Save Me The Waltz 2

     "Alabama could not read the letter. It was in French. She tore it in a hundred little pieces and scattered it over the black water of the harbor beneath the masts of many fishing boats from Shanghai and Madrid, Colombia and Portugal. Though it broke her heart, she tore the picture too. It was the most beautiful thing she'd ever owned in her life, that photograph. What was the use of keeping it? Jacques Chevre-Feuille had gone to China. There wasn't a way to hold on to the summer, no French phrase to preserve its rising broken harmonies, no hopes to be salvaged from a cheap French photograph. Whatever it was that she wanted from Jacques, Jacques took it with him to squander on the Chinese. You took what you wanted from life, if you could get it, and you did without the rest."   -Zelda Fitzgerald