Save Me the Waltz: A Novel (33 page)

“Oh, quite!”

People can’t learn about their relations! As soon as they’re understood they’re over. “Consciousness,” Alabama murmured to herself, “is an ultimate betrayal, I suppose.” She had asked Bonnie simply to spare the lady’s feelings.

The child played often at her grandmother’s house. They played at keeping house. Bonnie was the head of the family; her grandma made an agreeable little girl to have.

“Children were not brought up so strictly when mine were young,” she said. She felt very sorry for Bonnie, that the child should have to learn so much of life before it began for her. Alabama and David insisted on that.

“When your mother was young, she charged so much candy at the corner store that I had an awful time hiding it from her father.”

“Then I will be as Mummy was,” said Bonnie.

“As much as you can get by with,” chuckled her grandmother. “Things have changed. When I was a child it was the maid and the coachman who argued about whether or not I could carry a demijohn into the church with me on Sundays. Discipline used to be a matter of form and not a personal responsibility.”

Bonnie stared intently at her grandmother.

“Grandma, tell me some more about when you were little.”

“Well, I was very happy in Kentucky.”

“But go on.”

“I can’t remember. I was much the same as you.”

“I shall be different. Mummy says I shall be an actress if I want, and go to school in Europe.”

“I went to school in Philadelphia. That was considered a long way then.”

“And I shall be a great lady and wear fine clothes.”

“My mother’s silks were imported from New Orleans.”

“You don’t remember anything else?”

“I remember my father. He brought me toys from Louisville, and thought that girls should marry young.”

“Yes, Grandma.”

“I didn’t want to. I was having too good a time.”

“Didn’t you have a good time when you were married?”

“Oh, yes, dear, but different.”

“I suppose it can’t be always the same.”

“No.”

The old lady laughed. She was very proud of her grandchildren. They were smart, good children. It was very pretty to see her with Bonnie, both of them pretending great wisdom about things, both of them eternally pretending.

“We shall be gone soon,” the little girl sighed.

“Yes,” sighed her grandmother.

“Day after tomorrow we shall be gone,” said David.

Out of the Knights’ dining room windows the trees put out down like new-feathered chicks. The bright, benevolent sky floated across the panes and lifted the curtains in billowing sails.

“You people never stay anywhere,” said the girl with the shanghaied hair, “but I don’t blame you.”

“We once believed,” said Alabama, “that there were things one place which did not exist in another.”

“Sister went to Paris last summer. She said there were—well, toilets all along the streets—I’d like to see it!”

The cacophony of the table volleyed together and frustrated itself like a scherzo of Prokofiev. Alabama whipped its broken staccato into the only form she knew: schstay, schstay, brisé, schstay, the phrase danced along the convolutions of her brain. She supposed she’d spend the rest of her life composing like that: fitting one thing into another and everything into the rules.

“What are you thinking about, Alabama?”

“Forms, shapes of things,” she answered. The talk pelted her consciousness like the sound of hoofs on a pavement.

“——They say that he kicked her in the bust.”

“The neighbors had to close their doors to keep out the bullets.”

“And four in the same bed. Imagine it!”

“And Jay kept jumping through the transoms, so now they can’t rent the house at all.”

“But I don’t blame his wife, even if he did promise to sleep on the balcony.”

“She said the best abortionist was in Birmingham, but anyway they went to New York.”

“So Mrs. James was in Texas when it happened, and somehow James got it taken off the records.”

“And the chief of police took her off in a patrol wagon.”

“They met at her husband’s grave. There was some suggestion that he had his wife buried next door on purpose, and that’s the way it began.”

“So Greek!”

“But, my dear, there are limits to human conduct!”

“But not to human impulses.”

“Pompeii!”

“And nobody wants any homemade wine? I strained it through an old pair of underwear, but it seems to still have a little sediment.” In
St-Raphaël, she was thinking, the wine was sweet and warm. It clung like syrup to the roof of my mouth and glued the world together against the pressure of the heat and the dissolution of the sea.

“How is your exhibition?” they said. “We’ve seen the reproductions.”

“We love those last pictures,” they said. “Nobody has ever handled the ballet with any vitality since——”

“I thought,” said David, “that rhythm, being a purely physical exercise of the eyeball, that the waltz picture would actually give you, by leading the eye in pictorial choreography, the same sensation as following the measure with your feet.”

“Oh, Mr. Knight,” said the women, “what a wonderful idea!”

The men had been saying “Attaboy,” and “Twenty-three skidoo,” since the depression.

