Zelda (61 page)

Janno’s romance with Jacob begins on a different footing. To her he is from the first a romantic figure and she imagines him living in a world totally different from her own. She makes up stories about him. “In some of the dreams he lived in a dark mahogany-haunted house with ferns and red-coated ancestors and sometimes he lived at various Country-clubs.” He is a young lieutenant stationed in Janno’s Southern town during World War I; he comes in with the army and he leaves with Janno. She has been equivocal about marrying him for a while, but she thinks (as Zelda had) that you can marry or you can be a stenographer, and “life was gayer and the things of marriage were more familiar to a young girl than the disciplines of offices.” In passages clotted with images of violence and destruction the author establishes what will become the dominant tone of the marriage. She forecasts disaster and moves toward it relentlessly.

“So they were desperately in love and being desperately in love involves a desperate existence.” Zelda uses the word “desperate” in its most literal sense, thereby extending the slang phrase into a darker area of meaning. Janno and Jacob drink, shoot good golf, and (as Zelda becomes apocalyptic again) survive on the “possibility, and hope, of sin.” Zelda calls this phase of Janno’s life “Nemesis incubating,” adding that she tried to adopt Jacob’s taste, failing miserably.

And Janno, who is not content to become Jacob’s “evocateur” (“to him women were agents—evocateurs of his own grace”), begins to examine Jacob’s relationship with other women in his life. She concentrates on the women in his family, for it was toward them (or in reaction against them) that she believes his attitudes were formed.

He hated his sister.… largely because he never could find out what it was about her that he so heartily resented. He hated his mother because…he blamed her for the failure of his life. He hated Janno for the same reason but this did not come to light until many years later when it really had become difficult to make money and some of his portraits were—O well, over the garage in case they were ever wanted again.

The same cool, even cold, observation is given to Jacob’s person and mannerisms.

Jacob went on doing whatever it was that Jacob did; he was always doing something with pencils or pieces of string or note-books or things which he found in his wallet; this made him absent-minded and preoccupied and also gave savour of material purpose. He was more important than Janno; she always felt as if she should be helpful about his tinkerings; they were intricate enough to need an assistant.

Their marriage begins to fall apart: Jacob drinks too much, but when Janno asks him to stop he tells her to mind her own business. Janno is not able to cope with Jacob’s increasing success as a portrait painter. She envies New York, where they are living; its “wondrous chic…the nail-polish and orchids, the hushed florescence of the gilded restaurants, the subdued arrogance of people who really had much to lose, the disciplined pomp of winter hotels, the swish of leisure” intimidate her.

Jacob has a flirtation with a nineteen-year-old girl he has been commissioned to paint. Janno thinks the girl “vulgar” and feels strangled by her own inability to do anything other than watch. Suddenly Jacob decides to go to Europe; Janno does not want to go, but her husband “never tolerated any policies of inertia.” And then
the about-face. Tacked on this description of the early days of their marriage is Janno’s comment that Jacob is really a “sweet man,” sweet because he gives her presents on holidays. “She was grateful and devoted; promising gratitude and devotion to God for having sent him. She was a lucky girl.…”

At the opening of the sixth chapter, entitled “Over here, over there…Flight,” they arrive in Paris and once again enter the world of sophisticated wisecracking and general discontent. Janno is busy “redecorating the gilded cage.” Their time is spent at the Ritz bar, to which they are described as superior. But the entire opening is weighted with bitterness and irony. They run into chic people to whom Janno is “socially deferential.” She must pretend to admire them, all the while abhorring their taste and pretentiousness. “Everybody liked them as standard millionaires the same way a good hotel or a crack train is appreciated. They were able.”

At the parties among the rich Janno feels the restlessness, she and Jacob and the others must move on to other parties, driven by the idea “that somewhere else might be nearer the center.” Jacob’s flirtatiousness makes her unhappy.

