West of Sunset (25 page)

After coffee she wanted to go for a stroll on the beach—an innocent request, yet inwardly he balked. They left their shoes by the lifeguard stand. The sand was cool and soft as flour. There was no moon, only the lamps of the fishermen spreading their nets, laughter floating across the water. Far down the strand a tiny kaleidoscope of a Ferris wheel beckoned. As they walked toward the colored lights, he was afraid she would take his hand.

“What is she like?” she asked.

At first he thought he'd misheard.

“Who?”

“Please, it's obvious.” She didn't stop, didn't glance at him. “Let me guess. She's an actress. Blond and petite and very young. She thinks you're a genius.”

He scoffed as if it were impossible. She might have been describing Lois Moran, fifteen years ago.

“I know you, Dodo. You're no good on your own.”

“There isn't anyone.”

“Really, I don't mind. I'll give you a divorce if you want.”

Was she bargaining with him—a divorce for her freedom? The one had nothing to do with the other. And why, after all this time, would he want one now?

“I don't want a divorce,” he said. “I want you to get better.”

“And once I'm better, then what?”

“Then you can go home.”

“What about you?”

They'd been so miserable together that he'd never invented a happy ending for them. He assumed they would go on like this indefinitely.

“I'll go wherever I have to go.”

“Will you still come see me?”

“Of course I will.”

He believed it when he said it, though later, wide awake in bed, he wondered if it was true. The whole conversation was strange. Until she'd brought up the possibility, he never dared imagine a life without her. Now the idea teased him, exposed him as weak and unprincipled. He was tempted to go down to the bar but held off, and then, the next night, when he finally gave in, he found it dark, the doors locked.

He ended up at the cantina, nursing a beer and admiring the local rituals of courtship as the young slowly processed around the zocalo beneath the eyes of the entire village. The waiter, as if it were a standard courtesy, asked if he wanted a woman.

“No,
gracias
,” he said, waving him off. “I have too many already.”

“You like the marijuana?”

“I'm happy with my
cerveza
.”

“Uno mas?”

“No
mas
,” he said, shaking his head, because he'd promised Sheilah.

Beyond the main square, the side streets were shadowed and rife with vice. On his way back to the hotel he passed a nightclub exuding a slinky rhumba, and a barker for a cooch show dabbing his forehead with a handkerchief, and, down a sinister alley, a crowd gathered in a garage lit by a bare bulb to bet on a cockfight, and thought of Ernest. When had he lost his sense of adventure?

The Danes were in the pool, naked, the water turning their bodies cubist. He detoured around the shuffleboard courts so as not to intrude. Upstairs, he closed their balcony doors, brushed his teeth and went straight to bed, knowing Zelda would be up early.

The next morning, to avoid writing, he went fishing, taking a charter out into the straits with a couple other guests. Hopeful pelicans rode their wake. From the water the peninsula was a green strip of jungle dotted with white and pink and yellow boxes. Columbus had been here, and the conquistadors. Though it wasn't yet lunchtime, the other men drank beer and smoked cigars as if at a stag party. He concentrated on his casting and caught a sizable tarpon and an impressive hammerhead shark. Did
senor
want the kitchen to prepare them for dinner?

“Oh, you should have,” Zelda said.

“That's what tourists do.”

“We're tourists.”

“We don't have to act like them.”

“Didn't you want to take a tour of the fort?”

That night, as if to refute her, he lingered at the cantina, switching from beer to a local cane liquor, tipping the waiter outrageously. On the bandstand in the middle of the zocalo, a guitarist picked limpid tunes. Scott watched the young couples promenade beneath the strings of lights and remembered his first cotillion with Ginevra, the soft white gloves and boxed orchid he saved all month to buy, giving up cigarettes, and, later, on the balcony of the club, the darkness of the golf course and the lights on the dock, the sleek yachts at anchor. That summer the world was all promise and sweet fumbling, driving her father's Pierce-Arrow along the north shore to their lake house. She kissed him in the garden and at the rail of the ferry and in the boathouse with the rain tapping in the rafters. Everything unattainable was his, bestowed like a gift. By winter all of it was gone as if it never happened.

He sneered at his own sentimentality. His glass was empty again.

“Uno mas?”
the waiter asked.

“Uno mas,”
Scott said, holding up one finger.

