Swan Song

by Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott

‘You have for some. And the rest seem pretty clear.’

  ‘Nah… They’re too dumb. They won’t even recognize themselves.’

  Lee places a wide-brimmed sun hat over her face, and through its checkerboard weave she rasps, ‘We’ll see. If they do recognize themselves, they ain’t gonna be too happy.’

  BENEATH THE SHADE of a canopy of Royal Palms on an estate in West Palm Beach, Gloria and C.Z. sit in matching wicker arm-chairs, remnants of lunch and a pitcher of iced tea between them.

  They’re a study in extremes.

  Gloria with her raven hair, C.Z.’s palest platinum. The brunette in a black shift dress; the blonde, the same in ivory. The former, rich olive complexion. The latter iridescent, almost nacreous. The lava-hot Latina listens as the ice-cool Bostonian reports the extent of the damage, flipping through a copy of Esquire.

  ‘My ghaaaaaad,’ C.Z. intones in her Brahmin-stretched vowels. ‘He writes this “Lady Ina” as a desperate, aging lush … On a transatlantic flight where her husband gives her the boot, and there she is, trapped beside the heartless bahstard for six more hours fullah hell .’

  ‘Dios mío!’ Gloria’s eyes widen.

  ‘Wait! It gets worse…’ C.Z. skips down a few lines, absorbing the material.

  ‘What does he say?’ her companion leans forward, impatient.

  ‘Oh it’s simply ahhhhhhwful…’

  ‘Go on!’

  ‘I cahn’t.’

  ‘You must!’

  ‘Ahhlright … The author implies that Coolbirth’s pahst her prime—at forty no less—thrice-divorced, facing the gallows of Extra-Womanhood …’

  Gloria furrows a brow, as if it’s a concept she’s not had need to learn the meaning of. ‘What do you mean by this, ‘Extra’ … ?’

  ‘Oh dahling, you know. The Spare. The one for whom the hosts feel obliged to import a ‘suitable’ Extra Man at dinnahs, in order to keep her company. Hosts that care about such bullshit … It’s why I ahlways favor a nice communal buffet.’

  ‘Why can’t this “Coolbirth” simply find another husband?’

  ‘They’re thin on the ground, the Keepahs.’

  ‘Could she not borrow someone else’s … ?’

  ‘We cahn’t all be you , dahling.’

  Reading a few more lines C.Z. reports—‘My ghad … It ends with her simpering into her soufflé …’ She lowers the magazine, sips her tea, rendering her verdict. ‘Ahhhwful … but effective.’

  Gloria laughs, shaking her head. ‘Él tiene cojones, Diablito …’ ‘What’s that, dahling?’

  ‘He has balls, our Truman.’

  ‘Thahht he does.’

  ‘But why this gossip—when he could write anything?

  C.Z. shrugs. ‘Writers write. One cahn’t be surprised if they write what they know.’

  ‘Poor Bebé. And Slim!’

  ‘Yes, but really. What were they thinking?’

  Gloria frowns. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We all knew what he was. They should have been talking to their shrinks, not a writer. What did they think he would do? Of course he was going to use all that mahterial, sooner or later.’ C.Z. reaches for the pitcher, refilling their glasses. ‘It’s why I’ve never told him anything interesting enough to mattah.’

  ‘Hmmm.’ Gloria falls silent, suggesting that she perhaps had not been so wise.

  ‘He doesn’t say for certain if it’s them,’ C.Z. allows.

  ‘Who else could this ‘Coolbirth’ be? We both know that ‘Dill’ is Bill …’

  ‘Truman told me that story years ago—most of the others too.’

  The palms rustle above them, accompanied by a low rumble of thunder.

  ‘Bueno.’ Gloria, with a deep breath. ‘I’m prepared,’

  ‘For whaht, dahling?’

  ‘Skip ahead to what it says about us.’

  C.Z. flips forward through the article, while Gloria waits with what she hopes might read as wariness—but what we’ll later come to realize is, in fact, something more closely linked to appetite …

  Reaching the end, C.Z. looks up, tossing the magazine on the table.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘What do you mean, nothing … ?!”

  ‘Nada. Zilch. It seems we’ve escaped the shit-storm.’

  Gloria grabs the magazine, scanning its column inches.

  ‘How can that be … ?’

