The Swans of Fifth Avenue

by Melanie Benjamin

  That’s what the swans remembered, as they drank Babe’s wine and ate her food one last time. Truman and Babe. Darkness and light, elegance and impudence. Beauty and brains, heart and soul.

  Together.

  La Côte Basque, 1984

  …..

  “Bill, darling man.”

  “Slim.”

  They air-kissed, then allowed the maître d’ to escort them to one of the front tables.

  The restaurant hadn’t changed much since Henri Soulé’s death in 1966, the year of Truman’s ball. The seaside murals on the walls were still there, the linens still the finest, the tables still groaned with fresh flowers, the bill for these rumored to be in the thousands per week. There was a new chef, but the food was still heavy French, with an emphasis on cream and butter.

  Bill Paley and Slim Keith took their seats at an intimate table à deux. Instinctively, each sucked in his gut, sat up straight, scanned the room surreptitiously. But they were disappointed, it must be said.

  For few of their contemporaries were present; the restaurant was mainly filled with businessmen on expense accounts. Bill, of course, knew some of these and nodded, while Slim relaxed, let out her breath, and lit a cigarette.

  “Where the hell is everybody?” Slim asked, but it was a rhetorical question. She knew.

  They’d gotten old, some had died. The Duke of Windsor had passed away even before Babe. Wallis was in France now, rumored to be mad as a hatter, locked away by servants.

  Marella and Gianni still puttered around on their yachts but increasingly remained in Italy, at their palace, forgotten gods taking refuge on Mount Olympus. C.Z. still had her gardens, published many gardening books, and remained as unflappable as ever. Slim did still see her now and again when C.Z. was in Manhattan, serving on charity boards, her blond Boston beauty finely honed and weathered, so that she resembled that type of Brahmin matron she’d sworn she always loathed, but never tried too hard to prevent herself from becoming, at that. For all her fun, her breeziness, her memories of Diego Rivera, C.Z. had always dressed like a debutante. And now, like a figurehead with her pearls, cashmere, and tweed.

  Then there was Gloria. La Guinness, as Truman had dubbed her.

  Ah, Gloria.

  “What do you think, Bill?” Slim turned to her companion, now very stooped, thinner than his rangy frame warranted. His hair was very sparse, and he had a hearing aid in one ear.

  “What?” He turned up the aid.

  “What do you think about Gloria? Do you think she really did it? Commit suicide?”

  “It was a heart attack, wasn’t it?” Like many men his age—eighty-three—his voice was querulous, high, and loud. Not the commanding bark it once had been.

  “That’s what Loel said, anyway. But one of her maids—well, it’s just that she had been so despondent, so low, those last few years.” Gloria had died in 1980; only two years after she’d envied Babe for checking out before growing too old.

  “I don’t believe that bunk.” Bill signaled for the waiter, ordered some wine for the two of them. “Not Gloria. Why would anyone do that? Especially her?”

  “Because she was beautiful,” Slim replied quietly. “Once.”

  “So were you. Still are, to some.” Bill grinned, and she glimpsed the man he had been, the man she’d known for more than fifty years; the man she first met, before he married Babe, on a fishing trip in Cuba with Papa. If she closed her eyes, she could visualize him then, brown all over, except for that blinding white smile. His hands, she remembered; that’s what she first noticed about him. His hands, huge, always open, always grasping. Wanting more.

  “Stop,” Slim retorted, slapping away one of those hands now, as it grasped her knee. “We’re too old for this.”

  “We didn’t used to be. We could go up to the apartment, just like we used to.” Bill grinned, and suddenly looked ten years younger. Maybe twenty.

  And Slim relaxed; she allowed Bill to grasp her knee, she squeezed that huge hand, the fingers now knobby, arthritic, but the grasp still powerful. Sure of what he desired; certain that it could be attained.

  Sex hadn’t packed up and left, after all. She was surprised to feel that eager tingle between her thighs.

  “I assume your wife is out of town, then?” Slim knew it was cruel, to remind him of their old game. But it slipped out.

  Bill released her hand. They both picked up their menus.

  “So, I imagine you heard about Truman?”

