He ponders—as he steeps in the steaming chlorine bath—if he has the energy to dog-paddle a lap, keeping his panama hat above water. More often than not he prefers to float on a plastic raft, gazing through his insect shades into a tangle of eucalyptus branches.
Joanne has filled the rambling ranch house (a one-story monstrosity on a particularly perilous stretch of Sunset) with llama skins and wicker swings and yogi memorabilia. It’s been designed to invoke a Tibetan monastery, candles a flickering constant. She used to light these on special occasions, but the boy has insisted that every day they spend together is an ‘Occasion,’ and has thus kept the wax trade thriving in Bel Air.
We muse that Carson must be paying hefty alimony, given that Joanne’s lifestyle isn’t exactly commensurate with her second-act career as a ‘holistic nutritionist.’
She’s gotten the boy into that shit—feeding him hemp seed and tiger’s milk and wheatgrass in excess. She brags that when he stays with her, his vices seem to vanish.
‘Sugar,’ he’ll tell the last stragglers in his weary entourage, ‘California may gobble your brain cells, but the food there is so damn healthy. Joanne makes me fresh-squeezed juice in a special machine every morning. Carrot-and-apple-and-grapefruit, oh my!’
He balances a highball of juice on his gut as he lolls on the raft in Joanne’s pool. We—and Jack—and anyone who knows him— have to wonder where he’s stashed the vodka. As he sips and floats with what we suspect is his traditional Orange Drink, his thoughts turn to his former pool in Palm Springs, to the house at Thirst’s End. The unrelenting midday heat makes him think of Maggie, lying in the desert sun with her steady, listless panting. He knows how hard Jack fought to save her in the end, when her hind legs were paralyzed, and regrets with all his heart suggesting otherwise in a blind moment of rage.
He thinks of Jack, who he misses terribly.
Not the harridan Jack of now, who berates him each time the boy lands himself in the hospital, who regulates his meds when they happen to occupy the same space, though that happens less and less frequently. Not the Jack who still resents him for turning their romance chaste—certainly not the prudish Jack who, when the boy attempts to undo his poor choice and make love, fails to become aroused, mechanics prevented by spite.
It is the Jack of his youth that he craves.
When he closes his eyes and inhales the eucalyptus and the fragrant scent of Joanne’s climbing jasmine, the boy allows himself to travel in his mind. As the August heat seeps into his skin, he wills himself to another heat-soaked clime…
Not to sweltering days in Monroeville, though he travels there too sometimes, to visit Nelle and Sook and his Mama— who, in the Monroeville of his choosing, is not driving down the long dirt road, leaving him behind, but rather sitting withhim. They sunbathe on the soft grass in the Faulk cousins’ yard, watching ice cubes melt atop the griddles of their chests. They swing together on porch swings, enjoying the harmony of creaking back and forth together. When and if theboy allows the drama of a snakebite to intrude, it’s the boy’s Mama who kills five chickens to drain their blood for hiscure. It is she who holds his hand and strokes his fringe and tells him what a fine boy he is, while he glugs from a bottle of crystal-clear Mama-juice, its fire trickling like lava down his— —
But that’s not his memory of choice now.
Today, lying on the plastic float in Joanne Carson’s pool, he’s traveled further afield, to more exotic landscapes. He has sprouted wings and flown elsewhere, transported through the heat and botanicals to a secluded beach in Morocco.
The boy is twenty-four.
He knows this because today is Jack’s birthday and in memory he’s about to turn thirty-five again, rather than the seventy years of now.
They wake in each other’s arms.
He has forgotten just how soft Jack’s skin can be, having not run his fingers over its freckled terrain in some time. The boy, in his reverie, takes full advantage of the chance when it comes, attempting to kiss his way along the patterns that he worships, to find logic in their clusters. Jack laughs, his low, resonant laugh. Gawd, it’s been so long since he’s heard that laugh, it nearly breaks his heart with delight.
Jack loves him again—the boy can tell. He’s waited for this love to return, waited through ill-fated conquests, through brawls and petty feuding. Through betrayals and defections. Through the unbearable loneliness.
