West of Sunset

by Stewart O'Nan

  Sheilah was waiting for him in an apron, her hair tucked under a scarf. She was baking a pumpkin pie, and the cottage was warm with its scent. She’d cleaned, and set out cut flowers, and he thought he should have gotten her roses. When he offered to take her to the Inn tomorrow, she showed him the stocked icebox. They had everything they needed right here.

  Before she started dinner, they pulled on their sweaters and took in the sunset, strolling hand in hand past the shuttered fishing shacks and battened-down compounds. The sky was the color of sherry, gulls straggling home. She seemed pleased the beach was all theirs, as if she’d planned it.

  “We’ll see how long that lasts,” she said, since tomorrow was Christmas Eve.

  Dinner was lamb chops, potatoes Lyonnaise and green beans with slivered almonds. From this one meal, he conceded she was a more accomplished chef than Zelda, though that wasn’t hard. What touched him was the amount of preparation. She must have been working all afternoon. Afterward, like a dutiful husband, he did the dishes. Once the sun was down, a chill set in, and he laid a fire, the two of them snuggling on the loveseat, each reading a book, the picture of domesticity. The logs hissed and snapped, sending up sparks. He marked the quiet, broken only by the crash of the occasional wave, the approach of a car on the highway.

  The pie was too much. By nine he couldn’t keep his eyes open. She showed him where they were sleeping, and after the insult of the freezing bathroom, they leapt into bed, clutching each other for warmth under the covers.

  In the morning he was surprised he’d slept the night. The sea was flat, the light so precise he could make out the Greek flag on a freighter headed for port. The beach was empty in both directions. They wandered along, filling a pail with crabs and sand dollars and garlands of seaweed for the tree. She’d borrowed his sweater, far too large for her, and flitted around him like a child, batting at him with the empty sleeves and laughing, making him chase her. He caught her, kissed her, took her hand again and walked on. The same quiet reigned during the day, and for a moment, strolling barefoot beside her with the water glittering and the sun on his face, he thought how fateful it was that they’d washed up on this gilded shore, two refugees fleeing their beginnings. He could picture them living here, shipwrecked on their own private desert island. It was an idle wish, and a selfish one, to be rid of the world, and yet, as with any daydream, there was some truth to it. Whoever she was, he wanted her, as he wanted these peaceful days to last, and this new life, impossibly, to be his.

  EASTER, 1928

  She understood that he had to go back East once the script was turned in. It was harder after spending Christmas together. They shared a strained fatalism, never discussing the situation at length, or his itinerary there, only when he would be leaving. She seemed to accept the trip in the same spirit he presented it, as an unhappy yet necessary task, knowing he’d be back in two weeks, and then when Mank finally gave him the okay, she sulked, as was her right. He could only sympathize, he had no basis for complaint. The night before he left, they said good-bye gravely, as if he were going to war. He went back to the Garden and slept alone and in the morning drove himself to the airport.

  He didn’t like to fly—the noise and vibration gave him a headache—but, as with anything new, he was excited by the strangeness of it. The disjuncture intrigued him: stepping through a door in one place, sitting still for a few hours, then stepping out a thousand miles away. It seemed to him a very American mode of travel, even more so than the car, not simply going farther faster, but eliminating any temporal experience of the journey, skipping over whole sections of the country, the sole focus on arriving, with the help of expensive and arcane technologies, at one’s destination, except, of course, when one didn’t—a thought brought on by his own instinctive disbelief and the bumpiness of the flight. He liked the idea of a plane crash, being indicative of the times, for a third act climax. Like Icarus, his producer would dare the sun and, like all men, fall. The forces joined against him were mediocre but legion—that was the tragedy of Hollywood. His man, like Thalberg, would be the last lion, feared, fawned upon and ultimately run to ground by dogs.

