Swan Song

by Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott

  So the Countess-turned-Princess ascended once more;

  Loel Guinness’s arm she’d adorn.

  He purchased her passport and war dossier,

  And the famous ‘La Guinness’ was born.

  CODA

  GLORIA SITS IN a booth in the roadside Howard Johnson’s, waiting.

  The New Jersey Turnpike location. Absurdly remote, but she can afford to take no chances. She has taken the liberty of ordering. She knows what he’ll want, he being a creature of habit. Besides, she means to make this quick.

  Say what needs to be said. Make a clean break.

  The waitress approaches with a tray, placing dishes on the table, one by one.

  ‘All right, hon, that’s two clam chowders, a chef’s salad for you, and for your friend…’ She glances at the empty space opposite— at the unoccupied half of a turquoise vinyl booth.

  ‘The jumbo fried clam special,’ Gloria confirms.

  ‘You want me to keep this under the warming lamp?’

  ‘No, thank you. I’m sure he’ll be here shortly.’

  ‘Enjoy.’

  As the waitress retreats, the bell attached to the chapel-style door jingles, announcing a new arrival. Gloria is shocked to see how much weight he’s put on—the bloat. Far too much for that midget frame to carry. He raises a hand when he spots her, his face alight with hope. Yet from her impassive expression he lowers it sheepishly.

  He joins her in the booth, which makes a farting sound as he slides across its slick vinyl surface. She laughs in spite of herself.

  Babe would never dream of laughing at such a thing. She’d flush at the crassness. Marella would, without question, fail to understand. Slim and C.Z. are earthy enough to get it, but their humor tends toward the biting (Slim) and the verbal (C.Z.). Per Bouvier trademark, Lee, like her sister, lacks a sense of humor altogether (though both would argue otherwise).

  As Truman scooches into the booth another inch, again toots the sound, causing them both to snicker. Blessedly breaking the ice.

  ‘Hello, Mamacita,’ he says, taking in every detail of her face, as if seeing it for the first time. Offering, as a gesture of contrition, a careful smile… feeling his way.

  ‘Hello, Diablito.’

  Silence.

  Then, hardly daring to hope—‘Are you speaking to me?’

  ‘Here I am.’

  ‘Are you speaking to me anywhere else?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I see.’ He covers his disappointment, turning his attention to the food. ‘Oh, look! My favorite! Clams dos ways!’

  ‘And a dry martini. I knew that’s what you’d want.’

  ‘That’s because you know me.’

  ‘It’s been a long time. Demasiadas comidas…’

  ‘One can never have too many lunches.’ He sips his drink, watching her. ‘Are you mad at me, Mamacita?’

  ‘Yes.’ She stares at him with cold, resentful eyes.

  He frowns. ‘But why? I didn’t write anything about you! Not a peep!’

  ‘Exactly!’

  He stares at her, confused. ‘But—’

  ‘You knew all my stories! My stories! You could have had greatness. Danger. A rags to riches tale. Instead you’re worried about which puta arrogante bled on Bill Paley’s sheets… ?’

  ‘I thought—I thought that I was sparing you.’

  ‘Thanks a lot.’

  ‘I wanted—to teach Bill a lesson. For Babe’s sake…’

  ‘And you thought she’d be all right with this? Diablito, you certainly don’t know Babe.’

  ‘I thought that I did.’

  They sip their chowders together in silence.

  ‘Darling,’ Truman asks, lost in thought, ‘do you remember the Clay/Liston fight? The sixth round?’

  ‘Of course I do.’ She softens slightly at the memory of a carefree age—when life still possessed the ability to surprise.

  ‘Everyone said there was no way that brash li’l loudmouth was gonna get anything but massacred after all that talk. And then… he didn’t.’ He smiles, wistful.

  Gloria looks at him, shaking her head. ‘Oh, Truman. Pequeño bastardo! Did you really think you could get away with writing that… ?’

  He pauses. ‘I knew they’d be mad… But I thought that they’d come back.’

  ‘Well, that’s not going to happen.’

  ‘I know that now. I can see.’ Then, with eyes full of terror, part confession, part appeal, ‘Se me fue le mano.’

  Gloria nods. ‘Yes, Truman. You went too far.’

  Pleading—‘Mamacita…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Forgive me.’ Then, hushed… ‘Perdóname.’

  She falters, moved by his earnestness.

