Beautiful Fools

by R. Clifton Spargo

  But she jerked away, her torso unbending as she tilted to the side, rolling from him like an ocean buoy toppled by the rise of a wave.

  “Don’t,” she said. “I want an answer. Tell me where you were, why you left me alone while someone was trying to break into my room.”

  He hadn’t been gone long, he assured her, realizing he would have to play the bluff all the way through. “I stopped to check on you not an hour ago, Zelda. I cracked the door, you were sound asleep, perfectly safe the entire time. I was never more than a few minutes away.”

  She was almost ready to believe him, he could see it in her eyes.

  “It was only the cannon, which sounds, well, it sounds like a huge gun, the crash and echo. I’m sure it startled you and then you heard the knocking in your dream.”

  “But it was so real.”

  He wrapped his arm around her, pulling her close, maybe too close, because she abruptly jerked free, head cocked to the side.

  “You were with him just now, weren’t you? Or did he visit last night while I rested?”

  Now it comes, Scott thought.

  “He’s here in this city, maybe at this very hotel. I knew it, you arranged it all.”

  He wouldn’t listen to any more of her nonsense.

  “I want you to take me downstairs. I’ll bet he’s down there waiting for you.”

  Did she know how unreasonable she sounded? She was just saying whatever came to mind, with no thought as to whether she believed it or not.

  “Prove to me he’s not here,” she said, throwing back the covers. “Take me downstairs.” She stood before him without a stitch of clothing on, without so much as a pang of modesty. Despite all her sufferings this past decade, despite the troubles inflicted on face and skin by her broken, patched, and several times refurbished mind, her body was as shapely as ever, her breasts fecund, muscles toned and vital, everything about her charged with sex.

  All right, he said, suffering stabs of lust for her but banishing them. “Whatever you want, that’s what we’ll do.” He was happy enough to go downstairs. First, though, she had to eat a few bites of the dinner he’d gone to so much trouble to fetch for her.

  “Why didn’t you just wake me in an hour like we planned?” she asked, walking onto the shallow balcony where she might be observed by almost anyone, letting the cool night air into the room, then turning and sauntering toward him, her nipples newly alert. “It’s Saturday night, maybe our only Saturday night in Cuba, and now I’ve slept so long and it’s so late.”

  “But Zelda, you know it’s early yet for Havana.”

  Rounding the corner of the bed still stark naked, then folding her toes over his leather shoes, she stood like that for several seconds, her body gently radiant, each of her movements supple and trained. On her left leg she executed a half-pirouette, with the right held out from her as she fell back into a sitting position on the bed, bouncing once before coming to rest, her legs opened and her pelvis arched as she folded the right leg into her body.

  “Okay,” she said, in a voice airy with mischief, “you may feed me.”

  All at once she had let go of anger.

  “Zelda, you can’t eat like that.”

  “Why not? Nothing you haven’t seen before.”

  “Aren’t you cold?” he said, laughing, already giving in.

  He unwrapped the plate, realizing only then that he had failed to bring any damned utensils. How could he forget such a simple thing?

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter,” she said. So Scott picked up the leg of chicken and lowered it to her lips, instructing her to take a bite. Zelda laughed like a spoiled child and said, “All right, daddykins,” sinking her teeth into the chicken but then having trouble tearing it, saying with mouth half full, “Schotth, you hath to hold it shtill,” as he pulled the leg back until the meat tore free. He opened a ginger ale, held it to her lips, and tilted it until she raised her index finger, his cue to lower the bottle as a trickle of gold liquid dribbled from the corner of her mouth. She smiled at him, and again he held the chicken to her mouth so she might take another bite, and she was like a wonderful, stupendously naked, and sexy child, but also his own thirty-eight-year-old wife with a long history of reinventing herself, again preparing to become brand new, someone trusting and ready to hope. She laughed that exultant, devilish laughter of hers, so different from the laugh she put on in public when trying to imitate the happiness of other people—no, this laugh was truly her own, the kind that couldn’t be faked. It came up dark, eager, and destructive from within her. Here was the Zelda no one else knew, his reckless companion of the bedroom, the eternally youthful spirit she revealed only for him. Holding her palm out, she waved the chicken away, turning her head to the right and left as she struck herself between the breasts, pointing at the bottle and rolling her hand toward her chin, still laughing as Scott raised it to her lips and she touched the drink to steady it, inhaling the liquid until she could free the chunk of chicken lodged in her throat. When she finally stopped laughing, she could breathe again.

  “I was choking,” she gasped.

  “I saw,” he said. “That’s what you get for eating in the nude.”

  “Well, I’ve eaten all I’m going to eat. I’m simply not that hungry and I do so wish to see Havana at night. I’m much happier now that I know something awful hasn’t happened to you and you were checking on me the entire time, now that you’ve stood before me like my very own valet while I sat naked on the bed eating my dinner, my own dear Dodo taking care of me.”

