“Should I have asked more questions?” she muttered to herself, hanging up the phone.
“Did you say something?” Maryvonne asked from the bed, where she continued to dote on Scott, having removed the old bandage, now in the midst of rinsing the rapidly blinking eye with a mixture of water and boric acid.
“You have been so awfully helpful, Maryvonne, and we will not forget your kindness.”
Zelda cleared out the bathroom first, next the dresser drawers, pitching Scott’s personal items into her luggage, flinging hers in with his, vowing to sort them later at the hospital. She found his soft Alpagora overcoat in one of his suitcases and set it aside.
“I wonder whatever has become of that doctor,” Maryvonne mused aloud as she applied some sort of gelatinous salve to the eye, preparing to dress it. It was as though she was attempting to prove herself indispensable. “He might at least do something for the pain.”
Soon Famosa García knocked at the door to announce that the car was waiting below, but Zelda wasn’t ready. Panic washed over her. She didn’t know where Scott had stored the return plane tickets, where the rest of their money was, what he’d done with the passports. It might all turn up later in one piece of luggage or another, but still she combed the room, the desk, the dresser, the bathroom, asking Maryvonne to help perform a quick sweep. “Look under the bed, could you,” she instructed. Her inability to locate the medallion saddened her, but there was too much else to do and she could not concentrate on its loss.
Downstairs a maroon four-door Nash sedan waited before one of the archways of the villa. Neither the colonel nor a hotel manager anywhere in sight, Zelda decided their bill was most likely paid several days in advance. There would be no way to recover the money. She and Maryvonne lowered Scott into the backseat of the car, while the driver and Famosa García loaded bags into the trunk.
“I will ride with you, as far as Havana,” Maryvonne offered.
“So kind of you, but altogether unnecessary,” Zelda said.
“He needs tending, he needs someone to monitor the pain and make sure there is nothing unexpected in the next few hours.”
“I will look after my husband,” Zelda snapped.
Aurelio still hadn’t returned from his search for the gun, and his absence made the reproof of Maryvonne seem harsher somehow. Like Zelda herself, Maryvonne was an exile—banished from all who had once constituted the core of her life, from familiar sorrows, from acquaintances new and old, set adrift on the currents of things done and those she might still do if given the chance. She wished only to be of use somewhere in the world.
“We do not have a permanent home in Cuba,” Maryvonne said. “It is hard to say where we will settle. I would wish to write to you and Scott. At which address, though?”
On principle Zelda refused to give out the address of the Highland Hospital. Maybe the couple had extracted the story from Scott, maybe they hadn’t, but Zelda wasn’t about to advertise herself as someone enrolled in the ranks of the mentally wounded. She couldn’t recall Scott’s address at the studio and didn’t have an address for him in Encino, so she suggested that Maryvonne write them at Scribner’s, care of Max Perkins.
“Well, goodbye,” Maryvonne said, bowing forward robotically, her puckered lips brushing the soft skin above Zelda’s jaw, before she leaned into the car. “Bon voyage, Scott,” she said, bending to kiss him, her lips lingering at the corner of his. “Please take care of yourself.”
Zelda was surprised to discover that Famosa García was nowhere in sight. She had expected him to travel with them to Havana, and the prospect of riding off into the night with a complete stranger worried her. The tires of the car rolled slowly forward, gravel popping, when all of a sudden headlights shone behind them, brighter by the second, Maryvonne jerking open the back door with the car still in motion and jumping onto the runner to stick her head in and announce, “I will see who is this arriving, perhaps the doctor.”
Sure enough, it was Colonel Silva with news of the village doctor, whom he expected to appear within the next five minutes, not much longer than that. Maryvonne strongly recommended waiting, since it was best to be armed with as much information about Scott’s condition as possible. “Is he bringing morphine?” Zelda asked, having encouraged the colonel to make the request earlier, but no one knew anything for certain. “It’s the only reason to wait,” Zelda said, overriding the Frenchwoman’s frustrated objections, her confidence mounting with each small decision. For the first time all night she felt as though she were truly in charge. “Besides, I’m certain the doctor is strictly small-time, and Scott will soon be a patient at an excellent hospital in Havana.”
