The Swans of Fifth Avenue(25)
“Nothing, True Heart. So don’t strain yourself. It’s nothing.”
“Really?” Truman looked up, first at Slim, then at Babe. His wide eyes narrowed; his jaw set. “Really, honey? Because you know me. You know I just can’t stand secrets, unless I’m the one telling them!”
Slim didn’t join in the general laughter. She looked worriedly at Babe, who didn’t return her gaze.
She couldn’t. Babe Paley was staring at Truman with the indulgent, yet hungry look of a proud mother.
Or was it a lover?
La C?te Basque, October 17, 1975
…..
“You 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 C?te 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.