In the Faded Blue Light

By Don Donato

Dedication
for Zelda and Nathalie
— Souvenez-vous de Paris

NOTE: Presented here are the first two chapters of an eight-part novella — continuing in the fall issue.

Chapter I.

 No personality as strong as Zelda’s could go without getting criticisms and as you say she is not above approach [sic]. I’ve always known that. Any girl who gets stewed in public, who frankly enjoys and tells shocking stories, who smokes constantly and makes the remark that she has ‘kissed thousands of men and intends to kiss thousands more,’ cannot be considered beyond reproach even if above it. But Isabelle I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity and her flaming self respect and its [sic] these things I’d believe in even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn’t all that she should be.

But of course the real reason, Isabelle, is that I love her and that’s the beginning and the end of everything. You’re still a Catholic but Zelda’s the only God I have left now.

[F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1920]

Note: All excerpts from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s letters appear as they were written. Many of the errors are not annotated with [sic].

It was late in the morning when I needed to change trains in California on my way to a wayward piece of Los Angeles. I was bound for an appreciating tract of unreal estate known as Hollywood, a shining lure for believers in far-flung dreams, a district of hope for talentless “would be” actors and washed-up novelists. It always seemed fitting that a place of such tenuous promise should be situated in California, a strip of land teetering on a faulty line between gaiety and annihilation. A place where, for nearly a century, the wide-eyed have brought their fantasies and well-concealed desperation. 

I had taken a seat on a hard-wooden bench situated under the station’s eves, successfully hidden from the boorish California sun. A weedy man with a swarthy complexion covering tight, leathery skin, sitting close-by, looked up and caught my indolent stare.

“You must be from the East,” he said. “You’re from the East, right? I can tell by the lack of color in your face.”

He proceeded to introduce himself, and I feared he was about to try and sell me one of those parched, sand covered lots somewhere far from civilization for the purpose of bringing vitality to the city bound. I pretended he was speaking to someone else and reached for my newspaper. He walked toward me and took the adjacent seat. I held the paper in both hands to discourage any intention he might have had of shaking my hand.

“Paul Paulson’s the name. You new in these parts?”

It wasn’t my first trip to Hollywood. Ten years ago, I had accepted an offer from a producer to take up residence in a studio cottage to write about the “Jazz Age.”  Zelda, my wife, and I left Paris, and I attempted, as commissioned, to create a “flapper comedy.” I was, indeed, a product of the Jazz Age, perhaps, as some have said, in gauche praise or hardened accusation, that I created it. Even so, I don’t think I could have attempted to recapture such a time without Zelda. She was a flapper to her very depth.

“Yes,” I lied to the prune of a man sitting next to me. “I’m en route to a plot of desert land I purchased a while ago for the purpose of improving my faded appearance and overall health.”

“You missed it you know,” he replied.

I looked at him blankly.

“The train, you missed it.”

I pulled my watch from my vest pocket.

“It’s only 2:25. I’m waiting for the 2:40.” I put the timepiece to my ear.

“There’s nothing wrong with your watch.  You missed it.”

My watch was ticking. That brown stick of a man was right. I missed it. Not all the hope the world has ever known would bring it back. He sat as close to me now as the painted les femmes who had strolled passed me on the Boulevard du Montparnasse. Their bodies glowing proper and their desire spilling out through closed-lip smiles. In the soft blue light of a new Paris evening I had sat at a table set outside the café Le Select. Gatsby, my latest character, recently had left me. He was about to make his way in the world. I waited to hear what others would think of him. I have always envied him. His life relived each and every time someone finds him on a dusty, bookseller’s shelf. Certainly, each time his life would end in tragedy. No matter. He would try again and again. 

“Is there another train?” I shouted at the man.

“There’s always another train, but the one you’re waiting for is gone. It came early.”

I thought I heard the train coming. I rushed to the precipice of the platform and looked back down the track as far as I could.  Nothing was there. I could have sworn I heard it. The man yelled to me,” It doesn’t come from that direction.” When I turned toward the pedantic son of a bitch to tell him to mind his own business, I found him engrossed in my newspaper. I resolved to remain standing at the platform’s edge, waiting, looking back down the tracks.

After a while, the tracks began to rattle, and the 3:10, coming from the other direction, started to come into view. It approached the station, slowly but steadily. Its slowing wheels squealed against the metal rails like an overweight hog. The engine blasted air from its undercarriage, and my suit jacket blew open. An older woman held her hat down and shielded her face. The wind burst again. I bent my head down to keep the blown dust out of my eyes. There was an enigmatic clang, and the beast lumbered to a stop.

I feigned tying my shoe and watched the would-be land salesman board. I entered a car several away from him with my spirit lagging pitifully behind. It was in Hollywood where I hoped to turn things around. The money was good, 1,000 dollars a week for creating screenplays, a form of writing similar to the novel minus meaning, feeling, and thought.  Nevertheless, it afforded enough to keep Zelda in Asheville Psychiatric Hospital, and, allowed me to devote time to writing seriously again. I had an idea for a new novel. But, in spite of all this, each day my mood turned grayer and darker. Zelda weighed heavily on me. At the end of each day, the light fading slowly and sweetly with invitation, Zelda’s voice jingled again in the streets of Paris.

“Scott, Scott, let’s have a drink here. We’ve never been. Come on. Maybe someone will recognize us. Come on. We’ll drive them all crazy. We’ll kiss and carry on like they have never seen, not even in Paris. Come on, it’ll be fun.” It was hard to refuse Zelda. Her voice thrilled with an excitement which promised so much.

“Inside or out?” I replied. 

Her eyes widened, and I felt her spirit leap. I abandoned any notion of sinking into a few drinks, into a placid place, waiting and wondering if my telegram reached Max soon enough.  I wanted to change the proposed title for my new novel, which, at that moment, sat perilously at the edge of a no-nonsense printing press. I was crazy about my new title, Under the Red, White, and Blue. Max was satisfied with calling it The Great Gatsby. It never made any sense to me. There’s no emphasis, even ironically, on Gatsby’s greatness or lack of it. My new title told the story. That’s what it’s about: lost dreams in the midst of such hopeless hope. Zelda grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the entrance of the café.

“Outside, of course,” she answered, “much more scandalous. Maybe we’ll make the US papers, and Max’ll send you another letter.”

“Max has my, our, best interest, always,” I blurted out as we rushed off the street into the gathering of tables.

“Oh, he never has any fun, so he doesn’t want anyone to have any. Who cares what people think of us. What you write sells books, not who you are. Right? Right?”

“People want to believe what they read. Who can believe a drunk with an out-of-control wife?”

“Out of control? Who’s out of control?” She whipped her head toward me, and without pause, quickly redirected it to the waiter watching us from beneath the awning.

