Swan Song

by Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott

  Of course. Babe’s birthday. Before the gloom has time to settle, he scrawls Sidney’s name below hers, and makes his way to the kitchen.

  He opens the freezer to find a pristine bottle of Stoli, purchased by Sidney in his absence. No one to stop him, Truman pours himself a generous Orange Drink, his ‘friend’ having thoughtfully left a fresh carton of OJ in the fridge as well. The boy sips with delight. He pulls his pillbox from his coat pocket, placing a lilac pill into his mouth then a green one, together blooming like a vine of inflorescence, which makes him think of Babe all the more… Gawd but he misses her in moments like these. Finally, the pièce de résistance: the oval tablet of Halcion, which he savors like a nun with a Eucharist wafer.

  He makes his way down the hall to his own bedroom, where he changes into a pair of black silk pajamas. As he shuts the wardrobe door he sees a figure standing behind him in the glass.

  He jumps with fright—the hit men—the assassins! (Who on some level he knows don’t really exist. There are intruders in his house all right, but they’re of quite another nature.)

  He starts to scream, but stops, recognizing the figure behind him.

  ‘Joe… ? Is it you?’

  In the mirror, Joe Capote—whom he’d seen less and less since Nina died, hardly at all since his third wife stalked the boy genius. Could this be his comeuppance?

  He rubs his eyes roughly, steeling himself to look back toward the mirror. When he does, the vision is gone. Not a trace of Step-papa Joe. He takes deep breaths, taking a vial of Dilantin from his medicine cabinet. He’s been told to take these to stave off the seizures, which at this point he’s keen to avoid. ‘Christ, let’s hope he didn’t bring Nina with him,’ Truman mutters to himself, sounding more flippant than he feels. He recovers his Orange Drink and moves to his study. He hears something… Soft. A thrumming of sorts?

  He looks to see a moth, wings fluttering, caught inside his Tiffany lamp, drawn to the light, its whisper-weight beating against the bulb. Only a moth, he laughs at himself. Even so, he sits on the Victorian sofa, his back to the wall, so nothing might sneak up behind him.

  It’s then that he hears it properly. Not the moth wings, but beating all the same. Thrumming… Louder. Over it, something like Babe’s laughter, rippling… then Gloria’s. He turns to catch what he imagines might be their shadows crossing the room, or perhaps its just a trick of the light. On the windowsill, beside the chintz curtain, two perfectly white feathers. A pigeon’s, he tells himself, blown in from the ledge. But when he reaches a hand out to grasp them, he’s more convinced than ever of their origin, as little sense as it makes.

  Two perfect, white swan feathers.

  He moves back to the sofa, trembling now. A joke? A terrible joke that Jack has played to scare him onto the straight and narrow? Or could this be a plot to sneak in and steal his precious manuscript? His manuscript! He throws caution to the wind, racing to the hallway where his bag and suitcase lie, only to discover that the latter has been opened, guts rifled, every conceivable item tossed from its cavities. He stops—confused, losing the plot. He lunges for his carry-on—and lawdy-mercy-praise-jesus there it is.

  Eight hundred pages, wrapped in brown— —

  Of course he hadn’t lost it! He’d learned that lesson years ago, when he first began to hear us. He returns to the study, unwrapping the paper, anxious to ensure that all is there. He holds it close, shielding the pages from phantom eyes, checking each chapter—snickering at moments that tickle his fancy. Brows furrowing critically on occasion, grasping for a Blackwing to alter wayward typos. Others he considers with a ruminative gaze, besotted with his own prose. He places the manuscript carefully on the table, and feeling thus secure, returns to the kitchen for a top-up of his Orange Drink.

  He pauses… What’s that he smells… ? Cigarette smoke? It couldn’t be—he gave up years ago, after what it did to Babe. Could it be seeping through the walls? Do the Rothsteins smoke? One never knows these days. He sniffs the air with a sommelier’s skill, detecting floral notes in the cigarette smolder. Perfume. Not one, but several. The scents he used to relish at cocktail parties, when women left their signature fragrances lingering in their wake, a sign of their presence as they moved from room to room. He thinks he detects the sweet fragrance of jasmine that Babe so often wore, though it equally reminds him of Marella, hers brightened with top notes of bergamot. He catches a hint of the spicy musk of Gloria, the orchid milk of Lee, which peppers the air with danger. The fresh simplicity of C.Z. and her tuberose, or Slim and her wet gardenias, mixed with Leland’s bay rum, lingering on her skin.

