Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald (28 page)

“I’ve never been fishing, did you know that? I didn’t want to tell him—”

“You’d hate fishing. You have to sit cramped up in a little boat, or on some log or rock for
hours
. And fish smell bad—and then of course there’s the bait.…”

“Sounds to me like
you
hate fishing. I think he’s right—there’s something honorable and true about pitting yourself against nature.”

“Did he mention a wife while I was dancing with Pound?”

“Watch out for him,” Scott said.

“Who, Hemingway?”

“Pound.”

I let go of Scott’s hand to turn a few pirouettes. “He’s got his hands full as it is. Besides which, I’m not so good at sharing.”

“Ernest’s wife is called Hadley, she’s from St. Louis. And they have a boy who’s about eighteen months. Remember Scottie at that age? All that roundness? What did Ring and Ellis call her—I can’t remember. Not Pumpkin…”

“Little Miss Dimple.” I stopped turning and fell into step with him again.

“What? No. I don’t recall that.”

“I’m surprised you recall anything from Great Neck. I’m surprised
I
do. What I want to know is, what woman thought it’d be a good idea to throw her lot in with
Wem
.”

“You know, don’t you, that there are people who wonder the same thing about you after they’ve met or heard about me.”

“Maybe,” I said, linking my arm through his. “But the difference is that you don’t have a false bone in your body.”

“You think he does?”

“Anybody who uses the word
true
as much as he does can only be the opposite.”

Scott shook his head. “You’re wrong. He’s too young, too sincere, for it to be an act. He’s the real thing; just give him a chance, Zelda, and you’ll see.”

*   *   *

Scott was especially vigorous in bed that night, and then afterward he said, “If you don’t get pregnant by summer, we should find a specialist to check you over. There might be some treatment or procedure—”

“We have to give it some time, Deo. It hasn’t even been six months since my surgery.”

“Those wop doctors, I doubt they had any real idea what they were talking about. You should see someone
here;
the French are far more advanced in medicine than the Italians.”

He plumped his pillow and turned onto his side, throwing one arm over my hip while closing his eyes. “I’ll see about getting you an appointment with someone who’s tops in the field. I’d really like to have a son.”

31

As we’d soon learn, Gertrude Stein, an American expat whose salon rivaled Natalie’s, lived by her own rules. You never got the sense of her having been young; she seemed to have been planted at 27 rue de Fleurus as a middle-aged woman fully conceived in both physical form and reputation. Everyone knew Miss Stein, everyone admired her—and no one more than Ernest Hemingway, at least at the time.

“You just
want
to be around her,” Hemingway told us during dinner at his apartment on a Saturday evening in late May.

This was the first time we’d met Hemingway’s wife, Hadley. When she’d opened the apartment door, her appearance had shocked me nearly as much as the building’s horrible, stinking stairway had. I’d imagined someone pert and sweet like Sara Mayfield back home, or else one of those simmering, sultry types, like Tallu. Hadley was neither of those, nor any other type you might think would win herself a handsome, energetic he-man.

She was, in fact, just about homely. Her hair was dark and of no particular style—though I suspected it had at some time in the past been bobbed like mine. She wore a gray shirtwaist with a long, darker gray wool skirt and an apron over the top, and shoes similar to those I’d seen on peasant women plodding along the cobblestone alleyways with big cloth bundles on their backs. Her features were round and boyish—but her smile was genuine, and her eyes were warm; I liked her right away.

Hadley was saying about Gertrude Stein, “We’ve named her as Bumby’s godmother. She’s been lovely to Tatie, here. Very encouraging with her critiques.”

“You let her read your work?” Scott said with surprise. My surprise was in hearing Hadley call Hemingway
Tatie
. Sure, I had my nickname for Scott, which anyone hearing might find somewhat odd—and that’s why I didn’t use it around company.
Tatie,
I thought.
Weird
.

We passed around simple china bowls filled with potatoes, peas, slices of beef roast in gravy, and Hemingway said, “Sure I let her read it. There’s no better eye than Gertrude’s, no better mind.”

Scott looked dubious. “She’s, what, a fifty-year-old never-married woman, right, and a Jew to boot? Hardly seems like someone who’d be authoritative about modern writing. But I guess I’ll take your word for it.”

