Zelda (43 page)

A pretense that the invalid made sense fluttered over the fine face. The face had nothing to do with the psychiatry. She inspected it like an interloper she might have found in her room, returned to the patient and said, “Go on.”

“We lived in a big house by the river [Ellerslie in Wilmington]. The rooms were high and full of the immensity of beautiful proportions. The house was so perfect that the doors grew smaller at the top like the columns of a Greek temple. A circular stair-well plumbed its depth. There were trees outside the windows that rose like rockets and spread in sprays at their ultimate point across the wide panes. A gaunt barn with a burnt sienna roof and walls that had faded to a gangrenous sheet of bilious green, rested on thin posts like the niches of a cathedral. Violets grew in the abandoned traces of an ante-bellum garden and yellow roses like crumpled bits of tissue paper climbed the fence. Outside the stark luxuriance of the yard, cinders stretched for miles and miles, to a government buoy station whose red roofs lay like a canopy over the sandbars and to a boiler factory bound by a white rose hedge.

“There were many things to brood about. There was Marie, a wonderful negro maid, high and gawky, who laughed and danced barefoot about the Christmas tree on the broken balls, and there was Phillipe, a Paris taxi-driver who wanted to run the house like a cab at night, who was stupid and insubordinate, and boxed with his master and worked too hard in his official capacity as butler. He had an air of being always startled, perhaps in his uncertainty of his present role. We called him from the kitchen with a French auto-horn attached to the dining room chair. There was Ella who sang spirituals in the kitchen and sat like a dark ejection of the storm in the candle-light of the dining room when thunder blew up the Maryland lightning belt at night and whipped and cracked over the river. And there was Mademoiselle, nervous and reeking
of sachet, whose great brown eyes followed a person about like a mop and who cried and wept and grew hysterical about Phillipe…

“The first company came: a young actress like a breakfast food that many men identified with whatever they missed from life since she had no definite characteristics of her own save a slight ebullient hysteria about romance. She walked in the moon by the river. Her hair was tight about her head and she was lush and like a milkmaid. Carl [Van Vechten] came. Carl is divine; he spent six months in prison rather than pay his wife alimony. He is an experimentalist and a connoisseur. He brought suppressed nigger records and a cock-tail shaker and saved my letters and collects first editions in friends whom he vivisects with rapt interest. He’s a dramatist at heart. Our relations were very impersonal but Carl was a fine friend.

“Teddy [Theodore Chanler] came. Teddy is an instrument of our lost republic. He could understand why an amusement park is the best place to be amorous—it’s something about the whitewashed trees and the smell of peanuts and the jogging of the infernal machines for riding….

“Dick [Richard Knight] came. I do not know why he is attractive. He flung a pot of mustard at the dining room door, his head is too big for his body, he is a lawyer. One lost afternoon in a black lace dress we drank cocktails in a New York apartment and sat afterwards a long time on the stairway, oblivious with a kind of happy desperation…We would have made scenes but there was trouble… I forgot him during rehersals for the Opera Ballet. I was too tired to care and too full of brooding except when something external drove me to him: the night Scott came home drunk from Princeton and smashed my nose about some conflict of his own and my sister left the house and never forgave him, poor man. I telephoned Dick. He has the most magnetic voice I’ve ever known. Dick had to go;… I don’t think though Scott had a world of his own which made no provision for our lives together except to kick about rehersals because once I got drunk in an Italian restaurant with some girls from the ballet after I’d finished a story in the Phila. library during the afternoon, and he was angry. He left me so much alone that I was very ashamed of wanting him once…He was thinking of the actress: he said so. I said I wanted to leave him but he wouldn’t let me go. We fought.

“My dancing teacher was a protege of Nijinsky. I ate lunch with him at Rubens and went with him to his apartment. There was nothing in the commercial flat except the white spitz of his mistress and a beautiful collection of Leon Bakst. It was a cold afternoon. He asked me if I wanted him to kill me and said I would cry and [he?] left me there. I ran to my lesson through the cold streets. I always wore white…

“I do not know what Scott was doing during that year. He went to New York: I didn’t want to go. He worked a little, we lived in the cinders and the wind from the river and sometimes, rarely, we did things together.

