Zelda saw her opportunity. He’d spent the night fearing her death and he looked the worse for it. She needed to persuade him that the entire episode simply proved how necessary she was to him. Nevertheless, she didn’t wish to explain herself, why and where she’d gone, what she prayed for, whether anyone answered.
“I’m okay,” she promised him.
He couldn’t believe she’d done this to him again.
“I needed to clear my head, but everything is fine now.”
He’d been half certain she was dead.
“Well, you seem to have handled my demise rather riotously,” she said, alluding to the alcohol on his breath, the late hour. The cruel glance he shot her hastened regret. “I didn’t mean that,” she said. “Can I take it back?”
The doors to the balcony had been cracked so that she might listen to the reliably pounding surf, the thunder rolling in while she prayed at the foot of the bed. Just then a gust of wind blew the doors open and she scampered forward, pushing them shut against the spitting winds, thankful for the chance to move out from under his stunned stare.
“Zelda, where were you?”
“It’s not important,” she said, facing him again, noticing he’d left the door to their room ajar, now striding forward also to close it and lock them in. “I can’t remember all the places, in town, at the church—”
“I knew it,” he said.
Then back to find the clairvoyant, after that mostly on the beach, in and out of the woods of the resort.
“We checked most of those places.”
“I know you did, dearest Scott,” she said. “Can we not talk about it just now? We need to take care of you, get you out of those clothes, into something dry and warm.”
Under her coaxing, he seemed all at once to let go, the man before her no longer someone middle-aged, distinguished, handsomely graying at the temples, but instead a person on the verge of collapse, bags under his eyes, his posture slackened, exhaustion emanating from every fiber of his being. On cue he began to cough. It was a hacking, wet cough.
“Scott, let me draw you a bath.”
“I need to let the front desk know you’ve come home.”
“Later.”
“They’re looking for you.”
“Not at this hour, they’re not,” she said. “Besides, I’ve already been found. I’ve been in this room for hours.”
He tried to make calculations about the length of their separation, about the places searched, about his last visit to the room. She watched him doing the math in his head.
“Where did you go after the church?” he asked.
Having turned on the spigot, she ran her fingers under the stream, waiting for it to warm, no guarantee it would at this hour of the night, in the middle of a terrific thunderstorm. While the pipes clanked and water thrummed against the white porcelain basin of the tub, she exited the bathroom to undress her husband, peeling the sleeves of his jacket from his arms, fishing in the breast pocket for the Moleskine to discover it damp around the edges but otherwise undamaged. She placed it on the desk. Lifting her gaze, she saw the gun tucked in his belt and recoiled.
“Scott, where did you get that?”
His hand reached automatically for his hip, the place on his body where her eyes were fixed. “Oh,” he said, “it’s the old Smith and Wesson I bought years ago in Baltimore.”
“Why do you have it on you? Have you been carrying it the entire time?”
“I thought you might be in danger,” he said, extracting the gun from his belt, laying it on the desk beside the journal.
Though disconcerted, she resumed the loving chore of undressing him, remembering all the ways she’d stripped him of clothing in the past, trying to concentrate on the facts before them, wet clothing, wet skin, weariness, so as not to return to the events of the night. Off with the rumpled pinstriped shirt, also the T-shirt underneath, until he was bare chested and she could run her fingers through the ghostly blond-white wisps of hair on his well-defined pectorals, down along his muscled but alcohol-bloated stomach. “You have such nice skin,” she said as she tugged at his belt and in one swift motion pulled his trousers to his ankles, realizing only then that she should have removed his shoes first. He shuffled to the bed and sank into it, coughing as he reclined, a fist held to his mouth to smother the hacking even as he raised his legs so she could unlace the Florsheims and free his feet, ripe from sweat and rain. Again she checked on the water running into the tub, lukewarm at best, but it would do.
He was lying on the bed, naked except for his BVDs, drowsing. She pulled him to his feet, saying, “Scott, let’s get you washed, then we can sleep.”
Afterward she walked him naked, rubbed dry, his pale skin flushed in splotches, only a bathrobe draped over his shoulders, the front hanging open to expose his pene, as the Cubans called it. Depositing him on the sheets, the covers pulled back, she burrowed in beside him.
At some point he must have passed out, he couldn’t be sure for how long. She wore only a long sheer pink nightgown through which he could see the rise of her hips turned sideways, her body rotated into him, her groin warm against his. She nuzzled him, asking was he awake, and how long could they stay in Cuba. “Scott, Scott,” she was saying as he listened to the wind-whipped torrents against the window. “Are we together again? I never know what any of this means.” It was just like her to want everything put back together in an instant, always wanting back into the now, into her marriage, into the notion of family. She believed so desperately in the myth of normalcy, always fearing it had eluded her. Normalcy: he would have defined it, in the style of his friend H. L. Mencken, as the notion that somewhere someone who wasn’t having a good life could still believe she was owed one. Through those long months of her first full breakdown, the institutionalization at Prangins and the tortures endured there in order to be readmitted to the world, the call to normalcy haunted her. Even when inside it, while living on the estate at Ellerslie, or vacationing with her husband and daughter in Charleston, or touring Cuba, she feared it was all just pretend and not how people who were really normal felt about being normal.