  They stopped to refuel in Memphis, where it was dingy and drizzling. The airport was a low brick garage with plate glass windows facing the tarmac. The time change almost fooled him. Though it was dark as night outside, it was only three. He was tempted by the bar but held off, smoking and sipping a Coke, watching the drops dimple the puddles. As he searched his memory for that line of Byron about the world set shivering on a leaf, beyond the trees a fissure of white light split the sky, illuminating the clouds. A bolt exploded close by, making the lights blink and the whole place go oooo like a roomful of schoolchildren. A gust pushed at the window, followed by waves of rain. The front they’d leapfrogged had caught up with them. An announcement confirmed his suspicions: they were stuck there till it passed.

  The boredom of provincial airports, the same as train stations. The delay made him late getting into Asheville, and by the time he’d hired a car and driven out to Tryon it was past visiting hours. He’d called Dr. Carroll to let him know, but worried that Zelda might be upset. The smallest disappointment could trigger her.

  Already there’d been a misunderstanding over the moccasins she wanted to replace her old pair. They were light as toe shoes and fur-lined, perfect for the open ward, which could be chilly this time of year. She wanted real ones, hand-crafted by the Navajo, decorated with beadwork. In her letter she’d asked him to get off the train in Tucson and buy her some, though he’d specifically told her he was flying. To placate her he’d sought out a suitable pair in the souvenir shops along Hollywood Boulevard, probably made in Japan. With her, any gift was precarious; this one, being a patent fraud on two counts, seemed even more fraught. The trouble, as always, was divining her state of mind.

  His rooms at the old hotel were available at winter rates, but he only needed a single. The clerk wasn’t surprised he was staying just the night, and he wondered if, like a flagellant, he carried a visible mark of his suffering. Brushing his teeth, he thought he was different from the man who’d lived here, or was that vanity? Nights on the verandah, nights at the Garden, nights on the Cote d’Azur. At least he was consistent in his dissipation.

  The next morning, before they could be reunited, Dr. Carroll ushered him into his office for a progress report. Though across her stay at Highland Zelda’s behavior had fluctuated wildly—from catatonic to attacking her nurses—the doctor spoke as if, thanks to her new regimen, she was steadily getting better. She’d had only the one episode all fall, after coming back from Charleston, and she’d enjoyed their trip to Sarasota.

  “It will be interesting to see how she does in Montgomery,” the doctor said. “That’s going to be the test.”

  First they had to make it through Miami, Scott thought, but didn’t contradict him.

  “I know you and Mrs. Sayre have had your differences.”

  Mrs. Sayre was an indulgent old busybody whose children tended to kill themselves.

  “In the end I think we want the same thing,” Scott said. “We just disagree on the timing. After the last time I want to be certain she’s ready. If you think she is, I trust your judgment.”

  “I wouldn’t say we’re anywhere close to that. This is more of a dry run. I’m hoping she’ll feel comfortable there, so we want as little tension as possible.”

  What gall, to admonish him on that woman’s word.

  “I’ll do my part,” Scott promised, leaving the rest unsaid.

  In the lobby, yet another version of Zelda stood beside her bags, hat in hand, as if waiting for a bus. She was thinner, in someone else’s drab hand-me-downs, her bangs razor-straight. When she smiled he saw her front tooth had been fixed. It had been five months, and he wanted to apologize, again, for leaving her here. As they embraced, he was seized by the irrational fear that he smelled of Sheilah’s perfume.

&n
bsp; “Merry Christmas, darling,” she said, confusing him for an instant.

  “And a Happy New Year.”

  “Look at you, you’re brown as a bear. Your hair’s so light.” She reached up and touched it as if it might not be real.

  “It’s the sun. Your new tooth looks good.”

  “You like it?” She bared her gums, turning her head so he could inspect the dentist’s work. Close-up, the crown stood out, a whiter white.

  “It’s very nice.”

  “I wanted to look beautiful for you.”

  “You do.”

  “I’m so glad you could come.”

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t be here for Christmas.”

  Was everything he said a lie? Because he could see himself on the beach with Sheilah, their seashell tree. There was a ring of Hell for the deceitful. Maybe this was it, eternally returning to find her waiting for him, still hopeful.