“Monsieur,” she said, her voice rose a tone. “Monsieur.”  The waiter stepped out onto the street into the full dimness and warmth of the early Paris evening. A few patrons turned their heads. Some faces struck still. A woman, dressed fine and rich, turned to the gentleman sitting next to her, and whispered in his ear. He looked up, and he caught my stare.

“Monsieur.” Zelda’s words now shrill. “Monsieur, a table for two. Mr. Fitzgerald and I prefer the outside. S’il vous plait.”

The waiter nodded. We followed him. The gaiety of the City’s faded blue light, promising a never-ending life of playful glances and soft laughter, peeked in as we made our way under the awning, passing among the circle-shaped tabletops. A man with a white walking cane dangling from his table, jerked his head up. His expression was tight. He looked down, adjusting the balance of his cane as he stared at its imaginary teeter. He held his head in a strict focus away from my direction. He waved to the waiter, who promptly brought his check.   

Zelda paid no attention to the uneasiness which had begun to ripple around us.

“I’ m sorry, I never, I just never…,” Zelda repeated over and over, her Alabama drawl driving and twisting each word as we bumped and ricocheted our way through the narrow table passages. Embarrassment on empathetic faces brought my eyes down. We gathered momentum as we passed between tables. With a sudden stop, Zelda landed in a chair, bounced up, and settled down with her body slightly quivering.

“I don’t care. Let’s have a few drinks and make love in public,” she said, her aging face locked stolidly before my eyes. At seventeen her beauty caused contriving, young men to meet her “unexpectedly” wherever they expected her to be. Their only wish was to share a hopeful word or two with her. She rarely touched a door or moved a chair.  She rewarded her would-be suitors with a sweet smile, followed by a glance from long-lashed eyes which she quickly hid behind a fan of Southern charm.

I stepped quicker and began to stumble. With a reckless and defeated heave, I fell into a seat next to everything that kept a fire burning somewhere inside me. I hadn’t yet regained my balance, when Zelda grabbed the lapel of my coat. “Kiss me wildly,” she said. I pulled her closer and put my hand on her knee. She lay her hand on mine and moved it inward and higher. The eyes of two courtly women darted back and forth from each other to the unfolding scandal with a syncopated rhythm of the Jazz Age. Others shrank into open-mouthed children while they pretended not to notice.

 I grasped her face, holding it motionless. The evening light fell silent to the ambient hum of increasing conversation. For a moment, beneath the titillation, beyond the boundaries of  propriety imposed by self-protective righteousness, we were what the world wanted most: the excitement of the forbidden; a glimpse of hope in the mundane; perhaps a morsel of a lost memory; and, in all its non-yielding desperation, the reality of fantasy.

 I took a seat by a window, settled in, and the train began to crawl away from the platform. The speed picked up and I watched through the window the occasional houses, made miniature by acres of buffering California farmland, pass-by at ever increasing speed. A vineyard came into sight, then quickly receded, dragging my eyes along until it disappeared. The snarled vines remained in my mind and reached so deep that my body tingled and my eyes filled. I wanted to jump out and run back and follow those vines back to where I first saw them on the train going to Lyon from Paris.

On that day I had travelled to Lyon, I was to be accompanied by a fellow whom I had met a few days before in a bar in Paris. He was a writer, but he hadn’t published much at that time. I had read a few of his stories which appeared in some European magazines, and I could see he had great talent. He was a well-built man, rather tall with a sturdy body and flaring ears. His unbuttoned vest matched his woolen sports-jacket and his white button-down shirt was wrinkled and its collar splayed open revealing chest hair.

He spoke to everyone in a low tone while scrutinizing their faces. I always wondered what he was looking for. His eyes exuded a confidence bordering on conceit that promised that whatever he found was assuredly an unspoken object of criticism. 

He insisted I call him Ernest. He hated Ernie. In all truth I hated it as well. It had a way of grinding him into the top layer of the earth’s soil where the masses spent their lives — lost and unaware.  For reasons still unknown to me, save the interpersonal tightness induced by the better part of a bottle of Beaune, Ernest consented to come with me to Lyon to pick up my car. It had broken down when Zelda, I and Scotty, our daughter, had attempted to drive to Paris from Antibes. We continued our trip to Paris by train and had to leave the car in Lyon for repairs.

After drinking the better part of the night away, Ernest and I had agreed to meet at the station a few days later and take the early train to Lyon. Through no fault of my own, I missed that train. Ernest went to Lyon, as planned. I arrived on a later train. He had called my apartment several times while waiting for me at the station. He had spoken to my housekeeper. I had told her to tell him I wasn’t at home.

When I reached Lyon, I went directly to the hotel bar to settle what was left of my nerves. Ernest walked in.

“Where the hell you been? I checked every hotel bar in Lyon,” he said.

“I must apologize. The time got away from me, and I missed the train. I was going to come looking for you, but I wanted a drink first.”

Ernest stood next to me at the bar. “And second, and third, and… which one is this?”

“Barkeep, un pour mon ami.” I turned to Ernest. “Bourbon or are you drinking the hard stuff?”

“I never touch absinth outside of Paris. Can’t trust it anywhere else.”

“Okay, bourbon it is.” The bartender brought a bottle and filled the shot to the brim.

“Scott, what happened? Were you tight and fell asleep somewhere?”

“Sleep. I wish I could sleep once in a while.” I pulled a vial from my coat pocket. “I need this stuff to maybe get some sleep.”

Ernest brought the glass carefully to his lips.

“I was working,” I said, “a deadline for a story.” 

Ernest lowered the empty glass to the bar, his fingers still wrapped around it. He barked at the bartender, “Another bourbon.”

He looked at me. “Are you a reporter now?”

He didn’t believe my story, and it was just that, a story, fiction, the stuff which lives in my head like so many orphans. This wayward child wound up in Ernest’s incredibility. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him the truth. I couldn’t tell him that it was Zelda, who was unraveling like an overwound clock. She wouldn’t settle down. She kept throwing things, whining, crying, screaming. 

A few months prior, in the south of France, she had some screaming episodes when she was drunk, but I thought it came from her insatiable need for attention. I was writing day and night then. Some sober talk eventually calmed her, but this time she wouldn’t listen to me. I grabbed her. She broke free and tried to run out. I caught up with her at the door.  I couldn’t trust to leave her alone with the housekeeper. I called this doctor I had met in Le Select a few nights before. He said if I ever needed anything…. He gave Zelda an injection of morphine. It put her to sleep. That was the first time she needed the morphine to bring her back. It soon became a regular affair.

