He held his breath, expecting the room to move, but it was finished. He’d survived his first earthquake. There was probably no surer sign that he was an easterner, but it seemed an accomplishment. For weeks he would recall the spastic, wavering sensation, as if to prove it had actually happened.
At the studio no one was impressed. A water main had broken in the back lot, sending an impromptu river through the Chinatown set, and the commissary was closed. After his drugstore lunch he surveyed the damage. Capsized in a muddy pond, nested in the lath-and-canvas wrack of a dozen scrims like a cottage swept from its foundation, lay a serene Buddha. Rips in the idol’s jade skin disclosed it was made of foam rubber. A trio of grips conferred by a crane, debating its fate. They were technicians, practical men. The plates of the continental shelf—the world itself—had shifted, and their first concern was putting things back in place. He could have told them it was no use, though his whole life he’d done the same.
Scottie wasn’t good about writing, too busy with school and boys and other extracurricular exploits, and finally he lost patience and prodded her. Inevitably, their letters crossed in the mail, and he regretted not holding off.
I’m so glad your visit went well, he wrote. It’s easy to forget that your mother when fully herself can be the pleasantest of companions. Despite all of her tribulations she’s managed to retain a playful charm I find touching. Some part of her will always be young and devil-may-care, for better or worse. I know she worries that you’ve seen her in more of her worse than her better moments lately, so maybe this will even the scales a bit.
My own plans here are unsettled, but once I have the time I intend to take her on a long-overdue vacation. I have three more weeks on the bomb-shelter picture, which is the best I can say for it. I’m giving it my strongest effort nonetheless, as you should with Philosophy. You must know by now that life presents us with only so many opportunities, and the greatest regrets attach to those we squander, whether through sloth or weakness or pride. What I am asking is that you stick with it, whatever it is, so that when you get to be my age you can look back and say you did everything you could. Thus endeth the lesson. (And no, I will not apologize for the headmasterly tone. You know I think you’re a lovely person and brag about you to everyone who will listen, but Pie, you are not and never will be a C student. I know this because I have been a C student and a D student and an F student and wish I had never been. Do as I say, etc.)
He took his own advice. Without Sheilah his evenings were free, and as Air Raid neared its explosive climax, he wrote morning and night, shipping off two more stories to Ober. At the least, he figured, they were worth two-fifty apiece. With the extra money he could hire a secretary to transcribe his piles of notes for the novel. He’d start this summer, once he was done at Paramount.
He was hoping to catch on there for one more project. He didn’t want a six-month contract like Don’s, just another picture to pad his bank account, another credit for his resumé. His next-to-last week he asked Swanie to talk to Lazarus. Before Swanie could call him, word came down: Air Raid was being shelved.
Scott wanted an explanation, as if a valid reason might cushion the shock. Don, Swanie, Sheilah—they all shrugged. That was Hollywood.
He’d be paid, but he was off the lot, and Swanie couldn’t get him back on. He had all day to write now, wandering the house like a ghost in his robe and slippers. He’d grown so used to his routine that being let go broke his rhythm. He wasn’t ready to start the novel, and every story idea seemed trite.
Ober had more bad news. The Post and Collier’s had both passed on “Strange Sanctuary,” as had Esquire. He didn’t want to submit it elsewhere without talking with Scott.
“Where is ‘elsewhere’?”
“Liberty.”
Had it come to that? They’d gone there only once before, when he was at his lowest.
“What about the Century?”
“They’re not reading right now.”
“Redbook.”
“Not their thing.”
“The American.”
“Folded a year ago.”
“What if we go out with the other two instead?”
“We can do that,” Ober said, his lack of enthusiasm plain.
“How much is Liberty paying nowadays?”
“Same as before—a hundred.”
“Fine,” Scott said, “let’s try them.”
But they didn’t want it either.
Of the three stories, Ober thought the first one the best. He didn’t think it would be useful showing the other two to the Post or Collier’s.
“What about Esquire?”
“We can try Esquire.”
Scott couldn’t decide if it was his tone he resented or the empty concession. Both. Wasn’t Ober supposed to believe in him?
The next week he received an envelope in the mail from Ober’s accountants, his full name printed in the cellophane window. It was a check, though for what he didn’t have a guess. Perhaps this was Ober’s way of apologizing. He saved it till last, setting the bills aside and composing himself before ripping open the flap. It was a royalty check from Scribners, along with a detailed statement. Combined, for the period ending in January, his books had earned a total of $1.43.
“That is cute,” he said, then turned the check over and endorsed it.
Alone, with no prospects and nothing to work on, he was wasting his time, and decided, while he had the means, to take Zelda to Cuba for their anniversary. He prepared by drinking beer and fighting with Sheilah. She surprised him, driving out to Encino unannounced. After weeks of ignoring him, she didn’t want him to go.
“You know what’s going to happen. Look at yourself—it’s already starting.”
“It’s been over a year.”
“You can see her in the hospital.”
