Beautiful Fools

by R. Clifton Spargo

  Her reverie was interrupted when a young boy bawled at Scott in Spanish, one hand on the rail separating the restaurant from the street, the other on a wooden box camera that he aimed at them, saying, “¿Les gustaría que les tome una fotografía?” Scott put his arm around her shoulder, but she pulled away on instinct, not from Scott, but from the boy and the camera.

  “Please,” she said, “I’m tired and I’ll dislike the picture intensely and I don’t want you to waste our money. Maybe after I’ve been in the sun for three days and we’ve slept twelve hours each night. I do wish to be terribly lazy, the two of us sleeping off our exhaustion until we’re young and beautiful again; maybe then we can take a picture. Besides, I’m getting nervous that they’ll give our hotel rooms away.”

  “Oh, for crying out loud,” Scott barked, waving off the boy, who took one step backward, still aiming the camera at them, then propping it on a three-legged wood stand and burying his head in the hood attached to it and before they could say anything else depressing the shutter, waiting several seconds, then pulling the box from the case, announcing, “Handsome Americans, es una buena fotografía, very best photograph, you buy from me.” Zelda started to protest, “We asked you not to take our picture, please go,” flipping her hand up and away from her, but Scott put his palm on her knee and said he would take care of everything.

  The boy, lapsing into Spanish and raising his voice, appealed to el Señor or some godly notion of justicia, wishing to make it clear that he knew only a few phrases in English and any misunderstanding about the photograph must be laid at the feet of the foreigners to whom he’d offered his services. Scott slid his chair back, rose, then strode off the patio, disappearing behind a pillar near the entrance so as to negotiate with the boy on the street, but she could hear the boy naming his price as Scott approached, “Pay me, señor, por favor.”

  Already she saw what Scott would do and she was opposed to it. “Scott,” she called after him, “don’t let the boy trick you into buying that photograph. We didn’t ask for it, I don’t want it, I don’t want to see it.” Angry with the young boy, she didn’t believe it had been a mistake at all. For several seconds she even considered that somebody might have sent him to spy on her. What right did the boy have to come and take their picture without permission, intruding on her privacy, ruining what until then had been a happy start to the holiday? If Scott gave in to this extortion, she wouldn’t soon forgive him.

  Sure enough, he returned to the table minutes later, holding the photograph by its corner, saying, “It’s really not half bad, if you—”

  “Please, don’t. I told you I didn’t want my picture taken, that boy had no right to take it, and you had no business rewarding him for his treachery.”

  “We’ll throw it away then,” he said. “First, though, we must rush down the street to the front desk to find out if there’s still room at the inn.”

  Scott held out his hand to guide her from the restaurant, crisis averted just like that, and for the first time in years she believed he might set things right in her world. Only as they entered the Ambos Mundos, the porter holding the door for them, did she remember to ask about the photograph.

  “What have you done with it?”

  Why, he’d left it on the table as she’d asked, so they might pretend it had never been taken.

  “But it was taken, Scott.”

  And he’d paid for it, then discarded it.

  “You can’t erase the past by pretending it didn’t happen. We have to go back.”

  “What about securing the room you’re so worried about?”

  She released his arm and stood clear of him, the porter pretending not to listen to their mild squabble. Scott stiffened in surprise, eyeing her, his mouth contorted in a grimace.

  “First things first,” she said. “It can’t be helped.”

  By the time she reached the table at the restaurant, the tip was still there, but no photograph.

  Oh, they have found us already, she said to herself.

  “The boy must have come back for it,” she said to Scott, who now caught up with her, panting heavily.

  “I’m sure there’s another explanation. Stay here, let me find out.”

  Deep inside the restaurant, he leaned forward onto the bar as he spoke to the owner, hands gesticulating toward their table. Shortly thereafter he opened his jacket and accepted an item from the man, tucking it into an inner pocket.

  “Problem solved,” he said, his face broadening into a smile as he came jaunting toward her. “A man saw we’d left the photo and gave it to the bartender, predicting we’d return for it.”

