Beautiful Fools

by R. Clifton Spargo

  SHIVERING IN THE EVENING AIR, HIS CHEST AND FOREHEAD SOAKED with sweat, he slid along the sheets, contorting his hips like a snake, lifting the limp doll’s arm draped over his stomach, sidewinding until he was out from beneath Zelda. He checked the time, sat up abruptly, and rose into flashes of dizzying color, mostly reds and purples, his entire body heavy as sand, wanting nothing so much as to succumb to the drowsy pull of the bed. He took several steps, yawned, felt a rush of emptiness come over him as though he were blacking out, his balance thrown so that he had to catch himself to keep from toppling. The room was dark, the heavy curtains shutting out all but a dim radiance that settled on the floor near the desk. Zelda hadn’t stirred. Without flicking on a light he slipped into the bathroom, pulled the door shut behind him, wrapping his hand in the dark on the shower knob, its four prongs like the steering wheel on a sailboat. Stepping inside a drizzle that had all the intensity of water sprinkled from a watering can, its cold jarring, brisk, he tucked his head into the stream and withdrew it several times, waking himself. Gradually the water warmed, and though he knew he should step out and get dressed, he lingered under its spray, the heat easing his tired muscles.

  He wanted to steal from the room before she awakened. Maryvonne and Aurelio would be waiting for him on the patio downstairs. He was still planning to attend the cockfights because it was the type of thing that might make for a story someday and because he was tired of Zelda dictating the terms of his experience, tired of a life lived for so long without choices. It was a matter of principle. Here was something he wanted to do, an activity he might enjoy. Yesterday belonged to her, the hours squandered on her maniacal fit. Still, as he pulled on clothes he’d laid out neatly on the cool tile of the bathroom floor—all donned earlier this morning, still relatively fresh—he worried that she wasn’t well enough to be left alone.

  She was the only thing he truly loved in the world, but his love was twisted and wounded, and he could never again make it a simple, straightforward thing. He saw himself standing over her, demanding the gun, threatening violence, and he wanted a drink, he wanted to forget. There was no way of taking anything back, ever. It was out there in the world and even if she forgave him, she could remember it at a later date, in the middle of some fight, recalling the exact words he’d used, recounting what he’d done and hurling it back at him.

  Scott traversed the room in the dark, checking the closet, his suitcase, rummaging through the dresser, on the hunt for chocolate, Benzedrine, stimulants of any kind, something to pull him through the fatigue.

  “Why are you nervously pacing?”

  He had thought she was still asleep and waited a moment before replying. “I can’t find my other jacket.”

  “On the balcony.”

  He found the damp sport coat stretched over the back of a white iron chair. Searching the outer pocket, his fingers sinking into a morass of Baker’s German’s sweet chocolate that had melted into the lining, he traipsed through wrapper and foil until he found a stout stump, like a severed plant stem, extracting the pieces of wrapper embedded in it. The candy tasted stale and bitter, laced with musty lint, with tiny scraps of wrapper. Still, he licked his fingers clean and again plunged his hand into the pocket, digging amid the frayed wrapper until he found several newly chocolate-coated pills, bennies, popping them into his mouth.

  “I would never have remained silent for so long about your problems,” she said as he reentered the room. “You let me slip too far down—you saw I was in decline and did nothing.”

  She was sitting up in the bed, back propped against the headboard, lost in the whirligig of her obsessions in which time was all of a piece, in which this morning was interchangeable with the day they met; yesterday, with her first breakdown in Paris. Even the smallest of his freedoms was a commentary on her captivity, their reunions in one exotic place or another merely sentimental. He had a life elsewhere, another woman waiting for him, worrying about him, pining for his safe return.

  “We’ve been here before, Zelda,” he said, conscious of the fact that he was running late.

  “Except I can’t remember.”

  “I can.”

  “I don’t want you to, I don’t want that anymore.”

  “What?”

  “Can’t you just forget me? I want to be forgotten, I want to be new again. Do you think that’s even possible? Not just for me, but do you think it’s ever possible, for anyone?”

  “Of course I do,” he said hastily.