  ‘We should thank our lucky staaahrs for small favours.’

  Unconvinced, Gloria flips backwards through the pages herself.

  Beads of rain begin to fall, at first in isolated droplets, then a gentle patter, ricocheting off the table. C.Z. rises to open a standing umbrella above them, as an autumn shower commences.

  SEVEN

  1976

  VARIATION NO. 5

  FRANKLY, FUCK PALEY,’ Babe practically spits, enjoying the fricatives of the consonants on her lips as she chases them with a long drag of her cigarette.

  The swearing is new, something she relishes like a rebellious adolescent.

  We’ve noticed it on bedside visits in these last molasses months, where we sip Manhattans as Babe chain-smokes her beloved L&Ms, musing they could hardly hurt her now, their damage already done.

  Babe has changed these last few weeks. She is depleted, yet strangely full.

  For those of us who know her, she’s more herself than ever.

  The cancer has robbed her of lingering vanities, stealing her lustrous hair, her gamine strength. Yet for all that it takes, it gives her something she’s long denied herself.

  A voice. Not her mellifluous voice, not the well-mannered one.

  It’s an uncensored Babe who’s emerging.

  She has come to find that death is far from an amiable houseguest. There’s no seating arrangement that will encourage buoyant small talk. No place setting that will please, no delicacy that will satiate its ravenous appetite. And like the most nightmarish of guests, it refuses to leave. It has even had the audacity to move into her bedroom, sits at the foot of her down-covered mattress.

  It watches her in fitful, pain-racked sleep, greets her when she wakes each morning, ravaged. She has no privacy, even within the fabric-draped walls of her master suite—the fabric with Moroccan vines that she’d selected despite warnings that it might feel claustrophobic. These days she has ample time to study its intricate, serpentine lines. She finds their complexity comforting.

  The few times a day she ventures downstairs to join the world of the living, her unwanted visitor’s decaying perfume lingers in the hallways. Like any good hostess, she’s tried to turn a blind eye to its impudence. She’s developed a disquieting sense of calm when it comes to the presence that follows her. She even addresses it, speaking out loud to the ‘Other,’ only to find that she’s talking to herself.

  Babe talks a great deal more than she used to. The new alien voice bubbling from her elongated throat started with small tantrums. About a meal brought on a silver tray, food she cannot fathom an appetite for. About a male nurse with clammy hands who stabs at her withered arm in a vain attempt to find a vein, too thick to appreciate the irony, she tells him. Once she starts using her voice—the honest one, gravelly, no longer eager to please— she finds that she likes the sound of it. She realizes that it’s an entity quite apart from her. She reserves a special round of daily vitriol for Truman, who she continues to loathe from a distance, who she hates all the more, knowing he’s the one person who could have cheered her.

  But the bulk of her rage is reserved for the man that robbed her of her beloved Truheart.

  ‘Well, isn’t it true? If Paley hadn’t had his dick up anything that passed in a skirt, would Truman have bothered to write that shit in the first place?’

  She calls him ‘Paley’ now, or ‘the Old Bastard’—never ‘Bill.’ Not anymore. He has lost the privilege of intimacies, as much as the author himself.

  ‘As if it made a goddamn iota of difference if Old Bastard Paley had aspic or mousse. Skippy or Jif. Over-easy o
r sunny side up.’

  At the word ‘sunny’ she turns her laser gaze to Slim, who nearly always is described as such. Golden. Sun-kissed. Breezy…

  ‘Babe, that’s unfair. You did want to please him,’ Slim ventures, sitting at her bedside, sipping her manhattan, taking her turn in the revolving-door of one or other of us paying daily visits. Babe stares at her with a peculiar expression, as if she has just recast her closest female friend as villainess. Hadn’t Slim insisted, along with Bill, that she never, ever speak to Truman again?

  IT WAS AT Quo vadis, six months after the rift. We all remember slightly different versions of the encounter. Some of us recall Babe and Slim sitting at a prime table, in full view.

  One knows exactly where one ranks in Manhattan’s social pecking order by where they’re seated. The more comfortable booths that line the perimeters of Vadis or Basque or Cirque, the ones that offer a modicum of privacy, are disastrous. If you’re seated in a cozy, out-of-the-way banquette, you know that you’re a nobody.