“I promised.”
“Didn’t Scottie just visit her?”
“She says she’s doing well. Even if she wasn’t, she’s my wife.”
“I just don’t want you to hurt yourself again.”
He had nothing to rebut her, and thought of his producer and his English girl. They would never fight like this.
“Go,” she said. “I can’t stop you.”
“You can’t.”
“At least promise me you won’t drink on the plane.”
“I promise.”
“Or in the airport.”
“Or in the airport.”
“Not even a beer.”
He raised his bottle. “Not even a beer.”
But then, two nights before he was supposed to go, he ran out of beer and opened a bottle of gin. In his stupor he called her to come rescue him. By the time she arrived he’d forgotten calling and told her to leave him alone. For reasons unknown, his gun sat on top of his bureau. When she tried to sneak it into her purse he grabbed her wrist. She slapped him hard across the face, knocking him to the floor.
When she discovered the gun was loaded, she railed at him.
All he could say was that he was sorry. He wasn’t going to do anything.
“I didn’t pull myself out of the gutter to waste my life on you,” she said, and left, taking it with her.
There wasn’t enough time to make up. There was barely time for him to get sober. Maybe the trip would be good, a break for both of them.
As if to prove her wrong, he abstained the whole way across the country, sleeping the last leg, and arrived fresh and rested. Tryon never changed—the train station, the library, his old hotel. He might have been gone for the weekend. Along the winding drive to the hospital, the rhododendron were in bloom.
Before he could see Zelda, Dr. Carroll took him into his office and filled him in on her progress. She’d been stable almost five months now. There was still a touch of religious mania—no more than your average Baptist, h
e joked. Overall she was responding to treatment. How had he been? Last time there’d been some trouble. They didn’t want to upset her, especially now.
Ober, Sheilah, now the doctor. Why did everyone speak to him as if he were a child?
“Of course not,” Scott said, and signed the papers.
The Zelda the nurse delivered from the women’s wing was new to him, another imposter. Her hair was dark as chocolate, a bad dye job, her bangs cut straight as a monk’s. For the first time in her life she wore glasses, gold wire rims, which, combined with the hair, seemed a clumsy disguise. In his absence she’d grown moon-faced and jowly like her sister Rosalind, fine lines like cracks around her mouth. After Sheilah she seemed dowdy and middle-aged, an effect only exacerbated by her lost-and-found clothes.
“Dodo,” she said, claiming him, but stood apart, as if out of modesty or following orders.
After an awkward second he moved to embrace her. “Happy anniversary.”
“Yes, happy anniversary.”
“How many is it now?” the doctor prodded.
Nineteen. She’d been nineteen when he married her, his wild belle, and if that girl was gone, so was the dashing lieutenant he’d been, with his pocket Keats and his overseas cap and his dreams of immortality. The years may have shown more outwardly on her, but the two of them were a pair in a way he and Sheilah, with her indomitable health, would never be.
“You look well.”
“Thank you.”
“Scottie said you had a good visit.”
“We had a nice time. She was very sweet.”
In front of the doctor they spoke with a saccharine courtesy as if at the last second he might change his mind. Zelda was bringing her box of watercolors to do a few seascapes. It would be nice to have something new to paint for a change. He told them to have fun, an injunction Scott thought misbegotten.
She didn’t take his hand as they crossed the lobby, and he saw he’d been wrong. Her earlier reserve wasn’t abstract but purposeful, directed at him, as if, without his prior knowledge, they were fighting. He wondered if somehow—not necessarily through Scottie—she’d found out about Sheilah.
She was subdued in the car, waiting till they were outside the gates and into the shade of the woods to make her opening statement.
“I think I’m ready to go home.”
“Right now, you mean.”
“I’m serious. When we come back I’d like you to talk to the doctor.”
“I will,” he said.
“You’ll see, I’m really so much better.”
“You’ll excuse me if I’ve heard that before.”
“That’s why I want you to see for yourself.”
He’d observed her enough to know when she was off. She might seem fine now, reasonable and alert, but that was typical of the first day. Inevitably would come the slippage—the blank spots and delusions and outbursts. She wouldn’t be able to hide it for a week at close quarters.
“Fair enough,” he said. “I hope you are.”
She would be sane. He would be sober. Even before they boarded the plane, their time together was an experiment, one they’d attempted for more than a decade, in all the best places. He had no reason to believe the results would be any different here, yet out of a stubborn loyalty or inborn urge to punish himself, he was willing to try again. In the airport, when she returned from the ladies room, about her neck she wore a tiny silver cross she touched from time to time, as if for luck. As they fought the trade winds across the Straits of Florida, the Keys below white as salt in the glimmering turquoise, the fatalist in him thought it would be easier if they just got it over with now instead of spending the week dreading the inevitable.
Ernest had a place near Havana, but held everything that had happened against Zelda. Scott would have to visit him some other trip.