Later, after the indestructible church had tolled midnight and the paths of the zocalo were empty, a fat gray moth lit on the rim of his glass. It sat there a long time, it seemed to him, flexing its wings as if testing them before fluttering away over the other tables. He thought the moment remarkable, charged, but the waiter had vanished and there was no one to bear witness. He decided he needed to leave, otherwise he might not make it home, and then was amused when, attempting to don his suit jacket, he kept missing the armhole.

The waiter appeared, bottle in hand.

“No
mas
,” Scott said, swaying with the palms, and gave him two more pesos.
“Muchas gracias, amigo. Buenos noches.”

Did
senor
want a taxi?

“No,
gracias
. I can walk.”

He could, miraculously, from years of practice, leaning forward and keeping his feet moving, using an occasional pole or wall to correct course. An insistent music thumped from the nightclub, all congas and maracas. He vamped, waggling a hand and shaking his hips as he passed the open door. He was sweltering and his mouth was dry. He could use a cold beer, but he needed to get to bed. Zelda would be up early, ready to paint the whole damned island.

He thought he was going the right way, but must have made a wrong turn, because he never reached the cooch parlor. The street he was following dead-ended at the churchyard, giving him a chance to pay his respects and relieve himself against a tree. Zipped up again, he reversed field, heading back toward the zocalo, tracing a maze of unfamiliar streets, led on by a riot of mingled voices like bidders at an auction till he found himself at the mouth of the alley with the brightly lighted garage he'd seen last night.

There were no tourists here. The garage was airless and stank of men's sweat, old motor oil and cheap cigars. Under a bare bulb hanging by a wire and haloed with smoke thick as opium, a circle of field-workers pressed against a knee-high ring of rough boards, waving pesos and calling out bets.
Cinco, el negro! El rojo, dos!
In the middle of the arena, to show their champion's fighting spirit, the two handlers danced toward each other, mimicking the sexual combat of the tango, the birds flaring, trying to strike. He'd seen this type of fight before, in a gypsy camp outside Nice, with Ernest, who'd propounded upon the savage nobility of the sport, imparting lore from the age of Charlemagne before two half-starved chickens cut each other to pieces.

The birds squawked and slashed the air. The ceremony was designed to excite the bettors as much as the combatants. As the only white man there, in his linen suit, Scott drew stares. To deflect suspicion, he unfurled a peso note and declared himself for the smaller El Negro, siding, as always, with the underdog. As if he possessed some occult knowledge, the betting shifted to the black one. The mob had all the logic of the stock exchange.

If they had simply let the cocks fight to the death, satisfying their atavistic drive for dominance, that would be cruelty enough. To improve on nature, the handlers fitted their claws with spurlike razors. Then, as now, Scott thought it a perversion. Ernest liked to believe the war had made him pitiless, but, having boxed with him, Scott suspected he enjoyed the superior feeling that came from watching another suffer. He'd never liked Zelda. When she was going through her first bad time, he told Scott directly that he was better off without her. True or not, they'd broken over it, though Scott still wished to be friends. Since then, Ernest hadn't missed an opportunity to kick him.

The handlers were ready, bent over their birds, whispering last-minute instructions. The ringmaster collected the final bets, locked them away in a tin strongbox and high-stepped over the boards and out of the arena, leaving behind an expectant silence. The handlers met in the center of the ring with all the solemnity of duelists. They went to one knee, setting the birds on the stained concrete, still restraining them. Around him the crowd was reverent, ready for a sacrifice. The ringmaster raised a hand like a starter, nodded to each handler in turn, and then, without a word, chopped his arm down.

The handlers stepped back and the crowd shouted. The birds flew, spurs flashing, colliding in a flurry of feathers under the bright light. They squabbled in midair, locked together, flapping and clawing, then dropped to the ground, stalking each other. They reared and tangled, scratching and jabbing. Three, four times they clashed and rested before one did any damage. Scott didn't see the blow, but after a skirmish the black was dragging a wing. The fellow beside him, a backer of El Rojo, laughed and clapped him on the shoulder.

