the face of disaster? She was his true passion, the one thing he could never get over. He thought of diving into the waves even now, hazarding all to save her, letting the water creep into his leaky lungs, but if she had in fact gone under, he didn’t know where. He accused himself of not checking the boulders before she plunged from the crag earlier in the day. She must have registered his neglect, must have told herself, He cares more about preserving his precious lungs than about my splitting my head open on some rock.

  “It’s my fault,” he said aloud. He was incurably selfish, even narcissistic. Maybe that was true of all artists. He drank too much and neglected her. She distracted him while he was working, sometimes only by sitting still and saying nothing at all, the mere possibility of disruption making him tense and irritable. He ordered her to leave hotel rooms in which they stayed so he could write for a few hours. Even in strange cities, even in cold weather. On countless occasions he sent her away, and once she had asked, in a broken, sincere whisper, “But where should I go? I don’t have anything to do with myself,” and yet he still shouted, “Why is that always my problem? Anywhere but here, please. Can’t you ever leave me alone for a few hours?” As soon as she was gone, though, he gave in to regret, spent the entire day worrying about her instead of working, fretting about what might happen to her alone on the streets of Paris, Baltimore, or New York. “Your problem,” she once said, “is that you can’t work when I’m in the room, sometimes even in the house, but you also can’t stand it when I’m out on the town without you.”

  He could hear her voice, the familiar tones, that bizarre sense of humor about his neurotic need to put her out of mind. “Did you enjoy bumping me off?” she asked him once while she was marooned in Prangins, shoulders, breasts, and face plagued by rashes, her entire being afflicted by the itching and flaking of a psychosomatic disease that got worse with every hour spent in his company, until the doctors pronounced him a precipitating condition and banished him from the hospital. And what had he done in the face of her seemingly incurable distress? He’d written a story hypothetically killing off the cracked soul of his poor wife, easily one of the four or five best of his career.

  “What was it like with me gone, once and for all?” she said after reading the story.

  “Don’t be silly. I wrote from my deepest fears, I exaggerated my wrongs and put them on trial, punishing the man for what he hadn’t even meant to do in the first place.”

  “It’s a beautiful story, Scott, one of your very best in my estimation,” she said. “You can tell he loves her, especially now that she’s dead. But you and I have read enough Freud to know that our deepest wishes and deepest fears are closely related. By the way, I liked the detail of his locking her out of the house; I imagine that part wasn’t hard to come up with.”

  “He didn’t do it on purpose.”

  “No, he was drunk and could hardly remember anything at all,” she said, smiling royally, luxuriating in her ability to forgive his flaws. “I’m told it’s a common phenomenon with dipsomaniacs. Vague remorse wrapped up with innocence, outrage at the very deeds perpetrated by their secret souls.” She had let the point sink in before kissing him on the cheek. “All the same, the story made me feel loved. I felt sorry for you without me. You got one thing right. When he imagines she wouldn’t want him to be so alone—that’s true, Scott; if I disappear on you for good, if ever I can’t climb out of this hole in myself, I won’t want you to be alone.” She was capable of a thousand small kindnesses. He resented the doctors who diagnosed her as having a megalomaniacal personality. Though vicious and spiteful when wounded, she was kinder, more giving and bountiful, than anyone he’d ever known.

  The beach narrowed at the far end, the sun slipping low in the sky, soon to sink into the waves, the air above it purplish and peach with a low plane of clouds running out from the fiery center in striated lines. He had walked a mile, maybe farther, so caught up by his obsession with finding Zelda that he only now detected the drop in temperature.

  He remembered the letter, wondering if it might provide a clue to where she had gone. Pulling the perfumed green stationery from his journal—that sudden trace of her in the air sent a coarse sadness through him—he began to skim it: “Dearest Scott, I want you to know how much it means to hear you promise to take better care of yourself.” He looked for phrases: “Hearing you speak with hope” and “fills me with a belief in the future.” He skipped ahead: “This may be hard for you to understand, as I myself am only now beginning to understand it.” Then further on: “If you lose your moorings, I will too.” The letter was full of judgments about his fine character, how he might get it back. She spoke of his writing, his struggles to write, comparing him to his peers. “You are a finer writer than any of them, in every way, and oh so much more my own favorite writer.” She begged him to think of what they’d built together, not only of what they’d foolishly torn down. “You’ve been sad for such a long time.” Then she brought it back to herself: “It makes it hard for me to go on when you speak of your life ‘being over.’” He skimmed the rest, nothing new here, nothing especially ominous. Except perhaps all that overbearing hope.

