The Beautiful and Damned

THE BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED

He was on his feet, shaking hands briskly – then his car was a wraith of dust down the road. Anthony turned to his wife in bewilderment.

“Why, Gloria!”

“You don’t mind if I have a trial, Anthony. Just a trial? I’ve got to go to town Wednesday, anyhow.”

“But it’s so silly! You don’t want to go into the movies – moon around a studio all day with a lot of cheap chorus people.”

“Lot of mooning around Mary Pickford does!” “Everybody isn’t a Mary Pickford.”

“Well, I can’t see how you’d object to my trying.” “I do, though. I hate actors.”

“Oh, you make me tired. Do you imagine I have a very thrilling time dozing on this damn porch?”

“You wouldn’t mind if you loved me.”

“Of course I love you,” she said impatiently, making out a quick case for herself. “It’s just because I do that I hate to see you go to pieces by just lying around and saying you ought to work. Perhaps if I did go into this for a while it’d stir you up so you’d do something.”

“It’s just your craving for excitement, that’s all it is.” “Maybe it is! It’s a perfectly natural craving, isn’t it?” “Well, I’ll tell you one thing. If you go to the movies I’m

going to Europe.”

“Well, go on then! I’m not stopping you!”

To show she was not stopping him she melted into melancholy tears. Together they marshalled the armies of sentiment – words, kisses, endearments, self-reproaches. They attained nothing. Inevitably they attained nothing. Finally, in a

231

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

burst of gargantuan emotion each of them sat down and wrote a letter. Anthony’s was to his grandfather; Gloria’s was to Joseph Bloeckman. It was a triumph of lethargy.

One day early in July Anthony, returned from an afternoon in New York, called up-stairs to Gloria. Receiving no answer he guessed she was asleep and so went into the pantry for one of the little sandwiches that were always prepared for them. He found Tana seated at the kitchen table before a miscellaneous assortment of odds and ends – cigar-boxes, knives, pencils, the tops of cans, and some scraps of paper covered with elaborate figures and diagrams.

“What the devil you doing?” demanded Anthony curious-

ly.

Tana politely grinned.

“I show you,” he exclaimed enthusiastically. “I tell – “ “You making a dog-house?”

“No, sa.” Tana grinned again. “Make typewutta.” “Typewriter?”

“Yes, sa. I think, oh all time I think, lie in bed think ‘bout typewutta.”

“So you thought you’d make one, eh?” “Wait. I tell.”

Anthony, munching a sandwich, leaned leisurely against the sink. Tana opened and closed his mouth several times as though testing its capacity for action. Then with a rush he began:

“I been think – typewutta – has, oh, many many many many thing. Oh many many many many.” “Many keys. I see.”

“No-o? Yes-key! Many many many many lettah. Like so a- b-c.”

232

THE BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED

“Yes, you’re right.”

“Wait. I tell.” He screwed his face up in a tremendous effort to express himself: “I been think – many words – end same. Like i-n-g.”

“You bet. A whole raft of them.”

“So – I make – typewutta – quick. Not so many lettah – “ “That’s a great idea, Tana. Save time. You’ll make a fortune.

Press one key and there’s ‘ing.’ Hope you work it out.”

Tana laughed disparagingly. “Wait. I tell – “ “Where’s Mrs. Patch?”

“She out. Wait, I tell – “ Again he screwed up his face for action. “My typewutta — “

“Where is she?”

“Here – I make.” He pointed to the miscellany of junk on the table.

“I mean Mrs. Patch.”

“She out.” Tana reassured him. “She be back five o’clock, she say.”

“Down in the village?”

“No. Went off before lunch. She go Mr. Bloeckman.” Anthony started.

“Went out with Mr. Bloeckman?” “She be back five.”

Without a word Anthony left the kitchen with Tana’s disconsolate “I tell” trailing after him. So this was Gloria’s idea of excitement, by God! His fists were clenched; within a moment he had worked himself up to a tremendous pitch of indignation. He went to the door and looked out; there was no car in sight and his watch stood at four minutes of five. With furious energy he dashed down to the end of the path – as far as the

233

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

bend of the road a mile off he could see no car – except – but it was a farmer’s flivver. Then, in an undignified pursuit of dignity, he rushed back to the shelter of the house as quickly as he had rushed out.

Pacing up and down the living room he began an angry rehearsal of the speech he would make to her when she came in –

“So this is love!” he would begin – or no, it sounded too much like the popular phrase “So this is Paris!” He must be dignified, hurt, grieved. Anyhow – “So this is what you do when I have to go up and trot all day around the hot city on business. No wonder I can’t write! No wonder I don’t dare let you out of my sight!” He was expanding now, warming to his subject. “I’ll tell you,” he continued, “I’ll tell you – “ He paused, catching a familiar ring in the words – then he realized – it was Tana’s “I tell.”

