Beautiful Fools

by R. Clifton Spargo

  “We were preparing,” Colonel Silva said, “to send our staff to look for her again.”

  “All taken care of,” he said, entering the room. As he rounded the corner of the short foyer he saw Zelda seated on the bed, his revolver in her palm.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I was working up the nerve to come to your rescue.”

  “Zelda, put the gun down, you don’t know how to handle it.”

  “Well, how hard can it be?” she asked, flipping it in her hand. “What did they want?”

  “It was the hotel management, like I said it would be.”

  “Someone knocked earlier while you were sleeping.”

  He couldn’t decide if she was making this up. “Since we didn’t answer,” he said, “I suppose we can’t know who it was that knocked.”

  “Of course we do,” she said. “It was Maryvonne, and maybe Aurelio too, inquiring about tonight.”

  Again he told her to lay the gun on the bed or hand it to him, barrel to the ground, handle forward.

  “What are you planning?” she said, trying to find her way inside the next round of the quarrel. “Scott, I don’t want you leaving the resort tonight, really I won’t stand for it. It’s not safe, the clairvoyant warned me.”

  “Now you’re just wildly inventing, and, besides, it’s not your decision.”

  He wondered why she had picked the gun up in the first place.

  “Do you know what makes me angry,” she demanded, “the only thing that still makes me angry?”

  She flipped the gun absentmindedly from palm to palm, pointing it once at the ceiling, once in his direction, no idea what she was doing with that thing or whether it was even loaded.

  “There’s still time, lots of time for us,” she continued, “life is long, Zelda, you would tell me, and I’d ask, Are you sure?”

  “You’re your own worst enemy,” he said, trying to make himself stand down, experiencing the rush of memory, always so extravagant and expensive, as it pressed against the present, crowding out possibility with the knowledge of what had been lost, what they could never get back. His true feelings for Zelda were located elsewhere, he told himself, beyond the realm of mutual resentments, in a place where he had once seemed capable and marvelous to her, and she, in turn, the source of his ability. “You depend on niceties,” he said, knowing better than to fight back yet unable to stop himself from doing so. “You depend on elegant vacations and fine clothing to cope with the asylum. You’re used to the frills and bows, all my sweetly bought comforts, I’ve always indulged you, but do you know how often you write saying, I love you, Scott, and by the way we owe this to so-and-so, and could you scrape together money for my expense account because debts need to be paid at the tea shop in Asheville or at some boutique for a new dress? How am I supposed to save a dime? We’ve owed so much, Zelda, I’ve paid and caught up, fallen back and tried to catch up again—what more do you want from me?”

  “My father was right.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “When the Judge first met you he said you were a man who would probably have trouble paying his taxes. That even when you had money, it would slip through your fingers.

  “Why do you suppose you hate ballet so much?” she asked in a level, impartial voice. She had worked round to her favorite source of bitterness: his refusal to let her accept that role with a prestigious ballet company in Naples so long ago, her big break in dance. Apparently she couldn’t be bothered to recall that the tentative offer from the company was hardly a major role, one she herself judged beneath her talent grade, or that it arrived while she was behaving erratically, weeks prior to her first schizophrenic break. Did she ever think what it might have been like if she’d lost control of herself on a stage in Naples in front of thousands of spectators?

  “You can’t ever admit that as a ballerina I fashioned myself into a true artist.”

  “Only at the cost of ruining yourself,” he shouted.

  In her opinion, he hated ballet because he couldn’t stomach being in a room filled with accomplished dancers who were artists of a different order, who challenged the definition of art as he understood it.

  “And your love of ballet? Well, it’s about the quaint feeling of superiority you derive from immersing yourself in the only truly aristocratic art, no peons invited to the show. The Bolsheviks weren’t wrong, you know,” he said, reminding her how those enchanting exiles she loved so much, Madame Egorova and all the lovely Russian aristocrats displaced by the revolution to Paris, had perfected their art on the backs of the masses.

  “Please, stop. Can we stop, please?” she pleaded. “Why are we talking about politics anyway? I didn’t know you had decided to become a political writer, and I can’t see how it will help us pay our bills.”

  She paced the room, wild with fresh grief, as if everything they were talking about had happened only yesterday. He recalled the hallucinations from last night, the chanting, the talking back to voices that only she could hear.

  “Zelda,” he said, “put the gun down and we’ll get you some food.”

  “I’m not hungry, I’m too worked up. It’s just that I’m losing hope, and I’ve never heard of two people in a bad place drawing each other out of it.” She moved to the bed, poised on its corner, straddling it, her arm raised, the gun extended before her. “Scott, why do you have this?”

  “Dearest, please,” he said, trying to placate her, inching closer, halting a couple of feet shy of the bed. “Let’s put the gun back where you found it and we’ll forget the whole—”

  “You’re not always in charge,” she said and he rushed her, shoved his weight against her body as if throwing himself into an opponent during a football training camp drill, toppling her so that her head dangled off the bed, her hair falling like a mop in her eyes as he seized the arm that held the gun, gripping the soft fingers wrapped on the handle.

  “Scott, answer me.”