  A warm slosh of water filled his shoes. Without realizing it, he had wandered to the ocean’s edge straight into a wave rushing high onto the sands. The water squished unpleasantly in his socks, trapped in the arches of his shoes. He inspected the beach, unable to proceed much farther. Immediately ahead the tide swallowed the shore as whitecaps rolled over a small embankment of sand, on the other side of which grass and reeds and trees grew out into the salt marsh. The sulfurous stench of landlocked tidal currents greeted him and he could detect the percussive chatter of insects, here and there the flapping of a crane or a pelican as it skimmed low over the grasses. Sitting down to rest his lungs, he heard the cawing of a gull and watched as it plunged into the marsh and emerged seconds later from behind the tall grass, a fish held like a thick branch in its bill as it flew directly above him. Several other gulls cawed searchingly after it, gliding on the wind, wings spread like children’s kites as they swooped slantingly, clamoring, until the first bird dropped its prey on the sand not far from him. The fish convulsed, flipping into the air, as four additional gulls congregated (when one flew off, another descended to replace it), all stabbing mercilessly at the dying fish with hooklike beaks.

  He felt the odd desire to lie down. The terraced sands carved by the day’s waves, caked by sun but soon to be swallowed by nighttime tides, looked inviting. But he couldn’t rest as long as she was gone. Not a person in sight for as far as he could see—why not call out? Go ahead, he urged himself. Zelda, Zelda, he recited her name but couldn’t bring himself to utter it aloud. If he spoke her name on this desolate beach where no one could hear his cries, if he listened to his fears in a call and response between himself and the sky—well, who knew what possibilities that might invite? He couldn’t predict how he’d }respond to hearing his own desperate need for her to be safe echoed back to him.

  It was time to ask for help.

  The manager hesitated at first, doubtless recognizing Scott as the man he’d
evicted from one of the cottages only last night. Scott explained that his wife spoke almost no Spanish, and that she suffered from mental illness, a patient in an asylum back in the United States. This news put the manager on alert, instilled in him a proper sense of urgency, though Scott resented having to leverage Zelda’s illness to get him to do what he ought to have done simply and automatically. “I am a somewhat famous writer,” he told the manager, wishing to see him squirm. “If my wife dies in an accident on your beach, it will be bad for the hotel’s reputation.” Of course, if Zelda learned about it later, what he’d said to provoke this man into action, how many people knew about her condition as a result, an entire hotel staff put on alert for a madwoman gone missing, she would be mortified. But she had left him no choice.

  Maryvonne hastened from the restaurant as soon as she saw him, wending her way through small clusters of guests assembled on the patio to watch the sunset. “Have you found her?” she inquired, as though she’d thought of nothing else for the past two hours, and perhaps that was true. “How can I help?”

  There was nothing this woman could do for his wife, least of all if Zelda had already inflicted some awful, final fate on herself. Most often her suicide attempts were bits of theater executed in his presence: the time she jerked at the steering wheel attempting to plunge them off a cliff on the Riviera, or those occasional dashes for tracks when she spied a passing locomotive. He was always there to save her from herself. This time, though, she was roaming tropical terrain in a foreign land in the midst of a mild break, perhaps unable to find her way back or to ask directions to the hotel. Harm might descend from anywhere, from almost anyone.

  “You have heard from her by now?” the Frenchwoman asked, as he escorted her to the perimeter of the patio, away from the other guests.

  “She left a note,” he told her. “She’s off on yet another walk, it appears.” Though he had just asked the hotel manager to dispatch several employees to comb the beach and make inquiries in the village after his wife, he nevertheless refused Maryvonne’s kindnesses, maybe on instinct, maybe on the sad speculation that he didn’t want her around if it all went south. It would be one thing if they found Zelda wandering the village, or swimming in strong waves, alive and well, waiting to be recovered, then escorted to the hotel so that everyone might pretend nothing had happened. Quite another if he got word from the hotel staff that local police had discovered a drowned woman.

  “She will be fine, then?” Maryvonne asked, unconvinced.

  He could tell from the tilt of her head and the tone of her voice that she didn’t believe his feeble lies. Why should she? She was asking to be let inside his sorrow and he was saying no.

  “Perhaps I will look for you later,” he said. “Perhaps Zelda and I together will look for you later, if she’s up to it.”

  “Would that not be lovely?”

  “Will you be at the bar, here on the hotel patio, on the porch of your cottage?”

  “One place or another,” she said before retreating to the hotel restaurant where Aurelio sat waiting for her, waving once at Scott without rising.

  He discovered Famosa García at a corner table in the hotel bar, reading a newspaper. The old Cuban looked up at Scott as if the two men had a scheduled appointment.

  “Ah, Señor Fitzgerald, I am pleased to meet you.”

  Scott was anything but pleased. He didn’t care to listen to news of any sort from Matéo’s messenger, even if it meant the entire police force of Havana was about to descend on him without warning. Matéo was just using the threat of legal hassle to keep tabs on him. Scott wanted to have it out with Famosa García, tell him how lousy his timing was. For a split second, though, he paused, wondering how far Matéo’s network reached, whether he was aware of today’s events on Varadero, whether his skilled messenger might already know of Zelda’s disappearance—a wild thought, so Scott put it out of mind.

  “Have you nothing to say to Señor Cardoña?” Famosa García asked.

  “Can you get a message to him?”

  “Anything you like; I am only enviado, maybe you say, the reporter of news?”

  “Envoy.”

  “An envoy, yes, at your service. So we drink first?”

