The operatic sigh. The animated gestures. The smoke was even part of Agnes’ act, pirouetting up and up into the air.
Was it the infinite sadness of her eyes that drew him or the mirror of himself that he found in the gorgeous clarity of her mind?
— F. Scott Fitzgerald,
This Side of Paradise
She began to see Teddy regularly.
He took her out to dinner. He always paid. He took her shopping at Liberty. He bought her a little black dress at Liberty. It was not even on sale.
She enjoyed trying it on for him twirling around outside of the dressing room. Well, you should definitely have that, he said. You need it. Of course. I see that.
The shopgirls seemed more respectful of her as they carefully wrapped the dress up in the black tissue paper, and laid it gently into the deep purple bag.
This is too generous of you she gushed.
It’s nothing he shrugged.
He was very curious about her, her life, her thoughts. She didn’t know what to make of his attention. So far he had not laid a hand on her. She didn’t know whether he was wooing her, whether she was supposed to eventually go to bed with him. She didn’t know if he thought of her in that way. He treated her like a child, like a delicate flower. He called her
ma petite poupée, ma petite fille.
They went to bookshops on Charing Cross Road. She stared longingly at the fiction shelves. He bought her books he thought she should read—
Tender is the Night
,
Lolita
,
Ulysses
. She skimmed through most of them. She would pick up
Ulysses
and read it at random. She didn’t understand a word of it although she liked Molly Bloom.
Every green girl needs a Svengali, trading her charm for his experience.
He was always scribbling something down. He wrote for various magazines, although he said he was working on a novel.
I write too she said. Or I’d like to.
I’d love to read some of your material he said.
But this green girl does not have any material besides herself. She was a rough draft. She was impressionable, everyone left their impressions on her. To be a writer she would have to take herself back as a character. She would have to escape from her life as muse. Escape from her role as the blank slate which everyone scribbled on.
Yes he is writing a novel. She is the novel. It is the book of his Ruth, the book of her youth. He freely takes pages.
If she had looked at the open page of his notebook she would have seen these notations:
—she has a young girl’s mannerism of asking constant approval with every comment
—as ethereal as the Holy Ghost
But for now she was happy being a character. She was happy having dinners and dresses bought for her. She was happy to have someone to walk the streets with, ride the tube with. There were fewer stares.
He takes his delectable American gamine to the Queen’s Gardens to walk amidst the roses and watch the black swans curl into each other. (He writes: She is at home among the slender budding stems. She has a charming habit of biting her lower lip while deep in thought.)
He lectures her on literature she should read, movies she should see. He lectures her about the war. She takes on his opinions. She is malleable. She changes opinions easily. Changes identities easily. She is his raw material. His Galatea. A fistful of clay, gray gray gray.
He takes her to see the Francis Bacons at the Tate Britain. (He writes: Her teeth are childishly arranged in her mouth.)
She stands in front of a triptych silently, considering, as if at some sort of church, while Teddy watches her. Her facial expression smooth, difficult to detect. Three gruesome distorted bodies set against a rage-filled orange. The open mouth. What is there to do but scream? And no sound comes out. We have lost ourselves. We offer ourselves up to the popes of abandon, of frenzied despair. Our identities gone. Our faces blurred, racing.
She was overjoyed looking at them, at those faces that swirled and swirled, but when he pressed her to explain further she couldn’t. He always wanted to know her thoughts, what she was thinking. It’s horrible and beautiful, she says. Like life, horrible and beautiful. She is trying to be deep. Or maybe she is accidentally profound. Then she shivers, suddenly. (He writes: She looks far away for a moment, far far away, so far away I could never reach her.)
He takes his Ophelia to a production of
Hamlet
in Covent Garden. He is trying to cultivate her. As they get up to leave he finds that she has scribbled on her program that she leaves on her seat. It reads:
To die, to sleep, then nothing more? Nothing, nothing more?
He silently pockets this find. He takes out his notebook and writes:
She drowns herself in her own reflections.
