West of Sunset Read online

  At Chimney Rock the sun had brought out the throngs. Along one edge of the lot sat four tour buses parked nose to tail, making it impossible for him to single out the culprit. He found a shady spot on the far side, head-in against a split-rail fence, as if he might hide the car. She waited for him to come around, letting him unlock the door and help her dismount.

  Among the dungareed, overalled tourists swarming the walkways they were strangely formal, dressed for the theater or the philharmonic, yet when they cleared the cherry trees and the great stone column rose into the sky above them, piled precariously as children’s blocks, they stopped and shielded their eyes like everyone else. The rock stood alone, a chase of staircases stitching the cliff face behind it. High up, at the very top, outlined black against the wispy clouds, a narrow catwalk spanned the final gap. The profusion of tiny people clambering over the scaffolding reminded him of an ant farm. The idea of joining that mass dismayed him, and protectively he thought of lunch.

  She was already heading for the stairs.

  “Aren’t you hungry?”

  “Come on,” she taunted, and before he could argue, she was off, cutting through the other gawkers and taking the first flight at a gallop, her snood bouncing behind like a tail.

  He followed, trying to keep her in sight, but the doctor’s regimen had worked. He wasn’t entirely well either. He spent too much time at his desk, smoked too much, drank too much, and by the second turning he’d lost her. He knew she wouldn’t stop: it was a game. The higher he climbed, already winded, the more he reassured himself that she was just being the old, playful Zelda. He was sweating, and shed his jacket, stripped off his tie. Once, in Macy’s, around Christmastime, Scottie had gotten away from him; now he felt the same helpless panic. He kept on, using the banister to haul himself up, resting on the landings, peering skyward, hoping to find her laughing at him from the catwalk. His fear, remote yet real, was that when he reached the top she wouldn’t be there, a crowd gathered where she’d climbed the rail and swan dived.

  Once across the catwalk, he saw her immediately, her red dress a flag. She stood at the far end of the rock, bellied up to the rail, looking out over the valley with everyone else. When he slid in beside her, she covered his hand with hers. Now that he’d stopped, he was pouring sweat, drops gathering in his eyebrows.

  “You’re getting old, Dodo.”

  “You always were faster than me.”

  “You should really take better care of yourself. I suppose that’s partly my fault. I’m supposed to take care of you, aren’t I? I’m afraid I’ve been a grave disappointment in that category.”

  “I can take care of myself.”

  “Not hardly.”

  “We’re supposed to take care of each other,” he said.

  “I don’t want you to have to take care of me. I just want to go home.”

  “I know.”

  “I’ve been good, haven’t I?”

  “You have.”

  “I try so hard and then things go wrong and I can’t stop them. I wish I could.”

  “I know you do.”

  “You do?” she asked.

  “Of course. I’m the king of things going wrong.”

  “And I’m your queen.”

  “You are,” he said, because, though the throne had sat empty for many years, and the castle, like the kingdom, long since fallen, she was. Despite all they’d squandered, he would never dispute that they were made for each other.

  On their way back to the catwalk they came across a group of schoolchildren kneeling over sheets of paper, making charcoal rubbings. The rock was embossed with fossils—trilobites and skeletal fish—evidence that all of this had once been underwater.

  “They’re beautiful!” she cooed, a judgment he automatically resisted as sentimental. As she went from child to child like a teacher, praising each, he thought he should be more sympathetic. Wasn’t every world, ultimately, a lost world, every memento a treasure? As a writer he might believe that aesthetically, but here, in real life, he didn’t feel it. What was gone was gone.

  The descent seemed longer, and then in the racketing cafeteria they had to wait. The special was goulash with noodles. He made the comment that the food wasn’t much better than the hospital’s, expecting her to argue. She said nothing, kept chewing vacantly as if she hadn’t heard. He leaned over his plate and waved his fork to get her attention. Even then it took an effort to rouse herself from the spell.

  “I’m sorry, darling,” she said. “I’m just tired.”

  He was so used to watching for signs. He understood. He was tired too.

