“Well, then,” he said.
“Don’t go.” He hadn’t started to move yet. I felt him caught there, in my living room, looking slightly uncomfortable, wary of what might be asked of him, until finally he sat.
“Well,” he said. “Here we are, Ellen.”
“Am I keeping you against your will?”
He turned to me, finally, and maybe it was the dark of the room that allowed him to hold his gaze. At last—it was what I wanted—he was taking me seriously.
“There’s that guy upstairs,” he said.
“What? Do you think I want you to kiss me, or something?” It was bold, but it had asked to be said.
“No, I don’t think that, Ellen.”
He kept staring right at me, and even in the dark I could see from the cast of his features how far he was from wanting to kiss Ellen Conlon, or any of us.
“Why do you come here, Billy?”
It was that that made him turn away.
“Oh.” He scratched the couch, and made it all turn light. “A little family life is good for the soul, I guess.”
“And the rest of the year, what do you have then?”
His hands fell into a folded position. Billy looked like an altar boy there on the edge of the couch. His face all these years had retained the thick, mask-like texture of those pubescent boys you see holding the incense and candles, thinking God knows what while they swing the thurible. Some of them turn into killers, and you’re never surprised.
“I get faculty parties. I get apartments that smell like somebody else’s socks.”
“And is there a girl?” I corrected myself. “A woman?”
“Sometimes.”
“Who is she?”
“She’s somebody like me, mostly.”
The way he said it—the way he seemed to abandon the words as soon as they were out of his mouth—let me know this couldn’t be pursued.
“Do you ever hate it?” I asked.
“Yes.” He looked at the TV. “Sure.” But he was not maudlin, was, instead, factual.
“But you could have something else, couldn’t you?”
“No. No, I couldn’t, Ellen.” He was still being matter-of-fact, enduring this conversation as if for the sake of something else; his tone remained light. But then his eyes lowered and his index finger stretched out purposefully against the knee of his pants. “And neither can you.”
He’d said it quietly, almost as if to downplay it, an uncharacteristic moment of generosity for him. Except that he’d said it, the damning thing. Funny, I was almost glad, to have the air cleared that way, though I could feel the pang of a kind of truth making an incision on my heart, a wound I would have to deal with, sooner or later.
The actual pain followed, more quickly even than I’d have thought, and I wondered what would happen if, instead of leaving it at that—telling me the deep, wounding thing and then moving on—Billy were to follow it up. To say: Change your life, why don’t you? I wondered if I wouldn’t then want to go upstairs and curl up next to Steve, and hide. I thought: Yes, probably that is what you would want to do. And it wouldn’t be wrong, not really. What was wrong was asking for the criticism, demanding that Billy wound me on such a regular basis, as if I needed that in order to respect myself.
Billy got up. It was odd, it was like he had just fucked me and now was sensing his proper exit: was I okay now? Had he stayed long enough? The memory of something like this surfaced from a long time ago, and how, afterward, I hadn’t liked the boy. But I couldn’t hate Billy. I even moved slightly to let him know it was okay. My head lowered and I lifted it and tried to smile, though he knew I was only making an effort, but that was okay, too. He left, quietly, stopping once in the kitchen to fetch something, or maybe to look back at me, I couldn’t tell. Then I heard his car start up outside, and the late-night crunch of tires on snow, and then nothing. The world is very quiet, at least, this time of year, and I sat there, simply listening for a while. In a minute, I told myself, I would go upstairs. Perhaps Steve would still be awake, though I didn’t wish for it. His warmth would be enough, the way his body moves to accompany me when I get in beside him, a part of him ever-hopeful. I said to myself: Learn to respect that, too. Hope and endurance. Those things.
But I knew, even then, it was no good. I am a woman, I thought, who loves the fact that certain questions can be phrased, deep, hard, penetrating questions that cut to the core of existence. I want to believe, sometimes, that I can follow them all the way, even into oblivion, if need be. But I am also a woman who eats in good restaurants, and sleeps with a dull, good man. A woman who cares, I hope enough, about her children. I am like those women on the streets of Vienna, chafing against the bit and caring, too, about fashion, about propriety; only half-knowing that the world they inhabit is going to be blown to bits, and all that will survive are a few questions.
