West of Sunset (24 page)

Ober, Sheilah, now the doctor. Why did everyone speak to him as if he were a child?

“Of course not,” Scott said, and signed the papers.

The Zelda the nurse delivered from the women's wing was new to him, another imposter. Her hair was dark as chocolate, a bad dye job, her bangs cut straight as a monk's. For the first time in her life she wore glasses, gold wire rims, which, combined with the hair, seemed a clumsy disguise. In his absence she'd grown moon-faced and jowly like her sister Rosalind, fine lines like cracks around her mouth. After Sheilah she seemed dowdy and middle-aged, an effect only exacerbated by her lost-and-found clothes.

“Dodo,” she said, claiming him, but stood apart, as if out of modesty or following orders.

After an awkward second he moved to embrace her. “Happy anniversary.”

“Yes, happy anniversary.”

“How many is it now?” the doctor prodded.

Nineteen. She'd been nineteen when he married her, his wild belle, and if that girl was gone, so was the dashing lieutenant he'd been, with his pocket Keats and his overseas cap and his dreams of immortality. The years may have shown more outwardly on her, but the two of them were a pair in a way he and Sheilah, with her indomitable health, would never be.

“You look well.”

“Thank you.”

“Scottie said you had a good visit.”

“We had a nice time. She was very sweet.”

In front of the doctor they spoke with a saccharine courtesy as if at the last second he might change his mind. Zelda was bringing her box of watercolors to do a few seascapes. It would be nice to have something new to paint for a change. He told them to have fun, an injunction Scott thought misbegotten.

She didn't take his hand as they crossed the lobby, and he saw he'd been wrong. Her earlier reserve wasn't abstract but purposeful, directed at him, as if, without his prior knowledge, they were fighting. He wondered if somehow—not necessarily through Scottie—she'd found out about Sheilah.

She was subdued in the car, waiting till they were outside the gates and into the shade of the woods to make her opening statement.

“I think I'm ready to go home.”

“Right now, you mean.”

“I'm serious. When we come back I'd like you to talk to the doctor.”

“I will,” he said.

“You'll see, I'm really so much better.”

“You'll excuse me if I've heard that before.”

“That's why I want you to see for yourself.”

He'd observed her enough to know when she was off. She might seem fine now, reasonable and alert, but that was typical of the first day. Inevitably would come the slippage—the blank spots and delusions and outbursts. She wouldn't be able to hide it for a week at close quarters.

“Fair enough,” he said. “I hope you are.”

She would be sane. He would be sober. Even before they boarded the plane, their time together was an experiment, one they'd attempted for more than a decade, in all the best places. He had no reason to believe the results would be any different here, yet out of a stubborn loyalty or inborn urge to punish himself, he was willing to try again. In the airport, when she returned from the ladies room, about her neck she wore a tiny silver cross she touched from time to time, as if for luck. As they fought the trade winds across the Straits of Florida, the Keys below white as salt in the glimmering turquoise, the fatalist in him thought it would be easier if they just got it over with now instead of spending the week dreading the inevitable.

Ernest had a place near Havana, but held everything that had happened against Zelda. Scott would have to visit him some other trip.

Varadero was an hour outside the city on the north shore, at the end of the Via Blanca, a highway bordered by cane fields and whitewashed churches. Donkey carts shared the road with blaring diesel trucks hauling sea salt from the Bay of Cardenas. The Playa Azul ran the length of the peninsula, the grand hotels set down like temples among the fishing villages.

They were at the Club Kawama, in the main house, a lichened granite villa with balconies overlooking the pool. With its royal palms and Moorish fountains and stucco bungalows, it might have been the Garden of Allah; all that was missing was the ghost of its owner. The season had ended and one wing was closed, its windows shuttered. In the dining room their first night, he heard another couple speaking German and wondered if they were spies or exiles or both. The woman was younger, a dark blonde dressed for the casino, her bare shoulders caramel colored. He and Zelda had a suite with separate beds, and with a wistful envy he watched the couple finish and head out for the evening.