  Back at the car, the sun had moved. The pecan brittle had melted into a gluey mess taking the shape of the box.

  “You can wait till it hardens,” he offered, “then break it again.”

  “I shouldn’t be eating it anyway.”

  Once more it felt like they were escaping, leaving the throngs and the crammed lot behind. They passed the log cabin with its growing rows of cars outside and climbed the switchbacked road up the mountain at their own pace, stopping at the top to appreciate the view and the rarefied quiet, sharing an illicit cigarette. Far below in the trough of the valley, Lake Lure sparkled, sunstruck. A few stray clouds draped black shadows over the slopes, reminding him of Switzerland.

  “Remember our chalet in Gstaad?”

  “The one where Scottie split her chin open.”

  He’d been thinking of the antler chandelier and the great, sooty fireplace and the eider duvet on their bed, but now he could picture the polished hardwood staircase, and Scottie trying to climb it in her Doctor Denton’s, the missed step and the solid knock of bone shocking them like an alarm. Strange, how the past was both open and closed to them, but she’d remembered. So often she couldn’t.

  “I was thinking,” he said. “What do you think about Scottie coming down for a bit before she goes to camp?”

  She dipped her head and drew a line in the dust with the tip of her shoe. “She doesn’t want to see me.”

  “Of course she does. I think this is a good opportunity. She might not be able to for a while.”

  “You’re not making her.”

  “She wants to see you—if you think you’re up to it. I think you are.”

  “I would like to see her.”

  “I figured.”

  “I wish I could tell you I’ll be good for her.”

  “I understand,” he said, and looked at her to seal the pact. She could be so reasonable. For an instant he thought of kissing her cheek, but—today, especially—feared she might misinterpret it. They gazed out over the silent vista again, and then, after she’d taken a last drag of the cigarette and dropped it in the dust for him to crush out, turned and headed back to the car.

  As they coasted down the far side, he said, “I wonder if groundhogs like pecan brittle.”

  “Southern ones do. I can’t speak for you Yankees.”

  “I believe they prefer peanut brittle.”

  “Oh, Dodo, it’s been such a nice day. I don’t want to go back.”

  “I know.”

  “Seventeen years,” she mused. “It doesn’t seem that long.”

  “No,” he said, though he could disagree.

  At the same time, he could feel the day waning, and their moments alone together. Visiting was always hard, but these field trips were a torture, even more so when they went well. In the end, he was charged with returning her to her cloister. There was something of a surrender to it that chafed his honor, as if he should be fighting for her. All the way through the hot, flat town and up the long, winding hill, instead of relief, he felt he was conspiring in his own defeat, a traitor to them both.

  He checked her in at the front desk. The doctor was busy with other visitors, and a chipper nurse took her from him, asking if they had a nice time.

 
; “Very nice,” Scott said.

  “It’s our anniversary,” Zelda said.

  “I know,” the nurse said. “Happy anniversary.”

  “Thank you. Happy anniversary, Dodo.”

  “Happy anniversary,” he said, chastely embracing her, then letting go.

  “Poor Dodo. Don’t look like that. I’ll see you next weekend. I’ll be good, I promise.”

  “I’ll talk to Scottie.”

  “Do, please. Till then, my love.” She blew him a kiss and let the nurse lead her away through the doors toward the women’s wing, leaving him alone again.

  Outside, he maundered to the car, sapped of purpose. Her pecan brittle sat in the backseat, evidence of his meager effort. Later, on the darkened verandah, it would serve as his dinner.

  Monday, when he met with the doctor, he reported that she’d been fine. They’d gotten along. Her memory was sharp, her speech clear, her thoughts coherent. He didn’t mention the cigarette or the pecan brittle, or her manic gallop up the stairs, or her blank face as she chewed her goulash. The doctor seemed pleased, and agreed that seeing Scottie would be good for her, but then, after Scott had successfully lobbied Scottie, Zelda attacked her tennis partner with her racket, breaking the woman’s nose, and was moved to the locked ward. Scottie went off to camp as planned, and when Ober called and said Metro wanted him to come to New York for an interview, he took the first train from Asheville. For two full days he was completely, wrackingly sober, and passed. Six months at a thousand a week. He wanted to tell Zelda face-to-face, but she was in isolation. The doctor forbade him from seeing her, an affront and a reprieve. He waited till the last minute—in fact, after he’d packed up and left town—composing the letter in the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans, across from Union Station.

