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Authors: Zelda Fitzgerald
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go.”
The city fluctuated in muffled roars like the dim applause rising to an actor on the stage of a vast theater. Two Little Girls in Blue and Sally from the New Amsterdam pumped in their eardrums and unwieldy quickened rhythms invited them to be Negroes and saxophone players, to come back to Maryland and Louisiana, addressed them as mammies and millionaires. The shopgirls were looking like Marilyn Miller. College boys said Marilyn Miller where they had said Rosie Quinn. Moving-picture actresses were famous. Paul Whiteman played the significance of amusement on his violin. They were having the breadline at the Ritz that year. Everybody was there. People met people they knew in hotel lobbies smelling of orchids and plush and detective stories, and asked each other where they’d been since last time. Charlie Chaplin wore a yellow polo coat. People were tired of the proletariat—everybody was famous. All the other people who weren’t well known had been killed in the war; there wasn’t much interest in private lives.
“There they are, the Knights, dancing together,” they said, “isn’t it nice? There they go.”
“Listen, Alabama, you’re not keeping time,” David was saying.
“David, for God’s sake will you try to keep off of my feet?”
“I never could waltz anyway.”
There were a hundred thousand things to be blue about exposed in all the choruses.
“I’ll have to do lots of work,” said David. “Won’t it seem queer to be the center of the world for somebody else?”
“Very. I’m glad my parents are coming before I begin to get sick.”
“How do you know you’ll get sick?”
“I should.”
“That’s no reason.”
“No.”
“Let’s go someplace else.”
Paul Whiteman played “Two Little Girls in Blue” at the Palais Royal; it was a big expensive number. Girls with piquant profiles were mistaken for Gloria Swanson. New York was more full of reflections than of itself—the only concrete things in town were the abstractions. Everybody wanted to pay the cabaret checks.
“We’re having some people,” everybody said to everybody else, “and we want you to join us,” and they said, “We’ll telephone.”
All over New York people telephoned. They telephoned from one hotel to another to people on other parties that they couldn’t get there—that they were engaged. It was always teatime or late at night.
David and Alabama invited their friends to throw oranges into the drum at the Plantation and themselves into the fountain at Union Square. Up they went, humming the New Testament and Our Country’s Constitution, riding the tide like triumphant islanders on a surfboard. Nobody knew the words to “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
In the city, old women with faces as soft and ill lit as the side streets of Central Europe offered their pansies; hats floated off the Fifth Avenue bus; the clouds sent out a prospectus over Central Park. The streets of New York smelled acrid and sweet like drippings from the mechanics of a metallic night-blooming garden. The intermittent odors, the people and the excitement, suctioned spasmodically up the side streets from the thoroughfares, rose in gusts on the beat of their personal tempo.
Possessing a rapacious, engulfing ego their particular genius swallowed their world in its swift undertow and washed its cadavers out to sea. New York is a good place to be on the upgrade.
The clerk in the Manhattan thought they weren’t married but he gave them the room anyway.
“What’s the matter?” David said from the twin bed under the cathedral print. “Can’t you make it?”
“Sure. What time is the train?”
“Now. I’ve got just two dollars to meet your family,” said David searching his clothes.
“I wanted to buy them some flowers.”
“Alabama,” said David sententiously, “that’s impractical. You’ve become nothing but an aesthetic theory—a chemistry formula for the decorative.”
“There’s nothing we can do with two
The city fluctuated in muffled roars like the dim applause rising to an actor on the stage of a vast theater. Two Little Girls in Blue and Sally from the New Amsterdam pumped in their eardrums and unwieldy quickened rhythms invited them to be Negroes and saxophone players, to come back to Maryland and Louisiana, addressed them as mammies and millionaires. The shopgirls were looking like Marilyn Miller. College boys said Marilyn Miller where they had said Rosie Quinn. Moving-picture actresses were famous. Paul Whiteman played the significance of amusement on his violin. They were having the breadline at the Ritz that year. Everybody was there. People met people they knew in hotel lobbies smelling of orchids and plush and detective stories, and asked each other where they’d been since last time. Charlie Chaplin wore a yellow polo coat. People were tired of the proletariat—everybody was famous. All the other people who weren’t well known had been killed in the war; there wasn’t much interest in private lives.
“There they are, the Knights, dancing together,” they said, “isn’t it nice? There they go.”
“Listen, Alabama, you’re not keeping time,” David was saying.
“David, for God’s sake will you try to keep off of my feet?”
“I never could waltz anyway.”
There were a hundred thousand things to be blue about exposed in all the choruses.
“I’ll have to do lots of work,” said David. “Won’t it seem queer to be the center of the world for somebody else?”
“Very. I’m glad my parents are coming before I begin to get sick.”
“How do you know you’ll get sick?”
“I should.”
“That’s no reason.”
“No.”
“Let’s go someplace else.”
Paul Whiteman played “Two Little Girls in Blue” at the Palais Royal; it was a big expensive number. Girls with piquant profiles were mistaken for Gloria Swanson. New York was more full of reflections than of itself—the only concrete things in town were the abstractions. Everybody wanted to pay the cabaret checks.
“We’re having some people,” everybody said to everybody else, “and we want you to join us,” and they said, “We’ll telephone.”
All over New York people telephoned. They telephoned from one hotel to another to people on other parties that they couldn’t get there—that they were engaged. It was always teatime or late at night.
David and Alabama invited their friends to throw oranges into the drum at the Plantation and themselves into the fountain at Union Square. Up they went, humming the New Testament and Our Country’s Constitution, riding the tide like triumphant islanders on a surfboard. Nobody knew the words to “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
In the city, old women with faces as soft and ill lit as the side streets of Central Europe offered their pansies; hats floated off the Fifth Avenue bus; the clouds sent out a prospectus over Central Park. The streets of New York smelled acrid and sweet like drippings from the mechanics of a metallic night-blooming garden. The intermittent odors, the people and the excitement, suctioned spasmodically up the side streets from the thoroughfares, rose in gusts on the beat of their personal tempo.
Possessing a rapacious, engulfing ego their particular genius swallowed their world in its swift undertow and washed its cadavers out to sea. New York is a good place to be on the upgrade.
The clerk in the Manhattan thought they weren’t married but he gave them the room anyway.
“What’s the matter?” David said from the twin bed under the cathedral print. “Can’t you make it?”
“Sure. What time is the train?”
“Now. I’ve got just two dollars to meet your family,” said David searching his clothes.
“I wanted to buy them some flowers.”
“Alabama,” said David sententiously, “that’s impractical. You’ve become nothing but an aesthetic theory—a chemistry formula for the decorative.”
“There’s nothing we can do with two
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