SSC (2004) The Complete Stories of Truman Capote (17 page)

Like fragments of an old letter, scattered popcorn lay trampled flat, and she, leaning back in a watchman’s attitude, allowed her gaze to hunt among it, as if deciphering here and there a word, an answer. Her eyes shifted discreetly to the man mounting the steps, Vincent. There was about him the freshness of a shower, shave, cologne, but dreary blue circled his eyes, and the crisp seersucker into which he’d changed had been made for a heavier man: a long month of pneumonia, and wakeful burning nights had lightened his weight a dozen pounds, and more. Each morning, evening, meeting her here at his gate, or near the gallery, or outside the restaurant where he lunched, a nameless disorder took hold, a paralysis of time and identity. The wordless pantomime of her pursuit contracted his heart, and there were comalike days when she seemed not one, but all, a multiple person, and her shadow in the street every shadow, following and followed. And once they’d been alone together in an automatic elevator,
and he’d screamed: “I am not him! Only me, only me!” But she smiled as she’d smiled telling of the man with painted toenails, because after all, she knew.

It was suppertime, and, not knowing where to eat, he paused under a street lamp that, blooming abruptly, fanned complex light over stone; while he waited there came a clap of thunder, and all along the street every face but two, his and the girl’s, tilted upward. A blast of river breeze tossed the children’s laughter as they, linking arms, pranced like carousel ponies, and carried the mama’s voice who, leaning from a window, howled: rain, Rachel, rain—gonna rain gonna rain! And the gladiola, ivy-filled flower cart jerked crazily as the peddler, one eye slanted skyward, raced for shelter. A potted geranium fell off, and the little girls gathered the blooms and tucked them behind their ears. The blending spatter of running feet and raindrops tinkled on the xylophone sidewalks—the slamming of doors, the lowering of windows, then nothing but silence, and rain. Presently, with slow scraping steps, she came below the lamp to stand beside him, and it was as if the sky were a thunder-cracked mirror, for the rain fell between them like a curtain of splintered glass.

“Walter, listen to me: if everyone dislikes you, works against you, don’t believe they do so arbitrarily; you create these situations for yourself.”

Anna had said that, and, though his healthier side told him she intended nothing malicious (if Anna was not a friend, then who was?), he’d despised her for it, had gone around telling everybody how much he despised Anna, what a bitch she was. That woman! he said, don’t trust that Anna. This plainspoken act of hers—nothing but a cover-up for all her repressed hostility; terrible liar, too, can’t believe a word she says: dangerous, my God! And naturally all he said went back to Anna, so that when he called about a play-opening they’d planned attending together, she told him: “Sorry, Walter, I can’t afford you any longer. I understand you very well, and I have a certain amount of sympathy. It’s very compulsive, your malice, and you aren’t too much to blame, but I don’t want ever to see you again because I’m not so well myself that I can afford it.” But why? And what had he done? Well, sure, he’d gossiped about her, but it wasn’t as though he’d meant it, and after all, as he said to Jimmy Bergman
(now there was a two-face if ever there was one), what was the use of having friends if you couldn’t discuss them objectively?

He said you said they said we said round and round. Round and round, like the paddle-bladed ceiling fan wheeling above; turning and turning, stirring stale air ineffectively, it made a watch-tick sound, counted seconds in the silence. Walter inched to a cooler part of the bed and closed his eyes against the dark little room. At seven that evening he’d arrived in New Orleans, at seven-thirty he’d registered in this hotel, an anonymous, side-street place. It was August, and it was as though bonfires burned in the red night sky, and the unnatural Southern landscape, observed so assiduously from the train, and which, trying to sublimate all else, he retraced in memory, intensified a feeling of having traveled to the end, the falling off.