I went upstairs after a while, and lay beside Steve. He was warm, as I expected, and I leaned in close against him. In a few months, I told myself, Billy would be gone, and all that will be left is this. Steve and the rituals and the breathing of the children. I saw the habitual life waiting to seize me again, just as Steve’s hand, awakened somehow, reached over and made a short, expert traverse of my skin. I took it, and lifted it higher, to cup my breast.
Steve awoke then. He needed no more than the physical suggestion to go from sleep to a highly charged state of awareness. It is one of the things I like most about him, that readiness.
In a certain way, too, I thought of it as an answer to Billy: our mindless late-night lovemaking, the heaviness of our bodies, the grunts that mean nothing and, I guess, sometimes everything.
THE SECOND ACT
Imagine, instead, that he hadn’t died. Not, anyway, in the sordid manner the newspapers reported, the great writer lying prostrate on the floor of Sheilah Graham’s apartment, still clutching The Princeton Alumni Weekly. A heart attack is not necessarily fatal, and he was only forty-four. Much better, truer, to conceive him as going on, recovering. There was a doctor in Hollywood he had come, vaguely, to trust. Suppose this doctor had, in no uncertain terms, cautioned him against the ravaged life he had been living, and as a result, Scott Fitzgerald made a change, a resolution, and before the California winter was even half done, boarded a train headed not for New York but for Baltimore.
Imagine him then making the long southwestern rail loop, bottles of club soda at his feet. Already, good habits are playing havoc with his system. On the train, he alternates between gloom and a billowing, strange hope. He is going to the city where he completed Tender Is the Night, where he knows, still, very few people, where he will fulfill his promise. He has decided all this, made himself sober on it. He purchases coffee, and somewhere between Albuquerque and the Texas border, experiences one of those false highs, brought on by a combination of sleeplessness and the caffeine rush, in which his own future seems, again, bright. He has been in Hollywood too long, that is all, trying to earn money, trying to earn a screen credit, being fed humiliation along with an increasingly long series of memos from Joseph L. Mankiewicz. It is some kind of miracle that he can still do this, still inhabit the sense that great things might yet be accomplished. He rides with the feeling for several miles, then places his hands, unconsciously, against his breast. A moment later, he smiles, understanding this, correctly, to be a cautioning gesture. Above him, in a box resting on the luggage rack, is the manuscript, half completed, of the novel he has been working on, The Last Tycoon. He takes the box down, holds it in his lap, doesn’t open it. The texture of the box is smooth and he runs his hands back and forth over it. “Cut the rest away,” he thinks to himself, and, inside, believes he can hear the snap, the severance from all that has been difficult, and pretends that he is twenty years old again, on fire with the ambition to be a novelist.
The doctor who had saved his life was a wiry man who resembled the character actor Allyn Joslyn. Perhaps you don’t remember Joslyn. He marched, pale and moonfaced, throug
h a thousand supporting roles. He was the rejected suitor, disconsolate in a tuxedo, outshone even by the likes of Brian Donlevy. This sort of thing, the doubleness of Hollywood, the resemblance of people to other people, always caught Scott by surprise, and when the doctor said the one thing he really ought to have heard, he was only half-listening.
“I’ve taken a look at your heart, and it’s a curious thing” was what the doctor had said. “If I had to describe it, I’d say there are etchings on it, lines made, well, like with a penknife.” Then, because the doctor had a trade of writers and considered himself, too, something of a literary man, he couldn’t resist adding a flourish: “It’s like someone’s been writing with a sharp instrument on your heart.”
On the table, shirtless, Scott had stared out the window and seen a woman, on the sidewalk, looking first this way, then that.
