At least his English was good.
After the exam, he administered some morphine and pronounced, “Until we get in there and see it, we can’t know for certain whether it’s the ovary, the uterus, the colon, or the appendix. We’ll schedule a surgery and see if we can excise the thing that’s troubling you. It may not be possible, you understand.”
I understood all too well.
Scott was worried that the Antibes hospital was too far behind the times and insisted I have the operation at the American Hospital in Paris. I let him worry to his heart’s content, let him take over the planning, let him step back into his role as my protector, all the while secretly pleased to have wrested his attention from Hemingway. Fate was intervening to give me back my husband, at least for a little while. Before we left for Paris, I told Sara, “If things get out of hand again, I guess I can always have my tonsils out.”
The Paris doctors removed some scar tissue and my appendix and pronounced me cured, which I was willing to believe without reservation. I hardly cared that my lower belly was now and would forever be a map of scars; I was luxuriating in Scott’s attentive presence at my bedside throughout visiting hours every day. He read to me, we played cards, we wrote letters, we talked …
Apparently, though, it was the pain medication that made me so dreamy and content, because when my last day approached and I said I thought we should stay in Paris and send for Scottie, Scott said, “Stay? God, no. I’ve just finished writing a full evaluation of Ernest’s manuscript. There are some things he really has to address before we let Max have a look at it.”
Ernest. Again.
I said, “Can he not just leave you be? Have you heard what Bob McAlmon’s been saying about you two?”
“McAlmon’s still seething over having lost Ernest to Boni and Liveright—who are now very sorry to have lost him to Scribner’s.”
The doctor came in then, and Scott said, “I’d like to take her back to Antibes. Don’t you agree that it would be better for her to avoid the city—the germs and filth and such—when she’s in this condition?”
“Quite right,” the doctor said. “I could do with a summer at the coast myself.”
And so to the Riviera we went, where Scott could return to the thick of the drama, the place in which he felt most at home. Surely this, not Hemingway, was what was truly drawing him back.
* * *
Late one night in July, Scott woke me by switching on the bedside light and shaking my shoulder.
“What? What’s the matter?” I said, immediately awake and certain that someone must have died—until I saw Scott’s face.
He looked giddy. “What do you get when you mix three different alcoholics together?”
Hemingway and the others had gone off to Pamplona a week earlier. Citing my delicate post-surgery condition, I’d refused to go, which made it easy for Scott to pretend that he would have gone, if not for me. The fact was, he had no stomach for the bullfights or for anything gritty or brutal beyond its presence in photographs or inside the pages of a book. He’d taken up, then, with Charlie MacArthur and playboy Ben Finney.
Scott and his new friends played all sorts of pranks on hapless waiters and musicians. Once, they persuaded a pair of waiters to come out for a ride with them, then drove to a cliff and acted as if they intended to kill the young men. They claimed to have been so convincing that one of the fellows wet himself before they confessed the joke, and then they took the pair out for a steak dinner and fine bourbon to make up for the trouble they’d caused.
Now I wanted to punch Scott. “I was sleeping. That’s what people do this time of night. Shut that light off.”
“Don’t be such a poor sport. Come on, tell me, what do you get when you mix three alcoholics?” He reeked of bourbon, and cigar smoke.
“Don’t you mean alcohols?”
“No—alcoholics. I am a wordsmith, you know. I always, always choose le mot juste.”
“If I answer, will you promise to bathe before you come to bed?”
“Sorry, madam, you’ve taken too long. You get Love’s Betrayal, or A Simple Story of Incest.” He leaped off the bed and began loosening his belt. “I’ve just finished the screenplay, and we’re shooting it over at Grace Moore’s villa, starting tomorrow.”
“Tell me I didn’t hear you right. Y’all are making a movie about incest?”
“Don’t scowl like that, it puts the most unattractive lines across your forehead.” He dropped back onto the bed still half-dressed and leaned against his pillow. “Oh, God, is it going to be funny. Grace will play Princess Alluria, the most wicked woman in Europe—”
“I don’t need to know any more. Turn the light off so I can get some sleep.”
“And we’re going to paint all the title cards right on the walls, to save the trouble of cutting them into the film.”
He held his arms out the way a director might when framing a scene. “‘Her tits were perfect halves of peaches, firm and ripe and golden from the sun.’”
“I said I don’t want to hear this. Just keep it to yourself.”
“‘These she displayed at any urging. But her juices she saved for only those she favored most.’”
I got out of bed, grabbed my pillow, and left the room.
* * *
In mid-August, Scott returned from a luncheon at Villa America. “Hadley’s given up.” He said this as if it was Hadley we should blame; the old girl was obviously deficient in some way. “They say they’re getting a divorce. Ernest’s just a mess over it.”
“Is he, now?” I was on the terrace at my easel, trying to perfect the shades of orange in my dancing girl’s dress.
“You don’t sound sympathetic in the least.”
“I have great sympathy—for Hadley. If you see her before I do, tell her I said, ‘Good riddance.’”
The marriage wasn’t over yet, though. Hem being Hem, he would prolong the agony when they got back to Paris, acting the innocent while letting his marriage bleed for months, until he’d tortured Hadley sufficiently for her to finally put the sword between the bull’s shoulder blades herself.