Janno had always been jealous. Situations which had to be faced with dishonesty and endured for the sake of a code to which she did not subscribe made her sick. She couldn’t say to Jacob, “I don’t want you to go, you’re obligated to me. Anyway she’s not as nice as I am.” She sat being tragically poignantly courageous and saying to herself that after all, such was all in the game. This sophistry disoriented her momentarily and by the time she had organized an adequate humility to meet the humiliation the two people had got away and the table settled to another rhythm. The party went somewhere else and rattled negligibly along where the night was padded in red leather cushions.

“Now listen,” the baron kept saying, “you ought to be making something out of a promising girl like you.”

It was gratifying to feel that one might be a financial asset. However, she was making something of herself: the best she was able, under the circumstances. All these bedraggled wan spectres seemingly so immersed in the pattern of tragic futility were very much engaged in turning accident into memoir. They imagined things about themselves, then forgot the thread of the current romance and disintegrated through the fumes of the night in search of the story of their lives.

Couples begin to pair off, but Janno is excluded; she does not want to be left out, but she cannot participate in affairs such as those
taking place right under her nose. “During the first shock of infidelities the realization that the ties in which one has invested are nevertheless perishable gives poignancy.” Janno realizes that she can’t force Jacob “to feel fidelity,” therefore she “trooped her colours and accepted this, the custom of the country, with tragedy, regret and compensation.”

Eventually, however, Janno leaves one of the parties with a Mr. Fish, and they drive out to St. Cloud, kissing and drinking wine until the morning. At the end of the scene in St. Cloud Janno makes a moral pronouncement, “This is wrong,” and she and Fish leave.

Jacob disapproves of Janno’s staying out all night, but he is in no position to protest. Finally he decides to forget it and presents her with a golden necktie. Janno calls it “a gala emblem.” Jacob replies, “I’ll let you wear it sometime—next time you want to hang yourself for instance.’ And the conversation is left at that, as if it were a clever
bon mot.

Janno and Jacob meet the Comings, a rich couple who own a house in St. Cloud set in a magnificent pebbled garden. The description of the couple and their house, with its black glass tables and gilded ceilings, recalls the Murphys; what is unexpected is the undertone of irony and dislike in Zelda’s description of them: “He and Charity put much effort into human relationships; having friends made such a difference.” Their house is filled with hundreds of dollars’ worth of the most recent magazines from America. Corning insists upon two Bacardi cocktails before meals; it is only one of the minor details in his plan for a correct evening. The Comings give wonderful dinners “to the stars and to migratory Americans and to French people of consequence; not on the same evening.” But there is a tradition, Zelda writes, “amongst the rich and famous that they have earned the right to know the people they want.…”

All of the Coming’s parties have the air of having been rehearsed. The only thing Zelda says Corning worries about is never having lost his temper: he is afraid it is a defect of temperament. He perfects “his garden, his gadgets, his graces, his retainers, his dependents, his children,” each with the same attention to detail. He misses only one thing according to the narrator, “love.” He is charming and impersonal; the love he says he gives is, in the narrator’s estimation, “parental solicitude.”

“Corning said, ‘I want all these people to love one another because I love all of them—’…The guests obediently loved him:
everything was so good and so new and so well-dramatized; he gave them some more.”

“Now this was paradise,” begins Zelda’s last chapter, echoing David’s reaction to the Riviera in
Save Me the Waltz.
“We are now in Paradise—as nearly as we’ll ever get.…” Janno and Jacob are on the Riviera and Zelda tells of the young wife’s romance with a French aviator, Jacques. It is related in greater detail than in
Save Me the Waltz.
Janno and Jacob have met the son of an advocate “and several young flying officers from the depot at Frejus.… The flying officer who looked like a Greek God was aloof.”

They meet at a pavilion set back from the sea, facing the ring of bright lights strung in a crescent around the perimeter of the shore. Jacob insists that Janno begin a conversation with the officer, but she is reluctant.

Janno was vaguely baffled by the pleasurable expectancy which she felt concerning the French lieutenant.… life suddenly offered possibilities to a reckless extravagance which she didn’t like. She had premonitions of wanton adventure.