Ernest had not yet met Zelda, and I hadn’t spoken much about her. He struck me as a serious writer. I knew his work, and it was the real thing. I wanted to know him better before explaining the terrible strain my marriage had become. Zelda was restless. She missed the constant swirl of party-filled nights we spent in New York. Like all flappers she lived in a world which danced the Charleston perpetually.

At that time, when I first met Ernest, Zelda and I were living in Paris, an extraordinary timeless place where characters lingered on every corner, and night-lit cafés offered a home for the light-hearted while giving refuge to the lifeless.  It was a time when Zelda’s words still sparkled, and her voice vibrated with thrilling alarm created by the flame burning inside her. She lived life as a fairytale, a series of frivolous adventures in a world which allowed her to romp like a child in an amusement park, her beauty, her only ticket of admission. At seventeen she was the most beautiful woman I had ever known, but time had taken hold. What was once her carte blanche to life, at age twenty-six had begun to wane. Her reality beginning to trail listlessly behind.

 We found each other at an early age when I was a young Army officer stationed in Montgomery, Alabama. She was the last of a type known as the Southern belle: a rich, young beauty who manipulated the whims and fantasies of infatuated young men. I was no exception.

 The boys at Camp Sheridan were invited to a country club dance in Montgomery. The War was in full swing in Europe and we waited for our orders to come through. We knew where we were going. There were rumors about the Argonne Forest in France.

One officer, who had returned from the front, spent some time on the base before he could hitch a ride back to one of those farm states, Iowa or Idaho. He wanted to spend the rest of his life there on a small farm his father had left him. He had lost his right arm and several fingers from his left. In some deep part of me, I knew why he wanted to go back to that farm.  What he had lost in France was no matter. He wanted to find the parts of himself he had left in the rows of plowed soil and in the air that smelled of freshly turned earth.  He wanted only again to loosen familiar ground and find the dreams buried by a young boy. He took mess with the enlisted men. He had lost his taste for privilege.  As we walked together one day, he told a bunch of us, “When men die, they all die equally.”

We reached the entrance of the mess hall, and the group followed the wounded man in. I trailed behind and watched them disappear into the building. I walked a little closer and stopped a fair distance from the door. My orders were sitting on some General’s desk waiting for his signature to send me into, perhaps, the last days of my life. I began to sweat, and my hands trembled. I pushed and pulled on my damp shirt. I took a step back and then another and another. I saw the door open and someone was waving to me to come. I turned away. It wasn’t death I feared. It was the idea that all men die equally which haunted me. I had to re-write my novel and get it published. I headed to the officers’ dining club.

During my free time on the weekends I had written enough pages of some disjointed ramblings to convince myself I had a novel. I called it the Romantic Egoist and sent it to Scribner Publishing. I had made the contact through a friend who knew the editor, Max Perkins. He liked the idea, but he had objections and suggestions that needed to be made if I ever had any chance of publication. I had written for the Tiger and the Nassau Review at Princeton, but Perkins wanted something different. He wanted it all to make some deeper sense. The story was inspired by my life as a student at Princeton. How much sense could I make of that?

The War ended, and I was discharged. I wanted nothing more than to have what I had written, what I thought was a novel, published. I went back to Minnesota to try to find out what Perkins was talking about. Something was different there in the Mid-west. It was something the East had discarded or, perhaps ignored, and through no fault of its own, died of neglect.

St. Paul hadn’t changed much. The same barber shop I went to as a young boy was still in operation, and I suspected some of my locks could be found stuck in a floor crack. On the edge of town stood the wheat fields, golden and swaying in the wind, still waiting for harvest since the time I last had seen them as a much younger man.

 At Princeton I had belonged to the Cottage Club, a college fraternity of sorts. The only thing we ever grew was ambition. I associated with a group on campus known as the writers, the literary set. Edmund Wilson had the most promise. We called him “Bunny.”

“You still working on that play for the Triangle Club, Scott? Bunny said one day as we walked up Nassau street on our way to the Yankee Doodle Tap Room.

“Yep. What are you working on these days, the Great American Novel? You got the best shot you know.”

“Always with your head in the clouds, Scott. Maybe someday you’ll write that novel. It will catapult your name to the lips of every literature professor in every University in America, even Princeton. On second thought, maybe you should wait until Professor Gauss is dead. He might remember you.”

Secretly, I dreamed of nothing less. I knew I was a good writer back then, not as good as Bunny, but good, and I got better. It’s like I told Zelda many years later, “I’m a professional writer. You are not. Writers like me are one in ten million.” However, neither I nor Bunny ever wrote that Great American Novel. Maybe Bunny was right, I should keep my head out of the clouds, but I never could. It was there in the haze of the seemingly unreachable I wrote four novels and married the belle of my dreams.

 It was in Minnesota, while working on my first novel, in the frozen ground I felt unyielding beneath my feet, I became aware of what I had learned at Princeton. Success in America had become the compromise of ideals, rather than its progeny. I had come to realize that my generation had entered a time in which wealth supplanted the self, and righteousness had given way to opportunism. No character suffered more from this realization, five years later, than Jay Gatsby. By that time, hope had become the pre-occupation of the misinformed, and dreams the fertile ground for the cynical.

 I re-wrote my novel. The title changed to This Side of Paradise, and Scribner published it. It was in the time when excitement exuded from my overwhelming dreams, when disjointed feelings crashed brutishly onto blank pages. It was the time when my rarified reality, honed and nurtured in the sweet field of my homegrown truths, started to take root.   

  I had never been to a country club and the sound of it held me captive. The thick crop of its influential harvest held a sway that lifted me into the warm, close air puffed from half-lit, dollar cigars. I had written to a friend at Princeton who had lived in Alabama in the cushion of soft money. He had given me the names of a few of the “fastest” debutantes in Montgomery. As is often the case with young college men, the purported looseness of female prospects is surely more the imaginary and misguided information of virgin liars. As a consequence, my mind and fantasies remained opened.

 It was that night that I first saw Zelda. She was walking across the dance floor arm-in-arm with two female partners, who by all indications, provided more than moral support. She was the most beautiful girl of whitish-pink skin. Her auburn hair was bobbed with enough audacity to send it into large curls, bouncing recklessly. Every eye was on her. The men moved in anticipation to where she was going, and the women fanned themselves with quick flutters and bustled aimlessly. 

She had my full attention. A young sergeant I had known on the post nudged me. He had poked around the town on a few weekends, and he had heard a few things, especially about who was who in Montgomery. I dropped my stare to just catch him in the corner of my eye.

“She’s the brass ring around here, they tell me”, he said. “Every guy in Montgomery wants to marry her. She’s old Alabama money. She even lives on a street named for her family. You’re out of your league here Lieutenant.”

“Out of my league?” I heard myself repeating the words rushing from inside me. My eyes never left her.