* * *
Scribner published The Sun Also Rises in October of that year, 1926. Its sales were respectable but not astonishing, and its reviews generally good but not an avalanche of praise. All of this sat well with Scott—far better than the performance of Hemingway’s next book would. For now, in his mind he was still the more prominent, more experienced, more successful of the two.
Though the Riviera season had ended, we stayed on through the fall. Scott’s new friends and admirers had such a hold on him that he attended every party, frequented every casino and bar. Too often, he would drink to excess, become argumentative or crass, embarrass me, and embarrass himself. There were fistfights. There was an arrest. There were mornings I woke to find him asleep at the kitchen table, the servants going about their business around him and averting their eyes from mine. I complained to him, he apologized to me, and we both acted as if There, that ought to fix it. Until the next time.
If I refused to accompany him in the evenings—and I did, often, claiming illness twice as many times as was true—he would stay out all night, and then, when he finally showed up at home, he’d refuse to say where he’d spent the night. He wanted to punish me for leaving him on his own. Other times he’d say things like “You deserve so much better than a louse like me, Zelda. I don’t mean to mistreat you.… I want us to be like we were. Two of a kind. ‘The Golden Couple.’ Didn’t everyone love us then?”
And because I missed those happier days, too, I forgave him.
There were limits, though. I was in the kitchen one November day, slicing mangoes for Scottie, who was playing hopscotch in the courtyard outside, when Scott appeared looking like death itself.
He was pale, unshaven. His hand shook as he reached for the cupboard door. “We’ve got to leave this country before it ruins me.”
This time I tried, but failed, to summon sympathy for
his misery, and tried, but failed, to be agreeable. “How ’bout we leave this town and go back to Paris.”
“Max has been asking when we’re coming stateside, my parents want us home.… I need to be someplace where I’m not going to be tempted by so many distractions.”
“We’re always leaving a place that we went to because the previous place had too many distractions. Do you even see that?”
“And no more of the hard stuff.” He rubbed his forehead. “Water, from now on. I can do it if we’re back in the States.”
“How do you figure? Prohibition never slowed you down before.”
“I feel bad enough as it is, Zelda; couldn’t you show me a little faith, a little support? I’m trying to turn over a new leaf.”
“There are plenty of leaves in Paris. Come on, Deo; it’d be so much easier to go there than to change continents—you can use that room you rented,” I said, a setup that would benefit me as much as him. “And then while you’re working, just act like you don’t know anybody in town.”
“Renting that room was a mistake. I can’t work in a garret.” Meaning he’d decided that he couldn’t imitate his great good friend Ernest’s habits and still retain his superiority.
“And I don’t want you there hanging around with all those lesbians, that crowd with Esther and Natalie and those bull dykes. We need a fine, new, fresh place, a fresh start. Paris is unwholesome.”
“That’s pretty rich coming from you. And where’d you get that word, bull dyke? I don’t like it, it’s unkind.”
“I don’t know where I heard it. It’s around. Those women who look like men, wearing suits with pants, for God’s sake—”
“I bet it was Hemingway.”
“Right, blame Ernest, everything is Ernest’s fault.” He looked genuinely perplexed when he said, “What do you have against him?”
“He’s rotten inside. I can’t believe you still don’t see—”
“He’s a fine person, he just needs a little guidance. You know, I genuinely hope you get over the colitis and whatever else has made you so bitchy this year. I haven’t been an entirely model husband, but that never used to bother you. You used to have a fine sense of humor.”
I pointed the knife at him. “If I hear you use the word fine one more time, I’ll use this to take out your tongue.”
* * *
We let Lillian and the rest of the staff go, then sailed on the Conte Biancamano in December. To leave Europe was both a relief and a disappointment. The relief lay in knowing that Scott would be separated from his playmates. For me, though, I was once again being torn from the people and places that provided me with a sense of balance. An evening at Natalie Barney’s salon, a day wandering the galleries of Saint-Germain, another day at the Louvre, an ad-libbed dance solo performed with a cooperative orchestra’s accompaniment—all these had given me purpose or brought me pleasure. We weren’t sure, yet, where we’d settle, but it would be someplace remote, and then what would I do with my time?
On our first evening aboard ship, I was at the rail watching the sun dissolve into the sea and wondering why I couldn’t have one of those marriages where my husband was content to lead his own life—if not in a respectable manner then at least a separate one—and let me lead mine. Where I’d once been so central to his life, now I felt like an afterthought. And that was all right; I didn’t need to be central, not anymore. But if he couldn’t make our family the center of his life, then what I needed was to be left in peace. Being left in Paris would be even better. For that, I needed money of my own, more money than anyone in my family could give me if I were willing to ask, which I wasn’t.
“Zelda!”
I turned to see Ludlow Fowler coming toward me. He said, “What a delightful surprise!” I guess I was scowling because he added, “Or maybe I’m the only one who’s delighted?”
I hugged him. “Do I look that bad off?”
“You are as lovely as ever, but plainly not thrilled—even by my presence.”
