West of Sunset Read online

  ALSO BY STEWART O’NAN

  FICTION

  The Odds

  Emily, Alone

  Songs for the Missing

  Last Night at the Lobster

  The Good Wife

  The Night Country

  Wish You Were Here

  Everyday People

  A Prayer for the Dying

  A World Away

  The Speed Queen

  The Names of the Dead

  Snow Angels

  In the Walled City

  NONFICTION

  Faithful (with Stephen King)

  The Circus Fire

  The Vietnam Reader (editor)

  On Writers and Writing by John Gardner (editor)

  SCREENPLAY

  Poe

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My deepest thanks to Joan Bayley Weamer for sharing her memories of working on the MGM lot in the 1930s, and to Holly Watson for connecting us.

  Abject thanks, as always, to my faithful early readers (and listeners): Manette Ansay, Paul Cody, Lamar Herrin, Stephen King, Michael Koryta, Dennis Lehane, Trudy O’Nan, Lowry Pei, Alice Pentz, Mason Radkoff, Susan Straight, Luis and Cindy Urrea, and Sung J. Woo.

  And lastly, grateful thanks, again, to David Gernert and to Paul Slovak for believing.

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

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  First published by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2015

  Copyright © 2015 by Stewart O’Nan

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  O’Nan, Stewart, 1961–

  West of sunset / Stewart O’Nan.

  pages ; cm

  eBook ISBN 978-1-101-60839-5

  1. Fitzgerald, F. Scott (Francis Scott), 1896–1940—Fiction.

  2. Authors, American—20th century—Fiction.

  3. Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.)—History—20th century—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3565.N316W47 2015

  813’.54—dc23

  2014038470

  This is a work of fiction based on real events.

  Version_1

  CONTENTS

  Also by Stewart O’Nan

  Title Page

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  CHIMNEY ROCK

  THE IRON LUNG

  THE GARDEN OF ALLAH

  SECRETS OF THE STARS

  A YANK AT OXFORD

  THE SWEETEST PIE IN HISTORY

  THE GRAVEYARD OF THE ATLANTIC

  THE RICH GIRL

  LILY

  ROBINSON CRUSOE IN MALIBU

  EASTER, 1928

  INFIDELITY

  THE CURE

  MARIE ANTOINETTE

  BELLY ACRES

  HANGOVER, NEW HAMPSHIRE

  LA VIA BLANCA

  CHER FRANÇOISE

  THIS THING CALLED LOVE

  Once again

  to

  Trudy

  There are no second acts in American lives.

  —F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Nothing was impossible—everything was just beginning.

  —F. Scott Fitzgerald

  CHIMNEY ROCK

  That spring he holed up in the Smokies, in a tired resort hotel by the asylum so he could be closer to her. A bout of pneumonia over Christmas had provoked a flare-up of his TB, and he was still recovering. The mountain air was supposed to help. Days he wrote in his bathrobe, drinking Coca-Cola to keep himself going, holding off on the gin till nightfall—a small point of pride—sipping on the dark verandah as couples strolled among the fireflies rising from the golf course. Outside of town, Highland Hospital crowned the ridgeline, a spired Gothic palace in the clouds worthy of a bewitched princess. He couldn’t afford it, as he couldn’t afford the other private clinics they’d tried, but he pleaded poverty and hashed out a discount with the trustees, begging the money from his agent—an onerous form of credit, borrowing against stories he’d yet to imagine.

  He had no choice. At Pratt they left her too much alone. She’d strangled herself with a ripped pillowcase, nearly succeeding, the livid band across her windpipe a reminder. One night while she was strapped to her bed, the Archangel Michael appeared, glowing, and told her the world would end unless she could move the seven nations to repent. She took to wearing white and memorizing the Bible. In her paintings the faceless damned writhed in fire.

  At Highland her new doctor believed in diet and exercise. No cigarettes, no sweets. Every day the patients hiked a prescribed distance, sturdy nurses spurring them on like coaches. She lost weight, her skin tented over her cheekbones, her nose a blade, recalling that awful year in Paris she whittled her body down trying to remake herself for the ballet. Yet not manic, not frenzied like then, her knees bruised black, feet cracked from practice. After her insulin treatments she was calm, subdued by sheer lack of energy. Instead of sinners she painted flowers, big blowzy blooms just as corrupt. She could sleep now, she said, a mercy he envied. Her cursive returned, neat lines running like waves down the page instead of the bunched, slanted hand he’d come to dread.

  Oh Goofo, every day I think of the warm skin of the sea and how I ruined our eyes for each other. You were angry and shut me in when I wanted the sun. Maybe I was never meant to be a salamander, just this thing they wrap in sheets and feed when the bell rings. I’m sorry I cost you all those cities all those perfect boulevards with their lights burning down around us in the night.