  ‘I’d like to, Diablito… but I can’t.’ His eyes well with tears. Gloria dabs a napkin at something in her eye. ‘It’s just that Loel, being so close to Bill and Babe…’

  He nods. ‘I understand.’

  ‘It’s just—I’ve worked too hard to get here. I can’t go back to…’

  As her voice trails off, Truman reaches across the table, placing his tiny hand atop her long one. ‘Honey. You listen to me… I understand. We’re hustlers, the pair of us. You do what you gotta do to survive.’

  She covers his hand with her free one, cradling his trembling fingers in the nest between her own. They sit in this manner for another half an hour, at which point they rise, he places a tender kiss on her cheek, and they exit through the steeple of the chapel of Howard Johnson’s.

  They pause, standing still in a sea of station wagons in the parking lot. He takes a long look, as if preserving the memory of her face for posterity. Then nodding, he turns away, walking to the pay phone, presumably to call a taxi.

  Suddenly she calls back—‘Truman?’

  ‘Yes, Mamacita?’

  ‘Why didn’t you use my stories?’

  ‘Because I promised you I wouldn’t.’

  ‘Ah.’

  Then, with a devilish grin—‘But don’t you worry, honey. There’s plenty more where that came from. I might just write like a butterfly, sting like a bee…’

  He gives her a wink, and in doing so allows a tear to fall.

  They diverge in the crowded lot, going their separate ways.

  FOURTEEN

  1978

  VARIATION NO. 7

  HE LIES SUPINE on the spartan daybed, pencil clutched inhand, half-heartedly musing why ‘lying’ and ‘supine’ constitute tautology, when they happen to sound so right together.

  His brain often values rhythm over logic—cadence over correctness. Although in this case it might be argued that the repetition serves, he being doubly guilty of lying, in both factual and horizontal senses.

  The pencil is one of his trusty Blackwings—weapons which, for the most part, have rarely failed to serve him.

  A yellow legal pad rests on his chest, the color of well-made hollandaise. Not the congealed yellow sludge at the local corner diner. The pale, silky sort, custard-hued, impeccably prepared at Oscar’s American Bistro at the Waldorf.

  The unblemished yolkiness of the page stares back at him. Relentlessly sunny. Mocking him with its cheerfulness.

  He wonders why his limbs won’t budge. Wonders who has slipped the poison into his Orange Drink. He wills his arm and Blackwing to flutter, concentrating with all his might on this single isolated act. He’d always insisted that a person could make anything happen if only they focused on their most treasured of desires.

  Yet try as he might, the pencil lies dormant, the hand that grips it paralyzed.

  His mind is very much alive, racing; thoughts tripping over themselves in a futile rush for preeminence. Spinning into violent tarantellas of nouns and verbs, a blur of images, locked in a whirl of jewel-toned adjectives.

  ‘Of course words have colors, sugar,’ he’d have informed us, exasperated by our ignorance. ‘Just like a palette of paints. Some words positively simmer in the reddest of reds. Others offer a gulp of azur
e, like a clear country stream…’

  Stream… or was it a creek? Is there a difference? He thinks he remembers that there isn’t, the difference being determined by whatever slob once named them, if they were ever named at all. No—creeks you wade in. Streams you swim.

  He has a sudden flash of a crystal creek—wading through its gentle current, herringbone trousers rolled to his knees. They’re the eggshell ones his Mama sent two birthdays back, and the only reason they still fit is’ cause his shrimpo legs refuse to grow.

  He’s twelve now, but, much to his dismay, he still looks ten.

  He shuffles bare feet over the stone floor of the creek bed. He can see Nelle scampering up the bank ahead of him, but he lingers, enjoying the slickness of their polished surface against the soles of his feet.

  ‘C’mon, Truman!’ he hears her shout through the mile-high reeds. Before he can answer, he spots it… the serpentine form, ribboning through shallow water.

  He freezes—as that’s what he’s been taught to do. He’s learned such things from reading tales of young Indian braves, left to fend for themselves in the wild. Or perhaps his Daddy imparted this pearl, the one time he turned up to take his boy fishing. Perhaps they’d lounged on the bank over a picnic of pimento sandwiches, watching the riverboats glide past, imagining stowing away on board together—the boy as a tap dancer, his Daddy as a poker champ.

  Perhaps his Daddy had assumed a knowledgeable air and said in a voice firm but kind, ‘Son, you ever see a cottonmouth, you just stay right put. You play possum, and you can fool that poor snake clean outta his scales.’ He might have polished off his cheese and crust, chasing the last morsel with an icy lager, letting his boy try a swig too, as that’s what men do. The boy might have nodded, filing the information away for just such a moment.

