Villa America

by Liza Klaussmann

  Sara looked up. “Oh, yes.”

  “This evening?” He cocked his Stetson over his eyes, shading them.

  “If you’d like.”

  He would like. He wanted a chance to be alone with her. He had nothing against Gerald Murphy, whom he found quite original, but he was drawn to Sara. Perhaps it was her Americanism. It was true that he’d never been exposed to this kind of American woman before—married, rich, a mother but also a muse. He knew the young stupid ones and the old ones and the Sapphic ones. None of those appealed. This one was sensual in a way that was unself-conscious.

  He wouldn’t go too far; perhaps a hand on the small of her back, leaning close. Just to run his hand over her figure, to feel what until now he’d only drawn. He thought about the moment just before something begins, just before the hourglass is tipped and time starts to run out. He loved that moment, and once it passed, it felt like a death.

  He was thinking of this and of what might happen when Olga opened her eyes and stretched. Sara put her book down again and asked her: “Would you like to see our house this evening? We were thinking of going for a viewing.”

  “Oh, that sounds nice,” Olga said lazily, and she looked at him. “That’s a good idea, isn’t it?”

  Owen sat at one of the rickety tables at the Café des Pêcheurs, overlooking the Port d’Antibes, drinking a Remplaçant. He’d acquired a taste for anise, liked watching the liquid cloud over when he added water from the little carafe on the side.

  There were only a few other people at the café: some fishermen relaxing after a haul, a group of those bohemian artists who seemed to flock to the region in the summer, and a drunk war invalid—the Riviera used to be full of men like that, but they were becoming less and less visible. It was six o’clock in the evening, but it wouldn’t get more crowded than this.

  The village was too small to attract fun seekers, who had Saint-Raphaël, Cannes, and Juan-les-Pins, with its new casino and smarter restaurants, to choose from. Here there was nothing except a couple of cafés, a movie theater that was open once a week—if the piano player could be located—and some fine beaches.

  It was a good hour’s drive, at least, from Owen’s rooms near Saint-Raphaël, but he liked to come here to escape. Just to be quiet. He rented space for his plane at the Fréjus air base and from there ran his business of flying in goods from London, Paris, and farther-flung places across Europe for the rich, who couldn’t be without their caviar or silk handkerchiefs during the winter season. He sometimes took tourists on pleasure trips along the coast to supplement his income.

  Because he was always at the base, he’d come to know the young aviators stationed there, and they, along with the proprietor of the café below his rooms, made up his circle of friends. But there were evenings, like this one, when the joviality and youth of the French pilots depressed him. None of them had served in the war and they looked upon his experiences as the pinnacle of glory. Yet Owen had started to become frightened of relating his stories; it felt like they no longer belonged to him, like they had happened to someone else, in a book, perhaps.

  After Chaudun, he’d been sent to Cannes, to a convalescent hospital, where he’d stayed while his leg healed. It had been broken in three places, and after five months, one operation, and a few metal screws, the war was basically over and he’d been discharged. He’d been in no hurry to leave; he was ruined for combat flying, and it had been beautiful there—the Croisette and beaches, the palm trees, the converted hotel with its big turrets.

  So he’d taken some of the money he had left from the sale of the farm and bought one of the army’s surplus planes, going cheap, and an old Citroën, which he’d fixed up. He’d struck a deal with the commander at the Fréjus air base for hangar space and eventually taken rooms in Agay on a perfect little bay surrounded by the Esterel Mountains. There, the cliffs were pink instead of golden. Along with the one café, there were a few villas, some smaller houses, and a handful of fishing shacks. It was eight miles from the base, but the calm was worth the price of the petrol.

  The patron of the café, a squat brown man with shoulders like planks, came to refill his glass. Owen’d been there often enough for the man to know he took two refills before leaving.

  The sun was changing the color of the sea from light to dark as it made its way west. He looked over at the artists talking, his attention drawn by the mix of English and French he heard.