“It’s true,” Hadley said. “She’s been hosting a salon for artists and intellectuals every Saturday since, well, forever. It’s held in her home, which is a veritable art gallery. You should see it.”

“I’m surprised you haven’t already been,” Hemingway said. “So, good—we’ll bring you around tonight. I’m sure she’d want me to, and no time like the present, eh, Fitzgerald?”

“I’m game for anything.”

“So I hear, so I hear. How about boxing?” he said, and I made a serious effort not to roll my eyes. “Ever take a turn in the ring?”

*   *   *

Gertrude Stein was what you might call amply proportioned. Her skin was smooth, her features unexceptional save for her eyes, which had the clarity, humor, and wisdom I’d seen in old Aunt Julia’s ancient mother, Mama Clio, who I’d known when I was a little girl. Mama Clio was half-Haitian, half-African, and had the pruniest skin I’ve ever seen; she must have been near a hundred years old when she passed. She knew
everything
about life and the world; it was all there in her eyes, and she could tell you all about it. Gertrude Stein had those same eyes.

“I’ve been hearing a great deal about you,” she told Scott after Hemingway presented us to her in her anteroom. “Our friend Sherwood Anderson found your book very satisfying and sent it to me to read, and I’ve found much about it worth reading.”

Scott smiled—not the polite, secretly condescending smile I’d seen him give to other writers who saw themselves as superior to him, but a genuinely pleased grin. He said, “That’s very good to hear.”

We followed her into the whitewashed, high-ceilinged main room. Unframed paintings filled every wall; I recognized Pablo’s serene, lovely
Head of a Sleeping Woman,
which Sara Murphy had praised, and his striking portrait of our hostess, which hung at the head of a long table in the corner to our right. Small statuary done in marble and plaster and carved wood sat on sideboards and side tables throughout the room.

“Sit there,” she directed Scott, pointing to an armchair near the hearth. “Hemingway, pull up a chair for yourself as well, and ladies, Alice will get some tea.”

This Alice, who I guessed we were supposed to either know about already or not pay attention to at all, was looming silently nearby.

She said, “Come.”

I didn’t imagine that we “ladies” wouldn’t also gather at the hearth, but Alice led us past it into a distant corner of the room. Nice as the corner was—plush wool rug, upholstered settee and chairs, lovely spindle-legged side tables with hand-painted Chinese lamps—it wasn’t central, and I was used to being in the middle of things.

Alice left us, saying, “Please, make yourselves comfortable. I’ll just be a minute.”

I must have let my irritation show, because Hadley whispered, “I should have warned you. The wives sit over here.”

“And you don’t mind that?”

She shrugged. “I’m not a writer, or an artist either. I wouldn’t have much to contribute.”

I was both—which neither Scott nor I seemed capable of pointing out, here in the revered Miss Stein’s apartment. And so I said, “Is Alice her sister?”

“Her … companion,” Hadley said in a low voice.

“Oh.” I looked over at Miss Stein, trying to see her as the object of anyone’s desire, let alone another woman’s.

My stomach chose that moment to cramp, and I became far more concerned about those implications than about Miss Stein’s romantic life or whether I was worthy of an audience with her. Rather than tell Hadley about my stomach trouble and have her think her cooking was to blame, I stood up and said, “Well then, I hope you’ll excuse me. Not that it hasn’t been grand to visit with you, but there are other things that need my attention.”

I stopped beside Scott and said, “Miss Stein, it was purely a delight to meet you. I’m afraid I’ve promised myself elsewhere.”

Scott looked up at me with surprise and concern while Hemingway joked, “She’s got a date with Pound.”

“Dancing on a Saturday night—why not?” Then I leaned down and said in Scott’s ear, “It’s my stomach. Stay as long as you like.” I hurried off, calling, “Good night, all,” and barely made it back home in time to save myself an awful embarrassment.

32

A typical day that Paris summer would go something like this: I’d paint in the morning while Scottie had her lessons and Scott was still asleep—at this time I was using watercolors and gouaches on paper, which was simplest given the limited space in our apartment. I might have lunch with Scottie or I might meet up at Deux Magots with one of the women I’d met at Natalie Barney’s salon, which I preferred over an evening at Miss Stein’s. I’d paid my first visit when Scott and Hemingway went off to Lyon to retrieve our car, damaged during transit from Marseille. “He’ll be good company,” Scott had said, packing a bag with more clothes and books than he could possibly need. “And I think he could use my counsel.”