  The Jackies and Lees of the world, the Babes and Slims of our set, are placed at the hellishly uncomfortable tables in the center of the restaurant. The closer to the door the better. Never mind the glacial chill that sweeps in each time the doorman swings the portal open to herald a new arrival. Ditto the hard, upright chairs, like something from a Puritan grade school. These are the prime tables, where one can be seen—by incoming patrons, or lurking paparazzi, or, better still, by one another. But we digress.

  We’d made a pact not to speak to him. Ever, ever again. He was out. Persona non grata. Of course Slim and Babe—the most violated of us all by the Esquire chapter—were the most staunchly resolved. But there’s more coming, he’s always warned. Who knows when it could be our turn. And so we rally in a public display of solidarity.

  Privately, we’ve each played our hands a bit differently.

  Lee sees him, Lee’s status exempting her from the need to follow the herd. As a slain President’s sister-in-law and royalty through marriage, Lee can march to whatever drum she likes. She’s continued on with little Tru, though her enthusiasm is waning.

  C.Z. has stood by him, but then Truman has never hinted at her cool vanilla Hitchcock persona in his work. Gloria’s schadenfreude at Babe and Slim’s humiliation has been tempered by a growing anxiety that she herself is next. She hasn’t cut Tru exactly, but her invitations to Gemini have ceased; Loel has forbidden them. As much as he misses Truman’s company, his is a staunch world of protect-one’s-own handshakes and greased palms, exchanged between titans. Bill is too close a friend (or too vital a business ally) to risk Truman’s presence.

  Marella was forced to sit beside him at a dinner at Lee’s, dining à trois—naughty of Lee, really. It was her attempt to broach a reconciliation, at Truman’s hangdog begging, no doubt. The three had a perfectly civilized meal, perched on Fez pouffes in Lee’s Moorish pied-à-terre, picking at tagines of stewed prune and lamb. When dinner was over, Truman had insisted on escorting Marella home. She silently cursed Lee as she allowed the poisoned gnome to help her into her fox-hair coat, to take her arm with forced intimacy, walking her out of Lee’s town house, into the whirling snow.

  Truman had snuggled up against her in a taxi, she’d told us, resting his chin on her furry shoulder. ‘Why haven’t we seen each other, miele? Little Tru has missed his Numero Uno.’

  ‘I couldn’t bear to tell him that I’d seen something black and rotten in his soul that last day in Genoa. Instead I simply said, “Oh Truman, you live here, I live in Europe. It does make things difficult.”’ He’d taken her hand and patted it.

  When the taxi had rolled to a stop in front of her hotel, Truman gallantly climbed out and walked her to the door. He’d presented his ruddy cheek, she said, its horizontal spread looking more reptilian than she’d remembered. In that moment Marella felt every inch the Italian princess in a twisted fairy tale, kissing the toad with the reverberating croak, in a scene Central Casting couldn’t have orchestrated better. Truman’s wide eyes searched hers for a sign—of rejection, of redemption. Marella had smiled, perfectly civil, perfectly polite. She couldn’t tell if his voice trembled when he asked it, or if that’s a detail she’s imagined after the fact, when he turned to leave her.

  ‘You’ll call me, Uno? For lunch?’

  ‘Yes, Truman. I’ll call you.’

  Marella said she had known as she quickened her pace into the sanctuary of the Ritz lobby that she would never call Truman again.

  SOME OF US remember that afternoon at Quo Vadis with Babe sitting at a prime table by the door, waiting for her lunch date to arrive.

  Others recall Babe and Slim well into their meal when it happened. Still another camp recalls Truman arriving first, stalking the bar.

  Lee remembers Tru holding court in a prime spot, Babe being forced to walk past his table to reach her lunch companion.

  Majority rules, so the legend has, for the most part, gone the Slim-and-Babe route: Truman proceeding directly to the bar, ordering a double martini. After a few fortifying slurps, he’d breezed—this part is certain—up to Babe and Slim’s table, seemingly without a care in the world. Slim refused to look up from her Langue du Boeuf, stabbing violently at the tongue on the plate. Babe sipped her Pouilly-Fumé, allowing her doe eyes to flick upward, unable to resist a quick glance. Truman had beamed his chandelier-smile at her as if nothing were wrong.

  ‘Hello, Babyling,’ he chirped.

  Startled into habit, Babe’s manners responded for her. ‘Hello, Truman.’

