Marcus Pendergast sees Zelda Fitzgerald for the first time at a party, recognizing the reckless figure from the tabloids while she’s bent over tying her shoe. The laces on her low-heeled Oxfords—much better for dancing than high heels—have come undone. These are what keep her together, he thinks, from exploding into some dazzling sunburst, some black hole that could swallow him entirely and end his existence.
He wouldn’t mind this, for he has fallen in love with her.
This is the first party he’s been to since he moved to Paris two months ago. He only came to put in an appearance, to quietly announce himself as another expatriate writer to look out for in issues of The Saturday Evening Post, to see something besides the windowless walls of his apartment.
What he sees is Zelda. Scott has left to replenish his drink, so she’s kneeling alone in the middle of the dance floor, the couples bouncing around her slowing to a halt. Marcus takes note, understanding her beauty is sufficient to pause time. He’s heard she’s crazy, but nothing about her appearance suggests insanity. Staring at her dark lips and severe eyes, he decides she stands out among the party’s guests like a beautiful line of prose in an otherwise tepid novel. She is a sentence he could read over and over and discover a new meaning each time, but parties are hardly ideal places for reading. Before leaving, he steals one last glance at her, committing her to his memory, a place cluttered with gloomy trenches and machine gun fire, yet somehow she is the loudest and brightest thing there. * The novel he’s writing sits unfinished on his desk, stale laundry piling up on his typewriter. Marcus Pendergast is a name he can clearly picture on a book jacket. While shaving, he sometimes looks in the mirror and mouths his name slowly, wondering what its five syllables would feel like in somebody else’s mouth. In Zelda’s mouth.
Mar-cus Pen-der-gast.
He nicks his chin with his razor. Mutters obscenities. He imagines his name has a gravitational pull, strong enough to draw people toward bookstore windows where they would peer past their reflections long enough to ask, Marcus Pendergast, who is that?
He tries to remember, thinks back to before his deployment: halcyon days at Columbia, internship for The New Yorker, polished shoes and parties in fraternity houses where he could be found hovering close to the door, watching ice cubes drift lazily around his drink.
Then there was the war, deafening and crowded and illuminated by fireworks. Not so different from a party, Marcus thinks, if you look at it the right way.
Feeling beleaguered by the endless lights and sounds of New York, he joined the mass exodus of writers leaving America for Paris after the war. His short stories have found homes in several journals, but are usually returned to him in yellow envelopes. Perhaps one day he’ll become a famous writer and outsell even Scott Fitzgerald—a Princeton man, no less. He hears rumors of men sipping tea in Gertrude Stein’s salon at 27 rue de Fleurus, dining at Michaud’s near James Joyce and his family, lives that move from one meal to the next. Measured out in coffee spoons, he thinks. He knows how to reference poetry. Often he wonders what poets Zelda likes.
Byron maybe, the reckless lover.
Keats.
Shelley.
Romantics exclusively, and Zelda, the girl who rides on top of taxis and wades in fountains and stops time when she ties her shoes, is the last of them.
The last of the romantics.
This might make a good title for his book, which follows a writer stationed on the Western Front who escapes through a magic foxhole that transports him to all the places he’d rather be. A quiet armchair at the New York Public Library; the Coney Island Wonder Wheel on a brisk autumn night; his boyhood living room on the 9th floor of an apartment on Riverside Drive, old books bought with old money and fresh flowers always in the vase on the piano. * Months pass and Zelda fades in his memory, becomes amorphous, everyone and no one. He tries to remember her but instead sees other faces. His mother, an image of St. Veronica wiping the face of Jesus in his childhood cathedral, a field nurse in France gently dabbing his forehead with a warm washcloth and telling him it’s all right, it’s just a broken leg, before long no one will ever know you’ve been hurt.
At last his prayers are answered—he sees her again, this time at breakfast as he sips coffee, his pencil poised against paper but not moving. Wearing ruffled sleeves and pearls, she sits with Scott at a table in the corner of the cafe. Marcus leans closer, watching, listening. A waiter comes over and pours a bottle of applejack on her omelet. Flames leap up from her plate, and she and Scott cheer wildly, faces red with laughter.
Getting up, Marcus bangs his knee against the table, trips over a loose floorboard on his way out of the cafe. Halfway down the sidewalk, he realizes he left his notebook, but he can’t go back now, can’t go back ever, can’t face the confused old lady he’d left frightened in his wake, Scott’s Princeton smirk, all those blank pages, and Zelda, certainly not Zelda. They’ll think he’s unsophisticated, that he’s never seen anything prepared flambé.