The birds faced off and launched themselves again. With only one wing, the black barely left the ground, the red sailing high, stabbing it below the eye, landing near the far wall, where it strutted about as if the fight were over. The crowd jeered, and the handlers prowled the ring, urging the birds on. The red charged and the black squared, game. It tried to fight, but the red flew and struck it in the breast, the spur sinking in to the hilt. The black staggered back and fell on its side directly in front of Scott, its inky eye blinking up at him, a fresh drop of blood on its beak. The spur must have punctured a lung because its breast was wet and bubbled with every breath. Again, the red strutted in the center of the ring, declaring victory.

Still the crowd demanded the kill. The black's handler cursed and flung up a hand in disgust, disowning it, while the red's enjoined his bird, clapping. The black flapped and blinked up at Scott, its beak opening and closing mutely, and as the red homed in and the crowd howled, Scott stepped over the boards and scooped up the dying bird like a loose fumble.

He hadn't known beforehand he was going to do this, and had no plan. He made for the far wall, thinking he'd vault it, stiff-arm the ringmaster and keep going. There had to be a back door. Once he reached the street he could outrun the mob like Groton's heavy-footed secondary. He had surprise on his side, God and the right, like a knight errant, but he was drunk and old and caught his toe on the wall going over, and before he could get up they were on him.

H
e could not remember a hotter summer, or a lower time in his life. For weeks there wasn't a cloud, the arroyos drying up, the fields withering, sparking a water war between the valley farmers and the city. He couldn't stop drinking and fought with Sheilah and the platoon of nurses who invaded Belly Acres to give him the cure. Overtaxed, he collapsed and his TB flared, stealing his breath, drenching him in night sweats. The doctor prescribed strict bed rest and IV fluids. He was confined to his room, the blinds drawn against the heat, and as the stifling days eked by and he slowly regained himself, Sheilah visited less and less.

While he was incapacitated, rather than tend to him herself, she brought in a full-time housekeeper, a blue-black churchwoman from Fort Smith, Arkansas, who might have been Flora's cousin. Erleen wore a lavender turban and listened to the afternoon soap operas turned up loud while she cleaned the downstairs, talking back to the characters as if she had a role in the show. Though he didn't use any of the rooms, she ran the vacuum daily. Every morning while he was in the shower, she made his bed with clean sheets, laying out a fresh pair of pajamas and taking away the soaked ones; later they would be drying on the line like the dissected halves of a scarecrow. She catered to his sweet tooth, whipping up angel food cake and egg custard and generally making herself indispensable, and though Scott enjoyed her company, her presence only served to remind him of what she was—a paid stand-in for Sheilah.

He understood her reservations. He shared them, knowing too well his own faults and weaknesses. He'd apologized many times for the scene with the gun, for his constant lapses. In the beginning his shame had moved her, as if it were her responsibility to save him. Now she saw him as he saw Zelda, a helpless purveyor of chaos.

With rent money in the bank and no job prospects, he was free to start his novel, and resolved to win her back via sober industry.

Before he could write a sentence, he needed to get organized. The first step was registering at an employment agency for a secretary. After interviewing her to make sure she had no ties to the studios and swearing her to secrecy, he hired a bookish young woman named Frances Kroll. Lithe and pale and slightly knock-kneed, she was a transplanted New Yorker like Dottie, unimpressed with L.A. She said she'd read some of his stories in high school, which pleased him, though she couldn't recall which ones. Her father was a furrier in Hollywood, a connection he thought might prove useful. She was also Jewish, which would help him with his hero, Stahr, a far-flung son of the Old World.

They set up shop in the spare bedroom downstairs. Propped on pillows, he pawed through his boxes of notes, dictating character sketches and background details and ideas for scenes. She was a touch typist, holding her perfect posture as she rattled off staccato bursts, sometimes finishing before he did.

“Read that back to me,” he asked, and she would have it.

She brought her own dictionary from home, and quickly he learned to defer to her on matters of spelling and grammar. She really belonged in college, but maintained that she was more interested in life. She was punctual and unstintingly chipper, helping Erleen in the kitchen and doting on him like a daughter, snipping a rose for the bud vase on his bureau and reminding him to take his pills. Even with the windows open and a fan going, the room was muggy, yet she never complained. After a particularly oppressive afternoon, when they were finished for the day, she came to him formally, as if petitioning for a special dispensation, and asked if she could wear shorts.

