West of Sunset E-Book

Stewart O'Nan

• Herausgeber: Allen & Unwin
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

In 1937, F. Scott Fitzgerald was a troubled, uncertain man whose literary success was long behind him. In poor health, with his wife consigned to a mental asylum and his finances in ruin, he struggled to make a new start as a screenwriter in Hollywood. With flashbacks to key moments from Fitzgerald's past, the story follows him as he arrives on the MGM lot, falls in love with brassy gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, begins work on The Last Tycoon, and tries to maintain a semblance of family life with the absent Zelda and their daughter, Scottie. Written with striking grace and subtlety, this wise and intimate portrait of a man trying his best to hold together a world that's flying apart, if not gone already, is an American masterpiece.

Leseprobe

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.

First published in the United States by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2015.

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Allen & Unwin

Copyright © Stewart O’Nan, 2015

The moral right of Stuart O’Nan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

This book is a work of fiction based on real events.

Allen & Unwin

c/o Atlantic Books

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London WC1N 3JZ

Phone: [phone]

Fax: [phone]

Email: [email protected]

Web: www.allenandunwin.com/uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The names of some individuals who appear in this book have been changed to protect their privacy.

Paperback ISBN 978 1 92526 612 2

E-Book ISBN 978 1 92557 556 9

Designed by Spring Hoteling

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

CONTENTS

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

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.

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 heartbreaking 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.

“I had breakfast at the hotel, thanks.”

“When’d you get in? Everything all right? How you liking the Miramar? Great crab salad, if you haven’t had it. You’ve got good timing. We’re supposed to be getting new pages by the weekend.”

“Oh?” Scott said, because he’d assumed the script was finished. A Yank at Oxford, the picture was called. They’d brought him in, with his eye for campus life, to punch up the dialogue. It didn’t matter that he was forty, or that he’d never graduated.

“Monday or Tuesday at the latest—Wednesday at the very latest. Don’t worry, you’ll have more than enough time, a pro like you. I’m actually thinking of you for another project we’re just getting started. Tell me what you think. These three soldiers, they come back from the war to their little town in Bavaria, and each of them has to find his way home, or figure out what home is now. There’s a girl that two of them are in love with, only one of them comes back a cripple. Great role for Tracy.”

Scott didn’t volunteer that he’d never been to war and, unlike Eddie, was neither German nor crippled. He hadn’t planned on being pitched his first day back, which only showed how long he’d been gone, and how much he’d forgotten. He knew the novel, had considered it pat and maudlin when it was published a year ago. As Eddie spun out the story line, he smiled and nodded at the right places, chiming in with prescient questions so as not to seem too ingratiating, with the result that, as happened so often now, he felt utterly false, and, though it was his own doing, used. Even as he wondered if he’d ever possessed Eddie’s venal enthusiasm, he reminded himself that, just for sitting there listening to him, he was being paid. He thought the idea should buoy him more.

Though he had nothing to work on, there was an office waiting for him. As Eddie led him down the hall, they passed the gilt-edged names of several old friends. Aldous Huxley was here, and Anita Loos, and Dottie Parker with her husband Alan Campbell—or not, since their offices were dark and the only typing he heard issued from an anonymous transom.

“That’s Oppy,” Eddie said with a dismissive wave, as if the scrivener never left his cell.

His own office had no name and a view across Culver Boulevard of a billboard in a vacant lot touting a coming subdivision artfully christened Edendale, and, in its shadow, as if in rebuttal, a string of flaking stucco bungalows and a corner drugstore, outside of which a wooden Indian chained to a downspout stood like a sentinel. On the desk sat an impressive new Royal, which, though he didn’t use a typewriter, he appreciated as a piece of machine design. Beside the desk stood a bookshelf, half full, and around the walls, as in a gallery, hung framed stills of Metro’s moneymakers. Garbo and Lon Chaney, neither known for their sparkling repartee, were both well-represented, as were Buster Keaton and John Gilbert, outmoded now, casualties of the talkies. In one corner a gooseneck lamp and end table attended a thronelike leather easy chair.

