Tender is the Night

by Francis Scott Fitzgerald

  “—Only the very big ones, Baby.”

  She had caught something facetious in his eye and she changed the subject. It seemed impossible for them to hold anything in common. But he admired something in her, and he deposited her at the Excelsior with a series of compliments that left her shimmering.

  Rosemary insisted on treating Dick to lunch next day. They went to a little trattoria kept by an Italian who had worked in America, and ate ham and eggs and waffles. Afterward, they went to the hotel. Dick’s discovery that he was not in love with her, nor she with him, had added to rather than diminished his passion for her. Now that he knew he would not enter further into her life, she became the strange woman for him. He supposed many men meant no more than that when they said they were in love—not a wild submergence of soul, a dipping of all colors into an obscuring dye, such as his love for Nicole had been. Certain thoughts about Nicole, that she should die, sink into mental darkness, love another man, made him physically sick.

  Nicotera was in Rosemary’s sitting-room, chattering about a professional matter. When Rosemary gave him his cue to go, he left with humorous protests and a rather insolent wink at Dick. As usual the phone clamored and Rosemary was engaged at it for ten minutes, to Dick’s increasing impatience.

  “Let’s go up to my room,” he suggested, and she agreed.

  She lay across his knees on a big sofa; he ran his fingers through the lovely forelocks of her hair.

  “Let me be curious about you again?” he asked.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “About men. I’m curious, not to say prurient.”

  “You mean how long after I met you?”

  “Or before.”

  “Oh, no.” She was shocked. “There was nothing before. You were the first man I cared about. You’re still the only man I really care about.” She considered. “It was about a year, I think.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Oh, a man.”

  He closed in on her evasion.

  “I’ll bet I can tell you about it: the first affair was unsatisfactory and after that there was a long gap. The second was better, but you hadn’t been in love with the man in the first place. The third was all right—”

  Torturing himself he ran on. “Then you had one real affair that fell of its own weight, and by that time you were getting afraid that you wouldn’t have anything to give to the man you finally loved.” He felt increasingly Victorian. “Afterwards there were half a dozen just episodic affairs, right up to the present. Is that close?”

  She laughed between amusement and tears.

  “It’s about as wrong as it could be,” she said, to Dick’s relief. “But some day I’m going to find somebody and love him and love him and never let him go.”

  Now his phone rang and Dick recognized Nicotera’s voice, asking for Rosemary. He put his palm over the transmitter.

  “Do you want to talk to him?”

  She went to the phone and jabbered in a rapid Italian Dick could not understand.

  “This telephoning takes time,” he said. “It’s after four and I have an engagement at five. You better go play with Signor Nicotera.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “Then I think that while I’m here you ought to count him out.”

  “It’s difficult.” She was suddenly crying. “Dick, I do love you, never anybody like you. But what have you got for me?”

  “What has Nicotera got for anybody?”

  “That’s different.”

  —Because youth called to youth.

  “He’s a spic!” he said. He was frantic with jealousy, he didn’t want to be hurt again.

  “He’s only a baby,” she said, sniffling. “You know I’m yours first.”

  In reaction he put his arms about her but she relaxed wearily backward; he held her like that for a moment as in the end of an adagio, her eyes closed, her hair falling straight back like that of a girl drowned.

  “Dick, let me go. I never felt so mixed up in my life.”

  He was a gruff red bird and instinctively she drew away from him as his unjustified jealousy began to snow over the qualities of consideration and understanding with which she felt at home.

  “I want to know the truth,” he said.

  “Yes, then. We’re a lot together, he wants to marry me, but I don’t want to. What of it? What do you expect me to do? You never asked me to marry you. Do you want me to play around forever with half-wits like Collis Clay?”

  “You were with Nicotera last night?”

  “That’s none of your business,” she sobbed. “Excuse me, Dick, it is your business. You and Mother are the only two people in the world I care about.”

  “How about Nicotera?”

  “How do I know?”

  She had achieved the elusiveness that gives hidden significance to the least significant remarks.

  “Is it like you felt toward me in Paris?”

  “I feel comfortable and happy when I’m with you. In Paris it was different. But you never know how you once felt. Do you?”

