This post is Part 2 of a story I started yesterday. I can’t tell you what to do, but you’d be advised to read the first part first.

I’ve been going over the end of this story in my mind since last night and I realized that I stepped into a trap of my own design. I’m setting up Zelda as a femme fatale, which she absolutely was, but I’m not going to come off  well myself without some major historical revision. I like to keep these things as close to reality as my memory allows, which probably isn’t that close.

Before carrying on, there are some details to address. During the months of Zelda’s absence I had moved out of the four square into the gun cottage – I don’t know how she found out where I was living. At the haranguing of my friends, I had begun to ‘get over it’. I started dating again, using my coffee shop job as a personal dating agency. At the time of her unannounced return, in fact, I was dating a 19 year old sorority girl from South Carolina who looked and sounded a lot like Zelda without all the mystery, misery and annoying tendency to vanish.

I was bored.

But when Zelda turned up that night on my porch, I was a wiser man. I wasn’t going to be sucked back into a disastrous relationship. I would have that proffered drink (who was I to say no to a drink?) but that was it.

Let me quote from my diary at the time…

Back in my life, my bed, my heart is [Zelda]. Tall and beautiful and cold, she’s found a way to open my heart again. On a balmy winter night my bourbon soaked mind broke apart and gushed into her listening ears. So far, she’s been sweet. Her cold steel eyes are soft and inviting. She’s sane and easy.

I made her breakfast in bed the next morning. But still, I didn’t want to give up a healthy, albeit dull, relationship with a robust young South Carolinian for what I knew (somewhere in my reptile brain) was going to be pain and melodrama. Instead, I decided not to tell them about each other.

This was a manageable arrangement for a while. With Zelda, I went to gay bars and smoky basement clubs. With the sorority girl I went to formals and tailgates. There was never any reason for paths to cross. It went this way all through the winter and early spring – dating two girls, having my cake and eating it too.

There were moments – when my razor-sharp brain forgot which night I was meant to be with which girl. There was a Saturday lunch with Zelda, some friends and vodka martinis that got way out of hand.  We stumbled back to my place at about in the afternoon and collapsed into bed. There was a niggling memory in the back of my brain that the sorority girl was coming over for dinner and I couldn’t quite remember whether or not I had run interference of some sort. Zelda was out cold and I was…

I came to early Sunday morning with the crucifying headache that can only be caused by six or more martinis and a sense of something ominous in the room. I looked over and saw a tangled mess of curly mahogany hair, which could mean one of two women. A gently shove, a soft moan and I saw the softer features of the sorority girl. To this day, I don’t know where Zelda went or when. I guess that habit of vanishing wasn’t all bad after all.

All through these months, my friends were spending equal amounts of time laughing at my stories and warning me that it was an unsustainable situation. They all said the same thing – get rid of Zelda.

‘Are you still dating that crazy bitch from south Georgia?’

‘She’s just using you for a good time for a while, she’ll be gone again in a few months.’

‘What does she do, Chris? She doesn’t have a job. She doesn’t go to school. She just spends your money.’

As the spring got older, I was getting tired. I was at UGa full time, working full time and holding down two relationships. So, I finally made a decision.

I broke up with the sorority girl and invited Zelda to Florida for Spring Break. She was thrilled – a real vacation and for a while things were good. We started intermittently co-habitating – she moved clothes and makeup and that White Diamonds into my cottage.

After this decision, I was talking to a friend – a sweet little punk pixie from Savannah – who rang me up asking if I wanted to go out in Atlanta that night.I said no, that “I need to save momey for Florida. I need more than usual, because of Zelda and all.”

“No wonder she likes hanging out with you, Chris”, she spat back at me and rung off.

A week before the trip, on a Friday night, she wanted to go dance at the gay bar. I didn’t. The gay bar wasn’t that interesting to me. But I indulged the request and we were away. I sat at the bar drinking poofy drinks and watched Zelda dance with the queens. About 2, I was ready to go home. But Zelda wanted to go to an after party.

‘Just for a bit’, she soothed.

It had been a hellish week – exams, overtime at work and I demurred. “But, you’ll come back to my place after. Right.”

She kissed me deeply, gave me the full brunt of her cold grey eyes and said, “Just give me an hour and I’m all yours.”