“He is in considerable pain,” Maryvonne repeated. “If we could give him a shot of morphine, maybe it is wise to wait.”
She was just stalling, though, buying herself a few more minutes with Scott. Zelda affectionately squeezed the Frenchwoman high on the arms, saying it was okay, she would get Scott to a hospital. Only as she started to pull the door shut did she consider again everything Maryvonne had done for Scott. This refugee couple, though honeymooning at a resort their first week here in Cuba, probably didn’t have much in the way of funds.
“I should pay you for your help,” Zelda said. “I don’t want to insult you and we’re hardly in high cotton ourselves, but would you take something as a gesture of gratitude?”
“But I did exactly no-thing,” Maryvonne protested.
Zelda pulled her husband’s billfold from her purse, extracting a twenty and a ten-spot. Maryvonne refused to extend her palm, but Zelda held the bills forward, saying, please, as a favor, so they wouldn’t feel so bad. Still the Frenchwoman’s hand didn’t move, so Zelda stuck the ten back in her wallet and said, “Here, a fair compromise,” extending the twenty-dollar bill by itself. “Maryvonne, please, it’s hard to go through life never paying one’s way.”
“But, of course, it is not for money,” the nurse protested.
“Of course not,” Zelda said kindly, and the Frenchwoman slowly unfolded her arm, palm upward, accepting the cash, embracing Zelda again, wishing her luck in Havana. “You know where to reach me the next few days,” she said, not mentioning Aurelio at all, “if you require advice on medical matters—there can never again be a question of money.”
As the car drove off, Zelda flipped through the diminished cash in Scott’s wallet, estimating there might be a hundred dollars left, a hundred and twenty at most. She prayed Scott had stashed money elsewhere, or they might run out within the next two days, stranded in Havana without a friend in the world. What would she do if that came to pass? Whom could she wire on short notice? Maybe Scott had scribbled the numbers for Harold Ober and Max Perkins in his Moleskine. She searched the pockets of his sport coat, and on finding them empty realized that the men who’d filched his wallet might also have stolen the journal or that Famosa García, recovering it, might have kept it for himself so as to have something on her husband.
In a stupor Scott snarled, “Why is someone trying to wake me?”
She fell back against the seat of the car.
“Where are we going?” he asked repeatedly, though she was certain she’d told him several times already. He protested that he couldn’t make it all the way to the city without alcohol or painkillers. Squirming in pain, he demanded that the driver turn the car around this instant. If she hadn’t emptied the flask back at the hotel, and then for good measure left it behind, she might have given him a drink just to quiet him for a while. “Stop the car,” he commanded as she tried to imagine what the driver would do if Scott became ugly, unruly, and altogether too much to handle. “Where’s the luggage?” He had Luminal in his bag, which would take the edge off. So they pulled to the side of the road and Scott tore through the luggage in search of the pills. The driver kept saying it was dangerous to be parked roadside, and Zelda couldn’t tell whether he was worried about a speeding truck coming wide off the curve ahead to smash into their car, or perhaps marauders from some nearby vil
lage finding them undefended in the night. “Esto es peligroso, muy peligroso,” the driver murmured over and over. “Por favor, date prisa, porque ésto es peligroso.”
“Scott, get into the car,” she pleaded. She was near tears. “Why are you doing this? I keep waiting for you to get on your feet, some stroke of fortune that will tell you everything’s okay again—”
“Enough,” he shouted, his words echoing from inside the trunk of the car. “I won’t listen to any more. It all started with your dis’ppearing act. Everything els’s just neurotic chatter.”
He was right on some level, she decided. It was a bout of nerves and she mustn’t let it get the better of her.