  Dearest Heart, he wrote. Please forgive me. I have to leave for now to pursue our fortunes. I wish there were any other way. Keep working and try to be good, and I will where I am.

  The next day, on Metro’s ticket, he took the Argonaut west.

  THE IRON LUNG

  The train took three days, with stops in El Paso, Tucson and Yuma. He’d sworn off even beer, and the ceaseless drumming and swaying infiltrated him like a sickness. He wrote Scottie and Ober and Max, read and smoked and slept. At breakfast Palm Springs shimmered like a mirage. After the salt wastes of the desert the Sierras were a welcome respite, the crawling ascent up the grade, then the headlong rush through the dusty ranches and orange groves and garden suburbs with their Okie motor courts and endless rows of stucco bungalows. As they breached the city limits, an eastbound freight blew past, clattering, rocking the car, and then they were racing along the dense, peopled streets of L.A., the horn calling a warning at every crossing. He was searching the skyline for the ivory trophy of city hall when, abruptly, as if they’d lost power, they slowed and coasted into the switchyard, clanking past the stilled freights and shuttling donkey engines and into the dark shed of the station, slipping by amber caution lights and soot-caked pillars, until, with a final, grinding squeal, they lurched to a stop.

  He’d come here twice before, as two very different men. The first time, he’d entered the city triumphant, the golden wunderkind and his flapper bride, signing autographs and mugging with Zelda for the cameras as they detrained. The last, after the Crash, she was recovering in Montgomery, and he got off at Pasadena to avoid the reporters. Now as he stepped down onto the platform there was no one to greet him. He gathered his bags, flagged a cab and disappeared into traffic.

  As if to quarantine him, the studio was putting him up in Santa Monica, the last stop on the car line, at the Miramar, a grand seaside mansion that had outlived its silver magnate builder. The new management had chopped the place into apartments, and the hallways were dank and empty, the only hint of life the clashing of the elevator grate. Out of habit he tipped the bellman too much, then locked the door and put his few things away, a task that, once done, was somehow discouraging. He’d come so far to be in this room. From the curved turret window he watched the blue Pacific roll in foaming beneath the pier. It was Wednesday and the beach was teeming, a riot of striped umbrellas. The unrelenting sunlight burning down on the bathers and the gaudy palms flanking the boulevard and the tawny mountains sloping to meet the sea made him think of Cannes and those vagabond years that now seemed a fever dream.

  That afternoon, to get his bearings, he took the streetcar to Hollywood, an interminable journey that left him sweating and thirsty. The other riders were mainly Mexicans in shirtsleeves and dungarees, and he felt foolish in his suit. In his absence the city had proliferated, its sensible trellis of streets overgrown with a tangle of new parkways and boulevards. Along Wilshire, fringed with pennants and tinsel, the asphalt car lots ran for miles, the polished fenders and windshields glinting in the sun. With the proceeds from the roadster, he bought a used Ford coupe, a sturdy if unlovely steed, and promptly got lost.

  For dinner, he ventured out among the torpid, sunburned crowds dragging home their beach gear, and thought of Scottie, the lazy days at Saint-Tropez. He headed south down Ocean Boulevard along the palisades, crossing the top of the ramp that descended like a slide to the pier. He passed a bottle shop playing a ball game on the radio, then, after some unremarkable sole, passed it on the way back.

