That summer in the French Riviera
Katherine Jimenez
Goofy, my darling, do you remember how we used to dance to
Jazz?
There was a piano below pale fingers somewhere in the room,
the sweet richness sounding slow and distant in the corners of my mind I
hadn’t fully discovered yet.
Scott looked at me with distaste and said, Tell them about Jozan,
dear. Come on. Ernest doesn’t like to be kept waiting.
Heat crept onto my face and neck. I felt the tears about to sting
my eyes, my eyes, my eyes
but I would not allow them to fall this time. I could not allow
him to make me the butt of his joke, the laugh, the joy, the little Southern
flapper girl that Hemingway hated so much. But after he says it, they
won’t stop laughing, because if they do then they’ll see the light in
Scott’s eyes isn’t all green. That new money isn’t quite the same as old.
That it doesn’t have the same Midas touch. Not the same texture as my
father’s hundred dollar bills. Not the same as daddy’s little girl.
The green light is always there. Always his, never mine, for it is
Scott’s and Scott's dream alone. It doesn’t care whether this is that or that
is this.
No. He doesn’t care.
He’s a dream painted on two-way glass where his alcohol makes
poetry and our parties make celebrities. And he drinks away my time
since time is all he needs. Time away from me but not them, not his little
buddies, not Hemingway again.
He just needs time to write.
But when I ask for time to dance, to talk, to hold a pen just as
beautifully as he does, his green flame singes through the letters, the
diary entries, the words I didn’t speak to the air but to the paper in a
youth he and I no longer shared.
A nice feeling that must have been, to take what was mine and
call it his. Get all that publicity, those movie remakes, and books taught
in a high school classroom. A very nice feeling when all he needed was a
different sex between his legs.
No, I want to say, I don’t feel like telling that story today.
but in time, when the alcohol too had worn my brightness away,
I felt myself getting smaller and smaller under the weight of his mocking
stare until finally I disappeared into another character in his grand life,
for a man’s success is a man’s alone.
Always Scott’s, never mine, because my words still keep him
alive.