If he closes his eyes, he can imagine himself back at El Morocco, on the packed dance floor in the Forties, treading on Ann Woodward’s clodhopper toes.
Sometimes his fellow dancers, in their spandex and sequins, glare at him like ole Bang-Bang, when he inadvertently bumps into them. They can look at him funny all they like, the boy doesn’t give a hoot.
He’s already sprouted wings and flown far above their tawdry company. Flown away to a time and place of his own—the time and place that he has lost, but recovers on the floor; soaring higher still to another time and place entirely, where their soulless era can no longer touch him.
Sometimes he swings Babe around the floor, and Jack, the trio of them cutting loose together, like they once had at his party.
C.Z. alone—the few times she accompanies him to the nightclub of the future—knows the truth, and can only hope that this might make him happy.
In his silk pajamas or his white linen suits with nothing underneath, panama hat pulled rakishly over one eye, Truman Lindy hops for hours among the disco darlings, sweat pouring down his rapturous face, dancing frenzied, tipsy jitterbugs to the Big Bands in his mind.
TWENTY-ONE
1983
FANTASIA
TCHAIKOVSKY, OPUS 20
HE CROSSES HIS pygmy legs in a booth at the Turnpike Howard Johnson’s, sitting across from Gloria—pleased as punch.
He’s sipping a Salty Dog, admiring its innocuous shade of pink, rosy as a virgin’s tit; Gloria, a blush-colored daiquiri to match.
It’s been years since they’ve lunched. Years since they’ve spoken, in fact, she ever cautious, not wanting to offend Loel or Babe or Bill.
And yet, under the circumstances, so much time having passed, she has chosen—he supposes—to simply let bygones be bygones.
Of course they meet at their secret haunt, the one too gauche for all the others. They’d decided to order clams exclusively, both as a special treat and as a gesture of nostalgia, the Howard Johnson’s shellfish specialties being their favorites. As they polish off the first round of these, the boy laments the sorry state of affairs.
‘Don’t you find, Mamacita, that it often isn’t worth bothering to get outta bed these days?’ He looks as if he only succeeded in half the effort, in a blue seersucker suit like the ones his Mama once bought him—though having forgotten to put on a shirt. ‘I mean really. Compared to the old days, where can one hope to go… ?’
Gloria sighs, fingering the stem of her daiquiri. ‘Yes. Well. When we were young we had such divine restaurants, did we not?’ (The best of which have shut in recent years, it pains us to say, or been overrun by the wrong types and thus irrevocably altered.) ‘Wonderful nightclubs—’
‘And the parties…’ he interjects.
‘Beautiful parties,’ she beams at him, and they both know she means his Ball. She shakes her lovely head with regret. ‘Now all they want to do is go to discos,’ with palpable disdain.
‘Well, Mamacita, you never went to Cinquanta-Quattro. That was a fine disco—mighty fine.’ (Of course, its owners having been arrested for tax evasion, Truman’s beloved 54 has shuttered its doors as well.) ‘It had a magic of sorts… I did so want to take you there. C.Z. adored it…’ He tries to sound convincing.
‘Bah,’ Gloria scoffs. ‘It couldn’t hold a candle to what we knew.’
‘No, I guess you’re right. They’re a pretty-enough bunch, but they’re all a flash in the pan. Nothin’ but PR puppets. Not an ounce of glamour among’ em. They lack what you had.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘Gravitas.’
She sips her drink, ingesting this.
‘I mean, can any of that bunch compare to a Betty Bacall? Or a you or a Babe or a Slim? Even the vile Bouviers will have’ em talking decades hence for the lack of competition. This bunch… they’re no flock of Swans. They’re not even ugly ducks—they’re plastic ones. Identical, factory-lined, mass-produced…’
‘I think we must accept, Diablito, that the days of your Swans have passed.’
They sit, pondering this loss with a quiet reverence.
‘Do you ever find,’ he finally muses, a tinge of regret in his voice, ‘that all the people you really like are dead… ?’
‘Yes,’ says Gloria with a sad, knowing smile.
He nods. They eat, content.
‘I’ve missed you, Mamacita.’
‘I’ve missed you too, Diablito.’
