Zelda (25 page)

The contest between the Fitzgeralds was no more pretty than that between the Divers; all rules of conduct were void. There were delirious parties that ended at Maxim’s or the Coupole. Zelda wrote, “Nobody knew whose party it was. It had been going on for weeks. When you felt you couldn’t survive another night, you went home and slept and when you got back, a new set of people had consecrated themselves to keeping it alive.” And the Fitzgeralds were seen stepping from taxis, their handsome faces half hidden in the shadows of the night. Those were the evenings, indistinguishable from each other, spent in the company of the lively and exotic Kiki, or with Dolly Wilde, Oscar’s niece, who had kohl-rimmed eyes and a total lack of discretion. Scott would make her an American girl in a canceled episode in
Tender Is the Night
and name her Vivian Taube: “To be a tall rich American girl is a form of hereditary achievement…. Nevertheless it was increasingly clear to him that Miss Taube had more immediate concerns—there was a flick of the lip somewhere, a bending of the smile toward some indirection, a momentary lifting and dropping of the curtain over a hidden passage. An hour later he came out of somewhere to a taxi whither they had preceded him and found Wanda limp and drunk in Miss Taube’s arms.” This was later cut from the manuscript, as were most of the other descriptions of homosexuals.

On the boat to Europe Zelda had mentioned to Scott that she thought a friend from the ballet was a homosexual. Now, desperately uncertain of herself, she accused Scott of a homosexual liaison with Ernest Hemingway. Scott, who had gone without Zelda to have a drink one evening with Hemingway and his wife, had returned home intoxicated and had fallen into a deep sleep. In his sleep he had murmured, “no more baby,” which was taken by Zelda as absolute proof of her suspicions. Fitzgerald was dumfounded. They quarreled violently, each making increasingly wild accusations against the other. Scott did not once question Zelda’s sanity.

If the origin of such an unhappy rupture in the Fitzgeralds’ marriage can be dated, it would be early in 1926. For it was then that
Scott worriedly told the wife of a friend of theirs that Zelda complained of his inability to satisfy her. It was also in the winter of 1926-1927 that they had begun trying to have another child, for they very much wanted a son. Several months later Robert McAlmon told Hemingway that Scott was a homosexual. Hemingway must have relayed the accusation to Fitzgerald, for Scott mentioned it in a letter to Maxwell Perkins: “Part of his [McAlmon’s] quarrel with Ernest some years ago was because he assured Ernest that I was a fairy— God knows he shows more creative imagination in his malice than in his work. Next he told Callaghan that Ernest was a fairy. He’s a pretty good person to avoid.” Zelda knew of McAlmon’s canard. By the spring of 1929, the Fitzgeralds’ own physical estrangement all but complete, Zelda turned that charge against Scott. It took surprising effect. For a while at least Scott had begun to believe her.

Morley Callaghan, in his memoir of this spring in Paris, reports an incident that struck him as peculiar at the time. He and his wife had gone into the St. Sulpice Church, which was near the Fitzgeralds’ apartment. Scott was with them but he refused to enter the church and waited outside. Then they came back out and began to cross the square together. Scott said quietly,” ‘I was going to take your arm, Morley …’

” ‘Well, so …’

” ‘Remember the night I was in bad shape? I took your arm. Well, I dropped it. It was like holding on to a cold fish. You thought I was a fairy, didn’t you?’

” ‘You’re crazy, Scott,’ I said. But I wished I had been more consoling, more demonstrative with him that night.”

By the time the Fitzgeralds left Paris for the Riviera in July not only their marriage, but their very identities were in peril.

They stayed at the Villa Fleur des Bois in Cannes that summer. Zelda looked weary and haggard; her complexion, which had always been fresh, was ashen and colorless. Even her speech seemed to have changed. Gerald Murphy remembered her sudden bursts of laughter for no discernible reason, which came more as spasms of reaction than from enjoyment. He said: “The laughter was her own, not like a human voice. Something strange in it, like unhinged delight. It was ecstatic, but there was a suppressed quality about it, a low, intimate sound that took one completely off guard.” And he remembered
going to a movie at the local cinema near Antibes that summer with the Fitzgeralds and Sara. It was a documentary about underwater life and had been filmed in an aquarium. “There were all sorts and varieties of strange fish swimming by the camera; there were myriad reeds and seaplants swaying in the water, and then the movie began to show photos of the predatory fish in their natural habitat. Quite nonchalantly an octopus, using his tentacles to propel himself, moved diagonally across the screen. Zelda, who had been sitting on my right, shrieked and threw herself all the way across my lap onto my left shoulder and, burying her head against my neck and chest, screamed, ‘What is it? What is it!’ Now, we had all seen it and it moved very slowly—it was perfectly obvious that it was an octopus—but it had nevertheless frightened her to death. She was hardly a timid woman; I mean, she was really absolutely fearless and she was an expert swimmer. One simply didn’t think she would have been so frightened by what she had seen, unless, of course, she had seen it as a distortion of something horrible.”