  They spoke mostly by letter. Though he could see the hospital from the steps of the town library, he rarely saw her, which made her changes more striking. Dr. Carroll limited their visits, doling them out, like any privilege, by a strict reward system. Weekends they might be allowed a few unscheduled hours together, strolling the grounds, even leaving the mountain for lunch at a diner or in a quiet corner of the hotel restaurant, tooling back up the winding, rhododendron-lined drive in his roadster to the long sunset view at the top, but the week was reserved for the hard work of recovering herself. The patients woke before dawn, like farmers. At nine they played tennis, at eleven they painted. The idea was to keep her regimented, which he understood, having disciplined himself to write though otherwise his life had lost any semblance of order.

  At forty, by a series of setbacks he ascribed to bad luck, he’d become a transient. With Scottie off at her boarding school, he no longer had to keep a house, a relief, since it meant one less expenditure, except now they had no home to go back to, their most cherished possessions given up to musty storage. He’d pared down where he could, and still there was no way he could pay both the hospital and Scottie’s tuition, but—out of misplaced honor or plain delusion—he refused to skimp on his responsibilities. It would be too easy. Every month Zelda’s mother petitioned him to let her come home to Montgomery. She wasn’t ready, if she’d ever be. His hope was that
Dr. Carroll would help her get well so he could go to Hollywood and make enough to cover his debts and maybe buy himself time to write the novel he owed Max.

  There was interest at Metro, the promise of a thousand a week, but so far Ober couldn’t get them to commit. He had to be honest with Scott, the studio had concerns about his drinking—his own fault for publishing those mea culpas in Esquire. All March he pestered Ober for word, assuring him he hadn’t touched a drop, when his bottom drawer was heavy with empties.

  With Zelda everything was a test. For their anniversary they were allowed to take a day trip to Chimney Rock. He was to be both husband and chaperone, charged with cataloging her conduct, speech and intake—observations he registered automatically yet resented sharing, as if, after so long in captivity, they had a shred of privacy left. It was a balmy Saturday, the dogwoods frilled with pink, the visitors’ lot busy with gussied-up loved ones toting picnic baskets. Dr. Carroll himself delivered her to the front desk, handing her over to Scott like a doting father.

  In her twenties, baby faced and petite, she’d seemed girlish. She’d been an athlete and a dancer, a notorious flirt, her stamina and fearlessness irresistible. Now, just shy of thirty-seven, she was pinched and haggard, cronelike, her smile ruined by a broken tooth. Some well-meaning soul had fixed her hair for the occasion, gathering the unruly honey-blonde mop back into a knitted black snood which sat catlike on one shoulder—a style he’d seen on shopgirls and waitresses but one she would never choose, especially since it made her face even sharper, hawkish. The carmine sundress was an old favorite, though it had faded from hard washing and hung on her, robelike, the yoke of her collarbone hollowed, a sheer scarf knotted like a choker to conceal her throat. When he leaned down to greet her, she turned her face into his, her lips grazing his cheek.

  “Thank you,” she said, pulling away, as if he’d done her a favor.

  “Happy anniversary.”

  “Oh, Dodo. Happy anniversary.” It always surprised him to hear her soft Dixie lilt coming from this wizened stranger, as if, hiding somewhere inside, his fresh, wild Zelda still existed.

  The doctor congratulated them. “How many years is it?”

  “Seventeen” she said, looking to Scott to check her math.

  “Seventeen years,” he confirmed, nodding, uncertain if this fact was happy. The number was as illusory as their marriage. As his wife she’d now been hospitalized as long as not, and in fretful moments the question of whether she’d been mad all along and he attracted to that madness unsettled him.

  “Enjoy yourselves,” the doctor said.

  “We will,” she said, and took Scott’s hand, squeezing it as they walked through the vaulted lobby and into the bright day, relinquishing it only when he opened the car door and helped her in like a footman.

  On her seat rested a present he’d bought at the hotel gift shop.

  “Dodo, really, you needn’t have.”

  As he closed the door, he palmed the knob, silently locking it. “It’s nothing—a token.”

  “And here I didn’t get you anything.” She didn’t wait, shucking the paper to reveal a shallow candy box. “If this is what I think it is . . . You devil. You know I can’t resist peanut brittle.”

  “Pecan brittle.”

  “It’s lovely, darling, but I don’t think it’s allowed.”

  “I promise not to tell.”

  “You’ll have to help me then.”

  “To dispose of the evidence.”

  “Precisely.”

  How quickly they were conspirators, as if it were their natural state. Together, in another age, they’d been famous for their fashionable trespasses, the stuff of magazine covers and scandal sheets, and perhaps because his fall had been less spectacular, and far less punitive, at times like these a nostalgic guilt pricked him, as if, impossible as it was, he should have saved her.

  Leaving the grounds, he had the sensation that they’d escaped. Though he knew it was exactly the wrong attitude to adopt, once they were outside the gates he liked to pretend they were any other couple off on a jaunt. A similar denial applied to his driving. At Princeton he’d been witness to a deadly wreck, and more than once, careering late at night over the darkened roads of Long Island or the Riviera, in the hands of stimulated friends, he’d been frightened for his life, with the result that, drunk or sober, he was cautious to a fault, going so slowly that he posed a hazard to others. Now, instead of guarding their new anonymity, he succeeded in attracting the wrath of everyone stuck behind them.