Bananas foster.
Crêpes doused in powdered sugar.
He’s seen fires that not even Zelda would believe. * While kneading dough and dusting pans with flour at a boulangerie near his apartment, he waits anxiously for her to walk through the door. Every time the doorbell chimes, he feels warm, sick. One day he’ll look up and she’ll be at the counter, asking for a baguette. Maybe she’ll prove she’s insane after all by lighting it like a Roman candle and tossing it into the sky.
He wants this and doesn’t. If she comes in, he’ll smash his face into a pie, smear it with flour, render it past recognition.
Perhaps he could apply for a job following her around until her laces need tying, or until she desires to watch her breakfast go up in flames. He imagines taking her by the hand and leading her to his little apartment building, no hot water, landlady that curses him in inscrutable French, and throwing a lighted match at its feet. He would set himself aflame if it meant she’d watch, enraptured, before throwing back her head and laughing, genuinely happy.
Genuine happiness—even though he is a writer, this is something he isn’t able to express. He cannot give words to something he doesn’t know. Sometimes happy children come to the boulangerie and ask for cinnamon buns and chocolate éclairs, laughing gleefully when he hands them over, as if these pastries have just told them some secret joke. He’d like to know what’s so funny. He’d like to know just what the punchline is. * Whenever he sits down at his desk to write he starts strong, his pencil igniting land mines and spreading mustard gas across the page, but eventually loses focus. He wanders away from the front lines into Paris, past the bookstore windows that will one day display his name and into waking dreams about Zelda. They are exchanging witty repartees with Dorothy Parker over lunch; they are admiring a Picasso painting hanging in Gertrude Stein’s living room. Sometimes he pictures their smiling photograph in the gossip section of the New York Post beside the bitter details of her divorce from Scott.
There is one recurring fantasy he cannot explain and embarrasses him, in which he reveals to Zelda that his life is coming to a premature end. Each time, he tries out different sicknesses, deciding which one he likes best, which contains the most heart-wrenching pathos. Cancer.
An intestinal parasite picked up in a muddy trench.
Some defect of the heart.
They are always huddled together on a white bed in some darkened bedroom. After he announces his imminent death, she allows him to collapse against her, his head on her chest, where he can feel her body shudder with sobs.
This is what he wants: a pain he can articulate, a tragedy he can share. * If he had a magic foxhole, he’d hunker down and emerge with Zelda in a field strewn with daisies, the two of them crazy together, holding hands and spinning in mad circles until the world collapsed around them. They might be transported to Versailles, the moon, his parents’ flat in Manhattan, where he could say he is better, the limp is gone, the novel is finished, he has at last found love and this is her name—Zelda.
He doesn’t need the foxhole, for he finally sees her again. Another party. Irving Berlin, the Charleston, feathers and sequins. Scott has his arm around the waist of another woman, and Zelda has thrown herself down a flight of stairs. Tomorrow bruises will blossom on her arms and legs like violets. Crying, she hides her face in her hands. What is she now? Broken English, a poem with erratic meter, iambs scattered randomly. Her shoes don’t have laces, but one of their buckles has come undone.
This is his chance.
Perspiring and shaky, as if afflicted with a sudden bout of flu, he approaches her and kneels down as if at an altar, his quivering hand reaching out. The golden buckle is just inches away, the only thing capable of holding her together. It is cold in his fingers, slippery. People have gathered around, are whispering and pointing. He doesn’t care who is watching, or else forgets to take notice. If he could just buckle the shoe, make sure it never comes undone again--
She removes her hands from her face, revealing eyes wide with fear. He notices something in them he hadn’t seen before. Deranged sadness, some suppressed and unspeakable emotion.
“Who are you?” she shrieks, kicking him with the sharp heel of her dancing shoes. “Go away!” Surprised, he drops the buckle. “I’m Marcus Pendergast,” he says, but the words have lost their gravity and feel wrong in his mouth, like the name of a stranger, somebody he knew long ago.
Aleyna Rentz is currently enrolled in Georgia Southern University's Honors Program, in which she is pursuing an English/writing double major. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including Blue Earth Review, Hobart, Entropy Magazine, The Collapsar, Black Fox Literary, Deep South Magazine, and others. She is also one of the founding editors of Moonglasses Magazine.