Yet Anthony neither laughed nor seemed absurd to himself. To his frantic imagination it was already six – seven – eight, and she was never coming! Bloeckman finding her bored and unhappy had persuaded her to go to California with him....

– There was a great to-do out in front, a joyous “Yoho, Anthony!” and he rose trembling, weakly happy to see her fluttering up the path. Bloeckman was following, cap in hand.

“Dearest!” she cried.

“We’ve been for the best jaunt – all over New York State.” “I’ll have to be starting home,” said Bloeckman, almost im-

mediately. “Wish you’d both been here when I came.”

“I’m sorry I wasn’t,” answered Anthony dryly. When he had departed Anthony hesitated. The fear was gone from his

234

THE BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED

heart, yet he felt that some protest was ethically apropos. Gloria resolved his uncertainty.

“I knew you wouldn’t mind. He came just before lunch and said he had to go to Garrison on business and wouldn’t I go with him. He looked so lonesome, Anthony. And I drove his car all the way.”

Listlessly Anthony dropped into a chair, his mind tired – tired with nothing, tired with everything, with the world’s weight he had never chosen to bear. He was ineffectual and vaguely helpless here as he had always been. One of those personalities who, in spite of all their words, are inarticulate, he seemed to have inherited only the vast tradition of human failure – that, and the sense of death.

“I suppose I don’t care,” he answered.

One must be broad about these things, and Gloria being young, being beautiful, must have reasonable privileges. Yet it wearied him that he failed to understand.

WINTER

She rolled over on her back and lay still for a moment in the great bed watching the February sun suffer one last attenuated refinement in its passage through the leaded panes into the room. For a time she had no accurate sense of her whereabouts or of the events of the day before, or the day before that; then, like a suspended pendulum, memory began to beat out its story, releasing with each swing a burdened quota of time until her life was given back to her.

She could hear, now, Anthony’s troubled breathing beside her; she could smell whiskey and cigarette smoke. She noticed

235

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

that she lacked complete muscular control; when she moved it was not a sinuous motion with the resultant strain distributed easily over her body – it was a tremendous effort of her nervous system as though each time she were hypnotizing herself into performing an impossible action....

She was in the bathroom, brushing her teeth to get rid of that intolerable taste; then back by the bedside listening to the rattle of Bounds’s key in the outer door.

“Wake up, Anthony!” she said sharply.

She climbed into bed beside him and closed her eyes. Almost the last thing she remembered was a conversation with Mr. and Mrs. Lacy. Mrs. Lacy had said, “Sure you don’t want us to get you a taxi?” and Anthony had replied that he guessed they could walk over to Fifth all right. Then they had both attempted, imprudently, to bow – and collapsed absurdly into a battalion of empty milk bottles just outside the door. There must have been two dozen milk bottles standing open-mouthed in the dark. She could conceive of no plausible explanation of those milk bottles. Perhaps they had been attracted by the singing in the Lacy house and had hurried over agape with wonder to see the fun. Well, they’d had the worst of it – though it seemed that she and Anthony never would get up, the perverse things rolled so....

Still, they had found a taxi. “My meter’s broken and it’ll cost you a dollar and a half to get home,” said the taxi driver. “Well,” said Anthony, “I’m young Packy McFarland and if you’ll come down here I’ll beat you till you can’t stand up.” ...At that point the man had driven off without them. They must have found another taxi, for they were in the apartment....

“What time is it?” Anthony was sitting up in bed, staring at her with owlish precision.

236

THE BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED

This was obviously a rhetorical question. Gloria could think of no reason why she should be expected to know the time.

“Golly, I feel like the devil!” muttered Anthony dispassionately. Relaxing, he tumbled back upon his pillow. “Bring on your grim reaper!”

“Anthony, how’d we finally get home last night?” “Taxi.”

“Oh!” Then, after a pause: “Did you put me to bed?”

“I don’t know. Seems to me you put me to bed. What day is it?” “Tuesday.”

“Tuesday? I hope so. If it’s Wednesday, I’ve got to start work at that idiotic place. Supposed to be down at nine or some such ungodly hour.”

“Ask Bounds,” suggested Gloria feebly. “Bounds!” he called.

Sprightly, sober – a voice from a world that it seemed in the past two days they had left forever, Bounds sprang in short steps down the hall and appeared in the half darkness of the door.

“What day, Bounds?”

