Country of a Marriage

by Anthony Giardina

  They had lunch at the Belvedere. Zelda, cold, kept her coat on. Rosalind, the sister, sat like a woman petting a dog in her lap. Rosalind adopted a slouch and eyed Scott as if waiting for him to spill his drink. It happened to be club soda with a sliver of lime, but he suspected that, if given a chance, she’d sniff it for evidence of gin. This was an old, old scene among the three of them, and it would be over soon. After three days of settling in, of talking to the doctors at Sheppard-Pratt and making sure that all the many things Scott had attended to for years would in fact be taken care of (and she approached this as if everything about Zelda’s maintenance would be new to him, all the familiar things need to be explained), Rosalind would get back on the train and urge the wheels forward with her brittle worry.

  Finally, the day arrived. He introduced Zelda to his customs. “I write between these hours,” and so forth. “It’s all right,” she answered. Her smile struck him as the smile of a woman attempting to hide a broken heart. Had she expected something more? It was soon clear she had not. She took out her Bible and settled into a comfortable chair near a window. Every once in a while, he interrupted his writing and opened the door a crack. Zelda appeared placid, staring out at the yards and the rooftops of Bolton Hill. Returning to his desk, he felt the loss of tension: it was hard to go back to Monroe Stahr after watching Zelda. He found himself, instead, a room away, listening for her every move. For an hour, he traced doodles in the margin of the paper before him, he attempted to write a graceful sentence. Finally, he gave up and took Zelda on his walk to Mount Vernon Square, to the Quaker School. “Look,” he said, pointing out his favorites among the students. “Look at that one.” Distracted, she blinked, tried to focus, missed what he had pointed out. He took her by the elbow, led her home. The nap of her coat felt thin, the coat itself unstylish, and when he looked at Zelda’s face it seemed that he himself was twenty-four years old, but that she had aged at a speed and in a dimension foreign to him.

  That night, the first of their solitude, he sat in the hard-backed chair by her bed and watched her undress. In the later years of their marriage, it had not been their custom to undress in front of one another, but in the dark. So his staring made her overcautious, not sure which button her fingers ought next to go to, and she asked him to turn off the light. “Why?” he replied, and reached for a glass, which contained water. “Because I’m embarrassed,” she lied. But he, in his chair, was merely waiting, patient, determined not to blink, in spite of what a wreck life may have made of her body in the time of his absence.

  “Ignore me,” he said.

  She proceeded, was naked only briefly. He was startled, and nearly turned away, but forced himself to look. This was not Zelda, this was a woman he didn’t know. He felt ashamed for her. It was inconceivable that he had coupled with her, her skin had housed his children. Her skin had gone spotty, there were folds, the breasts hung with a suggestion of illness, and it was all pale, abnormally so. She sat on the side of the bed. In her lap was the white nightgown, while below, he could just make out the tawny bush between her legs. For a moment he lifted his eyes and stared out at the night and at several lit windows and in the dusk and compacted glow of the scene tried to recover an ancient sense of life’s romance.

  In the silence of the room, he understood that she was talking.

  “Will we sleep in the same bed?” she asked.

  (Until now, she and Rosalind had shared the bed, he’d taken a sofa downstairs.)

  “Of course.” He nodded, to back it up. They had not had sex in years, sex was quite impossible.

  “Won’t that …” She didn’t finish.

  She put on her nightgown and lay back, covered herself with the sheet and blanket.

  It was too much that he should make the same display of himself. Nor did she ask. Once, as young people, they had paraded naked before each other in expensive hotels, though always a little shy. It was one with the silliness of who they had been, the way they had gone about things. The couple on the cover of Hearst’s International, gorgeous and mortally still. Briefly, the most envied couple in America. Sometimes, during fights, he had reminded her of that small fact.

  Now he turned off the lights and undressed. He folded his clothes and coughed, twice.

  “Your heart, how is it?” she asked, out of the dark.

  Written on. Scourged. Impaled on a stake.

