It was a gig he couldn’t refuse, for it paid him enough to bankroll Nina and Joe—the ability to do so being something he wants badly.
Having met and charmed the matinee idols of his youth, the boy was pleased to have infiltrated their meteoric sphere. He was the film’s mascot, never failing to regale both cast and crew with outrageous tales, whose veracity they doubted, but whose invention they admired. He earned the reluctant acceptance of Bogie and Huston, who came to respect their pint-sized scribe for his capacity to out-drink the whole damn bunch, as well as for his astonishing physical prowess.
Having beaten Bogie in an arm-wrestling challenge, the boy is feeling every inch the man his Mama always wanted him to be. He has—all five foot three of him—managed to rassle the great Bogart to the ground, inflicting a week’s worth of bed rest.
She’d love that detail… it’s macho after all.
‘Nina,’ he plans to brag to his Mama, ‘I overpowered Bogart. I took that poor, sweet man down in a bet. For all his tough-guy facade, he’s an absolute pussycat.’ (Of course we’ve all heard different figures—two hundred seems to be the median take, but his Mama’s indifference requires the fudging of figures for impact.)
When he phones specially to tell her this, a few days before Christmas, he fails to reach her. Christmas comes and goes without a call, but this isn’t unique. The boy has spent more Christmases without her than not. She usually sends a present in a box, wrapped in foil-paper, mailed to wherever he might be—tweed suits or bow ties or smart new swimming trunks—but this year he knows not to expect this.
It is he who sends her boxes now, or envelopes stuffed with cash. Money she needs to maintain her sham of a life; money that will keep her clinging to the final rung on the ladder of Café society, after the others have snapped beneath her.
His stories, once rejected by the New Yorker, have long since become the objects of an ongoing tug-of-war between publications.
Better still, he’s found love with a kind man. A man who is as present as Nina has been absent. Jack—a man’s man. The kind of man his Mama always wanted him to be.
‘Jack was tout droit when we met—straight as an arrow, honey. He was married to a terribly lovely girl—Joanie was her name. They were in Oklahoma together—dancers in the chorus, of all goddamn things! And inseparable, until she ran off with another chorus boy while Jack was fighting the Jerries overseas. Well, that just smashed that big ole heart of his into a thousand little bits. He was never gonna love again… until he found me.’
The boy’s Mama even likes Jack—as an entity unto himself, that is. When first introduced she flirted with him shamelessly, as she had with all of Truman’s lovers. He’s her perfect specimen. Rugged good looks, in an ‘everyman’ way. Freckled Irish skin. Auburn hair. A strong-set jaw and rich baritone. And Nina does love a man who can dance.
Her only beef with Jack, in fact, is the fact that he could ever take an interest in her son in that way. She refuses to believe Jack is anything more than her boy’s ‘close friend.’ When her own friends argue otherwise, Nina’s quick to insist, ‘Jack was married, for Chrissakes! As for Truman, all he needs is to find the right gal and settle down.’ When pressed—after a coupla Scotches—Nina will slur, ‘Look, I know what he is… But there are plenty of queers who marry nice girls.’
THE PHONE GOES at sunrise in the room at the Hôtel de France et de Choiseul on the rue Saint-Honoré.
The boy and Jack are sleeping, limbs entwined.
Jack fumbles for the phone, reaching past the boy, who disappears beneath the bed sheets. When he hears Joe Capote’s thick Cuban accent shouting on the line, Jack passes the phone along, wordlessly. It’s hard to make out what Joe’s saying on a good day, but now he sounds sauced beyond sense.
‘Joe… slow down,’ Jack hears the voice beneath the covers plead. ‘I can’t— What about Nina… ? Joe… Listen to me… Just put her on the line. I’ll sort it all— What—? Gone? When will she be back?’
Then:
‘What do you mean she’s gone… ?’
It’s then that Jack feels the boy’s body begin to tremble against his torso when he— —
*
JACK RECALLS BEING under the drill when the call comes—a sad fuck with a root canal.
He returns from the dentist to find the boy sitting on the Big-Bed, hanging up the phone. He looks to him, eyes wide. Frightened.
‘My Mama’s gone away, Jack.’