  “Who do you think you are?” he said, lying completely on top of her, attempting to pry her fingers loose. “It’s just for protection. I bought it while we were living in the woods of Maryland, you remember.”

  “I don’t remember a gun.”

  “Of course you do, now hand it over.” He squeezed her forearm, digging his thumb into the grove of tendons beneath the wrist, and still she didn’t let go.

  He struck her torso with his free arm as she rolled away from him, the gun peeling from his palm, still in her possession, her dress riding up above the knees, her auburn hair splayed violently across her nose. In an instant he was suffused with regret, yet all the more angry with her for having pushed him to this precipice.

  “Are you going to give me the gun,” he said, standing again, “or am I going to have to fight you for it?”

  Intentionally or not, she was pointing it at him, her index finger tapping the side of the trigger. She rose from the bed, straightened the folds of her dress, tidying her hair as he studied her expression.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” he said.

  “What do you mean, what are you saying?” Zelda asked, her voice cracking, full of dread. She replaced the gun on the desk where she’d found it. “I didn’t know my holding it would upset you so.”

  Goodbye, Zelda, he whispered silently to himself, realizing how long he’d held on, never quite allowing himself to believe the day would come when he would give her up. “Goodbye,” he said audibly now, aware that his eyes were welling. “It’s over,” he scolded himself. “Don’t let her make you forget all the craziness and impossibility ever again.”

  “I didn’t hear you. What are you saying?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer.

  “Don’t go,” she said as he shuffled into his jacket. “When will you return? I told you I don’t want you attending those cockfights because something bad is going to happen.”

  “I’m only going for a walk.”

  “And you won’t go to the cockfights later?”
/>
  Again he didn’t answer.

  “When did you say you would be back?”

  As he trod the frond-littered pathway that led to the beach, the lawns of the resort strewn with fallen branches, the ground flora still flattened by the rains, Maryvonne appeared from behind a knoll in a floral sundress. Her face flushed, eyes bright and sharp, she wore a look of invitation. Despite his almost desperate desire to be alone, he found himself welcoming her company.

  “Scott,” she cried, pressing two fingers to his chest as he stepped onto the beach. “You cannot wear those lovely shoes in the sand.”

  He glanced from her sandaled feet to his Florsheims.

  “I have a cough coming on,” he said. “Hardly the time to be going barefoot.”

  “The sand is warm,” she replied, and after minimal protest he removed his shoes, leaving his socks on.

  “She has returned,” Maryvonne said as they strolled up the beach, following the same route he’d pursued by himself the previous evening. “When you join us for drinks on the patio last night, she still does not return, I sense this, but now she has. I should be angry with you, for watering the truth, telling me gentle lies, but I am not.”

  “I didn’t want you to worry needlessly.”

  “It is your private life, no concern of mine,” Maryvonne said nonchalantly, as if putting distance between herself and a lover but not throwing him over entirely. Though her lineage was anything but aristocratic, she was by instinct a rather sophisticated woman. “Mostly I am glad to see you, tu reprends—resuming yourself, would you say?”

  “How can you tell?” he asked.

  “By your smile, it is free. When you see me appear on the path, you are happy, I can tell.”

  He tried to imagine how that could possibly be true, how he could be caught smiling (if in fact he had been) after what had just transpired in his hotel room.

  “It is the only way.”

  “What?”

  “It is the only way to tell about happiness,” she explained. “How you feel when you are not thinking about it. This is true also of love, I think, also sadness perhaps.”

  She ran her fingers from his elbow down his forearm, her fingernails teasing the skin on top of his knuckles.

  “Why could you and I not meet later?” she asked, halting, cupping his hand in hers, pressing open the fingers and tickling his palm softly with her nails.

  “Zelda,” he started to say, but how to explain that he had to return to the room soon and make sure his wife hadn’t harmed herself, or that in states of manic paranoia she had an uncanny talent for surmising when other women were attracted to him. “Well, frankly, I’m not sure what we’re doing, how long we’re staying.”

  “You are here at least through tonight and you have an excursion with my husband.”

  “Also there is someone in Hollyw—”

  “Yes, the second woman of the cards, I did not imagine it was I. So I know these things from the diviner, from our conversation, from my intuitions—but what is this to do with me?”

  Hers was a highly European take on passion. It struck him as odd that he’d never had a truly sexual affair with a European woman. Two Brits, first Bijou O’Connor in the early thirties, and now Sheilah, but they didn’t count. Europeans, especially the French and Italians, were so much more capable of duality, of grasping the divide between marital love and eros, between obligation and desire, without compromising one or the other. Americans, the Brits too, he supposed, were all so sincere and puritanical that even while committing adultery they tried to simplify their notion of fidelity. As soon as he took up with a new woman, she started plotting to steal him from Zelda, even after he made it clear—often stating the rules explicitly beforehand—that he could never desert her. Sheilah’s tolerance for the duality of his attachment owed much to her own well-kept secrets, but once she’d shared the greatest of them, she became less cosmopolitan in her views, worrying about the depth of his affections, objecting to his use of declarations such as “my marvelous mistress” or “my beloved infidel” to inspire his lust for her. “Just once I’d like to hear you call me,” she had said only this past winter, “the woman you would like someday to make your wife.” Couldn’t he give her that small satisfaction? Couldn’t he tell her he wished it might be so? “You mean if Zelda had never existed, or if she had died during one of her bouts with insanity?” he had asked, and she cursed him, before starting in on herself. Only a masochist, only an orphan with a terrible opinion of self, racked with guilt about the lies she’d told to get where she was and filled with enough self-hatred to throw over marriage to a lord for a tawdry affair of the heart, could have attached herself to a permanently hopeless lush of a man who refused to come up with a Plan B for his life.