All through that summer Zelda sank more deeply into her private world, becoming increasingly remote from Scott and Scottie. She continued her ballet lessons and danced professionally for the first time at brief engagements in Nice and Cannes. She was encouraged by her success, minor as she knew it was, and hoped that upon her return to Paris she could begin dancing with a major ballet company like Diaghilev’s.

Scott quarreled with the Murphys that summer too, and the escapades of the Fitzgeralds that had once had such élan now took on a sinister cast of self-destructiveness that was unavoidably clear to their friends. Sara Murphy said, “I don’t think he knew much about women and children.” She once wrote Scott: “You don’t even know what Zelda or Scottie are like—in spite of your love for them. It seemed to us the other night (Gerald too) that all you thought and felt about them was in terms of
yourself.
… I feel obliged in honesty of a friend to write you that the ability to know what another person feels in a given situation will make—or ruin lives.”

At the end of the summer, with the accumulation of grievances bearing down hard upon him, Scott wrote Hemingway:

My latest tendency is to collapse about 11:00 and, with tears flowing from my eyes or the gin rising to their level and leaking over, tell interested friends or acquaintances that I haven’t a friend in the world and likewise care for nobody, generally including Zelda, and often implying current
company—after which the current company tend to become less current and I wake up in strange rooms in strange palaces. The rest of the time I stay alone working or trying to work or brooding or reading detective stories—and realizing that anyone in my state of mind, who has in addition
never
been able to hold his tongue, is pretty poor company. But when drunk I make them all pay and pay and pay.

Scott’s pallor had become such that when he slept beneath the striped umbrellas on the
plage
he looked unearthly. What hopes the Fitzgeralds had invested in the Riviera as a place which would revive their troubled spirits vanished, and they returned to Paris in October. It was on the automobile trip back to Paris along the Grande Corniche through the mountainous and steep roads of the south of France that Zelda grabbed the steering wheel of their car and tried to put them off the cliff. To her it seemed that the car had a will of its own, that it swerved as though by its own volition: “… it seemed to me it was going into oblivion beyond and I had to hold the sides of the car.”

Hemingway answered Scott’s letter by reassuring him that the summer was a disheartening time of year to work. Death, he said, was not in the air as it was in autumn. In the fall of 1929 Paris was filled with Americans. Zelda wrote, “There were Americans at night, and day Americans, and we all had Americans in the bank to buy things with.” But the dollar was about to collapse, and the gala spree, the ceaseless and unrelenting party, was nearly over for all of them. Zelda said, “We went [to] sophisticated places with charming people but I was grubby and didn’t care.” Her nervousness made Scott edgy, and there were dinners taken together when Zelda held the sides of the table in order to endure sitting through the entire meal. She was nearly fifteen pounds under her normal weight. She continued her dancing lessons as if driven, and indeed she was.

On September 23, 1929, Zelda was invited to join the ballet school of the San Carlo Opera Ballet Company in Naples. She was offered a solo role in
Aïda
as her debut, with the promise of other solos in other operas during the season. Madame Julia Sedova, who ran the school as well as the ballet company, added in her letter of invitation that living in Naples was inexpensive; one would be able to have a complete pension for thirty-five lire a day. It was Zelda’s chance and it was not such a bad one, but inexplicably she did not
take it. Scott never acknowledged that Zelda had come this close to a serious career as a ballerina. As late as 1936 he was writing that Zelda had been hoping to get “bits” in the Diaghilev Ballet and that the only people who came to the studio to watch her “who she thought were emissaries of his and who turned out to be from the Folies Bergeres … thought they might make her into an American shimmy dancer.”

