express train for Paris and to go to the American hospital at Neuilly.'
'Our clothes won't be dry until morning and there aren't any express trains,' I said.
'Why don't you rest and have some dinner in bed?'
'I want my temperature taken.'
After this went on for a long time the waiter brought a thermometer.
'Is this the only one you could get?' I asked. Scott had shut his eyes when the waiter
came in and he did look at least as far gone as Camille. I have never seen a man who lost
the blood from his face so fast and I wondered where it went.
'It is the only one in the hotel,' the waiter said and handed me the thermometer. It
was a bath thermometer with a wooden back and enough metal to sink it in the bath. I
took a quick gulp of the whisky sour and opened the window a moment to look out at the
rain. When I turned Scott was watching me.
I shook the thermometer down professionally and said, 'You're lucky it's not a rectal
thermometer.'
'Where does this kind go?'
'Under the arm,' I told him and tucked it under my arm.
'Don't upset the temperature,' Scott said. I shook the thermometer again with a single
sharp downward twitch and unbuttoned his pyjama jacket and put the instrument under
his armpit while I felt his cool forehead and then took his pulse again. He stared straight
ahead. The pulse was seventy-two. I kept the thermometer in for four minutes.
'I thought they only kept them in for one minute,' Scott said.
'This is a big thermometer,' I explained. 'You multiply by the square of the size of the
thermometer. It's a centigrade thermometer.'
Finally I took the thermometer out and carried it over by the reading light.
'What is it?'
'Thirty-seven and six-tenths.'
'What's normal.'
'That's normal.'
'Are you sure?'
'Sure.'
'Try it on yourself. I have to be sure.'
I shook the thermometer down and opened my pyjamas and put the thermometer in
my armpit and held it there while I watched the time. Then I looked at it.
'What is it?'
I studied it. 'Exactly the same.'
'How do you feel?'
'Splendid,' I said. I was trying to remember whether thirty-seven six was really
normal or not. It did not matter, for the thermometer, unaffected, was steady at thirty.
Scott was a little suspicious so I asked if he wanted me to make another test.
'No,' he said. 'We can be happy it cleared up so quickly. I've -always had great
recuperative power.'
'You're fine,' I said. 'But I think it would be just as well if you stayed in bed and had
a light supper, and then we can start early in the morning.' I had planned to buy us
raincoats but I would have to borrow money from him for that and I did not want to start
arguing about that now.
Scott did not want to stay in bed. He wanted to get up and get dressed and go
downstairs and call Zelda so she would know he was all right.
'Why would she think you weren't all right?'
'This is the first night I have ever slept away from her since we were married and I
have to talk to her. You can see what it means to us both, can't you?'
I could, but I could not see how he and Zelda could have slept together on the night
just past; but it was nothing to argue about. Scott drank the whisky sour down very fast
now and asked me to order another. I found the waiter and returned the thermometer and
asked him how our clothes were coming along. He thought they might be dry in an hour
or so. 'Have the valet press them and that will dry them. It doesn't matter that they should
be bone-dry.'
The waiter brought the two drinks against catching cold and I sipped mine and urged
Scott to sip his slowly. I Was worried now he might catch cold and I could see by now
that if he ever had anything as definitely bad as a cold he would probably have to be
hospitalized. But the drink made him feel wonderful for a while and he was happy with
the tragic implications of this being Zelda's and his first night of separation since their
marriage. Finally he could not wait longer to call her and put on his dressing-gown and
went down to put the call through.
It would take some time for the call and shortly after he came up, the waiter appeared
with two more double whisky sours. This was the most I had ever seen Scott drink until
then, but they had no effect on him except to make him more animated and talkative, and
he started to tell me the outline of his life with Zelda. He told me how he had first met her
during the war and then lost her and won her back, and about their marriage and then
about something tragic that had happened to them at St-Raphael about a year ago. This
first version that he told me of Zelda. and a French naval aviator falling in love was truly
a sad story and I believe it was a true story. Later he told me other versions of it as
though trying them for use in a novel, but none was as sad as this first one and I always
believed the first one, although any of them might have been true. They were better told
each time; but they never hurt you the same way the first one did.
Scott was very articulate and told a story well. He did not have to spell the words nor
attempt to punctuate and you did not have the feeling of reading an illiterate that his
letters gave you before they had been corrected. I knew him for two years before he could
spell my name; but then it was a long name to spell and perhaps it became harder to spell
all of the time, and I give him great credit for spelling it correctly finally. He learned to
spell more important things and he tried to think straight about many more.
On this night though he wanted me to know and understand and appreciate what it
was that had happened at St-Raphael and I saw it so clearly that I could see the singleseater
seaplane buzzing the diving-raft and the colour of the sea and the shape of the
pontoons and the shadow that they cast and Zelda's tan and Scott's tan and the dark
blonde and the light blond of their hair and the darkly tanned face of the boy that was in
love with Zelda. I could not ask the question that was in my mind, how, if this story was
true and it had all happened, could Scott have slept each night in the same bed with Zelda?
But maybe that was what had made it sadder than any story anyone had ever told me
then, and, too, maybe he did not remember, as he did not remember last night.
