Villa America (18 page)

“Truly? You know him?”

“One evening, over an
apéro,
” Vladimir said, clearly eager to return to his yachting explanation.

Sara continued to stare at this young blond aviator. She knew it was a bit impolite, but this was a village, and open curiosity was tolerated by the French in a way it would never have been in England or America. “What’s he doing here?”

Vladimir, now resigned to this line of questioning, shrugged. “What is anyone doing here?”

She liked the way the young man looked back at her—slightly nervously, slightly eagerly, like Baoth when he was learning to swim.

“I think I’d like to meet him,” Sara said.

O
wen was dreaming. In his dream, he was a blade of wheat, green and unfurling, pushing out of the ground with sun and moisture. As the sun grew warmer, he grew longer, taller, stronger. He shot up and then he stopped. But the sun kept on. And as it became hotter, he began to change color; he turned from green to golden. He was drying up. And then he was burning. All at once, he was cut down, quickly, with a metal blade. He was dead and rolled up and turned into feed, and he couldn’t stop it any more than he had been able to stop himself from growing in the sun.

He awoke covered in sweat. The small bedroom with the linen curtains felt close and yet it was only just dawn, the air cool and dryer than usual. His yellow bedspread was damp from his body.

He got up and put on his swimming trunks and a shirt and his espadrilles and left, shutting the door behind him. He walked down to the beach and dove into the water. There were only fishermen up at this hour, and they were far away on their boats, tiny dots on the horizon. He swam for a while and then went back to his rooms above the Café d’Esterel.

He took a quick rinse in the bath on the landing, then dressed for the day in his chinos and chambray shirt. The sun was up, but not high, and he went to take his coffee with Auguste.

The Frenchman was already finishing his first café au lait when Owen found him at the zinc counter. Upon Owen’s arrival, Auguste, without a word, prepared the same for Owen and slid it over to him. They stood there in silence, but it was the good kind, and it reminded him of early-morning breakfasts with his mother, who’d also known about quiet. After a bit, Auguste made him a tartine, which Owen wrapped in a napkin and took with him out to his car to eat on the drive.

At the base, most of the aviators were at breakfast, and the hangars were deserted. He pulled in front of his own and shut off the motor. Inside, in the semidarkness, she was waiting for him.
That Girl
. She was a modified SPAD, a two-seater that, unlike
Lettuce,
was built for durability and distance, not speed.

Off to one side was a wooden desk where he kept his accounting and appointment books as well as the maintenance calendars for
That Girl
.

He checked these over now, knowing already he had nothing on. Still, it grounded him to see everything in order. Afterward, he went over to his plane and began the ritual of running his hands over her wooden body, speaking to her, telling her what a beautiful day it was turning into.

By the time he reached her nose, the sound of the aviators and the mechanics descending on the hangars filled the air. Owen went out and flagged down Eugene, the mechanic he shared with one of the other pilots, Edouard Jozan. Eugene, with the blessing of the French military service, received a small stipend from Owen for helping him out with
That Girl
.

Eugene moved quickly, always—one of the things that Owen liked about him. And when he’d first met him, he’d been glad to see that he was a man, not a boy like Arnaud, his mechanic during the war.

“Just going out for a turn,” Owen said. “Won’t be up long.”

Eugene nodded and waited while Owen pumped the throttle. When Owen called out, he cranked the prop; Owen made contact, and the mechanic stepped away. Owen lifted a hand in thanks and began to taxi.

Once up, he made for the Golfe de Fréjus and the open water. In the morning sun, the colors of the sea were sharply delineated: first a mossy green near the line of the shore, then a band of turquoise, and finally a deep indigo.

The sun above and the water below and the hum of the engine, so much quieter than in the fighters he’d flown, made the dream finally disappear and he felt a contentment come over him. The day was before him and he could do as he pleased. After this, perhaps another swim and then lunch in Saint-Raphaël. He checked his controls; all the numbers and arrows waited only on his decisions.

The champagne was finished before they’d even left the Marseille train station.

“We should have brought more than one.” Zelda sighed.

“You shouldn’t have let me forget my billfold and then we could have bought some,” Scott said irritably, although he knew it was as much his fault as Zelda’s.