  Or maybe that longed-for chat never occurred… Maybe it’s as pie-in-the-sky as the Gulf Coast beach trips his Daddy’d promised him, tempting with visions of fresh-caught shrimp in a silver bucket that they’d peel and eat themselves, dipped into jiggers of remoulade. They’d visit places with exotic names—Pensacola. Panama City. Galveston and Naples—just like in Italy. His Daddy could sell the skin off a rattler, and his tales of seaside paradise had his boy in a lather. He’d practically leaped with joy in his new swimming trunks, as he rushed to the porch to await the arrival of his Daddy’s Cadillac. He had his knapsack packed with garden spades, which would work a treat for building castles made of sand. He’d thrown in a couple of books, appropriately themed. He figured he and his Daddy could take turns reading Treasure Island as they lay in the sun, getting brown as matching butternuts. It took three long days, waiting on the porch until Cousin Jenny insisted he come inside for his dinner, before he learned to treat such coastal jaunts as fiction.

  Maybe it was the tales of Mohawk braves after all, but he’d been assured by someone that cottonmouths only attack under threat. He forces his body to freeze, standing still as a totem pole, straining to look just as stoic, despite the tom-tom thumping of his heart. All he now knows is his Daddy or Hiawa-tha—whichever’s responsible for the lousy advice—got it dead wrong. They should have told him to run, run! as fast as his little legs could carry him, which would likely have served him well, the boy being the fastest runner in his class. Instead he stands, feet-pads suctioned to the riverbed floor, watching the longest water moccasin he’s ever clapped eyes on swim toward him, mouth agape, revealing its cotton-white insides—white as the gauze that would one day encase the heads of the four Clutters in their coffins, masking shattered countenance in thin, filmy shrouds.

  Oh, that snake knows he’s a live thing all right, aiming straight for him, sinking hypodermic fangs into trembling flesh.

  What follows: a blur. He hears his own cry—an out-of-body howl.

  Nelle—or is it his Faulk Carter cousins?—older boys with rural builds, raised strong on collards and buttermilk—scoop his tiny frame in their big capable arms, and scale the creek bank with him slung over their shoulders. They run through the cedar forest, all the way to the nearest farmhouse, leaving a trail of blood behind.

  Just like his grown-up counterpart lying on the daybed in the house in Sagaponack, unable to lift neither pencil nor Orange Drink, the last vestige of sensation drains from the boy’s pint-sized limbs. He feels the venom pulsing through his veins, robbing him of motion.

  The Faulk boys carry him up the porch steps and into the house, where they drop him onto the farmhouse table like a sack of potatoes. Mrs. Walter slides aside the roast she’s been basting, and with a country wife’s efficiency, examines the wound. Looks hard into his dilating pupils. Without skipping a beat, she strides out the porch door, toward the chicken coop. In a flurry of feathers she grabs one by its scrawny neck. Returning to the kitchen, she removes a meat cleaver from the butcher’s block, and maneuvering the flapping fowl close to her patient’s lower extremities, raises the blade. Unable to lift his head, he feels himself flinch, though his features, well into septic shock (or so he says…) register nothing.

  He braces himself for the chop, imagining his altered life with an amputated foot. Wondering what it will be like never to run or skip again… whether he’ll need a crutch or wheelchair to get himself back and forth to school, or whether he’ll take to his bed for good, just like old Marcel had done.

  The cleaver comes down on the table’s edge, severing the chicken’s head. Mrs. Walter squeezes its open neck, smearing thick, hot blood directly onto the two puncture marks on his ankle, swollen five times its natural size.

  By this point, Mr. Walter has fetched the snakebite kit from the recesses of the hall cupboard which the missus waves away, trusting the wisdom passed down between old wives over modern science. ‘That fancy doctor’s box won’t help this boy,’ she assures him. ‘Ain’t nothin’ better to draw out the poison than fresh chicken blood.’

  ‘Baby, I almost died that day,’ he’s since recalled, spinning the yarn to anyone who’ll listen. ‘But that farmwife saved my life with her remedy. Mr. Walter drove us home in his wagon, with me lying limp in back with my cousins, who slit the throats of three more cocks in wire cages, just to keep me going.’ We thought this sounded both medically and logistically improbable, but who were we to argue? When first told the tale, we appreciated such verbal truth-flexing, as we came to call it. As he himself put it, they weren’t exactly lies per se… they were simply the truth made more interesting, for entertainment’s sake. This we could forgive, for there was a peculiar romance to Truman’s lies. Part pageantry, part poetry. Mesmerizing.

