Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [101]
I can’t help feeling that what Dad likes about fiction is the power of it, the power of being, essentially, more beautiful, more charming, smarter, better than, the truth.
“Almost . . . superior?”
He laughs. “Well said, Jean-Joe.”
We talk of two-leveling: writing a story using another story as the base or first level of your story, like Joyce using the Odyssey as a first level for Ulysses. He hops back to the subject of Zelda and tells me about some new stuff he’s gotten for his book from an old Esquire piece titled “A Summer with F. Scott Fitzgerald.”
“You don’t wreck a life to create a novel,” he blurts. “You don’t ruin a woman like Zelda who was a genius in three different directions.” I hear it again. It’s not that he thought he should have gotten to my mother’s apartment sooner and saved her life. It’s that he feels he killed her slowly, over the twenty-three years that they were married and then not married, because of the work he wanted to make, the two novels and everything else, and I think maybe he’s doing an upside-down two-leveling: using the story of Scott’s work taking precedence over Zelda’s mental and physical health to come to terms with or write the story of his own artistic ambition and the unsightly fall of my mother.
“ I GOT ONE WORD for you . . . ‘Fitzgerald.’” When Nick says it one day I don’t feel all that mad. At the very least it feels premature. He feels this is the cruelest, most powerful thing he can say, tapping into my greatest fear, of being as obsessive and unproductive and impractical as my dad. But articulating someone’s biggest worry does not make it true. I am capable of making money, at least enough to survive. I take care of our son and I produce actual writing. Mommy just bought herself two teeth, muthafucka! Scrappiness has seen me through years when I wasn’t getting paid. He is right in thinking, What kind of maniac would endure all that just for a shot at the big-time? Or in my case, what kind of jerk would spend months writing a play just to put it on in my living room for one night and have a fantastic time doing it? The very thing that has gotten me here is the thing he despises, the thing he’d rather avoid if he can by not seeing my dad, the thing he lacked to keep going with painting: insanity.
I say my parents lived in the past, but to tell this story, I was, as my husband loved to point out, living in the past. Spending, in other words, every day of my life in the past, my past, my parents’ past, even my grandparents’ past, the past of my hometown, St. Louis, Jesus it never ends, the past! It just keeps going and going and going. I admit it; I’m lured in by stories, telling them, capturing events and people and molding them, making people laugh. And I am like both of them.
THE MARRIAGE ENDED. Maybe because we never should have gotten married. We were nothing alike. The way I look at it, though, is that I might never have become a mother if we hadn’t been together. If I don’t make any mistakes, I don’t live, essentially. I miss out. The things that are wrong with me, the things I struggle with, are the things that define me. I have not changed in the way that I relate to struggle more than I do ease. This is, I suppose, my beef with sunshine. With Los Angeles. Was he right to quiver when he heard that there was a time when I owned one knife, a single spoon and two plates—at age thirty? Did he think that I would prefer to spend the day writing when I had a babysitter, over going out to lunch and a movie with him? Did he feel I loved to poke around on my computer, jotting down ideas and working on plays, more than I loved him? Maybe he did. Did he feel the only person for whom I would happily sacrifice a day of working was my son? I don’t know. I do know that I now get to try to figure out how to be a writer and a parent. I get to try to figure out how to put my child before writing.
I have