Early on, the work was bookkeeping. When he'd gone through all the boxes, he jotted a number by each entry, assigning them to categories she then collated on new pages. He went over these closely, making changes and passing them back, gradually, draft by draft, building a notebook while the fan paddled the sluggish air. Occasionally she couldn't read his handwriting and had to ask what a certain word was, but for long stretches they could go without talking, their shared effort, like the book's potential, filling him with contentment. Like him, she was a whistler, the two of them unconsciously picking up each other's tunes as they worked, twining, falling silent, beginning again. “The Bear Went Over the Mountain.” “Tea for Two.” He wondered if her boyfriend knew how funny she was.

The coincidence of their names tickled him. Franny, he called her, but more often, recalling Proust, Fran
ç
oise.

“Fran
ç
oise, take a letter,
s'il vous plait
.”

“Oui, monsieur.”

I hope the doctor takes into consideration what a peach you were to me through the whole ordeal,
he dictated.
I'm still in bed but practically recovered, no thanks to the hellish weather. Water has become such a precious commodity that the dam here is guarded by armed constables and ice cubes have become a form of currency. Please don't fret about my health. It will not be four months. That quack in New York doesn't know my recuperative powers. The real shame is that it ruined what should have been—and still was, I submit—a triumph for you. I've written and told the doctor this. You were heroic and tender and lovely in every way, and I won't forget it.

Frances didn't ask what had happened, though he could see she was intrigued. The hospital's address was an irresistible clue, and once again he struggled with how best to explain Zelda. Rest home and sanitarium were evasions, asylum frightening. He was afraid Frances might see him as tragic, and tried to be matter-of-fact.

“She's in a mental hygiene clinic.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Thank you. She hasn't been well for some time now. Lately she seems better, so we're hopeful.”

“That's good.”

“It is,” he said.

He was honest, she was sympathetic. So why did he feel he'd betrayed their dearest secrets?

“Is this her?” Frances asked, pointing to a picture of Sheilah and himself at the Cocoanut Grove.

“No, that's just a friend.”

“She's very pretty.”

“She is,” he said, noting the innate female prejudice against the better-looking.

He didn't have to explain Sheilah to Frances, and yet he courted her approval. He was still sending Sheilah roses with breast-beating notes. As he dictated his entreaties to Frances, she must have thought she'd walked into a Restoration farce, though she gave no sign. Friday, when he introduced the two of them, he felt the same trepidation he had that first dinner at the Troc with Sheilah and Scottie, and was relieved when they seemed to get along.

“She's very young,” Sheilah said later.

“You make it sound like a bad thing.”

“What I'm saying is that she's at a very impressionable age. She obviously thinks you're wonderful.”

“I'm not?”

“You can be, when you're not being an ass.”

“I believe it's pronounced ‘arse.'”

“Case in point.”

Terrible as it was to confess, during the week, with Frances there, he didn't miss Sheilah as much. The days were full as Stahr's Hollywood opened to him, another world. He woke early and worked so she would have fresh pages to type. At lunch Erleen made iced tea with sprigs of mint and served them on the shaded verandah overlooking the pool, taking a chair and fanning herself with her apron in lieu of a breeze. The hills were baked brown. In the distance rose the snow-covered peaks, promising a false relief. He had his one illicit cigarette for the day and they sat listening to the shrilling cicadas, invisible in the trees.

“Well,” Erleen said when he was done, “time's a-wasting,” and collected their plates on a tray.

His life was quiet, focused solely on the novel. With the heat wave he stayed inside, free to dream, never leaving his keep. If he needed a book from the library or a prescription filled, Frances had her father's Pontiac. He called her at all hours, rousting her from sleep with lists of things he wanted for tomorrow. He prevailed on her to deliver roses to Sheilah and choose Zelda's birthday card. No errand was too intimate. A confederate, she disposed of his empties and bought him extra cigarettes. She became his envoy, representing him at the bank and the post office and Western Union. If she were a conman, she could have taken him for everything he was worth—a toothless risk, since he had nothing.

With no job, he was vigilant with expenses, but as the weeks passed and the bills rolled in, his savings dwindled to an alarming figure. In a month Scottie was visiting him, and her fall tuition was due. There was no way he could pay it. He pressed Ober to send the stories to more places and met with the same indifferent resistance. Swanie said it was a bad time of year to approach the studios. Town cleared out in the summer. Everyone was in Malibu or up at Big Bear.

