The Man Who Would Be F. Scott Fitzgerald by David Handler Page B

Why?
    Hoag: Just being thorough.
    Noyes: Seymour. Peter Seymour. When the dust settled, it turned out father was in terrible debt. I had to sell off the Knott manse and all of the antiques in it to pay off his creditors. I was left with a small trust — just enough to pay for my education — and Uncle Jack’s shack. Otherwise I was a penniless orphan the day when I was shoved out into the cold, cruel world at age fourteen.
    (end tape)
    (Tape #2 with Cameron Noyes recorded May 7 at the Blue Mill. Wears same suit as day before with torn black T-shirt, no shoes or socks. Is bleary-eyed, but punctual.)
    Noyes: I ran into a friend at Live Bait last night who thought he’d seen you on a squash court at the Racquet Club yesterday, though he couldn’t swear to it — he said you looked a lot older than your book-jacket photo.
    Hoag: Tell him, whoever he is, that he’s an asshole.
    Noyes: It was you.
    Hoag: Getting killed by a senior vice president of Kidder Peabody.
    Noyes: I don’t get it, coach. “Why are you still hanging out at that gentleman’s dinosaur pit? I thought you hated those people, like I do.
    Hoag: I told you I was complex.
    Noyes: But how can you write the way you do and still … I don’t understand you.
    Hoag: You don’t have to. I’m the one who has to understand you. I meant to ask you yesterday, do you have any old photographs of your family? Pictures of you as a child? Charlie will want to sort through them for illustration purposes.
    Noyes: Not a one. I threw everything out a long time ago.
    Hoag: So tell me about the cold, cruel world.
    Noyes: The lawyer, Seymour, decided that a boarding school made the most sense, so he sent me off to the Deerfield Academy. Deerfield became my home for the next four years, and the people there my family. Deerfield is where I came of age, though I don’t give the school much credit for that. I hated the place on sight. It’s in a small village in the middle of the cornfields in western Massachusetts. Deerfield Village is like Farmington, only more so. More quaint. More into itself and its past. The whole place is a living fucking colonial museum.
    Hoag: I take it you don’t go in for preservation.
    Noyes: I go in for destruction. On the surface, the academy was a decent enough place. Lovely campus. Superior library and laboratories and athletic facilities, second-largest planetarium in all of New England … But it was, for all intents and purposes, a minimum-security prison. Instead of cells we were assigned dorm rooms. Instead of prison blues we wore blue blazers and ties. We were told where to go, what to do, when to eat. Curfew was at ten. No drinking. No cars. No girls. Two proctors per corridor to keep an eye on you, and a corridor master to be your buddy. Mine was a prized dickhead named Darcy Collingwood, a middle-aged bachelor who taught algebra and wore Hush Puppies and ate Wheaties with diet raspberry soda on it. He smiled a lot. I didn’t. I was used to coming and going as I pleased. Plus they really laid on that whole Eastern-elite prep-school mindset — the old-boy tradition of hearty good comradeship and spirited athletic competition. Sports do make the boy into a man. They also tire him out so he won’t think about how horny he is and how there’s nobody around to fuck except for the other boys. Deerfield just went coed this past year — actually joined the twentieth century. But when I was there, the nearest wool was three miles away at Stoneleigh-Burnham, and only then for purposes of organized activities like dances. It was a prison. I wanted no part of it. I would have fled, too, if it hadn’t been for Boyd. As freshmen we were placed across the hall from each other in Plunkett, the oldest and ricketiest of the dormitories. I’d never met anyone like Boyd. He seemed conventional enough on the surface. Suburban middle-class background. But even then he was a visionary scam artist. Within weeks his room had become a working laboratory in