The boy has needed Jack’s love more than ever these last years. Needed the person he’s most adored to understand the scope of his loss. To feel with him what it is to be bereft. To have done something so heinous, without meaning to, he’s been forever barred from paradise. To be denied the chance to make amends, which is perhaps what has hurt him most.
We know he has a big heart, the boy. Perhaps that’s his problem—an oversized heart, bursting with limitless love. There’s so much of it stored up now, prevented from release, it’s constricting his very breath.
His heart feels as big as that of a great blue whale, which he’s read has the largest heart of any living creature. Their hearts alone weigh as much as a jet plane, their tongues as much as an elephant. The aorta is big enough for a grown man to crawl through. The boy feels like a Balaenoptera musculus trapped in a shrimpo body.
It hurts to have that much love to give and no one left to give it to.
He thought that Jack would understand, but his patience ran thin quick—his patience for such things being limited to begin with. A wedge had been driven between them, so in addition to losing us, he’s lost Jack too in a way. He would never again be the pure, joyous sprite Jack had fallen in love with; he would always be marred by pain.
Jack hadn’t fallen in love with a boy with a broken blue whale heart. The loss of Babe, of Slim, of each of us, has altered the boy’s anatomy. Jack has not been certain what mammal he’s now dealing with, and being thus unsure is incapable of communing with it.
But here in the travels of the boy’s imaginings, Jack loves him without reservation.
THEY’D FIRST GONE to tangier to meet Cecil Beaton. Jack would have happily remained ensconced in their rented house on the cliff in Taormina, with its bougainvillea and its citrus trees, laden with fragrant blood oranges.
But Truman wanted Tangier and Jack couldn’t resist indulging him in those early days. Cecil was someone the boy had long admired. He’d studied him from afar—fascinated by the artist who mingled with society—‘Sugar, with the royals, no less!’
Cecil had taken to Truman, had adopted him as a protégé of sorts. They made quite the double act—the lanky, posh English-man and the brash midget hillbilly. But they were a friendship made in paradise. Thanks to Cecil, they found themselves (to Truman’s delight and Jack’s dismay) part of an expat community of artists… Cecil and Jane and Paul Bowles, and nasty little Gore Vidal, who loathed the boy as much as he was loathed in— —
No, the boy will not allow washed-up grudges to taint his memory. He inhales the wisteria once more, feels the faintly medicinal eucalyptus cooling his overburdened lungs. He forces himself back onto a beach, the day of Jack’s thirty-fifth birthday.
He has been planning to give his darling Jack and the tiny expat town a fête they won’t soon forget. He and Cecil have spent the better part of two weeks down on the beach, at the Cave of Hercules in the Cape Spartel, near the summer palace of Moroccan kings.
They’ve devoted their combined talents to setting the stage for a celebration of epic proportions. They’ve draped the inside of the cave with Moroccan tapestries. Covered the sandy floor with cement tiles shipped in a crate from Marrakech. They’ve procured every lantern in the remote town. It will be lit from within, turning the abandoned beach into a sultan’s harem.
‘Cecil baby,’ the boy tells him as they arrange rugs and ottomans, hookahs and furs, ‘you know, inside the harems there were often bang-up parties. Those poor little gals were slaves, but that didn’t stop’ em from kicking their heels up now and again. They would sw
im in sea hammams—private beaches like this one, where they’d play musical instruments and sing and paint and dance, naked as jaybirds…’
Cecil half-listens. He’s far more interested in how it looks than what it means.
‘They say that Hercules slept in this cave before performing his eleventh labor—snatching golden apples from the Hesperides’ Garden,’ the boy continues, undeterred. ‘I don’t care if we have apples—or food for that matter. It’s my party—’
‘And Jack’s,’ Cecil reminds him, in clipped English vowels.
‘Of course Jack’s! I’m doing this for him, aren’t I… ?’ He then enthuses, ‘There’ll be nothin’ but bottles and bottles of lovely fizz and hookahs full of hashish!’
And so it comes to pass, as the party makes its way down the brittle cliffs in the dark, led by shirtless Moroccans wielding torches, and when they discover the glowing jewel-box cave, even the most cynical of them catches their breath. Jack takes it all in, pragmatism silenced by awe.