  “You don’t, though, I can tell. For what it’s worth, neither do I. But you don’t know how hard it is to fight what’s inside of you as though it were your enemy—”

  “I was there, Zelda.” He assured her he had seen her through it all, from the onset of the illness, and he would help her if she were ever again to sink beneath its waves.

  “And yet you’re going out on the town with them tonight.”

  He sighed and stole a glance at his watch.

  “To gape at birds killing one another. You’ll be horrified by the result, you’ll be unable to decide if you feel worse about betting on a winning, murderous cock or watching the loser writhe in helpless agony.”

  “Oh, for crying out loud, look, if you’re so damned lonely, I told you that Maryvonne’s not joining us, she wanted to meet you for tea on the—”

  “Please drop it,” Zelda interrupted, resignation in her voice. Then, springing from the bed, launching herself into his arms and resting her cheek against his chest, she said, “You’re still angry. How long are you planning to stay mad?”

  At dinner Aurelio appeared to be wearing his wife’s foul mood, waiting for the portion of the night when he would be free to do as he pleased. The couple had taken the liberty of ordering for Scott, though the meal was cold by now: chicken smothered in garlic and herbs, dressed in mango and avocado, the dish altogether too pungent and spicy for his palate. Scott drained his Cuba libre and reached for his beer. The ale with its bitter hops was pleasant going down, the temperate brown-gold liquid staving off the cotton-mouthed sensation. The double dose of alcohol gave him a jolt. For days he’d been running on adrenaline, on the stirrings of this new place and the good healthy sweat of humidity cleansing his body, so that he was never quite fully drunk, not in Havana, not here on Varadero. He ought to put something in his stomach. He took several bites of the chicken, coating his seared tongue with beer and water.

  “So, no Zelda, what is the story here?” Maryvonne asked sharply. She was irritated at both Scott and her husband, for their willingness to abandon her. “How am I to pass this night alone?”

  “Mi compañero,” Aurelio said, ignoring the tenor of his cousin’s complaint, “my wife tells me that you do not live with Zelda in the United States. How often do you see each other?”

  Before he could defend himself, Maryvonne protested. Aurelio of all people, she said, should understand that couples must arrive at arrangements suited to life’s difficulties.

  “Zelda has trouble with her health,” Scott said, giving away as little as possible, “so she resides in a hospital in Asheville, North Carolina.”

  “Yes, yes,” Maryvonne said. “Of course.”

  “Whereas I make my living writing for the movies, and there’s only one place to do that, in California, on the West Coast. As Maryvonne says, it’s a difficult situation, but we manage, spending time together between films.”

  The waiter came to the table and Scott ordered another drink, loathing himself for saying even the little he’d just said, hoping the alcohol might shut him up. By the time the waiter returned with his second Cuba libre, one of the clerks from the front desk had circled round behind Aurelio to impart a message.

  “Our ride is here,” Aurelio said to Scott. “Did you get enough to eat?”

  “I’ll take my drink with me,” Scott said, standing, as Maryvonne got to her feet and leaned in for a quick word.

  “You wish I should visit her perhaps?” she asked.

  He appreciated
the offer but, no, it wasn’t necessary.

  She kissed him, first the right cheek, which was visible to her husband, then the left, catching the corner of his mouth at a discreet angle, her moist lips lingering there a second, her wine-sweet breath whispering, “Maybe I will see you later.”

  In the black Oldsmobile with the long, elegant hood that ascended in the front into a brilliant chrome grille and bumper, Aurelio teased him about the aside with Maryvonne, asking whether secrets had been traded. “Mostly about Zelda,” Scott replied noncommittally. It was hard to tell whether the Spaniard suspected a liaison, and if so, whether he was encouraging or preventing it.

  “I always have exceptional relationship with my cousin,” he said, impossible to read one way or the other. “Never nothing to complain about. We share different views about marriage, about a new life in Cuba, but what is this? Nothing, I say. Everything change for me since the war, that is all.” He was trying to confide in Scott and doing a poor job of it, or maybe it would be more accurate to say that Scott was doing a poor job of earning the man’s confidences, partly because he couldn’t understand what was being asked of him.

