Another Side of Paradise

by Sally Koslow

  “If you need me, here’s my number.” Scott’s editor hands me a card along with the folder filled with Scott’s past work. I thank him again and Scott, now fully awake, bids goodbye to Arnold so lavishly you’d think one of them is being deployed to battle.

  Halfway to the airport, he says, “Doesn’t she have the most delightful curls?” pointing to the young brunette in the seat in front of us. The girl smiles at her escort. “Isn’t she pretty?” He continues to ladle on the flattery, sotto voce—“utterly ravishing . . . exquisite”—until the woman turns and flashes us a smile.

  “Who are you looking at, you silly bitch?” Scott hoots.

  “Apologize!” I say as the woman’s escort raises a fist. Fortunately, this is the moment when we arrive at Midway Airport. The limo stops. The other couple flees as Scott stumbles out, tripping on the pavement, ripping his trousers. With the driver’s help, we hoist him upright and slowly escort him to the check-in counter.

  “We’re sorry, sir, but we can’t permit you to board in this condition,” a clerk says.

  “In that case, I’ll buy a plane,” Scott replies, bloated with indignity.

  “If only you could. The next flight doesn’t leave until five in the morning.” In desperation, I phone my messiah.

  “Get Scott in a cab and just keep circling till it’s time to go back to the airport,” Arnold Gingrich advises. “I’ll call every bar in the area and tell them if a man in a dirty raincoat and fedora shows up, to serve him only beer. By two, most of the taverns will close.”

  Scott passes out on my shoulder while we take a trip to nowhere. Every few minutes he wakes to say to the man, “You motherfucker—I asked you to stop at a saloon” or, to me, “Hello, baby,” after which he promptly shuts his eyes and begins to sleep. Throughout the ride, I ruminate on how impaired my judgment must be to have allowed myself to fall in love—twice—with a weak man. My coat of arms may as well say Make a mistake, then make it again.

  At four-thirty a.m., an hour when nothing good ever happens, we return to the airport. Scott is allowed on the plane. He dozes through the entire flight.

  On my way home in Los Angeles, I drop him at the Garden of Allah. In a moment of complete sobriety, as if the real Scott has been restored, he says, “Sheilo, my love, I’m deeply sorry for my behavior. You deserve a thousand apologies.”

  “Oh?” My voice is ice water.

  “Can you forgive me?”

  I offer my most lacerating stare.

  “I want you to know this was the first time I’ve had a drink in almost a year. Worrying about my script and whether my contract would be renewed and Scottie and well, other things—it’s been too much. I’m sorry. I fell off the wagon.”

  “Fell off the wagon? There’s a vast difference between a drink and this sideshow.” My tone continues to be artic.

  “Please, I beg you not to worry, Presh, I can stop this whenever I want. I’ll report in sick to the studio for a few days, and see a doctor, and get a nurse.” He kisses me softly on the cheek. “I can dry out. I’m sure of it. I’ve done it before.”

  “We’ll see.” I hustle him out of the taxi. “Get some rest.”

  When he wakes, will he remember a word he just said, or any of the last two days? Is drunk Scott the real Scott, or vice versa? Does he love me? Do I still love him?

  I know the answer to only the last one. I have caught Scott as if he were a virus. I am no longer naïve enough to believe that we get to pick whom we love. The only thing I’m sure of is that I can no longer look at this man, nor can I listen to him.

  I am sick of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

  Chapter 27

  1937

  Arnold Gingrich’s package sits like a sulfurous dragon whose breath sours my flat. I am tempted to toss the manuscript in the fireplace. Bloody hell. Let my romance incinerate along with it.

  Swimming through the motions, I dash off the last item for Tuesday’s column.

  Harry Warner walks over to a child at the Coconut Grove to say, “You’re the prettiest little girl I’ve ever seen. Would you like to be in pictures?”

  “Well how do you do, Mr. Warner?” she answers. “I’m Shirley Temple.” His studio’s top box-office draw for the last few years.

  Thank you, Harry Warner, for never recognizing a soul.

