Call Me Zelda (16 page)

“You’re my best friend, Peter,” said Scott. “My very best pally.”

“You too,” said Peter. “Drink some water when you get home. Tell your wife you love her tomorrow.”

“I love her,” he said.

“You do,” said Peter. “Tell her.”

“I love her.” The weeping resumed, but we shut him in the taxi and sent him home.

W
e didn’t say much on the way back to the apartment.

Sorin’s lights were dark, and I wondered whether he was asleep or if he had friends to meet in city bars. The ballerinas’ rooms were also dark. We trudged up the stairs and into the apartment. Peter sat on the sofa and took off his shoes while I filled two glasses to the brim with water. I brought him a glass and sat across from him on the piano bench.

He clinked my glass.

“Cheers.”

We were both bottoms up in less than a minute. He took the glasses into the kitchen for a refill and we drank more water. When I finished I looked at my wedding picture on the piano and prepared myself to tell him my big news. I took a deep breath.

“I resigned from Phipps,” I said.

Peter was silent for a moment. “What’s that?” he finally said.

“I resigned. From the clinic. To be Zelda’s private nurse.”

“When did this happen?”

“I put in my notice last Friday. We are in a period of transition.”

He placed his empty water glass on the table and shook his head.

“You need to ask for your job back,” he said.

“It’s too late. They’ve already replaced me. It happened a week ago.”

“Is this for her?” he asked. “For them?” He said
them
as if it were made of poison.

“It’s for me. And for her.”

“You can’t allow yourself to be absorbed by them.”

“I’m not worried about that.”

A lie.

“Is it because they’re famous? You have to guard against
that. Those who are famous have a way of making people serve them.”

“That’s not fair, Peter,” I said. “I do want to serve them, especially her, but it’s not the celebrity.”

“Then what is it?”

“I’m needed. Me. Personally. Not because I’m a nurse, but because I have a special connection to someone who needs
me
, Anna.” I stood and walked over to the piano with my back to Peter. “I haven’t been needed in a long time. I forgot how good it feels.”

Peter was quiet for a moment. When I turned to face him, he spoke kindly but with conviction. “Anna, you can certainly make your own decisions, but I can’t help but think this is a mistake.”

“He’s paying me fifty a week,” I said.

“Oh.”

“I’m making more money than I did at Phipps, but it’s not just that. I feel that I’m called to be there.”

“After meeting him tonight, I think you’ll earn every penny.”

“You seemed to get on well enough,” I said, not hiding my sarcasm. “You didn’t say no to any drinks, either.”

He started to protest but then fell silent. “I feel bad. I shouldn’t have drunk like that,” he said. Peter put his face in his hands and rubbed his eyes. “I just think you’ll regret your decision.”

I knew that he was probably right, but like an addict I felt no power to restrict myself. Zelda had made little progress in the weeks she’d been at La Paix, but quite honestly, she had made little progress at Phipps. Was she supposed to be institutionalized for the rest of her life?

I couldn’t believe that. I had to hope that she could improve and her family would find a way to live as one, her little family of a man and a wife and a daughter. Two pieces of my family were gone, and I knew that if they were here I would do everything—I
would risk everything—to keep us together. I had to try to help the Fitzgeralds so they could fit together and run the way they should.

But maybe it was my selfish desire to be needed. Maybe it was their celebrity. Deep down I knew I longed for the blissful anonymity of becoming part of something beautiful and tragic and even historic—like a single stroke of paint on a large and detailed landscape.

THIRTEEN

Against the recommendation of Dr. Meyer, and in spite of the fact that there was no measurable improvement in her condition, Zelda was formally discharged from Phipps Clinic on June 26, 1932. Scott was tired of dealing with Meyer, whom he did not respect and who insisted regularly that Scott stop drinking, and felt that my full-time attention would benefit his wife. I tried to assert that Zelda should still spend half of her time at the clinic, but Scott would agree only to weekly therapy.

I was determined to keep Zelda on Meyer’s schedule and to help her find healthy ways to satisfy her creative impulses, while maintaining the peace with her husband. Meyer regimented her eating, reading, dancing, painting, tennis, horseback riding, and outpatient therapy schedule. I tried to push her from one activity to the next like a child in primary school.

It was a task beyond my qualifications.

One stiflingly humid July afternoon, I placed a watercolor of the dancers Zelda had just finished on the side table to dry, and rinsed out her brushes in the sink. Her small room at the top of
the house felt especially close with the hot air rising, the open window only bringing in more heat, and Zelda’s sudden need to move through ballet positions.

When I turned back to her, I noticed her picking at a patch of eczema beginning on her neck and chin, flaring like a red flag. The skin irritations and obsession with work had historically produced major breakdowns, so I decided to steer her toward more restful activity. I thought perhaps I could interest her in a walk under the shade trees when a sudden noise in the hallway was followed by Scott bursting into the room. His eyes were wild and he looked as if he wanted to catch us at something. I didn’t know exactly what he was looking for, but he seemed almost disappointed not to have found it.

Since our night at the Owl Bar, Scott and I had made a silent agreement that we would not speak of it. Zelda would make more of it than necessary, and Scott at least had the good sense to understand that Zelda must think me entirely hers if there was to be any trust between us.

“I’m not writing a word, you terrible bastard, so get the hell out of here,” she said.