  “That makes no sense. Why didn’t he run after us?”

  Scott, pulling the flap of the jacket away from him, reached inside to extract the photograph.

  “I said I didn’t want to see it,” she cried. “It’s just odd that he didn’t run after us.”

  “I don’t pretend,” he said coolly, “to understand the etiquette of Cubans.”

  “I wonder if they’ll intuit our arrival right away,” she said under her breath as they crossed the lobby, scouting for familiar faces. How many days until they were tracked down? There was no place they could run where they wouldn’t eventually be found.

  Scott handed a ticket to the bellhop, requesting their luggage before asking her to repeat what she’d said. All she wanted to talk about, though, was whether there would still be rooms available. Just two couples ahead of them in the check-in line. She shuffled her feet in place, and when at last it was Scott’s turn, the clerk informed him that the hotel did have rooms, exactly two of which were side-by-side: at the front of the hotel, overlooking Calle Obispo, very nice rooms. He named a price, which Scott, failing to barter, paid in full. She was sure he spent more on the rooms than they could afford, but she was relieved nonetheless.

  What can you remember of Cuba? She put herself through the exercise after Scott had deposited her in her room and gone next door to his. In the country but a few hours, and already she was committing roadside palms to memory, retracing the route from the airport, the highway plunging in and out of fields and trees, the Caribbean sky reappearing in pools of blue by which she kept her bearings. Also the clean washed marble of the pillared porticoes, the gold and rose-colored estates, their windows and doorways shadowed in layers of carbon and opal that refused insight into interiors. It didn’t take much to imagine what was behind those doors, all that plantation history, the backyard slavery and obscured suffering.

  “What are you thinking, Zelda?” Scott asked, standing in the doorway of her room.

  “Scott, please knock.” Her words sounded harsher than she meant them to be.

  “I only came to see if there was anything else you needed.”

  “It’s just you scared me.”

  “Zelda, am I that strange to you after all these months?” He was regretful, oddly formal, a man who had taken his secrets and hidden them away in a vault so as to pretend there was nothing to hide. You are not mine anymore, she said to herself. Still, she managed to lift her head, reminding herself to be grateful for the trip, folding her mouth into the image of some happier time, say, a photo taken years ago in Cannes on their first visit.

  Scott gravitated to the curtained windows and pulled back the heavy folds of fabric so that arrows of light shot into the room, elongating fuselike across the carpet.

  “Scott, please!”

  He was about to parry with awful words, but at that moment the bellhop entered with their luggage.

  “Leave the large trunk here, please, also those two valises,” Scott commanded, handing American dollars to the bellhop.

  When the bellhop left, Scott turned to her. “That was unnecessary.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “How, then?”

  “I only meant,” but she stopped herself, not sure she could make him understand her desire to memorize the lovely neoclassical houses along the Prado or the vistas on the Plaza de Arm
as, her effort to retain this vacation piece by piece. Call it intuition, call it clairvoyance, but something was telling her, in spite of her hopes to the contrary, that her imminent liberation from the Highland was far from guaranteed, that there might not be many more of these trips to be counted on. Each holiday she and Scott took was costly, in all senses of the word: they were down to two per year, and some ended catastrophically, dissolving in bitter quarrels. On returning to Asheville she would try to figure how and where things had gone awry, blaming her own judgment, discovering flaws in Scott’s character further and further back into their marriage, sometimes tracing the damage and misunderstanding to the very beginning, her memory chewing up the scraps of joy little by little, year by year. With so many places lost already, she needed Havana to last. But if she said any of that, he might believe it a sign that she was going crazy again, when nothing could be further from the truth. So she improvised. “Scott, I’m sorry. The light, it’s a fuse, if it so much as touches—”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you had a headache?”

  He walked over to the trunk, which had been set on a stand near the dresser. What she needed right now was to be alone, the wish for privacy so intense she could hear it shrieking inside her. But better to let Scott feel useful, believing again in his own kindness.

  “See if you can’t find that yellow silk nightgown you gave me that I love so much. I’m almost certain I packed it.”