“On the boat he had friends and I was very unimaginative about a dark man who thought it was nice that he had a brown jacket and I had a blue one…They all came down and we drank champagne. I think I wanted him to see a new nightgown I had.

“In Genoa, Scott and I slept together.

“In Nice, I worked at a studio which I did not like, with Nevalskaya. Scott and I were happy in the bright, incisive sun, watching the frog swallower on the promenade and the awful comedies at the Casino. He was mad because I wouldn’t go to a French version of Broadway and liked me when I told him why the Place Gallieni was charming: about the faded Baroque painted houses and the one-dimensional quality of that sun-sterile stone. He hated the child’s nurse. We drank aperitifs at a blue cafe in front of the Jetée and I loved walking to the hotel from my dancing. The sapphire twilight was deep and mysterious and I hummed the songs that the old man played; mostly Strauss waltzes…The studio piano was out of tune. The hotel bedroom was red plush and the bed was brass and the rooms were on the sea and I loved him very much.

“We went to Paris. You have the history of the studio there in my book. It was like living in a dream. Scott drank almost always… I thought always of my dancing and of Egorova. I wanted to do something for her terribly. I was very tired and cried once for 2 hours when she asked me to work with a girl who did not dance as well as I. The girl came dressed in a new cerise ballet-dress which faded afterwards on the chair of the dressing room. I could not get it off, the stain, with eau-do-cologne.

“Scott went out with King Vidor and Andre Champson and hated the apartment and our dreary lunches. I was working and unattractive. We bought a black cat that had diarrhea and had to give him back…I didn’t think much about him [Scott] because I felt like a priest about my work. We went once to church. I hated taking his money for my lessons: I wanted my dancing to belong to me, so I wrote to pay for them.

“He came out with me to Egorova’s to dinner. He passed out. It was an awful meal. I adored her. She lived in poverty and seemed very poignant. Once we took her to a Russian cabaret and I filled her champagne glass with daisies. She was a great artist. I used to carry lemonade to the hot studio…She seemed to me like a gardenia, so I gave her gardenias and found some Oriental gardenia perfume for her. She was reticent and I don’t know what she thought. She was very good and kind and always gave me lessons, the famous dancers clamored for her hours.

“Scott and 1 went to Cannes. We quarrelled there that year: everybody did. It was a nightmare. I worked everyday in Nice, largely to escape…

“Scott had half a novel done. It was fine. He brought some friends home with him drunk, and I found it all over the floor the next morning. He was sick with tb and drank. I drank sherry and ginger-snaps—not much after swimming. I wrote a ballet called ‘Evolution’ and made the scenery and costumes on the beach. I hardly saw my child because I hated the nurse she had, who snored and was mean to Scottie. Scott did not want to fire her. I was half-crazy and thought the people looked like embryos, and wanted to get back to Paris. Scott and I were completely alienated. He went some with his friends, exotic, interesting people who sat up all night. I couldn’t: I was working on grand pirouettes…He talked and talked and talked at table with the governess about French politics. I couldn’t stand much talking.

“We came back to Paris through the Cévennes. The trip was fun and we would have been closer but when the car swerved to the crest of a hill, it seemed to me it was going into oblivion beyond and I had to hold the sides of the car. I wrote a story about those mountains. I felt like Cardinal Ballon in the car and wanted to leave him at Tours, but I felt too sorry to think of his driving alone thru the rain—or maybe I did come home on the train: I can’t remember. Anyway, I was very sorry for Scott.

“In Paris I worked and wrote and went to Algiers. In Algiers I thought of my teacher always and wrote many letters from Biskra and Bou Saad and was miserable in the gorge of Constantine and unhappy at Tungaad and nervous in the big, tearing bus. There were apple trees in bloom on the bleak hills and velvet nights and wonderful smells and goat cheese and lamp-light along the way at dusk.