‘Jack… ! Jack… ! Look up, Jack!’
The party turns to see Truman, every bit the pasha, sitting cross-legged, being hoisted on a makeshift palanquin by four strapping Moroccans.
‘Helloooooooo, Jack!’ The boy can see his beloved on the beach as he makes his descent, drawing near and nearer. Jack stands in a field of lanterns, surrounded by a halo of light. His features are obscured, but the boy is certain the faint lines around those green Irish eyes are softening his countenance, as they tend to when he smiles. It’s an image the boy will sear into his memory to relive again and again.
‘Jack!’ he calls to him and waves, as if he’s brand new to him. It’s how he’ll always say Jack’s name—as if he’s something new and wondrous that he will never tire of.
And from a pool in California, the boy dips his limbs in the water as he remembers a beach in Morocco, where revelers ran naked into the ocean in the pale moonlight, as the Andaluz band played on.
JOANNE HAS SET up a ‘writing room’ for Truman in her ashram of a ranch house.
Naturally we’ve never seen it, but we have heard… and photos will later be printed by the tabloids. We’re all struck by the tawdriness of it. She can call it a ‘Writing Room’ all she wants, but we can see what it is… the maid’s quarters. A tiny, bare space, just off the kitchen, originally designed for the staff.
She’s christened the maid’s rathole Truman’s, and keeps things there we can’t fathom him stomaching. For someone who worships beauty as much as Tru, the contents of the space seem especially obscene: a fraying wicker peacock chair, a mass-produced sepia Madonna and Child—these for a boy who values antiques and loathes art that we’ve heard him dismiss as ‘religious propaganda’ in famed galleries. A half-deflated party balloon, dejected in its flaccid state. A four-poster canopy bed that looks like a hand-me-down from a ten-year-old girl’s room. From its iron posts hang two kitsch piñatas. (We all know that since watching what happened to Dick and Perry, Truman is squeamish about hangings of any sort; he must lie awake at night, staring at those papier-mâché donkeys strung up by their necks, and shudder.)
Joanne swears that he relishes the solitude. That he comes to her to get healthy (even though she—the nutritionist—keeps his nightstand stuffed with Snickers bars and M&Ms and peanut-butter cups left as offerings). There are ‘no drugs’ in her monastery, she insists—though presumably she hasn’t bothered to count Truman’s black doctor’s satchel of prescription bottles, supplying everything from Quaaludes to codeine. Dilantin, Thorazine, Valium—you name it.
‘Sugar, I just love my little pills—they make one feel so cozy. I pop a few and it’s like cuddling up with them for the evening.’
He ‘doesn’t drink’ in her palace of wellness either, according to Joanne. This too we have our doubts about, Truman being better than a speakeasy barman at hiding the hooch. We’re certain he’ll be secretly spiking all that juice Joanne is plying him with. In fact, the health nut would be stunned to learn that the protein shakes Truman mixes in her blender contain a healthy splash of bourbon from a discreetly concealed hip flask.
Still, on days when he feels ambitious, they drive to the beach in Malibu, where they fly homemade kites, like the ones he’d flown with Sook when he was her ‘Buddy’ in Monroeville. On rare days he summons the strength to dog-paddle the length of the pool a few times.
He tells Joanne that he’s writing, but she has not, by her own admission, seen pages emerge. She’s received the same verbal recitation of the Answered Prayers extracts, but we suspect he’ll be bullshitting her, just as he’s done with the rest of us. She claims she once saw an elusive missing chapter—the inflammatory ‘Father Flanagan’s All-Night Nigger Queen Kosher Cafe,’ which the mighty Clay Felker never did get his hands on.
After ten years of Tru running his mouth about these famous ‘chapters,’ most of us suspect they don’t exist—that they’re but another of the boy’s tall tales.
Lee thinks he wrote the whole frigging opus, all eight hundred pages, but destroyed it when the fallout occurred. C.Z., for her part, feels certain if he had something written, there’s no way he would have delayed publication. At this point he has nothing left to lose. Babe and Gloria, had they been here to conjecture, would continue to hope that he’s hidden his pages away, to be found at an opportune moment. (Perhaps where they’ve gone they know the answer to such questions, which we’ll one day learn when we join them.)
