Here’s what I figured: Édouard was less a man than a symbol for me, a symbol of my yearning for something I couldn’t yet name. If I’d heard of Amelia Earhart at the time, I might have been as willing to follow her lead as I was Édouard’s.
I wasn’t in love with him, not really. Édouard was a symbol. Édouard was a symptom. Scott, for all his shortcomings, owned my heart.
* * *
By the time I went inside, the dew had settled; I tracked into the bedroom with wet feet. Scott was sitting up in bed. The end of his cigarette glowed.
I stripped off my damp clothes, then took the cigarette and put it aside.
“You’ll stay?”
“Yes.”
“No more beach, no lunches, you won’t go anyplace without me while he’s here.”
“All right.”
Neither of us said another word for the rest of that night—a remarkable thing by itself. That night, we kept quiet so that our truth could be heard, and seen, and felt, in the ways we touched each other’s skin, the ways we sighed or gasped, our tentative glances, the press of my forehead to his.
When I didn’t return to the beach for a week, nor send a note to Édouard, nor place a call, he stopped looking for me there. At the casino, he asked after “the Fitzgeralds” and got nothing more than a shrug. All this Scott learned from René, who’d said he was loath to reveal anything at all to Scott, but out of respect for the friendship they’d developed during those months, he thought it only right that Scott know what had almost happened.
Scott told me, “René says Jozan is heartbroken and confused and may never get over you.”
“He will.”
“Perhaps. Though if he doesn’t, I won’t be surprised. I said to René, ‘Tell your friend that he’s now a member of a very prestigious club.’”
25
October: Scott found me in the Villa Marie garden taking in the inspiring Mediterranean view for what would be one of the last times that year. “Here.” He handed me a piece of paper that read,
Trimalchio
High Bouncing Lover
Among Ash Heaps and Millionaires
Trimalchio of West Egg
Gold Hatted Gatsby
On the Road to West Egg
Under the Red White and Blue
The Great Gatsby
Our lease would end when the month did, and then we’d migrate elsewhere the way the birds and our friends were all doing—most to Paris, some to Venice, or London, or Berlin. I’d persuaded Scott to tour Rome and Capri so that I could see a lot of the art and some of the artists that I’d been hearing about from the Murphys during our visits with them. After the tour, we’d get a place in Paris and—we reassured each other—be even more responsible about the partying and drinking and our marriage than we’d been here.
In Paris, we’d await and then celebrate his third novel’s publication; he was more certain than ever that he’d accomplished everything he’d set out to do with this book, and at the same time he was terrified that he hadn’t.
“What do you think?” he asked now. “I’m torn. I’ve been leaning toward one of the Trimalchio titles, but Max thinks the association’s too obscure. I could make more of it in the book, I suppose—but I hate the thought of spoon-feeding my readers. God, I do too much of that for the slicks as it is. Still, Trimalchio of West Egg is a great title; it might be worth Nick making a little narrative sidestep in order to share the background.”
This being my third go-round with Scott and his novels in prepublication madness, I knew there was no shortcut out of the anxiety; we both had to endure it the way you endure the headache, nausea, and malaise of a hangover.
As was now our tradition, I’d read his draft—had just finished the new one, in fact—and had been gathering my thoughts while I sat there. “Before we get into titles,” I told him, “I have to say that there’s something still kinda blurry about Gatsby. I can see Tom and Daisy, and Myrtle’s poor husband! And even Nick is clear enough.… Maybe it’s that Gatsby’s history is murky. Wouldn’t people know something about him? Or think they did?”
Scott crossed his arms. “These people don’t care about how he made his money, they only care that he’s rich and throws insanely great parties.”
“You wanted my opinion.”
“I did, I know.” He uncrossed his arms. “Thank you.”
“For titles, I like The Great Gatsby.”
“You do?” He looked disappointed. “Really?”
“Really.”
“That’s the one Max wants, too.”
