Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald Read online

  “Have you ever thought that writing should just be your hobby?” I asked hopefully, selfishly—stupidly too, ’cause I already knew better. “You could do something stable for a profession. Banking, maybe, like my brother-in-law Newman.”

  Scott shook his head. “I can’t.”

  “Why can’t you? Why does it have to be writing?”

  “It’s the only thing I know how to do. I don’t have a single other talent or skill.”

  “You could learn one.”

  “I can’t. You don’t understand. I was terrible in the army. Worst aide-de-camp ever. I can’t run an office. I can’t lead men. I’m not a whiz with numbers. I’ve got no patience for administrative work—do you know what kinds of idiots head up these companies? But it doesn’t matter. None of that matters. With you there to come home to … You’ll inspire me. You do inspire me. I’ll work so much better if I’m not worrying about you.”

  Such romantic words! If the scene were being played out in a dime novel or a picture show, the heroine, heart racing, would swoon and fall into the hero’s arms. We’ll leave it to fate! she’d say as she fainted. I guess I’m not the swooning type, though, because I knew Scott was giving himself a prescription:

  I’ll work so much better if I’m not worrying about you.

  As I had already concluded, he was completely right, just not in the way he thought. He’d never give up on any of his goals—wasn’t his appearance here clear proof of how ridiculously stubborn he was?—and if he didn’t give up on any of them, he’d fail at them all.

  So I swallowed hard and said, “You know, I think our love has run its course and we both need to just move on.”

  His mouth fell open. “What are you talking about? What—because I won’t be something else, something your father would approve of, something soul-crushing and meaningless just to get a good paycheck?”

  “If you want to see it that way.” I shrugged.

  Oh, the look on his face! It was awful. I thought flames might shoot from his eyes, that his hair might catch fire, that he might burst apart on the spot.

  When he could speak again, he accused me of having led him on, of being self-centered and unwilling to sacrifice my comfortable life for the meager-but-honorable one he was offering. He pointed at me. “I never should have trusted a girl like you. You’ve obviously been lying to me all along.”

  I shrugged again and told him he should go.

  “Zelda—” he tried once more, so angry, so confused.

  I couldn’t stay there and face that; I’d break down before long and then where would we be? I got up and walked away, head up, chin out, fists and teeth clenched, until I was safely inside the house, inside my bedroom.

  There I stayed for hours, pacing, crying my eyes out, sure I’d done the wrong thing. I wanted him to come pounding at the door, insisting I elope with him—and at the same time I was terrified that he might.

  He didn’t return, though, and when my tears turned to hiccups and then to sighs, I took a bath and washed my face and got on with the business of being a heartsick, single, almost-nineteen-year-old Montgomery girl.

  * * *

  —Until October, when I came home one day to find a telegram waiting:

  MISS ZELDA SAYRE

  6 PLEASANT AVE MONTGOMERY ALA

  MY DEAR SCRIBNERS TO PUBLISH MY NOVEL MUST SEE YOU ARRIVING THURS. SCOTT.

  When I saw him, he told me how, that summer, he had quit his job, gone home to St. Paul, and put all his effort into revising the novel once more. He said that he’d sent Scribner’s the manuscript in September. The next spring, it would be published as This Side of Paradise—the book that started it all.

  7

  When Scott returned to visit in January, he took a room at an inn across town from my house. No need to explain the choice; I understood full well what he had in mind. Understood, and was as eager as he was.

  In the twilight of that wintertime afternoon, I changed out of my wool dress into the green one I’d worn for my eighteenth birthday. Beneath my dress was only one undergarment: an ivory silk chemise I’d bought earlier that day.

  Our engagement is rock solid, I told myself. Why not take this next step?

  We had decided we’d wait ’til spring to marry, so that he’d have time to finish polishing up his manuscript and a bunch of short stories he hoped to sell. The advance he’d gotten for the book wasn’t enough to live on, not by far. But he’d acquired a literary agent. Credibility. He’d written to my father to assure him that all the doors had now opened to him, that the two of us wouldn’t be living on tins of fish and beans, that he’d keep a suitable roof over our heads.