“But I’m tired too,” she said. “Tired of your fears of me, for me, about me. And even if the big break came tomorrow, if you finished the novel and made it a bestseller, there’d always be one more thing, Scott, the latest in a long list—”
“Zelda, it stops this instant or I’m not getting back in that car. Next week you’ll be writing me saccharine-sweet letters, saying I’m so sorry, saying you had a nice time on holiday, you didn’t mean to be so ungrateful, but I won’t open them. Stop this now or it’s the last trip we ever take.”
Ah, there it was, the bottle of Luminal stashed in one of her silk purses. He swallowed three pills without water, tucking the bottle into his jacket for safekeeping, the clothes scattered across the floor of the trunk as he slammed it shut. She worried he had taken too many pills, but his tolerance for narcotics was high.
“Is that supposed to be a threat?” she murmured, more for her own ears than his. “Because you’re such a joy to travel with? Showing up drunk at the Highland to pick me up.”
She gestured for the driver to get back into the car.
“Which I’ll hear about from the doctors and other patients at the Highland for weeks after my return, don’t think I won’t; and then to top it off you go and befriend dubious characters, drag us to a dangerous juke joint, get beaten up at a ghastly cockfight, leaving me to manage you and your rummy friends.”
The echo of her voice trailing in the dark as she got into the car made her sad. Scott stayed conscious long enough to say he was sorry for being irritable, he had been in tremendous pain. He was so much more peaceable when sleepy. Also he didn’t want to check into a hospital in Havana, he was okay, truly, his eye stung but not unbearably, nothing permanently wrong with it. And then there was the tuberculosis, and the drinking, what if the doctors recommended treatment, attempted to hold him over here in Havana?
“Because it would be terrible to have to recover from illness in a foreign country,” she said as he nodded off.
Scott’s head slanted, bobbing against the leather seat, his own snores every now and then awakening him. “Don’t worry, I won’t let them commit you,” she said, sliding a finger along his jaw, pulling together the lapels of the overcoat she’d retrieved from his luggage earlier. His head now rested on her shoulder, the unbandaged side of his face smooth and fleshy against hers. Something in her still enjoyed taking care of him, experiencing herself as necessary, but it felt like long ago. “Being in love with you,” she said aloud, her hand tucked beneath layers of jacket, stroking his stomach in circular movements, “is like being in love with one’s own past.”
As her thumb circled the cotton fabric of the shirt near his belt, it caught on something, maybe a stray thread, but, no, it was too coarse to be a thread. Eagerly, she followed the woven twine into her husband’s pants, parting the two jackets to unbuckle his belt, loosening the slacks, fingers exploring his lap while Scott slumbered on, dead to the world, the twine leading her to the waistband of his BVDs, catching there, some of it looping down like a lasso along the crease of his groin. And as she tugged at it, she whispered the beginning of a novena to St. Anthony taught to her by one of the patients at the Highland, able to remember only a few key phrases (“glorious Saint Anthony” and “condescension of Jesus”), but improvising others (“obtain for me this medallion, a sign of my devotion to my husband and my trust in you and God and the company of saints”), promising someone—God, the saint, or only herself—to look up the words later and say a weeklong novena all the way through once back at the hospital in Asheville. Then she heard the tinking of metal against the belt buckle and suffered, yes, on a smaller scale, but nevertheless something akin to the blissful rapture of the saints—Lazarus spared the grave and walking back into the light; his medallion spared the filth of the cock pit, cradled in the waistband of her husband’s BVDs to be returned to her, so that she might get it properly blessed by a priest, secure it on a sturdy silver chain, and present it again to Scott.
15
WITH MODEST, FAINTLY GRIZZLED LIGHT, DAWN CREPT OVER the seawall of the Malecón as they pulled up to a discreet roadside square that gave access to the Plaza de Armas. Stray revelers made their way home to hotels from all-night joints such as Sloppy Joe’s, still boisterous and frolicsome, outraged by the suddenness with which the dance floors had been pulled from beneath their feet. Small shipping vessels headed out of the harbor, huffing on choppy waters, the wake of each curling off the stern in an apron of froth, the barreled voices of the men aboard saluting soldiers on watch or fishermen on the docks who embraced their role as harbingers of day. At this quiet hour several taxis and a long white Cadillac nestled against the curb of the roadside square. The driver said to her, “That must be the car of Señor Cardoña.”
