Zelda (8 page)

Still, their correspondence flourished. Zelda wrote Scott that she hoped his mother would like her. “I’ll be as nice as possible and try to make her—but I am afraid I’m losing all pretense of femininity, and I imagine she will demand it—” Then, because he wanted to know exactly what she did with her time, she told him about a “syndicate” she and Eleanor Browder had formed: “…we’re ‘best friends’ to more college boys than Solomon had wives—Just sorter buddying with ’em and I really am enjoying it—as much as I could anything without you— I have always been inclined toward masculinity. It’s such a cheery atmosphere boys radiate— And we do such unique things—” The day before, a good friend of hers from the University of Alabama, John Sellers, was short of his return train fare. Zelda helped him collect what he needed by dressing up in long skirts, with a floppy old hat pulled low over her eyes, and carrying a tin cup at the railroad station while they begged for alms. She was
having a grand time “acquiring a bad name,” as she put it, and thrived on the sensation she created.

As though to pacify any reaction to her cutting up, she added in one letter: “… every night I get very loud and coarse, and then I always wish for you so—so I wouldn’t be such a kid—” But this did little to assuage his feelings about her adventures, and wild letters again crossed between New York and Montgomery. Zelda was obviously having fun, and even as she assured him of her love she was also writing him: “The Ohio troops have started a wild and heated correspondence with Montgomery damsels.… I guess the butterflies will flitter a trifle more—It seems dreadfully peculiar not to be worried over the prospects of the return of at least three or four fiancées. My brain is stagnating owing to the lack of scrapes— I haven’t had to exercise it in so long—” And in her fashion she added: “Sweetheart, I love you most of all the earth—and I want to be married soon—soon— Lover— Don’t say I’m not enthusiastic— You ought to know—” But Scott was beginning to wonder; April began and he visited Clothilde in New York in order to search for a suitable apartment for himself and Zelda.

Meanwhile Zelda was growing impatient in Montgomery; she was tired of waiting for Scott to make his fortune, and her petulance began to show in her letters. Writing about a woman she knew, she told Scott that all women “love to fancy themselves suffering— they’re nearly all moral and mental hypo-crondiacs—If they’d just awake to the fact that their excuse and explanation is the necessity for a disturbing element among men—they’d be much happier, and the men much more miserable—which is exactly what they need for the improvement of things in general.” It was a nearly perfect summary of Zelda’s own attitude toward men and Scott did not miss it. He put her letter almost verbatim into his novel
This Side of Paradise
as a pertinent description of “Rosalind,” who was partly patterned upon Zelda: “Women she detested. They represented qualities that she felt and despised in herself—incipient meanness, conceit, cowardice, and petty dishonesty. She once told a roomful of her mother’s friends that the only excuse for women was the necessity for a disturbing element among men.”

By the next letter Zelda’s mood had again shifted; she told him all about a wild drive to Auburn “with ten boys to liven things up” and an escapade down on Commerce Street near the river in the worst part of Montgomery, where she had donned men’s clothes
and gone to the movies with a gang of boys. Fitzgerald was furious. Rather coolly she assured him:

Scott, you’re really awfully silly— In the first place, I haven’t kissed anybody good-bye, and in the second place, nobody’s left in the first place— You know, darling, that I love you too much to want to. If I did have an honest—or dishonest—desire to kiss just one or two people, I
might
—but I couldn’t ever want to—my mouth is yours.

Maddeningly, she went on:

But s’pose I did— Don’t you know it’d just be absolutely
nothing
— Why can’t you understand that nothing means anything except your darling self and your love— I wish we’d hurry and I’d be yours so you’d
know
— Sometimes I almost despair of making you feel sure—so sure that nothing could ever make you doubt like I do—

It was definitely not the sort of letter that would reassure Scott and, afraid that other men were seeing Ze!da often, too often, on the 15th of April he took a few days’ holiday and went to Montgomery. After the trip he wrote in his Ledger: “Failure. I used to wonder why they locked princesses in towers.”

But, if Scott considered the trip a failure, Zelda did not seem to.

Scott my darling lover—

everything seems so smooth and restful, like this yellow dusk. Knowing that I’ll always be yours—that you really own me—that nothing can keep us apart—is such a relief after the strain and nervous excitement of the last month. I’m so glad you came—like Summer, just when I needed you most—and took me, back with you. Waiting doesn’t seem so hard now. The vague despondency has gone— I love you Sweetheart.

