Beautiful Fools

by R. Clifton Spargo

  “Again, I thank you for all you have done,” she said. “It is above and beyond the call.”

  Their driver transferred their luggage to the white Cadillac, while Cardoña and his chauffeur hoisted her husband from the backseat onto their shoulders and dragged his slack body across the plaza, his brogue shoes scraping on the cobblestone. She wasn’t sure whether Cardoña had agreed to her terms or not. For all she knew, she was being abducted. She wished for more information, about what Scott and Mr. Cardoña had discussed, about what agreement if any they’d come to in the wake of Saturday’s violent crime. What was it exactly that Scott had asked this man to do on their behalf? All she could be sure of for the moment, as she glanced across at Cardoña, conducting himself as though he would ultimately make the decisions, was that he had settled her account with the driver, one less matter for her to worry about.

  Inside the Cadillac, as her husband slouched between herself and Cardoña, she repeated her wish to return to the United States. Cardoña said nothing as the car drove out along the harbor, banking into a curve that hugged the seawall. Was it possible he had enough influence in this city, she wondered, to check her husband into a clinic without her consent? The Cadillac turned inland, up a street that ran parallel to a magnificent tree-lined promenade they’d walked only days ago, the splendid white dome of the Capitol visible up ahead, the pink and yellow neocolonial theaters, hotels, and mansions framing the street on which they rode. Soon they diverted onto a smaller street, the car rattling through a neighborhood of colonnaded porticos that fronted colorful three-story buildings with multiple stone balconies or heavy black iron balustrades along the second- and third-story windows, the ride so rough and dramatically uneven she found it hard to reconcile the architecture and the roads.

  “I would make excuses for our streets,” Señor Cardoña smiled, “but what excuse can there be? It is simply deplorable, loose blocks everywhere, potholes the size of small gullies.”

  On cue they were jolted into the air, Zelda gasping in surprise, Cardoña hitting his head on the roof of the car, then swearing softly in Spanish as he warned the chauffeur to be more careful. Through all the jostling, Scott slept on, unperturbed.

  “Perhaps this is the condition in which one must drive our streets,” Cardona said, nodding toward her slumbering husband, but almost instantly eating his words—“I mean no disrespect, of course”—and telling her the story of the city’s new Capitol building, of the diamonds in its floor. He seemed oddly talkative. He held a newspaper in his hand, folded shut, as he listed off the morning’s headline news: Mussolini had scorned FDR’s proposal for a conference to curb Italy’s aggressive economic expansion; the U.S. president was rebuking not only international leaders but also dissenters from his own political party, suggesting that anti–New Dealers among the Democratic party resign; and here in Cuba, Colonel Fulgencio Batista expressed a willingness to stand for the presidential elections if it became necessary for him to do so.

  “He is already running the country, of course,” Señor Cardoña remarked.

  “I am sorry,” she said, unable to feign interest. “I’m distracted this morning.”

  “I have an errand that will take but a second,” he said as the car pulled sharply to a curb, Cardoña opening the door before they had even come to a complete stop.

  The more she thought about it, the more she resented Cardoña’s officious manner, his presumption in asking her to wait while he ran errands and refused to tell her where they were headed. She might easily coax Scott into a cab and demand to be taken to the airport. But what if the return tickets really had gone missing? What if after paying the taxi she needed to haggle over the fare or customs fees? What if she lacked the funds to leave the country?

  “Scott,” Zelda whispered, shaking his arm, “Scott, dearest, won’t you wake up?”

  The lid above the undamaged eye fluttered. “Zelda, that you?”

  “Do you remember where you stored our return tickets?”

  No sooner had the words left her mouth than the door opened, Cardoña standing above them framed by bright sunlight, the doctor at his side.

  “I want him to look at the eye, listen to the lungs, that is all.”

