A Bittersweet Reprieve

This is probably the most famous book cover of all time.  And why not?  These are not the eyes of T.J. Ecklburg but of some ghostly, haunting reminder of one's squandered, allusive youth and beauty and the failures of romantic love in a cripplingly materialistic world.  Everyone has read the novel, I suppose, if they went to school.  It is, perhaps, the the most read novel ever published.  And yet, when Fitzgerald died, the book was not even in print.  Indeed none of his works were.  

I wasn't aware until this morning that "The Great Gatsby" had turned 100 years old. Oddly enough, only yesterday I was on Amazon looking for the book of his letters.  "Gatsby" is a great novel, maybe perfect in many ways, but it is not the sole creation of a desperate writer.  The novel was ordered and polished by Fitzgerald's friend Edmund "Bunny" Wilson and the editors at Scribners.  Fitzgerald had a terrible time with organization.  Perhaps it was the result of his drinking.  Ha!  

"Many must have it."  

I think that cover art certainly added to the novel's allure, too.  The sad, beautiful eyes of everything we long for and can never achieve or hold on to.  

But Christ, she has a small mouth.  

Last night, I had a moment of reprieve.  Of a sort.  Like everything else in life, it seems, it was bittersweet.  I felt myself the eyes of T.J. Eckleburg, a melancholy symbol of a ruptured past, present and fading, a symbol of some imaginable but forgotten glory still--but barely--visible on a long abandoned billboard.  

I'd visited my mother.  She was doing better.  The day before was over, she seemed to say.  Everything was "Go."  Yea, sure. . . nothing but blue skies and daffodils ahead, all trouble behind.  So, letting myself be fooled by the present, when I left her house, I decided I would join the Billionaire Boys Club for a drink.  

It had been a spectacular day and the coming night promised to be soft and elegant.  It was Alumni weekend at Country Club College.  Wealth and success were coming to town in an effort to revive those ardent days of future glory, desperate not to lose what was sure to fade. . . in memoriam.  

The BBC was reduced for the evening, but we picked up a famous judge (retired) who made his fortune as a successful attorney before donning his robes.  He is a man my own age as he is quite fond of mentioning.  

"Really!  You don't look as old as old C.S. here."

"Well. . . I think he lived a more exciting life."

It was just the usual beating, but the judge spoke up in my defense.  

"I haven't really gotten to know him until recently, but I used to see him come to the gym years ago and I remember thinking he always looked impressive."

"What happened?"

"I got broken into pieces," I said.  "Aging is a disappointing achievement."

One of the fellows quietly paid the tab, but when the judge found out, he tried to give him money.  Twice he spilled metal credit cards all over the floor.  A wiry island boy (the accent gave him away) was there to pick them up right away.

"I could feel those things hitting the ground all the way over there, mon."  

There sure were a lot of them.  The judge had to leave to meet his son, so he excused himself with a promise he would meet us at the next bar.  

As the rest of us got up to go, the waitress handed me a credit card.  

"Your friend forgot one," she said.  

"We'll be using this at the next spot for sure," one of the boys trilled.  

The next spot was a new, upscale place on the Boulevard.  I had not yet been.  The famous d.j. who always Ubers because he's always drunk hitched a ride with me.  

"Jesus. . . we could have just walked here faster," he said as I parked behind City Hall.

"Yea, but I have a bunch of expensive cameras in the car and didn't want to leave on the street over there."

"Are you insane?  Have you not learned your lesson?"

The sky was turning a velvet purple as we approached the restaurant.  Our buddies had impossibly gotten  prime seating at a low table half inside the lounge, halfway on the sidewalk.  The bar was full and the parade of fabulous people was underway.  It was a fashion show past and present, sharp couples and trios of girls in a constant stream.  The waitresses were quite attentive, of course, and everything was grand.  The booze was flowing and the boys were eating low dose gummies every hour or so.  Creamy lobster hors-d'ouvres, crab cakes, tequila, vodka, and beers.  

"Holy shit," I mewed. 

"Yea. . . this is the new must-be place.  See and be seen."  

