by Kim Powers
I should have known that was an omen.
I looked in the mirror and talked to myself.
“This is my party. This is my party. I have a Pulitzer prize and he doesn’t.”
It was the first time in my life I’d ever said it aloud.
It was like somebody else was talking.
Only then did I notice an attendant in the bathroom. As soon as I saw her, in the mirror, she looked down, as if to say “I didn’t hear a word you said.”
“I. am. mortified. I didn’t mean . . . I know it’s his party . . . I was just joking.”
She didn’t know what I was talking about, and even if she had, she wouldn’t have cared.
She offered a tray, covered with objects in black or white: washcloths, combs, hand soaps, even breath mints—everything stamped with the ornate “P” of the Plaza Hotel. I picked up one of the soaps, and saw that the back was stamped with “TC.”
Truman had infiltrated even the bathrooms.
The black soaps smelled like licorice.
I took a white soap and sniffed it: vanilla, a scent that was always in the air of the kitchen Truman grew up in. (You might remember our mother never cooked; we were always having to go next door to get a decent meal.)
“They’re souvenirs. You s’posed to keep ’em,” the ladies’ maid said. “I already got a pocketful. Gonna try to sell ’em to those autograph hounds out in the rain.”
Trying to escape my embarrassment, I put the white soap in my bag and went out, trying to brush the wax from it off on the back of my dress, even though the maid was already snapping out a hand towel—black or white, of course, the choice was mine.
When I got back to the ballroom, the stroke of midnight had come and gone: masks had been removed, guests had begun eating. Chicken hash with sherry, omelettes, and caviar—birds and eggs, Truman went around chirping, when he wasn’t chirping that his mask had cost just thirty-nine cents at Kresge’s. (And that’s when he wasn’t chirping how he got paid $14.80 a word for In Cold Blood, since he’d made over two million on it.)
I thought back to Truman’s good-bye Halloween party when he was seven, how it was really no different from this: word of it had gone out around town, and it had grown to become the thing everybody wanted to attend. And Truman had asserted his power by keeping everyone guessing to the last possible minute who got in, and who didn’t. Standing there at the front door, he was host and gatekeeper, judge and jury, all at once. Truman, guarding the gate. It’s what he’s always done.
Finally, unmasked, I could see who’d been pelting me with questions all night long: Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow, Candice Bergen, Lauren Bacall, Jerome Robbins, princes and princesses and kings and queens of countries I’d never heard of. Secret Service men, guarding Lady Bird and her daughters. Tall cotton indeed.
It may have started out as a fantasy, but now, it was a reality: I was the belle of the ball.
“May I?”
I was yanked out of my fantasy when a rubber band hit my skull.
I guess pride does goeth before a fall.
It was Truman, reaching toward the sleep mask I’d forgotten and left on top of my head, making my hair bunch up into something even more unattractive than it had started out as.
“Don’t wanna look foolish, do we?”
In his sleight of hand, he managed to give it an extra-hard snap as he pulled it off and stuck it in his pocket.
“I’ll just take what’s rightfully mine.”
He leaned closer, whispering into my right ear, which was weighted down by a ridiculous earring on loan from his Mr. Kenneth.
Truman’s accent was stronger than it had ever been in his life.
“Sistah, you’re stealin’ my thunder.”
That’s all he said before he grabbed Lauren Bacall by the waist—a forkful of omelette halfway to her mouth, a question to me still hanging in the air—and yanked her onto the dance floor.
No one else had seen it.
I didn’t think anyone else had heard it, what Truman told my new friend Miss Betty Bacall, as she’d told me to call her:
“Poor little thing,” I imagined Truman saying, “I practic’ly had to write her book for her. Why else d’you think I’m in it?”
Betty Bacall looked at me, a feeble, uncertain smile.
Truman looked very certainly at me, sticking out his tongue like a snake, then darting it back into his mouth to poke at his cheeks.