I believe in the flapper as an artist in her particular field, the art of being—being young, being lovely, being an object…
— Zelda Fitzgerald
He takes her to a party. It is an adult party at an adult home with expensive, adult things. Ruth wears her new dress. She is happy to go to be looked at but she is shivering in it because it is cold inside. Ruth feels underdressed. All the women have fancy shawls and fancy jewelry and she just has the fancy dress. She stumbles around, outside of herself, looking at all of the well-dressed women looking her up and down in disdain.
Teddy presents her to the hostess. She is a sculptor, he tells Ruth. Her husband is a painter.
Your home is lovely. Ruth says shyly.
The woman looks Ruth up and down. She smiles politely. She is patronizing.
Well isn’t she lovely. She says to Teddy, as if Ruth isn’t even there. Ruth’s role is to just stand there. Always nice to meet one of Teddy’s friends, she says. As if there have been many before. She seems to have heard of Ruth before their introduction. The most important parts of an introduction always occur in one’s absence.
And what do you do? The dreaded question.
Nothing. Ruth says. She is uncomfortable. The green girl does not like to be out of her element. She does not like to leave her comfort zone. All of a sudden Ruth feels silly in her new dress and her glistened pout. She feels young and awkward and naked to the world. But inside deeper inside she is furious and decides she hates this woman and wants to leave immediately.
Can we leave now? She begs. No, not yet. Teddy is annoyed, impatient. So she follows Teddy around dumbly.
They are in a circle of people. They are talking about an exhibition at some place called the White Cube. They ignore her as if she isn’t there. So she doesn’t try to contribute anything. She grows meek and then melancholic.
Ruth sits down on a couch and decides to feel very sorry for herself. She decides she is going to drink as much as possible to drown her miseries.
What is wrong with you? Teddy is standing over her. I want to go home. She has now reverted to being an eight year-old. She is close to throwing a tantrum.
Fine, fine, I’ll take you home. He sighs heavily, a disappointed father. On the train home he berates her: Why are you like this? Why do you act like this?
But Ruth has already turned off from him. The green girl shrinks when someone tries to pry underneath. She begins to pout if pried too far. There is nothing inside, nothing underneath.
She decides not to see Teddy anymore. And that is that. The green girl draws decisive lines in the sand. The green girl breaks easily with her past.
She knows now she has to get a job. Just another job where she will be just another salesgirl. Another disposable job, another disposable boy, her disposable existence.
I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, Sir, because I’m not myself you see.
— Alice in Lewis Carroll’s
Alice in Wonderland
Would you consider yourself a leader? Ruth is being interviewed for a position at a high street women’s clothing store at Oxford Circus. Her interrogator is a tiny blonde girl named Alice, utterly proper, immaculately groomed. Alice was outfitted in standard flower child regalia, wearing a flimsy peasant top that revealed a dainty patch of freckled white and a thick leather belt fitted over narrow hips, the kind Ruth had seen everywhere in London, even given away free in some women’s magazines.
Ruth didn’t know what being a leader had to do with folding shirts, but she had rent to pay so still she answered what she was supposed to. Still she answers Yes.
Okay. Soft, careful voice. Alice marks something on her clipboard using a gold glitter pen. They are going down a list of questions. Ruth has had enough jobs to know how to stay inside the right box.
Okay, Ruth, what makes you want to be in sales? With that the blonde girl looks up, with her patient tiny heart-shaped face. There was something about this girl—and there were legions of them in London—English roses so unflawed in their femininity, so petite and prim, so perfectly contained, that made Ruth feel like something was threatening to spill out of her when she was around them, an avalanche of American vulgarity. She felt her armpits a damper black.
Well…
Ruth’s eyes wander around the cramped office surroundings, settling on the headlines of yesterday’s Metro. MAN BEHEADED ON STREET, it read.
I like to shop so…
Charles and Camilla at some social function. Camilla wearing a hat like a well-behaved blue chicken roosting on her head. Smiling, arms around each other. They looked happy. She always noticed when people looked happy. They were her parents’ age, maybe older. Happy. She had seen pictures like that, pictures where her parents were at some wedding or another, poised standing behind a table. Happy.