Beautiful Fools Page 4

  Once inside the cottage, she refused to join him on the deck. The business for which she’d come pertained to what went on inside these walls, to the confinement soon to follow, to the sordid rebirth of a soul from the detritus of its own ugliness. Long days of darkness, cruelty, and torpor had transformed him into a person who shared little in common with the Scott she loved. The man before her was someone who could emerge only after weeks and weeks of drinking had warped both vision and memory. So she treated him with clinical coolness, making no decisions about the future.

  “How many bottles will I find?” Sheilah asked, returning to the bureau where she’d made her stand earlier that day.

  “Oh, let’s not bother with any of that. It’s a history of which I’m not proud, of which we’ll soon be free. Please, Sheilo,” he said, peering again into the graying light of the predawn sky, gesturing for her to join him outside. “Can we not think about that right now?”

  “Why am I here?” she asked.

  From where he stood he could make out a convex of light inside the door, Sheilah positioned within the recessed darkness, her silhouette just visible, the expression on her face illegible. She tugged at the chain on the freestanding lamp next to the dresser, then knelt down and jostled the bottom drawer, already ajar, widening the opening so she could run her hands through T-shirts and underwear, over the empty bottles, rattling and rolling together in a musical, hollow tinking. In the next drawer too, she took stock of how far he had descended into that part of him that wished never to be returned to the world. Her hands stayed longest in the top drawer, digging beneath handkerchiefs and socks until she must have felt the cold hard metal, most likely wrapping her fingers onto its grooved cylinders, knowing right away what it was.

  “What are you doing?” Scott stepped inside. “Get away from there this instant.”

  “What is it, Scott? What’s here that I’m not allowed to see?”

  She pulled the object from the drawer and held it in her palm, thumb resting on its handle, fingers relaxed under the trigger guard.

  “Sheilah, goddamnit, that’s not yours. It has nothing to do with you.”

  “Like hell it doesn’t,” she said. “I want to know, I want you to tell me why you have it.”

  He didn’t owe her an explanation, not for the gun anyway. The conversation they were supposed to be having was about Cuba. Her eyes shone with self-righteous indignation, only her mouth giving her away, her lower lip unable to hold its naturally gallant shape.

  “Hand it over,” he said. “I’ll only ask once.”

  “Fine, see if I give a goddamn,” she said, and threw the gun at his head. He ducked and the gun crashed against the wall behind him. “At least it would be efficient. You don’t want to change, you’re in love with your own ruin. I’m leaving. The nurse will be here before long and I don’t care anymore. What happens to you is none of my concern, I think you’ve made that perfectly clear.”

  She waited to see what he would do next. When he said nothing, when he didn’t budge an inch, she walked out of the bedroom. Seconds later he was listening to the fall of her even, unhesitant steps on the stairs, the front door of the cottage opening, the lock rattling as she slammed it shut behind her.

  By the time the car disappeared down the lane, he was again on the deck, surprised by his contentedness. By leaving him twice in the same day, Sheilah had absolved him of duplicity. For better or worse he was Zelda’s husband again; he could go to Asheville and rescue her from a loneliness that, if not identical to his, was so parallel as to be at times indistinguishable from it.

  He would leave today, he told himself. He laid a suitcase on the floor and began reaching for clothing in his closet. Havana, he imagined, would be similar in climate to Southern California, and as someone who suffered chills even on seventy-degree Hollywood winter days, he packed four sport jackets and four pairs of heavy cloth pants, fistfuls of underwear and socks, the suitcase overflowing until he returned half of the clothing to the closet. The gun lay on the floor beside the bed, so he wrapped it in a pair of BVDs, burrowing it deep in the suitcase, explaining to Sheilah in some far-off future, “But darling, the gun was loaded,” wondering if that made a difference, if it justified anything.