  It’ll be fine. He loves me. There’s no real risk.

  Under cover of darkness and a heavy, figure-hiding old coat and headscarf that had been Grandmother Musidora’s, I went to see him at the inn.

  He met me at the front door. “Aunt Myrna!” he said for the clerk’s benefit. “So good of you to come. I brought some supper in; we can have it in my room. Come on, I’ll bet you’re hungry.”

  I hobbled along with him, head down, face hidden. “Good of you to anticipate your poor old Aunt Myrna’s desires,” I said, and Scott coughed.

  “You’ll see,” he said as we reached the staircase. “I have such good things waiting for you.”

  The room could have been my grandmother’s, too, that’s what I thought when Scott ushered me inside. Flouncy draperies covered the windows. The chair and settee wore crocheted antimacassars. On the narrow bed was a beautiful but old-fashioned quilt. All of the furnishings were timeworn, as if they’d been bought from old estates and then given a new life here at the inn.

  Scott pulled me to him. When he kissed me, I tasted bourbon.

  “How ’bout a drink for your girl?” I said.

  “Are you nervous?”

  “No. Yes. No,” I decided. “Not nervous. Just … It’s all so momentous. I feel like you and me … we’re this new creature just hatched into the world and there’s nobody like us and we have to figure out every little thing fresh. But that’s silly, isn’t it? People’ve been fallin’ in love and doin’ the next natural thing for eons before us.”

  Scott pressed his forehead to mine. “It’s not silly at all. We are making our own path. This is momentous.” He kissed me again. “Let me pour you that drink.”

  The bourbon did what bourbon can do so well, and before long, Scott was admiring that new chemise with his eyes, then his hands, then he was moving it out of the way of places he wanted to admire with his mouth. I was admiring him as well.

  We went about it slowly, a little awkward at first, me giggling, him shushing me and then laughing, too. Bare skin against bare skin, we entwined ourselves, eventually fitting together exactly as Nature intended. When Scott buried his face in my neck and moved against me, all thought fled my mind. There was nothing but sensation, this profoundly primal feeling I hadn’t anticipated or even known could occur.

  And while that first time lasted only a few intense minutes, it proved for certain that Scott and I had something exceptional, something irresistible to us both. For good or ill, that act, those feelings, defined everything my life was going to become.

  * * *

  Scott visited again in February. Again, I went to his room eagerly and in disguise. I don’t recall us saying more than Hello before we were peeling off each other’s clothes and falling into bed.

  Afterward, I told him I thought I might be pregnant.

  “You couldn’t possibly know the minute it happens.” He laughed.

  “From before, I mean.”

  He stared at me for a moment, then said, “Well, I guess neither of us has any right to be surprised. Fatherhood, though.” He shook his head. “I didn’t imagine it would happen so easily—not that I don’t want to have children.”

  “Me, too.”

  “It just feels awfully fast.” He shifted so that he could sit up, then lit a cigarette.

  I sat up, too, pul
ling the sheet up to cover us both. “I know, it does.”

  “Too fast. There are ways of … of managing the situation. Do you know about the, er, treatments? The pills and such?”

  “Of course.”

  Tallu’s sister, Eugenia—Gene—had informed us girls on this topic, along with all sorts of other salacious things that we were forever asking her to repeat. I did also learn some important things. To prevent pregnancy, there were devices and herbal teas and special rinses—none of which were considered fail-safe, and none of which I’d ever considered trying. Like Scott, I’d thought that getting pregnant would more likely take multiple exposures. It’d taken Marjorie years, after all, and Tootsie seemed to be on that same path.

  And, Gene told us, to undo pregnancy there was another class of herbal teas and special rinses, along with a variety of pills that I’d seen advertised as providing “feminine relief.” No girl I knew had used any of these things, but we all talked about them. There were, we all agreed, certain kinds of women and certain kinds of situations that would benefit from such things. For example, really poor women who had too many children already. And of course prostitutes.

