A Moveable Feast (14 page)

Hearing me come in the room, he spoke. 'Did you get the thermometer?'

I went over and put my hand on his forehead. It was not as cold as the tomb. But it was cool and not clammy.

'Nope,' I said.

'I thought you'd brought it.'

'I sent out for it.'

'It's not the same thing.'

'No. It isn't, is it?'

You could not be angry with Scott any more than you could be angry with someone who was crazy, but I was getting angry with myself for having become involved in the whole silliness. He did have a point though, and I knew it very well. Most drunkards in those days died of pneumonia, a disease which has now been almost eliminated. But it was hard to accept him as a drunkard, since he was affected by such small quantities of alcohol.

In Europe then we thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also as a great giver of happiness and well-being and delight. Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary, and I would not have thought of eating a meal without drinking either wine or cider or beer. I loved all wines except sweet or sweetish wines and wines that were too heavy, and it had never occurred to me that sharing a few bottles of fairly light, dry, white Macon could cause chemical changes in Scott that would turn him into a fool. There had been the whisky and Perrier in the morning but, in my ignorance of alcoholics then, I could not imagine one whisky harming anyone who was driving in an open car in the rain. The alcohol should have been oxidized in a very short time.

While waiting for the waiter to bring the various things I sat and read a paper and finished one of the bottles of Macon that had been uncorked at the last stop. There are always some splendid crimes in the newspapers that you follow from day to day, when you live in France. These crimes read like continued stories and it is necessary to have read the opening chapters, since there are no summaries provided as there are in American serial stories and, anyway, no serial is as good in an American periodical unless you have read the all-important first chapter. When you are travelling through France the papers are disappointing because you miss the continuity of the different
crimes, affaires,
or
scandales,
and you miss much of the pleasure to be derived from reading about them in a cafe. Tonight I would have much preferred to be in a cafe where I might read the morning editions of the Paris papers and watch the people and drink something a little more authoritative than the Macon in preparation for dinner. But I was riding herd on Scott so I enjoyed myself where I was.

When the waiter arrived with the two glasses with the pressed lemon juice and ice, the whiskies, and the bottle of Perrier water, he told me that the pharmacy was closed and he could not get a thermometer. He had borrowed some aspirin. I asked him to see if he could borrow a thermometer. Scott opened his eyes and gave a baleful Irish look at the waiter.

'Have you told him how serious it is?' he asked.

'I think he understands.'

'Please try to make it clear.'

I tried to make it clear and the waiter said, 'I'll bring what I can.'

'Did you tip him enough to do any good? They only work for tips.'

'I didn't know that,' I said. 'I thought the hotel paid them something on the side.'

'I mean they will only do something for you for a substantial tip. Most of them are rotten clean through.'

I thought of Evan Shipman and I thought of the waiter at the Closerie des Lilas who had been forced to cut his moustache when they made the American bar at the Closerie, and of how Evan had been working out at his garden in Montrouge long before I had met Scott, and what good friends we all were and had been for a long time at the Lilas and of all of the moves that had been made and what they meant to all of us. I thought of telling Scott about this whole problem of the Lilas, although I had probably mentioned it to him before, but I knew he did not care about waiters nor their problems nor their great kindness and affections. At that time Scott hated the French, and since almost the only French he met with regularly were waiters whom he did not understand, taxi-drivers, garage employees and landlords, he had many opportunities to insult and abuse them.

He hated the Italians even more than the French and could not talk about them calmly even when he was sober. The English he often hated but he sometimes tolerated them and occasionally looked up to them. I do not know how he felt about the Germans and the Austrians. I do not know whether he had ever met any then or any Swiss.

On this evening in the hotel I was delighted that he was being so calm. I had mixed the lemonade and whisky and given it to him with two aspirins and he had swallowed the aspirins without protest and with admirable calm and was sipping his drink. His eyes were open now and were looking far away. I was reading the
crime
in the inside of the paper and was quite happy, too happy it seemed.

'You're a cold one, aren't you?' Scott asked and looking at him I saw that I had been wrong in my prescription, if not in my diagnosis, and that the whisky was working against us.

'How do you mean, Scott?'

'You can sit there and read that dirty French rag of a paper and it doesn't mean a thing to you that I am dying.'

'Do you want me to call a doctor?'

'No. I don't want a dirty French provincial doctor.'

'What do you want?'

'I want my temperature taken. Then I want my clothes dried and for us to get on an express train for Paris and to go to the American hospital at Neuilly.'

'Our clothes won't be dry until morning and there aren't any express trains,' I said.

'Why don't you rest and have some dinner in bed?'

'I want my temperature taken.'

After this went on for a long time the waiter brought a thermometer.

'Is this the only one you could get?' I asked. Scott had shut his eyes when the waiter came in and he did look at least as far gone as Camille. I have never seen a man who lost the blood from his face so fast and I wondered where it went.

'It is the only one in the hotel,' the waiter said and handed me the thermometer. It was a bath thermometer with a wooden back and enough metal to sink it in the bath. I took a quick gulp of the whisky sour and opened the window a moment to look out at the rain. When I turned Scott was watching me.

I shook the thermometer down professionally and said, 'You're lucky it's not a rectal thermometer.'

'Where does this kind go?'

'Under the arm,' I told him and tucked it under my arm.

'Don't upset the temperature,' Scott said. I shook the thermometer again with a single sharp downward twitch and unbuttoned his pyjama jacket and put the instrument under his armpit while I felt his cool forehead and then took his pulse again. He stared straight ahead. The pulse was seventy-two. I kept the thermometer in for four minutes.

'I thought they only kept them in for one minute,' Scott said.

'This is a big thermometer,' I explained. 'You multiply by the square of the size of the thermometer. It's a centigrade thermometer.'

