The Beautiful and Damned - F. Scott Fitzgerald (best fiction books of all time .txt) 📗

“April 20th.⁠—Spent the day with Anthony. Maybe I’ll marry him some time. I kind of like his ideas⁠—he stimulates all the originality in me. Blockhead came around about ten in his new car and took me out Riverside Drive. I liked him tonight: he’s so considerate. He knew I didn’t want to talk so he was quiet all during the ride.

“April 21st.⁠—Woke up thinking of Anthony and sure enough he called and sounded sweet on the phone⁠—so I broke a date for him. Today I feel I’d break anything for him, including the ten commandments and my neck. He’s coming at eight and I shall wear pink and look very fresh and starched⁠—”

She paused here, remembering that after he had gone that night she had undressed with the shivering April air streaming in the windows. Yet it seemed she had not felt the cold, warmed by the profound banalities burning in her heart.

The next entry occurred a few days later:

“April 24th.⁠—I want to marry Anthony, because husbands are so often ‘husbands’ and I must marry a lover.

“There are four general types of husbands.

“(1) The husband who always wants to stay in in the evening, has no vices and works for a salary. Totally undesirable!

“(2) The atavistic master whose mistress one is, to wait on his pleasure. This sort always considers every pretty woman ‘shallow,’ a sort of peacock with arrested development.

“(3) Next comes the worshipper, the idolater of his wife and all that is his, to the utter oblivion of everything else. This sort demands an emotional actress for a wife. God! it must be an exertion to be thought righteous.

“(4) And Anthony⁠—a temporarily passionate lover with wisdom enough to realize when it has flown and that it must fly. And I want to get married to Anthony.

“What grubworms women are to crawl on their bellies through colorless marriages! Marriage was created not to be a background but to need one. Mine is going to be outstanding. It can’t, shan’t be the setting⁠—it’s going to be the performance, the live, lovely, glamourous performance, and the world shall be the scenery. I refuse to dedicate my life to posterity. Surely one owes as much to the current generation as to one’s unwanted children. What a fate⁠—to grow rotund and unseemly, to lose my self-love, to think in terms of milk, oatmeal, nurse, diapers.⁠ ⁠… Dear dream children, how much more beautiful you are, dazzling little creatures who flutter (all dream children must flutter) on golden, golden wings⁠—

“Such children, however, poor dear babies, have little in common with the wedded state.

“June 7th.⁠—Moral question: Was it wrong to make Bloeckman love me? Because I did really make him. He was almost sweetly sad tonight. How opportune it was that my throat is swollen plunk together and tears were easy to muster. But he’s just the past⁠—buried already in my plentiful lavender.

“June 8th.⁠—And today I’ve promised not to chew my mouth. Well, I won’t, I suppose⁠—but if he’d only asked me not to eat!

“Blowing bubbles⁠—that’s what we’re doing, Anthony and me. And we blew such beautiful ones today, and they’ll explode and then we’ll blow more and more, I guess⁠—bubbles just as big and just as beautiful, until all the soap and water is used up.”

On this note the diary ended. Her eyes wandered up the page, over the June 8th’s of 1912, 1910, 1907. The earliest entry was scrawled in the plump, bulbous hand of a sixteen-year-old girl⁠—it was the name, Bob Lamar, and a word she could not decipher. Then she knew what it was⁠—and, knowing, she found her eyes misty with tears. There in a graying blur was the record of her first kiss, faded as its intimate afternoon, on a rainy veranda seven years before. She seemed to remember something one of them had said that day and yet she could not remember. Her tears came faster, until she could scarcely see the page. She was crying, she told herself, because she could remember only the rain and the wet flowers in the yard and the smell of the damp grass.

… After a moment she found a pencil and holding it unsteadily drew three parallel lines beneath the last entry. Then she printed finis in large capitals, put the book back in the drawer, and crept into bed.

Breath of the Cave

Back in his apartment after the bridal dinner, Anthony snapped out his lights and, feeling impersonal and fragile as a piece of china waiting on a serving table, got into bed. It was a warm night⁠—a sheet was enough for comfort⁠—and through his wide-open windows came sound, evanescent and summery, alive with remote anticipation. He was thinking that the young years behind him, hollow and colorful, had been lived in facile and vacillating cynicism upon the recorded emotions of men long dust. And there was something beyond that; he knew now. There was the union of his soul with Gloria’s, whose radiant fire and freshness was the living material of which the dead beauty of books was made.

From the night into his high-walled room there came, persistently, that evanescent and dissolving sound⁠—something the city was tossing up and calling back again, like a child playing with a ball. In Harlem, the Bronx, Gramercy Park, and along the waterfronts, in little parlors or on pebble-strewn, moon-flooded roofs, a thousand lovers were making this sound, crying little fragments of it into the air. All the city was playing with this sound out there in the blue summer dark, throwing it up and calling it back, promising that, in a little while, life would be beautiful as a story, promising happiness⁠—and by that promise giving it. It gave love hope in its own survival. It could do no more.

It was then that a new note separated itself jarringly from the soft crying of the night. It was a noise from an areaway within a hundred feet from his rear window, the