He dozed once more and then felt her stirring. She thought there might be somebody in the room. She wanted him to get up and check, then changed her mind. “Don’t leave me, dearest.” So he rolled onto his side to stare into the empty space between the bed and the balcony, assuring her no one was in the shadows. Heavy with exhaustion, listening to the rain, softer now as it prattled on the roof tiles above, he stroked her hair, but she was already asleep.
“I’m here,” he whispered. “It’s always just you and me.”
When next he awoke it was quiet, only dripping drains, the sprinkle and shimmer of wind through drenched palm fronds. Their bodies were no longer touching, she on her side of the bed, he on his. As he drifted in and out of fitful sleep, he thought he heard her chanting in a prayerlike whisper, the murmur soothing as his head sunk heavy into the pillow. When he woke next he had dreamed of her standing by the bed, laying hands on him, running holy medallions and herbs and charms over his prone body, the old woman with the yellow feline eyes witnessing his nudity while guiding Zelda through some incantation. The image of the clairvoyant chanting over his naked body terrified him, and he jolted awake several times during the night, until he became aware of what was happening on the other side of the bed, feigning slumber so as to pretend not to hear his wife’s words.
Eventually, though, he was peering through sleep-heavy lids at Zelda, propped against the headboard, eyes fixed on the air above as if listening to someone, then replying in a string of negation. “I am nothing, I am nothing, I am nothing,” she chanted in a whisper, waiting a few seconds, then answering, “It doesn’t matter, I am nothing.”
“Zelda,” he said softly.
“I’m all right,” she said, gasping for air, on the verge of hyperventilating. “It was only pretend—I wondered what it was to be one of the devoutly possessed, you know, those virgin myst
ics who experience true union with God.”
Gently he massaged her wrist, so that she would understand what was real, what wasn’t, and she turned to him, tucking her nose into the crook of his neck, silent at first, but soon he could feel the warm trickle of tears pooling along his clavicle.
“Scott, I know something’s wrong with me.” She lifted her face, sniffling, unable to breath, her words nasal-noted from crying and congestion. “But I wasn’t always like this, I don’t care what you say.”
On some level he had known all along how it would happen. So as the sun shone through the white muslin curtains, he held himself responsible. Silhouetted against the morning light, Zelda knelt in the foreground, arms tented in prayer on the brightly colored comforter, fingering the beads of a rosary, head bowed, eyes shut, lips moving rapidly in a simmer of mostly inaudible sound. Here was the reason why he hadn’t slept with her on the trip to Manhattan last fall, even though she had tried several times to seduce him over wine at dinners. No sooner did she begin to envision what might be hers again than she rushed into the future, heedless of danger, without judgment, without temperance. “Is it because you don’t find me attractive anymore?” she had asked in bed at the Algonquin on the last night of their stay in New York.
Why, then, if he’d known not to go down this road six months ago, had he behaved differently here in Cuba?
Well, for one thing, Zelda had seemed healthier, sturdier. He was always too quick to believe in her recovery, celebrating the signs of her old self, the two of them embracing any chance whatsoever to unburden themselves of alienation and acrimony and start over again.
“Did you say something?” she asked from the foot of the bed, her voice hushed, and he remembered again the middle of the night, wishing he had taken his own room as in Havana so that he didn’t have to see Zelda in such a state. In the gray night her wide-open empty eyes had rolled up until nothing but the whites remained visible, shocking, like the faces of zombies in photographs. And as she whispered words in a mantra of negation, “No, no, no,” he stirred, flopped, hoping to nudge her into a less hazardous dream, though he knew it wasn’t a dream, but she shunted him aside, her gaze fixed intently on the ceiling. “Who am I that God should take account of me?” she had muttered. “Am I not small enough yet? When I’m so small as to be hardly visible, when I’ve emptied myself once and for all, will you leave me alone so that I can be the nothing that comes of nothing?”
That memory belonged to the middle of the night. It was dawn now and she had spoken lucidly, seeming to be herself again, so he braced himself for the new day.
“I prayed for you and a clean feeling washed over me,” Zelda said brightly. “Do you have the charm I gave you? You didn’t lose it, did you? Let me see it.”
He raised the twine round his neck to show the silver medallion of a limping Lazarus accompanied by loyal dogs.
“I think you should visit the church today and ask Father Hijuelos to bless it.”
“If I have time.”
“You don’t have anything better to do.”
He remembered that he still hadn’t checked in with the Club Kawana’s management to call off the search by the police. “Well, I told Maryvonne and Aurelio,” he said, focusing his thoughts elsewhere, “that we might join them for an early dinner, and then Aurelio and I are going—”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said and bowed her head in prayer again, not wishing to discuss the matter. But looking up from the bed a few minutes later, she asked, “Are you thinking of her?”
He thought she must mean Maryvonne.
“You want to go back to her, don’t you?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your girl in California, the one who probably resembles me, the way they all do in your mind.”