  God, how he hated that nickname. He tried to remember when she’d come up with it. Probably after her first collapse, maybe early fall of 1930 when she was writing letters to him from Prangins, flooding them with affectionate, imploring epithets, Dearest One, D.O., next Deo and Dearest D.O., next Dudu and Doo-do, giving rein to her imagination as revenge against reality, letting it take on the properties of an indulged child. Sometimes she would use pet names in the bedroom, while kissing him below the waist or while he was preparing to put himself into her, and if his penis went suddenly soft, she would remark, “Don’t you want me?” or “Did you have too much to drink?,” never surmising that her words were to blame.

  Within minutes she was dressed and ready to go, wearing a lavender cloche above a pale-ivory silk dress with short sleeves showing off her still lovely, if slightly too muscular, arms. Whenever healthy, Zelda put on muscle. The nap had been good for her. The glow had come back into her face, her skin like the surface of calmed seawaters, buoyant, lush, reflective.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” he said, stooping as he opened the door to pick up and pocket the note left by Matéo. “It was supposed to go under my door. It’s from the concierge, a question I posed about their dining hours.”

  On the stairs it occurred to him that even now his new friends might be waiting for them in the lobby. Sure enough, as Zelda and he cleared the small crowd of guests waiting at the base of the stairs, he spotted the Habanero and his girl Yonaidys seated on the gold sofas, deep in conversation with two new gentlemen.

  “Let’s make our way across the Plaza de Armas down to the seaside promenade,” he said.

  “Do you know where you’re going? Did you ask the concierge for recommendations?”

  “There’s a place called Sloppy Joe’s where all the Americans go,” he said, improvising, having no idea where it was, planning to ask an American on the street how to get there, calculating his chances of slipping Zelda out the door before his Cuban friends saw them. “I inquired earlier, we’ll be fine, we’ll stay within shouting distance of—”

  “Please ask the concierge,” Zelda said, rotating toward the lobby, then wheeling around in the next instant. “Scott, why is that woman waving at you?”

  When he looked up, he saw that Yonaidys was indeed waving at him; there was no one else in the vicinity.

  “Oh, yes, well, I had a pleasant chat with her companion while I sat in the lobby waiting
for you to wake up.”

  “Do you want to join them?”

  “Let’s go for a walk before it gets too late. You slept so much today. We’ve hardly had a minute to ourselves.”

  “Scott, aren’t you being rude?” Zelda asked, but she allowed herself to be led out the door as he waved at Yonaidys. “What’s your opinion of them? The man is certainly handsome, if somewhat swarthy in complexion. What does he do?”

  “He was educated at Columbia University; he’s quite Americanized, an investor of some sort.”

  The foot traffic on the Calle Obispo had thinned at this late hour, music from an invisible jukebox sounding somewhere up the road, tinny and desolate. An old Model T drove directly toward them on the narrow cobblestone street, as Scott hoisted Zelda by the waist onto a ridiculously narrow sidewalk. Two taxis straddled corner curbs on opposite sides of the street, and the driver of a green-colored Plymouth parked beneath an American flag hailed them. On the Plaza de Armas they strolled inside the columns of the City Hall’s magnificent arcade, which stretched the length of the square, the shadows here in the tunneled recesses spooking Zelda so that she touched his chin and asked again, “Do you know where you’re going?” A lonely horse-drawn carriage, an empty two-seater with a driver up front, crossed the plaza where those walking at this hour did so mostly in pairs. Splendid elms highlighted by electric street lamps cast silhouettes along the walkways. Beneath the bronze statue of a Cuban patriot and several towering royal palms, Scott saluted and tipped a bongo player and guitarist for playing an American jazz tune he vaguely recognized. On the harbor side of the square, he found the Templete, explaining to his wife that the silk-cotton tree beside it had been grafted from a ceiba tree beneath which the first Mass in Cuba had been celebrated.

  “Where did you learn all this?” she asked.

  “You were asleep a long while,” he said. “The Cuban gentleman in the lobby recited endless stories about the Old City for me. I’ve taken copious notes in my journal. Follow me, I must show you the fort to the north of the plaza.”

  They reached an ancient wall of gray coral from behind which rose a Moorish fort with a silolike watchtower, and Scott told her how the famed explorer Hernando de Soto built this fortress, the most secure in all of sixteenth-century Spanish America, in order to make sure his wife Isabel was safe while he set out for Florida to conquer the North American continent.

  “For more than four years she waited for him, the New World’s very own Penelope,” he said.

  “I know how this ends,” Zelda muttered under her breath.

  “Each morning contemplating the sea for hours, searching for clues to his fate.”

  “Oh, Scott,” she said, interrupting him, “please.”

  But he found the tale irresistible. He couldn’t keep himself from reporting how de Soto surveyed North America for years, the first European to explore the continent as far west as modernday Texas, before succumbing to fever on a stray bank of the Mississippi River.

  “No doubt she pined for him the entire time,” Zelda said, and only then did Scott regret telling the story. He suggested they walk on.

  The city’s magnificent promenade curved along the harbor, up and about the face of the northern coast where Gulf waves splaying themselves against a ragged shoreline of coral boulders cast a pleasant mist over the pedestrians. The number of people following the seawall at this hour of the night was astonishing, and Scott noticed many foreigners among them. All the same he instructed Zelda to stick close to his side.