Finally I took the thermometer out and carried it over by the reading light.

'What is it?'

'Thirty-seven and six-tenths.'

'What's normal.'

'That's normal.'

'Are you sure?'

'Sure.'

'Try it on yourself. I have to be sure.'

I shook the thermometer down and opened my pyjamas and put the thermometer in my armpit and held it there while I watched the time. Then I looked at it.

'What is it?'

I studied it. 'Exactly the same.'

'How do you feel?'

'Splendid,' I said. I was trying to remember whether thirty-seven six was really normal or not. It did not matter, for the thermometer, unaffected, was steady at thirty.

Scott was a little suspicious so I asked if he wanted me to make another test.

'No,' he said. 'We can be happy it cleared up so quickly. I've -always had great recuperative power.'

'You're fine,' I said. 'But I think it would be just as well if you stayed in bed and had a light supper, and then we can start early in the morning.' I had planned to buy us raincoats but I would have to borrow money from him for that and I did not want to start arguing about that now.

Scott did not want to stay in bed. He wanted to get up and get dressed and go downstairs and call Zelda so she would know he was all right.

'Why would she think you weren't all right?'

'This is the first night I have ever slept away from her since we were married and I have to talk to her. You can see what it means to us both, can't you?'

I could, but I could not see how he and Zelda could have slept together on the night just past; but it was nothing to argue about. Scott drank the whisky sour down very fast now and asked me to order another. I found the waiter and returned the thermometer and asked him how our clothes were coming along. He thought they might be dry in an hour or so. 'Have the valet press them and that will dry them. It doesn't matter that they should be bone-dry.'

The waiter brought the two drinks against catching cold and I sipped mine and urged Scott to sip his slowly. I Was worried now he might catch cold and I could see by now that if he ever had anything as definitely bad as a cold he would probably have to be hospitalized. But the drink made him feel wonderful for a while and he was happy with the tragic implications of this being Zelda's and his first night of separation since their marriage. Finally he could not wait longer to call her and put on his dressing-gown and went down to put the call through.

It would take some time for the call and shortly after he came up, the waiter appeared with two more double whisky sours. This was the most I had ever seen Scott drink until then, but they had no effect on him except to make him more animated and talkative, and he started to tell me the outline of his life with Zelda. He told me how he had first met her during the war and then lost her and won her back, and about their marriage and then about something tragic that had happened to them at St-Raphael about a year ago. This first version that he told me of Zelda
.
and a French naval aviator falling in love was truly a sad story and I believe it was a true story. Later he told me other versions of it as though trying them for use in a novel, but none was as sad as this first one and I always believed the first one, although any of them might have been true. They were better told each time; but they never hurt you the same way the first one did.

Scott was very articulate and told a story well. He did not have to spell the words nor attempt to punctuate and you did not have the feeling of reading an illiterate that his letters gave you before they had been corrected. I knew him for two years before he could spell my name; but then it was a long name to spell and perhaps it became harder to spell all of the time, and I give him great credit for spelling it correctly finally. He learned to spell more important things and he tried to think straight about many more.

On this night though he wanted me to know and understand and appreciate what it was that had happened at St-Raphael and I saw it so clearly that I could see the single-seater seaplane buzzing the diving-raft and the colour of the sea and the shape of the pontoons and the shadow that they cast and Zelda's tan and Scott's tan and the dark blonde and the light blond of their hair and the darkly tanned face of the boy that was in love with Zelda. I could not ask the question that was in my mind, how, if this story was true and it had all happened, could Scott have slept each night in the same bed with Zelda? But maybe that was what had made it sadder than any story anyone had ever told me then, and, too, maybe he did not remember, as he did not remember last night.

Our clothes came before the call did and we dressed and went downstairs to have dinner. Scott was a little unsteady now and he looked at people out of the side of his eyes with a certain belligerency. We had very good snails, with a carafe to start with and while we were about halfway through them Scott's call came He was gone about an hour and I ate his snails finally, dipping up the butter, garlic and parsley sauce with the broken bits of bread, and drank the carafe of Fleury. When he came back I said I would get him some more snails but he said he did not want any. He wanted something simple. He did not want a steak, nor liver and bacon, nor an omelette. He would take chicken. We had eaten very good cold chicken at noon but this was still famous chicken country, so we had
poularde de Bresse
and a bottle of Montagny, a light, pleasant white wine of the neighbourhood. Scott ate very little and sipped at one glass of the wine. He passed out at the table with his head on his hands. It was natural and there was no theatre about it and it even looked as though he were careful not to spill nor break things. The waiter and I got him up to his room and laid him on the bed and I undressed him to his underwear, hung his clothes up, and then stripped the covers off the bed and spread them over him. I opened the window and saw it was clear outside and left the window open.

Downstairs I finished my dinner and thought about Scott. It was obvious he should not drink anything and I had not been taking good care of him. Anything that he drank seemed to stimulate him too much and then to poison him and I planned the next day to cut all drinking to the minimum. I would tell him that we were getting back to Paris now and that I had to train in order to write. This was not true. My training was never to drink after dinner nor before I wrote nor while I was writing. I went upstairs and opened all the windows wide and undressed and. was asleep almost as soon as I was in bed.

The next day we drove to Paris on a beautiful day up through the Cote d'Or with the air freshly washed and the hills and the fields and the vineyards all new, and Scott was very cheerful and happy and healthy and told me the plots of each and every one of Michael Arlen's books. Michael Arlen, he said, was the man you had to watch and he and I could both learn much from him. I said I could not read the books. He said I did not have to. He would tell me the plots and describe the characters. He gave me a sort of oral PhD thesis on Michael Arlen. .