He tried to pretend she was merely speculating, that she didn’t mean a word she was saying.
“The one who stole you from me,” she said. “You didn’t think I’d find out? The old gypsy told me all about her, I know everything, you don’t have to lie. If you would only be honest, I wouldn’t hold it against you.”
He wasn’t going to have this conversation.
“She said you were living with someone, most of the time. Why do you keep secrets from me, Scott? I always find out.”
Were these the revelations that had made her flee and take refuge in a church? Maryvonne hadn’t mentioned anything about them. Had Zelda really returned, as she claimed last night, to visit the clairvoyant a second time?
“Scott, answer me,” she said, angering. “I deserve to know the truth, I deserve to be respected. Why do you never talk about her?”
He was almost persuaded, remembering the times she had begged him to find someone else to take care of him so that she wouldn’t have to worry about him alone in the world, working too hard, drinking too hard, no one to rein him in. Sometimes he wished to talk with her about Sheilah, this nobody who’d made a name for herself in Hollywood, how good she was for him, how kind and tolerant she was, how she consoled him when no one else could, helping him to believe in brief intervals that not everything (all his self-worth, all his future prospects) depended on the next novel.
“At any rate, I’m your wife, not her,” Zelda was saying. “All this chivalry protecting the good name of your mistress. Doesn’t she know you’re married? And what do you tell her about me? Poor Zelda, to whom I’m loyal so long as I can keep her stowed away in a mansion for maniacs and not deal with her myself every day. Do you tell her all my secrets? I have a right to know.”
“Zelda, I would never say anything against you,” he said, but he was thinking how much easier it was without her, how much easier it was with Sheilah. It was a guilty thought. He had long prided himself on always being there for her. “I am loyal to us beyond your wildest imaginings.”
“It’s all just words now, words and memories. So what do you tell her? Do you say I’m crazy and you would like to be with me, but you can’t, well, for reasons that are more obvious to you and my doctors than to me?”
“She has her own secrets,” he said, aware that he’d crossed a threshold by alluding to Sheilah and admitting her into Zelda’s life.
“Another sorrowful golden-haired woman, another replica of me?” Zelda came and sat next to him at the top of the bed, then surprisingly she nuzzled into him.
“Please let’s talk about something else,” he said.
“What’s her name?”
“Zelda, please, let’s talk about something else.”
“Would you like to know what else the clairvoyant told me?”
“There’s more?” he asked, again half-suspecting her of wild invention, and yet wishing to dig, if possible, for the root of yesterday’s disappearance.
“She said we were like siblings, that’s why we know each other so well, why we’re bonded. We’ve known each other in many lives, and in a past life we were brother and sister.”
Under different circumstances he might have pushed back on the revelations and asked in what era they had been siblings, whether they had gone ahead and married anyway. He might have asked whether it was possible to cheat on your sister.
“Don’t you worry that you’re taking advantage of her?” Zelda asked him. “What does she think of this trip we’ve taken? Or doesn’t she know?”
She could never let go of anything. He walked onto the balcony, breathing in the late morning air, damp from last night’s storm, his temples throbbing, his neck and limbs weary. He let himself remember again the thousand outrages of Zelda, how tense a few of her well-chosen words could make him, his back muscles clenching even now, but also how soothing and beatific—he was inclined to say, how necessary—it felt to be in her good graces.
“I can trust you with anything,” she said, again behind him, resting her palm on his back, “you’ll always come for me, won’t you?”
“I’m going for a walk, Zelda,” he said, stepping around her to get out of the sun.
She pretended not to have heard him. “Maybe you should come back to bed.”
Suddenly there was a loud knocking, and she gasped, whispering to him, “Who is it?”
“Un momento,” he called to the door, then turned to her. “We never called the front desk, remember, I told you last night we had to call the front desk.” But he caught himself, adjusted his tone. “Zelda, stay here. I’ll speak with them outside, I’ll say I found you in the middle of the night during the storm, slightly before dawn, and I was dressing now to come and tell them to call off the search.”
“You’re just worried they’ll think you’re a hypochondriac who called in the cavalry when his wife went missing for a few hours.”
“I’ll say you’re in a delicate state and you don’t wish to talk with them.”
“Why would I have to talk with them?”
“Because you went missing, because they might want to know where.”
He dressed swiftly and stepped onto the landing, shoes still untied, to encounter a man he hadn’t met before, a stalwart Cuban named Colonel Silva, owner of the resort, here to follow up on a report about the guest who had gone missing.
“Is there anyone you suspect?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Your reason for asking us to call the police,” Colonel Silva said. “I’ll need to give our reasons.”
Scott wanted to shout, “Because she is missing,” but he caught himself, remembering that his wife was no longer missing. Still, it was infuriating: last night’s manager had promised he would notify the police right away.
“I’ve found her on my own,” Scott said.
“You should have called us.”
“And the manager on duty last night should have called the police when I asked.” Scott stopped himself, realizing he was working at cross-purposes to his present desire. The more he made of the disappearance, the longer this man would linger.
Beautiful Fools Page 26