That’s all it took for the rumor to begin and take hold, just like the roots of the chinaberry tree in which we’d first huddled so many years ago, after Truman’s first triumphant party.
I couldn’t take those feeble, uncertain smiles that followed, the questions in their eyes.
I left, but not before I’d dropped the small white soap in Truman’s drink, for him to wash his mouth out with.
Little good it did; the rumor took hold, and has lasted till this very day.
It’s all poor Alice ever thinks about.
I can only ever write this to you, very late at night.
I’ve never told anyone before.
He made me think I didn’t write It, when I knew I had.
He killed me, as sure as Dick and Perry killed the Clutters.
Nelle put the pen down, the callused sides of her writing fingers smeared with ink. Her hand was worn out, but no more than her brain and her pride, and she couldn’t write anything more to Ed.
That was the last time she’d seen Truman.
When she got back to Monroeville, she was asked to write an article on the party for the local paper, the very paper her father had once owned. One of the town’s very own, at the party of the decade. Even then, Truman had begun lopping branches off the family tree; no one from his family in Monroeville had been invited. She declined, saying, with a mischievous smile, that what happened at the party stayed at the party, like she’d just come off furlough on a ship with the Merchant Marine.
But despite the painful memories, Nelle did keep her invitation, and the shell of a silver balloon she’d taken on her way out (and popped, with a glittering bobby pin she’d seen fall out of Marianne Moore’s hair).
She’d kept one other souvenir from that evening: a silver napkin that had been dabbed with lipstick—not her own, God forbid, but Betty Bacall’s, just before Truman had waltzed her away and whispered into her ear.
It was hours before the sun came up, but Nelle was all ready to go out: to the graveyard, where Myrtle had seemed to indicate Truman had left the answers.
Answers to what, she didn’t know, although she could guess:
Why he’d gone even more crazy at this juncture in his life.
Why she seemed to be following him there, giving any of her time to a man who had so rejected her.
For once, she thought Alice might be right: it was the telephone’s fault. Alice had said it would be the end of them; she’d said that the very day they’d had it installed. And her prediction had come to pass: those calls from Truman, this last call from Myrtle . . . it was the end of something.
So was what Nelle was doing now: sneaking into her sister’s bedroom to take the gun that sleeping Alice had left by the side of her bed.
There was too much sneaking around in the house, but Nelle made a silent promise this would be the end of it: whatever she found at the cemetery, whether it was something, or nothing . . . that would be the end.
To keep her company, to keep her safe, she took the letter she’d just finished to Ed, the snake boxes and photos, and the gun.
Truman had taught her very well indeed: if you introduced a gun into a story, somewhere, somehow, it had to go off.
Chapter Seventeen
“He’s a fag, you know. Yag. Gay.”
Truman hated saying the word, so he always inverted it.
“Yag as a goose.”
He’d woken up in the middle of Myrtle’s SOS call to Nelle, but now that it was really bedtime, he couldn’t go back to sleep. The blue late-night-TV light flicker
ed over him as he sat on the couch, jotting down ideas for his party and watching Johnny Carson.
“Who’s ‘yag’?”
“Johnny Carson. He and Doc Severinsen, they’re lovers.”
He said it without a shade of inflection, no gossipy delight, just a statement of fact. He couldn’t even take delight in his lying anymore, he was so drugged out. And if there’s one thing Myrtle knew, it was that Johnny Carson wasn’t a fag. Doc Severinsen, now, she wasn’t altogether sure about him.
“And those clothes, just hideous. All those stripes and polyester.”
Myrtle was trying to figure out how to tell Truman she was dying, and all he wanted to talk about was Johnny Carson being a fag, a poorly dressed fag at that.
Truman was one to talk, lying there in shorts and an old T-SHIRT, his belly hanging out, coffee stains all over him. Myrtle had begged him to let her wash the shorts, but he’d refused, saying they were his good luck shorts: since he’d been wearing them when his book had been returned, he was certain that if he kept wearing them, he’d be able to do some new writing. He just had a few more chapters to go, he had it all mapped out, he’d practically memorized it.