Slim says she wouldn’t doubt it if he never wrote a syllable beyond the original hatchet job. He is, as we know, appallingly lazy… But Marella puts her two cents in—in her cryptic post-antiquaire way, ‘I promise you, there’s more. He told me what he plans to say. He’s written it, and it’s lethal.’
Ever one to manipulate a tale for entertainment’s sake, Truman yammers on of late about random keys and bank vaults and fabricated theft. He’s taunted eager journalists with tales of lockers in stations. Of safety-deposit boxes, secured with indefinite payments. His publisher has been mailed a cryptic list of far-flung Greyhound depots; his lawyer instructed to file suits against likely culprits of theft. Planting the seeds of his own bespoke conspiracy, he’s been consistently inconsistent.
TRUMAN AND JOANNE travel to various countries, he having determined their itineraries beforehand.
‘We’re going to Barcelona tomorrow,’ he might declare upon arrival.
The following morn he’d present his hostess with a tray of churros and café con leche. They’d spend the afternoon taking art books from the library, poring over photos of Gaudí’s architecture as they lunch, nibbling plates of tapas and sipping Tempranillo. They’d listen to Spanish guitar records and critique the works of Picasso and Dalí.
They’d been to Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, Moscow… all without stepping on a plane.
On this particular visit, Tru reveals their destination, mimicking Johnny’s Tonight Show catchphrase—‘Heeeeeeeeeeeere’s China!’
‘Where in China?’ Joanne asks.
‘Shanghai. I’m simply dying to go. Y’know it’s the only place on earth I haven’t been?’
They order a takeout, which they eat on the floor by the fire, studying maps and sketches of the Great Wall. They eat dim sum with chopsticks and look at photos of the Bund. Of Old Shanghai in the Thirties, in all its glorious excess. As they sip their oolong tea, Tru tells Joanne about the bruisers he’d hired in Monroeville to dig up his cousin Jenny’s vegetable patch in search of Oriental treasure. He presents her with a gift of a tiny porcelain medicine jar, procured at a shop in Chinatown.
Curiously, while flipping through an atlas, Truman pauses and says—‘I really am going to China, you know.’
‘That’s wonderful, Truman. When?’
‘Oh, I dunno. Soon… But I’m going.’
What he doesn’t discuss is the one-way ticket to Los Angeles he purchased the week before, at a higher rate than usual. What he hasn’t told a soul—not even Jack—is that after being released from the hospital in S
outhampton, he’d returned to the city, and within the walls of his UN Plaza digs they started up again…
The voices. Our voice.
It’s getting close, Truman… isn’t it? Not only can he hear us, he’s accepted our presence as something that is part of him.
It will soon be here… It will soon be here…
‘Stop it!’ he hisses, to no one in particular. He pops a little lilac pill—a new acquisition called Lotusate, which he finds works a treat for keeping unwelcome warnings at bay.
Truman had arrived at Joanne’s the previous day hoping for the best, though he now fears his body is failing him. She assumes this means he’s been drugging, despite his doctors’ warnings.
‘No,’ he says quietly, ‘I’ve taken nothing.’
(Not exactly true, but a cocktail of barbiturates is something he considers the ‘norm.’)
He looks so weak she makes him scrambled eggs on toast, as basic as it gets. Afterward, he asks her for the stack of his books she gives as Christmas gifts each year, which she always asked him to personalize.
‘But it’s only August,’ she objects.
‘I’ll just feel better, knowing that they’re done,’ he says.
He works his way through her stockpile of Music for Chameleons, then continues scrawling his signature on blank scraps of paper. When Joanne looks confused, he explains—‘You can save them and tape them into books in the future.’
When he finishes signing her scraps for future books, it is he who surprises her, with a cake and candles, her birthday being just before his own.
‘Darling, what can I get you for your birthday? Is there anything that you want?’
‘I want you to write. That’s all. Please, Truman—just write.’
Yes, Truman, write, but not that shit-on-a-shingle gossip…
Write something worthy.
Swan Song Page 46