“February the twenty-second, I think, sir.” “I mean day of the week.”

“Tuesday, sir.” “Thanks.” After a pause: “Are you ready for breakfast, sir?”

“Yes, and Bounds, before you get it, will you make a pitcher of water, and set it here beside the bed? I’m a little thirsty.”

“Yes, sir.”

Bounds retreated in sober dignity down the hallway. “Lincoln’s birthday,” affirmed Anthony without enthusi-

asm, “or St. Valentine’s or somebody’s. When did we start on this insane party?”

237

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

“Sunday night.”

“After prayers?” he suggested sardonically.

“We raced all over town in those hansoms and Maury sat up with his driver, don’t you remember? Then we came home and he tried to cook some bacon – came out of the pantry with a few blackened remains, insisting it was ‘fried to the proverbial crisp.’”

Both of them laughed, spontaneously but with some difficulty, and lying there side by side reviewed the chain of events that had ended in this rusty and chaotic dawn.

They had been in New York for almost four months, since the country had grown too cool in late October. They had given up California this year, partly because of lack of funds, partly with the idea of going abroad should this interminable war, persisting now into its second year, end during the winter. Of late their income had lost elasticity; no longer did it stretch to cover gay whims and pleasant extravagances, and Anthony had spent many puzzled and unsatisfactory hours over a densely figured pad, making remarkable budgets that left huge margins for “amusements, trips, etc.,” and trying to apportion, even approximately, their past expenditures.

He remembered a time when in going on a “party” with his two best friends, he and Maury had invariably paid more than their share of the expenses. They would buy the tickets for the theatre or squabble between themselves for the dinner check. It had seemed fitting; Dick, with his naïveté and his astonishing fund of information about himself, had been a diverting, almost juvenile, figure – court jester to their royalty. But this was no longer true. It was Dick who always had money; it was Anthony who entertained within limitations – always except-

238

THE BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED

ing occasional wild, wine-inspired, check-cashing parties – and it was Anthony who was solemn about it next morning and told the scornful and disgusted Gloria that they’d have to be “more careful next time.”

In the two years since the publication of “The Demon Lover,” Dick had made over twenty-five thousand dollars, most of it lately, when the reward of the author of fiction had begun to swell unprecedentedly as a result of the voracious hunger of the motion pictures for plots. He received seven hundred dollars for every story, at that time a large emolument for such a young man – he was not quite thirty – and for every one that contained enough “action” (kissing, shooting, and sacrificing) for the movies, he obtained an additional thousand. His stories varied; there was a measure of vitality and a sort of instinctive in all of them, but none attained the personality of “The Demon Lover,” and there were several that Anthony considered downright cheap. These, Dick explained severely, were to widen his audience. Wasn’t it true that men who had attained real permanence from Shakespeare to Mark Twain had appealed to the many as well as to the elect?

Though Anthony and Maury disagreed, Gloria told him to go ahead and make as much money as he could – that was the only thing that counted anyhow....

Maury, a little stouter, faintly mellower, and more complaisant, had gone to work in Philadelphia. He came to New York once or twice a month and on such occasions the four of them travelled the popular routes from dinner to the theatre, thence to the Frolic or, perhaps, at the urging of the ever-cu- rious Gloria, to one of the cellars of Greenwich Village, noto-

239

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

rious through the furious but short-lived vogue of the “new poetry movement.”

In January, after many monologues directed at his reticent wife, Anthony determined to “get something to do,” for the winter at any rate. He wanted to please his grandfather and even, in a measure, to see how he liked it himself. He discovered during several tentative semi-social calls that employers were not interested in a young man who was only going to “try it for a few months or so.” As the grandson of Adam Patch he was received everywhere with marked courtesy, but the old man was a back number now – the heyday of his fame as first an “oppressor” and then an uplifter of the people had been during the twenty years preceding his retirement. Anthony even found several of the younger men who were under the impression that Adam Patch had been dead for some years.

Eventually Anthony went to his grandfather and asked his advice, which turned out to be that he should enter the bond business as a salesman, a tedious suggestion to Anthony, but one that in the end he determined to follow. Sheer money in deft manipulation had fascinations under all circumstances, while almost any side of manufacturing would be insufferably dull. He considered newspaper work but decided that the hours were not ordered for a married man. And he lingered over pleasant fancies of himself either as editor of a brilliant weekly of opinion, an American Mercure de France, or as scintillant producer of satiric comedy and Parisian musical revue. However, the approaches to these latter guilds seemed to be guarded by professional secrets. Men drifted into them by the devious highways of writing and acting. It was palpably impossible to get on a magazine unless you had been on one before.

240