  His search of the trunk was inefficient, impatient, confused, as he turned up dresses, undergarments, and shoes, sighed, then dug into recesses of clothes that kept sliding back like dirt into a poorly excavated hole. She would have found the gown by now, without the mess. What’s more, she would need to repack the entire trunk after waking from her siesta. At last he extracted the gown, rubbing its fine silk between his fingers, perhaps remembering it on her body, remembering the reams of expensive clothing he’d bought for her over the years.

  She walked across the brightly polished wood floor, placing a hand on his shoulder.

  “You found it, thank you. You were always so devoted whenever—”

  “Was I?” he asked. Honestly, he couldn’t remember most days what he used to be like.

  “Can’t you remember how you were when we first married?” she asked him.

  Assured that her headache would dissipate once she lay down, he left her to herself, promising to call in time for dinner. A single day in his presence, and already she could feel herself taking on his anxieties and displeasures. She was surprised by how much she relaxed once the man she loved was no longer in the room. Within minutes she lay undressed and supine, spent from the effort of stripping herself, the nightgown on the bed seeming far away, too much effort to reach for it.

  3

  THE LOBBY OF THE HOTEL AMBOS MUNDOS WRAPPED ITSELF AROUND the bar, in front of which sat dark rattan couches with gold cushions for well-to-do Cubans and foreigners, wood tables and chairs off to the side for those opting to sit less conspicuously. The ceiling fans whirred quietly in the heat. A half dozen towering wood-shuttered windows on the north wall opened onto the persistent buzz of Calle Obispo. Seated at the bar, early in the evening, counting drinks, Scott alternated the hard stuff with Coca-Colas. Their second day in Havana had been passed mostly in and around the hotel, he and Zelda strolling down to the harbor once in the afternoon. Just now Zelda was again catching up on sleep, and he suspected he ought to be doing the same. Twice he had asked the bartender to save his stool so that he might run upstairs and check on her, but she hadn’t responded to his knocking on her door either time. Returning to the lobby, he reclaimed his seat only to be approached by a handsome Cuban he’d noticed earlier sitting with a cocoa-skinned girl on a sofa beneath one of the windows, its dark wood shutters thrown back.

  “My friend, you are American,” the Cuban said in impeccable English, his Latin accent softly infecting his n’s, rolling his vowels.

  Often distrustful when inebriated, Scott could be just as suspicious en route. But he took an immediate liking to this Cuban who had been educated at Columbia University in the late 1920s. On learning that Scott hailed from Princeton, Señor Matéo Cardoña insisted on buying him a drink and fondly toasting the United States. Next he led him across the lobby to join the long-legged girl who sat alone on the gold sofa, distracting herself by tilting her head to listen with apparent rapture to a nearby piano. Scott installed himself in a chair to the left of the sofa, the piano at his back yielding amicable jazz as he peered over the girl’s bare shoulder at the streetcars, automobiles, and horse-drawn carriages passing with regularity.

  He paced his drinking by his companion, persuading himself that he was only showing respect for the customs of Havana. So far the strategy was working: the alcohol hadn’t gone to his head. Maybe it was the humidity of the Caribbean night. For he was sweating beneath the collar of the blue pinstriped Arrow shirt he wore under a Scottish tweed sport coat, his new acquaintance remarking on his stylish wardrobe, from the jacket to the shoes to the hat, worrying nevertheless that Scott must be warm in such attire. He is flattering me, Scott thought, conscious of the decade-old tweed of the sport coat, slightly worn at the elbows. He now and then wiped his brow with a paisley silk handkerchief, the thought of removing the jacket increasing his self-consciousness about how much he was sweating, which of course made him sweat all the more. But he didn’t wish to succumb to a bout of those chills that often emanated from deep within his body. Even on the warmest of days they plagued him, only Sheilah knew how badly, harbingers (so he feared) of the final onslaught of tuberculosis that would draw him under. For months now, through a California winter as mild and dry as anyone could remember, he had felt a tickling in his chest, his breathing often difficult, and he couldn’t keep warm except when burrowed inside his cottage, wrapped in an extra layer of clothing, a blanket over his shoulders, a stiff drink in hand.