  By the clock on the night table he saw that it was nearly five. He could leave for the airport, attempt to board a postdawn flight. Then he remembered the nurse. Too late to call. He couldn’t strand her at the door of an empty cottage. He would have to postpone his departure for the airport until she arrived. He felt his spine slacken, his courage leaking from his pores as he succumbed to lightheadedness, vertigo, nausea. He would never make it through the day without sleep. He lay back on the bed and closed his eyes. The nurse, of course, would recommend he put off the trip, see the cure through, and make plans from the other side. But surrender to the regimen of drying out meant weeks as an invalid, and afterward he would need to call in favors across the city to see if he could pick up freelance work. All the while Zelda would be planted evenings in the foyer of the Highland, sitting quietly, reading, imploring him for as long as spring should last to be true to his promise to come for her.

  The knocking from below—a steady pounding by the time he heard it—woke him. He made his way down the stairs and caught a whiff of his own alcoholic stench, disgusted on the nurse’s behalf. He unlocked the front door without so much as a hello, retreating to the second-floor bathroom, hearing her greeting while still on the stairs, “Mr. Fitzgerald? You all right?” Turning the faucet on, he removed the T-shirt and pajama trousers he had been wearing under his robe, lathering chest, armpits, groin, then toweling himself off. Next he doused his hair with water and cologne, scrubbed his face with soap, splashing water freely, squeezing toothpaste into his mouth, searching in vain for his toothbrush, then sawing each side of his mouth upper and lower with his finger, tasting the cologne in the toothpaste, spitting out the froth; and only after he’d done all of this did he swing open the bathroom door to answer the nurse.

  Mrs. Carmichael chattered to him from the kitchen, cleaning the overflow of dirty dishes. “I’ll make you some breakfast. Get your strength up for the long battle. Were you sleeping? Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, you was out, Mr. Fitzgerald.”

  He was annoyed by her maternally hovering presence.

  “Mrs. Carmichael,” he called from the bedroom, trying to be heard above a boiling kettle. “My calendar’s changed. An appointment this morning, a matter of some urgency, it can’t be helped.”

  “I’m sorry, did you say something, Mr. Fitzgerald?” She climbed the stairs and entered the bedroom doorway just as he was removing his underwear from beneath the robe, though, fortunately, with his back turned to her. Securing the robe in front, tucking the underwear in a pocket, he pivoted on his heels.

  “I was saying I have to leave town this afternoon. Planning to return in a week or so. Headed for New York, can’t be—”

  “Mr. Fitzgerald, you sure? Last night you sounded like the prodigal child who knows he better turn back or he’ll soon be knocking on death’s door.”

  “Alcohol makes one melodramatic.”

  “Alcohol makes one a lot of things, none of them very good, but I don’t know how many second chances we get in life. You’ve already had your fair share.”

  It couldn’t be helped, he told her again, trying not to let her see how badly he was hurting, his hands shaky with the d.t.’s, nerves tensed in one long scream whose only solace was the dose of alcohol he would allow himself once he was out of her presence.

  “I’m not nearly so bad off as I sounded, but I may want your help on my return.”

  “Tell you what I thought this morning when you didn’t come to the door. I was pounding for better than ten minutes, readying myself to go for the police.”

  “Guess I woke in the nick of time.”

  “You mightn’t have.”

  “It’s possible,” he said, hesitating. If she meant to frighten him, she was doing a fairly good job of
it.

  Informing her less than an hour later that he had to run to the studio but would be back in the evening, he left with suitcase in hand (just in case, he told Mrs. Carmichael, knowing he wouldn’t return). During the drive he thought of Sheilah, how she accepted the symptoms of being in a relationship with him but not quite the facts of it. As long as Zelda remained a tragic ghost, Sheilah could cope with the marriage, doing her best not to interfere. But any sign of Zelda creeping back into his life to lay claim to even a portion of what was rightfully hers and there was trouble. Only last week Sheilah had discovered a letter from Zelda.

  “Oh, Scott, she is still so in love with you. What do you say to her? She is waiting every day for you to come and rescue her. Why don’t you go and be with her? She’ll take you back, she will always take you back.”

  As if any of that were an option.