“So your advice”—he had swallowed, gotten over something lumpish in his throat—“is to cut out the drinking.”
“And the smoking.”
“Yes.”
“And walk. For God’s sake, walk.”
It was what he did now, in the city of Baltimore, in a cold winter, a retired man, a writer. After his work was done, instead of reaching for the bottle and the handy daily abuse of Zelda and whoever happened to be visiting, he took a long gentleman’s stroll to Mount Vernon Square, sat like a pensioned officer among the statues, and listened for some bothersome, incorrect phrase from his novel to surface. He limited himself to thoughts of craft; erected a wall against the vast, airy other side of life. Then, because of the cold, he got up and walked briskly, all the way to the Quaker School at the end of his own block, on Park Avenue. There, he sat on a bench and waited for the children to be dismissed.
This became a daily ritual and the thing he looked forward to the most. At four o’clock, a bell rang, a matron came and opened the gates. The boys rushed out and the girls, walking slowly, wearing hats, had to endure frequent taunts and pushes from the boys. Occasionally, one of the girls, high-colored and with spectacular hair, stopped in her tracks to face down her tormentor. A daily game; he enjoyed watching it. At her post by the gate, the matron stood with pursed, alert lips. The girl was no-nonsense, however, and was never dragged into a fight. The boys spoke, yelled, begged entry into the hot, intimate circle of her attention, but she turned on her heels and soon enough they all disappeared, boys and girls, around corners, toward homes; the matron locked the gate. It was that bereft time of day, after writing, between rituals, when the temper of everything darkened and he thought of Zelda in Montgomery, released from hospital into her mother’s care.
It was not a thing he wanted to be thinking of; it went contrary to his plans for himself—those good plans—so in the evenings he tried to distract his thoughts by going to the movies. It happened to be a decent season for American entertainment: Kitty Foyle and The Philadelphia Story and Chad Hanna. But most nights he caught only half a movie. For the other half of the time, he studied men’s faces. Ginger Rogers came on the screen and the men took on a sleepy look, underneath which was the most intense scrutiny. It was marvelous to watch. His excuse for his own absorption in the lives of other men was the novel he was writing: he told himself he was only behaving like his hero, Monroe Stahr, a man making a conscious effort to drop away from ambition, to become like those men who simply go out in search of love. It was no good, though, as an excuse; the novel had taken on a life of its own. Something else, something closer to him was at work. He was afraid of it, and gave it other names.
There were nights when he followed young men in their after-movie wanderings. Most nights he was disappointed; the young man he had chosen to follow simply went home. But one night he got lucky, and followed a man in the direction of the harbor. The man was heavy, unattractive, thick in the legs, and wore a brown suit. Also a hat, pulled low. He walked with determination, at the same time hesitantly, as if he might reach his destination at any moment. There was fog, dampness in the air. Now the man had stopped; that is, his body had come to rest in a charged but absolutely still manner. Across the street, a woman stood under a streetlamp, looking like she was waiting for a bus. Of course she wasn’t, but there was still the illusion, beautifully maintained, that at any second she would take out a purse and begin counting her change. Her hat, he could see from this distance, was felt, perhaps gray, and hugged her head like a loose fist. The man continued to study her, then moved across the street. It took Scott several seconds to catch up with the movement. By then they were impossibly close to one another, though not kissing or embracing; negotiating. The woman looked up, as if helpless under an assault. The backs of her knees wobbled. The man’s hand had gone out and begun stroking her shoulder and arm. Soon they would go inside somewhere and continue, and the act, as he imagined it, took on a bitter seriousness that evoked in him an acute form of envy.