  “I’m expected to live,” he said lightly. He climbed in next to her, in pajamas. From her side, a heat rose. It was like a mild opening scene between Robert Montgomery and Carole Lombard. Soon, something would happen, he was sure, though what it was, what turn it would take, comic or tragic, this was the uncertain element. He was, in any case, far from sleep. She had taken pills to help her. The wild stirrings of the Baltimore spring approached the window, which rattled. Thinking her asleep, he got up to close it, then, approaching the bed, saw her eyes, wide open.

  “Strange,” she said, and he waited. “To be here.”

  Soon they had customs, an ordinary couple’s religion of habits. They ate at the proper times, and cut their food carefully and stared out the windows of the modest restaurants they frequented. Once they would have torn apart their fellow diners, the pretentious hats, the ridiculous silent men, but now they took them in and said nothing, aware that they were as ridiculous as anyone else. An older couple, anxious as to the prices, sharing only the tiniest bits of information in place of conversation, declining dessert. It took an abnormally long time for Zelda to get out of her seat, to slip her spring coat on. Scott took a toothpick, and waited. He watched their habits descend to those of a class he had once scorned, and didn’t seem to mind. The first exposure to the evening air was tonic.

  Their lives could almost be said to be regular ones except, of course, for Zelda’s madness. And madness was a thing that came and went. You could believe, for long passages of time, that it was not important. Then a streetcar would make a rude noise and Zelda, clinging to him, would have to be brought home, and any plans they’d made for the evening canceled.

  Still, madness had been with them so long it had begun to give way to a form of nostalgia. Zelda asked, for instance, one Saturday, if they might go walking on the grounds of Sheppard-Pratt, where she had once tried to throw herself in front of a train. She insisted on following certain paths. He was struck, moved even, by what she was doing, by the intent, nearly distorted cast of her features as she sounded out some inner declivity, worked it the way a tongue does a missing tooth. Madness had altered, for her, the map of the world. It was this that touched him, the privacy of it, the way she felt compelled now to trace her own obscure topography on the old cow paths of the institution.

  In the summer, he bought a car, cheap, barely functional, but enough to get them out into the country during weekends. Baltimore was hot, and they had not much money. Collier’s had bought serialization rights to The Last Tycoon, though at an embarrassingly low figure. And there was Scottie at Vassar. Still, the WPA had seen fit to accommodate them: there were parks in Maryland where Zelda might rest her head against his stomach for an hour or two, and sleep. These were his happiest moments. He kept bankers’ hours now, felt no compulsion to work on Saturdays and Sundays. Monroe Stahr was safely on a plane that would crash; Scott could see his hero’s demise arriving on a set of graded steps, to be trod on lightly. Scottie arrived late in June, freed from school, to stay for a week. He abandoned the bed, allowed the women to sleep wrapped in one another, brought them coffee in the morning. At night, under the single lamp of the kitchen, they plucked strawberries from a carton, Scott in his shirtsleeves, Zelda laughing. To his agent, Harold Ober, he wrote, “I am remaking it all, just as if there were never pain and shame involved. Don’t believe me? You would if you could look in our window, on the nights when I’m generous and walk down to the corner to bring back ice cream. We are a cozy little family, except, of course, for our ghosts.”

  During the evenings of Scottie’s stay, as he lay on the downstairs so
fa trying to hold on to consciousness an extra few minutes, simply to relish that much longer the state of his family at rest, the ghosts that visited him were mostly fictional ones, and it occurred to him that he had outlived them all. Dick Diver had been last seen driving from town to town, isolated and in decline, Jay Gatsby left lying facedown in a pool. In his imagination, there had been only a sudden descent from the cloud-capped tower. The world of the in-between had been peripheral, George Wilson’s days of fixing cars while Myrtle screwed Tom Buchanan. He found now that he had to adjust his sense of identification. He was becoming like his own secondary characters, those for whom it was enough to simply hold on.