“No, it is a treat to see you here. Where’s your new bride?”
“Elsie’s in the cabin—hasn’t got her sea legs yet, poor girl. But I’m hoping she’ll be fit for the salon later.” His eyes and his voice were aglow with affection and concern.
“I envy you two, being at the start of everything.… Can you believe it’s only been six years since we were in St. Patrick’s Cathedral together? Feels like it’s been twice as many, and all of them spent swinging a pick into a rock pile.”
Ludlow smiled sympathetically. “I’m sure it’s just a rough stretch of sea—”
“—on a fruitless voyage. Listen, if you want your marriage to be any good, don’t let drinking get you into the same position it’s gotten Scott.”
“Speaking of the devil, I ought to find him and—what?—punch him?”
“If I thought it’d do any good.”
“He loves you, Zelda. I hope you aren’t questioning that.”
“What good is it, though, when all he really wants is to somehow have been you? He was born into the wrong life, and Scottie and me, we have to pay for that mistake.”
“How is she, anyway? I loved the photo you sent, you three in the canoe.”
“She’s well.” Scottie, at five years old and with no recollection of life before France, fully believed what her papa claimed: that we were embarking on our biggest, best, most incredible adventure yet. “Still young enough that she’s mostly oblivious to her parents’ foolishness,” I added with a grateful sigh. “The question is whether we’ll improve in time to save her.”
PART IV
No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.
—George Eliot
38
“Listen to this!” Scott said. “Thirty-five hundred up front … twelve thousand five hundred dollars if the script’s accepted; we’re going to California!”
We’d disembarked the ship a day earlier and were at the Plaza in New York City. Scott had just retrieved the bundle of mail that had been routed to his bank there, a common practice for rootless people like us. Among the letters was the offer he’d just trumpeted, which had come from Douglas Fairbanks at United Artists. He was producing a new film and wanted Scott to write it.
I said, “What about your book? You told Max—”
“I’ve often thought my real genius was for stage and film,” Scott said while putting his coat back on. “It was just a matter of the industry catching up to that eventuality.”
“Where are you going?”
“To cable Fairbanks. And we’ll need train tickets. Oh—would you phone my mother and tell them we’ve had a change of plans? She’ll take it better if she hears it direct from you.”
Scott’s parents had moved to Washington, D.C., and assured us we would love the area. Join us here, his mother had written. We could be such a help to you and Zelda, and Scottie deserves to know her grandparents, don’t you think? It was the best thing for Scott, so of course we’d agreed that, yes, we’d find a quiet place to rent nearby and settle in for a while, live like regular folks.
“So, we’re not going to move to Maryland?”
Scott put his hat on. “Ask Mother to keep Scottie while we’re away. I’m not sure how long it’ll be—a month or two for sure.”
I shook my head. “We’ll just bring her.”
“There’s no time to find a nanny.”
“Then I’ll stay.”
“I need you with me, Zelda, and I need you free. This could be my biggest break, and you know socializing is a huge part of that. Don’t worry, she’ll love being spoiled by her granny,” he said, and then he was out the door.
* * *
What didn’t I love about Hollywood, once we’d finally arrived? It was all so wonderful, at first.
There was the trellis thick with fragrant roses outside the window of our Ambassador Hotel bungalow; the aquamarine parrot calling us to join him beside the brilli
ant aquamarine swimming pool; the heat, the eucalyptus, the palms and poinsettia trees; the surprisingly low-key parties to which I wore a new, smart black suit or green dress or creamy silk blouse with a kaleidoscope skirt. I loved that we were celebrities again and looked forward to the luncheon Douglas Fairbanks was going to hold in our honor. I loved that Scott hadn’t mentioned his great good friend since before we’d gotten off the train.
Scott loved going to his office at United Artists. He loved the idea of himself as a screenwriter, the prospect of the money he could make, the attention of the film-to-be’s star, Constance Talmadge, the sight of the new celebrity estates dotting the hills above town. At the Fairbanks luncheon, I heard him telling a young lady—a guest’s teenage daughter, I assumed—how he loved the way Hollywood was all about invention and reinvention, that a little talent combined with a lot of effort could lead just about anyone to home ownership in those hills.
That teenager turned out to be a starlet, a supposed nuppincomer named Lois Moran. She wasn’t all that pretty. Her face was too round, her nose too sharp, her hair—like mine—too frizzy without serious attention by the likes of an Elizabeth Arden salon. She had something, though; that’s what they say in Hollywood when you don’t look like Mary Pickford or Greta Garbo. She was sweet and smart and had landed a prime role in Stella Dallas, a movie that came at the end of the silent-films era, too bad for her: she had a tiny voice, impossible for the talkies.
At first, it seemed that Scott was doing with Lois what he had so often done for an admiring and aspiring new friend: taking an interest, sharing his expertise, making connections or recommendations. We, or he, would see Lois and her mother at brunch, or for tea, or bump into them at a restaurant and end up spending the evening together. These events were mixed in with a lot of other similar brunches or lunches or teatimes or dinners with some other actor or writer. Lois’s mother was ever present as her chaperone, so I had no qualms about Scott spending time with her. She was not quite eighteen years old.
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