In what had by now become a pattern with them, they traveled to North Africa in February, 1930, as much to escape as to vacation. “It was a trying winter,” Zelda wrote, “and to forget bad times we went to Algiers.” Since they were fleeing from themselves, they did not find respite. They took a series of snapshots which they carefully saved in one of their scrapbooks, “dated 1929-1931. Scott was tanned and his hair was thinner, but Zelda looked ravaged in the harsh and telling light. It was characteristic of her to appear entirely different in each of her pictures, but in these the effect was eerie; she is wraithlike, as if haunted. Her shoulders are hunched, deep lines surround her eyes, her mouth is unsmiling always. She looks furtive and distracted.

One afternoon after the Fitzgeralds’ return from North Africa, the Murphys, who were living in Paris for the spring, went to the Fitzgerald’s apartment on the rue Pergolèse to pick up Zelda, whom they were taking to an art exhibit. As they approached the apartment they saw both Fitzgeralds and John Bishop leaving the building. “We immediately sensed something wrong between them. You know the way one can tell if there has been something embarrassing or upsetting that has happened. Zelda was surprisingly quiet and didn’t say anything to us, which was not her usual form; in fact, she hardly spoke to us. Suddenly she turned to both of them and said, ‘Were you talking about me?’ She was watching them very closely and they were embarrassed. Scott turned away toward me as though to say, ‘You have no idea of what we have been through this afternoon.’ They had all been having luncheon together at the Fitzgeralds’. Can you imagine her suspecting that they were talking about her? I mean, she was sitting right there with them!”

But such incidents were no longer rare. Undoubtedly as Zelda’s own behavior became more clearly peculiar her friends did reflect something of their discomfort in her company. Zelda’s reaction was
to become suspicious of all those people who had formerly been considered their friends—now she thought of them as Scott’s friends.

Inevitably the break came. During a luncheon party in April which the Kalmans, old friends of theirs visiting from St. Paul, attended, Zelda became afraid of missing her ballet lesson and abruptly left the table to catch a taxi. Kalman, noticing how nervous she seemed, went with her. In the taxi, while Zelda changed into her practice clothes, he tried to persuade her to take a rest from the ballet. But she did not appear to hear him and mumbled something unintelligible. As the taxi paused at a crossing, Zelda ran from the car toward her studio. Kalman returned to Scott, told him what had happened, and suggested that there was something seriously wrong with Zelda.

Madame Egorova, too, had begun to notice a change in Zelda. One afternoon Zelda invited her to tea. They were alone in the apartment and it became clear to the older woman that there was something strange happening to Zelda—her gestures, her face, and even her voice seemed increasingly peculiar. When they had finished their tea, Madame Egorova sat down on the couch facing Zelda. Suddenly Zelda threw herself down on her knees at Egorova’s feet. Trying to prevent the situation from going any further, Egorova rose calmly and told Zelda that it was late and that she had to go home, and quietly left the apartment.

On April 23, 1930, slightly more than a decade after their marriage, Zelda entered a hospital called Malmaison on the outskirts of Paris. She was in a state of extreme anxiety, and restlessly paced the room, saying: “It’s dreadful, it’s horrible, what’s to become of me, I must work and I won’t be able to, I should die, but I must work. I’ll never be cured. Let me leave, I must go to see ‘Madame’ [Egorova], she has given me the greatest possible joy; it’s like the rays of the sun shining on a piece of crystal, to a symphony of perfumes, the most perfect harmonies of the greatest musicians.” She was slightly intoxicated on her arrival and said that she found alcohol a necessary stimulant for her work. On the 2nd of May Zelda abruptly left the hospital against her physician’s advice.

Unfortunately, when she returned to their apartment, Scott was involved in a series of wedding parties and bachelor dinners for Powell Fowler (the brother of Ludlow Fowler). There was a lot of
drinking and no time for convalescence. Scott wrote Perkins at the time that “Zelda got a sort of nervous breakdown from overwork and consequently I haven’t done a line of work or written a letter for twenty-one days.” But Zelda’s collapse was far more serious than Scott implied. She returned to her ballet lessons with a frenetic exuberance. Less than two weeks later she was dazed and incoherent. She heard voices that terrified her, and her dreams, both waking and sleeping, were peopled with phantoms of indescribable horror. She had fainting fits and the menacing nature of her hallucinations drove her into an attempted suicide. Only an injection of morphine could comfort her. The demonic dreams which she experienced became more real for her than reality and Scott could not let her out of his sight. She entered Valmont, a clinic in Switzerland, on the 22nd of May. But Valmont handled gastrointestinal ailments primarily and the physicians there recognized that Zelda’s illness was of a deeply psychological nature. At the request of her physician, Dr. Oscar Forel was called in to examine her. The report from Valmont was ominous.