  Zelda wondered if this was a stratagem of some sort, but she didn’t protest as the doctor slid in next to her husband. The doctor listened to the lungs with a stethoscope, lifted the bandage from the eye to examine it as he asked questions of Cardoña, who leaned into the car, now and then shooting her a few conciliatory words.

  “He runs the clinic of the club of which I spoke, with its roster of patients that includes some of Havana’s oldest families.”

  Immediately alarm shot through her and she said before she could gather her thoughts, “Really, we can’t afford a clinic,” stopping herself, feeling flustered by her mistake, finding it uncouth to have spoken so frankly of money to a man she hardly knew.

  “What do you think about morphine?” Cardoña asked, ignoring her remark. It took her several seconds to understand that the question had been addressed to her.

  How much would the doctor charge, she wondered, for a shot of morphine? Scott’s complaints had subsided, the Luminal having cast its spell. Maybe the morphine shot wasn’t a good idea after all, especially with so many substances already in his system. Besides, if Cardoña intended to overrule her and check her husband into a hospital, she would need him vaguely coherent, able to stick up for himself.

  “Will it present a problem for the airlines?” she asked, making the tactical decision to proceed as though Cardoña intended to cooperate with her wishes.

  “You let me worry about that,” he replied.

  “And it’s safe?” she asked, listing the substances Scott had ingested within the past twelve hours, almost too many to count.

  The doctor administered a mild dose of morphine, assuring her it would keep the misery at bay for hours but would not prevent her husband from traveling.

  As the car pulled from the curb, leaving the doctor behind, she breathed easier. She had been sure he would declare Scott in need of emergency care and insist on escorting him to the clinic. Still, she was at the mercy of a man they hardly knew, riding down streets she couldn’t recognize, Scott passed out and unavailable to help in any way. Cardoña said little as the sun brightened behind them; and now the landscape grew familiar, no longer dusty as it had been on the ride into the country, here and there splashes of dark red clay, the countryside around them ordered in long green rows of neatly irrigated fields. The tightness in her chest released, giving way to gratitude, then triumph. They were headed toward the airport.

  At the terminal, Matéo Cardoña was a whir of efficiency, bypassing one line after another, working officials, skipping baggage and passport checks, preempting objections before the airline staff could raise them. He produced a letter from the doctor, waved it in front of several peons, and when they sought the advice of their superiors soon overrode all protests. “He has been given a few sleeping pills because he is ill,” he explained, setting aside objections that the passenger was in no condition to fly, “and his wife can easily wake him in case of an emergency.” When she tried to explain about the lost tickets, Cardoña dismissed her concern. “It has been taken care of.” His solicitousness did not end there. He would not allow her to wait for the airplane alone, but instead ordered his chauffeur to transport the luggage to the tarmac, then helped her settle Scott on the plane, as a patient rather than an inebriated man who had been badly beaten in a fight.

  She was prepared to give Cardoña all the money in Scott’s wallet if it came to that. God only knew how much they truly owed their benefactor. She studied him with a new appreciation for his angular face, slender in the jaw, darkened ruggedly by stubble from a sleepless night. She would promise to send him money once they were home, not knowing what they could afford to pay or when. Or, she supposed, she might ask him to bill Scribner’s. Max might not be pleased, but over the past couple of years Scott had
resolved his personal debts to his editor as well as his publishing house. He was good for the next loan.

  “I wish we were leaving right away,” she said once they had boarded the plane, empty of passengers. It was not scheduled to depart for an hour still.

  “Time is only the enemy if you see it as such,” Cardoña said.

  He was too much of a gentleman, she realized, to bring up money. So, versed in the etiquette of the Southern lady, exploiting codes against which she’d once dramatically rebelled, she summoned those social graces by which women procure favors without recompense and pay benefactors in flattery for kindnesses and benevolence. She couldn’t believe how easily she managed the aristocratic Cuban. And whatever his original intentions might have been, whatever he’d once wanted (perhaps still wanted) from them, he rose to the codes of a lapsing era and received her extended hand as if he’d never expected anything more.

