Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald
| Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald |
| Ron Carlson |
| USA |
| (1977) |
In this tender, comic novel, Larry Boosinger—graduate student,
writer, garage attendant, escaped convict (and perhaps a person)—has one
foot in late adolescence while he searches frantically for a place to
put the other. Beset by illusions, attracted by paradoxes, Larry carries
on his allegorical fistfight with life. He operates in a movie-created
world where attempts are made at perfection. Enamored of the romantic
ideals of old movies, popular songs, and his own personal hero, F. Scott
Fitzgerald, he seeks experience that will match his expectations.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
For Georgia Elaine
Everything that glitters should be gold.
Eldon Robinson-Duff
My undergraduate days, having left my bed and board, I can no longer be responsible for their debts.
Larry Boosinger
Daily Utah Chronicle
1
“Blame is not important,” my father used to say. “Whose fault it is will not get anything fixed.” And he ran a benevolent household wherein no one cried over spilled anything, providing the offender sprang up to get a towel. I’d always shared a vague inclination toward this pragmatism, until several grown men spilled everything everywhere in my name and did less than nothing toward clearing it up. The days before we learn the value of revenge are callow days indeed. In the mirror today darker eyes than I have ever known are reflected, and I have reluctantly become the kind of man who waits suspiciously in hotel rooms for the safe arrival of his luggage.
I should add that I do not blame Fat Nicky, the Waynes, Teeth, exclusively, nor Lila, Royal, or any of the host of citizens, attorneys, Indians, housewives, turnkeys who have hounded and disappointed me, and in the end committed indelibilities upon my tabula somewhat rasa, but I do blame them for generous portions of it. In reflection I have walked these routes again and again like a rabid mailman and it keeps coming up the same: bad news. I am not of so wishy-washy a temperament as to call myself an innocent bystander, “There are no innocent victims,” Sartre said; but I was clearly a bystander, amazed that people seemed to be doing things to me, or ignoring me, all on purpose. The acts I did commit, stemming as they did from creeds outworn and untenable obsessions, were perhaps for the most part exactly wrong. From where I sit tonight, by a river full of the season’s first fallen leaves, talking quietly with a woman with whom it seems a future might be founded, these recent calamities, these recent wins, losses, ties, appear in mind as a berserk sort of shuffle-board, the scores lost in retrospect.
I knew myself. Let’s spend the largest lies at the beginning. But despite this dizzying self-knowledge, I was happy when events took a sudden manual turn, when the allegorical fistfight my life had been became more like the genuine article and people began hurling more than words at each other.
We were playing drunken croquet at DeLathaway’s on the first springlike evening of the year, and I, being the only person present still in some touch with his reflexes, was winning. DeLathaway was from Maryland, and went around generally pretending to be decadent and from the Deep South, honing his accent in his poetry class, and this bourbon-and-croquet thing was his idea of the way a lost southern aristocrat entertains.
I had spent the first hour drinking Old Bardstown Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey, made in Bardstown, Kentucky, 86 proof, reading the bottle labels, and trying to figure out why I had been invited. As I counted heads, Wesson and I were the only two “students.” Ah Wesson, who was presently standing on the porch talking Chaucer to DeLathaway, Wesson had finagled this, somehow inviting himself, and subsequently me, since he was afraid to attend any faculty social event alone.
Although DeLathaway did like me. I had taken his class and bought all his books, and I recall I was in my formal period, which lasted most of a semester, writing pattern poems about race-car driving and hunting with hounds, things I’d never done. (I hadn’t done much, it was occurring to me). I thought DeLath was young to be so form oriented, he considered open verse to be as low as stealing hubcaps; “Scaly,” he called it.
Even the croquet course was set up impeccably on his manicured lawn, on which, as I’ve noted, I was winning the ball game. By my return trip through the wickets, I had been delivered to that quasi-orbital, sour-mash precipice that has allowed me at other times to (1) put out entire tupperware parties with a single garden hose, women fleeing the patio in every compass direction, covering their heads with lettuce crispers; (2) present my “Vietnam is not over” address to standing-room-only crowds at Arby’s Roast Beef Sandwich Restaurant; (3) and casually board passing trains. That is to say I was moving into the margins, mallet in hand: belligerency in chinos.
“Larry. Hey, Larry Boosinger.” Banks, who teaches Shakespeare,
and
had graced my most recent adventure-in-sight—a paper on the strength of the puns in King Lear—with a D, was calling me aside in his inebriated sotto voce.
I walked over to where he leaned on DeLathaway’s junked ’57 Buick, the kind with the three snazzy holes in the side. The Buick was sitting on four cinder blocks in the driveway, headlights broken out, and weeds grew up through the floorboards. There were no doors and DeLath kept a ratty, runty goat tied to the back bumper. I had already pointed out that his “Deep South” focus was confused, by the contrast the wreck made against his well-kept lawn and the four huge Dorian columns that supported his tiny porch gable.
“Order, yes,” DeLathaway had said and pointed to the car, “But ma Buke is a
classic
.”
Banks stood leaning on the ruin, and I sat up on the fender next to him, absolutely awash, and said, “Yeah, Banquo?”
He did a little backward blink, and it didn’t register in my engorged mind that no one had ever called him that to his face. But he recovered, frowned, and came closer.
“Listen, Boosinger, this girl,” he indicated a blonde, Susette Bedd, one of the department secretaries, who was groping for her ball under an azalea. While we were watching she fell down twice. “This girl, she should win.” He put his hand over his mouth, inadvertently covering his nose too; the gesture was to indicate enough said.
“Right, Mr. Banks.”
“Right, then. Right.” He smiled at me and fell into the driver’s seat.
I went back to my ball: I was orange. No one was paying a whole lot of attention to the game; there wasn’t much consciousness left, but when someone would knock someone else into the shrubbery, a perfectly legal tactic, cries of indignation fired out into the twilight. Royal, a fine Milton scholar who had been at the university so long that the paper cover of
The Great Gatsby
had changed four times, was blasted into the neighbor’s yard by Virgil Benson, the film instructor. It was really a very logical, objective stroke, but Royal screamed and his eyes boiled up.
Wesson, my pal, leaped off the porch where he had just said, “Why, there’s not a single black man in all of Chaucer!” in an overloud, point-getting voice to DeLathaway. The two of them, Wesson and his teacher, Royal, surrounded Benson in a scene straight out of
Riders of the Purple Sage
, in its push-shove possibilities. The trio shuffled about for a moment, then Benson apologized to Royal, quietly dropped out of the game, and went to the backyard where the wives had circled DeLathaway’s ten-ton rusted wrought-iron lawn furniture and were holding court. Watching Virgil Benson place his mallet in the rack touched me. I liked Benson. He showed
Frankenstein
a lot, and shared a sympathy for the monster that I found to be the closest thing to truth in the university. Royal brought his green ball back in bounds, and gave himself a favorable lie. I made up my mind to get him.