  He’d forgotten how long the sun lingered over the Pacific, how, once it was down, night fell like a painted backdrop. Out on the pier, the lights of the Ferris wheel turned merrily. From his open window he could hear tiny shrieks, and the piping of a calliope. Farther out, beyond the yacht harbor and its protective jetty, on the bay proper, the gambling ship Rex sat at anchor, its empty masts strung with Japanese lanterns, beckoning the swells and high rollers. One night, on a bet, he’d jumped over the side in his evening clothes. As he surfaced, still breathless from the shock of the water, he saw Zelda in her white silk launch herself off the top rail like a gossamer angel. She didn’t jump like he did. She dove.

  “I win,” she said, treading water. “What was the bet?”

  He no longer remembered—as if it made any difference. She would always go him one better, or so he’d thought. Now, a decade later, he still couldn’t believe she’d cracked, though soon enough her older brother Anthony provided brutal confirmation that they shared the Sayre legacy. Exiled to an asylum in Mobile, he’d flung himself from a high window rather than rot in a hospital. For all their self-made aspirations, their lives were circumscribed by family. The Greeks knew: you couldn’t outrun blood. It might be, he thought, that you couldn’t outrun anything, yet here he was.

  Dearest Heart, he wrote, in his bathrobe. I have arrived at last at the blessed end of the continent, well and rested and ready to do battle with Goldwyn and Mayer and whatever third head of Cerberus guards the gates.

  Like a new schoolboy dreading his first day, he was afraid of being late, waking to the strange room at three-thirty, and four- fifteen, and again at five, to birds shrieking in the trees. He packed his briefcase with fresh legal pads and pencils and set out early, arriving well before the prescribed time. The facade of the studio was an imposing colonnade of Corinthian pillars, and, like everything there, a monumental fake, made of lath and plaster. They had his pass waiting at the gate, or one for a Mr. Francis Fitzgerald. His last time on the lot he’d been a guest of the real boy wonder, Irving Thalberg, chauffeured around in his Rolls like a prized pet. Now that Thalberg was dead, and Metro’s best intentions with him, Francis Fitzgerald had to find his own parking spot.

  He left the Ford behind the paint shop and walked back up Main between the numbered, warehouselike soundstages, slipping into the flow of gaffers and grips and extras dressed for a Western. At the corner of Fifth Avenue, a flock of impossibly tall hula dancers in mock-coconut bras gabbed and snapped their gum while they waited for a prop man rolling a golden sarcophagus to cross, then went on, their grass skirts rustling, shedding fronds. Was there anything more heart
breaking than starlets, their sisterly camaraderie, their shared dream so nakedly on display? A veteran, he was better at concealing his ambition and fear. He’d been worried, uncertain of the wisdom of his return, but the goofy business of production soothed the song-and-dance man in him. Here was a game company and a waiting stage, all they needed was a decent book, a few catchy tunes. He had to believe he was still capable of that.

  The old Writers’ Building, a stucco block the color of chopped liver, had been replaced by a poured concrete mausoleum the size of a high school named, unjustly, after Thalberg. The lobby was as cool as a theater. In a nod to honesty, the roster by the elevator didn’t list a single writer, only the producers on the fourth floor.

  Eddie Knopf, who’d interviewed him in New York, had an office on the third, his name in gilt on the frosted-glass door. It was a leap from the story department bullpen, where he’d had a desk in a roomful of junior editors. That he was Scott’s lone champion there, a holdout from the old days, Ober had made clear, and while Scott was grateful, the change in their stations puzzled him as if it were a mistake.

  Scott smoothed his hair with a hand, knocked and stood back like a salesman.

  “Come!”

  He opened the door and poked his head in as if he might be told to leave.

  “Scott!” Eddie said, getting up and bounding across the room, his hand extended. He had only the one. The other he’d lost to a grenade in the Argonne, his sleeve folded under and safety-pinned to cover the stump. He was a big, bluff man, and, jacketless, in shirtsleeves and suspenders, seemed even burlier. He had a dab of a mustache, aping Gable’s, and a hand-painted tie, maroon with a white iris. “Great to see you, you look great. Come, sit. You’re early. Like the new digs—swanky, huh? You’ll see, everyone has their own window.” His desk was layered with scripts, one of which he was fixing in blue pencil. He was having coffee and a donut, and offered Scott the same.