“Remember when you revised the end of Beautiful and Damned?”
Scott sighed. “I’m too close to the work, that’s what you’re saying.”
“That’s what I’m saying. So listen, the Murphys are just about to pack up and head back to Saint-Cloud. While you’re stewing over edits and titles and such, let’s take Scottie over to see Patrick—she’s been asking forever—and we can celebrate her birthday a little early. I was thinking I’d make a circus set for her—like paper dolls but the dolls will be animals. Camels, horses, tigers, elephants, lions, and a mistress of ceremonies who looks just like her. Maybe I’ll add a unicorn, too.”
“That all sounds marvelous, and I’m sure you’ll do a bang-up job of it. I was thinking it might also be nice to give her a brother.”
“Were you, now? All on your own?”
“With some help from the stork, of course.”
“The stork’s going to need more than seven weeks, you know.”
He said, “Hm. I suppose that’s right.”
“But I guess we can confer with the stork. Place the order, you might say.”
“Are you ready for that?” he asked.
“I believe I am.”
I rested my head against his shoulder and we watched the sun set, just like you might see in the movies. We’d worked hard to create this lovely, new domestic bliss, and before Gatsby’s publication, right up until the book was printed and put into the hands of both the reading and the reviewing public, it looked as if we might actually succeed.
Wait: if I leave it at that, it’ll sound like the novel’s disappointing performance is to blame for the disaster we made of our lives, and that’s not really so. Ernest Hemingway is to blame.
26
Sara Murphy looked sad as we all filed into the dining room for the season’s final Dinner-Flowers-Gala, as she called these more formal events. The men were in tails, the women in slim, ankle-length summer gowns in all the colors of a Mediterranean summer. Sara stood next to her chair and sighed. “One final gathering—”
“Before the next one.” Gerald kissed her forehead and took his seat at the opposite end of the table.
Present in this, their rented Antibes home, were Scott and me; Dick and Alice Lee; Pablo without Olga—they were on the outs; Pauline Pfeiffer, a friend of Sara’s who worked as a writer for Vogue magazine; Dottie Parker; and Linda without Cole, who, she said, was “traveling.” She said it like that, with quotation marks in her voice; no one asked her what she meant.
The weather had been perfect for us all week: clear skies, hot afternoons, the sea still warm enough for the children to spend all day splashing and playing. We’d toured the grounds and house that were slowly becoming the grand estate that the Murphys would name Villa America. In the evenings, the adults gathered for charades and bridge and a game Scott invented, whereby I sat at the piano while he named a theme, and then each of us had to ad-lib a story and sing it to one of the half dozen tunes I could play by heart. Every time I opened the keyboard, I apologized in advance: “Y’all will forgive me for not being Cole.”
“And forgive me as well,” Scott would say, but I knew he preferred it this way. Without Cole, the spotlight was all his.
Gerald’s invented cocktails were a real help with our game, which Linda named “The Terribly Witty Ditties.” Gerald poured the drinks while Scott exhorted everyone to come up with ever-more-creative rhymes. Then,
when our imaginations could no longer meet the challenge, Scott would single out one or another of the group for Twenty Questions, which, depending on how much he’d had to drink, might go on well past twenty and into the night. His subjects always cooperated; who doesn’t love being found unendingly interesting?
Now Sara sat down at the table across from Gerald, saying, “It might be months before we see these friends again.”
At her right, Dick Myers reached over to Scott next to him and thumped him on the back. “One can hope.”
“Have I exhausted your talents?” Scott asked.
“Prob’ly their patience,” I said fondly.
“When he has exhausted yours,” Pablo told me in heavily accented English, “you must come to mi estudio en Paris, sí? I will exhaust you all about art.”
Sara put her hand on mine. “You must. And visit Gerald’s studio, too. But see Rome’s art first, then bring them every question that comes to mind. You won’t find better mentors than this pair.”