But why he was here in this stifling hotel in this faraway town he could not say. There was a window in the room, but he could not seem to get it open, and he was afraid to call the bellboy (what queer eyes that kid had!), and he was afraid to leave the hotel, for what if he got lost? and if he got lost, even a little, then he would be lost altogether. He was hungry; he hadn’t eaten since breakfast, so he found some peanut-butter crackers left over from a package he’d bought in Saratoga, and washed them down with a finger of Four Roses, the last. It made him sick. He vomited in the wastebasket, collapsed back on the bed, and cried until the pillow was wet. After a while he just lay there in the hot room, shivering, just lay there and watched the slow-turning fan; there was no beginning to its action, and no end; it was a circle.

An eye, the earth, the rings of a tree, everything is a circle, and all circles, Walter said, have a center. It was crazy for Anna to say what had happened was his own doing. If there was anything wrong with him really, then it had been made so by circumstances beyond his control, by, say, his churchly mother, or his father, an insurance official in Hartford, or his older sister, Cecile, who’d married a man forty years her senior. “I just wanted to get out of the house.” That was her
excuse, and, to tell the truth, Walter had thought it reasonable enough.

But he did not know where to begin thinking about himself, did not know where to find the center. The first telephone call? No, that had been only three days ago and, properly speaking, was the end, not the beginning. Well, he could start with Irving, for Irving was the first person he’d known in New York.

Now Irving was a sweet little Jewish boy with a remarkable talent for chess and not much else: he had silky hair, and pink baby cheeks, and looked about sixteen. Actually he was twenty-three, Walter’s age, and they’d met at a bar in the Village. Walter was alone and very lonesome in New York, and so when this sweet little Irving was friendly he decided maybe it would be a good idea to be friendly, too—because you never can tell. Irving knew a great many people, and everyone was very fond of him, and he introduced Walter to all his friends.

And there was Margaret. Margaret was more or less Irving’s girl friend. She was only so-so-looking (her eyes bulged, there was always a little lipstick on her teeth, she dressed like a child of ten), but she had a hectic brightness which Walter found attractive. He could not understand why she bothered with Irving at all. “Why do you?” he said, on one of the long walks they’d begun taking together in Central Park.

“Irving is sweet,” she said, “and he loves me very purely, and who knows: I might just as well marry him.”

“A damn-fool thing to do,” he said. “Irving could never be your husband because he’s really your little brother. Irving is everyone’s little brother.”

Margaret was too bright not to see the truth in this. So one day when Walter asked if he might not make love to her she said, all right, she didn’t mind if he did. They made love often after that.

Eventually, Irving heard about it, and one Monday there was a nasty scene in, curiously enough, the same bar where they’d met.
There had been that evening a party in honor of Kurt Kuhnhardt (Kuhnhardt Advertising), Margaret’s boss, and she and Walter had gone together, afterward stopping by this bar for a nightcap. Except for Irving and a couple of girls in slacks the place was empty. Irving was sitting at the bar, his cheeks quite pink, his eyes rather glazed. He looked like a little boy playing grown-up, for his legs were too short to reach the stool’s footrest; they dangled doll-like. The instant Margaret recognized him she tried to turn around and walk out, but Walter wouldn’t let her. And anyway, Irving had seen them: never taking his eyes from them, he put down his whiskey, slowly climbed off the stool, and, with a kind of sad, ersatz toughness, strutted forward.

“Irving, dear,” said Margaret, and stopped, for he’d given her a terrible look.

His chin was trembling. “You go away,” he said, and it was as though he were denouncing some childhood tormentor, “I hate you.” Then, almost in slow motion, he swung out and, as if he clutched a knife, struck Walter’s chest. It was not much of a blow, and when Walter did nothing but smile, Irving slumped against a jukebox, screaming: “Fight me, you damned coward; come on, and I’ll kill you, I swear before God I will.” So that was how they left him.

Walking home, Margaret began to cry in a soft tired way. “He’ll never be sweet again,” she said.

And Walter said, “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Oh, yes, you do,” she told him, her voice a whisper. “Yes, you do; the two of us, we’ve taught him how to hate. Somehow I don’t think he ever knew before.”