He’d apparently brought some gin when he came, the “best at the Exchange,” and Zelda told him, “I’d rather have had 10¢ a quart variety— I wanted it just to know you loved the sweetness— To breathe and know you loved the smell—” Then, abruptly, the transition being perhaps the aroma of the gin, she added:

I think I like breathing twilit gardens and moths more than beautiful pictures or good books— It seems the most sensual of all the senses— Something in me vibrates to a dusky, dreamy smell—a smell of dying moons and shadows—

I’ve spent to-day in the grave-yard— It really isn’t a cemetery, you know, trying to unlock a rusty iron vault built in the side of the hill. It’s all washed and covered with weepy, watery blue flowers that might have grown from dead eyes—sticky to touch with a sickening odor—
The boys wanted to get in to test my nerve to-night— I wanted to
feel
“William Wreford, 1864.” Why should graves make people feel in vain? I’ve heard that
so
much, and Grey is
so
convincing, but somehow I can’t find anything hopeless in having lived— All the broken columnes and clasped hands and doves and angels mean romances—and in an hundred years I think I shall like having young people speculate on whether my eyes were brown or blue—of cource, they are neither— I hope my grave has an air of many, many years ago about it— Isn’t it funny how, out of a row of Confederate soldiers, two or three will make you think of dead lovers and dead loves—when they’re exactly like the others, even to the yellowish moss? Old death is so beautiful—so very beautiful—We will die together—I know—

Sweetheart—

Touched by the beauty of her letter, he sent her a marvelous flamingo-colored feather fan. It was the perfect gift for Zelda, frivolous and entirely beautiful; she was delighted by it.

Those feathers—those wonderful, wonderful feathers are the most beautiful things on earth—so soft like little chickens, and rosy like firelight. I feel so rich and pompous waving them around in the air and covering up myself with ’em ….

I love you most of everything on earth, and somehow you [your] visit made things so much saner, and I
do
believe in you— Just the wild rush and knowing what you did was distasteful to you—made me afraid— I’d die rather than see you miserable.… I want to go to Italy—with you, Darling— It seems so yellow—dull, mellow yellow—and that’s your color—

Each year a secret society called
Les Mysterieuses
, which was composed of sixty socially prominent young matrons and girls, gave a ball. That April it was a “Folly Ball,” and Mrs. Sayre and Rosalind wrote the playlet that preceded it. The auditorium in which it was presented was covered with a canopy of yellow and black ribbons intertwined and baskets of yellow roses. The part of Folly was played by Zelda, who, dressed in a costume of black-and-gold malines trimmed with tiny bells, danced upon her toes, “using numbers of small balloons as she went through the mazes of the dance.” Zelda had Kodak snapshots taken of herself for Scott, as she posed in her costume among her mother’s roses in their back yard. Her face had taken on a haunting prettiness; she was slimmer than she had ever been before (she said in a letter to Scott that she wanted to be “5 ft. 4″ x 2″”), and with her piercing eyes, high cheekbones and straight nose she
looked very much (as John Peale Bishop was later to describe her) the “barbarian princess.”

Zelda continued to cut up and just for the fun of it she and Eleanor Browder talked a streetcar conductor into letting them drive his trolley, and before the poor man realized what he’d done the girls had run it off the track, or so Zelda wrote to Scott.

Then we got fired—but we were tired, anyway! Mothers of our associates just stood by and gasped—much to our glee, of cource— Things like the preceeding incident are our only amusement—

Darling heart, I love you—truly.… I must leave or my date (awful boob) will come before I can escape—

Good Night, Lover

She closed her letter with a pencil drawing of the outline of her lips; “This is the biggest kiss of any on earth—because I love you.” Some of the fun was not so innocent, however:

Look at this communication from Mamma—all on account of a wine-stained dress— Darling heart—I won’t drink
any
if you object— Sometimes I get so bored—and sick for you— It helps then—and afterwards, I’m just more bored and sicker for you—and ashamed—

When are you going to marry me— I don’t want to repeat those two months—but I’ve just got to have you— When you can—because I love you, my husband—

Zelda

The enclosed note read:

Zelda:

If you have added whiskey to your tobacco you can substract your Mother.… If you prefer the habits of a prostitute don’t try to mix them with gentility. Oil and water do not mix.

