Read Online Save Me the Waltz: A Novel by Zelda Fitzgerald - Free Book Online

that that was wrong so I told her we were going to get some more almost immediately.”
    “What’d she say to that?” asked David confidently.
    “She was suspicious; she said we were against the rules.”
    “Families always think the idea is for nothing to happen to people.”
    “We won’t call her up again—I’ll see you at five, David, in the Plaza lobby—I’m gonna miss my train.”
    “All right. Good-bye, darling.”
    David held her seriously in his arms. “If anybody tries to steal you on the train tell them you belong to me.”
    “If you’ll promise me you won’t get run over——”
    “Good—by—e!”
    “Don’t we adore each other?”
    Vincent Youmans wrote the music for those twilights just after the war. They were wonderful. They hung above the city like an indigo wash, forming themselves from asphalt dust and sooty shadows under the cornices and limp gusts of air exhaled from closing windows. They lay above the streets like a white fog off a swamp. Through the gloom, the whole world went to tea. Girls in short amorphous capes and long flowing skirts and hats like straw bathtubs waited for taxis in front of the Plaza Grill; girls in long satin coats and colored shoes and hats like straw manhole covers tapped the tune of a cataract on the dance floors of the Lorraine and the St. Regis. Under the somber ironic parrots of the Biltmore a halo of golden bobs disintegrated into black lace and shoulder bouquets between the pale hours of tea and dinner that sealed the princely windows; the clank of lank contemporaneous silhouettes drowned the clatter of teacups at the Ritz.
    People waiting for other people twisted the tips of the palms into brown mustache ends and ripped short slits about their lower leaves. It was just a lot of youngness: Lillian Lorraine would be drunk as the cosmos on top of the New Amsterdam by midnight, and football teams breaking training would scare the waiters with drunkenness in the fall. The world was full of parents taking care of people. Debutantes said to each other, “Isn’t that the Knights?” and “I met him at a prom. My dear, please introduce me.”
    “What’s the use? They’re c—r—a—z—y about each other,” smelted into the fashionable monotone of New York.
    “Of course it’s the Knights,” said a lot of girls. “Have you seen his pictures?”
    “I’d rather look at him any day,” answered other girls.
    Serious people took them seriously; David made speeches about visual rhythm and the effect of nebular physics on the relation of the primary colors. Outside the windows, fervently impassive to its own significance, the city huddled in a gold-crowned conference. The top of New York twinkled like a golden canopy behind a throne. David and Alabama faced each other incompetently—you couldn’t argue about having a baby.
    “So what did the doctor say?” he insisted.
    “I told you—he said ‘Hello!’ ”
    “Don’t be an ass—what else did he say?—We’ve got to know what he said.”
    “So then we’ll have the baby,” announced Alabama, proprietarily.
    David fumbled about his pockets. “I’m sorry—I must have left them at home.” He was thinking that then they’d be three.
    “What?”
    “The bromides.”
    “I said ‘Baby.’ ”
    “Oh.”
    “We should ask somebody.”
    “Who’ll we ask?”
    Almost everybody had theories: that the Longacre Pharmacies carried the best gin in town; that anchovies sobered you up; that you could tell wood alcohol by the smell. Everybody knew where to find the blank verse in Cabell and how to get seats for the Yale game, that Mr. Fish inhabited the aquarium, and that there were others besides the sergeant ensconced in the Central Park Police Station—but nobody knew how to have a baby.
    “I think you’d better ask your mother,” said David.
    “Oh, David—don’t! She’d think I wouldn’t know how.”
    “Well,” he said tentatively, “I could ask my dealer—he knows where the subways