Jacob is rather bored; he

didn’t really like the sitting around in a wet bathing-suit and he hated the taste of sand. He liked expatiating about values and origins and was exhaustive in his way of making the stories of people fit into his impetuous pre-conclusions about them. He kept nagging and asking and third-degreeing his acquaintances till it all made acceptable continuity with what he thought it ought to be dramaticly. He said people had to have friends. She didn’t have to have anything save the baby and him and a pint of wine with meals.

The setting is permeated with a sense of furtiveness, concealment, and utter confusion. The villa on the Mediterranean becomes a place of seclusion, a “secret house,” hidden by the lushness of the landscape, a “design of escape,” a place “for the heart to the or the world be hid.…”

When Janno again meets Jacques he immediately invites her to his apartment. “She said she would; she was horrified. She could not possibly not do so.” Apparently Janno’s idea of herself forces her to go to Jacques; she is driven into a tryst not because she is dominated by love, but because she is afraid of it. To succumb to her fear would be a weakness, a violation of her code, and therefore she
must confront it. But there is at no point in the chapter a clarification of the romance and only by ominous reactions to it can we feel the author’s point of view.

Unable to reconcile or resolve the conflicts between her heroine’s feelings, her behavior, and convention, Zelda allows Janno to escape all responsibility for her actions by blaming destiny.

She could not bring herself to deny her love its right of hearing, of clarification. She could go and see what in this destiny was ultimately inalienable; let issues declare themselves so that they might be faced and mastered. It was confused because she so hardly spoke the language and she was never quite sure about what she was saying.… One night the lights went out in the brine-blown pavillion. She danced with Jacques while the others drank the really good champagne on the porch.… Janno forgot to think. The lightning played about mysteriously and the night swayed black with arbitrary might outside. She kissed Jacques on the neck. It doesn’t matter now. The storm raged; this might be the end of the world. One was afraid; it might be God’s mal-diction. The kiss lasted a long time and there were two of them. She did not mean to do this; and when the dance was over and she joined the others, and put the matter aside. The young French officer treated her preciously and she knew that no matter what it was it would be tragedy and death; ruin is a relative matter.

If she loved him anyway she could not possibly hurt her husband and her child.… If she loved him, she could not possibly love him and live with another: she wouldn’t be able. If she loved him, there wasn’t any answer.

The trouble was she should never have kissed him. First, she should never have kissed Jacques; then she shouldn’t have kissed her husband; then after the kissing had become a spiritual vivisection and half-massochistic there should not have been any more. Life in those darkened days behind the blinds with unidentified purposes humming outside and poitesses [?] hanging abeyant and reproachful over the inside, was venemous and poisoned. There wasn’t much in calling the doctor; though she did. He prescribed champagne.

Janno considers her relationship to Jacques almost exclusively in terms of ruination, and Zelda’s writing is made uncertain by her circling around the situation. Jacob seems completely unaware of what is happening. “Jacob littered his fire-place with duplicates from his files and receipts for his insurance and cigarette-butts and pencil stubs and wine bottles. Then he shoved the screen across the disarray and tipped the maid a little extra and was absolved.” Eventually,
Janno asks herself, “How was she going to live if she did run off; if he [Jacob] did acknowledge the situation? What was he supposed to do?” Janno daydreams “that she would come back over the red clay where the sharp pines shed the blood of summer some day and the. This was probably the influence of Byron. It was a sad love affair holding no promise and too impassioned to be dignified.” Then suddenly Jacob acts: “‘I’ll get out of here as soon as I can. In the meantime, you are not to leave these premises—You understand?’

“Of course she understood, a locked door is not difficult of comprehension. So she told her husband that she loved the French officer and her husband locked her up in the villa.” She reads books and no longer goes to
the
beach. She desperately wants to see Jacques. But she makes no attempt to; Janno remains essentially passive, both in her love and in her thinking about it. The scene never closes, and the manuscript dwindles away after a discourse on adultery. There are a few more pages, but the life and love that Zelda has been trying to describe, which are beyond Janno’s control, are also beyond hers. Beyond even making an effort toward control. It is that failure that mars the entire novel and gives it its floating, directionless quality.