* * *
It was while standing in front of the Temple of Vesta that I first had the pain, a funny twinge low in my pelvis, near my right hip. Women get pains of this sort often enough that I paid it little mind, and it dutifully disappeared—for a while. Later that night it was back, and worse. Then it faded and was gone for a few days, only to return again.
The discomfort went on this way for five weeks. Sometimes I was cranky but functional, and we’d go out. We met up with some of the cast and crew of Ben-Hur during this time—who knows how Scott met them, to start? We were always being introduced to someone who knew someone whose husband was or brother was or great old friend was connected to someone or something we simply had to see. This happened so often that I’d stopped paying attention to the connections and concerned myself only with the results.
Too often, I spent half the day in bed clutching a water bottle to my hips like a lover. If you’re thinking pregnancy was the culprit, well, you can join me in being wrong about that. One night in December, just as Scott led Scottie in to read a book with me in bed, he found me doubled over and in so much pain that I was wishing I could trade that pain for labor, for amputation, for anything that would be better than the aching, burning ball in my gut. Everything around me—my whole field of vision—seemed edged in white. “Take her and call a doctor,” I gasped.
When Scott scooped her up by her middle, Scottie didn’t protest being whisked away. She thought he’d begun a game. “Bye, Mama!” she called. I could hear her laughing as Scott carried her off. “Make me fly, Papa, I want to fly!”
The Italian doctor who arrived an hour later spoke no English and had French about on par with mine. He looked in my mouth and nose and eyes, he put his stethoscope on my belly, he pressed and prodded, asking, “Ici? Ici?” while I gritted my teeth and either flinched or didn’t flinch in response. When he was done, his expression was grave, his words sober as he pronounced his conclusion, in French.
Scott, on the other side of the bed, looked panicked. “What’s he saying?”
I told the doctor, “Yes. Oui. Fine, I don’t care what you need to do, just make it stop.”
“L’hôpital Murphy,” he told Scott, as he took a needle and syringe from his bag. “Tout de suite. Comprenez-vous?”
“Zelda, for God’s sake, what’s he saying? What about the Murphys?”
I winced when the needle pierced my hip, a small but welcome pain that, within moments, delivered some miraculous something that allowed me to unclench my teeth enough to translate. “He thinks there’s probably a water ball on my tube, which will require a knife to resolve. They have good knives at Murphy Hospital; we should go there now.”
“A what?” Scott’s eyes were wild as a scared horse’s.
“A cyst,” I said, translating further as the drug continued to dull the pain. The white edges began to recede from my vision. “On my ovary, I think.” The pain faded, and faded, and I could breathe again.
Optimistically I asked the doctor, “Mais je me sens mieux. Est-ce que l’hôpital est nécessaire?” which was supposed to mean I’m feeling better now; do I really need to go to the hospital?
The doctor scowled and unleashed a string of Italian curses—or so it sounded to me. Then he said in French, “L’hôpital ou la mort.” Go, or die.
The idea of submitting to surgery was only slightly less terrifying and undesirable than death, so I went.
* * *
Afterward, the pain wasn’t gone so much as it was altered and muted. Recovering, first in the hospital and then in our hotel, I felt altered and muted. To a person who has hardly been sick in her life, sudden illness feels like a betrayal.
The doctor hadn’t been able to assure us—not in Italian or French or English—that I would still be able to get pregnant now that one ovary was gone. When I translated this for Scott, he looked at me accusingly and asked the doctor, “Could medications for ‘feminine troubles’ have caused the problem?”
“Eh? Médicaments?”
I knew what Scott was talking about, even if the doctor didn’t.
“Yes … to regulate cycles, and so forth.”
The doctor looked to me for translation. “C’est rien,” I said. “Il ne sait pas ce qu’il dit. Il est tout simplement inquiet.” Never mind. He doesn’t know what he’s saying, he’s just worried.