  Several times the Habanero raised his glass to “nuevas amistades,” Scott grateful for these easy hours in a foreign place, relishing the elation of unearned intimacy that was alcohol’s greatest gift. He made the choice to trust it for as long as it should last, wishing he could know how long that might be, but of course that was the one thing you couldn’t know. Matéo asked what Scott did, translating the answer for the girl, his voice full of respect when he used the term un escritor and next asked for Scott’s surname. He rocked back in his chair, tilting his jaw, hesitating as he chose his words, before inquiring if by chance the American author before him bore any relation to the writer who had invented the flapper, whose Saturday Evening Post stories were once read by all of New York, whose novels Matéo believed he might also have read. Scott didn’t ask him to name titles.

  Matéo prodded Scott to help him remember what it was like to stroll beneath the skyscrapers of New York City, or take the ferry from Manhattan to Brooklyn, or comb the beaches of Rockaway, or walk into one of those many speakeasies filled to capacity with people whose “good time” was sought in relaxed defiance of prohibition. Matéo hadn’t visited New York since the end of 1930, and Scott’s own returns to the city over the past decade had been infrequent, chaotic, or worse, so the two men toured the city together in their minds, revisiting nights passed at the Cotton Club or at 21, deciding they must surely have become drunk together, unknowingly, in the same Manhattan joint, on the very same night. It was like the crush of first love, the thrill Scott once felt on being introduced to his classmates Bunny Wilson and John Peale Bishop on the Princeton lawn, squandering time with spendthrift eagerness in lofty conversations about novels, poetry, Broadway. It was like the charge of first eyeing a young Zelda at a military ball in Montgomery, intuiting what she would someday mean to him.

  His thoughts turned to Ernest, who might be here in this city, in this very hotel, ready to walk through the door in the next few minutes. Weeks ago Scott had left word with his editor Maxwell Perkins, asking where Ernest stayed when in Havana, receiving a wire the same afternoon with the name a
nd address of the Ambos Mundos. The last time he’d seen Ernest? At a Hollywood screening of a film about the Spanish Civil War that Ernest had narrated, Scott attending the event in the company of the playwright Lillian Hellman. Taking Ernest aside, he offered hasty congratulations as reporters clamored for words from the icon who was Hemingway. As Ernest walked into the throng of photographers and journalists, putting himself at the beck and call of those for whom his propaganda was intended, he yelled out, “You look well, Scott, better than I expected.”

  When Max had cabled Scott, he mentioned that Ernest might be in residence in Havana during the spring, even asked whether he should relay a message, advising the first of his prized writers, “You and Ernest have suffered different miseries these last few years, Scott, but you should stay in touch. The only thing I can offer either of you is the recommendation to guard your friendship!”—the gesture, though well-intended, as unrealistic as it was sentimental. Max knew full well the difficulties between the two writers. Scott sent a wire in return, judicious in its understatement:

  DEAR MAX THANKS FOR OFFER TO PUT ME IN TOUCH WITH EH BUT HAVE TO ANSWER PROBABLY NOT STOP TOUCHED BY NOTION BUT MOST LIKELY ZELDA AND I WONT HAVE TIME STOP SHE WILL HAVE AN ITINERARY REPLETE WITH BEACHES AND HORSEBACKRIDING AND PHYSICAL ENDURANCE AND TRIP IS ALL FOR HER STOP SO IT MUST REMAIN STOP EVER FONDLY SCOTT

  Scott could expect Max to sniff out the allusion to Zelda’s old animosity to Ernest, reason enough in itself not to make contact. Still, the irony wasn’t lost on Scott that if he truly wished to avoid Hemingway he might have visited any Havana hotel other than the one in which his former friend regularly stayed.

  “Our memories of New York do not bring you pleasure,” Matéo said, breaking Scott’s train of thought.

  “Memories often do not,” Scott said.