  I go to a concert with my friend Jonah, clean my closets, make a pot of vegetable soup, and devour Gone with the Wind while munching on peanut brittle. None of these distractions keeps me from thinking of whether I owe Scott the courtesy of reading his essays. Three days pass and then I break. As much out of curiosity as loyalty I begin reading, and then must force myself to stop several times and mop up my tears. “The Crack-Up,” “Pasting It Together,” and “Handle with Care ” are the testimony of a man flying his fear like a flag. All pretense is gone, revealing a raw human stalk riddled with emotional shrapnel.

  I suddenly realized I had prematurely cracked. Scott writes of sleeping twenty hours a day and in his few wakeful hours, making lists, hundreds of lists—of popular tunes, suits he owned since he left the army, women he idolized, people who snubbed him, happier times. I slept on the heart side now , because I knew that the sooner I could tire out, even a little, the sooner would come that blessed hour of nightmare which, like a catharsis, would enable me to better meet the new day. He likens his condition to being overdrawn at the bank, mortgaged physically and spiritually. Scott compares himself to a cracked plate you consider tossing, and—few writers see to the truth at the bottom of a murky pond better than he—notes that at three in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence.

  I need to stop when Scott writes about the novel, no longer the supplest medium for conveying thought and emotion. Scruple-free Hollywood merchants, capable of reflecting only the most superficial thought and emotion, will make fiction extinct, he rages in his own wily way. Yet here, I think, is Scott, throwing himself at the mercy of producers, another greedy author struggling to write scripts. It was he who suggested that the mark of a first-rate intelligence is to be able to balance two conflicting ideas in your mind at once and still maintain the ability to function, but it was my Tatte who said, Keyner zet nit zany eygenem hoyker. No one sees the hump on his own back.

  Every genius scribe in America wants a bite of Hollywood’s apple pie because elsewhere, Americans are starving. Here, even if film industry folk aren’t floating gardenias in their pools and importing Napoleon’s parquet, no one lines his shoes with cardboard. Even lesser acolytes—I, for example—live flush with snug comfort. I am willing to own up to this. I may be a liar, but I’m not a hypocrite.

  Scott is right about movies trumping books. I can’t help but think that’s not merely because books cost a few bucks and films, two bits. In Scott’s case, the subjects he’s written about became his undoing. He gave voice to a decade that roared as it rode on the roofs of taxis, and he rhapsodized about that hedonism better than anyone. Now, most people can’t afford taxis, shut up and get on with it.

  I never expected life to be all cherry cheesecake and Cole Porter lyrics. I figured out how to put one foot in front of the other, with no allowance for suicidal gloom. Perhaps this has left me a tragically sensible Brit who can’t accept that the man she loves has a lesser will. The half of me honed by a slum and an orphanage is shocked by Scott’s naked self-pity. But maybe Scott’s falling off the wagon is more. I pray it’s not the beginning of a second severe breakdown.

  It’s a sad business to prospect for feelings alone. I call Dorothy. “He’s a fine writer and a beautiful person, our Scott, but when life frustrates him and his sweets are taken away, he kicks and screams like a spoiled brat,” she says. “That’s when the drinking begins.”

  This is not helpful.

  Next, I speak to Robert, to whom I give the condensed version of my trip to Chicago.

  Ten minutes after I sound my alarm, he arrives. I point to the Esquire essays piled on the table. “What did Scott
’s friends make of these?”

  Robert sits back, lights a pipe, and the woodsy scent of tobacco turns my living room into a men’s club. His bulk threatens to capsize my armchair. “Public opinion was divided,” he says. “Most of us admired Scott’s honesty and writing—it’s sublime, and I wrote to him saying as much. True Confessions in poetry. But there were those who saw him as a whining, melancholy baby. Ernest, in particular.”

  “Did he read Scott the riot act?”

  Robert takes away his pipe so he won’t choke on laughter. “Oh that he were that subtle. He wrote to Scott to say he jumped ‘straight from youth to senility without going through manhood.’ Ernest thinks everyone’s spineless until he goes mano a mano with a grizzly.”

  My face must show that I like Hemingway even less now than an hour ago.

  “It gets worse, pet. Ernest published his own story , right after Scott’s three , and slandered our boy. I brought the evidence.”

  He pulls a clipping from his jacket.

  He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and how he had started a story that once began, The rich are different from you and me. And how someone had said to Scott, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Scott. He thought they were a special race and when he found they weren’t, it wrecked him as much as any other thing that wrecked him.