“Lieutenant, forget it… unless you got some money that I don’t know about. If you do, then you still owe me two bucks from that card game you should have stayed out of last week.”

My eyes never moved. Her curls bounced like words which no one could ever write. Each loose winding of hair jumped to tell a story propelled by boundless energy and full of endless promises.

“What else do you know about her?” I said to the Sergeant.

“Not much, but there’s s girl I met here before who probably can tell you more. Her last name is Bankhead. I can’t remember her first name. It sounds like Matilda or something… Tallulah, that’s it.” The Sergeant glanced around the room, “There she is.”

He raised his head in her direction. “Tallulah, Tallulah,” he said in a voice loud enough to carry above the discordant chatter in the room. He waved her over.

A young woman with wavy brown hair extending to her shoulders appeared at his side.

“Well, hello, again Sergeant,” I heard from a husky voice. She spoke and moved with the subtle swing of the country club type. Her words had a sureness which came from a perpetual source of gratuitous wealth. 

“You seem to be a man with something on his mind,” she said, scrutinizing the Sergeant. “I like that kind of man. What can I do for you? … Careful, I’ve heard it all before… and tried most of it.”

My eyes were still locked on the tipsy, curled-hair debutante.

“The Lieutenant here wants to know more about her,” the Sergeant said to Tallulah, giving a quick nod toward the girl of my focus.

I felt Tallulah’s eyes fall on me. I never turned my head.

“Nice to meet you,” I murmured, “I’m Scott. I, I just…..”

“Oh her,” Tallulah said, “Booze, cigarettes and boys. And not necessarily in that order.”

Zelda still wandered about flanked by her supporters. She was returning smiles to passing men, some of whom I presumed to be suitors and others whose time had come and gone. Tallulah, her face falling motionless, paused and again directed her eyes to Zelda. Her voice fell almost to a whisper, “she’s always talking about making it big somewhere. She’s a dancer you know.”

“Lieutenant, I’m going to cruise around. I’ll catch you later,” the Sergeant said.

I turned to Tallulah. She was quite attractive. She glowed with a polish afforded only to those who commit themselves to the never-ending care demanded by social standing and made possible by the servitude of purposeless money. I directed my eyes back to Zelda.

“What’s her name?” I asked.

Of all the questions I wished to ask, this was the only one which reached my lips. The others I answered for myself in the way children create reality from far-flung fantasy.

“Why don’t you ask her yourself, Lieutenant?”

Tallulah strolled slowly toward the three women. When she reached the trio, a neat, lanky fellow with gray shoes with white wingtips approached the tipsy, pinkish debutante. His suit was a checkered affair. I was sure I had seen one just like it in one of those men magazines I was forced to read while waiting to get my hair cut. His trousers sported creases with the sharpness of a pretension matched only by his good manners. He took Zelda’s hand, kissed it. He then bowed slightly, acknowledging the flanking ladies-in-waiting. Zelda grazed his cheek with the back of her hand without a word. He uttered something. She shook her head and smiled and turned toward Tallulah, whose back was toward me. She pointed at me over her shoulder. Zelda lifted her eyes in my direction. I stared down at the floor. When I looked up, my mind fumbled. What had seemed so distant, came nearer.  Unassisted, she floated toward me, her path unwavering, her momentum unstoppable. She washed over me like a moonlit tide making its way farther and farther ashore. Her curls chattered without pause as she moved, and, as she came closer, I was struck by the lack of flaws in her skin, unblemished and undisturbed by ordinary life. Her face was composed of a calm beauty, an extraordinary simplicity and concert found in art born from subtle genius.

  She rested within a breath’s warmth of me. I wanted to speak, but my words hardened in my mouth. Without hesitation the great Lieutenant Scott Fitzgerald moved me aside and stepped forward. The smell of the leather of his boots, the secure cinch of the belt from his waist coat, and the proud protrusion of the brim of his peaked cap gave him all the confidence I envied. His words fell from my mouth.

“Scott Fitzgerald. Lieutenant Scott Fitzgerald. The pleasure is all mine.”

His smile continued speaking. It had all the invitation of a million words. His riveted eyes glistened. They were eyes which said you excite me like someone I have treasured from the time I first had met you. I wanted to take her in and show her how much he could offer her. The young belle’s eyes danced around the room with all the pretense of searching for better prospects. She abruptly turned in my direction, paused, and her voice rose, unnaturally, as if startled by an unexpected burst from an awakened star. Clearly, simply and forever, she said, “I’m Zelda.”

Not a muscle in my body stirred. I observed her every movement, looking for any hint of what she was thinking. I stood more erect. Her nearness shot through me. I rose higher and higher. The well-healed men and the polished women, scattered about the room, blended with each other, sweeping me into the mix. I knew for the first time how it felt to be a man of the world. The air grew still around me, and nothing moved but time.  It wound itself back. The house in which I had grown up in Minnesota crumbled into a ghastly phantasm. My parents no longer had claim to me. The man made of golden images and flawless manners, the man who had lived in the mind of a young boy, broke out with unprecedented vigor. In that moment I was certain that the truths of my promises had so materialized that they existed outside of me. The girl with pink skin and audacious hair, who now stood so close, became forever part of the rock formed from igneous dreams.

 I fumbled to keep her engaged.

“I heard you want to be a dancer,” I said.

She gave me a look. She appeared puzzled.

“I am a dancer,” she replied.

“I just meant a very successful one, on the stage as a big star someday.”

“New York, first,” she said. It knocked me back. It was the way she said it. It was familiar and unmistakable. It came from someone too large for the world which contained her. 

“The Russian ballet, of course, is the best, but New York and Europe will let me show my talent.”    

I had loved a socialite once before. She was a woman of my station, but she saw only a blurry-eyed Princeton student. Her rank and money had numbed her to the reality of belief. “Rich girls don’t marry poor boys,” she had told me.

I have come to realize that in fields of plenty, hope withers. The rich have no need for what might be… but, the girl who stumbled, whose hair curled in search of something beyond her reach, stepped upon fairy wings to find her footing. With each uncertain step she took, she hammered squarely the truth in a way which I had discovered so innocently many years ago hiding in the dust of a genie’s lamp.   

The band began to play a waltz. It was late, and I suspected this was perhaps the last waltz.

“Would you like to dance,” I said.

“My card is exceptionally full this evening. I’m sorry, but I’m promised to others.”

“Think of it as a contribution to the war effort,” I interjected. I struggled to keep my smile, which threatened to break in to a thousand pieces.  “I’m going overseas soon,” I added.

She looked at me a for a moment and a smile escaped to her lips.

“Never let it be said that I didn’t do my part to defeat the Kaiser,” she replied.

