Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald Read online

  Betrayed by

  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

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Copyright

  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.

  2

  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 logica
l, 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.

  Confusion, like Koko, the albino horse-riding bear that appears in the circus wearing red scarves and leaping through flames, was mounting. DeLathaway had fallen off the porch and was wriggling in the pyracantha. When everyone rushed up to help him, I saw the secretary Susette lift her blue ball out of the shrubbery surreptitiously and flip it halfway home. I decided, regardless of Banquo, to get her too. DeLath was laughing now from where he lay in the bushes, and intoned: “A bed of roses, a bed of thorns, a bed of roses …” while a relatively nincompoopal crowd looked on from the porch.

  Royal stood by his green ball, crooning now into the microphone of his mallet: “It was only a Tristram in old Shanty town …” He kept singing it over and over to make sure everyone would hear it, which they already had. I figured he must really be in the throes of Old Bardstown to be attempting the first joke of his entire life. People looked at him strangely until he dropped the mallet and stood leaning on it sheepishly. And meanwhile, hearing Royal sing, Banks had begun bellowing from his seat in the Buick, “Desdemona! Where the hmmm hmmm hhmm hmmm hmmm hmmm hmmm!” to the tune of “Oklahoma,” but this too stopped after a dozen birds scattered from their nests in the headlights and Wesson ran over to see if Banks was okay. You can tell when jokes aren’t funny if you begin considering crying for your enemies.

  I felt a little sorry for Royal. All he really wanted out of life was a comfortable room lined with unopened leatherbound copies of the rare books of the Western World, in which he and a few friends, a ruly, polite group, could sip tea and play intense marathon games of Authors.

  Amid this display of sound and senselessness, and despite two onlookers, Professors Keen and Roachfield standing nearly on top of me discussing the merits of the first versus the third person, I whacked my orange ball out of turn. I did. Thus on my next turn, with the whole world watching, I tapped old orange cleanly through the double hoops and became Poison.

  “He’s Poison!” Miss Bedd said.

  Royal executed the frown he’d made famous in forty yearbooks.

  Upon hearing the word, “Poison” the entire sodden community emerged to take a look. DeLathaway, now on the porch, scratched but smiling, rubbed his hands together as if to say, “Ah yes, on with the games.” Banquo sat up in the Buick, as I feared he would, and did several neck-jarring takes. Wesson looked worried. He skipped over to me, not being too obvious, because he wanted to be seen mostly talking to teachers, not “candidates,” which we both were.

  “Caution, Lawrence.”

  “Larry, Wesson; and why?”

  “It’s a faculty party, remember. We’re guests.” He wiggled his tie.

  “I’m Poison, Wesson, one side please, or you may find yourself comatose at this particular faculty party.” He skulked away.

  After I sent orange ball into the field, at large, and the turns rotated, Banks motioned to me.

  “You fool!” he said, gripping the steering wheel of the Buick in an isometric demonstration that bulged his temples.

  “Easy there, fella.”

  “Easy! Why did you do that! Now you’re going to have to aim for one of the hoops and disqualify yourself. Right?”

  “Right, uh huh, right, right. Right, Mr. Banks.” While self-destruction was to become much more my style on future days, this hurling myself through a hoop business would not go. I returned to the wickets. I decided to venomize Royal first; and in obviously the best shooting of the evening I reached out and nailed him with a tricky forty-foot putt.

  “Death to Sir Green,” I said. “Touché, Messr. Royal.”

  “Why you’ve poisoned me!”

  “Yes and I’ve taken your class.” His jaw descended as an invitation to a left hook and I imagined my arm swinging across, clearing the air. But I simply added: “Zounds!”

  He stomped off, into the backyard. Wesson walked at his side, picking up his mallet, muttering rapidly, being generally attendant, the squire that he was.

  “Now, Miss Blue, for your dosage, arm or cheek?” Susette used her turn to flee, but unfortunately right into a small ditch that circled DeLathaway’s new weeping willow. Banks was really paying attention now, on the edge of his seat, rapt say. So I simply said, “Drink this then to me, dear, and sweets, don’t-you-know, to the you-know-who.” And I sent the potent orange right into the ditch as well, where it kissed blue for the last time.

  “Ahhhh!” Banks screamed in anguish. Susette was pouting, luckily, and so his attentions were shifted to her, his wife being in the backyard. I escaped to the porch where DeLathaway kissed both cheeks and knighted me with my own mallet.