“Ce médicament permettra de remédier à la douleur,” the doctor said, nodding, and he wrote down a prescription for pain relief.
I told Scott, “He says no, it wasn’t the pills, and this medication is our best bet.”
* * *
For the next few weeks, I was tired and uncomfortable and crabby, and antisocial because of it. What I wanted was home. What I got was an assurance that we’d leave Rome soon for sunny, mild Capri. And in the meantime, Scott had written three new stories, then reviewed the Gatsby proofs, made corrections, and shipped the proofs back to New York. With that done, he grew bored. He went out a lot, then would turn up late in the evening glassy-eyed and pink-cheeked, often cheerful but sometimes belligerent.
“Suppose you can’t get pregnant,” he said on one of those nights. “Suppose that your abortion”—he spat the word—“got rid of my son. When Gatsby makes me an American literary legend, who’s going to carry on my legacy, my name?”
“What, now you’ve decided that a daughter’s not good enough? If you did have a son, I guess you’d name him Francis Scott Fitzgerald the Second—and what would you call him? Junior? Or would you take Scottie’s name away from her and call her Fran or something?”
“You don’t want another child,” he accused.
“You didn’t want what we thought would be the first one.”
He slumped into the chair in the corner of the bedroom. “Women never understand this,” he said, ignoring my point. “To you, every baby is just another child, no matter the sex. Men need sons, it’s built into us, an imperative.”
I knew he was anxious about Gatsby, not to mention inebriated, and enervated by everything we’d been through. But I was tired. I said, “What men need is to grow up.”
27
Capri is an island, a big, gorgeous, rocky chunk of dirt and limestone that appears to have broken off Italy’s southeast coast and lodged in the Tyrrhenian Sea. Sun-drenched and ancient, the island is an enclave for the young, the strange, the beautiful, the rich—heirs and heiresses to fortunes built wholly by their ambitious forebears and managed by teams of accountants and advisers. The beneficiaries dressed themselves in linen and silk and sat beneath striped awnings talking about polo, and travel, and how hard it was to find good help these days. But in that winter of 1924–25, it was an artists’ haven, too—and I was intent on becoming an artist.
My incision was well healed, and the discomfort I’d suffered those weeks following the surgery had diminished enough for us to carry on as usual. While Scott went out, paying calls to writers like his old hero (and mine) Compton Mackenzie, I took Esther Murphy’s advice to
look up a woman named Natalie Barney and, through her, get acquainted with the artists’ community here. Esther hadn’t written much about Natalie, only saying, Just meet her. She knows everyone.
We met up at an outdoor café near the marina. Crying gulls skimmed overhead as a dark-eyed young woman seated us. She kept glancing shyly at Natalie but said nothing at all.
“So, Zelda Fitzgerald,” Natalie said when we sat down, “the prettiest half of literature’s Golden Couple. I’m glad to finally meet you.”
She was handsome, tall and thin and dressed in a smartly tailored white shirt above a long split skirt of blue linen. Her lack of makeup surprised me—not that she needed it. The soft lines near her eyes and the glow of her skin gave plenty of character to a face that looked proud of its forty-plus years.
I said, “The feeling’s mutual, I promise, but the truth is, I don’t really know anything about who you are or what you do. Esther insisted I find you here is all.”
“Well, when I’m not here amusing myself and seeing friends, I write poetry and plays and host a salon in the Latin Quarter in Paris.”
“A salon?”
“You don’t know salons? A ritual gathering place, a standing date, an open house for any and all artists, writers, thinkers. Do you know T. S. Eliot? Mina Loy, Ezra Pound?”
“Some of the names ring a bell,” I lied; only Eliot’s did, and only because Scott had insisted I read Eliot’s strange “Prufrock” when we were en route to Rome. “You have all these people coming and going in your house all the time?”
She laughed. “It sometimes feels that way, but no, officially it’s only on Saturday evenings. You’ll have to come if you ever get to Paris.”
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