Though I suspect he has someone out there, he writes to me all the time, and always ends his letters, With dearest love... My letters to him are signed, Devotedly... Even now, when we haven’t shared an address in six years, when he’s probably shining his light on some adoring girl who surely thinks she has saved him, we’re both telling it true. This is what we’ve got at the moment, who we are. It’s not nearly what we once had--the good. I mean--but it’s also not what we once had, meaning the bad.

I rested my head against his shoulder and we watched the sun set, just like you might see in the movies. We’d worked hard to create this lovely, new domestic bliss, and before Gatsby’s publication, right up until the book was printed and put into the hands of both the reading and the reviewing public, it looked as if we might actually succeed. Wait: if I leave it at that, it’ll sound like the novel’s disappointing performance is to blame for the disaster we made of our lives, and that’s not really so. Ernest Hemingway is to blame.

Trouble has lots of forms. There’s financial trouble and marital trouble, there’s trouble with friends and trouble with landlords and trouble with liquor and trouble with the law. Every sort of trouble I can think of, we’ve tried it out--become expert at some of it, even, so much so that I’ve come to wonder whether artists in particular seek out hard times the way flowers turn their faces toward the sun.

Scott and I had a row last weekend and haven’t spoken since--but as we are going to Sylvia Beach’s dinner for James Joyce tonight, I’ll once again have to put on my Mrs. F. Scott costume and try to play nice with him and the other children. Whose life is this, anyway? Only when I’m sweating rivers perfecting my plies in the studio do I feel like a whole and real person.

Scott spent the next several days drafting a story he called ‘The Rich Boy,’ then set it aside and returned to his routine of having cocktails with those very same types.