  Scott said, “So that’s what you’ll do, then.”

  “Hold on. First of all, I haven’t even seen a doctor yet—”

  “It’d be better to have a year or two to ourselves. I really need time to get established. A baby in the house … I can’t imagine being able to concentrate on anything.”

  “Well, sure, but since we’d eventually have ’em anyway—”

  “Eventually I hope to afford a nurse and a nanny and whatever other help you want. But that can’t happen until I’ve got more things written, more things sold. You understand.”

  “There’s still seven or eight months before the baby’d come,” I said, “and then when they’re first born, they pretty much sleep all the time. So that’s at least a year.”

  Scott was shaking his head. “If I can’t write, I don’t make more money, and if I don’t make more money, none of our plans will work out—and any money I’ve made already would go for the baby. I’ve paid in blood to get where I am, Zelda. You’ve got to take care of this. This isn’t what we want right now.”

  “You have paid, I know. But a whole year should be—”

  “Zelda.” He shifted to face me. His eyes were stern, but fearful, too. “I’m so close. Everything I ever wanted, it’s right there.” He stretched out his arm as if literary success dangled like an apple on a tree.

  “My father was a failure,” he went on, getting out of bed to pull on his undershorts, then pour drinks for us both. “When he lost his job in Buffalo and we had to go back to St. Paul, only the charity of Mother’s family kept us afloat. There we were, living in this grand house, acting as if we were as well-off as our rich neighbors, and it was all a farce.”

  He handed me my drink. “I can’t be almost successful. I can’t get this close to the life I’ve been witnessing, my face against the window like the Little Match Girl, and then see it dissolve like a mirage. When I get back to New York, I’ll see about some options, and we’ll get the matter taken care of. You understand, don’t you?”

  “I guess I do.”

  The solution to my still-missing monthly arrived a week later wrapped in a paper packet tucked inside an envelope. The small, pale yellow pills looked innocent as aspirin. It would be easy enough to swallow them fast and then just not think about it anymore—until the effects came, at which time it’d be too late for anything but regret. I held them in my palm for a moment, then slid them back into the packet, tucked it underneath my mattress, and went downstairs.

  At the piano, I paged through the pile of sheet music, rejecting the jazz piece I’d been working on, rejecting my father’s favored tunes like “Dixie” and “On to the Battle,” which I’d often played to get his attention and coax a smile. Then I saw “Dance of the Hours.” I put it on the stand and began to play.

  How simple everything had been that night I’d danced to this song. How easy. Nothing but laughter and the enchantment of a charming officer in his crisp dress uniform. Now everything was a tangle of hope and circumstance and connected fates.

  Scott’s happiness is my happiness, I thought. ’Til the end of time, amen.

  But … if I took the pills, if I ended a pregnancy just because it wasn’t convenient, wasn’t that the same as declaring that what we’d done was dirty and wrong? That I was no better than a whore?

  On the other hand, if I had this possible baby and our life afterward proved to be nothing but misery, he’d be resentful forever, and what kind of life would that be?

  But it wouldn’t be misery, I was sure. He was overdramatizing—

  “Zelda, for heaven’s sake,” Mama called from the library. “You needn’t pound the keys!”

  “Sorry, Mama!”

  I’d never compromised on anything important, damn it. Leaving the piano for a minute, I ran upstairs for the pills, then returned to the parlor and put the packet into the fire.

  As luck would have it, a few days later the matter resolved itself. I wrote to Scott, Things have a way of working out for us, and this is just one more sign.

  I believed it, too. Who wouldn’t have when, from about this time onward, nearly everything Scott had written in the previous year began to turn to gold?

  * * *

  “So his novel will be out soon,” Daddy said. We were in the parlor, where Mama and I had been discussing my trousseau. “Good for him, but it’s not a job. How long will it be before he can sell another, and what will you two live on in the meantime?”