  The nice thing, of course, would be to accept what had been presented to him and settle in, but he found in himself, on even the happiest of his nights, the seeds of resistance, and wondered when they might sprout. In a note to his publisher describing The Last Tycoon, he had written about Monroe Stahr, “He has had everything in life except the privilege of giving himself unselfishly to another human being,” and it was this that he considered his own noble purpose in having brought Zelda back from the dead. It worked, to a degree, so long as he was writing. But there came a day, early in September, when he had to send the book in. A good day, at least at the beginning. In the post office, he hesitated, and looked into the clerk’s eyes, trying to offer this heavy, good-looking young man an indication of the triumph he felt.

  The clerk smiled, indulged him a moment, then looked to the next person in line. Scott lit a cigarette, hesitant to leave. A mural lay against the great wall of the post office. In a movie, the camera would have drawn back and taken all this in: the great writer lost in the crowd, the cigarette smoke, the mural. Then the package on its conveyor belt, going on to Scribner’s. Until suddenly, drawn back into close-up, inhaling the pleasant smoke (against doctor’s orders, but the book, after all, was finished), he was struck by the emptiness of his situation: the novel sent off, the day yawning before him, and all the energy he had learned to harness and put to use struggling inside him, with nowhere to go. He walked back to the town house, where Zelda was resting at mid-morning. “Well take a drive,” he said, distracted, annoyed now by the simple presence of her.

  “Where?” she wanted to know.

  “I haven’t seen my father’s grave.”

  This was not strictly true: he had seen it, but not visited it since his father’s burial ten years ago. The old man was in the Catholic cemetery in Rockville, fifty miles distant. It was a destination, a place to go. There was no more to his suggestion than that, at least not at first, but she looked at him as if there were. He fidgeted in his chair, breathed out heavily, put his hand on his chest, reconsidered. But by then she had already gotten up to dress.

  The day was hot. A street was being repaired, a small parade passed: it was difficult getting out of Baltimore, and if the truth were told, he’d rather have been making this journey by himself, savoring his triumph alone. He felt an impulse, a wild desire—not new certainly, but not for a while this vivid—to say cruel things to Zelda. They idled in the city heat. Zelda said nothing and may have been praying silently. It occurred to him that he could rip her dress without thinking. He could expose her there, in the car, for everyone to see, and stand in his seat and point at her sickly breasts and shout: “You think I love those? Anyone? My life has been a colossal mistake!” Such actions seemed merely a half step away.

  Finally traffic moved. A breeze helped matters.

  “Say something,” he said to Zelda. “Say any damn thing.”

  She glanced at him and, sensing danger, closed her eyes, slept awhile. He drove. Arbutus. Relay. Horses raced in the depths of the Maryland countryside and the hotels resembled Selznick’s set for Tara. The one-story, shabby roadhouses were more inviting. He’d completed his best novel, his hardest and toughest. It would be all right certainly, today only, to let go. But he had this woman beside him and he was remembering—forcing himself to, anyway—the last time he had let go with her, in Cuba, when she’d ended up locked in a room, praying, while he’d nearly had his eye taken out in a fight. Or had that been later, another time? He fought the seduction, swallowed hard, drove. But it seemed too cruel a punishment, to have finished and to be facing only sobriety, dullness, ruin. Would she like to read to him from her Bible? The Book of Ruth, perhaps? He felt, in his imagination, the sting of his hand against those cheeks, slapping her back into life. She was intent on hiding from him, and he wanted something, suddenly very badly, if not from her then from another source. He pulled over, at the next roadhouse.

  The establishment was located at the top of a hill; behind it, the land fell off sharply. There was a wide circle for cars. He heard water somewhere not far off. Zelda awoke. She stared at the building, seemed to know what it was. Her anxiety took the form of scratching her knee.

  Scott opened the door and got out.

  He stood by the fender, lifted his shoe, looked at her. He was concerned with a couple of sentences in the book, wanted to call it back, would wait for Perkins’s reply. Zelda would not look at him now. That being the case (had he stopped here only to test her?), he was going in to have a drink, one or two. More. There was no end to what he imagined. What was tomorrow, and the next day, what would he do? He touched the warm hood of the car. She turned to him.

  Stop me, he thought suddenly. Stop me.