“On the boat coming home, I was sick. An English lady called out ‘Cheerio’ with every rock of the boat, and I was utterly alone and thought the boat was sinking. Scott had found companions. He is a popular man. The stewards were sick; everybody was sick. We ate Brioche and marmalade on the pier, when we landed. I brought Egorova a bandana handkerchief filled with perfume and silk for a green dress and amber chips from Africa. The moon in Bou Saada had been white and hot and the Ouled-Naïls had brown bodies to churn when they danced. Soft cries muffled the night; the Arabs ate nougat under the gas flares and the streets were baked and caked with dust… It was an awful trip, though there was a pleasant half-hour with Scott in Biskra. Somehow those dreadful passages have a way of assuming qualities that they did not possess at the time, in retrospect. It is one of the places I should like to go again. Algiers will always remain colored for me by my impatience and drive
to get back, my jealousy of Scott’s ability to amuse himself, and an implacable sense of desperation that haunted me constantly like a person crossing a dangerous stream, not daring to look further ahead than the next stone

“In Paris again, I saw a great deal of Nemtchinova after classes and my friend of the Opera. I worked constantly and was terribly superstitious and moody about my work, full of presentiments about the sun and the rain and the wind. I lived in a quiet ghostly, hypersensitized world of my own. Scott drank. One night he told me that he had spit up a cup of blood. I cried all night and next day he said it wasn’t true. He said he was sick and that he couldn’t work and we lived like strangers. He had other friends and so did I. I had grown to resent the people we knew who did not work, no matter how attractive they were and to feel contemptuous of them.

“We went to a party somewhere that ended at Maximes…All this time passed in A DAZE.

“… I was sick…All I cared about was my lessons. Every day I took flowers to the studio…Then at four o’clock one afternoon, after my lesson, Michael Arlen was at home drinking with Scott. He was very pleasant and told me to go to a clinic. I quarrelled with Scott violently because I felt that I needed him and he so obviously preferred being with Michael.

“I went to MalMaison and flirted outrageously with the Doctor.

“I came back and went to work. Egorova came to see me and gave me a present. I knew I could not dance again and I was utterly heartbroken when I told her goodby…”

She said that from the dance she had learned exaltation “and a feeling for the flights of the human soul divorced from the person.” When she found that she could not understand something she had only to transpose it into choreographic terms and it became clear. At the end of what she called “this…fairy tale” she left five blank lines for the psychiatrist to fill in with her opinions. Zelda had again disdainfully eluded those she called The Authorities. But had she? What was clear to them now was her refusal to confront her illness directly; she would neither admit nor accept their assistance.

At about the same time this document was written, Zelda wrote Scott in an entirely different mode:

Darling, Sweet D.O.—

… I have often told you that I am that little fish who swims about under a shark and, I believe, lives indelicately on its offal. Anyway, that is the way I am. Life moves over me in a vast black shadow and I swallow
whatever it drops with relish, having learned in a very hard school that one cannot be both a parasite and enjoy self-nourishment without moving in worlds too fantastic for even my disordered imagination to people with meaning. Goofo—I adore you and worship you and I am very miserable that you be made even temporarily unhappy by those divergencies of direction in myself which I cannot satisfactorily explain and which leave me eternally alone except for you and baffled. You are absolutely all in the world that I have ever been able to think of as having any vital bearing on my relations with the evolution of the species… I love you and I would like us to be covered with the flake of dried sea water and sleeping to-gether on a hot afternoon. That would be very free and fine. Dear Heart!

I have got so fetid and constantly smell of the rubbery things about here— It’s ghastly, really. I do not know to what depths the human soul can sink in bondage, but after a certain point everything luckily dissolves in humor. I want to fly a kite and eat green apples and have a stomachache that I know the cause of and feel the mud between my toes in a reedy creek and tickle the lobe of your ear with the tip of my tongue.

If Trouble still bites give him a good kick in the ass for me.

Darling, I love you so.
Zelda

Zelda was far more upset by her second collapse than she revealed to the doctors or to Scott, and she tried to hide from all of them her fury toward Scott for holding up her novel. She was overheard saying to herself, “I have always done whatever I wanted to do, whenever I could possibly manage it. My book is none of my husband’s Goddamned business.”