He begins to weep, but his tears refuse to come. Jack sits down beside him, wrapping his muscular arms around the stunned little creature.
As if in a daze, the boy assures him, ‘Don’t you worry. It’s okay. She’s done this before, and she always comes back, sooner or— —’
IN A VARIANT tale, the boy himself remembers arriving back from a walk in the Jardin du Luxembourg, icicles hanging from the trees like shards of Baccarat. He returns to find a telegram at the Hôtel de France et de Choiseul from Joe Capote.
When Jack returns from the dentist, he finds the boy curled in a ball on the mattress, still wearing his winter overcoat. He’s been crying, but he’s calm now.
‘Nina’s gone,’ is all he’ll say at first.
Jack lies down beside him in the bed and holds him. Then Jack hears him repeating a soft incantation, almost a lullaby:
‘I’ve got money. She didn’t have to do it… I’ve got the— —’
STILL ANOTHER TELLING brings a series of calls from Joe, who, no sooner than he hangs up, rings back again. He cannot comprehend that she really is gone, and needs to hear the boy’s high, melodic voice, his Southern cadence, if only to be reminded of his Nina, to fill the void left without her.
‘Just talk,’ Joe tells him on the transatlantic call.
The boy removes his glasses and rubs his brimming eyes, causing them to overflow, staining his cheeks with the damp.
‘What do you want me to say, Joe?’
‘It doesn’t matter. Say anything. Tell me a story… Tell me some gossip from the old neighborhood. I don’t care what you say—I just want to hear your voice.’
‘Okay.’
‘But Truman—?’
‘Yes?’
‘Keep talking. Keep talking, because if you stop, even for a second, I’m afraid I’ll fall apart.’
And so the boy, with a catch in his voice, begins to tell Joe Capote all about a hillbilly girl called Lillie Mae from Monroeville, who had scrapped and scraped to leave the little ole country town, who transformed herself in a willful feat of self-creation into Joe’s exotic Nina.
WHATEVER THE TIMING, it is certain that it happened in those first days of the new year, when the boy is summoned home to see his Mama one last time.
Jack resents the hell out of her. It’s just like Nina to drag him back, just when he’s finding his wings.
A plane ticket has been purchased and the boy has packed his grip. It’s arranged that a bus will collect him at the Hôtel de France et de Choiseul and drive him to the airport. His Vuitton suitcase sits by the door, a tag tied to its handle specifying ‘NEW YORK’ as its destination.
He sits on the bed’s edge, staring at nothing in particular. He cradles his dog close to his chest—the one he’d purchased for himself once he became successful. Since no one ever made good on their promises, he had to take matters into his own hands. It’s the boy’s first English bulldog—a puppy he’s christened Charlie J. Fatburger.
‘Now Charlie, you’ll be a good boy for Jack, won’t you?’ the boy whispers in his ear.
Charlie fails to reply beyond a steady, listless panting.
Jack is in the bedroom when the night maid enters, stumbling over the suitcase by the door. He hears her ask the boy—in heavily accented English—‘Alors! Monsieur,’ oo is going to New York… ?’
The boy’s voice—soft, forlorn—‘Me. I’m going.’
He sounds tiny—even tinier than he is. The boy’s persona is usually so much larger than his physical being, one forgets how s
mall he actually is.
When the concierge rings to announce that the boy’s transport has arrived, Jack carries his case downstairs for him.
It’s a freezing day in Paris, the temperature having dropped to three degrees Celsius. The boy shivers in a second-hand jacket, still holding his pup close, telling him in dulcet tones what a fine boy he is.
The driver takes his case, leaving him to say his goodbyes to Jack, who, in his stoic way, nods as if imparting the courage the boy lacks. He nuzzles Charlie Fatburger’s lumpy neck before placing him, with great care, into Jack’s arms. And without another word the boy climbs onto the bus, taking his seat among the empty ones. It starts to snow, the exact moment the bus pulls away from the curb, a gust of icy wind propelling him toward the airport, to the plane that will take him all the way across the world, back to New York City.
Later, we’ll think this is just the sort of indulgent, gothic detail the boy enjoys adding for impact and doubt that it had happened… but Jack, who is never one for embellishment, has sworn to those of us he deems worthy of conversation that it was indeed the case.