He went home and masturbated. He placed himself over the toilet on the second floor, standing. No fantasy attached to this, but he did close his eyes and felt his lips form a word he did not immediately recognize. A moment or two after discharging, he was overcome by a fit of self-loathing, and remembered how Zelda had told him he was somehow, mysteriously, less than other men. He had long since ceased to attach to this thoughts of length and girth; she meant, he was certain, something else. He mastered himself, he flushed, he went and lay on the bed. Baltimore was in darkness. The shape of a water tower at the bottom of Monument Street imposed itself like a thumb against the sky. He felt for his heart and recalled then, with sudden clarity, and as if hearing them for the first time, the doctor’s words. Someone had written on this organ of his. There were words, sentences. If he pressed hard enough, he imagined he could feel the raised bumps on his ventricles and read what was written there, which must be truth, and which would tell him the next thing to do.
But all he could feel was a stubborn beating, as if his heart had determined not to know anything, but merely to go on.
Soon after, he began writing to Zelda. Every day, as soon as he finished work on the novel, and before the walk, the same words. “Dear Zelda,” and then something inconsequential. Here’s how the writing’s going. Here’s what Baltimore looks like in the snow. He was after something, though its exact shape and form had not yet presented itself. The letters felt like wild, impulsive acts set against the order and duty of his new life, and he wondered about their power to disrupt everything all over again. Still, it disturbed him to read her stiff, careful replies, which implied she had not been unsettled by his letters at all. They arrived, her replies, on perfumed stationery. He lifted them to his nose and smelled her mother’s house, the brocade furniture and photographs on the walls, all the entrapment from which he had sprung her once, a young man in a uniform in the Southern night. Or not exactly sprung her (he needed to release himself from his own mythology): it had rather seemed, in the Montgomery nights and for several years after, that life could be lived solely on the terms of promise. Now here was something else. A man with thinning hair sitting alone in a Baltimore town house, a woman recovering from madness on her mother’s porch.
In her replies, Scott decided, Zelda was simply masking a fear of entering again into the old way of feeling, which had become for him, in the moment, necessary to explore. Yet what did he expect? “Your mother and I write to one another,” he wrote his daughter Scottie at Vassar, “like people who have danced once at the Junior class cotillion and don’t want to presume too much of the acquaintance.”
Then one day he found himself smashing past the formality. “Did we love each other?” he wrote to Zelda. “I wonder now. I think of the summer of 1918, who I was then, what I wanted, the long approach to the house on Pleasant Avenue …” He put the pen down. It was an awful start. He recognized, at least, that an impediment had been pushed past. But that word love. He turned it around in his mind, uncertain whether it was the true thing he was after. It was late, he was tired, he finished the letter and mailed it. Then went for another
of the routine walks. A gray pallor hung over Baltimore, the same gray pallor that had lingered now for a week. He went into the cathedral, looked at statues. Did we love each other? The oddness of the question haunted him, because on one level it didn’t matter, they were separate now. Yet it was part of what had happened to him, this gift of continued life he’d been given, to want to make sense of the past. Love, sex, things he had failed to understand. The young officer and the debutante, the romance of it, giving way to a man in Baltimore Cathedral wondering whether he had been, of all things, fair. An hour passed, then he got up and went back to his study and began another letter. The question, he had decided, was important after all. At least, unavoidable. Toward the end of his life, a man seeks to undo the damage he has caused. It was an old story, archaic, and he was not terribly surprised, though a bit annoyed, to find himself inside it now. With this next letter, he began the overtures, the suggestions that the doctors at Johns Hopkins and Sheppard-Pratt might be able to attend to Zelda as well as the ones in Montgomery.
Zelda arrived late in the spring, nervous (it had not been easy, but an effort, to get her here, letters back and forth over two months), and when she stepped down from the train he saw an old woman. Hesitant, he touched his nose and waved. They looked at each other like that for several seconds in Penn Station. Strangely, there was not a sense of the past, of all that had preceded this meeting, but of the simple, clamoring noise of the present—steam, and the rough energy of an American railway station at midday, the surprisingly conventional clothes each of them wore. The moment seemed curiously thin, almost routine. Zelda’s sister rushed up from behind, all bustle and suspicion, her hand at Zelda’s elbow, leading her forward as if uncertain she would, at the last instant, turn her charge over to this man who had done, already, so much harm.
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