  “How can I ever pay you back?” she said, making it clear by her tone she could not.

  Scott spent the flight wrapped in a morphine haze, experiencing only a lightheaded sense of being airborne, the pricks and aches of injury. From time to time he rose to consciousness, aware of the eye obstructed by gauze, the lid and lash flitting wildly against the cotton like a trapped insect, the visible world smeared in thick gray dabbings like the excess paint at the edge of an artist’s palette. When at last he opened his eyes, stinging, enmeshed in wrappings, he was on a train, able to remember (if only in faintly humiliating images) that he had lumbered in his sleep through an airport terminal before subsiding into a taxi.

  “How did we get here again?” he asked his wife, seated in the booth across from the sleeping berth.

  “Can’t you remember any of it?”

  “Sure, I lost a cockfight, and the nurse Maryvonne tended to my eye. Were we in the city with Matéo?”

  Portions of the night might eventually come back to him, though he wasn’t sure he wanted them to. Still, there was the terror of having gone missing from your own life— not just the wondering what you might have done, what you might have said, whether anything had taken place with that Frenchwoman, but the sense of having been rendered completely open to harm. An ambiguous terror, in truth attractive on some level: to lay yourself open to the cruelties and mercies and whims of other people. How many times had Scott seen drunks robbed, beaten, more or less ravaged? He’d even watched as such things were done to himself. Inside every true drunk was the desire to be punished for some crime you couldn’t remember having committed.

  “Are you really awake? Will you remember this?” Zelda asked, and he said he was and he would remember, without knowing if his statements were true, still under the spell of the morphine.

  Much of the conversation, she understood in advance, would slide back into his drug-hammered unconscious. Nevertheless there were things she needed to say. “The hardest part,” she said, studying him as he tried to memorize the words, “I wish you could understand this, Scott, the hardest part is never knowing whether these trips are experiments in starting over, if there’s anything at stake in them except killing time.”

  “I’m sorry, Zelda,” he said. She had pulled him through a tough spot, all on her own. “The lengths you went to there at the end, I won’t forget, I won’t.”

  He slept again, so she composed a note to him, organizing her thoughts: “Please believe me, Scott, the happiest I ever was was when I was with you. I do best that way, I think, in your arms and full of myself, and maybe I will again someday? Devotedly, Zelda.” She folded the note into the pocket of his shirt, vowing to scribble a whole series of notes over the next few days, if necessary. On a train traveling up the Eastern seaboard, through cities such as Charleston, Baltimore, and Wilmington, cities in which they had vacationed, reveled, or lived together, she began to plan the immediate future: how to manage Scott once they arrived in New York, how to get him checked into a hospital, what she must say to her doctors when she returned to North Carolina alone, the letter she would need to send Scott from the sanitarium covering for his failure to escort her safely home. Composing lines in her head, she tailored the story for the ears of her doctors, who read all her correspondence, who monitored every twist and turn in the drama of her private life. They must never find out what had happened in Cuba, not if she wanted to see Scott again anytime soon.

  He took the news of the lost Moleskine fairly well. How could he not? It was his own fault.

  “A lot of material in that journal, things people said, some nice sentences too,” he lamented. “But I suppose I’ll get most of it back.”

  “I wonder if there are any words you can never get back,” she said, teasing him with the memory of her lost love letter.

  “Zelda, why so cryptic, I can’t make sense of what you say when you talk like that,” he answered. “You’ve been spending too much time with clairvoyants.”

  She laughed, giggling at first, then letting the thought expand in her mind, the laughter building as she dwelt on it. He liked her newfound confidence, her way of seeing herself as someone who could make things happen. “You have a winning air about you,” he said. “I should let myself get beat up more often.”

  “Well, then, about California, when can I come?”

