The Swans of Fifth Avenue(96)



Then there was Gloria. La Guinness, as Truman had dubbed her.

Ah, Gloria.

“What do you think, Bill?” Slim turned to her companion, now very stooped, thinner than his rangy frame warranted. His hair was very sparse, and he had a hearing aid in one ear.

“What?” He turned up the aid.

“What do you think about Gloria? Do you think she really did it? Commit suicide?”

“It was a heart attack, wasn’t it?” Like many men his age—eighty-three—his voice was querulous, high, and loud. Not the commanding bark it once had been.

“That’s what Loel said, anyway. But one of her maids—well, it’s just that she had been so despondent, so low, those last few years.” Gloria had died in 1980; only two years after she’d envied Babe for checking out before growing too old.

“I don’t believe that bunk.” Bill signaled for the waiter, ordered some wine for the two of them. “Not Gloria. Why would anyone do that? Especially her?”

“Because she was beautiful,” Slim replied quietly. “Once.”

“So were you. Still are, to some.” Bill grinned, and she glimpsed the man he had been, the man she’d known for more than fifty years; the man she first met, before he married Babe, on a fishing trip in Cuba with Papa. If she closed her eyes, she could visualize him then, brown all over, except for that blinding white smile. His hands, she remembered; that’s what she first noticed about him. His hands, huge, always open, always grasping. Wanting more.

“Stop,” Slim retorted, slapping away one of those hands now, as it grasped her knee. “We’re too old for this.”

“We didn’t used to be. We could go up to the apartment, just like we used to.” Bill grinned, and suddenly looked ten years younger. Maybe twenty.

And Slim relaxed; she allowed Bill to grasp her knee, she squeezed that huge hand, the fingers now knobby, arthritic, but the grasp still powerful. Sure of what he desired; certain that it could be attained.

Sex hadn’t packed up and left, after all. She was surprised to feel that eager tingle between her thighs.

“I assume your wife is out of town, then?” Slim knew it was cruel, to remind him of their old game. But it slipped out.

Bill released her hand. They both picked up their menus.

“So, I imagine you heard about Truman?”

“Yeah.” Bill sighed, then frowned, that old Bill Paley icy glare. “Well, I can’t say I’m sad about it, Slim. Not at all. Not after what he did to Babe, to you, to me.”

“Joanne Carson called me—you know, he’d been staying with her, in that little room she had for him in Los Angeles. After we all banished him, that’s where he ended up, in the back room of a TV star’s ex-wife.” Slim smiled grimly. “But she called me, after they took him away to the mortuary. She said that his last words were ‘Beautiful Babe.’ She wanted me to know that, for some reason.” Slim choked a little, her eyes misting over with tears.

“Do you really believe that?”

“I’d like to. Wouldn’t you?”

“No. I don’t want to believe that little bastard was still in love with my wife. I don’t want to believe his last words were about her. I don’t want to believe anything other than Babe died peacefully, loving only me, and that Truman died painfully, alone. Call me cruel, if you want. But—”

“That’s the story you want to tell yourself,” Slim whispered. “I understand, Bill. Because I tell myself a lot of stories to help me sleep at night. Stories about how Babe was my dearest friend, and I never betrayed her. Stories about how you and I had a great love, not just an occasional roll in the hay whenever she was out of town. Stories about how wonderful life was back then, when none of us told each other the truth, but so what? It was all so beautiful, wasn’t it? It was all so lovely and gracious. Not like it is now.”

Neither spoke for a long time; they just gazed out at Fifty-fifth Street, full of tourists in their tourist clothes, sneakers and jeans, sweatshirts, windbreakers, those absurd Walkman headphones over their ears, blocking out the delicious sounds of the city. The St. Regis was just across the street, and still grand, but now rock stars stayed in the suites and nobody lived in hotels anymore. And it was owned by Sheraton. Astors and Vanderbilts and bears, oh, my; no one was afraid of any of them and their old money now. Not in the garish New York of the eighties and Donald Trump.

Bill Paley was still chairman of CBS, despite efforts over the last few years to oust him. Still, he was selling off stock, a little bit at a time; his days of acquisition were over. He’d already made plans to give his astounding collection of art to MoMA. Mostly, he played golf and swam and slept in his office between meetings at which he still made appearances, just to remind people who built the damn place, after all. To remind himself of that, as well.

“We do have a great love,” Bill told Slim, told himself, as he told every woman he still took up to the apartment on Fifth, even now—why, hadn’t he just been named one of People magazine’s top ten eligible bachelors?

Although every time he brought some little cutie up there, he couldn’t stop himself from giving a tour, a running narrative of Babe—Babe bought this, Babe put that there, Babe used to sit here, Babe felt that the dining room should be in this color…he’d never changed the apartment, had resisted efforts from his children to redecorate there, and at Kiluna. He couldn’t bring himself to; they were the last things in the world he had of her, her essence, that gracious living that Slim was talking about. He knew everything she had picked out was now out of fashion, but he didn’t care. He was too old to care.

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