Her stomach flipped with worry. In her haste to leave the peninsula, she had failed to negotiate a price with the driver. She had no idea what Scott might have paid for the trip to Varadero or what a reasonable surcharge for the emergency circumstances under which they left this morning might be. It was possible that the driver was yet another courier in the employ of Matéo Cardoña. Should she leave the matter of payment to their benefactor? How far into his debt could she and Scott afford to sink? Short on cash, considering that she still hadn’t tracked down the return Pan American tickets and had no idea how much the hospital might cost or how much she might have to dole out for new plane tickets or subsequent train fare to New York City—the only place she could think to bring Scott for rehabilitation because she couldn’t inflict him on her elderly mother in Montgomery—she decided to assume the car ride had been paid for.
Cardoña stepped out of the white car and strolled across the cobblestone plaza with the air of a man greeting the day rather than riding out a long night. “Ah, Mrs. Zelda Fitzgerald,” he called, “I hope the drive was pleasant.” Without invitation, he slid into the backseat to examine Scott and she didn’t protest. Instead she seized the opportunity to ask the driver to open the rear, so she might shuffle and repack the clothes strewn everywhere by Scott during his pain-induced rage, delving once more through interior pockets of the luggage in search of cash, plane tickets, the Moleskine, passports, turning up only the last of these. She checked the sport jacket worn to the cockfight, still smeared with dirt and blood: nothing inside its pockets. It made her recall her lost dress.
“His eye is very bad,” Cardoña hailed her, and she came forward to find the Cuban reclining in the backseat beside her husband, the bandage now dangling loosely from Scott’s eye. “I boxed in my youth, and I have not seen an eye in that shape in a long, long time.”
“Scott also boxes, or used to,” she said, not sure why it was relevant.
“Let us head to the doctor next. I have made arrangements at a clinic affiliated with a club of which I am a member. These clinics provide the finest care in Havana. I will find a room for you at an appropriate nearby hotel,” he said, his tone solicitous. “You must be positively tired after—”
“I have decided against the hospital,” she said, making up her mind only as she spoke the words. She was terrified that they would be marooned in this city without funds if the doctors remanded Scott to their care.
“This is impossible, I have made arrangements with a doctor, a bed awaits Mr. Fitzgerald.”
“We need
to go home,” she said studying the look of surprise on his face, aware that she had altered the script on him. She wondered what Cardoña had been able to infer about their financial situation while they were away on Varadero. After all, their reduced fortunes were hardly a mystery, Scott’s adversities well chronicled if by no one other than himself, easy enough to track if you had access to an independent news services such as Reuters. Did he still believe them to be members of the American leisure class? Was he blindly unaware how close they skated to broke, ever along the edge of irrevocable collapse?
“This makes no sense,” Cardoña protested, roused to anger, clearly someone who did not like to be defied. “This is not what you requested hours ago. I have gone to great trouble on your behalf yet once more. You are tired and upset and you are not thinking clearly.”
“Señor Cardoña, I appreciate your efforts more than I can say. I still require your help in leaving the country.” She resented his last remark but was determined not to let it show. “We’re a short plane ride from Miami, from family in Alabama. It makes no sense for us to stay on here as strangers, imposing ourselves on your hospitality, when a flight will solve everything. There we will have access to money and can repay you for all you’ve done for us, and when Scott is better, he can negotiate whatever business the two of you have begun.”
She was aware, of course, that the last part was a lie, that Scott was in no position to transact any business with Cardoña and had probably tried to make this clear to him.
“It is unsafe for him to fly in this condition, before his lungs have been checked.”
Cardoña’s concern seemed to be heartfelt, and yet it was most likely meant to intimidate her or make her second-guess herself. Refusing to take no for an answer, he dropped his voice into a softer register, into what she could only have described as a seductive lilt, offering to escort them in his own car to the clinic where Scott would receive the highest standard of care.
Beautiful Fools Page 32