He, solicitous, ‘Would you like another daiquiri, honey?’
‘Why yes—I think I would.’
‘More clams… ?’
‘Please.’
Truman flags the waitress. ‘I’ll have a top-up on my Salty Dog. The señora would like another daiquiri—and we’ll split another order of clams casino, por favor.’
The waitress stares at him with a wary expression. She begins to say something, then thinks better, scribbling the additions onto their ticket, setting it back on its dish beside the condiments, shuffling off to fetch their drinks.
‘Gracious! The way Flo there looked at me, you’d think I’d turned blue and sprouted six heads!’
‘Perhaps, Diablito, she failed to understand your order.’
‘Well, she can kiss my grits!’
Truman twists in his seat to keep an eye on the waitress in her polyester frock. ‘How dare she judge us for wanting another plate of those marvelous little— —’
He turns back, startled to find the booth opposite empty. He looks around for Gloria, but there’s no trace of her. The bell on the chapel-style door jingles softly, but no one comes or goes. The waitress eventually returns with a tray laden with clams, Salty Dog…
‘And a daiquiri for your… friend.’
THAT NIGHT, DINING with jack at La Petite Marmite across from the UN Plaza:
‘You’ve hardly touched your food,’ Jack says as the boy cuts his meat into tiny, unappetizing cubes.
‘I’ll get a doggie bag. Truth be told, I’m stuffed fulla clams.’
‘Oh?’
‘I had lunch with Gloria today.’
‘Truman.’ Jack pauses. ‘Gloria’s dead.’
‘Yes, I think I knew that…’ Then, calmly—‘When?’
‘Two years ago?’
‘How… ?’ He saws at his steak.
Jack studies him, concerned. ‘Do you really not remember?’
‘I’m—not sure.’
‘Heart attack. Loel found her lying on the floor of their bathroom in Lucerne.’
‘Oh.’
‘But some say she went like your mother…’
‘I see.’
‘That she got tired and called it a day.’
‘Hmmm.’
‘Seconal, they think.’
‘Weeeeuulll.’ The boy tries to sort this out in his mind, along with what he knows to be true. ‘We had lunch today and she told me to tell you hello,’ beaming Panglossian pleasure.
A beat. Jack rises.
‘I’ll see you back home,’ he says, leaving Truman alone at the table to ponder the loss.
THE BOY ISN’T certain, but he’s almost positive that Jack is holding him hostage.
He’s convinced that his life is in danger. He wants to make calls, to phone for reinforcements, but there are so few left who’ll answer.
‘Dahling,’ C.Z. tells him in her stern boss-lady tone on the line from Palm Beach, ‘Jahck is not trying to kidnahp you. In fact, quite the reverse. Now, you go play nice or he’ll be off on the first plane bahck to Verbier, fahster than your head can spin!’
‘But Sissy… he keeps talking about me in the past tense. As if I’m already gone.’
‘Maybe, bustah, you should spend a bit more time on your own prose rahther than deconstructing Jahck’s.’ Silence. ‘Truman? Do you hear me?’
‘Yes, Sis.’
He hangs up and returns to his bed. Lying flat, staring at the ceiling. Watching a spiral of dust in the air—air as heavy as the particles’ weightlessness. He f
eels his heart racing, tripping over itself to— —
He stops. Exhales. Slooooow the pace. Slooooooow.
He feels his pulse revving like a—? He can picture it, that object of transport Gianni owns… Not simply a speedboat but a—? Just as it’s about to come to him, he abandons the effort. Has it really come to this… ? Lost words, tired metaphors. Hack-neyed— Images he never would have— Even when he was little more than a kid with a Remington with keys that stuck, that he found in his— Was he not the writer who once insisted an entire work could be ruined by the faulty rhythm in a sentence? These days it feels he can barely write his name. Speedboats… Were they what he—? Or did that only pop into his head because he had Marella on the brain? There was something he saw—no, read—? that he found he wanted to tell her, something he felt sure would amuse her, but he’d promptly forgotten whatever it might—
A sharp pain. He grips his chest. He can feel his heart breaking into a thousand lethal— as if struck by a—? His grasp of language has— It’s like the fluttering wings of a—
Fucking hell. Is it a—? The words elude him. He can see the objects in his head, but cannot for the life of him remember what they’re called. Perhaps if he can manage to hold his heart inside the cavity of his chest—like Jackie held fragments of Jack’s skull in place in the back of a car in a plaza called Dealey, desperate to keep that precious brain matter from seeping out. If he can just keep his own heart from exploding; prevent his brilliant brain from leaking.