Her vehemence surprised me.

“Don’t act like I don’t have cause to be suspicious,” he said. “Anna, is she? Was she just working on her new novel?”

“She was not,” I said. “She just finished painting.”

“Show me,” he said.

I gestured to the drying paper and he walked over to see it. He ran his hands over the picture, smearing some of the color.

“Just go on,” said Zelda. “Destroy it. Like you destroy every part of me. I am nothing but a cadaver to you. Perform your autopsy, dear. Tell me what’s inside.”

“You’ve already started for me by clawing away at your face.”

“Once I wanted to live inside your head. Now I’d just like to tear it off.”

“Then please do. And put me out of my misery.”

I stepped between them.

“Please, both of you,” I said. “Scott, everything was okay here. Please leave us.”

The two of them stared each other down with the ferocity of boxers in the ring. Scott finally pivoted and left the room.

“I want to go back to Phipps,” she said. “Or I want to die. Pick one, but do not leave me here with this man tonight. One of us won’t make it through.”

“Zelda, you don’t mean that.”

“I mean it with every breath it takes to speak the words.”

She stormed over to the door and slammed it as hard as she could. I cringed, waiting for his footsteps to return. Instead I heard the front door slam downstairs. I went to the window and watched him charge down the path to the car, get in, and speed away, kicking up a cloud of dust in his wake.

“Good,” she said, shaking her head. “Good.”

“Did you quarrel last night?”

She laughed with a sneer. “Did we quarrel? When do we not quarrel?”

She walked over to her closet and pulled out a pile of papers that I knew to be the very thing that Scott had asked her not to write. She sat down in the chair at the table facing the window, dropped the papers on the watercolor painting, and started writing. The wet color bled through onto her words, but she did not seem to notice or care.

I watched her for a moment in her silent rebellion, trying to decide whether I should take her threats of murder or suicide seriously, when I heard the sound of a child’s voice through the window. Zelda stopped writing and looked out front to see Scottie skipping up the drive with her friend Andrew. They were having a race, and Scottie was winning. Through the open window drifted her laughter and narration.

“Up ahead is the brilliant, beautiful, worldly, and dashing Scottie Fitzgerald, first-place skipper and three-time Olympic champ.”

She was breathing so fast it was hard for her to get it out, but she did all the same, and collapsed into a fit of giggles with Andrew as soon as they reached the oak in the front yard.

I saw Zelda watching her daughter. Her shoulders began to rise and fall heavily and I could see that she was crying. I stepped behind her and placed my hands on her back.

“We’ve done one thing, just one thing right,” she said.

“It’s the most important thing,” I said.

Scottie and Andrew scampered off into the woods, leaving their happy echoes behind them.

“But she’s not a bit mine,” said Zelda. “Her face, her name, her manners. He won’t let her be mine, and she knows it, so she treats me with the polite distance of a lunatic aunt.”

“Why don’t you try to do something with her? Just the two of you. Take her on a horseback ride. Help her with tennis. Swim in the reservoir. Whatever. She’d be happy to do it with you.”

“No. I’d do something wrong. Something bad would happen. It’s better if I don’t poison her with my atmosphere.”

“Zelda, that’s not true. You must stop.”

She raised her hand to me.

“No more,” she said. “I don’t want to speak of it anymore.”

Zelda stood up and wiped her eyes. She picked up the papers, walked them over to the closet, and placed them back on the high shelf. Then she took down a folder and walked over to the fireplace. She motioned for me to join her.

She pulled all the essays she’d written for me out of the box, along with a photograph of a handsome man on a beach. She placed them in the bottom of the fireplace, opened the book of matches on the mantel, and struck one. She watched the flame
until it burned almost to her fingertips and then threw it into the fireplace. The papers ignited and curled into little piles of ash. The quick flare of orange reflected off her face and wide eyes, giving her a demonic look.

The smoke didn’t drift up the fireplace, but slipped out into the room, surrounding us with its odor and adding to the oppressive heat. I worried that the chimney was clogged, and retrieved the water from Zelda’s painting. I poured it over the papers, adding another layer of scorched air to the room.

Zelda inhaled deeply.

“Do you feel it filling you up, purifying you?” she asked.

“I feel it, but I do not feel cleaner.”

“I do,” she said. “I only wish I could add my diaries to the pile. Someday I will, but for now, good-bye, ‘Dance of the Hours’; good-bye, New York fountain; good-bye, aviator.”

I felt a flicker of recognition, then remembered Scott’s words at the bar.

“Aviator?”

“Shhh,” she said, walking back to the window and looking for Scott.

“Who is this aviator?” I asked.

“He is nothing anymore, but once he could have been everything. If Scott hadn’t locked me up all those weeks.”

“Where did he lock you up?”

She laughed suddenly, that terrible out-of-context laugh that seemed to disturb her as much as it did me. Her neck was redder than ever and I knew it was time to stop.

“I’ll write it,” she said. “Something more intimate than what I wrote for my novel. Something just for you. And then we’ll burn that, too. Like salamanders.”

It seemed that speaking of this aviator set her more on edge, and I was growing increasingly uncomfortable with her need to burn papers. It was hard enough to leave her each night; I didn’t
want to add worry about her setting fires. I tried to steer her in another direction.