  “I didn’t mean to read the letter,” Sheilah said afterward. “It was just sitting there among a stack of books in the living room, her dramatic penmanship, her untamed spirit, so much to admire in her. I only read enough to hurt me.” Scott was almost certain he’d stored the letter with the others, in a folder he kept in his dresser, but he didn’t press the issue.

  At the studio he flashed his identification badge for the guard and drove beyond the heavily wired perimeter to park his Ford coupe in the commoners’ lot. Crossing the campus he felt his chest tighten in the humidity and pulled out a handkerchief to wipe his brow. A trickle of sweat gathered in the small of his back and he couldn’t wait to get upstairs to his office. On the stairs he remembered again the letter snatched last week from Sheilah, which he’d stowed in the breast pocket of his finely threaded tweed jacket, the same one in which he was now profusely sweating in the midmorning sun. He reached inside the pocket for the letter and, sure enough, it was there. He pulled the scented green stationery out of the envelope, surveying Zelda’s undated, amorous scrawl.

  Monsieur mon cher,

  Spring awakens in me memories of all the happiness that awaits us, and at times it presses on me like a pain in the heart the size of memory itself. I believe so much in your writing and your talent and your oh so handsome face, and I do not see how they can continue to postpone your much-deserved good fortune in Hollywood. Cannot they see what is right there in front of them? Shall I write a note to your boss, Mr. Goldwyn, conveying my outrage about their infidelity to your wonderful ode to adultery, the Fidelity that wasn’t to be? Well, only if you promise to spend your carnal appetites (assured always of my indulgences and special dispensations) in humble doses and on women who are not nearly so pretty as I once was.

  Do you suppose you could ever again find me beautiful? I have my doubts. Some days I drown in regret over missed chances, our missed chances, and I become so bitter I am not fit company even for myself. But always I decide to be happy and hopeful for your sake, won’t you be so also for mine? I’m sure you’ll remember how charming I can be and how my hair once bobbed still pleases, how I too may be pleasing if you’ll please visit me soon. Regret seems frivolous. Who are we to question the fates? All things incline toward tragedy, we know this better than anyone. It is the way of the world not to value what you and I have fought to achieve. Scott, I know you have been sorry and unhappy, but you were once my religion, or the dream of us was like religion to me, and I cannot altogether believe that faith doesn’t bear fruit. I read the Bible at night and tell myself that prayer still works. Can you feel it? Shall I recite for you the Song of Songs, our favorite passages, all the dirty parts?

  If you come for me, I will succumb to any and all forms of transportation. Oh, this newly discovered fear of flying! Another weakness of constitution, another missing piece in my inadequate psychic armor—how can you ever have loved such a woefully inadequate girl? But with you I am always brave and if the plane plunges into the ocean and you are there are at my side, well, you see how my imagination runs.

  Devotedly, as ever, Zelda

  Though no longer under contract with the studio, Scott retained a desk there, in a high-ceilinged office shared with several other writers. The office was empty, the air stifling. None of the fans running. No mail in his box. All in all, an extraordinarily useless errand. Nobody looking for him, his life unaccounted for. Still, he would leave a note, just in case someone should try to reach him. He dug a pad out of the desk and wiped his brow with his handkerchief. In big block letters he scrawled across the sheet of paper “GONE TO CUBA,” then signed it “FSF,” placing the note on his desk, where it was likely to raise more questions than it answered. Still, he liked the style of his reticence. Why tell the bastards anything?

  He sat at the desk studying the note, then picked up the phone. Soon he was making arrangements for a plane that would deliver him on Zelda’s doorstep that very afternoon, and a second to take them to Miami, so they might leave for Havana the next morning.

  And now he descended into the festive, superficial light of Los Angeles, pausing under a row of date palms at the far end of the studio lot, shading his eyes from an unreal sun situated atop the mountains, the late morning sky so blue and pristine as to provoke belief in nature’s regenerative power. The past twenty-four hours had simplified his life considerably. If Sheilah was gone for good, he would suffer for it, but he had lived so long and on such intimate terms with grief that it was no threat to him. He felt vital and self-sufficient, free to do whatever he chose, perhaps nothing at all. For just a second he entertained the thought of not traveling all the way to North Carolina, not running again to Zelda’s rescue. He could leave town and go almost anywhere, alone, accountable to no one. Except he could picture Zelda in the foyer of that sanitarium, seated there evenings, feeling important because her husband was coming (as if they were just any leisure-class couple) to take her on holiday.