  Another driver held up both hands as he passed, as if to ask what he was doing.

  “Get off the road, you old fart!” a young twerp shouted.

  Scott waved them on.

  Beside him, squinting like a sailor, her scarf luffing in the breeze, Zelda sat with one elbow propped atop the door, pointing out the rushing streams and burgeoning pear trees. He broke his concentration on the road to murmur appreciation and steal a glance at the knob, still locked. Once, on a bluff above Cap Ferrat, she’d opened the door as they traversed a curve and stepped out onto the running board before he could stop the car. She laughed like a child playing a naughty trick. She was just angry over a remark he’d made to Sara and Gerald about Marion Davies, or so he thought. To his shame, looking back, he couldn’t pinpoint when she’d lost control of herself, or how long it had taken him to notice. Now he watched her closely, knowing from terrible experience that at any second she might lunge across and grab the wheel.

  She reclined and closed her eyes, basking. On her neck, peeking from beneath the thrashing scarf, was a freshly healed scratch the color of raspberry jam. When she caught him looking at her, she stuck out her tongue playfully, then made a point of shifting her body to watch him.

  Down in town they had to wait for the sole traffic light.

  “You look tired,” she said.

  “I am.”

  “You’re not drinking.”

  “I’m not sleeping,” he said.

  “Come spend a week with me. It’ll do you wonders.”

  “Someone in this family has to work.”

  “Don’t be a dodo, Dodo. Mama can help.”

  “Let’s let Mama worry about Mama.”

  They turned north, leaving Tryon, climbing into the mountains again, the air in the green hollows cool and damp. They saw a sharecropper with a lop-eared mule plowing a hillside, and a skirmish line of wild turkeys, and a groundhog that scurried away as they approached, each diversion making it easier and more of an occasion to be together, as if, in the future, they might remember the day as a happy interlude.

  Not wanting to set her off to no purpose, he’d postponed telling her about Hollywood. As with anything delicate, it was a matter of timing. Cowardly or hopeful, he figured it would be safer once she was home. Today was another step toward that goal, and while he remained vigilant for the slightest sign, so far he was pleased.

  Equally tricky was the question of when to broach the possibility of Scottie coming down after exams. The last time they’d been together, in Virginia Beach, Zelda hadn’t been right and Scottie was annoyed and short with her, leading to a blowup on the boardwalk he foolishly tried to referee. Since then he’d had to prod Scottie to write her, both apologizing for the circumstances and trying to instill in her a sense of duty he himself had never felt toward his own mother. That they should reconcile had become a preoccupation, though how he might effect that was a mystery. So much of his life now was making arrangements, and he’d never been any good at it.

  They crested the summit and coasted over the far side. The road was switchbacked, stepping down the mountain, hairpin turns giving on sheer drops. Far below, neatly splitting the valley, lay the thin blue puddle of Lake Lure. They poked along, Zelda soaking in the view. A circus of hawks banked and tilted above the rocky outcrops. He was occupied with keeping the car between the lines
and was surprised to find a red park tour bus looming behind them, surging closer and closer till it filled the mirror. The driver swiped his arm sideways across the windshield as if shooing a pesky fly.

  Zelda twisted in her seat. “I think he wants you to pull over.”

  “There’s no room.”

  He sped up slightly, convinced of his right to the road. He wouldn’t be bullied into doing something stupid. He hunched over the wheel, concentrating, afraid to look back. He was going too fast to slip into the scenic turnoffs, and as the bus hounded them down the curves, brakes juddering, he wondered why, if the passengers were sightseers, they were in such a blasted hurry.

  At the base of the mountain the road straightened out, regaining its shoulder. The bus flashed its lights. Still he didn’t yield.

  “There,” she prompted, pointing to a rustic country store ahead. “Please, darling.”

  He braked and veered into the unpaved lot, sliding sideways, raising a cloud of dust that settled around them as the bus roared past, horn blaring.

  He shook the back of his open hand at it, a curse they’d learned in Rome. “Ought to have his license taken away.”

  Her laughter shocked him—raucous, head tipped back with delight. The gesture seemed false and histrionic, a typical symptom.

  “What?”

  “Remember in Westport? You used to say that all the time. Everyone should have their license taken away. And then what happened?”

  He’d had his revoked for running their Marmon into a pond on a lark with Ring. Ring, who was as dead as his mother. Those days seemed to belong to another age, another person he’d been—heedless, charmed.

  “Thank you for reminding me.”

  “I’m sorry, Dodo. You’re so easy to tease.”

  “Too easy.”

  “Ohhh, don’t be cross.”

  He wasn’t, not with her. It was humbling how quickly anger turned him into an idiot, and he resolved, as always, not to let his frustrations get the better of him—a pledge that seemed even more timely when, after apologizing, he swung the car past the open door of the log cabin and realized it was a bar, the neon darkness inside inviting. Back on the road, neither mentioned it.