  “Yeah.” Bill sighed, then frowned, that old Bill Paley icy glare. “Well, I can’t say I’m sad about it, Slim. Not at all. Not after what he did to Babe, to you, to me.”

  “Joanne Carson called me—you know, he’d been staying with her, in that little room she had for him in Los Angeles. After we all banished him, that’s where he ended up, in the back room of a TV star’s ex-wife.” Slim smiled grimly. “But she called me, after they took him away to the mortuary. She said that his last words were ‘Beautiful Babe.’ She wanted me to know that, for some reason.” Slim choked a little, her eyes misting over with tears.

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “I’d like to. Wouldn’t you?”

  “No. I don’t want to believe that little bastard was still in love with my wife. I don’t want to believe his last words were about her. I don’t want to believe anything other than Babe died peacefully, loving only me, and that Truman died painfully, alone. Call me cruel, if you want. But—”

  “That’s the story you want to tell yourself,” Slim whispered. “I understand, Bill. Because I tell myself a lot of stories to help me sleep at night. Stories about how Babe was my dearest friend, and I never betrayed her. Stories about how you and I had a great love, not just an occasional roll in the hay whenever she was out of town. Stories about how wonderful life was back then, when none of us told each other the truth, but so what? It was all so beautiful, wasn’t it? It was all so lovely and gracious. Not like it is now.”

  Neither spoke for a long time; they just gazed out at Fifty-fifth Street, full of tourists in their tourist clothes, sneakers and jeans, sweatshirts, windbreakers, those absurd Walkman headphones over their ears, blocking out the delicious sounds of the city. The St. Regis was just across the street, and still grand, but now rock stars stayed in the suites and nobody lived in hotels anymore. And it was owned by Sheraton. Astors and Vanderbilts and bears, oh, my; no one was afraid of any of them and their old money now. Not in the garish New York of the eighties and Donald Trump.

  Bill Paley was still chairman of CBS, despite efforts over the last few years to oust him. Still, he was selling off stock, a little bit at a time; his days of acquisition were over. He’d already made plans to give his astounding collection of art to MoMA. Mostly, he played golf and swam and slept in his office between meetings at which he still made appearances, just to remind people who built the damn place, after all. To remind himself of that, as well.

  “We do have a great love,” Bill told Slim, told himself, as he told every woman he still took up to the apartment on Fifth, even now—why, hadn’t he just been named one of People magazine’s top ten eligible bachelors?

  Although every time he brought some little cutie up there, he couldn’t stop himself from giving a tour, a running narrative of Babe—Babe bought this, Babe put that there, Babe used to sit here, Babe felt that the dining room should be in this color…he’d never changed the apartment, had resisted efforts from his children to redecorate there, and at Kiluna. He couldn’t bring himself to; they were the last things in the world he had of her, her essence, that gracious living that Slim was talking about. He knew everything she had picked out was now out of fashion, but he didn’t care. He was too old to care.

  “No, we don’t have a great love, Bill. You were kind and very generous with money when I needed it; I was there for a diversion when you needed it, one of your blond shiksas. And I have to ask you a question, now that Truman’s gone. Do you think Babe ever knew, Bill? Did Truman? Because the st
ory—Truman’s story in Esquire, about Sidney Dillon and the bloody stain—did you ever tell him about that? That one time with us?”

  “No. Did you?”

  “No.”

  Truth or consequences. That old familiar game. Neither really wanted to play it, after all.

  “But Babe,” Slim said after a pause, unable to let the subject drop as she knew she ought, “Babe said something before she died. She said I was a survivor. It seemed odd, at the time. Out of the blue. And then, you know, she didn’t leave me much in her will, not like everyone else. God knows, I didn’t care about that, except it did seem strange, considering how generous she was with everyone else, like Gloria and Marella and C.Z. I don’t know. I just wonder.”

  “Babe didn’t know. She couldn’t. How? She could never have known that the woman in the story was you. Although she sure as hell knew the man was me.” And Bill remembered how bitter Babe was those last couple of years; how free she was with her regrets, her suspicions. Her accusations.

