Beautiful Fools Read online

  “You make me want to take them off.” Scott smiled and she put her hand in his lap.

  He was still so charming, she told herself. All he had to do was let the affect back into his voice and he was again irresistible.

  Look at her in that pose, the hand in his lap asking to be taken up, this small ritual by which they unburden themselves of history all at once. There is style in her gesture, one might almost call it a moral style. It is their style as a couple, and it has seen them through so much adversity, this penchant for reconciliation in the midst of ongoing conflict. The charm and lightness with which she faces down illness; his stubborn habit of perceiving her latest breakdown as merely one more setback in a string of soul-wearying events. Neither of them, Zelda no more than Scott, ready to admit defeat, their optimism unflagging despite all that has proven contrary to it. They have always been this way, he might tell himself, and their life not always so tragic. Never mind what people saw from the outside: everything could be forgiven, the past converted, all might be made new. If only, she reasoned, improvising a test, if only he will pick up my hand. He has done it so many times before, intertwined his fingers in mine, turned his wrist and mine inward, together.

  “So,” Zelda said after a long silence, withdrawing her hand from where it lay unembraced, “I suppose you’re wondering what became of the lousy old Irishwoman and her daughter.”

  He wouldn’t listen to her anymore if she insisted on using that word.

  “Please, Scott. Lousy, lousy, lousy, you’re so damned fastidious.” But when she looked up and saw that he wasn’t going to be teased out of his mood, she gave in. “Oh, all right, haggard, that haggard Irishwoman, is that better? I thought they were both perfectly dreadful, making a spectacle of themselves in front of the entire train.”

  “They weren’t so bad. I felt rather sorry for them, especially the mother.”

  “When it was she who wronged her own ward,” Zelda exclaimed. “Oh, let’s not talk about it.” Here for the first time all afternoon he recognized the illness in her voice, otherworldly in its intensity, capable of expanding in several directions at once and leading almost anywhere except toward that which could be reasonably deduced. “While I’m stuck in bedlam you’ll befriend such women, and their unseemly daughters will attempt to steal your heart.”

  “Zelda, control yourself. You don’t believe a word you’re saying.”

  “It was probably the new shoes,” she conceded, adopting a philosophical tone. “People buy new shoes and suits and dresses when they’re ready to fall in love with somebody else. I know you still love me, but you must often be overcome with buyer’s remorse. Excuse me, but I didn’t notice the cracks in her porcelain skin or that her mind was so fitful, some might say fundamentally impaired—do you suppose I might trade her in? Oh, wait, maybe I better not.”

  “Zelda, I’m not listening to any more of this.”

  “In the end you always decide to stick by me because you’re loyal and you would rather that I get well than have to start over with some new woman and train her to put up with the insanity of living with a writer and his neuroses.”

  The conductor came down the aisle, calling, “Next stop Baltimore, folks,” his voice trailing off as he passed to the rear of the car.

  “I don’t believe this emptiness is all I am,” she said, snaring Scott’s arm, digging into his biceps with her fingernails even as she pressed against him.

  “Of course not.” He ran his fingers along her forehead close to the hairline. “You’re a mother, a writer, an artist—mostly, you are my own girl whom I always love.”

  “And you’ll come visit and remind me of who I was and who I’m going to be again afterward, won’t you?”

  Scott watched the terror sweep across her face and take refuge in the corners of her eyes.

  “Do you suppose,” she asked, making an effort, toying with abstraction, as though observing herself from the outside, “Trouble has followed us all the way from Montgomery?”

  “What will he do if he catches up to the train?”

  “Well, he spends most of his time chasing us. It’s a game to him, the pleasure in pursuit.”

  Here she lifted her face to Scott so he could study the line of her chin in profile, the soft skin marred by the eczema only partly masked by face powder. He put his hand on her shoulder, but she pushed it away, so he asked, “Where is Trouble now? What is he doing?”

  “Oh, probably running alongside the train, panting heavily. It has been a long chase and he will be there, I imagine, waiting for me at the Phipps Clinic.”

  “Trouble is always waiting for you, isn’t he?”

  “Yes, he likes me better than you. But you also deserve your share of Trouble.”

  “You always were generous about sharing your Trouble with me.”

  A white-haired woman in the seat ahead cast a reproachful glance. Zelda, with her round Indian face and slightly slanted eyes, returned the woman’s scrutiny with such dread intensity that she turned forward again without uttering a word.

  They had invented the game on that trip to Florida before everything went bad. Only this past fall they had purchased a bloodhound to whom they gave the name Trouble (“Like a character from Hawthorne,” Zelda declared in a burst of inspiration). Late one night in Florida Zelda was feeling blue and began to pine for her dog, recalling Trouble’s droopy face and fond way of following at her heels, and she said aloud, with childish simplicity, “Oh, I wish Trouble were here with us.” Without missing a beat Scott answered, “Haven’t we had trouble enough the past few years?” and Zelda thrilled at his off-the-cuff double entendre. Within minutes they had concocted her new favorite pastime, which involved using their dog’s name in a string of sentences that might as readily refer to a bloodhound’s behavior as the rough lot in life of a black blues singer.