They were making the move down south to
e-con-o-mize,
as Zelda put it. In New York, they’d been running through the money as fast as the
Saturday Evening Post
could pay, and Paris hadn’t been much better. Scott needed to finish
Trimalchio in West Egg;
Scribner’s was losing patience, despite Max Perkins’s assurances that everyone had faith he could pull it off. So when Sara and Gerald had extolled the virtues—and cheapness—of the Riviera, the plan was made to go down in June in search of some peace and quiet. They’d settled on Valescure, on the northern edge of the town of Saint-Raphaël, about an hour-and-a-half drive from their friends in Cap d’Antibes.

The car had held out until they were almost at Marseille, when it had begun to smoke and cough and then, finally, just died. He and Zelda had grabbed what luggage they could manage, along with one bottle of champagne from the crates in the backseat, and made a dash for the Train Bleu. Someone would have to go deal with the car and the rest of the champagne later.

In the melee, he’d forgotten his billfold in the glove compartment, and he and Zelda had had a time of it scraping together the money—loose change from his pockets, errant bills in her handbag—to buy tickets for the salon car.

“Let’s talk about this summer,” Zelda said, breathing on the window and then drawing waves in the condensation.

“All right.” Outside, the edge of the city disappeared as the train rounded a turn.

“You’re going to work very hard and I’m going to get very brown.”

Scott nodded, his eyes wandering around the car, taking in the marquetry patterns of floral baskets, the polished ceiling fan and Lalique lights, the navy blue carpet and toffee-colored velvet seats. He wondered how much it had cost to put this car together.

“But,” she said, turning away from the window and poking his shoulder, “I’m going to work too.”

“On what?”

“On my swimming, and my dancing.”

“I see.”

“And,” she said, “you’re not going to drink too much.”

“You’re not going to drink too much,” he said.

This was a dangerous conversation. They both knew it and so were silent for a while.

After a bit, Zelda said: “Let’s play the game.”

“All right. Who?”

“Sara and Gerald,” she said.

“You go first.”

“‘If I were a Greek goddess, I’d be Demeter, in charge of all the golden fields and the harvest and fertility. An avenging mother.’”

“That’s good,” Scott said.

“‘I don’t like what’s in fashion, but I like beautiful things. All my clothes are soft and clean and made out of delicious fabrics. I’m graceful and my touch brings loveliness to even the smallest, itsy-bitsiest things.’”

“‘I’m sensuous,’” Scott said.

“‘I am?’”

“Well, she is,” he said. “In that sort of motherly way.”

“Hmmm,” Zelda said. “You never said that before.”

“Well…never mind. Go on.”

“‘I like things that are new: new art, new inventions, new people. But really, I’m very old-fashioned. I don’t ever get crazy. Maybe’”—and here she fixed her eyes once again on Scott—“‘maybe it’s because I’m forty.’”

“She’s not forty. She’s thirty-seven, I heard Gerald say so.”

“‘Oh, I’m forty, all right.’ A woman knows.”

“Fine. My turn. ‘I’m tall and lean and Irish. I’m a painter and I’m getting quite famous—I’m the one who did
Boatdeck,
after all, and got myself on the cover of magazines.’”

“Don’t be jealous.”

“I’m not, I’m in character. ‘Everything I do is precise, without waste, and designed to be generous and original; I like to give pleasure. I can be friendly but also cold when someone least expects it.’”

“Yes, that’s true, I’ve seen that. Like when we turned up at Saint-Cloud and said we were leaving on the
Lusitania
—”

“Don’t interrupt. ‘I’m like one of those machines I paint. Perfectly elegant, with lots of gears and fitted parts, and I look oh-so-finely tailored. With all my straps and buckles, I must be a masochist.’” Scott slapped his hand on his knee. “Ha.”

“Oh, I don’t know how you got masochist.”

“You saw how.”

“I think it’s a mighty big stretch.”

“Now who’s jealous.”

“All right. Let’s do Esther Murphy.”

“Too easy: ‘I’m distorted to look at, I smell like the gutter, and I’m brilliantly clever. I’m a cubist painting.’”

“You are canny sometimes.” Zelda smiled at him. “Let’s do Dos.”

“Dos Passos?”

“Do you know another Dos?”

“No, but I don’t see why we should do him. You’re picking some awfully dull ones.” Scott wasn’t sure how he felt about John Dos Passos. That book of his had been all right, just. But Dos judged him and Zelda, he could see it behind his eyes, hear it in his silences. He might also be squeamish about sex.

“He’s very canny too,” Zelda said sweetly. “
And
…they say he’s writing a book of genius—and getting on with it very well.”

“He doesn’t have a wife,” Scott said, hating himself for his prissy tone.