  They were a group of three: a stocky man with a big nose and dark hair parted deeply from the right, a black Stetson on his lap; a taller, slender man in a striped fisherman’s shirt whom he recognized as a Russian he’d spoken with one evening; and a woman in a flowing gown like some Greek goddess. She was older than himself, he thought, but beautiful. And seemed very still. She had sloping kind of eyes. She was staring at him.

  He looked at the port and then back at her to see if she was still looking. She was. It gave him a sort of funny feeling, like he was being memorized the way he’d memorized arithmetic problems in school. Her gaze was very frank for a woman, and he had the impression—one long forgotten and only vaguely and anxiously remembered—of something about to happen.

  The sherry at the café was very bad, Sara decided. But after they’d all gone to see the house she and Gerald had bought, Vladimir had suggested an apéro there; he’d apparently become very fond of it in their absence. Picasso had come along, but Olga had begged off in order to change for supper.

  It had cheered Sara to see the villa again; every time, she fell in love a little more. It was a place that people could be happy in, she decided. Perfectly nestled in the hills of Cap d’Antibes, a bit below the old lighthouse, it sat on seven acres of sloping terraced gardens looking out over the Golfe-Juan, west towards Cannes. It had been owned by some military attaché or other who’d brought back what seemed like an entire botanical garden from the Far East. Gerald knew all the plants’ names. When they’d started on renovation plans, they’d agreed that the gardens must remain intact.

  The villa had been purchased on something of a whim, but it hadn’t cost very much. Her father had decided to dole out proportionate amounts of his capital to Sara and her two sisters before his death, an effort to circumvent inheritance tax. The funds, along with a strong dollar against the franc, had made the price tag seem a pittance. (At least to Sara and Gerald, who, granted, weren’t very clear about money.)

  It had been especially beautiful that evening, with the hills below them the color of elephant skin, and the gulf turning from turquoise to jade as it spread towards Corsica. And it had pleased her to win Pablo’s approval.

  He’d found the garden très belle and the view perfect for a painter, he’d said. Of course she’d known the real reason he’d wanted to go up there, and in fact she was flattered. He was charismatic, there was no doubt, and had such a physical presence, and she liked being around him. But what he had in mind was out of the question. So she’d invited Olga and even roped in Vladimir as an extra precaution.

  Now, at the café, Vladimir and Pablo were carrying on a long discussion about the different types of boats moored in the port. Vladimir, who’d been studying to be a naval architect before his flight from St. Petersburg, was very interested in that sort of thing. Sara was not.

  Instead, she watched as a drunk war veteran got drunker and eventually went to sleep. Then she fixed her gaze on a young man, perhaps ten or fifteen years her junior, sitting by himself and sipping from his drink. He was built like a classical statue, his torso an inverted triangle, his long legs stretched out on either side of the table, the muscles in his arms faintly visible beneath his cotton shirt. He was tan and quite blond. He didn’t look local, or even French, but neither was he dressed like a wealthy Englishman or even an American. Couldn’t be a German.

  She stared at him awhile before he noticed. He looked back at her as if he expected something from her.

  She turned to the two men. “Who is that man over there, do you think?”

 
Vladimir looked over. “Un pilote américain.”

  “Truly? You know him?”

  “One evening, over an apéro,” Vladimir said, clearly eager to return to his yachting explanation.

  Sara continued to stare at this young blond aviator. She knew it was a bit impolite, but this was a village, and open curiosity was tolerated by the French in a way it would never have been in England or America. “What’s he doing here?”

  Vladimir, now resigned to this line of questioning, shrugged. “What is anyone doing here?”

  She liked the way the young man looked back at her—slightly nervously, slightly eagerly, like Baoth when he was learning to swim.

  “I think I’d like to meet him,” Sara said.

  1924

  Owen was dreaming. In his dream, he was a blade of wheat, green and unfurling, pushing out of the ground with sun and moisture. As the sun grew warmer, he grew longer, taller, stronger. He shot up and then he stopped. But the sun kept on. And as it became hotter, he began to change color; he turned from green to golden. He was drying up. And then he was burning. All at once, he was cut down, quickly, with a metal blade. He was dead and rolled up and turned into feed, and he couldn’t stop it any more than he had been able to stop himself from growing in the sun.