  As the boy moves through the kitchen, it seems that he can smell a bouquet, as if each of us has been present and chosen to exit the room.

  From the study he hears a bang! A blunt crack, like a gunshot. He rushes back in, where he finds the curtains billowing. The wind having blown the window open—just like the night of the break-in. A gust sends his manuscript pages scattering across the room, several sliding under the sofa, which he scrambles on hands and knees to retrieve.

  Make sure it’s all there, Truman. You wouldn’t want to miss a page…

  He practically leaps from his skin. He scuttles back to his sofa. The flapping escalates in volume, surrounding him. Wings… Sets of wings, descending. Imperceptible.

  Shining from various points around the room, a dozen eyes, liquid, lustrous black, a constellation of stars. Cygnus—the Northern Cross.

  He scrambles back to his perch with the wall at his back and stares. At nothing, at everything. At that which he cannot see, but feels. He knows he’s in the presence of something, but knows not what. He waits. And we wait. We have all the time in the world.

  Finally, he ventures—‘Hello?’

  Silence.

  ‘Is anyone there?’

  Silence, but for the battering of wind against the pane. ‘Nina… ?’

  No…

  With a mixture of fear and what can only be described as a rush of hope—‘Babyling… ?’

  And… (we prompt him).

  ‘Mamacita… ?’

  Our collective sigh ruffles the curtains. Truman. Do you really not know us by now?

  We watch his dull little brain begin to piece it all together, which he’s done before but forgotten, dismissing the revelations as the fleeting products of barbital or Thorazine or any number of others. It’s not so far-fetched after all! (Mind, this might be the Halcion talking.)

  ‘All of you— —?’

  He can feel a wave of warmth from our collective pleasure at his having guessed.

  He waits, and we wait. Listening and lurking.

  ‘Whh–what do you want?’

  Did you know, Truman, that swans—while undeniably graceful and usually benign—can fight like hell when they’re under attack? When their mates are threatened, or their nests are at risk… ? They can go from serene to vicious in an instant.

  We assume that he knows this—his head is stuffed with hundreds of useless animal facts—but being so addressed, he isn’t sure how to reply.

  Did you know, for instance, that their wings possess the power to break a human limb… ?

  He shakes a feverish head.

  Did you know that they’re the fastest of all waterfowl and migrate in V formation? They’ve learned, you see, that by staying alongside the wing-tip vortices created by their neighbors, they might exploit the wake of the upwash—propelling themselves with the force of the whole. Can you guess what that means?

  ‘No.’

  It means that there’s strength in numbers. And—this bit we feel you must know, it being right up your street—they can be referred to by a slew of collective nouns. A bevy. A bank. An eyrar. A drift, a game, a herd. A lamentation—we like that one best. It’s poetic, wouldn’t you say? Of course it’s referring to the dying swan’s lament…

  How his heart is racing. How he wishes we’d go away. He’d love to pop another Halcion, but fears what we’ll do should he dare move a muscl
e.

  Surely you know that swans sense their own death approaching, and sing the most beautiful of songs, right at the moment of expiration? They literally sing and then… finito.

  His little chest puffs in silence, too wary to brag, lest he might be punished for it. Of course he knows this. He knows it from Shakespeare and Tennyson and Dryden and Proust. Some of his closest pals growing up. ‘Like a long team of snowy swans on high / Which clap their wings and cleave the liquid sky,’ he almost whispers. He wouldn’t dare test our patience with a longer recitation, but reckons a heroic couplet couldn’t hurt.

  So. Silence.

  What about the book, Truman? What about Answered Prayers?

  ‘What about it?’ (Is that defensiveness we detect in his tone?)

  How’s it coming?

  ‘Fine.’

  Is it done?

  ‘No.’

  Is it close to being done?

  ‘… Yes.’

  Liar. Have you written any of it—beyond that shit in Esquire?

  ‘Yes!’

  You do know time is ticking…

  We feel his pulse speed, watch him press a hand to his chest.

  ‘Please stop! I don’t want to discuss—’

  Don’t you just feel that clock in the sky, ticking away?