  “Was there ever a time you say to yourself,” Maryvonne asked, “this is not my responsibility, I have done all I could do for my wife?”

  She had led them across the beach toward the runoff of the waves, professing her desire to walk in the shallows and feel the undertow, strong in the wake of the storm.

  “You go ahead,” he said, unwilling to bare his feet. “I’ll walk parallel to you, and we can bellow back and forth over the surf striking this empty beach. Highly intimate in its own way.”

  “And I will ask you personal questions and you will tell me?”

  Sure, why not?

  “Which of you slept first with another person? After your marriage, I mean.”

  Zelda, most likely. In retrospect she often denied that the affair of 1924 had been sexual, but Scott knew his wife only said that to spare his feelings.

  “Can you remember his name?”

  Of course he could.

  “Why not tell me? As a nurse I met so many soldiers and pilots. Maybe I have heard of him.”

  All the more reason not to utter it.

  “You are still pained by her infidelity after all these years?” she asked. “And yet you are the one now who leads the life of duplicity.”

  Only by necessity, that was the crucial difference.

  “Maybe there is choice too in your necessities, maybe it helps if you see it this way. It is only an affair, after all, this first infidelity of Zelda.”

  Except he knew that his wife had been ready to leave him for the Frenchman. She had asked for a divorce, her timing terrible. He was trying to finish a novel, his Gatsby, and angrily refused the request, in part because his pride wouldn’t bow before an arbitrary rival, in part because he saw what she couldn’t—that her heroic aviator didn’t want her permanently, that he wasn’t prepared to establish her safely in the world.

  “Zelda wasn’t someone who could make her own way in life,” he explained.

  “Did you want to leave her?”

  “It wasn’t an option.”

  “How can you be certain?”

  He didn’t reply. It was too hard to bring himself round to the idea that the code by which he had lived these many years might have been in vain, that Zelda might have managed just fine, or just as well, without him.

  “I have not seen a soul for a long mile,” Maryvonne observed. “Would it not be marvelous to take off all our clothes and swim far out in the ocean?”

  “It’s tempting,” he said. “If I were to stay on this peninsula much longer, you would become very hard to resist. Ask me in a few days, if I’m still around.”

  “Oh, look,” she cried, gesturing toward the water, where not thirty feet from shore swam a school of porpoises, breasting the waves in playful, arcing dives. “Do you not see what we have missed? Next time I will be more insisting.”

  As they neared the hotel patio, Scott could see Aurelio sitting alone, drinking a coffee and reading a newspaper on a bench beneath a stately palm.

  “I almost forget to tell you, my message, the reason I must search for you. You remember, yes, that my husband wishes to escort you on an excursion to the cockfights? Moi, he cannot escort to such a place, even though I offer to cut my hair like a boy. So it
is still a plan, he asks me to tell you.”

  “I’m looking forward to it.”

  “He is going to pick a winning bird for you,” Maryvonne promised, waving to Aurelio who had spotted them from the patio, then taking Scott aside by the arm, rising on her toes to whisper to him, her lips practically touching his—all of this in front of her husband, what audacity. “Let me walk you back to your room and encourage you, do not say no yet, to think about my proposal.”

  As they crossed the lawn, his socks soaking up water from the wet grass, he heard his name called and lifted his gaze to discover Zelda leaning forward over the balcony. He envisioned the scene through Zelda’s eyes, the Florsheims dangling from his fingertips; and the image of himself walking beside a strange woman for whom he’d taken off his shoes made his face redden as if he’d been caught in an illicit act.

  Maryvonne called out to say she hoped Zelda was better today, suggesting they might have a cup of tea this evening while the men watched birds kill each other, but Zelda, refusing to address Maryvonne by name, answered only, “I’m not feeling at all well.”

  “Scott, another thing,” Maryvonne said. “A man stops me this morning and asks if I know you, how long, many such things. There is nothing to it, I tell him, we are new friends and why should he always ask such things.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Long, beautiful hair, the color of argent.”

  “Silver hair and a milky eye?”

  “Exactement.”

  “Scott, are you coming inside?” Zelda called again from the balcony.

  “Is he a friend of yours?” Maryvonne asked.

  “Scott,” Zelda called.

  “Not a friend exactly,” he said, “but I suspect he’s relatively harmless.”

  The Frenchwoman kissed him adieu as Zelda again called his name, and Maryvonne now waved to her, saying she hoped they would all get together soon.

  “Aurelio did not think so,” Maryvonne replied. “I thought it is better to tell you.”

  13