Our clothes came before the call did and we dressed and went downstairs to have
dinner. Scott was a little unsteady now and he looked at people out of the side of his eyes
with a certain belligerency. We had very good snails, with a carafe to start with and while
we were about halfway through them Scott's call came He was gone about an hour and I
ate his snails finally, dipping up the butter, garlic and parsley sauce with the broken bits
of bread, and drank the carafe of Fleury. When he came back I said I would get him some
more snails but he said he did not want any. He wanted something simple. He did not
want a steak, nor liver and bacon, nor an omelette. He would take chicken. We had eaten
very good cold chicken at noon but this was still famous chicken country, so we had
poularde de Bresse and a bottle of Montagny, a light, pleasant white wine of the
neighbourhood. Scott ate very little and sipped at one glass of the wine. He passed out at
the table with his head on his hands. It was natural and there was no theatre about it and it
even looked as though he were careful not to spill nor break things. The waiter and I got
him up to his room and laid him on the bed and I undressed him to his underwear, hung
his clothes up, and then stripped the covers off the bed and spread them over him. I
opened the window and saw it was clear outside and left the window open.
Downstairs I finished my dinner and thought about Scott. It was obvious he should
not drink anything and I had not been taking good care of him. Anything that he drank
seemed to stimulate him too much and then to poison him and I planned the next day to
cut all drinking to the minimum. I would tell him that we were getting back to Paris now
and that I had to train in order to write. This was not true. My training was never to drink
after dinner nor before I wrote nor while I was writing. I went upstairs and opened all the
windows wide and undressed and. was asleep almost as soon as I was in bed.
The next day we drove to Paris on a beautiful day up through the Cote d'Or with the
air freshly washed and the hills and the fields and the vineyards all new, and Scott was
very cheerful and happy and healthy and told me the plots of each and every one of
Michael Arlen's books. Michael Arlen, he said, was the man you had to watch and he and
I could both learn much from him. I said I could not read the books. He said I did not
have to. He would tell me the plots and describe the characters. He gave me a sort of oral
PhD thesis on Michael Arlen. .
I asked him if he had a good connection on the phone when he talked to Zelda and he
said that it was not bad and that they had many things to talk about. At meals I ordered
one bottle of the lightest wine I could locate and told Scott he would do me a great favour
if he would not let me order any more as I had to train before I wrote and should not
under any circumstances drink more than half a bottle. He cooperated wonderfully and
when he saw me looking nervous towards the end of a single bottle, gave me some of his
share.
When I had left him at his home and taken a taxi back to the sawmill, it was
wonderful to see my wife and we went up to the Closerie des Lilas to have a drink. We
were happy the way children are who have been separated and are together again, and I
told her about the trip.
'But didn't you have any fun or learn anything, Tatie?' she asked.
'I learned about Michael Arlen, if I would have listened, and I learned things I
haven't sorted out.'
'Isn't Scott happy at all?'
'Maybe.'
'Poor man.'
'I learned one thing.'
'What?'
'Never to go on trips with anyone you do not love.'
'Isn't that fine?'
'Yes. And we're going to Spain.'
'Yes. Now it's less than six weeks before we go. And this year we won't let anyone
spoil it, will we?'
'No. And after Pamplona we'll go to Madrid and to Valencia.'
'M-m-m-m,' she said softly, like a cat.
'Poor Scott,' I said.
'Poor everybody,' Hadley said. 'Rich feathercats with no money.'
'We're awfully lucky.'
'We'll have to be good and hold it.'
We both touched wood on the cafe table and the waiter came to see what it was we
wanted. But what we wanted he, nor anyone else, nor knocking on wood or on marble, as
this cafe table-top was, could ever bring us. But we did not know it that night and we
were very happy.
A day or two after the trip Scott brought his book over. It had a garish dust-jacket
and I remember being embarrassed by the violence, bad taste and slippery look of it. It
looked the book jacket for a book of bad science fiction. Scott told me not to be put off
by it, that it had to do with a billboard along a highway in Long Island that was important
in the story. He said he had liked the jacket and now he didn't like it. I took it off to read
the book.
When I had finished the book I knew that no matter what Scott did, nor how he
behaved, I must know it was like a sickness and be of any help I could to him and try to
be a good friend. He had many good, good friends, more than anyone I knew. But I
enlisted as one more, whether I could be of any use to him or not. If he could write a
book as fine as The Great Gatsby I was sure that he could write an even better one. I did
not know Zelda yet, and so I did not know the terrible odds that were against him. But we
were to find them out soon enough.
18 Hawks Do Not Share
Scott Fitzgerald invited us to have lunch with his wife Zelda and his little daughter at the
furnished flat they had rented at 14 rue de Tilsitt. I cannot remember much about the flat
except that it was gloomy and airless and that there was nothing in it that seemed to
belong to them except Scott's first books bound in light blue leather with the titles in gold.
Scott also showed us a large ledger with all of the stories he had published listed in it
year after year with the prices he had received for them and also the amounts received for
any motion picture sales, and the sales and royalties of his books. They were all noted as
carefully as the log of a ship and Scott showed them to both of us with impersonal pride
as though he were the curator of a museum. Scott was nervous and hospitable and he
showed us his accounts of his earnings as though they had been the view. There was no
view.
Zelda had a very bad hangover. They had been up on Montmartre the night before
and had quarrelled because Scott did not want to get drunk. He had decided, he told me,
to work hard and not to drink and Zelda was treating him as though he were a kill-joy or
a spoilsport. Those were the two words she used to him and there was recrimination and
Zelda would say, 'I did not, I did no such thing. It's not true, Scott.' Later she would seem
to recall something and would laugh happily.
On this day Zelda did not look her best. Her beautiful dark blonde hair had been
ruined temporarily by a bad permanent she had got in Lyon, when the rain had made
them abandon their car, and her eyes were tired and her face was too taut and drawn.
She was formally pleasant to Hadley and me but a big part of her seemed not to be
present but to still be on the party she had come home from that morning. She and Scott
both seemed to feel that Scott and I had enjoyed a great and wonderful time on the trip up
from Lyon and she was jealous about it.
'When you two can go off and have such simply wonderful times together, it only