  They drove along the same road Scott had traversed only last night, Aurelio asking whether Scott had money on him. When he confessed to carrying a large sum of cash, the Spaniard smiled and clapped him on the back. “Do you trust me, mi compañero, I will make a rich man tonight of you.” The strategy, as far as Scott understood it, was to place bad bets early, throw money around, let their betting appear risky and haphazard, as if they were merely fumbling along on intuition. They must lose more than they won on the early fights. You couldn’t waltz into a foreign town and clear out the house bet after bet without provoking the locals’ resentments. Aurelio had spent the day scouting the cockfighting scene on the peninsula, angling for the skinny on several birds to be fought tonight, including one that was well-bred and to be pitted by an expert handler, a bird that might score them a tidy sum, though it was up against stiff competition. Scott couldn’t afford to gamble and wasn’t any good at it. He was the last man in the world who ought to be scheming for an easy score in a foreign land by betting on a sport he knew nothing about.

  There had been no time to collect her thoughts because he’d left in such a hurry. No chance to tell him about the demons that hovered over her while she slept last night and again this afternoon, their presence more electrical than substantial, waves moving in and out of focus, pulsing in red like a strobe light or flickering like fire, spirits looming behind the flashes of light inside of inchoate blackened orbs. They were ambient, distorted shadows of noise, except for every now and then when one of their bone-white faces obtruded for an instant, then retreated. She prayed to banish them, but the whispers persisted, buzzing in her ears, contemptuous of her prayers. They were used to being banished. Too cowardly to speak with clarity—she accused them of cowardice aloud—the spirits left only hints. Though never in whole sentences, they brought news of illness, death, awful occurrences.

  Alone now as dusk fell, she turned on the light beside the bed. If she stayed awake, the shadowed beings might be unable to find their way into the room. Still, the night ahead was long and beset with worry. She picked up the novel by Rachel Field, but it couldn’t hold her attention. She rummaged through her luggage, through assorted items on the dresser—her Mason Pearson brush, silk ribbons, cosmetics, several pieces of good jewelry Scott had purchased for her over the years—fondling a bracelet with silver charms from places they had visited together, only then remembering the issue of LIFE borrowed from Maryvonne. She regretted her harsh behavior toward the Frenchwoman this afternoon and hoped she might have a chance to make up for it later. Here again was that blonde girl in the jumper, who might have modeled for a Nazi propaganda poster except her face was so stern and joyless, her eyes eerie in resemblance to those of the doll on her lap, sharp yet somehow lifeless, as though the girl had been conceived in imitation of the doll rather than the other way around. The more Zelda studied the photograph, the more it spooked her. Flipping open the magazine, she vowed not to return to the cover, but every now and then, with index finger keeping her place in an article, she would fold the journal shut to study the girl’s empty eyes, perfect nose, and pouty lips. Fanning through pages of a magazine completely visual in its conception, each of its stories spare on the order of advertising copy or newsreels that merely skimmed the surface of world events, Zelda settled on a layout that caught her eye: the Nazis taking Prague without a fight. LIFE characterized the lies told by the Nazis to justify their actions as “stupid” and alluded to their practice of leveraging atrocity tales no one else believed. The politics of terror could be inferred, but just barely, from photographs of German tanks rumbling into Prague, of military processions filing down cobbled, conquered streets, the Czechs lining up in gray-black overcoats and berets, witnesses to their own capture, a few of the women jeering, perhaps cursing at soldiers with Mausers strapped across their backs who paid them no attention.

  On another page she found a quiz and filled it out on Scott’s behalf. It was about how people behave in automobiles, drivers mostly. She answered the first three questions, giving Scott the lowest score twice, the middle score once, and saved the best for last: “When you become tense and nervous during a trip, do you . . . .” Instantly she ruled out Option C: “Try not to let it affect you?” Clearly, the answer was either “Give sharp answers to the people traveling with you?” or “Sulk and refuse to talk?” She split the difference—A worth 5 points, B worth 15, so Scott received a 10, bringing his grand total to 35. The index at the end of the advertisement suggested that any score below 70 described a person tagged by doctors as a “nervous irritable,” the reasons for irritability many: ill health, worries, modern life, coffee. Readers suffering from a sub-70 score were advised to try Postum, a coffee substitute made of oats.