  “I hope she didn’t know,” Slim whispered, picking up a fork, weighing it in her hands, enjoying the cool heaviness of fine silver. “But I wonder…”

  “Don’t worry about it, Slim. It’s over. They’re both gone. And we’re left.”

  “We’re left with the memories. Not a great love, no, Bill, I don’t think either of us was capable of that. But Truman and Babe, they were—well, Babe was, anyway, and I think that blinded her because in the end, Truman was Truman. But he did what we never could. He began to speak the truth. Not someone else’s truth, not Perry Smith’s or Holly Golightly’s or even his own. No, he began to tell the truth about us. And the thing is, Bill, darling—the truth is ugly. Yours. Mine. Even Babe’s.”

  Bill made a garbled, anguished sound; Slim saw his throat working, as if he was trying to swallow something, and she grasped his hand again, and placed it against her breasts, her saggy, deflated breasts, so that he could feel her, feel her heart, her femininity, her warm, solid self. She closed her eyes, enjoyed a man’s hand upon her breasts for the first time in eons, and knew, right now, that she was alive, she was still here, not a memory, not a relic; not some old woman nobody looked at twice on the street. Not some forgotten name in a faded magazine, an answer to the question of “Where are they now?”

  She opened her eyes. Bill was grinning at her with that ageless boy’s leer, quite at odds with his watery, faded eyes, his visible hearing aid. But he had relaxed, his hand still upon her breasts, until she removed that hand and tucked it back on his own lap.

  “So I still like to see you, my friend. I still like to sit in La Côte Basque and sip wine and eat fine food and indulge in our memories—the good ones, the ones we want to remember. So let’s do that. That’s the story we can tell ourselves, at night when we can’t sleep. We can tell ourselves that there is one other person in the world who sees it in the same way, who remembers. Who remembers her. Babe. And Gloria. And even Truman, I guess, as he was, back then. Our fun, gossipy friend. Our entrée into a different world, for a time. An amusing, brief little time. A time before it was fashionable to tell the truth, and the world grew sordid from too much honesty.”

  Slim raised her glass; so did Bill.

  “To Babe. To Truman. To Papa and all the other glittering, prevaricating ghosts of the past.”

  “To Babe,” Bill echoed. And they clinked their glasses together in a toast, and spent the rest of the afternoon talking about their grandchildren.

  —

  IN THE END, AS in the beginning, all they had were the stories. The stories they told about one another, and the stories they told to themselves.

  “I loved her, she was the great love of my life, my only regret,” Truman breathed near the end, as he lay, exhausted from the world, from abuse, from himself, always himself.

  “I loved him, he was the great love of my life,” Babe whispered to herself as she closed her eyes and gave up the struggle, for it was ugly, and she’d never done an ugly thing in her life, and she wasn’t about to start now.

  “I’m alone,” they each thought, and one was amused, the other appalled.

  “Mama,” Truman whispered, as a stranger held his hand, and called for an ambulance.

  “Truman,” Babe thought she said aloud, as she felt herself sinking, sinking, and then rising. But then she knew she didn’t. And then she didn’t know anything, ever again.

  “Beautiful Babe,” Truman said, and he knew he said it, he heard his own voice, very weak, strange to his ears. And then he heard no more.

  Now there were no more stories to tell, to soothe, to comfort, to draw strangers close together; to link like hearts and minds.

  To wound, to hurt. To destroy the one thing they each loved more than anything else—

  Beauty. Beauty in all its glory, in all its iterations; the exquisite moment of perfect understanding between two lonely, damaged souls, sitting silently by a pool, or in the twilight, or lying in bed, vulnerable and naked in every way that mattered. The haunting glance of a woman who knew she was beautiful because of how she saw herself reflected in her friend’s eyes.

  The splendor of belonging, being included, prized, coveted.

  The loveliness of a flower, lilies of the valley, teardrop blossoms snowy white against glossy green foliage. Made lovelier because of the friend’s hand tenderly proffering the blossom, a present, a balm.

  The beauty of understanding tears in an understanding face.

  The beauty of a perfectly tailored shirt, crisp, blinding white, just out of the box.

  The beauty of a swirl of taffeta, the tinkling of bells, diamonds, emeralds; a pristine paper flower.