  The combination of the man’s velvety voice and the milky eye that couldn’t focus was appalling.

  “I’ll hold off on the drink,” Scott said as the waiter approached. “Una cerveza, that’s all for me, gracias.”

  His head was spinning and he knew himself to be treading dangerous ground. Did he have the guts to say what he was about to say? The more he thought about it, the more he believed Matéo’s kindness to be one long bluff, maybe not from the start—but somewhere early on during that long Saturday night, Scott had become a mark.

  “Tell him I’m broke, won’t you,” Scott said, playing his hand more decorously than he intended. “I’m in no position to invest with him, wish I could, that I had some value, some net worth.”

  Famosa García ran his fingers through his mane of hair, his chin bent piously over his drink as though he had no stake in what was being said.

  “I’m grateful for what he did for me back in Havana,” Scott continued, feeling the old man’s silence as leading, as though he was being given just enough rope. “Maybe he wants to broker an investment for me for the sake of fond memories we share of New York, and I appreciate all of this, I do, I enjoyed our two nights in Havana, I’m grateful for his company and his assistance—”

  “He does not require your gratitude,” Famosa García said. He was here to talk about the incident from the other night, the progress of the police investigation.

  Scott couldn’t believe what he was hearing. What more was there to say about the death of a peon in a juke joint, a death in which neither he nor Zelda had played any part?

  “My employer, he finds another witness, this is no problem. Señor Cardoña always he have many ways of solving problemas.”

  Obviously, the witness in question was someone Matéo had coerced. None of it made any sense. Why did they need a false witness in the first place? But the customs of Cuban law were beyond Scott’s grasp. He longed to protest, longed to shut down the conversation and shout, “Well, she’s gone, the invaluable witness is gone, there’s no need for machinations, let justice run its course.”

  “What is it?” Famosa García asked him. “You have something to say.”

  “What does that get us?” Scott finally asked.

  “Excuse me,” Famosa García said, as though Scott had directly challenged him.

  “The trumped-up witness, how does that protect my wife?”

  “The witness is the woman who the men fought over, she will say so.”

  “Well, convey my message, please,” Scott said, “my sincere gratitude for his help. I wish I had some way to repay him just now, but I don’t.”

  “It is done,” Famosa García said, pushing his chair back from the table. “I am only envoy.”

  Scott felt that etiquette required some gesture of appreciation for the man’s efforts.

  “My wife kept the picture we took together,” he said. “She was quite pleased with it.”

  “And how is Señora Fitzgerald?” Famosa García asked, his one good eye peering at Scott. Was it possible, he wondered again, that this man was behind Zelda’s disappearance, all of today’s events somehow orchestrated at Matéo’s command?

  “You know where she is, don’t you?” Scott asked spontaneously, but it was just the long day of drink talking, maybe also the heat.

  Famosa García stared at him without flinching, neither dumbfounded nor outraged. Either he knew nothing or he was a masterful actor. “She is in her room, tired from a day spent in the sun, no?”

  “Sure, that’s all I meant. She’ll be sorry to have missed you,” Scott said. “We were grateful for your guidance in Havana, and we also found a church here on the peninsula.”

  Of course, Scott said to himself, I should have thought of it sooner. He shook the h
and of the Cuban, wishing him safe travels, even as he pictured Zelda in the pews of that small mission-style church, crouched beneath its exposed-timber ceiling and the modest holy glass windows while light drained from the sky.

  That’s where she had gone, the village church; he felt it with dread certainty. But would she still be there at this hour? He took a long, slow breath, ignoring the rasp in his chest, gathering himself, sipping at his beer slowly to slow his pulse. He was balancing two competing emotions: sudden relief from the insight into his wife’s mind, this hope that the day might yet resolve itself peaceably, mixed with an undercurrent of terror. You haven’t found her yet, he reminded himself. He needed to set out for the village right away, before night descended, except—the thought held him back, if only briefly—he was afraid of what he might find.

  He pulled out his Moleskine, scanning its pages, pausing over a passage about Sheilah written days ago, in a stupor induced by alcohol or remorse, during that long night on which he’d vowed to go on the wagon, fighting off those middle-of-the-night dregs, then fighting with his mistress before fleeing to Asheville the same morning. “It was altogether possible that Colman had pursued her so diligently, had stayed so long with her, for no better reason than this: she was someone who could keep a secret.” Lost in his own words, he gave in to regret over the way he’d parted with Sheilah, who had put up with so much from him these past two years. What if he never saw her again? “He hadn’t gone looking for that quality in her. It showed in her bearing, a sense of style mixed with decorum. She was among those whose ranks were thinning from generation to generation, a woman designed for privacy, that rarest of products in a herd-like society, the truly trustworthy person. If as a rule natural-born confidants didn’t pursue work as gossip columnists, Colman had to admit it was perfect cover. In her bed he could unburden himself; there and there alone he was able to speak of matters which had plagued him for years, the secrets he knew about his wife—how damaged she was even in her finest moments, even at the peak of recovery—but could never reveal to the wide world.”