  What he needed was a drink to brace him against the requirements of conscience. Spotting a bar across the street, he decided he had time enough for one beer before heading to the airport to catch his flight—always pursuing the path of past promises, always returning to Zelda. He was all she had in the world, the ironclad law of his life. There was no other way of seeing it. Duty was the form his love for Zelda had assumed, this loyalty to a woman he’d always loved the one last truth to which he held firm.

  2

  AT THE FAR END OF THE PIER THE FLYING BOATS OF PAN AMERICAN Airways rested like dormant leviathans, their fat bellies dependent in the water. She looked up ahead to the planes, then behind her toward the white stucco terminal building, so many times that Scott said, “Zelda, please stop that, you’re making me dizzy.” Most likely they were being followed. She couldn’t say who it was or what he wanted, maybe a private eye hired by the Highland to keep tabs on them. A bad report to Dr. Carroll might bring an end to these trips with her husband, who despite his many flaws was her only company in the world.

  “I was checking to see how many people will be on our flight to Havana.”

  “Well, stop turning your head.”

  “Okay, Scott,” she said, feigning childlike submissiveness, all the while thinking that with his petulant, nervous impatience it was he who was childlike.

  A stewardess passed them, walking briskly toward the plane, and Scott touched her elbow. “How much longer ’til we board?” he asked.

  “Don’t bother the nice girl, Scott,” Zelda said, smiling into the woman’s vacant yet comely face, appeasing her. In all likelihood Scott had stolen a drink before they left the hotel, perhaps during the early morning errand he ran shortly before seven, without explanation, saying only that he would be back in twenty minutes. She was dressed by the time he reappeared, moving out of his way as he dashed into the bathroom, far enough to the side that even if she had been trying to smell his breath, and she wasn’t, she couldn’t have done so. He emerged from the bathroom primped, a blue silk cravat-shaped tie knotted in a neat square, the white shirt collar framing his freshened face, only his eyes showing signs of weariness. Not twenty minutes lat
er he had them arriving at the Pan American Terminal at Dinner Key well ahead of schedule, too early for his own good. He had been going at this clip since yesterday at the sanitarium, where he was hasty and abrupt, speaking few words to the attending nurse, insisting there was no need to call a doctor and then escorting Zelda through the lobby with such haste you might have thought he was abducting his wife rather than taking her on holiday. It seemed to Zelda that if he slowed even a little, his body would give out. She hated traveling with him in this condition, not simply because it was in violation of hospital rules—she could hear the doctors warning her, “His drinking is not good for you”—but because Scott might prove incapable in an emergency.

  “He’s been traveling for two days straight,” she told the stewardess, explaining his impatience. “He’s a writer in Hollywood and he’s very tired.”

  “Not long now, sir,” the stewardess answered. “Would I know any of your pictures?”

  “Did you see Three Comrades?” Zelda asked.

  “No, I’m afraid I never heard of it.”

  “It was an important film last year and won several awards,” Zelda told her. “Look for Gone with the Wind later this year.”

  “Did you work on that also?” the stewardess asked Scott. “I think I’ve—”

  “Yes, he—,” Zelda started to say.

  “Not really,” Scott said simultaneously.

  “He’s quite modest,” Zelda explained.

  “That’s a refreshing quality in a famous person.” The stewardess smiled, then moved on.

  “Why did you do that?” Scott snapped.

  “What did I do?”

  “You made me the author of a script I worked on for three weeks, without permission to insert a single sentence that wasn’t already in Margaret Mitchell’s execrably mediocre novel, a script from which as far as I know all traces of my input have by now been excised, every one of my lines rewritten.”