She opened her arms, and we touched. She was softer than I remembered women to be. Her body moved to the rhythm of the music, but, somewhere beneath that, in those moments of stillness, she held on tightly like a little girl. It was in those moments, I pressed her closer and held her in a way, I was sure, she had never known.  

The music stopped.

“I want to see you again,” I said

“I’ll be here next Saturday afternoon. I like to swim. Come back then, you will be my guest,” she said.

“It’s a date, next Saturday.”

She started to walk away, stopped, and put her hand near her mouth to shield her words.

“Bring some gin,” she added.

I watched her walk away.

“Lieutenant,” I heard someone say. It was the Sergeant approaching quickly from my flank. “Do you think it would be okay if I took a look at that list you got?”

 I had forgotten about it. Every guy in camp wanted a peek at it. I kept it hidden. It was a perquisite meant for those for whom untoward behavior could compensate for stunted dreams. The thought of going to the War, unfortunately, had made everyone a candidate, so I kept the sought-after list secure on my person at all times.

 I took the list from my breast pocket and handed it to the Sergeant. My eyes never left Zelda as she walked toward the door. The Sergeant turned to see what occupied my attention. He looked down sharply and perused the list.

“Lieutenant, she ain’t on it.”

“Who,” I said, turning my head just slightly in his direction.

The Sergeant lifted his eyebrows in Zelda’s direction.

“I know that,” I said.

“Are you going to see her again?”

There was never anything again that I was ever so sure of.  It no longer mattered that I was going to war. Perhaps it would all come to an end in the mud of France with nothing more ahead but the hazy fog of the Argonne Forest, but, on that night, in the dry breezes of the unassuming South, my past had begun in the way I had always known it would.   

“I think this one girl, Amanda Greggs, is here,” Sarge said, smiling a little. “You’re not going to pull rank on me, are you, Lieutenant? “

“No, no old man, she’s all yours.” The Sergeant started to walk away. He turned and looked back at me.

“I would hate to see a good list like this go to waste,” he said.

“Waste? No. It told me everything I needed to know.” What I didn’t know was that it told me only what I had hoped.

A few years later, in the days in Paris, when Zelda practiced her ballet relentlessly, I couldn’t help but think of that day in Montgomery when she floated to me. In Paris, alone in her room and at Mdm. Egorova’s studio, she twisted and strained, drifting farther from me, deeper and deeper into herself. She had new loves: ballet, Madame Egorova, and a prima ballerina, whom, at first, I knew only as “a dancer from the studio.” Later I learned her name was Lucienne. She had become Zelda’s new friend, frequenting cafés together afterhours.

I spent my nights at the Ritz bar, talking to persons I hardly knew. Some of them had heard of me, and some I had to inform. The gin gave me the courage to look them in the eyes and tell them with all the conviction of carnival barker that I was a writer, a real one, a novelist. “I wrote This Side of Paradise,” I would say. “I’m sure you’ve heard of it. Did you read it? Well, you must. I finished my third a few years ago. It’s called The Great Gatsby.  Now if you have read that one, I’ll buy you a drink.” 

I hardly ever had to buy that drink. Maybe Max was right. Maybe I should have developed Gatsby’s character more. No one knew who he was, but I knew who he was. In all truth, he really wasn’t anyone, not anyone at all.  He was a guy who bought drinks for people he didn’t even know.

On one of those lonely nights, a couple, dressed American, pushed up against the bar to my right. They wore jewelry, too much of it. His cuff links had initials. Her pearls dangled below her breasts as a testament to a string of martyred oysters. It was a time of seemingly forever, burgeoning wealth in America.

The gentleman stood back away from his bill lying on the bar. He cocked his head, tensed his face, and held his lips in a frown, as if protesting, with the upmost constraint, the sheer banality and personal intrusion of having to sign his name.  She sipped her coffee, legs crossed, her upper body straight and stiff. Their every movement had the theatrics of poorly scripted gentility and all the telltale crispness of new money. They were the new America. They stood for nothing, and they asked for everything. I moved closer and stood next to them.

It was a rare evening. The prolific Ernest Hemingway graced our presence with Gerald Murphy trailing behind him. Gerald was a man with no career, and he had everything to show for it. His fortune grew like wheat in the old lush fields of family businesses and was cultivated by personal indifference to it.

Ernest, dressed like a beggar, no jacket, no tie, his shirt sleeves rolled to his forearms, put his hand on my shoulder. I turned around. I took a step toward Gerald, and Hemingway’s hand lifted off me. There was enough talk about us. I loved the man, but not in that way. For some reason, a rumor started that Ernest and I were fairies. This firestorm of conjecture was started by McAlmon, a fag himself. Rumors, as rumors go, are usually at least half true. 

Gerald stood next to me at the bar.

“Hello, old man, how’s it going? It’s been a while,” Gerald said. “You and Zelda are in the papers quite a bit these days.”

“Don’t believe everything you read,” I said.

Ernest, now standing on the other side of me, leaned forward, like I was some object of inconsequence, and looked at Gerald.

“That’s true, my friend, good advice. Have you read his latest, The Great Gatsby?”

“It was really quite good, Scott,” Gerald said, his voice oscillating in frequencies and short pauses like a mother looking at her child’s penciled drawings.

“Leave him out of this,” I said, staring straight ahead at the bottles behind the bar.

“Who?” Gerald said.

“Gatsby,” I replied.

There was a momentary silence that rumbled through. I took down the glass of gin, sitting in front of me. The room was quiet. Ernest and Gerald faded away. The gin had done its job, and I felt numb to what the world wanted me to be – nothing, nothing at all.

Ernest broke the silence. “Scott, I heard you were looking for me. What did you want to see me about?”

“Barkeep,” I said, “another glass of gin.”

“Mr. Fitzgerald, another glass, sir?”

Gerald spoke up, getting the bartender’s attention. “He doesn’t need another glass.”  

The young man behind the bar looked at me with a wide-eyed stare.

“The man’s right,” I said to the young barkeep. His eyes relaxed, but for only a moment. “Bring me the god damn bottle.”

 “Very generous of you, old sport,” Ernest said. “Did I get that right? I liked the way Gatsby called his friend and enemies ‘old sport.’”

I turned to Ernest, dropped my eyes. My stare penetrated through my eyebrows. “I told you, leave him out of this.”

“Sorry about that old sp…man.”

Gerald ordered a beer. The bartender brought a glass for Ernest, and he put the bottle of gin between us. I poured myself a drink, grabbed the bottle, and put it on the other side of me.

“So, what do you want to see me about?” Ernest asked.