  Beauty.

  —

  THE SWANS SWAM AHEAD, always ahead, their bodies gliding so that none could see the effort of their feet beneath the surface, paddling, moving, propelling them forward, forward, to that beautiful spot far ahead, an incandescent curtain of light, a shower of moonbeams, a heavenly constellation of stars.

  His body, however, was not like theirs; the effort always showed, and he panted and grunted, trying to keep up, sometimes managing to sprint ahead, but always his brow perspired, his chest heaved, his breathing was labored.

  Sometimes the lead swan held out her hand, long and white and graceful, sometimes revealing rubies, sometimes emeralds; sometimes empty, waiting only for his hand to grasp it, and the two of them smiled their conspirators’ smile and he felt himself no longer working so hard or falling behind, and it was effortless, the two of them together, pulling ahead of the others, sometimes turning to wink or grin.

  But then, at the end; as the radiance began to descend upon them, raining down diamonds and sea glass, something happened. He never knew what. Only that he faltered once, smiled, danced, turned his back or ran too far ahead, he never could quite understand which it was. But he closed his eyes, opened them, and found himself once more back on the shore, his feet caked in mud, rooted, left behind. Alone.

  And the swans swam on toward that shimmering waterfall of luminescence; they never looked back, no matter how much he cried, how he screamed until his throat was raw and his face was red; they glided forward, one by one disappearing into the slender shadows between the moonbeams, the lead swan allowing the others to go ahead; she stood guard, watching them. And finally, she turned to gaze at him once more with those grave, understanding eyes, and he screeched her name, begged her forgiveness, pleaded her favor, but she turned away to follow the others.

  And she, too, vanished into the shadows between the light, and there was nothing left of any of them, only the faint ripples of their wake in the water, which he watched and watched with tears in his eyes, tears that turned into diamonds that turned into dust, the tremors of that wake widening, spreading, rippling into the crystal-dusted indigo of the pond that was the lake that was the ocean that was the dream of a forgotten world.

  Until it, too, disappeared.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  When I was a girl, I was one of t
hose people who were drawn to New York.

  I was born and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana. A lovely place, but I always had the sense that I didn’t quite belong. Somehow—and I honestly don’t remember how on earth this was possible—when I was fairly young, I got my hands on copies of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. I suppose maybe they were carried in the local library, or perhaps the one bookstore at the mall stocked them. All I know is the first time I opened The New Yorker—not quite understanding the cartoons, but pretending I did—I realized, finally, where I was meant to be.

  And so I wished myself onto these magazines’ sophisticated pages.

  I read about—and imagined I knew intimately—people like Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal and Brooke Astor; I devoured descriptions of night life and openings and galas and vignettes about Central Park, Tiffany, Bergdorf Goodman, 21. Truman Capote was always featured in the pages of these magazines, and of course I knew about him. I saw him on television, a bloated, campy figure waving his hands, telling outrageous stories. I saw him in Murder by Death, which at age thirteen, I thought to be hilariously witty.

  I knew that Truman Capote was the author of a book called In Cold Blood, a book my mother owned but wouldn’t let me read. That was about all I knew about him from a literary perspective, however. He was simply one of those flamboyant 1970s characters, just like Liza Minnelli and Halston and the Village People.

  In the pages of Vanity Fair, I also read, frequently, of a woman named Babe Paley. A fashion icon—that was always how she was described, along with other names like Gloria Guinness, Marella Agnelli, and Slim Keith. By the time I was aware of these women, they were already spoken of reverently, in the past, a past that was still longed for even in the late 1970s. They were ghostly, beautiful images to me, wearing clothes that were exquisite and unattainable. I didn’t know anything about “fashion,” of course; I got all my clothes at Sears and J.C. Penney. But I dreamed of fashion, just as I dreamed of New York, and the only thing I regret in my life is that I didn’t get there. I was a child of the Midwest, of midwestern parents who, well-intentioned, instilled the fear of God and big cities in me, even as I visualized myself on gritty urban streets, fantasized about taking the subway, longed to be surrounded by skyscrapers and people who talked loudly and in interesting accents. But the fear won out, I’m sorry to say. For a very long time.