  There was a moment then when she looked at him in the old way. A reservoir of feeling opened. But she couldn’t hold it, or his gaze. It had given him fuel, though; in his mind’s eye, he saw the battle he must have now, must, which would involve going in and getting drunk and maligning her to the bartender until he was thrown out, and then he would say the same hateful things to her, until someone drove them home or beat him up or did something to end it. And he must do this, he must hate her, though it had begun to seem to him, standing there, a source of infinite mystery that this old, pale woman in the car should require from him a punishment so severe.

  “I should tell you that I’m going to write Rosalind to come and get me,” she said, and it had a kind of debutante pout to it, something recovered from deep in the past. She looked as though she feared what he would say next.

  He came around and opened the door of the car.

  “Get out,” he said.

  She didn’t like the way he looked, the red around his temples, the manner in which he was clutching himself, near the armpit.

  “You shouldn’t …”

  “I don’t care what I shouldn’t be doing,” he said.

  He thought the line was melodramatic. He was dragging her into the woods. He imagined how they must look, how she must look, in the dress she had worn, gussying herself up as if for some occasion. He had no idea what his intention was except that there was nothing after it, nothing he could see, anyway. He wanted to be finished with her just as he had finished the book. The two had gone together, always, and he believed now, was certain (and wanted to punish himself for it) that it had been, after all, a false love, a goad to achievement, nothing more.

  Then they were in the woods, and stood there, facing the trickling brook, which was not much, and which flowed at a considerable distance down the hill. Around them were wild strawberries, blue flowers, acorns, the pale growth of late summer. He was holding her hand, and in the gesture there was still the potential for violence, though it had lessened—he couldn’t remember suddenly what he had brought her here for, or what he intended to do. She might not have known, though, that she was safe, because she fell against him, as a way, he thought, of escaping his grasp. She fell like a woman collapsing under the force of a man’s passion. It was impossible then, from the way she lay on the ground, the way her legs fell, that their old sex shouldn’t have reared its head. For a moment, neither of them looked away from it, but locked eyes. It hovered between them, and asked to be considered, and he thought, as it did so, that it was a thing—not the sex itself, but the charge out of which it had sprung—that neither of the
m would ever outgrow.

  Finally Zelda closed her eyes and wished it away. In the moments afterward, he was left with it, with the summation of feeling, as real a companion as he could imagine.

  Calm now, the air and everything it carried seemed held in abeyance, as if waiting for him to acknowledge what was left to be acknowledged. Crouching, he touched his scalp, felt the thinness of the skin, the thick veins pressing against it. How long before a repetition of the revolt of the heart? He rested two fingers on Zelda’s forehead. He would let her sleep, then they would get up, brush each other’s clothes off, and continue on the ride to Rockville. There, he would clear whatever dead growth was to be found around his father’s grave, freshen the earth, and say something brusque, sad, and officious, in place of a prayer. The words on his heart, which had leaped up in the moments before, as Zelda lay below him, retreated then, having not quite allowed themselves to be read. They would, to be sure, have been too banal to speak. He remembered, instead, a day at Cap d’Antibes, the water of the Mediterranean, his hand on his knee, and Scottie close, and Zelda. Someone was taking their photograph, he remembered now. They had held their poses a long time, not out of happiness certainly. There are one or two moments to which one remains true. One neither moves forward from them nor retreats. He ran his hand up and over Zelda’s forehead and said, with his hand, Now rest.

  THE FILMS OF RICHARD EGAN

  The View from Pompey’s Head (1955)

  An actor, if he is to become a star, has to be seen first in motion. Riding a horse. Driving a fast car. His initial impression, the tipping of his hat, must take place at a speed and in a dimension different from our own. This is a rule. In Lawrence of Arabia, we sit, for three or four minutes, waiting for the blur at the edge of the desert to come forward and distinguish itself. Then it becomes Omar Sharif, on a camel, and something begins, a kind of love affair. So Richard Egan, late of California and the Philippines, makes his first bid for our serious attention on a speeding train.