  He got up and began collecting his evening clothes—if he had to bring all the bitterness and hatred of the world into his heart, he was not going to be in love with her again.

  “I don’t care about Nicotera!” she declared. “But I’ve got to go to Livorno with the company to-morrow. Oh, why did this have to happen?” There was a new flood of tears. “It’s such a shame. Why did you come here? Why couldn’t we just have the memory anyhow? I feel as if I’d quarrelled with Mother.”

  As he began to dress, she got up and went to the door.

  “I won’t go to the party to-night.” It was her last effort. “I’ll stay with you. I don’t want to go anyhow.”

  The tide began to flow again, but he retreated from it.

  “I’ll be in my room,” she said. “Good-by, Dick.”

  “Good-by.”

  “Oh, such a shame, such a shame. Oh, such a shame. What’s it all about anyhow?”

  “I’ve wondered for a long time.”

  “But why bring it to me?”

  “I guess I’m the Black Death,” he said slowly. “I don’t seem to bring people happiness any more.”

  XXII

  There were five people in the Quirinal bar after dinner, a high- class Italian frail who sat on a stool making persistent conversation against the bartender’s bored: “Si . . . Si . . . Si,” a light, snobbish Egyptian who was lonely but chary of the woman, and the two Americans.

  Dick was always vividly conscious of his surroundings, while Collis Clay lived vaguely, the sharpest impressions dissolving upon a recording apparatus that had early atrophied, so the former talked and the latter listened, like a man sitting in a breeze.

  Dick, worn away by the events of the afternoon, was taking it out on the inhabitants of Italy. He looked around the bar as if he hoped an Italian had heard him and would resent his words.

  “This afternoon I had tea with my sister-in-law at the Excelsior. We got the last table and two men came up and looked around for a table and couldn’t find one. So one of them came up to us and said, ‘Isn’t this table reserved for the Princess Orsini?’ and I said: ‘There was no sign on it,’ and he said: ‘But I think it’s reserved for the Princess Orsini.’ I couldn’t even answer him.”

  “What’d he do?”

  “He retired.” Dick switched around in his chair. “I don’t like these people. The other day I left Rosemary for two minutes in front of a store and an officer started walking up and down in front of her, tipping his hat.”

  “I don’t know,” said Collis after a moment. “I’d rather be here than up in Paris with somebody picking your pocket every minute.”

  He had been enjoying himself, and he held out against anything that threatened to dull his pleasure.

  “I don’t know,” he persisted. “I don’t mind it here.”

  Dick evoked the picture that the few days had imprinted on his mind, and stared at it. The walk toward the
American Express past the odorous confectioneries of the Via Nationale, through the foul tunnel up to the Spanish Steps, where his spirit soared before the flower stalls and the house where Keats had died. He cared only about people; he was scarcely conscious of places except for their weather, until they had been invested with color by tangible events. Rome was the end of his dream of Rosemary.

  A bell-boy came in and gave him a note.

  “I did not go to the party,” it said. “I am in my room. We leave for Livorno early in the morning.”

  Dick handed the note and a tip to the boy.

  “Tell Miss Hoyt you couldn’t find me.” Turning to Collis he suggested the Bonbonieri.

  They inspected the tart at the bar, granting her the minimum of interest exacted by her profession, and she stared back with bright boldness; they went through the deserted lobby oppressed by draperies holding Victorian dust in stuffy folds, and they nodded at the night concierge who returned the gesture with the bitter servility peculiar to night servants. Then in a taxi they rode along cheerless streets through a dank November night. There were no women in the streets, only pale men with dark coats buttoned to the neck, who stood in groups beside shoulders of cold stone.

  “My God!” Dick sighed.

  “What’s a matter?”

  “I was thinking of that man this afternoon: ‘This table is reserved for the Princess Orsini.’ Do you know what these old Roman families are? They’re bandits, they’re the ones who got possession of the temples and palaces after Rome went to pieces and preyed on the people.”

  “I like Rome,” insisted Collis. “Why won’t you try the races?”

  “I don’t like races.”

  “But all the women turn out—”

  “I know I wouldn’t like anything here. I like France, where everybody thinks he’s Napoleon—down here everybody thinks he’s Christ.”