“You should introduce yourself,” she said. “I'm sure they're more fun than I am.”

“Fun's the last thing I need. I have too much fun, I get in trouble.”

“That's not fun, that's everything. We were never good at moderation, either of us.”

“I never wanted to be,” he said.

“And now you do.”

“Now I don't have a choice, if I ever did.”

“You did,” she said. “You just didn't care.”

“You were like that too.”

“I'm not saying I wasn't. I know I was awful.”

“You were wonderful,” he said.

“Wonderfully awful.”

“I thought so.”

“You didn't always.”

“Mostly I did.”

“Mostly,” she said, because the exceptions were great and unforgivable on both sides. All they had was the past, but they couldn't go back.

It was night out and bats fluttered above the lighted pool as they walked across the courtyard to their room. The air was humid and still, waves falling softly in the darkness. He thought of Sheilah in Malibu, the two of them lying on the cool sand, watching the planes glide blinking through the maplike backdrop of stars.
I didn't pull myself out of the gutter to waste my life on you.
Later, in his narrow bed, after Zelda had said her prayers and turned in, he heard splashing and padded to the balcony. It was the Germans, frolicking like otters. For a long moment he watched them from the shadows, then quietly closed the doors.

In the morning they were open and a pink dawn washed the sky to the east. Zelda was gone. Her bed was made, on the nightstand a Gideon Bible, her place in the middle of Ecclesiastes kept by a black ribbon. Outside, a rooster crowed and crowed. It was only five thirty. He pictured her at the bottom of the pool or facedown in the breakers and tugged on yesterday's clothes, raced down the stairs and through the blinding courtyard and across the shuffleboard courts, only to find her on the beach with her easel, trying to match the color of the sunrise. With her coolie hat and sunglasses and pale limbs, she looked like any tourist.

“What are you doing up?” she asked.

“Looking for you.”

“Go back to bed. I don't need a keeper.”

That's the whole question, isn't it, he might have said. Or, better: I have no desire to be one.

“How about breakfast when you're done?”

“Can you wait an hour?”

He'd waited ten years. What was another hour?

“You know where to find me,” he said, and then couldn't get back to sleep.

They ate on a patio off the main dining room, watching the high-piled clouds and a red-funneled liner making for Havana. He had tarlike coffee while she attacked her English breakfast with the gusto of a parolee. She offered him a sausage; he wasn't hungry. He didn't remember her ever having an appetite like this and wondered if it was the drugs.

The rumpled
New York Herald
the waiter retrieved for him was a week old. Again, imitating Hitler, Mussolini sent his troops into Albania unopposed.

Already the day was hot, the waves glinting as they rose and broke.

“I love the beach,” she said. “The light's so clear here. Are you going to write today?”

“I'm going to try,” he said, though in truth he had no plans. All his life he'd believed in the primacy of work, yet he'd written nothing since he'd talked to Ober. Did it really take so little to discourage him? For years her dabbling had struck him as slapdash and glib, lacking the discipline of the professional. Now he envied her simple love of creation. He'd written too much for money.

The light and heat reminded him of Saint-Raphael. Their days there shared the same tropical languor. He sequestered himself in his room while she made studies of the sea and sky, the fishing boats, the village with its busy
mercado
—baskets of purple squid and whiskery rockfish, pullets sticking their heads through the bars of wooden cages. They rendezvoused at noon and ate lunch at a cantina facing the zocalo, arroz con pollo for thirty centavos. Beer was just three, and probably safer than the water, but he was good. She asked him for a cigarette as if it weren't forbidden, blew out a cloud and murmured with pleasure.

“It's nice to be able to do what you want,” she said.

“Even when it's bad for you.”

“Especially then. ‘Sin in haste, repent at leisure.'”

“The other way around makes no sense,” he agreed.

Later he wondered if she was referring to herself or to him, to the ancient past or the immediate present. He was used to divining her riddles when she was sick. In this case she'd left room for interpretation, the comment intentionally barbed. He was pleased she was better—he wanted her to be strong—but it was also unsettling, as if he'd lost some advantage.

