Call Me Zelda (17 page)

“Why don’t you start with Westport and we’ll work up to the aviator?” I said.

“There’s nothing to tell of Westport,” she said. “Westport: the great Manhattan martini glass spilling over, tipsy-turvy with all of our terrible friends and lovers drowning us, distracting Scott, terrifying my parents, alienating my sister. Westport was a drunken mess. France is what you need to know next.”

“Did the diaries make it to France?”

“I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it. But France is where it cracked and couldn’t be repaired.”

“Your relationship?”

“Our relationship, my head, all of it. The great chasm started in France and has never stopped starting since.”

THE RIVIERA, ST.-RAPHAEL: SUMMER 1924

We watched the houses push out of the blue sea and shake off the sand to wait for us and our little party of four: an underused mother, a lush father, a bubbly baby, and a dictatorial nanny. The villa that was meant for us—the house of the nightingales—bloomed, a quick garden fragranced with boredom and a quiver of unease. Even the flowers trembled with it.

With barriers of language all around and the buzzing of planes like silver bees over the house at all hours of the day and night, we made for the little oasis of a beach. It had a new, just-raked quality about it. A well-polished man rose from the water and told us it was his, and we were welcome, and wouldn’t we just dress up his parties like shiny Christmas ornaments.

So we did. Party after party. A stew of wealthy, useless people of vast opinion with a peppering of artists to season the pot. A cubist here, a dramatist there, more writers.

I longed for those parties all the bored long days while the cook swatted me from the kitchen, the nanny swatted me from my girl, the husband swatted me from his work. I felt like a fly they all wished to splat against the window glass. Or one of the planes buzzing overhead.

Have you ever heard the terrible drone of bees? It’s a sound that carries a warning of sting and death with no winners. Death to the stung. Death to the stinger.

The death began the day I locked eyes with the aviator.

It was like those terrible fairy tales where the princess meets the prince and everything starts to conspire against them to keep them apart. I don’t know if the drunken husband saw the first eye lock or even the second. I’m quite sure he didn’t notice the dancing or the kisses by moonlight. It took a plane buzzing our house with my aviator’s wave and the dropping of a package for the husband to finally notice another man might be a threat.

But still he worked. Still he drank. Still he ignored, fussed, instructed, placated, and swatted me away.

The nights on the French Rivera make the shadows for the secret whispers the people wait all day to make. But I chose to stand in the middle of the dance floor under the light of the moon, to show my husband that it was okay and it was not okay. I thought if he saw me dancing he’d cut in. He did not. Why did he not cut in anymore?

The music of the three-piece jazz ensemble chased away my longing for my husband and forced me to attend to what was in front of me. This golden god of sun, vibrantly alive, pressing into me with his body and his sad eyes, hypnotizing me with his French words I could only partly understand. I didn’t have to understand the words, though. I felt their meaning searing the insides of my heart, cleaning out what had occupied it for so long, replacing it with a reminder of what used to be there.

Suddenly the Riviera was pulled away like a sandcastle by the tide. One wave, two, three—it was gone, and around me the old country club in Montgomery erected itself. Paper soldiers lined the walls with wilting female flowers on their arms, and it was just me and some faceless uniformed man whispering unintelligible things in my ear. My eyes locked with Scott’s in the corner, his once soft green eyes now hardened like jagged shards of arctic ice. I pleaded with my eyes,
Come to me, come to me, interrupt us.

But still, he did not.

Later that evening, I sat on the front porch with Zelda, reading her confessions by the pink glow of the setting sun, while I waited for Lincoln to arrive and take me to my parents’ house. She chewed her lips and picked her face beside me. I reached over while I read and gently pulled her hands down to settle in her lap. The moment I finished, I heard the crunch of tires on the road and looked up.

It was Scott.

My heart started to pound, and Zelda jumped visibly in her chair as I stuffed the paper in my handbag and zipped it shut. He slammed his car door and just stood, staring at her without saying a word. He came around the car slowly, like a panther watching his prey. She wrung her hands in her lap. He staggered a bit
as he approached the front porch stairs, started up them, and paused at the top.

“Tonight I will work,” he said. “I don’t want any interruption. I don’t want hysterics, theatrics, or pyrotechnics of any kind. Scottie is staying with the Turnbulls, my secretary will be leaving shortly, and you, Zelda, are to go to bed at eight thirty. Do you understand?”

“May I listen to my records?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “I will not stand for any distraction.”

“Then tonight I will kill myself. I have enough pills saved.”

“As long as you do it quietly,” he said.

Lincoln pulled up as Scott disappeared into the house. I slipped Lincoln the fare and told him to go home. I wouldn’t need his services tonight.