Varadero was an hour outside the city on the north shore, at the end of the Via Blanca, a highway bordered by cane fields and whitewashed churches. Donkey carts shared the road with blaring diesel trucks hauling sea salt from the Bay of Cardenas. The Playa Azul ran the length of the peninsula, the grand hotels set down like temples among the fishing villages.
They were at the Club Kawama, in the main house, a lichened granite villa with balconies overlooking the pool. With its royal palms and Moorish fountains and stucco bungalows, it might have been the Garden of Allah; all that was missing was the ghost of its owner. The season had ended and one wing was closed, its windows shuttered. In the dining room their first night, he heard another couple speaking German and wondered if they were spies or exiles or both. The woman was younger, a dark blonde dressed for the casino, her bare shoulders caramel colored. He and Zelda had a suite with separate beds, and with a wistful envy he watched the couple finish and head out for the evening.
“You should introduce yourself,” she said. “I’m sure they’re more fun than I am.”
“Fun’s the last thing I need. I have too much fun, I get in trouble.”
“That’s not fun, that’s everything. We were never good at moderation, either of us.”
“I never wanted to be,” he said.
“And now you do.”
“Now I don’t have a choice, if I ever did.”
“You did,” she said. “You just didn’t care.”
“You were like that too.”
“I’m not saying I wasn’t. I know I was awful.”
“You were wonderful,” he said.
“Wonderfully awful.”
“I thought so.”
“You didn’t always.”
“Mostly I did.”
“Mostly,” she said, because the exceptions were great and unforgivable on both sides. All they had was the past, but they couldn’t go back.
It was night out and bats fluttered above the lighted pool as they walked across the courtyard to their room. The air was humid and still, waves falling softly in the darkness. He thought of Sheilah in Malibu, the two of them lying on the cool sand, watching the planes glide blinking through the maplike backdrop of stars. I didn’t pull myself out of the gutter to waste my life on you. Later, in his narrow bed, after Zelda had said her prayers and turned in, he heard splashing and padded to the balcony. It was the Germans, frolicking like otters. For a long moment he watched them from the shadows, then quietly closed the doors.
In the morning they were open and a pink dawn washed the sky to the east. Zelda was gone. Her bed was made, on the nightstand a Gideon Bible, her place in the middle of Ecclesiastes kept by a black ribbon. Outside, a rooster crowed and crowed. It was only five thirty. He pictured her at the bottom of the pool or facedown in the breakers and tugged on yesterday’s clothes, raced down the stairs and through the blinding courtyard and across the shuffleboard courts, only to find her on the beach with her easel, trying to match the color of the sunrise. With her coolie hat and sunglasses and pale limbs, she looked like any tourist.
“What are you doing up?” she asked.
“Looking for you.”
“Go back to bed. I don’t need a keeper.”
That’s the whole question, isn’t it, he might have said. Or, better: I have no desire to be one.
“How about breakfast when you’re done?”
“Can you wait an hour?”
He’d waited ten years. What was another hour?
“You know where to find me,” he said, and then couldn’t get back to sleep.
They ate on a patio off the main dining room, watching the high-piled clouds and a red-funneled liner making for Havana. He had tarlike coffee while she attacked her English breakfast with the gusto of a parolee. She offered him a sausage; he wasn’t hungry. He didn’t remember her ever having an appetite like this and wondered if it was the drugs.
The rumpled New York Herald the waiter retrieved for him was a week old. Again, imitating Hit
ler, Mussolini sent his troops into Albania unopposed.
Already the day was hot, the waves glinting as they rose and broke.
“I love the beach,” she said. “The light’s so clear here. Are you going to write today?”
“I’m going to try,” he said, though in truth he had no plans. All his life he’d believed in the primacy of work, yet he’d written nothing since he’d talked to Ober. Did it really take so little to discourage him? For years her dabbling had struck him as slapdash and glib, lacking the discipline of the professional. Now he envied her simple love of creation. He’d written too much for money.
The light and heat reminded him of Saint-Raphael. Their days there shared the same tropical languor. He sequestered himself in his room while she made studies of the sea and sky, the fishing boats, the village with its busy mercado—baskets of purple squid and whiskery rockfish, pullets sticking their heads through the bars of wooden cages. They rendezvoused at noon and ate lunch at a cantina facing the zocalo, arroz con pollo for thirty centavos. Beer was just three, and probably safer than the water, but he was good. She asked him for a cigarette as if it weren’t forbidden, blew out a cloud and murmured with pleasure.
“It’s nice to be able to do what you want,” she said.
“Even when it’s bad for you.”
“Especially then. ‘Sin in haste, repent at leisure.’”
“The other way around makes no sense,” he agreed.
Later he wondered if she was referring to herself or to him, to the ancient past or the immediate present. He was used to divining her riddles when she was sick. In this case she’d left room for interpretation, the comment intentionally barbed. He was pleased she was better—he wanted her to be strong—but it was also unsettling, as if he’d lost some advantage.
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