It’s what he’d been telling people for years.
Because without a new book, there couldn’t be a new party.
For a brief time, he’d had a change of plans about it. Instead of an Arabian Nights setting, he wanted it to take place in Paraguay circa 1830, with everyone dressed like Spanish royalty. And not just set there, but actually take place there; everyone would have to fly to Paraguay, a place Truman had never been, for the party. But Myrtle had her heart set on the Arabian Nights, after Truman’s stories of harems and belly dancers and incense; she took one look at his Paraguayan pictures and told him she didn’t think he’d look all that good cinched up in a cummerbund like that.
“You’re right. What horrible clothes . . .”
“See, I told ya . . . you don’t wanna be all hemmed in like that . . .”
“No, Johnny. All that polyester. Just horrible.”
He was back on the King of Late Night, putting his party pad down.
“I can smell it through the TV screen. Can’t you smell that? Just look at it: checks on the pants, stripes on the shirt, more stripes on the tie, plaids going every which way . . . no wonder Joanne divorced him. How could you live with a man who dresses like that?”
Now that Truman had run everybody else out of his life, except Myrtle, Joanne Carson was the only one left who ever called or came to visit. She was Johnny’s ex-wife, and Truman had adopted her when they both lived at the UN Plaza in New York. He’d played Henry Higgins to her Eliza Doolittle, and tried to make her a part of café society.
“You know, he beat her,” Truman said, again matter-of-factly, as he sat there hypnotized by Charo trying to explain how to make coq au vin to Richard Chamberlain, shaking her tits as if they were part of the recipe. “Never let her go out. If it hadn’t been for me, she’d still be there. In that apartment. Captive. While he was out buying polyester.”
Polyester.
And she was dying.
“He needs me as a guest . . . this is one of the worst shows in the history of TV. You know why I’m such a good guest, Myrtle?”
“No, why are you such a good guest?” she asked, when what she wanted to scream was, “Don’t you ever notice anything but yourself?”
“Because I tell the truth. I’m the only person in the world who goes on these shows and tells the truth. People can tell it, they can sniff the truth a mile away. You can smell it worse than polyester. Every single one of ’em, liars . . . Richard Chamberlain, lying through his pearly whites. Charo, lying through those double-D tits a Beverly Hills surgeon stuck on her. She’s even lying about her Goddamn recipe. You and me, Myrtle, we’re the only ones who tell the truth, no matter who it hurts.”
He hadn’t told the truth since God knows when.
And he wouldn’t let her tell the truth to him, no matter how hard she tried.
“Call Johnny right now, get him on the phone, it’s in my address book, I’m gonna book myself right now, they need a dose of the truth. Get on a plane right now . . .”
But a few minutes later, Truman had already forgotten he wanted to be on the show, because Charo had started singing “The Windmills of Your Mind.”
It was one of his favorite songs that year.
When The Amazing Kreskin came on as the third guest of the evening, Truman claimed he was gay, too; he’d even slept with him. “He wasn’t any good ’cause he kept reading my mind. There wasn’t any mystery. No suspense. You can’t have good sex without suspense.”
He was lonely for Mr. Danny.
That was the only truth going on in that room, but Truman would never say it.
As long as Truman and Myrtle kept the TV on, the ghosts, alive as well as dead, would stay away.
Thank God Nelle had worn her tennis shoes; by the time she walked all the way to the cemetery on the outskirts of town, she was exhausted. She’d be surprised if her feet weren’t bleeding, even though she’d sliced open the sides of her tennis shoes with razor blades to make way for her bunions.
Cinderella, running away from the Black and White Ball, with bunions.
She didn’t care anymore. She’d been a good girl, and now she was tired, and angry.
She carried the gun from Kansas with her to deal with her anger.