“You’re a big one for excuses.” She stretched out in her seat, satisfied as a cat.

“Oh, shut up.”

They were quiet until the train trundled into the station at Saint-Raphaël, whereupon another problem presented itself: with no car and no money for a taxi, they had no way of getting themselves and their luggage to Valescure.

“It’s very hot,” Scott said, looking dubiously at Zelda’s leather case.

“Do we not even have enough for a lemonade? I’m awfully thirsty. How is it so dry here? I feel like a tumbling tumbleweed.”

“We might be able to beg one,” he said. “A lemonade. Not a tumbleweed.”

“I could put on my gypsy scarf,” she said, “and moan and gnash my teeth.”

Scott picked up his suitcase in one hand and Zelda’s in another, and they walked out into the bright sunshine. They were greeted by a magnificent byzantine dome, the color of pencil lead, rising above a church in front of them, and beyond it, the old port. They turned left onto the promenade, palm trees standing sentry between the beach and the red, red buildings with their red-tiled roofs. They passed the Grand Casino, blindingly white, and walked a bit farther, dazed by the heat and the newness of their surroundings, before concluding that they were going in a loop.

Scott was sweating in his white linen suit, and Zelda picked up a palm frond from the road and began fanning him with it.

“I think we should have taken a right outside the station,” he said, putting the cases down.

“Maybe we’ll just have to sleep on the street.”

“We should look for a Banque de Paris.” He stared up and down the promenade.

Zelda looked longingly at the shady cafés swelling with people taking their lunch. Then she stopped fanning.

“Scott, isn’t that the Murphys’ man?”

He followed her gaze. “Where?”

“There at the café, table on the left. With the blond man.”

“Yes,” he said, placing the face. “Yes. The Russian…what’s-his-name.”

“Vlad the Impaler,” Zelda said.

“That’s the one. How marvelous. We’re saved.”

“You could have saved us, Goofo.”

“The odds were long. Come on,” he said, picking the cases back up.

“Hello,” they said, almost in unison, when they reached him.

“Vladimir,” Scott began, “I don’t know if you remember—”

“Madame and Monsieur Fitzgerald, bonjour.” The Russian said this as if he’d been expecting them, as if it were the most natural thing in the world that they had wandered, sweating, carrying luggage and a palm frond, up to his table at this café.

“Yes,” Scott said brightly. “Look, we’ve had a problem with our car and then I left my billfold…in short, we need a lift to Valescure.”

“I’m going that way,” the blond man sitting with Vlad the Impaler said. An American, apparently. “I can give you a ride.”

“This is Owen Chambers,” the Russian said.
“Un ami.”

“Well, that would be awfully good of you.”

“I’m just going to finish my drink.” The blond man indicated his full glass.

“Join us, madame, monsieur,” Vladimir said.

“Oh, that would be heaven.” Zelda exhaled dramatically. “We’re desperate for refreshments. We’re not camels, after all.”

“No, indeed.” Vladimir bowed his head.

“You’re American,” Scott said to Owen when they’d pulled over chairs and sat down.

“Yes,” Owen said.

“Where from?”

“A small place. In New England. You wouldn’t have heard of it.”

“Try me,” Scott said.

The blond man just shrugged.

“He’s from here now,” Vladimir said.

 Scott didn’t like mysteries or people who pretended they had them. He was about to get into it when the waiter came over; Zelda ordered a champagne cocktail and he followed suit with a gin and tonic. “We’ll pay you back. Awfully good of you.”

“You’re very blond,” Zelda told the American. “Like a moth.”

The man smiled at her. “Thank you.”

“And very tan,” she said. “I’m going to get very tan too.”

“It’ll look nice,” Owen said.

The blond fellow was admiring Scott’s wife. He liked that; he admired her a lot too. Perhaps he would let it drop, the mystery or whatever it was.

“Do you know the Murphys?” he asked.

“I do,” Owen said.

“Don’t you want them to adopt you?” Zelda took the champagne off the tray before the waiter even had a chance. “Scott and I do. They’re so comforting.”

“I think I know what you mean,” Owen said, seemingly amused.

“Oh, good. Then they can adopt all three of us. It would be nice to have a moth in the family. Wouldn’t it, Scott?”

“That’s always a good thing,” Scott said. “Who doesn’t like a moth?”

The American’s car was a Citroën that looked like it had seen better days. Unless he was that certain type of old money who pretended to be poor, Owen was far from flush. But he had nice manners, the way he handed Zelda into the back carefully, as if she might break.