“Just to have a drink together. I can’t seem to write much these days. Some magazine stuff, that’s about it. And there’s another thing. No one I have asked knows where you live. Even Gerald doesn’t know where your new apartment is.” I turned and looked at Gerald. He lifted his beer and took a long, small sip, and then rested the glass back on the bar, never facing me. I made a half-turn toward Ernest and leaned against the bar. I held the gin in my hand.

“Bartender,” Ernest said. The young man turned his head. Ernest waved him over.

“Do you have any absinth?” he whispered.

“No sir, we aren’t allowed to serve it here in the Hotel. Management doesn’t want that bunch coming in here.”

“Son, they’re already here. Why don’t you ask who ever runs this joint if they might have a little private stock of it somewhere for a couple of special guests.”

“Yes, Mr. Hemingway. I’ll ask, sir.”

Ernest stepped back and grasped the edge of the bar with both hands.

“Scott, Hadley and I want to keep this place we’re in. You come around at all hours, tight, and people start to complain, and…

I faced the bar and poured the gin down my throat.

Chapter II.

Dear Scott:

… you say that you have been thinking of the past… so have I.

There was:

The strangeness and excitement of New York, of reporters and furry smothered hotel lobbies, the brightness of the sun on the window panes and the prickly dust of late spring: the impressiveness of the Fowlers and much tea-dancing and my eccentric behavior at Princeton. There were Townsend’s blue eyes and Ludlow’s rubbers and a trunk that exuded sachet and the marshmallow odor of the Biltmore. There were always Lud[l]ow and Townsend and Alex and Bill Mackey and you and me. We did not like women and we were happy. There was Georges apartment and his absinth cock-tails [sic] and Ruth Findleys [sic] gold hair in his comb, and visits to the ‘Smart Set’ and ‘Vanity Fair’ – a colligate [sic] literary world puffed into wide proportions by the New York papers. There were flowers and night clubs … and went to John Williams parties where there were actresses who spoke French when they were drunk… I was romanticly [sic] attached to Townsend and he went to Tahatii [sic] – there were your episodes of Gene Bankhead and Miriam…

[Zelda Fitzgerald, 1930]

Zelda and I lived in New York City for a while after we were married. It was a constant swirl: carefree guys I had known at Princeton, women whose intentions were poured into sleek dresses, uptown bars soaked with money from burgeoning post-war careers, and parties given by anyone who wanted to dress up his social standing by inviting a known author and his unpredictable wife. My first novel was selling, and the “slicks” bought a few of my stories. The money came in and lay in my pocket, the inside one of my sport-coat, like the calling card of a gentleman.

Harold Ober, my agent, had called me to a meeting at his office. He had great news. The Saturday Evening Post wanted more of my stories.

“Scott, have a seat. You’re going to love this. They want three more stories at double their last rate.”

Harold was looking at me hard in the eyes. It was the money that dragged a smile out of the pit of my stomach.

“Start writing more of the kind of stuff they’re looking for. The easy read, short stories. That’s what I can sell. It doesn’t matter how long it is, but no novel stuff, something that can be serialized in a few issues.”

The room was pale. The walls a wan blue. Harold sat behind a wooden desk covered with manuscripts from never-to-be heard of writers and a white porcelain coffee cup with a brown stain circling inside near the rim. A waist high radiator, sitting against a wall in the corner, shooshed steam from a tiny appendage. Harold had a habit of leaning back, tilting his chair with his hands grasped together behind his head. His eyes pierced through my silent stare.

“You working on that novel? What is it called?” he asked.

“The Beautiful and Damned, so far, anyway. I want to finish it, Harold, but I need the money. I’ll start on the Post’s stories.”

The radiator hissed, and I took a drag on the cigarette I held between my fingers. Harold sprung forward, launched by the tension of the twisted chair springs. He spoke as he flew back into his reality.

“Great, Scott. How’s Zelda?”

“Restless.”

“In New York?”

I glanced at the blank walls, no pictures, just some peeling paint above the radiator. The lower half of the solitary window to my left was obscured by the water running in narrow, helpless rivers down onto the sill. I crossed my legs, leaned forward, and put my cigarette out in the ashtray on the desk.

“The Beautiful and Damned, what do you think of the title, Harold? Will it sell?”

“I don’t know. What does Max think?”

“What do you think, Harold? Do you think the beautiful can ever be damned?”

“I’m not following you, Scott.”

“We all live in an endless eddy, Harold, forever swirling downward. We reach out from the dizzying whirl, and grasp nothing. Where once stood our imagination, there exists only its mangled images. The beautiful turns wretched, and we watch helplessly with the eyes of the damned.”

“We live in a what? I could have sworn you were sober when you walked in here. If this is some kind of writing thing, ask Max”

“Don’t you realize we are headed for a dreadful disorder of what was to be. What started on firm rock, now wobbles and teeters. It can’t last, Harold. She tries to destroy me, I try to destroy her, but all we will ever destroy is us. The beautiful are always damned.”  

“Look, Scott, you’ve been working pretty hard lately. Maybe you just need to give her some attention. That’s all.”

“Harold, I got to go.” I started to walk toward the door.

“Scott, can you have one of those stories by next month?”

I turned toward him and raised my hand as I left his office. I walked down the hall. The light from the door’s transom was nearly gone. I began to descend the stairs. The wood creaked with each step I took. I stepped lighter, but the tired wood continued its complaining. The sound was inescapable, a plaint for every time I bore my weight upon its vulnerable weak back. When I reached the bottom of the staircase, I rushed for the door, and I stepped out onto the street. New York flowed around me without favor or blame, like warm air in the heat of the summer. Cars chugged by haltingly in the traffic and preoccupied people pushed past each other in an endless flow of anonymity.

An indifference gripped me. I needed a drink. I couldn’t shake the darkness of the hallway. The faint echo of the creaking played over and over. It had the tenacity of crushing heartache born from sudden infidelity. A hopeless sadness burrowed itself firmly into all that still struggled to live within me. My chest and gut began to tremble.

 There was a bar within walking distance which was popular with the Princeton set. I headed in that direction. I wanted to stop on my way and buy Zelda something, anything, a gold necklace. I loved buying Zelda things. She loved surprises. That’s what she called them. “Scott, bring me home a surprise. Anything, anything at all,” she would say. There was a small jewelry shop on the corner of 34th and 5^th. She had bought some earrings there. They were of the kind that dangled from the ears of New York women stumbling across living rooms at cocktail parties while they spilled champagne from thin-stemmed glasses. I entered the shop and laid three one hundred-dollar bills on the counter. I walked out with a necklace the jeweler said would match the earrings Zelda had bought.

