Free West of Sunset by Stewart O’Nan

again.
    Felicitations on this most auspicious day,
he wrote Zelda.
May your returns be multitudinous and joyful. I hope you enjoy the pastels. I remember how you loved the Redons glowing in that black room in the back of the Louvre. If you need more, or anything for your art within reason, I’ve replenished your canteen, so please don’t hesitate. All is well here, just settling to the task. Attended a compulsory function at the Cocoanut Grove the other night and thought of our evenings and mornings there. If I weren’t so aware of time and our own ghosts floating about the halls I would say nothing has changed. The ocean on a calm day is still the color of your eyes. The hope now is that Scottie will see you and make a stop in Montgomery before heading out here, and I, Metro Goldwyn and Mayer all permitting, will return in September so you and I can take a few days together at the shore. Know that I think of you often and tenderly, and remain, in this bright, forsaken place, Your own Do-Do.

A YANK AT OXFORD
    M ornings, by design, he woke at five. He loved the newness of the day, the hungover quiet of the Garden broken only by the plashing of fountains, birds twittering in the hedges. Over the years he’d watched Hollywood devour his friends from back East, sapping their nobler ambitions as it filled their pockets. The heat was as much to blame as the money, the whole city drowsy with a subtropical languor. After a shift in the Iron Lung, even he was tempted to loll around the pool and do nothing. Dottie and Benchley and Sid could afford to slough off, with their Guild cards and laundry lists of credits, but he still needed to sell stories to pay the bills.
    His plan was to get up early and do his own work while he was fresh, except he hadn’t honestly slept in years, a side effect of his Cokes and his smoking. The bed he and Zelda once shared languished in storage outside of Baltimore, likely full of mice by now. At night he relied on two Nembutals and a few teaspoons of chloral hydrate to soothe him. In the morning, standing before the medicine cabinet, he washed down an equally necessary pair of Benzedrine, and soon evened out again. He shaved and showered, whistling ditties of his own invention, put on his suit as if he were going to work, made himself a pot of coffee, hung up his jacket and sat down at the kitchen table to write.
    For three hours he wrote badly, rushing things, frustratingly aware of the ugly clock above the sink, sometimes stalking out to his car in a rage because he’d had to leave in the middle of a scene, and yet every morning he managed to produce a couple of pages. They might be rickety, but he had the eye and the patience of a professional used to fixing worse. As with his Grandmother McQuillan’s black pudding, nothing was wasted. If a scene didn’t play, he took the good lines and saved them in his notebook for later. The one thing he could trust in this world was his sensibility. If he had failed his talent, as Ernest held, it had not been through under-use, but, rather, as he thought some mornings, his heart galloping from too much coffee, the opposite. Like an athlete, he had trained himself, day after day, and trusted that when he came to the arena he would naturally perform. He’d been doing it since before the Armistice, even when Zelda fell apart, and now, alone, saw no end, no respite. He was terrified he would die, pencil in hand, leaving an unfinished sentence and Scottie a legacy of debt. These still mornings in the kitchen were a kind of penance meant to exorcise that fear. When he was working, it worked. It was when he stopped that the world returned, and his problems with it, which was the reason he worked in the first place. He was a writer—all he wanted from this world were the makings of another truer to his heart.
    The story he was working on was a burlesque about a man who wakes up one morning to find a noose cinched tightly around his