  ‘I keep thinking I’m almost done—just a breath away! That all I need is one more day, one more day to get it right, to finish—the ultimate state of grace. But the time… !

  Tick. Tick. Tick.

  ‘It feels like there’s an organ-grinder speeding time up, cranking it faster and faster. And I’m just the monkey, chained to his box, forced to dance at warp speed, desperate to keep up! A day becomes a week becomes a month becomes a year—’

  Becomes five, ten, fifteen… ?

  ‘I’m begging you—’

  Have you ever stopped to consider, Truheart… who is writing who?

  ‘What?’

  Is it you who is telling our stories, or we who are telling yours?

  It all seems a puzzle, a nasty ventriloquial game.

  If only you’d done us justice…

  ‘But I have! It’s beautiful—! It’s Proust!’

  Gossip! we find ourselves barking.

  Pettegolezzo!—this from Marella.

  ‘But all literature is gossip!’ he cries in his defense. ‘What in God’s green earth is Anna Karenina but gossip? Or Madame Bovary, or War and Peace for Chrissake?’

  What will you do now, Truman? we hear ourselves sneer. Who are you—what are you—without your precious words?

  ‘I—’ he begins, but we stop him, pecking our rage.

  Nothing! Just a pissant rug rat from— Unwanted—unnatural—

  A monstrous little freak—

  A genius, a failure, an addict—

  A lethal goddamn cobra, taxidermied upright—

  Alone, abandoned—

  ‘Terrified.’ Truman exhales. He’s never been so close to knowing what his book needs to be. Yet never so far from reaching it.

  If only he had it in him! He sees it all so clearly—all that he wants—needs—to pull from the heavens and render immortal. The cast of thousands, all mixing and mingling at a glorious soirée in Shangdu—that ancient Chinese city in Mongolia, the Xanadu old Coleridge had in mind when he penned Kubla Khan, on a peacock fan of hallucinogens himself. There the boy sees shimmering rivers, on which one might float. Wavering wheat. Lapis seas. Sleek structures of glass and steel, rising from desert floors. Big drafty farmhouses with beauty in their sparseness. He sees yachts and speedboats and streamlined planes, one shape-shifting into the next. And the people… Everyone he’s ever met. Everything he’s seen.

  There above it all he balances with high-wire grace, hovering over his visions, his beautiful visions; the perfect world that he’s constructed in his head, from nothing more than his very own thoughts.

  It makes us want to jostle the tightrope.

  It gives a sick pleasure to watch him fall and fail. An incestuous spirit of schadenfreude, given how closely we’re linked. We’ll concede that there is no us without Truman, but neither is there Truman without us. He’s been forced to coexist with us as we honk and bark and rage. He lives with our resentment festering within him. We are the cancer eating his insides—a dilemma, when one considers it. We cannot exist without the host, yet we take solace in destroying him.

  It would seem to beg the question, are we committing some sick form of mass hara-kiri? But we could frankly give a fuck. It’s revenge that we seek. At any price.

  ‘I just wanted to tell your stories,’ he wails. ‘Like the most sublime of novels. I loved who you were—total self-creations, like the great heroines of literature—Karenina or Bovary, only better. Soooooo much better! Because you’re real.’

  We aren’t characters for your amusement, Truman. We’re women. Real women. And those are our lives you’re so casually scribbling.

  ‘Trust me, honey—there’s nothin’ casual about it!’

  Our lives—not fiction! You said the most horrible things—

  ‘I didn’t say them—P.B. did! You can’t blame a writer for what his characters say!’

  Who the hell SHOULD we blame?

  ‘I don’t know,’ he’s weeping now. ‘I just don’t know…’

  You know, there’s only one thing that cannot be forgiven…

  ‘Yes! Deliberate cruelty!’ he shouts, j’accuse, j’accuse, j’accuse.

  ‘You’re the monsters! What can be crueler than to reject someone flat out? Someone who loved you as much as I did?’

  You left us little choice…

  ‘I was an artist—always an artist!’

  Is any art worth this… ?Killing us and killing you—for something you’ll never finish—?

  ‘I’m trying as hard as I know how!’ he sobs. ‘And I’m tired… so tired.’