  He awoke covered in sweat. The small bedroom with the linen curtains felt close and yet it was only just dawn, the air cool and dryer than usual. His yellow bedspread was damp from his body.

  He got up and put on his swimming trunks and a shirt and his espadrilles and left, shutting the door behind him. He walked down to the beach and dove into the water. There were only fishermen up at this hour, and they were far away on their boats, tiny dots on the horizon. He swam for a while and then went back to his rooms above the Café d’Esterel.

  He took a quick rinse in the bath on the landing, then dressed for the day in his chinos and chambray shirt. The sun was up, but not high, and he went to take his coffee with Auguste.

  The Frenchman was already finishing his first café au lait when Owen found him at the zinc counter. Upon Owen’s arrival, Auguste, without a word, prepared the same for Owen and slid it over to him. They stood there in silence, but it was the good kind, and it reminded him of early-morning breakfasts with his mother, who’d also known about quiet. After a bit, Auguste made him a tartine, which Owen wrapped in a napkin and took with him out to his car to eat on the drive.

  At the base, most of the aviators were at breakfast, and the hangars were deserted. He pulled in front of his own and shut off the motor. Inside, in the semidarkness, she was waiting for him. That Girl. She was a modified SPAD, a two-seater that, unlike Lettuce, was built for durability and distance, not speed.

  Off to one side was a wooden desk where he kept his accounting and appointment books as well as the maintenance calendars for That Girl.

  He checked these over now, knowing already he had nothing on. Still, it grounded him to see everything in order. Afterward, he went over to his plane and began the ritual of running his hands over her wooden body, speaking to her, telling her what a beautiful day it was turning into.

  By the time he reached her nose, the sound of the aviators and the mechanics descending on the hangars filled the air. Owen went out and flagged down Eugene, the mechanic he shared with one of the other pilots, Edouard Jozan. Eugene, with the blessing of the French military service, received a small stipend from Owen for helping him out with That Girl.

  Eugene moved quickly, always—one of the things that Owen liked about him. And when he’d first met him, he’d been glad to see that he was a man, not a boy like Arnaud, his mechanic during the war.

  “Just going out for a turn,” Owen said. “Won’t be up long.”

  Eugene nodded and waited while Owen pumped the throttle. When Owen called out, he cranked the prop; Owen made contact, and the mechanic stepped away. Owen lifted a hand in thanks and began to taxi.

  Once up, he made for the Golfe de Fréjus and the open water. In the morning sun, the colors of the sea were sharply delineated: first a mossy green near the line of the shore, then a band of turquoise, and finally a deep indigo.

  The sun above and the water below and the hum of the engine, so much quieter than in the fighters he’d flown, made the dream finally disappear and he felt a contentment come over him. The day was before him and he could do as he pleased. After this, perhaps another swim and then lunch in Saint-Raphaël. He checked his controls; all the numbers and arrows waited only on his decisions.

  The champagne was finished before they’d even left the Marseille train station.

  “We should have brought more than one.” Zelda sighed.

  “You shouldn’t have let me forget my billfold and then we could have bought some,” Scott said irritably, although he knew it was as much his fault as Zelda’s.

  They were making the move down south to e-con-o-mize, as Zelda put it. In New York, they’d been running through the money as fast as the Saturday Evening Post could pay, and Paris hadn’t been much better. Scott needed to finish Trimalchio in West Egg; Scribner’s was losing patience, despite Max Perkins’s assurances that everyone had faith he could pull it off. So when Sara and Gerald had extolled the virtues—and cheapness—of the Riviera, the plan was made to go down in June in search of some peace and quiet. They’d settled on Valescure, on the northern edge of the town of Saint-Raphaël, about an hour-and-a-half drive from their friends in Cap d’Antibes.