  Walking them to the car, the doctor went over her medications like a referee explaining the rules to two fighters. He had an extra copy of her prescriptions for Scott. After all the talk of clean living, he was shocked at the number. Besides the Seconal, which he recognized from his own medicine cabinet, the rest were new to him, most likely tranquilizers. He wondered if she was doped up right now.

  “Have fun,” the doctor instructed, waving them away.

  “We will,” she said.

  In another time they would have, flying down to Miami and staying at the Biltmore with the hoi polloi. In their flaming years they’d played a drunken round of golf with Babe Ruth there, and skinny-dipped in the huge pool modeled after the Roman baths, dressing the terrace statuary in their underwear. Now the grandeur of the place only reminded him how much he was paying a night. They swam and played golf and woke up early one morning to go deep-sea fishing, and dined each evening in the grand salon, but he could not imagine a less restful vacation.

  The doctor was right, she was agreeable, even sweet, but spending every minute with her was grueling. For their belated Christmas she gave him a self-portrait, cat-eyed and high-cheeked in the flowing gold raiment of a high priestess, portentously holding up three fingers. He summoned a surprised delight even as he mulled where he would hide it in his villa. She gushed over the moccasins, but she gushed over the room-service eggs, and the parakeets in the lobby, and the croquet pitch, like someone slightly tight. The world was “perfect,” and “lovely,” and “divine.” He thought she was just happy to be free, to be with him again. She’d always had a theatrical personality, and naturally wanted to put the best face on their time together, as if that might win him back, but such saccharine enthusiasm was too much. He viewed her effusiveness as an unsubtle act, expecting at some point she would break character, reverting to her true, troubled self. Her cheeriness was relentless, inhuman. As his patience waned, he began to think it might be a trick of his imagination, fueled by guilt. No matter how well she behaved, he would find fault with her.

  They were playing tennis one morning when he realized she wasn’t acting. She was better than he was, and viciously competitive. As a girl, one of her favorite pastimes was beating the boys in front of the whole country club. She regularly trounced him, but today he was beating her easily, calling out encouragement as she shambled after his volleys. As she ranged to her right to return an easy forehand, her feet got tangled up as she swung, and she fell, rolling on her shoulder as the ball dropped into the net.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Nice one,” she called, brushing herself off. Her right side was a giant grass stain.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m fine. Thirty-love.”

  It wasn’t until they switched sides that he saw her chin was brushburned, a raspberry patch beaded with blood.

  “You’re hurt.”

  She touched a finger to it and laughed as if it were a joke.

  “It looks like it stings.”

  “It does a little.”

  She seemed more amused than concerned, and as the week wore on, he noticed that was her reaction to everything. A dolphin leaping free of the water, a pat of butter falling on the tablecloth—she regarded both with the same dazed appreciation. The drugs she was taking made her imperturbable, and he wondered if this wasn’t Dr. Carroll’s way of inoculating her against the world. He couldn’t imagine anything that would make her mother happier.

  They swam, they ate, they danced. It was all a pantomime at three-quarter speed. At bedtime they took their pills and lay down separately. She didn’t bother him like she used to, and lying awake listening to her sleep, he thought he should be grateful. She was thoroughly pleasant, asking nothing of him but his company. Any other visit he would have been relieved, so why did he picture himself creeping to the bathroom and flushing her pills? Why not his too?

  In the morning she dabbed cover-up on her chin so it wouldn’t look as if he’d hit her, only to break the scab with her napkin at breakfast. She smiled at him, the blood oozing through like yolk. He called the waiter and paid.

  The whole thing was grim, and yet as their time there narrowed, he wished they could stay. Mrs. Sayre would have her way in the end, he had no doubt. Eventually Zelda would go home. It was his wish too, for lack of a happier solution. Long ago they’d both abdicated their deepest responsibilities to each other, leaving this empty vestige. His hope now was that she could live a quiet life surrounded by the people she loved. That could only happen in Montgomery, and still, helping her onto the plane, he felt he was delivering her to her fate.

