The Swans of Fifth Avenue (8 page)

“Y
ou know, I tried to warn her.”

Slim ground out another cigarette; the crystal ashtrays were overflowing now with lipstick-stained butts, piles of ash spilling over the edges onto Monsieur Soulé's fine linen tablecloth. There was even a small burn mark, which Gloria had covered up with a wineglass. The sun was lower in the sky; so was the champagne in the bottle (the third bottle, to be precise).

“What, darling? What do you mean?” Gloria tried to stifle a yawn; she couldn't remember sitting in one place for so long, not even at La Côte Basque. Her ass, quite honestly, was a little numb. And she had to pee.

Instead, she raised her glass once more, and it was miraculously filled. Oh, being rich was simply lovely, when it came right down to it. Hold out a glass, and it was filled. Hold out an arm, and it was thrust into a satin-lined fur coat. Hold out a finger, and it was encrusted with jewels.

Yet even as Gloria smiled to herself, her eyes half closed, the memories of her childhood and early youth were not far away. They never were; they were always lapping at the edges of her consciousness, persistent waves of fear and loathing and humiliation:
Solo el que carga el cajón sabe lo que pesa el muerto.

Just the other day, trying on a new pair of Ferragamo pumps, her narrow foot stretching out luxuriously in the supple leather, testing the cushioned sole, she'd felt a burning, stabbing pain in the pad of that foot, so acute that she'd cried out, startling the Bergdorf salesman. It was the phantom pain of having to walk barefoot on bad days, or in the thinnest huaraches on good, on the burning gravel streets of the village in Mexico where she had been born, sixty-three years earlier: Veracruz, to be precise. But she hadn't said the name of her hometown aloud for years, decades. She'd hypnotized it out of her mind, for fear of blurting it out at an inopportune moment, one reason why she rarely drank much
—del plato a la boca se cae la sopa,
her father had often reminded her when she was a girl. But other details, stories, of her youth remained. That searing pain, for instance; how her feet never could get clean, how the gravel would disintegrate into a rough powder, grinding into her soles until they became ugly, thorny pads, not feet at all.

How the first thing she did, once she had a little money from working in the local dance hall, where a man would grab the first available girl like he was catching a
pollo
in a yard, was to buy cream to rub into her feet every night, so that someday, when she slept with the kind of man who would notice, they would be smooth, soft as velvet: aristocratic feet.

How the first time she did sleep with the kind of man who would notice, he didn't. But he did notice her hands, her nails, and so then she started spending time on them, too. Pinching pesos—stealing pesos—to buy more creams, a pumice stone. How she learned to view her body then as a man would, by sleeping with many men, many different men. The other girls dressed and preened for one another, but Gloria soon recognized there was no currency in that. She must stand out, be the one men wanted, because men, at their most vulnerable (in bed, with their soft spots exposed and used up, red and tender, the curling tendrils of their upper thighs matted with secretions), would
pay.

Women never let themselves be that vulnerable. And women never had enough money, anyway. She knew women who slept with other women, saying it was easier, but she never did. Maybe it was easier, but it simply didn't pay. So Gloria concentrated on the men, learning from each individual. There was the one who liked to lick her teeth, laughing at how crooked they were. There was the one who put his two hands about her waist and pinched at the roll of baby fat above her hips with a scowl. So she began to save, squirreling away the money to have the teeth fixed; she stopped buying sweets.

They all were entranced by her neck, that long, lovely pipe stem holding up her flower of a head. A few even wanted to hold it in their hands, chokingly, during sex, which she allowed only once. That was enough; she'd blacked out, the bastard had stolen from
her,
and it set her back for months.

But finally she found a man, a different man. A man who came to the dance hall one night and seemed entranced by the colored lanterns, the terrible mariachi band with the mismatched outfits, the dogs sprawling lazily around the edges of the dance floor, as hungry as the girls themselves were, but only the dogs could look forward to any scraps of food. A man who took his time to choose, and he chose her, Gloria Rubio y Alatorre, daughter of a journalist with lofty ideas and no money, and of a seamstress whose only useful piece of advice to her child was that she must learn how to sew a straight line with tiny stitches, and be nice to men.