  The car had held out until they were almost at Marseille, when it had begun to smoke and cough and then, finally, just died. He and Zelda had grabbed what luggage they could manage, along with one bottle of champagne from the crates in the backseat, and made a dash for the Train Bleu. Someone would have to go deal with the car and the rest of the champagne later.

  In the melee, he’d forgotten his billfold in the glove compartment, and he and Zelda had had a time of it scraping together the money—loose change from his pockets, errant bills in her handbag—to buy tickets for the salon car.

  “Let’s talk about this summer,” Zelda said, breathing on the window and then drawing waves in the condensation.

  “All right.” Outside, the edge of the city disappeared as the train rounded a turn.

  “You’re going to work very hard and I’m going to get very brown.”

  Scott nodded, his eyes wandering around the car, taking in the marquetry patterns of floral baskets, the polished ceiling fan and Lalique lights, the navy blue carpet and toffee-colored velvet seats. He wondered how much it had cost to put this car together.

  “But,” she said, turning away from the window and poking his shoulder, “I’m going to work too.”

  “On what?”

  “On my swimming, and my dancing.”

  “I see.”

  “And,” she said, “you’re not going to drink too much.”

  “You’re not going to drink too much,” he said.

  This was a dangerous conversation. They both knew it and so were silent for a while.

  After a bit, Zelda said: “Let’s play the game.”

  “All right. Who?”

  “Sara and Gerald,” she said.

  “You go first.”

  “‘If I were a Greek goddess, I’d be Demeter, in charge of all the golden fields and the harvest and fertility. An avenging mother.’”

  “That’s good,” Scott said.

  “‘I don’t like what’s in fashion, but I like beautiful things. All my clothes are soft and clean and made out of delicious fabrics. I’m graceful and my touch brings loveliness to even the smallest, itsy-bitsiest things.’”

  “‘I’m sensuous,’” Scott said.

  “‘I am?’”

  “Well, she is,” he said. “In that sort of motherly way.”

  “Hmmm,” Zelda said. “You never said that before.”

  “Well…never mind. Go on.”

  “‘I like things that are new: new art, new inventions, new people. But really, I’m very old-fashioned. I don�
��t ever get crazy. Maybe’”—and here she fixed her eyes once again on Scott—“‘maybe it’s because I’m forty.’”

  “She’s not forty. She’s thirty-seven, I heard Gerald say so.”

  “‘Oh, I’m forty, all right.’ A woman knows.”

  “Fine. My turn. ‘I’m tall and lean and Irish. I’m a painter and I’m getting quite famous—I’m the one who did Boatdeck, after all, and got myself on the cover of magazines.’”

  “Don’t be jealous.”

  “I’m not, I’m in character. ‘Everything I do is precise, without waste, and designed to be generous and original; I like to give pleasure. I can be friendly but also cold when someone least expects it.’”

  “Yes, that’s true, I’ve seen that. Like when we turned up at Saint-Cloud and said we were leaving on the Lusitania—”

  “Don’t interrupt. ‘I’m like one of those machines I paint. Perfectly elegant, with lots of gears and fitted parts, and I look oh-so-finely tailored. With all my straps and buckles, I must be a masochist.’” Scott slapped his hand on his knee. “Ha.”

  “Oh, I don’t know how you got masochist.”

  “You saw how.”

  “I think it’s a mighty big stretch.”

  “Now who’s jealous.”

  “All right. Let’s do Esther Murphy.”

  “Too easy: ‘I’m distorted to look at, I smell like the gutter, and I’m brilliantly clever. I’m a cubist painting.’”

  “You are canny sometimes.” Zelda smiled at him. “Let’s do Dos.”

  “Dos Passos?”

  “Do you know another Dos?”

  “No, but I don’t see why we should do him. You’re picking some awfully dull ones.” Scott wasn’t sure how he felt about John Dos Passos. That book of his had been all right, just. But Dos judged him and Zelda, he could see it behind his eyes, hear it in his silences. He might also be squeamish about sex.