  I explained that Scott had begun selling his short stories. “The Saturday Evening Post bought one called ‘Head and Shoulders’ for four hundred dollars—and they liked it so well that they paid nine hundred for two more.” When Daddy still didn’t look impressed, I said, “Add that to how much he got for his novel and it’s already as much as he’d have earned in two years at his old job. And he’s got a pile of stories already done.”

  “I don’t like it,” Daddy said. “It’s not a plan, it’s luck. And when his luck runs out—”

  A knock on the door interrupted him, and a moment later Katy came into the parlor to hand me a telegram.

  I opened it quickly and read the short message, and then I whooped! “How about this, Daddy: the Metro Company is paying two thousand five hundred dollars for movie rights to ‘Head and Shoulders’!”

  For a girl who needed irrefutable proof that her father was plain wrong in his thinking, nothing could have been better. I danced around the parlor waving the telegram before me, and didn’t care a bit that Daddy left the room in disgust.

  * * *

  Later that week, I was in my bedroom working on a story of my own when Mama came in with a small package. I was glad for the distraction; the story, which Scott had encouraged me to write, was going nowhere. I could give the most detailed examinations of my characters, but then couldn’t seem to make them do anything interesting.

  “This just came for you,” Mama said.

  Inside the plain brown paper was a short, square box, and inside that box was a hinged, velvet-covered one. I opened the lid and gasped.

  Mama said, “Lord!”

  It was a watch unlike anything I’d ever seen before. Its narrow rectangular face was set inside a perimeter of sparkling square-cut diamonds, with a band made up of diamonds laid out in an intricate, almost floral design.

  I took it out. Beneath the watch, Scott had tucked a card that read, To wear at our wedding—just a little “something new.”

  “It’s heavy!”

  “I’ll guess it’s platinum,” Mama said.

  Engraved on the back was From Scott to Zelda. I turned it over again and again, marveling at the design, the shimmer, the very fact of it.

  “Baby, do you have any idea what an extravagance this is? It had to have cost hundreds of dollars. He really ought not to spend this way; it’s irresponsible. This is a time
to save.”

  I fastened the watch onto my wrist. “I know how it seems. But he’s earning a lot now, and his book’s not even out yet. He’s making his place in the world, Mama. It’ll only get better from here.” Everything he’d promised was coming true.

  My mother sighed. She looked suddenly ancient, as if she’d aged ten years in one. Her hair had gone steely gray. Her skin had grown crêpey and was so pale—paler, even, than wintertime could explain. She didn’t seem ill, just tired and worn. I felt I could disregard anything she said because what could such an old woman know about modern love and life?

  I said, “It’s different for us, Mama. We’re not going to do things the same old ways.”

  She sighed again. “Honestly, I don’t know whether to envy your optimism or pity it.”

  I took off the watch and turned it again to see the inscription, then flipped it back to admire the diamonds. As I did, I caught sight of Daddy standing in the doorway.

  “When the novelty wears off,” he said—and I got the feeling he was referring to more than just the watch—“you can trade that for a down payment on a house.”

  8

  “Just think,” Eleanor said, the night before I was to leave home, “New York City! Did you ever imagine?”

  It was April 1, 1920; my wedding was set for April 3, one day before Easter and one week after the publication of This Side of Paradise. Eleanor and I were sitting cross-legged on my bedroom rug while I practiced how to look more sophisticated when I smoked. Along the wall were three new trunks filled with what little I’d take with me into married life: clothes and linens and shoes and books, a handful of photographs and a box of mementos, my diaries and my old doll, Alice. “Tilt your chin up a little more,” Eleanor directed.

  I did, saying, “New York’s goin’ to be grand. Scott made us a reservation at the Biltmore Hotel for our honeymoon.” I handed Eleanor the advertisement Scott had torn out of a magazine and sent to me.

  She read, “‘The Biltmore is the center of international social life in New York.’ Just the place for you, then.”