In the midst of his panic, Scottie wrote to say she'd sold an essay on the differences between her generation and his to
Mademoiselle
. It was scheduled for next month. Could he look it over for her?

KUDOS
PIE
,
he cabled.
MLLE
FINE
DEBUT
JE
T
AIME
DADDY

He was proud, yet the news left him feeling sour. He was aware that he was being small, and yet part of him suspected the magazine was taking advantage of her name—a hunch which proved true when he read the piece. Its thesis was that his views were as old-fashioned and outmoded now as the Charleston and bathtub gin, as if that generation didn't run the country. He told her he admired the wit in it and gently suggested she revise the piece to reflect a deeper continuity between the eras.
Without a real cataclysm like war,
he wrote,
very little changes. It's impossible for you to know, but 1920 and 1939 have more in common than 1913 and 1919, just as after the coming war 1939 will seem entirely a lost world. The luck I had was being old enough to see the new world clearly and so put in perspective both the admirable and the absurd.

He expected she would ignore him, as usual. A father, his duty was to offer advice in excess and hope some stuck.

While he awaited her reply, he received Pep's novel about Hollywood,
The Day of the Locust
. After hearing Sid talk it up, he was afraid Pep might bird-dog his best material, but like Pep's other stuff it was wildly morbid and overwrought, including a truly marvelous riot at a premiere. There was almost no overlap with what he had planned. In his relief he wrote Pep a glowing note.

A few days later he got a call from Scottie—rare, given the cost of long distance. He thought she might be sore at him.

“What? No. I wouldn't call you for something like that. This is serious. Right before exams I started having stomach pains. I thought it was just nerves. I tried buttermilk and Bromo-Seltzer but nothing helped. Finally I went to the doctor. He says I have to have my appendix out.”

“That's not so bad. Your mother had hers out.” He tried to remember how much he'd paid for the operation, but it was fifteen years ago, and in francs.

“He said it's not urgent, but I should definitely have it done this summer.”

“You're not in pain, are you?”

“It comes and goes. I'm sorry, Daddy.”

She spoke as if she'd failed him, when, if anything, the opposite was true. Again he wondered what he was doing here. Seeking his fortune.

“It's all right, Pie. We'll figure something out.”

“How are you doing?”

“I'm working,” he said.

He had been, until then. Now he dropped everything to schedule her surgery. She was already going to visit Zelda in Asheville before heading west, the two of them staying in a Saluda boarding house like two matron ladies taking the waters. A few years ago when he'd broken his shoulder, the doctor in the hospital there had done a good job setting it. Was he available then? Perhaps she could come down a week earlier. Could Dr. Carroll give Zelda another week of leave? What time did the train arrive? He called back and forth with a calendar in his lap, and once he'd gotten it all in place, had Frances make the arrangements.

To pay for it, he had no choice but to appeal to Ober. In Scott's two years in Hollywood he'd completely paid off his debt, more than thirteen thousand. While he hated to go back to their old credit system, an advance of fifteen hundred was nothing against his future earnings. The novel was underway and he had two new stories for him.

Ober wired and told him to try Swanie.

He didn't want to swear in front of Frances.
“Merci,”
he said, and set the telegram aside.

Over the decades, how many tens of thousands in commissions had Ober skimmed from his labors? Scott had stood by him when he left to form his own agency. Now that he'd built a stable of moneymakers like Agatha Christie he didn't need Scott and his problems. Ober had always considered him irresponsible, especially with money. The last few times he'd seen him in New York had been at the end of binges—unrepresentative, he might argue. If this was about his drinking, Ober could have thrown him over ten, fifteen years ago. Why abandon him now when he was sober and doing good work?

DONT
UNDERSTAND
SUDD
EN
CHANGE
IN
POLICY
,
he cabled.
WOULDNT
ASK
EXCEPT
THREE
FITZGERALDS
UN
DER
DOCTORS
CARE
.
PLE
ASE
RECONSIDER
.

After hearing nothing for a week, he wired Max:
CAN
YOU LEND ME
6
00 ONE MO
NTH
.
AM
BROKE
AND
SCO
TTIE
NEEDS
OPERATION
.
OBER
REFUSES
TO
HEL
P
.
HAVE
STARTED
NOVEL
.