T
he house was frightening enough during the daytime, but at night, with the vacancy left by Scottie, the sounds of Scott pacing the halls downstairs talking to himself, and Zelda’s groans and cries while she slept, it was almost intolerable.

After bathing her and brushing out her hair, I had sent Zelda to bed with a light sedative. As much as it frustrated me, I could not ask her about the result of her affair, if that was what it could be called. I had no notion whether she had actually made love to the aviator. That conversation would have to take place at another time. Whether or not she had, it was clear that the power shift in the relationship took place at that time.

I noted the dosing on her chart and made some notes for Dr. Meyer, then sat with Zelda until she slept. Once her breathing was deep and rhythmic, I left the room to read in her project room upstairs.

The watercolor she’d worked on that afternoon was nearly ruined from Scott’s hands and Zelda’s writing papers, but I did not discard it. Zelda might be able to fix it. I sat on the chair and
ran my hands over the now dried lines of the grotesque ballerina. I could feel the pain of the dancer in her monstrous, bulbous legs and contorted frame. We’d been taught that art was a mirror to the emotional state of the patient. This painting was the work of a disturbed individual, and it hit me with a wave of sadness that this real-world experiment was failing. Zelda and Scott could not continue to destroy each other at this rate.

Unfortunately, I think money was part of what motivated Scott’s decision to pull her out of Phipps. Money and a disdain for a clinic that advised him to stop drinking when he just wanted treatment for his wife. He could not see how his use of alcohol contributed to the turbulence in the house; or rather, he would not see it.

I pulled Zelda’s proofs for her novel closer and picked up where I’d left off the day before, just at the point when Alabama and David arrived in Connecticut. I was helping Zelda prepare the manuscript of
Save Me the Waltz
for Scribner’s and thought it had the ingredients of brilliance without an ounce of control. Scott had helped her with some of the editing, but either from fatigue or malice he’d stopped work on the project to resume his own.

I tried to read for several pages, but my thoughts slipped from my guilt after my mother’s silence when I called her to tell her I wouldn’t be coming for the weekend, to frustration that Peter would probably judge me poorly for it. I pushed these thoughts away but still felt unsettled. I moved from the chair to the couch and tried to read a bit more, but the words soon blurred and I fell asleep.

I
opened my eyes and couldn’t remember where I was.

Sheer netting surrounded my bed. Morning light crept through the wood-framed window, giving the room a rosy glow. I felt the weight of an arm draped across my stomach. Ben slept
next to me, his face young from sleep. I felt elation in my heart until my eyes slipped to the corner of the room, where Scott sat with a tumbler of alcohol in his hand, and I knew it was a dream.

“You are dreaming,” said Scott.

“Go away,” I said.

I realized that now it was only me and Ben in the room. It was the morning after the first night of our honeymoon. Wineglasses holding small, sticky red pools stood on the bedside table. A white flower Ben had picked for me from the garden path at night opened from an empty wine bottle he’d filled with water.

I ran my hand along his forearm and up to his shoulder. He stirred and smiled before he opened his eyes. I felt my body, still a bit sore from the previous night, begin to want him. I turned him to his back and rolled on top of him, nuzzling my face into his warm neck. He wrapped his arms around my waist.

“Anna,” he said.

“Anna.”

“Anna.” My eyes snapped open and took a moment to adjust to the darkness. Zelda knelt on the floor in front of me.

“We must burn it now.”

I pushed myself into a sitting position and she pressed herself into my knees and put her hands on my thighs.

“The aviator piece,” she said. “He’s asleep. We need to burn it right now.”

“We can wait until morning,” I said. “It’s in my purse; he won’t look there.”

“Now!”

I shushed her and stood, still shaky from my sleep, and found my purse. She followed me. I felt around the handbag, pushing aside my wallet, my keys, a tube of lipstick. I found a paper and squinted to see whether it was Zelda’s writing. It was my discharge letter from Hopkins. I felt around again and could find no other paper.

“Can you see it?” she asked. “Shall I turn on the light?”

My heart began to race. There was no other paper in my purse, but I worried that if I told Zelda she’d break down. I opened the purse a little wider, saw that her paper was gone, and made a decision.

“Here, let’s burn it.”

I stood and carried my letter to the fireplace. I crumpled it into a ball so she wouldn’t see the typewritten words and threw it deep into the ashes of the previous writing she’d burned. She struck a match and watched it flare up, and mercifully did not notice as the paper curled that it was not her handwriting on the sheet.

She left the room when the letter was gone, mumbling to herself, “Now I can sleep.”

But I could not.

I
felt his eyes on me while I moved around the kitchen preparing tea for myself and a tray to take up to Zelda when she awoke. I placed the toast on the tray with a shaking hand, picked up a napkin from the counter, and slid it under the butter knife. All the time I could see his form in the doorway out of the corner of my eye but couldn’t force myself to look at him.