  “Is it not safe?” she asked. “What did the concierge say about this promenade at night? Should we get a cab? Let’s either take our time and enjoy the walk or, if it’s not safe enough to be out walking, let’s hail a cab.”

  “It’s perfectly safe,” he said, scanning the street for criminal elements, because whenever she fretted about her safety, he started to believe the worst really might happen.

  4

  THE WINDS, STRONGER BY THE MINUTE, BLEW OUT ONTO THE GULF. Several times Zelda reached up to secure the lavender cloche atop her head, its floral bow tossed frantically by the gusts. Scott walked to her left, near the curb, her gloved hand resting on the cuff of his coat, their conversation aimless yet stilted. Despite the constant flow of correspondence between them these past few years, he existed now on the perimeter of her everyday life, and sometimes he wondered whether he had the right to be admitted to the inner workings of her mind.

  “Tell me again,” he said, “about the painting lessons in Florida, the time with Dr. Carroll.”

  Two months ago while in Sarasota under the hospital’s care, she’d taken a life drawing class at the Ringling School of Art, another in costume design.

  “Dr. Carroll thought it odd that I could be such an accomplished painter, his words not mine,” she said, “someone who has held exhibitions, sold paintings, and been reviewed in the New York Times, without the benefit of any real training.”

  “Some people are born with natural talent.”

  “That’s what Dr. Carroll said, but I know better. So many of my talents went untrained for so long. My natural creativity is highly undisciplined.”

  It was an unmistakable reference to her thwarted career as a dancer, for which she’d started too late, for which in an effort to compensate for her belatedness she’d trained too fast and frantically. Scott didn’t wish to take up the topic.

  “Some of the women from the Highland must have strolled here early evenings in January when they visited,” she said, alluding to the trip for which this vacation was a substitute.

  “Do you wish you’d come with them,” he said, “instead of coming with me?”

  “Scott, don’t ask that. You know I’d rather be with you than with anyone.”

  She stopped to rest against the seawall, leaning onto its wide-girthed bulk and into a purpling sky, the winds warm off the ocean, the moon and the city lights sparkling along the water far out into the straits where everything disappeared into black. She listened to the break of the waves, slapping on coastal rocks, then receding in a gentle wash.

  “I feel sorry for the other women sometimes,” she said. “They must do everything for themselves, must make sense of small things such as a walk on a promenade entirely on their own. I always have you to help me sift through my thoughts and memories.”

  She rarely spoke of her fellow patients as individuals. She spoke of exercises executed in groups, of her superiority to the women in sporting activities, of their prevailing opinions on films and books, but she cited none of them singularly as you might speak of a friend. Whenever he imagined her participating in some activity, she was stolid and alone. Always she had preferred men to women, and on the occasions when she broke from this basic pattern, her affections turned to crushes, passionate in their intensity. Madame Egorova, her former ballet instructor, was only the most illustrative, catastrophic example. Zelda’s obsessive desire to please her had led to the ascetic diet, the unceasing practices, and the insomnia that precipitated her first breakdown.

  “You think that’s petty of me,” Zelda asked.

  “What?”

  “You think it petty, or perhaps egoistical, of me.”

  “They’re hardly the same thing.”

  “Do you think it egoistical of me to see myself as better than the other patients?”

  “I didn’t take you to be saying that at all.”

  It was odd how easily they fell into familiarity, and yet there was so much that went unsaid, so much of everyday worry they no longer shared. She asked about Hollywood, when his contract was up for renewal, when he would be assigned to a new film, and he said to himself, She’s like a bloodhound, always on the scent of my troubles. He avoided any mention of his failure to be renewed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, promising there was no need to worry, work would soon come his way, downplaying the drama of his circumstances because, after all, there was nothing she could do to help and her worries only compounded his own. There was no one in whom he
might more naturally have confided the cumulative injustice of this past year’s string of professional heartbreaks, and yet he couldn’t risk it for fear of damaging her fragile psyche. Also, he had entrusted that privilege to another woman. Sheilah, in the role of confidante and booster, was entitled to hear his grievances, his increasingly humbler hopes. As someone who trafficked in the industry’s secrets, sharing them with the public in her syndicated “Hollywood Today” column, she could offer consolations based on practical knowledge of his trade. And he was sometimes able to return the favor, repaying her with writerly advice, helping her work out an idea for a column.

  “Are you thinking of her?”

  “Excuse me,” he said, stumbling, trying to remember where he’d left off. “Weren’t we talking about Dr. Carroll?”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “Also about the women at the hospital, whether you were petty?”

  “Well, I don’t care to repeat myself just now.”

  “If you were trying to bring up our daughter—”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “I wouldn’t mind speaking about our need to form a united front in conveying to Scottie the seriousness of her situation. How she must make her way in the world after Vassar, without resources to fall back on. How she must prepare to live on her own and for herself, realistically, beginning now while there’s time.”

  “So she doesn’t end up a young fool without a plan, much like her mother?”

  “Or her father,” he said equably.

  “Scott, you must remember she’s only a child, seventeen.”

  “She doesn’t have much of a safety net.”