I sat up drinking expectantly for an hour. Then drinking worriedly for another hour. Finally, I drank angrily until the sun came up. I threw all of her clothes and makeup into a garbage bag and put it at the end of my drive.

I was awoken at noon by the sound of broken glass and screaming. Zelda was systematically smashing my windows with a tire iron and screaming obscenities. I suggested that she fuck off and not come back. She expressed that she was perfectly fine with that and – breaking one last window on the way – fucked off.

By nightfall, she was back – composed and bearing a full bottle of Maker’s Mark, some clear plastic sheeting, a roll of duct tape and a bucketful of abashed contrition.

We went to Florida anyway. Me seething resentment through endless miles of south Georgia. Her sleeping. We took the long way down, stopping in Albany for a night to pick up camping gear from her mother’s house. I had visions, largely painted by Zelda, of a southern manor – all stately oaks and Greek columns. Her Mom lived in a double-wide on a half acre pine thicket outside of Albany. She chain smoked Virginia Slims, washed down Valium with Old Crow and spoke of lost beaus and phantom illnesses. Looking at her, I saw Zelda in a couple of decades and the artifice of the relationship that I had created.

We camped on St. George Island for a couple of days and then skirted the swampy armpit of Florida on the way down to Ybor City. By the time we arrived, I was done with the trip. I’d been driving for three days without any help from my passenger. She spent most of her time sleeping or bitching and I spent most of my time drinking and driving. Somewhere along that drive I had an epiphany. Again, from my diary at the time…

After meeting her Mom, I can’t fathom a long term relationship with [Zelda]. After this trip, I can’t imagine much of a short term.

I’ve never been very good at breaking up with people. That night in Ybor City we scored some coke, which she didn’t want to do, and hit the bars. Out of my mind on cocaine and rum punch, I decided that what was good for the goose was good for the gander. That night, I treated her the way that I perceived she had treated me throughout our intermittent relationship. I was cold. I flirted with other women. I danced half the night with a Cuban woman that couldn’t speak any English. When Zelda was ready to go, I tossed her a rolled twenty and told her to take a cab.

The trip back was even longer and dead silent. I pulled an all day drive and got us back to Athens just before midnight. She fell asleep on my couch as soon as we walked in the door and I left her there and went to bed.

The next morning, she and all her meager belongings were gone. Except for a note, scrawled in her manic, looping script.

“I know you don’t believe it, but I loved you. As much as I could.”

I crumpled up the paper and threw it in the trash.

That wasn’t enough then and it’s never been enough since.

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Image credits:

Femme Fatale I, II and III are by Karen Dupré. Images from art.com.

R.E.M.’s “Chronic Town/Dead Letter Office” is available from Amazon.

Let’s head back to mid 90’s northeast Georgia again. Your protagonist is working two jobs to pay tuition at the finest university in the South. At this point living in a one bedroom apartment carved out of the top floor of a genteel old four-square just outside of downtown. Restless, irritable and discontent due – in large part – to a lack of companionship from the fairer sex.

To assuage my frustration I was doing a lot of reading and during a particularly steaming Georgia summer, I went on an F. Scott Fitzgerald binge. I fell in love with his heroines – racy, beautiful, irreverent, unstable and utterly captivating. I learned that most of his female characters was based on his wife Zelda. So, in essence I fell in love with Zelda Fitzgerald and I wanted, more than just about anything, one of my own.

If I can deliver the predictable cliche – be careful what you wish for…

My personal Zelda quite literally walked through my door one July morning. That kind of Southern morning that wakes up hot and crushes your soul before noon. Living in another apartment lacking air-conditioning, I had all the doors and windows open to maximize a largely imaginary breeze. I was laying limp on my unmade bed praying for a cold front when I heard a gentle tap on my door frame. Weakly, I raised my head and was instantly smitten by a tall, busty brunette with the crisp Anglo-Saxon facial features that I associated, from my high school years, with the cruelty of indifference.

Dripping honey and gravel – that accent endemic to a swath of Georgia from Brunswick to Albany, “Pardon me, sugar, do you have a screwdriver by any chance?”

What else could one say? “Phillips or flathead?” (Actually, if one were a bit more suave, one could say ‘Phillips, flathead or Smirfnoff?” But I’m only that suave in hindsight.