He thinks there is nothing so terrifying as reaching into the clouds each day, trying to pull down the words from the sky—to graft—no, to pin them to the blank sheet of—
He crumples the mental paper.
Oh Lord, the terror—the sheer terror of the gamble, for that’s what it was, was it not? If he could only catch the words and secure them to the page.
He no longer believes that words and phrases are generated from him. Rather that they exist as independent entities, and the best one can hope for is to lure one or more of them into a trap in order to use for narrative purposes. He no longer has faith that even a boy genius could hope to act as anything more than hapless hunter. Even then, they might—possessing minds of their own— choose not to cooperate.
Just as one’s subjects might choose to resist.
It’s been so long since the words have come, he has forgotten what they—
He stops. Scribbling through the thoughts in his mind.
Exhaling his strangled breath in three staccato puffs. He lies perfectly flat—on bed or floor or sofa—no longer bothering to arrange his chintz pillows, a ritual which once seemed to serve him. Ditto the legal pads, the Blackwings, and the weighty Smith Corona. He no longer bothers with props. By the time he collects them, the glimmer of promise he initially felt will have faded, leaving him overwhelmed with fatigue for having failed before he started.
MANHATTAN FEELS CROWDED these days.
When he cannot pin down the words—which, let’s face it, is far more often than not—he prowls the city streets, amazed to encounter so many people that he recognizes.
Strolling down Fifth Avenue one rainy afternoon, he spots a woman in a mackintosh, standing in front of the window at Tiffany’s. Her gazelle legs extend from the hem, and even wrapped in the all-weather shield, her lithe, boyish frame is apparent. Her cropped hair is colored a multitude of hues—beige and caramel, streaked with champagne. Dark glasses shade her eyes, consuming her pixie countenance.
‘Holly…’ he breathes. He inches closer, careful not to spook the skittish creature, his clumsy stealth having the opposite effect. The girl suddenly turns, regarding him as a stalker sneaking up on her—perhaps a flasher in his own trench. She backs away, and he sees in an instant that she is not the girl he thought she was.
It’s in a less salubrious setting that very week that he encounters another familiar face. It happens at Twilight, an underground saloon on the East Side in the twenties, where older men go to meet beautiful boys and where beautiful boys vie for the affections of the old. He’s fled there after a fight with Jack, thinking himself one of the youngsters among the clientele, and is rather shocked upon arrival to find himself an elder. As he sits at the bar, drooped over a glass of bourbon, his cherub eyes catch the reflection of an ancient man in the mirror opposite. It takes a moment for him to recognize himself. He’s pondering how this might have happened, how he’s transformed from a golden baby doll to a shriveled Tes-tudo graeca alone at a bar, when a young man approaches him. Dark features. Sensitive eyes. Walking with a limp.
‘Evening, amigo.’
The tortoise peeks from its shell, recognizing the voice.
‘Perry… ?’ He squints in the dimness of the tavern.
The young man smiles, a lopsided grin he remembers.
‘Sure. If that works for you.’
‘My gawd… I’ve never been so relieved. I thought—I saw you—’ He finds he can’t bear to say the word ‘hanged,’ so instead he simply smiles, grateful that it’s clearly no longer the case. ‘I supppooooose,’ he ponders aloud, ‘a mistake must have been made. How are you?’
‘Swell. You?’
‘Over-the-moon, having seen you.’
‘Well, isn’t that great news.’
‘Care for a drink?’
‘Don’t mind if I do,’ the young man replies.
A couple of whiskeys in and he takes the trembling tortoise face in his hands, sharing a sloppy kiss laced with Mama-juice. How warm the youth’s lips feel. They taste of licorice and nicotine and the traces of other men. How he had longed to kiss them those many years ago, visiting a cell under the watchful gaze of wardens who might have prevented him access had he been caught indulging the personal. The book was what had mattered, more than his desire, which flared and faded with the force of his will. But here, now, the lips are his. Perry…
He lingers, eyes shut tight. Drinking him in.