  Most people are taken in by the rich. I certainly was, once. But after Monte and Randolph and Tom and Unity and Johnny’s carnivorous sister, the silk stocking crowd underwhelms me.

  “Ernest is more than cruel,” I say. “He’s disingenuous, always with his hand out for some noble cause or other.”

  Robert pats my leg as if I’m an overexcited dog. “There, there. We all know the man is a big, talented brute. With Scott, the animosity goes back to Zelda. It was hate at first sight with those two. To Ernest, she’s the bitch that dragged down her talented husband, competing with him and draining away his gift. Zelda called Hemingway a pansy with hair on his chest and accused him of having a homo’s interest in Scott. She’s suspicious of any man so fixated on physical bravery.”

  For the first time, Zelda comes alive. I suddenly like this woman I manage to forget for days on end, the wife for whom I do not exist. I imagine her as someone I might want as a friend.

  “Ernest has been an extra limb in the Fitzgerald marriage,” Robert explains. “His first mistake is to be convinced he understands it better than Scott does.”

  “Didn’t Scott help Ernest get his start?”

  “Sadly true, despite everything. Yet Scott has never tried to get even. He and Ernest will never be thick as thieves as they were in Paris, but according to Dorothy, he even wrote to Ernest and complimented him on his Esquire piece, though Scott told him to lay off.” Robert switches to a spot-on mimic. “When you incorporate the story into a collection would you mind cutting my name? The ‘poor Scott Fitzgerald’ rather ruined it for me. Approximately.”

  Hearing how gallant Scott was toward Ernest is a bold-faced reminder of who Scott is when he’s not inebriated: generous, eloquent, lovable. “I could sink a knife into that man’s heart.”

  “Whoa, little giant-killer. Forget Ernest and give Scott some rope. He’ll stop drinking. He always does. Hell, whatever his failings, I love the bastard.”

  My problem, exactly. Scott has his addictions and I have mine. Him. After Johnny, he’s virile. After Randolph, he’s kind. After Don, he’s appealingly complicated, and compared to all of them, he’s the best listener I’ve ever known as well as the best lover. I could go on.

  The next day a box of long-stemmed tulips, shamelessly red, arrives with a note,

  Darling,

  These are the color of my face. I have no words except I miss you. Will you take me back?

  Your forever fool,

  Scott

  This is the man who has said, “Loving you is a luxury like everything else about knowing you, dear face, dear heart, dear Sheilah.” My anger about his drinking looms less when I remember the tenderness. I think not exclusively of the sex—though I do miss it—but of Scott’s small gestures, and the pleasure we take in one another’s company . . . of how the evening before we went to Chicago, when I was soaking in a bubble bath, he brought me a small pillow for my head, yet averted his eyes from my naked body. I remember our last UCLA Bruins game. While he patiently explained football, he stroked my neck and held my hand, dropping it only to jump up and cheer giddily when our team scored a touchdown.

  It boils down to this: when I consider the past, I try to improve on it. Scott reaches for the gin or writes a requiem. But he is also generous and forgiving. If he can pardon Ernest Hemingway, shouldn’t I at least hear him out?

  I agree to meet him that evening to walk on the pier. When I get out of my car and see him waiting, my heart pounds in excitement. I had almost forgotten how handsome Scott is. He embraces me and for just a moment my head rests lightly on his shoulder. We fit together as if designed to complement.

  “Alcohol is a gift in the sense that I can’t remember much about Chicago, but it must have been wretched, whatever I did. I am very sorry, Sheilah,” he says, a bit formally, as he pulls me toward him with both hands on my shoulders, looking straight into my eyes. “I embarrassed you, I know, and I no doubt did the same to myself. I beg your apology.”

  My heart is pounding like the surf. Who am I to not forgive?

  “I accept, Scott, on the condition that this never happens again.” If he was on the wagon for all the months before Chicago, surely he has the willpower to climb up there again. Robert Benchley has said as much.

  “It won’t, I promise. I love and respect you far too much.”

  I blink back tears. “Thank you for saying that.” Respect is something I need as much as love, since whenever I think of my lies I have only the lowest regard for myself.