For once the boy doesn’t need fiction to garner our sympathy.
HE DOUBTS WHAT he’s been told until the moment that he sees her.
He feels certain they’ve gotten it wrong, and expects that when he walks into 1060 Park Avenue in his new Italian suit, plum silk waistcoat, and polished patent shoes, looking every inch the dandy, that Nina (a few Scotches in) will give him a scornful once-over and insist that he go change.
‘Who do you think you are,’ he’s sure she’ll challenge, ‘Oscar-frigging-Wilde? Now be a doll and pop off to your room and get yourself dressed proper. I’ve had your Brooks Brothers pressed and laid out.’
It’s not until he’s arrived at the barren apartment (she and Joe having been forced, by altered circumstances, to sell possessions in his absence in order to pay their creditors). Not until he’s donned the conservative blue Brooks Brothers suit she’s always favored—‘Now thaaaat’s classic,’ she’d drawl with sickly-sweet approval when he’d worn it under duress. Not until he’s seen her all laid out at Frank Campbell’s on Madison and 81st, Manhattan’s finest funeral parlor, for which he has footed the bill—she lying in the casket, in her one real Chanel suit, which she’d saved up for months to buy.
It’s not until then that it becomes a reality.
The boy braces himself as he approaches her coffin, prepared to encounter the features he’s studied so closely all his life. The long face, the porcelain skin. The honeyed curls, set at the beauty parlor in an arc around her face, like a halo dumped on its side.
When he brings himself to peek, the boy is startled to see not his Mama, but a woman much older than the Nina he’d last battled months earlier. Her hair, no longer its carefully maintained blond, is streaked with gray. He’ll later learn that she’d been forced to cancel her salon trips—an indulgence she and Joe could no longer afford. Still a spring chicken, just shy of her forty-ninth birthday, Nina’s graying hair makes her look a woman of sixty or more.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ the boy will demand of Joe as they hunch over a pair of bourbons, their fourth—or fifth?—round in a dive bar off East 56th in the blur of days to come. ‘Nina loved her hair… I could have paid for that.’ Joe will shrug, having existed in a permanent bubble of grief-stricken drunkenness for days.
Serene in her coffin as she never was in life, her complexion is preserved with the mortician’s thick pancake base, lending hercountenance a smooth, if slightly waxen sheen. (She’d have enjoyed that detail—calling it ‘a dewy glow,’ something she’dread in a magazine.) Her lips—thinner than the boy recalls, thanks to the stress of her troubles—are painted their signature red, though it now seems a smear of unnatural color.
A thin, crimson flatline.
The boy stares at her as if examining a stranger.
Later, when he attempts to piece together her final days, Eleanor Friede—the friend she had lunched with the week before her death—will tell him a story that nearly severs his grieving heart. Eleanor will recall it having been close to Thanksgiving rather than New Year’s, but county coroner records prove otherwise. They had been to the Plaza, the venue Nina (like her boy) loved above all others. They were seated in an out-of-the-way table in the Oak Bar, practically in the kitchen. Nina ordered modestly—a side salad and a single slice of bread, foregoing the rich delicacies she once had relished as lunch fare. The Plaza’s cognac chicken hash yet another luxury axed with all the rest. Besides, the hint of booze might have tossed her right off the wagon. She refrained from ordering even a thimble of wine, she having been off the sauce for almost six months. She chain-smoked a string of Trues and guzzled cups of coffee.
‘Tragic, really,’ Eleanor would muse. ‘We used to love a three-martini lunch, the pair of us. Hell, we’d start before noon, when we thought we could get away with it. But there Nina sat that last day—drinking coffee after coffee after coffee. She had the shakes—I dunno if it was the tremens, or all that caffeine, or plain old jittery nerves. But she wasn’t herself, that’s for certain. I should have known… If only I had said something. If only I’d intervened…’
Nina had confided in Eleanor about her recent trip to Cuba, where Joe had hoped to earn the dough to save his wanted hide. The authorities had circled like a kettle of vultures around Joe’s pending fraud case. He had been convicted on three counts and was facing fourteen years in Sing Sing, unless he could manage to pay back the hundred grand he had embezzled from employers. Cuba was a last-ditch effort to drum up the demanded sum, but that, like the rest, had ended in failure. Nina had said the trip would either make them or break them, and it seemed to have done the latter.