  “Maybe that nosy woman is angling to take ownership of our Trouble,” Zelda said in a voice loud enough that the eavesdropping woman ahead of them might hear.

  “Oh, he’d be too much for her,” Scott said.

  Soon the train was braking and everywhere at once air seeped upward through the floorboards, like the last exhalations of a military truck on which the tires have been shot out. But when Scott declared his intent to see the conductor about the luggage, Zelda lurched for his elbow, saying, “Don’t leave me,” her antics at once staged and altogether sincere.

  “Oh, all right, we’ll both go.”

  Along the train passengers disembarked, throngs of working-class people from the cars farther down, the blacks in even greater numbers at the rear. On the platform white men in suits stood erectly, waiting for the next departure.

  “Zelda, do you need anything? Otherwise we should find a taxi and start for Phipps.”

  “Yes, whatever you think best,” she said, trying to sound cooperative even though her stomach was tumbling in on itself. Humming a song, slowly recovering its words—Oh, I got that trouble in mind, it’s true—she trailed Scott through the turnstiles into the main concourse of Baltimore’s Penn Station, scouting for exits as they crossed its cold, marbled, cavernous center and now headed through one of the high arched doorways that led to Charles Street.

  I’m gonna lay my head on some lonesome railroad line

  And let that midnight train satisfy my mind—

  “Stop that, Zelda,” Scott insisted. “Do you hear what you’re singing?”

  A taxi pulled forward and the driver took the bags from Scott.

  “I was playing the game without you,” she explained once they were in the cab. “What else shall we talk about? Let’s pretend we’re a young couple starting out, the two of us newly on our own, heading to the theater and dinner because you’ve sold your first book.”

  “I would rather that we concentrate on the near future. Let’s at least agree on what we should say about what happened and how you slipped back.”

  “Get our stories straight, you mean.”

  “Not that we have a
nything to hide, but if we point the doctors in the right direction, maybe the cure will be easier on you this time.”

  “They’re very strong-minded.”

  “Zelda, they’re doctors, people of reason. Of course they’ll want to know everything that can be of help.”

  “They have a strange way of showing their love.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Morphine, numbing doses of chloral hydrate, solitary confinemen, restraints—”

  “Stop it, Zelda. It’s not love they’re supposed to show—”

  “No, that’s your job.”

  “They’re supposed to make you stronger, better able to cope with—”

  “With you,” she interrupted him. “Yes, I know all of that. What I should have said is that you have a strange way of showing your love.”

  She looked at him then, holding his granite jaw away from her. Why do you hate me? she wanted to cry. How did I become your opponent? For hate was radiating from his body, the desperate sense of lost destiny, which was and always would be her fault. Fierce and uncompromising, he wanted back the dream of uninterrupted existence, the writerly life to which she was the obstacle. If he were a harder man, such as Ernest, he would have abandoned her years ago and maybe it would have been better for everyone all around.

  “I don’t want to be their child again, Scott,” Zelda said softly, but his heart was hardened against her. So she reached two fingers to his chest, stroking his shirt beneath the tie. He resented her when she was strong and defiant and troublesome, but could never resist her when she was falling apart. He could not stand to watch her suffer at the hands of anyone but himself.

  “It’s only a short time, Zelda dear,” he said, his voice an archangel of mercy, come to her rescue—true, first he must hand her over to the enemy, but in time he will return to deliver her and she must remember to be grateful for what he will one day do for her.

  “Just ’til you’re well,” he added.

  “How will they know?” she asked after riding several minutes in silence, as though sound belonged only to the world beyond their windows, the metal shrieks of electric streetcars and the constant banter of car horns. “The doctors begin from a presumption of guilt, not innocence.”

  The patient must prove herself, show perfect docility, sometimes by performing the impossible, like witches with limbs tied together who must make their bodies sink even at the risk of drowning, who if they continued merely as they were, floating on the surface of the ordinary world, were still wrong. Only when she agreed to play the part expected of her—of wife, of mother, of artist in moderation—only then could they begin to talk of her release.

  “It’s not like that at all.” He was tempted to believe her, but what good would that do? “It’s also up to you to determine when you’re well.”

  “If that’s the case, if it’s up to me to say when,” she said, reasoning like a character out of Plato’s dialogues, perhaps one of the sophists, “then I’m well right now.”

  “I know, Zelda, but you must maintain it,” he said. He ran back over the day, able to recall only a single instance in which she had caused him to lose his patience. “You weren’t at all well two days ago.”

  “But you see for yourself I am now,” she said, maybe for the first time believing she might convince him to turn the taxi around and drive to a hotel for several days of necessary respite, away from her family. “Scott, what’s it for? Am I going to the asylum to expiate my sins?”

  “Is that your opinion of me?” he asked sharply. “I suppose that’s why I work round the clock writing stories, so many of which I hate, just to be able to pay your medical bills.”

  “I only meant that the doctors see it that way, Scott.”