  “Do the essays explain me at all, Presh? I’m just now, here in Hollywood, finding pieces of myself and trying to reassemble them. I’m a jigsaw puzzle hit by a tornado.”

  “Oh, Scott. What you’ve gone through . . . I hate even to think about it, and wish you’d told me everything sooner.”

  “I was trying to forget it. Fresh starts and all that.”

  “You’re entirely right, by the way. The rich are different.”

  “Oh?” he says.

  “This is a subject on which I feel qualified to speak.” He smiles for the first time, his teeth even and white, betraying no sign of his ubiquitous Raleighs. “But not now.” I want only to love and comfort Scott, and get the same in return. We walk to our cars and meet at my home, where we start with dancing and laughing, move on to a striptease, and end in bed, for hours, athletic yet vulnerable. I feel as if Scott has been put on earth to give me pleasure and I am happy to return the favor. We graft a new beginning onto our own crack-up.

  Scott wants to celebrate Christmas together. Scottie will stay East, where Robert and most of his troop are heading. He doesn’t suggest visiting Zelda, whom he quietly saw this fall. Johnny and I never made much of the holiday beyond a hotel lunch with the requisite silly hats; all Christmas has ever meant to me is another December day. But I am determined to create a Noel of wifely domesticity, though I suspect Zelda has never gone beyond toasting bread. I should invite Dorothy and Alan, but I am selfish. The last few weeks have been sweet, and I want Scott to myself.

  I buy The Settlement Cook Book and create a menu of oysters from Santa Monica, roast turkey with cornbread dressing, potatoes—sweet and mashed—and Brussels sprouts with chestnuts. For dessert, mince pie from Sunset Bakery. No plum pudding, because every recipe calls for whiskey, brandy or rum, and I do not want to find Scott under the Christmas tree.

  On Christmas Eve, Scott finds the last and stringiest tree in Los Angeles, sold off the back of a truck on Pico. I spend a full day in the kitchen and at five o’clock, we stuff ourselves with fat, briny oysters, dry turkey, perfect potatoes, limp sprouts, and plenty of pie. He reminisces about Christmas in St. Paul. A twel
ve-foot Norwegian pine he and his father cut down at a farm for the foyer of the big house on Summit Avenue. The cook’s goose, slick with grease. His grandfather’s declamation of “Twas the Night Before Christmas,” which Scott repeats in finest thespian fashion.

  “No stockings hung by the chimney with care, I’m afraid.”

  “Next year,” he says.

  I thrill to words that suggest a shared future. As the fire crackles, Scott plays a recording of carols that he has brought and sings along in a fine tenor. “We Three Kings of Orient Are. ” “ O Little Town of Bethlehem.” Songs I do not know.

  “Sheilo, join in,” he says in the middle of “Deck the Halls .” “Don’t leave me standing alone on the stage at Carnegie Hall.”

  “You know I can’t sing.”

  “But you were on the stage, and I’ve heard you in the shower. You’re a natural soprano.”

  “Got me. Darling. In England we sang different songs.”

  He breaks into “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing .” “You must know this one. The melody is by Mendelssohn.”

  Why has Scott mentioned a Jew? “Meet me by the mistletoe,” I say, trying to hide my alarm. “My visions are not of sugarplums.”

  His mouth is a holiday of its own, tasting of longing and sweet whipped cream. I cling to Scott, and almost pray. If an entire religion can grow from the idea of a virgin birth, perhaps he and I might be able to find our own peace on earth, an armistice without drunken tirades, perhaps even including a child.

  Mistletoe leads to a trip upstairs, joy to the world and all that. When we finish, I ask him if he wants his present now or tomorrow.

  “But we said no gifts—though I believe I just got mine?”

  “This isn’t from Bullock’s or Saks Fifth Avenue,” I say. “It isn’t even from me.”

  When curiosity lights Scott, the corners of his mouth turn up and he is ten. I want to emboss this face on my memory. “Carry on, Cleopatra of gossip.”

  “MGM is picking up your option.” Hedda Hopper, my officious new rival—now I have two—leaked the news to my friend Jonah. Scott wasn’t banking on it, and neither was I. His Chicago trip was unauthorized—grounds to cancel . I smother Scott in a hug. “And you’re getting a raise, and I’m going to trumpet the good news in print.”