  Maybe… we pause, holding his attention, it isn’t meant to be finished…

  Silence.

  Because you can’t do it anymore… can you, Truman?

  He shakes his weighty head in his hands.

  ‘No,’ he whispers, relieved that someone has said what he cannot. That he cannot accomplish the one shimmering thing he most wants. That we’re the ones who have guessed it moves him inexplicably.

  You want to be done, don’t you… ?

  A mournful little nod. ‘Awfully. Oh so awfully.’ He no longer seems a tightrope artist hovering above, hoping to maintain his balance, but a creature below, standing at the bottom of the sea, staring up at the light above the surface. And that’s when it strikes him.

  So simple, so clear. Suddenly he knows, regardless of the outcome…

  Sometimes no words are better than the wrong ones.

  It’s then that he hears it…

  A great glorious symphony of voices, trumpeting the old, heralding the new. A crescendo of joy, drowning the loss and the pain. Honking, wailing, sweet Cygnus release! The swan song of swan songs, perhaps what he’s been working toward all along.

  He can hear Our voices, blending in concert, yet he can hear each of us as he knows us, soloists rising above the chorus. Babe’s silver timbre, a familiar tune, deepening and ripening with time, with the counterpoint of uncertainty. Slim’s death rattle, the rhythmic clack of the castanets, dancers whirling round his tiny room. He hears Gloria’s primal cry—the tale of epic exploits. A mariachi waltz, taunting the mandolins of doomed Casanovas. The coloraturas of Marella’s impassioned arias soaring higher, ever higher, then plunging back down. Colliding with harmonics of a low, bluesy wail. The exhaled puff of Lee’s cigarette smoke rising and swirling with visions of gin-soaked bar-room queens and midnight ramblers, of the undulating beat of rhythm and blues. He can hear old vaudeville tunes, crackling on a gramophone. The razzmatazz of showfolk, of C.Z.’s off-key trill. Taps on uneven planks of riverboat stages—stomp-hop-shuffle-step-flap-step, stomp-hop-shuffle-step-flap-step. Trumpets’ wails, jangling pianolas. Lullabies in dulcet tones; a mam
a’s voice, honeyed. Singing to a boy she never asked for, who thought hers the sweetest of songs, given her smile as she cradled him close.

  Over it all, the sweet cry of waterfowl, like the blare of brass and woodwinds.

  The flock of Apollo, opening lovely, lengthy throats and issuing a final collective howl, traveling up the long, curving chambers, miles long, and bursting forth like a thousand rays from a single celestial sun. Flying closer, ever closer toward that brilliant orb, heralding the dawn with an eternal moan of joy.

  The boy feels two muscular pinions extend through the wall and surround him, the Cartier watch ticking closer to the dawn. Without looking, he knows to whom they belong.

  ‘Vi-chen-tee? Did you hear it?’ He leans back into the crook of a golden wing, which folds protectively across his concave chest. ‘That was Answered Prayers. And it’s beautiful.’

  With that the boy loosens his grip, pages fluttering to the ground like tufts of eiderdown. His heart’s still full, so full… but his mind is light as a feather.

  Floating on clean white pages, so long a life raft—besieged— now a pleasure cruise through glimmering emerald grottos, cutting through the Aegean, finally drifting languidly down placid streams of blessedly empty thoughts.

  TWENTY-TWO

  1984

  REQUIEM

  THE BOY IS fifty-nine when he finally goes to China.

  It’s the only country he has yet to visit, the last stop on a well-traveled wish list. It’s in the last stifling days of August, almost a month to the day from his birthday.

  He’s planning to celebrate reaching his sixtieth year in grand style, for while it sounds old, the boy feels unnaturally young.

  He’s staying with Joanne Carson, one of the few ‘La Côte Basque’ victims still speaking to him. Something of a Truman sycophant, she was delighted to find herself featured in his opus, even if painted as a bitter cuckquean with a flagrant case of the clap. Eager to be linked to his literary legend, she’s desperate to be ensconced in the pantheon of Swans, though we’ll never think of her as anything more than a second-string cyg-net at best.

  She devotes herself to her houseguest’s needs whenever he deigns to visit, keeping her swimming pool heated at Jacuzzi temperatures so that he might sit on the first step year round, armed with a composition book, pretending to write—something he does with panache.