  “This boy,” he said to Virgil Benson, who had been driven back out of the backyard as well, “is going to be as great a poet as he is a croquet player.”

  “No doubt.” Virgil said quietly.

  “Why do you realize he has already written a perfect sestina?” It was true. For some reason I had written one in one of my crossword moods, but it wasn’t perfect.

  “Whiskey! We need more whiskey.”

  “No, thanks DeLath,” I said. “I have to meet Riddel at the Black Heron and give him my last paper.” Riddel taught a philosophy course I was taking as allied studies, and had given me ten extra days on my paper which lay freshly typed on the seat of my green pickup even as I spoke. “And I have to be at work by twelve midnight.” I checked my watch: three o’clock. That meant it was eleven, my watch having been four hours fast for a year. Virgil Benson left, in order to get home in time for the late show, no doubt.

  “Naw. N-O. You are the champion and deserve to be celebrated. Come on to the back.” On the way through the kitchen, a man smiled and handed me a drink. He was Leeland Rose, DeLathaway’s “help,” and I’ve yet to figure out if his smile indicated that he knew we’d both be dangerous convicts soon, playing baseball on another side of the bars; there are so many different smiles in this world.

  “Haven’t you always thought it curious the way we say, ‘Fix a drink,’ as though it were broken,” Delathaway was saying, always the student of poetic idiom, raking the language for oddities. He looked at the ceiling and lit one of his famous cigars.

  As he exhaled acres of smoke upward and stood studying it, I reeled into the backyard, surprising my vertebrae by missing three stairs. “Leeway, here,” I whispered, getting up, “Degree candidate in need of leeway.”

  Wesson was now nodding wild affirmation into Professor Roachfield’s face as the latter offered his new theories on drama. I heard my earnest friend ask the professor, “You mean, if the playwright shows us the gun in Act One, he now has the responsibility not to fire it in Act Three? My God! that’s amazing!”

  I passed them and joined Professor Keen, an intense comparative-lit teacher, who was sitting aside the main circle of wives. The wives were talking about the history department wives. As I sat down by Keen, I didn’t know what to expect, from him or myself. He was esoteric and intense, and I was still buzzing. Keen had the quality I’d noticed lately in Wesson of going around as though every day was the one before the Graduate Record Exam, asking everyone large questions and then looking at his watch. He had stopped me one day
in the hall and asked, “In total, would you say Melville or Faulkner is the greatest American writer?”

  I’d made him a permanent enemy by answering, “Faulkner by land, Melville by sea.” Tonight, he appeared a bit more mellow, having just published an article in Overview on how Spanish gothic novels caused American southern gothic novels, though I did sense an aura of antagonism because I had blitzed Royal’s chances on the hoops of praise; but, Keen asked instead, “Who’s your favorite writer, Boosinger?”

  “Burroughs.”

  “Really?” Keen looked up from the blade of grass he was splitting into tenths. “Why he’s quite difficult isn’t he? Obscure, arbitrary, wild?”

  “Yes sir, quite difficult, but it pays off.”

  “Hmmm. Well, do you think his latest work compares with the early stuff, say Naked Lunch?”

  “Keep William S., Keen. I’m talking about the prolific Edgar Rice, and yes, I think Tarzan and the Antmen and Tarzan Goes to Mars compare quite favorably with say, Tarzan and Tarzan and the Apes.”

  Keen was pretty obviously recoiling at what he recognized as my potential to do him bodily you know what, so I asked him, “Do you think French bad taste compares to American bad taste?” I left him there, frightened in the dark, rubbing his chin.

  Darkness had fallen and the backporch beacon and my unsteady head made the whole scene seem a black and white film shot with a hand-held camera, the tripod gone to hell, and the cameraman away at the races. The circle of women had drawn closer and white light fringed their hair; white smoke rose from their Vantages, and their dark husbands knelt on the lawn between their chairs. I knew most of the wives and they were interesting taken one at a time, but “Faculty Wives” as a group and a concept are like a great heavyweight fighter: elusive, heavy, and repeatedly able to knock you down, if not out. All I could hear from the group was a few proper nouns and they were all names of women and cities in Europe: Daphne, Cleo, Doris, Dover, Marseilles, Naples. It was time, as it had been for three hours, for me to get out. A cool hand fell on my arm. It was Mrs. Banks. “I hear you won the croquet. Congratulations.”