The front gate to the cemetery was locked, so she tossed her bag of goodies over the short brick fence and scrambled over it like she used to when she was little and wasn’t afraid of things. It hurt, but it was a good hurt; because it took her straight back to childhood: through the soft rubber of the worn soles, she could feel the diamonds of metal that crosshatched the fence, feel her toes curling for a better grip, her fists searching for just the right handhold between the sharp spikes that ran along the top of the fence. The spikes were there to keep the wrong people out; with a gun and a bag full of oddities, as if to perform voodoo, she was definitely one of the wrong people.
A patch of moonlight had followed her all the way, her only friend right now, in the still of the night. How many times had that patch of quiet moonlight helped her pass the night, when words wouldn’t come. It didn’t talk back to her, like Alice, didn’t tell her everything was going to be all right, didn’t tell her that she was going to finish her book one day. It didn’t say or do anything, but somehow, it comforted her; it just stayed there—in the sky, on the wall, through the trees—night after night, never fail.
That’s all she wanted from a friend: consistency.
It was more than she’d gotten from Truman.
In the cemetery, she expected ghosts; instead, she got moonlight. But it was like a ghost in a way, an old friend that had come back after a gap of decades. It had been there in her New York walk-up the whole time she was writing The Book, a harbinger of that delicious time of night when everything went quiet, even the New York traffic, and she could finally hear the voices in her head. When Boo and Scout and Jem and Atticus and Calpurnia and Miss Maudie bubbled up, eager to tell their stories. She prayed for that time, when the only light was a square of moonlight on the wall, coming in through her tiny window.
Bit by bit, she’d move her attention from that square of moonlight to the square of paper in front of her; she’d begin filling it with words, and only know it was time to stop when, hours later, she had a saucer full of cigarette butts.That was her alarm clock; only then was it time to go to work. She’d drag in exhausted because she’d been up all night writing; sometimes she’d go in just as exhausted when she hadn’t written a word, but had been up all night knowing she should.
And during the day, all she could think about was coming back home at night to that square of moonlight.
Now, that same patch of moonlight, as old and weary as her, showed her the way, deep into the cemetery to her brother Ed’s tombstone. She had a new letter to show him, along with the other strange gods that had come
to haunt her.
In a commercial break between The Amazing Kreskin and Erik Estrada, Myrtle got Truman to let her put his “lucky shorts” in the wash. She didn’t know how lucky they were, just dirty, with slobber and stiff bristly hairs and paw prints from Maggie all over them. Finally, she couldn’t stand it anymore: she told Truman if he wanted a girl when he woke up in the morning—meaning her—then he better strip down now, because she couldn’t stand the filth anymore. She didn’t care if his show wasn’t over; the shorts were beginning to smell, and she was about to gag.
Truman changed to long pants, fiddling with buttons and zippers while his eyes never left the TV and the gold cross around Erik Estrada’s neck. “He could play Perry in a remake,” Truman mumbled to himself.
When Myrtle came back from running a wash, the smell of chlorine replacing the smell of dog, Erik Estrada had been replaced by Bernadette Peters, who was singing “Thank You for Being a Friend” and shaking her moppet red curls at the camera. Johnny looked “bemused” watching her; that had become one of Truman’s favorite words lately, and Myrtle had started using it as well.
“That girl sure does ‘bemuse’ me; I’d give anything to have Kewpie doll lips like her,” Myrtle said, then turned to get a reaction from Truman at her improving vocabulary.
Only Truman wasn’t there.
A dry wind outside blew the front door open and shut, as Bernadette took a bow to applause.
A few pages from Truman’s book scattered up in the breeze. Myrtle grabbed them, and then had a moment of conscience over whether she should look at what Truman had guarded so carefully. As she hesitated, more pages circled around her, and she just started grabbing and looking without thinking. She finally saw what his closely guarded magnum opus consisted of. It was worse than she had feared; not the quality of the writing, but what was on the pages themselves.