After lunch, while the sun hung directly overhead, the Germans emerged, lanky and dark as natives, spread their towels on the sand and lay down to bake. The woman looked nothing like Sheilah, yet recalled her, by nubile youth alone. When he was stuck he wandered out to the balcony to spy on them, and toward the end of the day was horrified to find Zelda in her coolie hat stopped beside them, her easel folded away, engaged in conversation with the woman.

“They're Danish,” she reported. “From Copenhagen. They come here every year. I invited them to dinner but they're going to Havana to see the opera.”

“They don't get enough opera in Copenhagen.”

“I guess not. They're very nice. Bengt and Anna. He's a professor of archaeology. She does some sort of social work with children.”

While he was curious about them as well, he imagined what they made of this stout older woman in her pageboy haircut and paint-smeared blouse asking them to dinner. Could they tell she wasn't quite right, or did she come across as your typical off-season busybody? Either way, short of an enforced luau on the beach, he didn't expect to be dining with the Danes.

It was a blow, he supposed, to admit they were no longer an amusing couple. They ate in the main room, undisturbed, one of three far-flung tables attended by a single waiter. The menu was the same as last night's; from the stains he assumed it never changed. He'd had better carne asada on the streets of Tijuana. Zelda was telling him her plans for tomorrow, which involved painting the different faces of the village church all day. “Like Monet,” she said. From across the room the bar called to him, promising release. He ordered the tres leches cake with rum sauce and a coffee and left feeling slightly high.

As loudly as Zelda touted her new freedom, she stuck to her hospital schedule, turning her light out at nine, leaving him to read. He thought of sneaking down to the bar for a nightcap but resisted. In the morning she was up with the sun, not wanting to waste a minute of light.

There was something obsessive in her painting. Like his writing, it was an escape, a way of making time pass. What would happen if they had to spend the whole day together? But they hadn't in years. Even in Saint-Raphael their lives were separate, given to solitary pursuits. Why should that change now, with Scottie gone?

She seemed fine at lunch, not at all tired, relating what the sexton had told her about the church being the only building to survive the great hurricane as if it were proof of divine intervention.

“What about the fort?”

“They all drowned.”

“All.”

“That's what he said.”

He wasn't used to her being so sure of herself, and expected, any minute, the bowed head and slumped shoulders, the mumbled liturgy. Instead she was direct and pleasant, making him impatient. He'd waited so long for her to be well again that he was skeptical, as if she were playing a trick on him.

That afternoon while she was occupied with the church he went through her room like a guard tossing a prisoner's cell. On her bureau rested a five-and-dime comb and brush set and a single vermillion lipstick, in the drawers several new pairs of underwear and hose. Her closet was a mélange of shifts without personality. She hadn't brought a swimsuit or sandals, which was unlike her. The nightstand held the Gideon Bible, a vial of her medication and a glass of water. The drawer was empty. He wasn't sure what he was looking for—an incriminating diary, maybe—but most of what she owned didn't reflect her, coming, as it did, from the hospital. The only real clue he could find was left in plain sight on the desk: a cardboard portfolio of her watercolors.

As she would admit, they were studies, quickly done. Technically, while the palms and fishing skiffs were somewhat clumsy, in the best of them she'd managed to capture the wide open feel of the sea and sky. They were pastoral—cool and blue, a touch bland. There were no burgeoning orgies of flowers, no molten whirl of demonic faces, no lapping flames. They were the work of an earnest amateur, and if they were less interesting, they reassured him as nothing else could. He closed the portfolio, set it back on the desk and shut the door.

At dinner she went on at length about her afternoon. She had to go back tomorrow. She'd spent hours on the bell tower alone—she needed to buy some more white. The pictures of the hurricane the sexton showed her were fascinating. She thought she might do a whole series on them. He'd written badly at his story and was immune to her enthusiasm. He knew he was being uncharitable, in a mood, and forced himself to concentrate on what she was saying, but it was a struggle. Was it a side effect of the medication or his being sober that made her so dull?