  “Scott,” she said to the empty room, remembering how she used to leave the light on in his study when he was away so that when she awoke she would think him near. She imagined him in the car, swigging rum with Aurelio. Hard enough to get him off the booze, never mind weaning him off coffee for some drink made of oats. “Please,” she said, “no more recollections of how I was when we first met, when I made you so happy.”

  An article about Charles Lindbergh gripped her longer than it should have; she found his reclusiveness appealing. He didn’t enjoy being in the public eye. How could he after what had happened to his firstborn, stolen from the nursery of the Lindbergh mansion? For several years the American press wouldn’t stop pestering the family, and what finally drove the Lindberghs from the country and across the Atlantic to London and Paris was a photograph taken by a journalist (reproduced here in LIFE) of their second boy in the backseat of a limousine, on display for the next psychopath with a vendetta against them.

  Scott would be at the cockfights by now, she imagined. What did he know about gamecocks anyway? Why was he always feigning interest in some sport he knew nothing about? As when he took up boxing after Ernest, trying to prove something to himself: he had even brought that unbearable Parisian back with them to the States in ’28—oh, what was his name?—who stayed with them for almost a year, serving as Scott’s waiting man, sparring partner, and drunken companion. Was Aurelio trustworthy? she wondered. Were the cockfights even legal? One way or the other, though it hadn’t occurred to her until now, there must be seedy sorts involved.

  From the top of the dresser with its fine brown-black burnish (she made a mental note to ask someone about the wood, what kind it was), she scooped her rosary up and rolled the beads nervously between her fingers. She felt no desire to pray, but she couldn’t leave him unprotected. So she turned to her devotion, counting beads, contemplating the sorrowful mysteries, knocking out Our Fathers, Hail Marys, Glory Be’s, and O My Jesuses in an effort to keep her husband out of harm’s way.

  Roughly a quarter-mile beyond the church, the Oldsmobile turned south on a dirt road that split
embankments of palms, acacias, and cedars, and before long it approached a ramshackle cottage. One of the men from the bodega yesterday, the sly one with the barklike skin, waited for them on the porch, seated on a battered wooden bench. He rose and advanced toward the car with his black gamecock cradled in his arm, the bird swelling and unfurling its wings as Scott and Aurelio climbed from the backseat.

  “Here he is,” Aurelio said to Scott, speaking of the bird, which was a Spanish black. “In my opinion, lo mas bello of the gamecocks.” He introduced the stocky indigenous villager as Maximiliano, Max for short, and Scott thought, What a marvelous name for a peasant.

  Only this morning Max had taught Aurelio the ins and outs of cockfighting in the region, reviewing, for instance, how the bird before them had been kept, when it had been dubbed (this referred to the act of slicing off the wattles beneath the beak and ear lobes, then trimming the fleshy comb, all of which must be done expertly in the first year and healed properly so that there were no pouches of skin where a rival cock might seize hold with its beak). The two men also discussed what Max fed the bird, where and for how long it had been walked, Aurelio preferring birds that passed the pen walk fending for themselves.

  A gamecock was to be watched over from a distance by those caring for it, diet supplemented now and then as necessary with protein, mostly eggs, scraps of meat. Since a cock must never encounter rivals during the formative months, the land it trod had to be kept clear of cocks young and old, also of adult male birds such as the Muscovy duck. Hens were off limits during the gamecock’s celibate initiation into a world artificially emptied of rivals and other distractions so that he might perceive it as his own. As Aurelio ran through the basics of raising gamecocks, Max stroked the handsome black bird with the bright red face, massaging its feathers, kneading the neatly cropped flesh of the comb. Occasionally he would dribble onto his fingertips and rub the spittle into the clipped skin beneath the beak, eliciting a ripple of sound from the bird’s chest.