Scott bewildered by the ghostly echo his wife was changed into. Now a character he has not written. “I cannot live in this ghost town that Zelda has become.” He just wanted her to return to being the girl, the flitting, flirty thing.
I wonder if the new complex on campus was built on the site of the destroyed dormitory, where women patients were locked inside their rooms and allegedly tied to their beds, making it impossible for them to escape during the fire. (I think of this as a sort of metaphor: locked up, confined, made safe.) Who were these other women, I wonder? What was the interior monologue of their unquiet minds? Or had they too been erased, subdued, rewritten?
SUPPRESS EVERYTHING SUPPRESSIBLE
I think about ghosts. I feel myself become more like a girlish, mischievous Zelda, light in my body as I jump up to walk along the rock fence that borders the campus, and steal under the yellow tape at Highland Hall to sit on a creaking lone white rocking chair. John takes my picture, but it is from too far away and I look removed, a stranger.
A tour bus goes through, necks straining, the man at his microphone: what mythology is he repeating? I imagine an alternative monologue — This is where Fitzgerald’s wife spiritually died. And later, yes, her body too. And yet, and yet this was the site of her eternal return: she would beg to go back. Eventually she believed she must be protected from herself. Or perhaps she wanted to get away from her husband. Or her mother.
Regardless, for a moment maybe these tourists are silent, attuned to Zelda’s story: a screwball comedy become tragedy.
Or perhaps the guide is now narrating that Nina Simone took singing lessons with Dr. Carroll’s wife as a young girl.
In the car ride back to the hotel I think of Zelda’s hair, her elegant neck shaved, the boyish bob of curls. My pixie cut is now growing out. I will cut it again, and again, in moments of fuzzy personal identity or panic. I muse whether I should take a picture of Zelda to the woman in Durham who now cuts my hair.
The small tributes I have been paying lately to Zelda as I have been reimmersed in the Fitzgerald legend, rereading the biographies — a glittery silver toenail polish from OPI’s Swiss collection, an homage to her time in the Swiss asylum.
I am beginning to be able to channel them. Their different energies. Zelda, bold, forceful, capricious, then staunchly mute. A silent film star — like Louise Brooks. (Yet they left Louise Brooks alone, in her hermitage in upstate New York, to watch movies and reminisce and write her lovely lyric nasty essays of the past, as well as her attempts at a book-length memoir which she dubbed Incinerator One and Incinerator Two. Zelda was only left alone in the end, to write her increasingly feverish and religious texts, her writing that was also always a rewriting of her past, of the same circling narrative, the primary scenes.)
But in the bed on the stiff white hotel sheets my thoughts go to Viv — and for a moment, I can feel her, I am in her nervous body lying there.
While at the vegetarian restaurant, Laughing Seed, John and I fantasize about renting a cabin someday here in Asheville, or perhaps we can find a country cottage closer to his work in Chapel Hill, already disappointed with where we’re living in Durham. So much like the Eliots and Fitzgeralds, always searching, searching for some ideal sanctuary. Too bad they didn’t have the ease of Craigslist.
She follows him where his work calls him,” writes Simone de B of her archetypal wife whom she sees as willfully refusing sovereignty.
Funny. I never thought of myself as the sacrificial type.
I think of these literary wives who picked up and went where their husbands wanted to, to whichever Shangri-La where the men could finish the book—everything in service of an eventual masterpiece. The self-imposed exile of wifedom.
The subaltern condition of being a literary wife — she must believe in the myth of his eventual genius even before he has realized it. See also: literary sister (Wordsworth’s) or mother (Flaubert’s).
If the modern husbands/serious writers were widowers to their wives’ maladies (an overwriting, as Tom and Paul were both sickly types, and Scott eternally sloppy), these women were widows to the cult of the book to be birthed. (She doomed to immanence, he allowed transcendence, or the time to procrastinate wildly and eventually get the words on the page, words marrying more words.)
The Bowles seemed to go wherever Paul needed to write, once he donned the cap of Author in the family, taking it from Jane’s elfin head. Or he went alone. He was always heading off to some island or another. Even while Jane was stroked out at 40, in and out of hospitals.
Scott always changing his mind about what ideal environment he required to finish, cocktails included. Tender a drawn-out nightmare of nine years syncopated by Zelda’s breakdowns and his sloshy lost weekends at whichever house they had landed: the gray country cottage in Connecticut or the mansion in Delaware. And then later the medical tourism that mimicked the mania of their earlier domestic retreats, a strange mirroring of their honeymoon years in Manhattan high-rises — Fitz living in and out of hotels while Zelda was institutionalized in Asheville.
Yet in our relationship, I am the Writer, the devouring ego. So much in service to the books that I write, except, of course, where we live.
I wonder why I didn’t jump at the chance to finally live in New York, although we didn’t have plans for how we would, exactly, support ourselves there. Why didn’t Edna Pontellier in The Awakening say fuck it all and move to Paris? Why didn’t Zelda take the ballet solo she was offered in Naples, perhaps then avoiding further containment and spiritual death, choosing instead her current state of marital miserabilism?
Perhaps there is something to this feminine dread of happiness. Or perhaps I was so desperate to get out of Akron I jumped at any chance to leave. I rehearse my lines. It is a wonderful opportunity for him. The economy and everything.
My life mirroring the mad wives more and more. Always moving, moving, moving.
We move in a blizzard, driving ten hours straight in our old Volvo station wagon, crossing the Mason-Dixon Line through the mountains of Appalachia the day after Christmas.
I have exited the Midwestern and am now entering the Southern gothic.
In Durham we live in a rehabilitated garment factory past downtown that houses residential lofts, offices, artist studios (much of the art is of the craft-fair variety — the clunky turquoise jewelry, the oiled, earnest portraiture). Once again, we move in sight unseen, our choice determined by what is available, what we can afford, rentals surprisingly costly compared to Chicago. We pick this place because they offered pictures and dimensions online, and John always fantasized about living in an urban, industrial loft. The pictures are gorgeous — we can picture our furniture inside, we even obsessively trace it out to scale in miniature to make sure everything fits.
Oh our modern lives. Days I’m more obsessed with looking up vintage Herman Miller chairs online than Henry Miller. (Oh Christ, I’ve become one of those essayists awash in their own privilege, yet I feel in many ways far far away from Joan Didion in her Malibu mansion.)