Love, Zelda by Vicky Kavanagh

Author:Vicky Kavanagh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
Published: 2019-07-03T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Eight

The Vegetable finally took to the stage at the Nixon Apollo Theatre in Atlantic City later that year. Scott and Zelda would soon wish it hadn’t.

The Lardners accompanied them and Max promised to make it down to the next showing. Little did he know, there wouldn’t be one. It was awful. It was awful in a way that one couldn’t quite place their finger on why it didn’t flow, they just knew it didn’t. The fantasy part that Zelda had helped Scott envision just didn’t work on stage. The essence that had formed in Zelda’s mind when she conceived it was so different to the staging before her that she had trouble connecting it with something of her own invention.

At the second intermission, Scott and Ring dove backstage and asked Ernest Treux who was playing the lead if he planned on staying for the rest of the show. Apparently gobsmacked, he replied, “Of course.”

“Right so. Well, we’re off. Good luck, old chap,” Scott said, before him and Ring dashed out to a bar down the street. They left Zelda and Ellis to watch the rest of the play while half the audience departed.

Neither of the wives even suggested searching for their husbands after they left the theatre. Both of them knew it was a futile mission.

When Scott did finally arrive home, he was full of liquor and rage. He tried taking it out on Zelda.

“It was a terrible idea to put the fantasy act in. The audience hated it,” he hissed in the rising morning sunlight to her as he sat on the bed and took off his shoes.

“They hated the whole damn thing, Scott. Don’t blame me on your shortcomings,” she snapped back. She waited for the reply, but it never came. Instead he fell onto his side and she felt him shaking as he cried. She rolled to him and wrapped her arms around him from behind. She held him as he sobbed until he finally wore himself out and fell asleep.

*

Scott tried to do rewrites on the play, with the possibility of restaging it and giving it another chance at life. But his heart, or focus, wasn’t in it and by late November, all talk of The Vegetable had ceased.

They had managed to glide their way back into debt through too much consumption of all the finest things. When their current dues hit $5,000, Scott committed himself to the chill box above the garage to write enough short stories to offset their money woes.

Zelda liked Scott like this, when he was writing. The shorts that were their bread and butter didn’t drain him of as much energy as his novels did. He would be pleased to see Zelda standing in the doorway, a smile and some conversation on offer to give him a break from unforgiving pages and the dictionary by his side. She would have the housekeeper make clam chowder soup and deliver it herself, Scott slurping off a spoon while she read over what he had written that morning.

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