Walter had been in New York now four months. His original capital of five hundred dollars had fallen to fifteen, and Margaret lent him money to pay his January rent at the Brevoort. Why, she wanted to know, didn’t he move someplace cheaper? Well, he told her, it was better to have a good address. And what about a job? When was he going to start working? Or was he? Sure, he said, sure, as a matter of
fact he thought about it a good deal. But he didn’t intend fooling around with just any little jerkwater thing that came along. He wanted something good, something with a future, something in, say, advertising. All right, said Margaret, maybe she could help him; at any rate, she’d speak with her boss, Mr. Kuhnhardt.

The K.K.A., so-called, was a middle-sized agency, but, as such things go, very good, the best. Kurt Kuhnhardt, who’d founded it in 1925, was a curious man with a curious reputation: a lean, fastidious German, a bachelor, he lived in an elegant black house on Sutton Place, a house interestingly furnished with, among other things, three Picassos, a superb music box, South Sea Island masks and a burly Danish youngster, the houseboy. He invited occasionally some one of his staff in to dinner, whoever was favorite at the moment, for he was continually selecting protégés. It was a dangerous position, these alliances being, as they were, whimsical and uncertain: the protégé found himself checking the want ads when, just the evening previous, he’d dined most enjoyably with his benefactor. During his second week at the K.K.A., Walter, who had been hired as Margaret’s assistant, received a memorandum from Mr. Kuhnhardt asking him to lunch, and this, of course, excited him unspeakably.

“Kill-joy?” said Margaret, straightening his tie, plucking lint off a lapel. “Nothing of the sort. It’s just that—well, Kuhnhardt’s wonderful to work for so long as you don’t get too involved—or you’re likely not to be working—period.”

Walter knew what she was up to; she didn’t fool him a minute; he felt like telling her so, too, but restrained himself; it wasn’t time yet. One of these days, though, he was going to have to get rid of her, and soon. It was degrading, his working for Margaret. And besides, the
tendency from now on would be to keep him down. But nobody could do that, he thought, looking into Mr. Kuhnhardt’s sea-blue eyes, nobody could keep Walter down.

“You’re an idiot,” Margaret told him. “My God, I’ve seen these little friendships of K.K.’s a dozen times, and they don’t mean a damn. He used to palsy-walsy around with the switchboard operator. All K.K. wants is someone to play the fool. Take my word, Walter, there aren’t any shortcuts: what matters is how you do your job.”

He said: “And have you complaints on that score? I’m doing as well as could be expected.”

“It depends on what you mean by expected,” she said.

One Saturday not long afterward he made a date to meet her in Grand Central. They were going up to Hartford to spend the afternoon with his family, and for this she’d bought a new dress, new hat and shoes. But he did not show up. Instead, he drove out on Long Island with Mr. Kuhnhardt, and was the most awed of three hundred guests at Rosa Cooper’s debut ball. Rosa Cooper (née Kuppermann) was heiress to the Cooper Dairy Products: a dark, plump, pleasant child with an unnatural British accent, the result of four years at Miss Jewett’s. She wrote a letter to a friend named Anna Stimson, who subsequently showed it to Walter: “Met the divinest man. Danced with him six times, a divine dancer. He is an Advertising Executive, and is terribly divinely good-looking. We have a date—dinner and the theater!”

Margaret did not mention the episode, nor did Walter. It was as though nothing had happened, except that now, unless there was office business to discuss, they never spoke, never saw each other. One afternoon, knowing she would not be at home, he went to her apartment and used a passkey given him long ago; there were things he’d left here, clothes, some books, his pipe; rummaging around collecting all this, he discovered a photograph of himself scrawled red with lipstick: it gave him for an instant the sensation of falling in a dream. He also came across the only gift he’d ever given her, a bottle of
L’Heure Bleue, still unopened. He sat down on the bed, and, smoking a cigarette, stroked his hand over the cool pillow, remembering the way her head had lain there, remembering, too, how they used to lie here Sunday mornings reading the funnies aloud, Barney Google and Dick Tracy and Joe Palooka.