  ‘I was paralyzed—completely paralyzed. I couldn’t leave my bed for months. Let me tell you,’ cause I know from experience… there’s just nothing more excruciating than wanting to move and not being able.’

  Back on the daybed, Blackwing in hand, he wants to move— at least as far as the nightstand for a top-up on his Orange Drink.

  He feels the venom coursing through his veins. Only this time, the serpent is invisible. No milky eyes, no gauze-stuffed gums. But it’s there all right… he senses it.

  O revered creator! Reviled destroyer! Show thyself!

  He manages to will his head to turn. He looks to see his reflection in the sliding closet door. Mirrored, left slightly ajar. His image split in its seam, kaleidoscope-divided. He stares at himself, at once repulsed and intrigued. He reminds himself of Lucian Cole and John White, the colored farmhands in his sideshow in Monroeville. His ‘Siamese twins,’ separate forms hidden behind a suit-draped hat rack. Likely both long dead, Cole and White, the boy being at least fifty-three himself by this point. As he contemplates this calculation, his tongue lolls in repose at the side of his mouth, fracturing into two sets of prongs in the mirrored door.

  Suddenly he sees it…

  He’s the thing with the poison… a mutant, two-headed snake. One body, dressed in a single silken caftan, its slick fabric shimmering like wet scales in the glass.

  It was the caftan Yves, in Marrakech, had insisted
that he have, as a souvenir of his stay at the Villa Oasis, so that he might retain a relic of Saint Laurent bohemia. We’d all smoked hashish and lolled on ottomans under the stars. We drank vast quantities of Moroccan mint tea, and champagne laced with rose water. We grazed on fruits and pistachios and were nourished by the sound of our own laughter. Yves had worn a caftan. Marella, Lee, and Gloria wore caftans—though Gloria insisted on reclaiming hers as a Mexican striped djellaba. C.Z. and Slim eschewed caftans, the former thinking them impractical, the latter dismissing them as pretentious.

  Tru and his beloved Babe had procured identical caftans, his borrowed from Yves, hers purchased in the souk to match. One evening they had swayed together in a hammock in the gloaming, whispering confessions in one another’s ears.

  ‘You know, Babyling, you really are my one true love,’ he said, inhaling the fragrance of her scalp with drowsy appreciation—a mixture of jasmine and the smoke of Turkish cigarettes, bought for a lark in the market. She smiled and nuzzled close. Their bodies, in their matching robes, seemed to merge. Another mythic Hydra—perhaps what has triggered the memory.

  And then he said the thing he’d told her twenty years before, that very first day aboard the Paleys’ plane. ‘You can tell that you’re really in love when you don’t have to finish one another’s sentences.’ They were beyond friendship now. Beyond lovers or spouses.

  She nodded. They swayed a bit longer, basking in that truth.

  After a long, fortifying silence, Babe pulled away—a shy, grown-up ingénue, speaking with the earnest weight of truth.

  ‘I think… you’re the only person in the world who could ever really hurt me.’

  Taken aback, he looked deep into her eyes and vowed—and we genuinely think that he meant it—‘But I’d never, ever hurt you.’

  She considered this, tilting her lovely chin to the side, tracing his own protruding jawline with her almond-shaped nails, as ever buffed to perfection. We knew she loved his face, loved its awkward angles, its elfin eccentricity. She loved the vestiges of the beautiful baby doll he once had been, long before she knew him. She loved his eager expressions, so desperate to succeed, with their hungry eyes and dazzling smiles that warmed gelid drawing rooms with their very presence. How he’d injected life into the flatline monotony that was the circuit. Unlike Marella, who was uneasy being one of the over-feathered flock, or Lee, with her need for exclusivity, Babe adored his talent to love each of us differently. Filling the gaping holes in our lives, born of our own mistakes. Swaddling our particular fears, bolstering singular egos. Babe saw this care as the ultimate gesture. To take those of us whom life had grouped together—perceived (whether worshiped or reviled, or treated with indifference) as one indistinguishable whole—and discover the remarkable in each of us. As much as we’d each like to have been, and competed amongst one another, jostling for preeminence, we each quietly accepted that Babe was Truman’s favorite.