  At the Bonbonieri they descended to a panelled cabaret, hopelessly impermanent amid the cold stone. A listless band played a tango and a dozen couples covered the wide floor with those elaborate and dainty steps so offensive to the American eye. A surplus of waiters precluded the stir and bustle that even a few busy men can create; over the scene as its form of animation brooded an air of waiting for something, for the dance, the night, the balance of forces which kept it stable, to cease. It assured the impressionable guest that whatever he was seeking he would not find it here.

  This was plain as plain to Dick. He looked around, hoping his eye would catch on something, so that spirit instead of imagination could carry on for an hour. But there was nothing and after a moment he turned back to Collis. He had told Collis some of his current notions, and he was bored with his audience’s short memory and lack of response. After half an hour of Collis he felt a distinct lesion of his own vitality.

  They drank a bottle of Italian mousseaux, and Dick became pale and somewhat noisy. He called the orchestra leader over to their table; this was a Bahama Negro, conceited and unpleasant, and in a few minutes there was a row.

  “You asked me to sit down.”

  “All right. And I gave you fifty lire, didn’t I?”

  “All right. All right. All right.”

  “All right, I gave you fifty lire, didn’t I? Then you come up and asked me to put some more in the horn!”

  “You asked me to sit down, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”

  “I asked you to sit down but I gave you fifty lire, didn’t I?”

  “All right. All right.”

  The Negro got up sourly and went away, leaving Dick in a still more evil humor. But he saw a girl smiling at him from across the room and immediately the pale Roman shapes around him receded into decent, humble perspective. She was a young English girl, with blonde hair and a healthy, pretty English face and she smiled at him again with an invitation he understood, that denied the flesh even in the act of tendering it.

  “There’s a quick trick or else I don’t know bridge,” said Collis.

  Dick got up and walked to her across the room.

  “Won’t you dance?”

  The middle-aged Englishman with whom she was sitting said, almost apologetically: “I’m going out soon.”

  Sobered by excitement Dick danced. He found in the girl a suggestion of all the pleasant English things; the story of safe gardens ringed around by the sea was implicit in her bright voice and as he leaned back to look at her, he meant what he said to her so sincerely that his voice trembled. When her current escort should leave, she promised to come and sit with them. The Englishman accepted her return with repeated apologies and smiles.

  Back at his table Dick ordered another bottle of spumante.

  “She looks like somebody in the movies,” he said. “I can’t think who.” He glanced impatiently over his shoulder. “Wonder what’s keeping her?”

  “I’d like to get in the movies,” said Collis thoughtfully. “I’m supposed to go into my father’s business but it doesn’t appeal to me much. Sit in an office in Birmingham for twenty years—”

  His voice resisted the pressure of materialistic civilization.

  “Too good for it?” suggested Dick.

  “No, I don’t mean that.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “How do you know what I mean? Why don’t you practise as a doctor, if you like to work so much?”

  Dick had made them both wretched by this time, but simultaneously they had become vague with drink and in a moment they forgot; Collis left, and they shook hands warmly.

  “Think it over,” said Dick sagely.

  “Think what over?”

  “You know.” It had been something about Collis going into his father’s business—good sound advice.

  Clay walked off into space. Dick finished his bottle and then danced with the English girl again, conquering his unwilling body with bold revolutions and stern determined marches down the floor. The most remarkable thing suddenly happened. He was dancing with the girl, the music stopped—and she had disappeared.

  “Have you seen her?”

  “Seen who?”

  “The girl I was dancing with. Su’nly disappeared. Must be in the building.”

  “No! No! That’s the ladies’ room.”

  He stood up by the bar. There were two other men there, but he could think of no way of starting a conversation. He could have told them all about Rome and the violent origins of the Colonna and Gaetani families but he realized that as a beginning that would be somewhat abrupt. A row of Yenci dolls on the cigar counter fell suddenly to the floor; there was a subsequent confusion and he had a sense of having been the cause of it, so he went back to the cabaret and drank a cup of black coffee. Collis was gone and the English girl was gone and there seemed nothing to do but go back to the hotel and lie down with his black heart. He paid his check and got his hat and coat.