“Scott, Scott,” I heard a man calling me. He was with a woman about a block or so ahead. It was Townsend Martin, an old friend from my Princeton days. He was living in New York, trying his hand at writing some plays. But it was the woman, her arm wrapped around his, who captured my attention. The shaking in my middle increased and it flowed into my upper arms. The falling night had brought a darkness which stood stark and still and bold. A ghastly image appeared and pierced me deeply, seizing my thoughts and narrowing my senses. Terror poured from my imagination. I stood frozen in the dank and coarse New York night. The woman was Zelda.  

“Zelda said that you went to see Ober,” Townsend said. “We thought you’d be at the that bar on 34^th Street.” Townsend was bubbling with enthusiasm. His party spirit lay like vomit on me, and I wanted to wipe it from my body and give it to the one who deserved it most. She snuggled his arm.

“Scott, you look lost, dear. Did Harold give you some bad news?” Her words flowed slowly with the intended cold rhythm of triumphant. Her brow wrinkled. Her intent, with a calculated precision, swarmed to extinguish the dwindling spark struggling for life within me. I didn’t want to share her, not even in the least of ways, and, at times, I hated her for it. Her flirtations and secrets cut at the very heart of me. Ernest, in our days in Paris, often said I should divorce her. He didn’t understand. The dreams forged from the once formless musings of the infinitely hopeful become hardened, never to be assailed lest they fall from the heavens. No other man must ever touch her.

“Scott, what do you want from me?” She would say when I asked too many questions about what she had done with the men who had come and gone in her life. “What does it matter?” she would say. My imagination had twisted itself into bizarre shapes of her body wrapped around another. My torment tore at the fabric of my dreams,  slipping from my grasp. I wanted them back as whole and pure as I had created them. Zelda never had wanted anyone but me. Her every indiscretion was a mistake, a simple lapse of judgment of haphazard youth. I insisted she tell me about each sexual encounter, and together we would go back and recreate the truth. 

She never has told me about any of them. She uses them as the most delicate of instruments, wounding so gently but effectively, over and over. She is a selfish woman. She has taken for her own despicable use the dreams I had shared with her in those early days in the shimmering waves of the Alabama heat.

“I guess we should get that drink,” I said.

Zelda linked my arm, but never released his.  The three of us walked together. My trembling, by the sheer crescendo of its magnitude, burst from my middle. It left in its wake a vacuum where once existed all that mattered. My body lapsed into a reckless state. The desperate person inside of me, incarnated from hope and vision, retched from pain.

Arm-in -arm we walked up the five concrete steps to the barroom. Townsend pulled the door open, and Zelda entered. He and I followed. It wasn’t quite five o’clock and the place was quiet. Only two young girls, somewhere in their twenties, sat next to each other at the mid-section of the bar. I drew up a stool next to them. Zelda sat to my left and Townsend next to her.

“What’ll it be?” the bartender said.

One of the young girls whispered into the ear of the other, and they giggled. They wore hats that fitted close to their heads and the design reminded me of the helmets worn by the German army during the War. Some hair escaped from the fronts and wound itself into loose, solitary curls. They wore dresses with belts which tied at their hips. The purposeful inattention of the girls to hems, which rested high above their knees, gave the impression that the impropriety was a result of innocence and naivete. They sat with their legs crossed, creating two slender cascades. The two women nearly faced each other, resembling bookends most appropriately found on the shelf in a bordello.

“A bottle of gin,” I said to the bartender. I looked at Zelda and Townsend and turned back to the bartender. “I’m not sure what they’re having.”

Zelda turned toward me and a gave me a look. Her lips were in a tight straight line. She turned her body toward Townsend. I shot a half glass of gin down my throat. How in the hell did he meet up with Zelda? What were they doing together? She could have told me anything, and I wouldn’t have believed her. Why did she hang on to him like that?

“Townsend,” I said in a tone of casualness not seen since the Kaiser asked how the War was going. “Why did you want to see me?” I could have cared less why, but I had hoped to unearth the circumstances of his meeting Zelda. My imagination by this time had invaded my gut.

“I wanted to tell you the good news,” he said. “One of my plays has been picked up by an off-Broadway company, and they’re actually paying me. I went to your apartment, and Zelda told me you had gone to see Ober. She said it would be fun to look for you.”

“I hope my thoughtful wife offered you a drink.”

Zelda turned to me. “Of course, my dear, we both had a drink, or was it two? I can’t really remember. Yes, it was two, one in the living room and one in the bedroom.”

Townsend was silent. His face fell sullen. He lifted his drink and sipped it staring into the mirror behind the bar.

“Is there anything else you would like to know, dear, or is that enough fiction for today. Fiction is what you are about? Right?”

I poured another half glass of gin. My trembling dissipated and rushed to my face as a hot blush. I turned to the girl sitting next to me. Her back was to me. I got up and stood between and behind the giggling pair of promised promiscuity.

“Scott Fitzgerald,” I said, wavering slightly as I spoke. The glass of gin was in my hand. I took a gulp.  “I’m a writer and I was struck by your whispering and laughing. I’m always in search of characters. What are you drinking? Another?”

“I don’t see why not,” said the one on my left. She looked at her near mirror image. They giggled in acquiescence. The bartender brought two martinis.

Zelda turned on her stool completely toward Townsend and held her head in her hand, supported by her arm resting on the bar.

The two tittering girls sat like two birds perfectly perched. 

The girl on my right said, “I’m not sure I want to be a character. I mean I just don’t know how I feel about that.”

“What do you write, Scott?” The other one said.

“This Side of Paradise, have you read it?  And some stuff for the Saturday Evening Post.”

“No, I haven’t read it.”

The other chirped, “I have. You’re F. Scott Fitzgerald, right? I’ve read some of your Post stories. Quite good I thought. How do you think of all that stuff?”

“Townsend, you missed our wedding. I just can’t forgive you for that.” Zelda said, grasping his forearm. I continued to feed the birds with the ramblings of a man of accomplishment.

“I didn’t get your names. I’m sorry.”

“I’m Cynthia,” said the one on the right.

“Catherine,” said the one on the left.

I moved closer to them and gripped the back of their stools.

“You want to know how I think up all that stuff?”

Catherine shifted her body in my direction. Her hem rose higher by virtue of her movement, and, I was sure, by her intention. She sat complacent, addressing me with her eyes. She exposed an inch more of her leg, and her invitation soared a mile in my mind. I stood taller. My face no longer burned from the current humiliation Zelda served as a sauce to the distasteful dish she so often forced down my throat. My threatened dreams hid in a shallow refuge formed by the circle which I formed with the two stray fowl.

“You owe me kisses, you know, wedding kisses,” Zelda said to Townsend. I saw in the periphery of my vision, her head, still resting in her hand, move more to a tilt. Townsend, standing, shifted nervously.

 I turned my attention to Catherine.