The luncheons sometimes turned into afternoon outings to a studio or gallery;
sponge-time,
I called those outings, wherein I soaked up everything I saw and was told about Impressionism, Realism, Rayonism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Modernism, Pointillism, Synthetism, Art Nouveau—and more. You couldn’t take a step in that district, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, without bumping into
art
. In addition to the galleries, along the riverfront on Quai Malaquai and Quai de Conti were artists and easels and, truth be told, a whole lot of really bad paintings.

Scott usually got up around eleven and then, with or without me, went out to the cafés in search of other writers who, like him, were doing a fine job of conversing about other people’s writing while producing very little work themselves. He’d finalized his choices for the new story collection, which would be published the following February as
All the Sad Young Men,
and talked a great deal about his unwritten next novel, as if by discussing it he would conjure a finished manuscript into being. There’d be wine at lunch—which lasted well into the afternoon—and then came late-afternoon cocktails before he’d return to the apartment to change clothes for the evening’s events. Throughout it all he exuded the same sort of pleasant buzz he must have been feeling.

Scott’s idea of an evening well spent began with a stroll among the horse-chestnut trees that line the Champs-Élysées, then cocktails at the Ritz, after which we’d often head into the Latin Quarter to meet up with the Hemingways at one or another of the
bal-musettes
for dinner, dancing, and drinks.

These had the potential of being good times, and to be fair, I enjoyed myself when the music began and I could set aside every thought and let the sounds infuse me from scalp to toes. A roomful of dancing, sweating, laughing people is a beautiful thing. Scott would dance with me some; more often he and Hemingway would drop out and I’d find them later at a table outside, debating not the finer points of sentence structure or the state of literary theory, but the merits or failings of various boxers whose matches they intended to see, or the intimate lives of their writer friends.

We would migrate from one place to another, getting progressively tighter and collecting friends as we went, and the party might go on until sunrise, at which time Scott would realize we’d lost the Hemingways hours earlier, Ernest having the self-discipline to leave early and get up, clearheaded, to write the next day. At home, Scott would want sex—except that sometimes his brain was more willing than his body, and nothing I tried made a difference. He’d push me away then, saying, “Never mind,” and we’d both just sleep it off.

I learned that if I consented to his outings regularly enough, on other nights I could go do what I preferred. On “my” nights, I would join the Murphys, or sometimes just Sara, or sometimes no one, for a performance of the Ballets Russes or a production at La Cigale theater. Here, amid the swelling orchestral music, the grace and beauty of the dancers, was the life of my childhood imagination.

As much as I loved the spectacle of the dance and the drama, I also loved being able to see the sets afterward, to meet the artists Gerald spoke of with admiration and high regard. In particular, Gerald introduced me to Mikhail Larionov, whose designs for the Ballets Russes that season were astonishing. Larionov fractured color into kaleidoscopic scenes that had sophistication and whimsy, both. You didn’t just view his wild sets and costumes; you
felt
them, responded to them. Or I did, anyway.

At the first of what would be many post-show coffee dates, the Murphys, Larionov, and I ran into Sara’s friend Pauline Pfeiffer and two of Pauline’s friends from
Vogue
at Deux Magots.

“So good to see you again, Zelda,” Pauline said. As usual, she wore an up-to-the-minute dress, in this case a gorgeous peony-and-birds print with gold metallic lace sleeves. “Didn’t we have great fun last summer in Antibes?” she went on. “Sara, do say we can all come to Villa America this year—I’m dying to see it done, and Zelda’s so good at that game we played.”

“We have grand plans to see everyone,” Sara assured her. “Have you met Mikhail Larionov, artiste extraordinaire? He’s promised to share all his brilliant secrets with us. Join us, why don’t you?”

“You’re sweet,” Pauline said while holding her hand out to Larionov. “Pauline Pfeiffer,
not
an artist. And thank you, Sara, but no. We’re on our way to the Dingo to meet some fellows.” She made a show, then, of kissing Gerald, then Sara, then me in the way the French do, before wagging her fingers and following her friends out.