Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [97]
What would I tell my father if we had more than a half a second to discuss my life? It’s not that he doesn’t care, he does, but it’s hard to reach him. He wants anecdotes to pass on to Eleanor or Katharine or Uncle Steve in St. Louis when he talks to them, he wants wit and good lines.
The truth is that I’ve had a baby and I want to be around my family, my sisters and my dad. I miss my friends. I don’t feel I will ever like L.A. I miss walking. I miss laughing about all the things that didn’t go your way that day as it seems people in New York do. I miss sarcasm. I miss talking to my friend Rosanna about a painting she’s working on and then going out to her studio in Queens to see some stuff she’s doing, wishing I could buy one, hinting for her to give me one, which she won’t do, she can’t afford to give away work. Sometimes I miss day jobs, joking around with this really funny married guy Danny at the DUMBO General Store, hearing about all the customers he’d like to but is not going to have sex with. No one here knows me, I want to tell my dad. Not even my husband. We’re still getting to know each other, and the best way to get to know someone is definitely not at three in the morning when your baby won’t stop crying for three hours straight and you don’t know if he’s sick or gassy or simply doesn’t like you.
That night my father e-mailed me the document. Once Hudson was asleep, I opened the attachment on my computer. Nick came over and touched my shoulders.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“It’s a one-hundred-fourteen-page transcript of a therapy session between F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda, and their analyst in 1933 that my dad transcribed by hand. He just e-mailed it.”
The hands came off my shoulders. “Whoa. Listen, I’m going to watch The Hills Have Eyes on my computer,” Nick said, slowly backing away from me and the attachment as if we were bears. I opened it up and read it, something I planned on never doing.
STENOGRAPHER’S REPORT OF THE CONVERSATION
Between Mr. and Mrs. F. Scott Fitzgerald and DR. THOMAS A. C. RENNIE, at the Home of Mr. and Mrs. FSF, La Paix, Rodgers Forge, Towson, Maryland, Sunday, May 28, 1933, 3:30 p.m.
DR. RENNIE: Mrs. Fitzgerald, what is the paramount thing in your life: to create, or married life? I really think you will have to decide this. (A lapse of about a minute when no one spoke.)
. . .
MR. FITZGERALD: That is the question. You see, there is an awful lot of water that has run under the bridge on your side and my side.
MRS. FITZGERALD: Dr. Rennie, I can answer that right away. I can answer that right now.
DR. RENNIE: You can answer that.
MRS. FITZGERALD: Yes. I want to write, and I am going to write; I am going to be a writer, but I am not going to do it at Scott’s expense, if I can possibly avoid it. So I agree not to do anything that he does not want, a complete negation of myself, until that book is out of the way, because the thing is driving me crazy the way it is, and I cannot do that. And if he cannot adjust it, and let me do what I want to do, and live with me after that, I would rather do what I want to do. I am really sorry.
MR. FITZGERALD: In that case, would you advise a separation, Dr. Rennie?
DR. RENNIE: I would not advise anything, because I am not at all sure that Mrs. Fitzgerald knows what she wants to do. I think right now she wants to write a book. Whether she has the greatness and capacity to write great books I don’t know.
MRS. FITZGERALD: That is not the point, Dr. Rennie. Something may be a sort of fulfillment of yourself, and it may not be great to other people, but it is just as essential to yourself as if it is a great masterpiece.
Fitzgerald contends that his writing is supporting them and she should not ruin their way of life with her writing. He says she is a society woman and nothing more. She feels this is what he wants her to be. He argues that she cannot write about their life because it is his material:
MR. FITZGERALD: Everything