  Babe felt a sharp pain as Slim gave her a good kick under the table. She quickly cast her eyes back to her quiche, flaking at the outer crust daintily with her fork, managing one more peek… His demeanor was jaunty, but there was something in his eyes that spoke the truth. Those eyes, hidden behind the glasses… the eyes of a very small boy who still desperately hoped to be asked to play.

  Her gaze met his, and for a moment they were locked.

  Please, she could almost hear him say. Please forgive me.

  Babe felt a pang in her heart, as acute as Slim’s kick. How she wished that all of this would end. How she would have loved to have Truman pull up a chair and go back to the way things were. Their forgettable lunch would suddenly be sprinkled with his magic-dust. They’d be wrapped in the cocoon of conversation, doubled with laughter at his witticisms.

  She had so much to tell him. About Kate joining a religious sect. About Billy’s drug bust. Amanda’s divorce. Disappointments all. (She always feared she was a shit mother.) Most of all, about Bill’s renewed fervor…

  Ever since her diagnosis, the strangest thing had happened. Bill Paley, philanderer extraordinaire, had fallen in love with his wife. It was as if the threat of losing her had opened the flood-gates of denied affection. He had been forced to recognize what he’d always had.

  He’d tried to seduce her again, attempted daily to make love, something that had ceased years ago, after Billy’s birth, at Bill’s insistence. He had not wanted her perfection marred by carnality. There were other women for that.

  Babe had been devastated when Bill had moved down the hall, ceasing to share their bed. One night she had crept down the darkened corridor to his suite. She dropped her robe and stood naked before him. Shivering. Vulnerable. Bill had looked on, as one might study a statue in a gallery and find it aesthetically pleasing. But when she took his hand and tried to move it between her legs, brushing the tangle of hair at her lips, Bill pulled away. He’d stroked her cheek and retreated to his study, flipping through the weekly network ratings, nibbling a leftover sandwich.

  Babe had quietly retrieved her robe, returned to the maze of Moroccan vines in her own suite, and cried into a throw pillow needlepointed with jade-plumed lovebirds.

  He had loved her once. Then he had stopped, once he had branded her Mrs. Bill Paley. Then, without warning, he loved her again. And Babe resented the hell out of him.

  As Babe sat beside Slim in Quo Vadis with Truman’s eyes
begging her forgiveness, she longed to tell him everything.

  He was the one person who would understand—if you wait long enough for something that never comes, you eventually cease to want it.

  Babe broke Truman’s gaze and looked back to her plate.

  He shifted his focus to Slim with cheery resilience.

  ‘Hello, Big Mama… Guess what? I’ve decided to forgive you.’

  Slim, unamused, polished off her Scotch, looking beyond Truman as if he were invisible.

  ‘Well, mercy me—seems I’m in need of a top-up. Back in a jiff.’ He managed to sound upbeat as he trotted back toward the bar, smiling at each of us as he passed.

  As Babe watched Truman’s seemingly buoyant retreat, she wanted to run to him, to unburden her fractured heart, which may as well have been removed along with her blackened lung. But Bill—and Slim—had denied her.

  EIGHT

  1970/1962

  MARELLA DRAMMA GIOCOSO

  AS A TRIBE, We migrate frequently and rapidly—largely because we can.

  While we can recall with vague nostalgia the pleasures of a summer crossing on one of the great Cunard liners, departing from New York, arriving in Europe in a week’s time, the ‘getting there’ having secretly pleased us as much as our stated destinations, that was before. Before the skies cracked opened and revealed their potential. Before the speed of metal wings granted us the luxury of restlessness. Before the urgency took hold, compelling us to make up for the years that we’d lost to the war. Before adrenaline infected our body clocks, tempted by thoughts of rarefied air and starry eyes and exotic booze in bars in far Bombay. Motion had corrupted us with wanderlust.

  Who now would dream of wasting a week, even a day, stuck on board a tortoise of a cruiser if one might just as easily jet off to Paris for an afternoon’s shopping spree—or on to Venice for a meal? With one’s intimates possessing the ability totransport one at the drop of a passport, why ever—we askedourselves, when the option first presented itself—would welimit our mobility?

  Babe and Bill were such dears—they offered to drop me off in Rome on their way to Sardinia. They have the most adorably intimate plane—have you flown with them?