  Her cousin Sara was waiting for them at the airport with their driver Freeman in threadbare livery. While two of Zelda’s three sisters lived here, they had their own families, and she, having no one, had been appointed Mrs. Sayre’s lieutenant. She was a religious woman with a concave body and long face that betrayed an exhausted disappointment in the world. She embraced Zelda and inspected her chin, flicking him a critical look, then took her hand as if she might run away. Scott helped the driver with their bags, though the man implored him, “Please, sir, let me.” Outside, watched over by a cop, sat Judge Sayre’s magnificent old LaSalle, the nickel hood ornament and grille glinting, the work, most certainly, of the chauffeur. As a legacy, the car went unloved by the Sayre women. He’d been dead seven years and none of them drove.

  Sara sat Zelda in the middle—again, as if she might break loose—and the driver pointed the LaSalle for town. The land was flat out here and worked hard, the fields for cotton, the piney woods lumber and turpentine. Scott remembered the red dust that blew into their tents at Camp Sheridan, giving their bedrolls a rusty tint. It had been some sharecropper’s farm, sold from beneath him to the war department for a fortune, the barracks and mess hastily improvised. The spring rains turned the earth into a chili-colored muck, and in the summer there wasn’t a single shade tree to escape the heat, but they were young and beguiled by a violent glamour. At the same time they groused about camp life, they lorded themselves over the locals. Friday nights, hair carefully watered, they took the bus along this very road at dusk, invading the movie houses and soda fountains in search of girls, plundering the town as it emptied their pockets. It was then he found her, that heroic summer when they were all going to march onto ships. Instead the war ended, broke off like a failed romance, leaving them unblooded and ashamed of their thwarted desires. Years later, when she was recovering from her first bad spell, they retreated here, taking a house near her parents, and one warm spring day he drove out and tramped the muddy fields, trying to find any remnant of the company streets and rolled square of the parade ground, but the earth had been turned too many times and he couldn’t be sure this was the right place anyway, and he conceded it was fitting that his near-glorious past had been plowed under, as lost to history as the tents of the Spartans or Napoleon’s armies.

  “I do love that old barn,” Zelda said of a bleached, leaning relic.

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bsp; Sara tutted. “Mr. Connor would never let things go like that.”

  “Is Tad still at the mill?”

  “He’s run off to Mobile again. It’s a shame. No one knows what’s going on with him.”

  “And he can be such a dear.”

  They nattered on, Zelda mimicking Sara’s sleepy lilt, drawing out her vowels into diphthongs, becoming, as they neared town, more and more the belle. She delighted in gossip, though by tomorrow—perhaps tonight—her arrival would be the hot item, traded across dinner tables and in the better restaurants. Locally she was held up as a cautionary example, her fall the price of her earlier notoriety. He’d seen children ride by the house, pointing and making cross-eyed faces. Once, outside the Grand Theatre, a gang tricked a slow boy of ten or so to shout “Bryce” at her, that being the name of the state hospital in Tuscaloosa. Scott had chased the boy down to teach him a lesson, dragging him back by the collar, only to have Zelda comfort the crying child.

  Ahead, the dome of the Capitol rose over the city like a medieval cathedral, the seat of power and privilege. A faithful servant of the law, the judge and his family lived in its shadow, along the elm-lined, aptly named Pleasant Avenue. The houses on her block weren’t antebellum mansions boasting porticoes and slave quarters but the same stolid turn of the century brick piles he knew from St. Paul, with four chimneys, wraparound porches and maids’ rooms tucked under the eaves, as if the designers of that era had signed a convention. The Sayres’, when he’d first seen it, recalled his Grandmother McQuillan’s, down to the stained-glass window on the stair landing, which he associated with old money and the antique majesty of the church. They shared an air of permanence at once easeful and suffocating. In a house like that nothing ever changed, and while the judge was patient with her, if vague, and her mother doting, Scott understood why Zelda was wild to get out. Leaving her there would be sentencing her to the dead past.