“What’d I tell you?”

“It’s plush,” Scott admitted, as the air-conditioning kicked in with a shudder. The vent on the wall exhaled a long, low bass note like the sigh of a leviathan.

“It does that. Coffee and donuts are in the lounge, supply closet’s at the end of the hall. Anything you need, feel free. Settle in. I’ll come grab you for lunch.”

“Thanks, Eddie.” Out of obligation as much as politeness, Scott shook his hand again. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this.”

“You don’t have to. Just write something great.”

“I’ll try.”

“You will,” Eddie said, pointing at him.

Left alone, he pawed through the desk and then the bookshelf, where he was surprised to find, among the latest masterpieces by Kathleen Norris and Edna Ferber, a coffee-stained copy of Nostromo. The chair was comfortable, but Conrad was too weighty an undertaking so early, and he soon gave up and stood at the window, watching traffic on the shadowless boulevard below, listening to the asthmatic vent wheeze. Down the block, across from a come-on for Oxydol, trolleys dropped off and picked up overalled workers by the side gate. Otherwise there wasn’t much action. From time to time cars parked in front of the drugstore, disgorging patrons who returned with their mysterious purchases, then went on their way. In St. Paul, as a boy, he used to spy on his neighbors from the third-floor gable. Now, regulating each breath like a sniper, he felt the same inner stillness. Between the bungalows, a postman tramped across the lawn. Scott watched their mailboxes like baited traps, and was rewarded when an old Japanese man in bare feet and an undershirt came out on his porch, then stood at the top of his stairs, calling through the megaphone of his hands “Eeee-to, Eeeeee-to.” Not long after he’d gone inside, a gray cat emerged from the weedy jungle behind the billboard and sauntered up the walk, at the last moment pausing to look back, stock-still, as if it was being followed.

A knock at the door startled him, as if he’d been caught. He sat down at the desk and fumbled for a pencil. “Yes?”

It was Dottie Parker, with Alan in tow. He rose to greet them.

“Scott, darling. Sorry to barge in—Eddie said you were here. Welcome to the Iron Lung.”

“Thank you,” he said, stooping to receive her kiss. She looked tired, lined around the eyes and a little thicker, almost matronly, not the dark pixie he’d known those incoherent years in New York. Once or twice, drunkenly, they’d ended up in bed, though now, perhaps mercifully, he could barely recall the details. They remained friends, partly because he admired her wit and courage, and partly because they never spoke of it.

“Good to see you again,” Alan said. His grip was supposed to be manly but came off as a butch imitation. He had the lean build and generous features of a leading man. It was a curious sort of Boston marriage. They both preferred younger men, and fought like mongooses, yet were inseparable.

“Eddie says you were here at eight,” Dottie said. “You know you can’t do that.”

“You’ll make the rest of us look positively slothful,” Alan finished.

“And you’re not.”

“Only milkmen do their best work before ten.”

“He speaks from experience,” Dottie said. “Where do they have you staying?”

“The Miramar.”

“No,” Alan said, scandalized.

“Yes.”

“You don’t want to be there,” Dottie said. “It’s not near anything.”

“It’s near the beach.”

“The beach is for people who can’t read,” Alan said.

“The beach is for people who can’t afford a pool,” Dottie said. “We have a pool where we are, and it’s cheaper than the Miramar.”

“I like that.”

“Who comes all the way to Hollywood to live in Santa Monica? You really shouldn’t be out there by yourself. We’ll talk at lunch. We just wanted to say hi. You know Ernest’s going to be in town tomorrow.”

God, no. “I didn’t.”

“We’re having a little fund-raiser for Spain at Freddie March’s. Ernest’s going to show his film, but that’s no reason not to come.”

“ ‘To grow the harvest,’ ” Alan intoned gravely, “ ‘the farmers of the village need rain.’ ”

“It’s ghastly, but it gets the big fish to write big checks.”

“It sounds like they need more than checks over there.”