‘My name’s Fred, by the way.’
‘What?’ the tortoise asks, eyes still closed with the rapture of it all.
‘Name’s Fred. But you can call me Terry if you like.’
‘Perry,’ he corrects. The leatherback lids flutter open and he sees…
A youth with Latin features, teeth like cracked piano keys. A cast on his foot explaining the limp. Not the character the tortoise had mistaken him for.
‘Whatever you say, amigo…’ The youth goes in for another greedy kiss, but it’s not the same. Truman drops a crumpled bill on the counter, hurrying out to the street.
NOT ALL OF these encounters are welcome ones.
Sitting at the Colony, tucked into a booth in the bar, nose in a book, slurping a bowl of mulligatawny on the table before him, he feels the sensation of being watched.
An eldritch gaze…
In the far corner of the room, he notices a woman, observing him.
She sits alone, a bottle-blonde. Dressed in subdued tones, yet emanating a shimmer of tinsel beneath the surface. Frosted lips. Painted eyes and cheeks. The spitting image of…
‘Bang-Bang…’ he stammers, in a state of disbelief.
The woman says nothing. Eats nothing. Drinks nothing.
Simply sits and stares.
He motions the waiter over. ‘Honey, how long has Mrs. Woodward been sitting there?’ He nods at the blonde across the room. The waiter turns, scanning the tables.
‘We have no Mrs. Woodward today, Mr. Capote. Mrs. Vanderbilt has been at her table since twelve.’ He nods toward an ashen matron in the next booth.
‘Not Mrs. Vanderbilt. Mrs. Woodward, beside her. Mrs. Ann Woodward.’
The waiter shifts uncomfortably. ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Capote, but I know nothing of the lady that you mention.’
Across the room, the blonde smiles at him—mockingly?
‘Ann goddamn Woodward, sitting right over there—plain as day!’
‘Oh, yes. Well. Of course. Mr. Capote, may I bring you another Orange Drink?’
The boy nods,
absently.
As soon as the waiter disappears, Ann Woodward raises her fingers, curling them into the shape of a pantomime gun. Pointing it directly at Truman, her ruby nails pull the trigger. He leaps up and all but sprints from the restaurant, not bothering to wait for his check.
A FEW NIGHTS later, the break-in occurs.
It so happens it’s Christmas Eve. The boy has taken great care to have an evergreen delivered to the twenty-second floor. He ordered a box of ornaments from Tiffany’s, and bought a silver star-topper from the Bronx five and dime. He’s indulged visions of carols around the tree, of endless cups of eggnog. Of presents wrapped and opened and of fireside canoodling.
He’s begged Jack to come home from Verbier in order that they might spend Christmas together, something they haven’t done in years. Tru has come to hate the Swiss, Jack to loathe New York, he refusing to leave the Alps at the height of ski season. Still, hearing the anxiousness in Truman’s tone, Jack conceded this once.
Upon arrival, Jack clears the liquor from the cabinets, dumping bottles into trash bags, along with Truman’s pills. He has yet to discover the stash of cocaine tucked between the pages of books on Truman’s shelves, making passages he loves to revisit all the more pleasurable—favorite lines of Flaubert or Proust guarding other sorts of lines entirely, which he likes to snort on the sly. The boy grows so giddy with the notion of having Jack home, he pops a few Thorazine to enjoy the feeling all the more— Thorazine which he chases with a fifth of vodka, cleverly hidden in a NyQuil bottle. Jack takes one look at the lolling tongue, the rolling eyes, and marches straight to the bedroom to dress, reemerging in evening clothes. Truman begs him to stay, but Jack seems unwilling to trade Verdi’s Macbeth for less interesting tragedy at home.
The boy retires to his study, where he pulls À la Recherche du Temps Perdu from the shelf, opening its clean white pages, snort-ing a neat line of blow directly from a madeleine. In half an hour’s time, he’s fallen asleep slumped on the Victorian sofa with old Marcel in his lap.
Swan Song Page 42