  But he could remember all those letters from Prangins, accusing him of being in league with the doctors and serving as her private inquisitor, plotting the barbaric things they would do to make her a true believer—though of what he’d like to know, since, he assured her, he had no doctrine anymore. Nothing in which he still believed.

  “Please don’t say that,” she pleaded. “You scare me when you speak like that.”

  “I’m through with consolations, Zelda.”

  “Please, Scott, you must be consoled.”

  “For what?”

  “For my sake. Please, I’ll make myself better and I’ll let the doctors believe they did it and then I will come and I will be your consolation.”

  Zelda tilted forward to ask the taxi driver, an Italian man with a heavy mustache and olive-dark skin smelling of soil, sun, and garlic, how far to the clinic.

  “Three to five minutes, signora,” the cabbie said, rolling his vowels in that wonderful Italianate manner, his words far more elegant than he himself could ever be.

  So she slackened in her seat, thinking of how long she would have to wait for deliverance. Scott looked at her and he was kind again.

  Studying her face, patient and gentle, youthful today as when he first met her, he could remember the possibilities he’d written for them. Last year at Prangins, with Zelda getting worse by the minute, Scott banned from seeing her, Dr. Forel had taken him aside and said, “I have read your stories. You are like the sculptor Pygmalion in the ancient myth, creating your wife and yourself in the image of what you might be, believing in youth as a promise. To be young is to be invulnerable. And neither of you—she more desperately than you, perhaps—can let go of what you were promised. Imagine, a grown woman taking up ballet, eight to ten hours a day, in her late twenties. Only a woman who doesn’t believe in the mortal body, who believes in fables of youthful lore told by her husband, could do such a thing.” It had made Scott angry for weeks afterward just to think of Forel’s harangue.

  To hell with them, the psychoanalysts were the booboosie, Zelda was right.

  Why not order the driver to turn the car around and drive them to Lexington Market to pick up wine, cheese, and fruit? He formed the proposal in his head. Zelda, if you’ll only discipline yourself, we can skip the doctors. He would take her on a picnic. She would be grateful and all his again, concentrating on his every word, able like any normal person to anticipate what should come next, assembling words and actions and their consequences into a story of self that held together. It might go on for days, weeks. He could remember seasons of terrific performance, the way she attended to him as ardent wife, doted on Scottie, kept things in balance, not indulging the wild habits of thought, the incessant dancing. Always, though, it unraveled, slowly at first, maybe in the wake of a critical remark he made after a glass of wine at the end of a long day of writing. “Zelda, why does it have be so hard?” he would ask, and it was as though a member of the audience had hurled an insult at her, drawing her out of character. In the face of criticism she was awful—breezy, lax in her duties, asking why it was that everyone had to slip through the house quiet as church mice until three in the afternoon each day, and when he said, “You know the answer to that,” she’d say, “Oh, yes, because you’re the great writer.”

  Then it would be over. She would prod and prod until she got him to admit his egomaniacal ambition, wresting from him a confession that he was in competition with the immortals, all of whom were, in her view, merely self-adoring seekers of fame. One stray remark and she was ruinous to herself and those nearest her, everything crashing down in its usual manner, as though she relished nothing more than her ability to make him stop writing. “I won’t be responsible for your failure,” she would scream. “I won’t let you use me as an excuse.”

  “Scott, listen,” Zelda said, tugging at the sleeve of his jacket, nudging him into the present, her lips pressed against his jaw in a seductive, husky whisper, “we could still escape.”

  Again she asked the taxi driver how much farther.

  “At the end of this street, ma’am.”

  “Scott?”

  “What, Zelda?”

  She stared into his eyes but could discern only judgment there.

  “
You’re not better than me.”

  He didn’t say a word.

  “Only please don’t say the bad things,” she begged. “Those are just between us.”

  “Zelda, we have to be honest.”

  “I’ll tell them everything, on my terms, in my way. It’s so much worse coming from you. Please, Scott, promise you’ll let me say the bad things, let me tell them what it’s like when I suddenly realize I’m not there anymore, that this woman who kisses her writer-husband and tells him she adores him or reads a book to her daughter is like a made-up character—I can pretend to be her for a while, but it’s just pretend.”

  “As long as you say all that.”

  “I will,” she said, “and more.”

  And maybe he hears the threat in this last remark, remembering the words she’s already said and those she might yet say about him, everything on record in some psychoanalyst’s office for people to read years later when he is dead.

  “But I don’t have to say any of it,” she now whispers, as the driver curbs the taxi before the austere five-storied red brick building and its tight, enclosed arcade with heavy roman arches. The driver removes their bags from the trunk to set them inside the front door of the clinic. “There’s still time,” she says. “Let’s make our escape.” But Scott has already paid the taxi driver and made arrangements to be picked up in two hours and driven to the Belvedere Hotel. And now her husband turns and cradles her arm, her knees folding in dread as they climb the wide, shallow stairs like worshippers at the altar of some unforgiving god.

  “I will be sad,” she says as he holds the door for her and she listens for their heels clicking on the mosaic tiles, “watching you walk away in your new shoes.”