The man—his name? Gloria honestly couldn't remember anymore—married her and took her away, and that was all that mattered. He took her to Europe, where she promptly left him at a train station in Paris, deciding that was where she wanted to be, not some village on an Alp. She took one look, one whiff of Paris—the scent of fresh cut flowers and warm bread, the saturated colors, even the grays were beautiful—and she planted her feet firmly on the train platform and said
“Buenas noches”
to her hapless German. Because Paris was where she belonged; instinctively, she knew that was where the wealthy men were. And her German, she had discovered on the boat over, when they'd settled for steerage and had to share a suitcase, was not wealthy.
Bastard!
Gloria detested men who lied more than she detested women who did. Women, after all, were trained to do nothing else from birth. We lie about pain, we lie about happiness, we lie about how happy men make us, how good they make us feel when really all we want is to sleep in a clean, warm bed. Alone.

Suddenly Gloria cringed, remembering something she'd told Truman not long ago, her head muddled by the false intimacy fueled by too much champagne and not enough food. “Loel farts,” she'd pronounced with a tipsy giggle. “Like a farm animal, all night long—pooh, pooh, pooh! That's why I can't bear to sleep with him. Who on earth could? And why do men fart, anyway?”

“Honey, if I knew the answer to that one, I wouldn't have to rely on Seconal,” Truman had commiserated.

Oh, God.
What if that made it into a story or a book someday?
La Guinness confided that she couldn't stand to sleep with Loel due to his uncontrollable flatulence….

What if something worse was made known to the world via the poison of Truman Capote's pen? Her mouth tightened, the muscles in her lovely long neck strained. Even now, after all these years, she felt the raw, animal fear of all she had to lose, should someone find out.

Gloria felt a grip on her arm; she looked up to see Slim's cat's-eye glasses askew, her lipstick smeared.

“I also made that little bastard a shitload of money,” Slim slurred, beckoning to the waiter. “Vodka, baby. Champagne gives me the trots, to tell the truth, but we don't normally do that, do we? Well, hell. Today, we do!”

Slim turned back to Gloria, who steadily, silently downed an entire glass of champagne, her gaze never leaving Slim's, as if to prove her superiority of constitution.

“I made him the deal. The film deal for
In Cold Blood.
I did! Not Swifty, not anyone else. And so what does he do? He makes
me
the bitch in his story. The blabbermouth. Lady Ina Coolbirth. What the hell kind of a name is that, anyway?”

“I think,” Pamela whispered, “there was a real person by that name, a long time ago….”

“Shut up, Pam!” Slim grabbed the crystal highball glass full of vodka out of the waiter's hands before he could set it on the table. She sipped, welcoming the icy-hot alcohol down her throat, and it brought tears to her eyes. Tears and memories, both.

Because it had been so long since she had just been Slim. Nancy. Whoever. It had been so long since she had been herself, and that was a laugh. A hell of a laugh. “Oh, Slim! You're such an original! No one's like you! You're true, the truest I know!”

God.
Truman had said that, hadn't he? The little creep. The wise old soul. The friend who had broken her heart—and friends who betrayed other friends were simply the—the—

Take Pam, for instance. Slim's heart was already broken long before Truman's deviltry, crushed and ground beneath the stiletto heel of one Pamela Churchill (Hayward). She gazed at Pam now, tempted to throw some ice water down that cleavage. God, Pam really was getting too old to dress like the slut that she was; her cleavage was a bit leathery, wrinkled. But Slim didn't douse her rival with ice water; Leland was dead now, anyway. Dead, dead, dead, like all the other men who'd loved her.

Almost all, that is.

But she had been an original back then, hadn't she, once upon a time? She'd reveled in it, rejoiced in it, chuckled to herself about it at night. All those men, those Hollywood men, those legends—how they'd all fallen for her, every one, and she'd pretended to be embarrassed or shy or confused or surprised. But she wasn't; she'd made them fall in love with her by being her truest self to the point that it became a costume she put on in the morning, a mask she slipped over her head. The all-American girl, the blond California goddess, the outdoorswoman who could ride and shoot and fish, seemingly not caring about how she looked—secretly spending quite a lot of time, indeed, brushing that golden hair and buffing those natural nails and plucking those untamed eyebrows, choosing those clothes, unusual and tailored and clean when everyone else was wearing snoods and lace collars and giant hats with feathers, jersey dresses with jewel clips.