  He showed less surprise than she expected. She told him how during the flight they had talked extensively of her visiting him in California within the next few months, of her helping him put his life in order. The truth was she had alluded to the possibility during the few minutes in which he’d opened his eyes, then drifted off, but while falling asleep he had said, “There’s room at my cottage, you could stay with me”—and that was all the encouragement she needed.

  “You remember inviting me to come, don’t you?” she said, then stopped, changing tactics. She asked him if he was in much pain and stood up to fetch another pillow, propping it behind him. Even in the sleeping berth, wrapped in blankets, he still wore the two coats, feeling the cold all the time, the hacking in his chest erupting in unexpected fits that seemed to her to last longer each time.

  “Of course,” he said automatically. He was lying, she knew he was lying, but it didn’t matter.

  Zelda hadn’t liked Hollywood when they’d stayed there as celebrities a decade earlier. This time, though, it would be a private experiment, the two of them off the radar, in a cottage in Encino, in the hills outside Los Angeles. She was no longer afraid of what that city represented. She had lost too much this past decade to bother competing with beautiful darlings who relished the fickle favor of fame, likely to be tomorrow’s castaways before they had even realized it.

  “When will I visit?” she asked again.

  “Maybe in July, so we can celebrate your birthday, also the anniversary of our first meeting.”

  “And, Scott, you do think I’m almost better? Truly?”

  “I know it,” he said with all the conviction he could muster.

  She stared out the window, the flat green land and the happy blues of oceans, glades, and marshes blurring as she held her forehead to the cool glass, overcome with fatigue. She hadn’t slept even an hour last night, and it was already past noon.

  “Scott, you look cozy in that berth,” she said, “and I don’t feel like climbing up into mine. Do you think I could come and lie there beside you for a few minutes?”

  “Of course,” he said. His bad arm was closer to the wall, so she, also fully clothed, wearing a long white frock, could rest her head on his shoulder.

  “What about our shoes?” she asked, kicking her feet. “Shouldn’t we take them off?”

  “Not yet,” he said. “Let’s just lie here perfectly still for a few minutes.”

  These hours spent sleeping by her side on the train—these and the scurried, muddled days ahead in New York City—they are the last he will ever spend in her presence. Summer will pass with Scott on the mend, Zelda’s visit to Encino postponed, replaced by talk of his coming East, but those trips also put off. He will become immersed in hi
s new novel, while Zelda is discharged from the Highland Hospital into her mother’s care—and for a year and a half there will be letters and imaginings, about how they will see each other as soon as circumstances permit, about how work progresses and finances deteriorate, and yet somehow he will always scrape together money for her expenses. It will be the longest span of not seeing each other in their entire life together, since they first met in the month she turned eighteen. Their love lies in the rhythm of written declarations of loyalty, in repeated vows of steadfast belief in each other and a future that remains within reach. He’ll write and tell her he’s under contract again, their money woes soon to be alleviated. And she’ll believe that this is the year in which he’ll get his life on track and at last make room for her somewhere, anywhere, since she now requires so little to be happy. Out of consideration for his illness, she’ll propose visiting him in California at a later date, when his lungs are recovered, when he’s making progress again on the novel.

  And in December, on the mend from a heart attack weeks earlier, only two days after sending Christmas presents for Zelda and Scottie, he will sit down across from Sheilah Graham to read about the Princeton football team in an alumni magazine, by some accounts having also just consumed a piece of his favorite chocolate, and he will stand up to stretch his legs, licking his fingers, reaching for the mantel as he collapses at her feet, dead by the time Sheilah returns with help.

  In the berth she slept contentedly, certain that the spirits couldn’t chase her on a train that was moving so swiftly. She awoke beside him having dreamt two dreams, the one melting into the other. She was dancing in a professional ballet company and attaining on stage greater height and arc in her leaps than ever before; then she was standing on a bluff above a white-sanded beach, her body turned out toward ocean, knowing Scott (though in the dream she couldn’t see him) was somewhere down below watching out for her. The dreams were exhilarating and she wanted to talk to Scott about them.