The dj is a character and apparently well-known.  He would address people passing by and they would smile in recognition as he said something borderline appropriate but witty.  

"Oh. . . I thought you were a friend of my daughters," he would grin.  "Sorry."

"No. . . don't worry, I'm married,"he'd say to giggling women.

He does it for a living and he is good at it.  

"You are on the radio.  How do all these people know who you are?"

"Social media, dude.  The station promotes the show.  I'm all over the place."

A couple sat down at the table next to us.  They had a huge assed dog.  Half-standard poodle, half St. Bernard.  The thing was fluffy and as friendly as a dog could be, and the couple was quickly a part of the group, but in a bit they left another couple took their place.  The woman was blonde, dressed in a brilliant red dress with lips to match.  When the man left, the boys noticed she was listening in on their discussion--couples with separate bedrooms.  She was a therapist, she said, and she was going to a conference in Atlanta next week on just that topic.  She was fascinated by the boys, I could tell, as they began to grill her.  She trotted out her credentials.  Her father was an Ivy League doctor, she said, and she'd grown up in Westbury and Rye.  She was interviewed on a radio show the night before.  The dj snapped a photo and sent it to the hosts who texted him right back.  Yup.  That was her.  She had two reality t.v. shows in the works at the moment, she said.  What were they?  One was about how people in their 40's and 50's handled dating.  She was perimenopausal herself, and she knew something about how shifting hormones change you.  

"We're heading to the Irish pub in a minute.  You come with us."

She hesitated.  The crowd would be young, her daughters' age.  But the boys would not relent, so she texted her husband out of courtesy to tell him she was going and he could meet up with her there if he wanted to.

"He won't," she said.  "But, you know. . . I don't want him to feel left out."

It was her second husband, not the father of her daughters.  We got to hear about that.  

"Text your daughters and tell them to come," I said.  

The boys gave me the eye.

"I mean. . . we don't want them to feel left out."

But I was done.  I wasn't going to the next bar.  And so we all got up and wandered to the parking lot.  As we parted, the dj, now well in his cups, said, "You and me, we're alike, aren't we."

"What do you mean?"

"The women like us.  You know I admire you, right?  I talk about you on the show all the time.  I don't use your real name, of course, but. . . the women like you."

I looked up in wonder at the swirling stars in the cloudless sky.  

"Ha!  I have no immediate evidence of that, my friend."

"Come here," he said, and he gripped me in a bear hug.  "Alright, brother. . . be careful driving home.  And take the fucking cameras out of the car for Christ's sake."

"Yea, yea. . . "

They boys had been to the pub last year during alumni week.  They said it was outrageous.  Alumni showed up to relive their college days.  

"Send photos," I said.  

As I sat with my last drink of the night just before bed, I got a text.  It wasn't from the boys.  It was from a young friend.  It was a picture of her and one of the BBC.  

"Why aren't you here?"

Because I have to get up early and take my mother to a doctor's appointment, I thought but did not respond.  

And that is what I must do now.  Early morning doctor, afternoon therapy.  That is my Friday.  But the cosmos last night allowed me a moment of reprieve, sitting on the Boulevard watching the parading progeny, the results born of generational marriages between beauty and wealth.  Fitzgerald's Golden Girls.  Those people, James Salter remarked, who'd had random behavior bred out of them.

I presented a paper at Princeton long ago, visited the eating clubs and went through some of the collection of Fitzgerald papers in the Princeton collection.  I wish I had the photos at my fingertips right now to show you, ones sent to me by great scholars from around the country.  I was in my forties, and I think I was beautiful then as my mother had been in her youth.  Maybe one never gets over it.  Maybe we simply look back into a memory, the fading eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg on some rotten billboard of life.  

When Fitzgerald died in his 40's, he was all but forgotten, living in a garage apartment and dating Sheila Graham, a well-known newspaper columnist.  Zelda was living in a mental institute where she would later die in a terrible fire.  

Such is life, I guess, a passing parade of success and youth and beauty.  

O.K.  The old clock on the wall keeps ticking.  We do not have forever.  It is time for me to go.