Not her. Not Slim.

Who'd called her that, in the first place? Bill Powell? Probably. He was the first movie star she'd met, when she was barely fifteen, escaping, running, charging away from a tyrant father who tried to control her even after he left, a sad, broken mother, a bitchy sister; the ghost of a dead brother hovering over the entire town of Salinas, California. So as soon as she could, she vamoosed, driving away in a convertible, heading toward a resort in the desert, already starring in the movie of her life. There, she found herself—her young, golden, slim self—surrounded by actual, honest-to-God movie stars: Bill Powell, for instance. Men who took her under their wing, at first, waiting until she grew up. Just a little.

And when she did, she met Howard Hawks, another daddy. God, how she had a thing for the daddy figures! She didn't have to pay an analyst fifty bucks an hour to figure out why. Classic story: Daddy left. Little girl spends her life trying to replace him.

Howard brought her into Hollywood finally, firmly, where she discovered, to her own surprise, that she didn't want to star in movies. It was so much more fun to be involved in the making of them, on the arm of one of the best directors in the business, Howard Hawks. Howard fetishized her, to tell the truth; he was fascinated by how she spoke, her chin tilted down, eyes looking up, her voice throaty and full of answers to unasked questions. Howard made her read his scripts, rewriting the women characters' dialogue as she would say it. He made sure their costumes were tailored, like her own wardrobe, even sending her out sometimes to buy an actress's clothes herself. That's how much he trusted her taste.

And he introduced her to more men, and what the hell was he thinking, doing that? She was so young—barely nineteen, then twenty. In love, but not in lust, and Howard knew that and so did she. And he surrounded her with Gary Cooper—rather stupid, but gorgeous as a mountain, those dimples! That surprised grin! Clark Gable—not stupid at all, although he dared you to think he was. A barrel of a man, broad-shouldered and -hipped; Clark never looked quite right in a tux, but he was a woman's own wet dream in a flannel shirt and jeans.

And Papa. Finally, always, Papa. Had she ever been sexually attracted to him? Not in the conventional sense; the man was a mess. You could see how he'd been gorgeous when he was young; the bones were there, like archaeological ruins beneath a windblown canvas tent. But when she'd met him, back in the forties, Ernest Hemingway was no longer interested in things such as grooming and hygiene. He'd found a look—safari shirt; baggy, ratty shorts or pants; scruffy beard—and kept it, no matter the season or occasion. And he so rarely bothered to bathe, or wash his clothes, or trim his toenails, or clean his fingernails.

Yet. He was so muskily, powerfully masculine. More than any other man she'd met, and that was saying something when Clark Gable was a notch in your belt. So it was that, and his brain, his heart—poetic, sad, boyish, angry—that drew her. And he wanted her. Slim could see it in his hungry eyes, voraciously taking her in, no matter how many times a day he saw her; each time was like the first time after a wrenching separation. He made no bones about it, not even in front of Howard.

And Howard got a kick out of it. To tell the truth, it turned him on. It made him tear her clothes off at night, knowing that Papa was just in the next room, or tent, brooding about her, dreaming about her. To tell the truth, she got off on it, as well.

Well, why not? Sex is great. Sex is all. Was, anyway.

Oh, hell. When did it vanish, sex? When did it leave, pack up its bags, and take up residence elsewhere, leaving only a polite thank-you note for your gracious hospitality?

“I'll have another,” Slim whispered, waving her glass, then tipping it for one last drop. The ice slid down and rattled her teeth.

“Your lipstick has come off,” Marella observed sleepily.

“So's yours.”

“I'll reapply it.” And Marella opened her purse and actually brought her lipstick out, before all four realized what she was doing and gasped. Gloria slapped her hand in horror.

“Babe would never do that,” Slim admonished her. “Babe Paley would never apply lipstick at the table.”