“All that stuff… I don’t think it up,” I said, directing my eyes on the soft, moist intensity in her face. “It comes to me, like a visitor bringing a message.” I reached around her and grabbed the bottle of gin sitting on the bar. I poured myself another glass. I raised the bottle, shook it side to side between the girls. Catherine raised her glass. I poured generously. Cynthia sipped her Martini. “Like you two,” I said. “You’re characters waiting to be discovered.”  I took a large swallow of the gin.

Zelda sprang off her stool. “Townsend, dance with me.”

“There isn’t any music,” he answered. He remained facing the bar.

“There’s always music somewhere.” Zelda replied.

Townsend bent his head down and turned in my direction. “Scott, do you mind?” I pretended not to hear.

“Scott, do you mind if I dance with your wife?”

The thought of another man touching her cut to my core. The pleasure she would give him sickened me. It could never be undone.

“What do you want from me?” Zelda had asked me countless times over the last two years. The answer was simple. Many years later, when her life was limited by the confines of Asheville Psychiatric Hospital, when nothing remained of us except the ghost of my hope, I finally told her the answer.

 “I want you to obey me,” I said.  It was then that I understood for the first time how she never realized the purity and power of the vibration that rang out from the stars on that night we had met. She was a selfish woman. She ignored the life I set in motion for us. She had travelled alone and arrived nowhere.   

Townsend took Zelda’s hand into his and put his other hand on her back. I finished the gin in my glass and forced a smile at the girls.

“Townsend,” I heard in clear tones, “I do want those wedding kisses.” I glanced quickly at Zelda. Her back was to me.

 “No wedding kisses,” Townsend replied, “no more to drink.”

It didn’t matter what she was about to do. She had already done it.

The intensity on Catherine’s face faded into a playful look. Her cheeks relaxed into supple, rosy beds. Her face resembled that of a child, smiling about nothing. Cynthia sipped her Martini which she held continuously near her lips. She bent her head down slightly and peered through her lashes at Catherine.

“Who am I?” Catherine said, looking at me, her eyes still and directed. Her mouth broke into a strange smile. Her lips protruded, tight and wicked.

I can’t tell you who you are. I am a writer. I can show you.” I stepped back. Zelda and Townsend came into my field of vision. She had her arms wrapped around his neck. Her body hung from him.

I looked at Catherine. “Your character is a beautiful woman sitting in a bar located deep in the loneliness of the City. A successful man sees you sitting unaccompanied. He is captivated by you. He buys you a drink, tells you his sorrowful story, and you long for him.” Cynthia giggled. Her eyes widened and looked squarely at Catherine.

“That is quite a good bit of fiction, Scott,“ Catherine said.

Cynthia giggled again. She reached out and touched Catherine’s face. She took Cynthia’s hand into hers and began stroking her arm. Zelda let go of Townsend, turned around and stared down along the bar, but she never looked at me. She sat frozen, no triumphant look, no smirk of ridicule. The chagrin of misspent revenge blushed my face. Zelda’s eyes were riveted to the girls. Her face was frozen, like a flesh mask fashioned by a sculptor who caught his subject in the depths of a fantasy, disarmed and consumed.

Maybe it was time to leave, I thought.

Catherine turned her gaze from Cynthia and looked in my direction.

“What do I do now?” she asked.

I looked at her blankly. 

“What does my character do now?”

“She gets up and walks into a different novel,” I said.

I leaned in to grab the bottle of gin, which sat on the bar between the girls. When my ear passed Catherine’s lips, she spoke softly and slowly, “We do like men.”

“Scott,” Townsend said. He walked toward me. Zelda sat at the bar; a drink was in her right hand. Her left arm was draped across her stomach and it held firmly onto her waist. Her back was tense and straight. She directed her eyes forward away from the girls. On occasion, with her lips on the wide rim of her glass, she glanced at Cynthia. With increasing frequency, Cynthia’s eyes landed in Zelda’s.

Townsend stood next to me, behind the two girls.

“Got to go,” he said, “I’m a working writer now, you know.”

“So am I,” I replied, “and that’s the reason I’m staying.”

“I don’t know how you do it, my friend, out all night, sleeping it off all morning…”

“I don’t do it. It does it to me.”

Townsend looked at me. He cocked his head and his eyes squinted slightly.

“It sits right here.” I pointed to a spot between my chest and stomach. “I try to put it on the page, to get rid of it, but it never goes away. It lays in a twisted lump.”

 It was in those times when I tried to unwind this draining convolution into words, a dark cloud would move over me.  Each time I ran, frantically and futilely, from the suffocating sadness, raining down. Hopelessness would puddled around me. It was then, in those times, when I fell back on the dreams which I planted many years ago and drank the gin which made them all believable.

It was that night in the haze of that drunken New York barroom, while I pointed to the struggle in my twisted gut, in the midst of the chaos that had become my life, two opposing characters appeared and grew in my soul. One lived with intoxicated hope; the other existed in a sober hopelessness. Four years later Jay Gatsby met Nick Carraway.

“Scott, you’ve had enough, Townsend said. “Why don’t you and Zelda go home?”

“No, not ready to go yet.” I looked in Zelda’s direction. “How about you, dear?”

“I’m with you,” she replied.

“Glad to hear that’s settled,” I said. Zelda turned her head and gave me a delighted stare. She seemed to savor the last bit of my jealousy.

“Alright,” Townsend said, “I’m leaving. Go slow, Scott.”

He began to walk toward the door. Zelda called to him, “I still want those wedding kisses.”

You bitch.

References

Chapter I.
Introduction
4  “All good books are alike….”
Ernest Hemingway. “Old Newsman Writes: a letter from Cuba.”  Esquire Magazine December 1, 1934: 26.

Chapter II.
5  “No personality as strong as Zelda’s … but Zelda’s the only God I have left now.” :
Broccoli, Mathew J., Fitzgerald, F. Scott, et al., Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Random House, 1980. P. 53
17 “I’m a professional … me are one in ten million.”
Stenographic Report of Conversation Between Mr. & Mrs. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dr. Thomas A. C. Rennie,” LaPaix, Rodgers Forge, Towson, Maryland, TMs (carbon), May 28, 1933, 114 pp., with note by Thomas A. C. Rennie to Dr. Slocum; Craig House Medical Records on Zelda Fitzgerald, C0745, Box 1, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

Coming in the Fall Issue: Chapter 3 & 4

BIO

Don Donato received a Masters of Liberal Arts in Creative Writing and Literature from Harvard University, College of Extended studies, in 2019. His graduate interest was studying the writing of the Lost Generation living in Paris in the 1920’s. In addition to short stories published in various journals, Don has written a novella, In the Faded Blue Light, in the voice and style of F. Scott Fitzgerald in the form of “memoir.”

Don Donato: Dod401@Alumni.Harvard.edu