In May the 4th Alabama regiment arrived in Montgomery from France, and the town turned itself into a colorful Mardi Gras to welcome them. There were large booths built along the streets, decorated with flags and confetti and streamers, and all the houses including the Governor’s were opened to welcome the returning heroes. Old costumes and masks were taken out of chests and dusted off and refurbished for the celebration. Rosalind’s husband’s company was going to march with the ranks unfilled; twenty-three of his men had been lost. Zelda wrote: “It almost makes me cry— I would if I weren’t expending all my energy on gum.

“I’ve started a continuous chew again—Your disapproval used
to put me on the wagon, but now I’ve got the habit again—” Scott had written her that he wanted to come to Montgomery again the middle of the month, and she replied, “Darling Sweetheart, I’ll be
so
glad to see you again—” But she didn’t leave it at that; she told him that if he waited until June he could accompany her as far as Atlanta, where she was to attend the commencement at Georgia Tech. “I’m going to… try my hand in new fields,” she added with a stunning insensitivity to his feelings. Ruthlessly she stimulated his already intense sense of competition for her.

In a rather pathetic attempt to keep her home, Scott had sent her Compton Mackenzie’s book
Flasher’s Mead
to read. But she didn’t like it: “Nothing annoys me more than having the most trivial action analyzed and explained.” She said the heroine was “ATROCIOUSLY uninteresting” and maybe she’d save the book and try to read it again in rainy weather. But she also tipped her hand more than she may have intended, for in the same letter she told him, “People seldom interest me except in their relations to things, and I like men to be just incidents in books so I can imagine their characters—” Everything, it seemed, had to revolve around her, her perceptions, her games, or she was not interested and refused to play. Certainly that letter carried a note of warning about herself, if Fitzgerald had been in any condition to receive it. But he was not. He knew the terms, they were remarkably like his own, and that exquisite egotism drew him even more completely to her.

But what he did not fully perceive, perhaps because Zelda did not, was the uncertainty within his girl. For, as worldly as she loved to seem to be, as reckless and ebullient as she was, Zelda knew nothing first hand of any world other than the protected Southern one of provincial towns and families who knew one another and were kin. For all her banter, New York, chic and fabulous, must have seemed as remote to her as the Orient.

Scott had sent Zelda a map of Manhattan, which she said might just as well have been China. “All I saw was the dot where we would live— I couldn’t help wondering over the fact that two rooms and bath took up the same space as Washington Square and Statue of Liberty.” In a last-ditch effort to arouse Zelda’s jealousy, Scott told her a story about an attractive girl he had met in New York, an actress, but it backfired when Zelda replied quite seriously, “Anyway, if she’s good-looking, and you want to one bit—I know you could and love me just the same.” That was not the reaction he had bargained for, and he was left without a rebuttal. If she was faking, she
cleverly made it sound as if she meant what she said—and, if she approved such behavior for him, might she not intend to do the same herself?

Zelda had said she wanted him to come South again; he replied that he still preferred to make the trip in May. He arranged to come for a few days and they had fun together, but he returned to New York with nothing settled; he promised her he’d come again in three weeks. Feeling more and more disheartened by his dreary lack of fortune in New York, Scott began to take it out on his friends there. He threatened to jump from the window of his club and the rest of the young men, weary of his moping, encouraged him; abashedly he climbed back down. There was one piece of luck. His story “Babes in the Woods” (which he had written while at Princeton) was bought by
The Smart Set
for $30. It wasn’t much, but it was a beginning. With the money he bought himself a pair of smart white flannels and sent Zelda a sweater. She wrote that it was “perfectly delicious—and I’m going to save it till you come in June so you can tell me how nice I look— It’s funny, but I like being ‘pink and helpless’— When I know I seem that way, I feel terribly competent—and superior.” Adding, with that touch of self-perception she summoned for Scott alone: “I keep thinking, ‘Now those men think I’m purely decorative, and they’re just fools for not knowing better‘— and I love being rather unfathomable. You are the only person on earth, Lover, who has ever known and loved all of me. Men love me cause I’m pretty—and they’re always afraid of mental wickedness—and men love me cause I’m clever, and they’re always afraid of my prettiness— One or two have even loved me cause I’m lovable, and then, of cource, I was acting.”