And it started there. She was moving in across the hall from me. One of the, many, idiosyncracies of this place was that the two top floor apartments shared a bathroom. With my previous housemate, a sweaty musician, this had been a burden. But I began to see the advantages of a shared powder room as I helped Zelda put her old iron framed bed together. In fact, I was completely in her thrall from the outset. She had that quality of a particular type of Southern woman – Blanche DuBois, Annie Savoy, Scarlett O’Hara – you know the type. I don’t know if it’s pheromones, or what, but I had been living among these women for a year or so at the time and could never get the time of day from one of them and now I’d be sharing the most intimate of spaces with one. Well not the most intimate, but you know.

I needn’t have worried; we were sharing that space fairly soon as well.

Zelda had dropped out of Tech under dubious circumstances and was trying to get on track at a local tech school so she could get into Georgia. She didn’t seem to work or to go to school much for that matter. I kept odd hours and no matter the time of day, she was there. The smell of White Diamonds and cigarette smoke wafted up under the door along with muffled dance music that she listened to incessantly. Everytime I came up the stairs, she would slink out from behind her door and invite me in for a ‘toddy’, regardless of time of day. I never declined. She told me stories, but never of herself. She told me stories of nights out in gay bars in Atlanta. She would tell me of shopping extravaganzas and vacations on Hilton Head and Pawley’s Island. And we would drink. Bourbon. When she was out she drank Manhattans, but at home she drank bourbon. Bourbon on the rocks. Any of you who have spent an evening with a person you’re attracted to talking and drinking bourbon on the rocks will know the inevitable outcome.

Now, I know that you know how this is likely to end. But in my defense, even as a randy 24 year old I wasn’t a complete idiot. We had some fun. We ‘went out’ for the rest of that summer. By going out, we spent most of our time in the top floor of that four square. But when I got paid, we’d hit the bars. Long drunken nights of drinking, dancing and necking. And fighting. God did we fight. Zelda was a flirt, one of the things that attracted me to her. I was plagued with the vicious jealousy of an insecure man. Virtually every night we went out we ended up roaring at each other outside of a bar over some perceived indiscretion on her part. Usually this was followed by a walk home on separate sides of the street hurling epithets at one another and a pair of slammed doors. But inevitably, one of us would creep through that shared bathroom with a bottle of Jim Beam and all would quickly be forgotten.

That’s the way that summer went. I was irrevocably enchanted and, to my credit, she seemed to be as well. She never paid for a drink, but then a gentleman wouldn’t let a lady pay for a drink. The petty jealousy was always assuaged by the fact that she was always there and always waiting when she heard me creaking up the stairs.

One day, shortly after the fall term started, I had classes all morning and then had to pull a double shift at the coffee shop. I went out for a drink with a couple of friends that I hadn’t seen since I met Zelda and didn’t get home until well after three in the morning. And her door didn’t open and her bathroom door was locked. I didn’t think much of it, but the next day I was home early from school. I made as much noise coming up the stairs as humanly possible, but still her door didn’t open. No smell of White Diamonds, no house music. Late that afternoon, I took to the roof, clambering over to her side of the house. It nearly  ended badly for me as I saw within an empty apartment. She, and every trapping of her, was gone. Even the cigarette smoke and perfume fumes seemed to have faded overnight.

I didn’t have a clue how to find her. The landlord was as clueless as me. This was before cell phones were ubiquitous. I’d never met any of her friends. I knew she was from Albany, Georgia but that town seemed to be populated entirely by people with the same surname. I asked around. I haunted the bars in which I knew she felt at home. I wandered around northeast Georgia discovering not even a hint of her existence outside my own mind and a couple of snapshots.

Then one night in late November – as insolently as she vanished – I found her smoking on my front porch with a half empty fifth of Maker’s Mark and a battered vanity case.

“Do you want a drink sugar?”

What else could one say?

Now, I hate to be all “The Bold and the Beautiful” on you, but this post seems to have grown legs of its own. Nothing’s worse than reading a 10,000 word blog post. Instead, I’m going to employ that coldest of writerly tricks – ‘to be continued’. UPDATE: Continued here.

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Image credits:

Zelda Fitzgerald’s ‘A Mad Tea Party’

My photo of the infamous four square.

Big Star’s “Third/Sister Lovers” is available from Amazon.

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Image credit:

Covington cemetery from the very talented Chad Purser.

Buy R.E.M.’s “Life’s Rich Pageant” from Amazon.