She’d thrown one final shindig, months before—had bragged she’d give li’l ole Park Ave an evening it wouldn’t forget. She’d made a list of all her society friends, and either circled their names or drawn an X through them, carefully weighing the transgressions of each. She’d planned for her party a Mardi Gras theme—made gumbo and po’ boys and beignets stuffed with cheese as offerings. But when word got around that Joe was Sing Sing bound, the guests had failed to come. Nina had sat on a rented chair in her vast, empty apartment and with head in hands had grieved for all that she had lost. She’d almost cracked the glimmering nut that was the great goal of her life; she had nearly become a society lady. But fate intervened and tossed Lillie Mae right back into the penniless gutter she’d worked all her life to escape.
Eleanor will report that after plates were removed at that last lunch at the Plaza, Nina pulled a compact from her pocketbook, along with a tube of lipstick. Her signature red—which the boy forever equates with sugared kisses and tin fire engines, bought by a con man called Daddy.
She’ll say Nina dug a tiny lip brush from her cosmetic bag, which she used to scrape the last of the lipstick from the tube, down to the dregs of the dregs. She painted her lips with an unsteady hand and laughed, sadly, ‘Well, that’s the last of that. Gone with the rest. Kaput.’
‘So get another—we’re walking right past Bendel’s.’
‘Can’t.’
Truman will listen as Eleanor recalls—
‘I did say to her, “Nina, for Christ’s sake, it’s just a tube of lipstick—anyone can afford a tube of lipstick… !” She looked at me in a curious way, looked right through me and said— “I can’t. It’s over.”’
The boy will shake his head, still trying to wrap his brain around it all. How had he missed it? Had he known, he would have sent her crates of lipsticks—cherries and scarlets and juicy candy-apples, mailed all the way from Paris, paying extra postage for first class.
He sheds tears when her birdlike body is all laid out at Frank Campbell’s funeral parlor, covered in hundreds of glorious calla— —
‘BUT WHAT HAPPENED?’ the boy asks joe as they take turns sitting in the few chairs left at 1060 Park after the funeral. The mourners have reconvened in the empty space, after s
he’s been cremated— burned to a crisp, to the consternation of her few remaining Bible-thumping relatives.
‘She told me to get the hell out, so I did,’ is all that Joe can offer. He himself seems unable to comprehend the loss—the burden of explaining it proving too great a task.
From what the boy pieces together, asking around the wake, his Mama, in her last few weeks, had fallen off the wagon. She had hit the bottle once again, the pressures of her ruin too much to stomach sober. She found she so relished the taste of that long-banned Mama-juice, she imbibed it like spring water. As was her habit when on the sauce, she’d have a glass too many and tend to pick a fight, with the closest person she could lay her hands on.
With Joe, whom she still loved with a lava-hot passion, her rage would fixate on his roving cock—between his Latin temper and Nina’s jealous rages, they proved a lethal cocktail when shaken.
That last night in question, Nina’s brother Seabon had come to stay, his wife in Bellevue for a tonsillectomy. The siblings had been drinking since mid-afternoon, starting, innocently enough, with lunchtime Bloody-Bloods, moving onto the dicier realms of Scotch.
As Seabon tells Truman, when cornered at the wake: ‘When Joe got home, Nina thought she smelled perfume on his collar. He’d leaned in to kiss her, see. She accused him of being the low-level rat she knew him to be—a no-good cheating sonofabitch.’
Joe had waved the white flag of the failed businessman’s button-down, which he stripped from his paunch as he retreated to the boy’s old room. Nina, itching for a showdown, had followed him, and Seabon in turn had followed her.
‘Don’t you pretend with me, Joe Capote,’ Nina’d reportedly hissed, climbing into Truman’s old bed, leaning over him. ‘I know where you go at night, you sick, whoring spic! I had you followed. Yeah, that’s right—followed by a gen-u-ine private dick. And he tells me that your cock-a-doodle-doo has been up to no damn good!’
Swan Song Page 21