Along the paths of their faces the light slept in their eyes like the sails of children’s boats reflected in a pond. The rings where stones kicked from the walk sank, widened and disappeared, and the eyes were deep and quiet.

“Oh,” wailed the guests; “the world is terrible and tragic, and we can’t escape what we want.”

“Neither can we—that’s why there’s a chip off the globe teetering on our shoulders.”

“May I ask what it is?” they said.

“Oh, the secret life of man and woman—dreaming how much better we would be than we are if we were somebody else or even ourselves, and feeling that our estate has been unexploited to its fullest. I have reached the point where I can only express the inarticulate, taste food without taste, smell whiffs of the past, read statistical books, and sleep in uncomfortable positions.”

“When I revert to the allegorical school,” David went on, “my Christ will sneer at the silly people, who do not give a rap about his sad predicament, and you will see in his face that he would like a bite of their sandwiches if somebody would just loosen up his nails for a minute——”

“We shall all come to New York to see it,” they said.

“And the Roman soldiers in the foreground will also be wanting a bite of sandwich, but they will be too jacked up by the dignity of their position to ask for it.”

“When will it be shown?”

“Oh, years and years from now—when I have finished painting everything else in the world.”

On the cocktail tray, mountains of things represented something else;
canapés like goldfish, and caviar in balls, butter bearing faces and frosted glasses sweating with the burden of reflecting such a lot of things to stimulate the appetite to satiety before eating.

“You two are lucky,” they said.

“You mean that we’ve parted with segments of ourselves more easily than other people—granted that we were ever intact,” said Alabama.

“You have an easy time,” they said.

“We trained ourselves to deduce logic from experience,” Alabama said. “By the time a person has achieved years adequate for choosing a direction, the die is cast and the moment has long since passed which determined the future. We grew up founding our dreams on the infinite promise of American advertising. I
still
believe that one can learn to play the piano by mail and that mud will give you a perfect complexion.”

“Compared to the rest, you are happy.”

“I sit quietly eyeing the world, saying to myself, ‘Oh, the lucky people who can still use the word “irresistible.” ’ ”

“We couldn’t go on indefinitely being swept off our feet,” supplemented David.

“Balance,” they said, “we must all have balance. Did you find much balance in Europe?”

“You’d do better to have another drink—that’s what you came for, isn’t it?”

Mrs. McGinty had short white hair and the face of a satyr, and Jane had hair like a rock whirlpool, and Fannie’s hair was like a thick coating of dust over mahogany furniture, Veronica’s hair was dyed with a dark aisle down the centre part, Mary’s hair was country hair, like Maude’s, and Mildred’s hair was like the draperies of the “Winged Victory,” flying.

“And they said he had a platinum stomach, my dear, so that his food just dropped into a little sack when he ate. But he lived for years like that.”

“That hole in the top of his head was to blow him up by, though he pretended that he got it in the war.”

“So she cut her hair after first one painter then another, till finally she came to the cubists and camouflaged her scalp.”

“And I told Mary she wouldn’t like the hashish, but she said that she must get something out of her hard-earned disillusion, so there she is, in a permanent trance.”

“But it wasn’t the Rajah, I tell you! It was the wife of the man who owns the Galeries Lafayette,” Alabama insisted to the girl who wanted to talk about living abroad.

They rose to leave the pleasant place.

“We’ve talked you to death.”

“You must be dead with packing.”

“It’s death to a party to stay till digestion sets in.”

“I’m dead, my dear. It’s been wonderful!”

“So good-bye, and please come back to see us on your wanderings.”

“We’ll always be back to see the family.”

Always, Alabama thought, we will have to seek some perspective on ourselves, some link between ourselves and all the values more permanent than us of which we have felt the existence by placing ourselves in our father’s setting.

“We will come back.”

The cars drove away from the cement drive.

“Good-bye!”

“Good-bye!”

“I’m going to air the room a little,” said Alabama. “I wish people wouldn’t set wet glasses down on rented furniture.”

“Alabama,” said David, “if you would stop dumping ashtrays before the company has got well out of the house we would be happier.”

“It’s very expressive of myself. I just lump everything in a great heap which I have labeled ‘the past,’ and, having thus emptied this deep reservoir that was once myself, I am ready to continue.”

They sat in the pleasant gloom of late afternoon, staring at each other through the remains of the party; the silver glasses, the silver tray, the traces of many perfumes; they sat together watching the twilight flow through the calm living room that they were leaving like the clear cold current of a trout stream.

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

1991 by The Trustees Under Agreement Dated July 3, 1975, Created by Frances Scott Fitzgerald Smith.

This work was originally published in
Zelda Fitzgerald: The Collected Writings
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