The Swans of Fifth Avenue(97)
“No, we don’t have a great love, Bill. You were kind and very generous with money when I needed it; I was there for a diversion when you needed it, one of your blond shiksas. And I have to ask you a question, now that Truman’s gone. Do you think Babe ever knew, Bill? Did Truman? Because the story—Truman’s story in Esquire, about Sidney Dillon and the bloody stain—did you ever tell him about that? That one time with us?”
“No. Did you?”
“No.”
Truth or consequences. That old familiar game. Neither really wanted to play it, after all.
“But Babe,” Slim said after a pause, unable to let the subject drop as she knew she ought, “Babe said something before she died. She said I was a survivor. It seemed odd, at the time. Out of the blue. And then, you know, she didn’t leave me much in her will, not like everyone else. God knows, I didn’t care about that, except it did seem strange, considering how generous she was with everyone else, like Gloria and Marella and C.Z. I don’t know. I just wonder.”
“Babe didn’t know. She couldn’t. How? She could never have known that the woman in the story was you. Although she sure as hell knew the man was me.” And Bill remembered how bitter Babe was those last couple of years; how free she was with her regrets, her suspicions. Her accusations.
“I hope she didn’t know,” Slim whispered, picking up a fork, weighing it in her hands, enjoying the cool heaviness of fine silver. “But I wonder…”
“Don’t worry about it, Slim. It’s over. They’re both gone. And we’re left.”
“We’re left with the memories. Not a great love, no, Bill, I don’t think either of us was capable of that. But Truman and Babe, they were—well, Babe was, anyway, and I think that blinded her because in the end, Truman was Truman. But he did what we never could. He began to speak the truth. Not someone else’s truth, not Perry Smith’s or Holly Golightly’s or even his own. No, he began to tell the truth about us. And the thing is, Bill, darling—the truth is ugly. Yours. Mine. Even Babe’s.”
Bill made a garbled, anguished sound; Slim saw his throat working, as if he was trying to swallow something, and she grasped his hand again, and placed it against her breasts, her saggy, deflated breasts, so that he could feel her, feel her heart, her femininity, her warm, solid self. She closed her eyes, enjoyed a man’s hand upon her breasts for the first time in eons, and knew, right now, that she was alive, she was still here, not a memory, not a relic; not some old woman nobody looked at twice on the street. Not some forgotten name in a faded magazine, an answer to the question of “Where are they now?”
She opened her eyes. Bill was grinning at her with that ageless boy’s leer, quite at odds with his watery, faded eyes, his visible hearing aid. But he had relaxed, his hand still upon her breasts, until she removed that hand and tucked it back on his own lap.
“So I still like to see you, my friend. I still like to sit in La C?te Basque and sip wine and eat fine food and indulge in our memories—the good ones, the ones we want to remember. So let’s do that. That’s the story we can tell ourselves, at night when we can’t sleep. We can tell ourselves that there is one other person in the world who sees it in the same way, who remembers. Who remembers her. Babe. And Gloria. And even Truman, I guess, as he was, back then. Our fun, gossipy friend. Our entrée into a different world, for a time. An amusing, brief little time. A time before it was fashionable to tell the truth, and the world grew sordid from too much honesty.”
Slim raised her glass; so did Bill.
“To Babe. To Truman. To Papa and all the other glittering, prevaricating ghosts of the past.”
“To Babe,” Bill echoed. And they clinked their glasses together in a toast, and spent the rest of the afternoon talking about their grandchildren.
—
IN THE END, AS in the beginning, all they had were the stories. The stories they told about one another, and the stories they told to themselves.
“I loved her, she was the great love of my life, my only regret,” Truman breathed near the end, as he lay, exhausted from the world, from abuse, from himself, always himself.
“I loved him, he was the great love of my life,” Babe whispered to herself as she closed her eyes and gave up the struggle, for it was ugly, and she’d never done an ugly thing in her life, and she wasn’t about to start now.
“I’m alone,” they each thought, and one was amused, the other appalled.
“Mama,” Truman whispered, as a stranger held his hand, and called for an ambulance.
“Truman,” Babe thought she said aloud, as she felt herself sinking, sinking, and then rising. But then she knew she didn’t. And then she didn’t know anything, ever again.
“Beautiful Babe,” Truman said, and he knew he said it, he heard his own voice, very weak, strange to his ears. And then he heard no more.
Now there were no more stories to tell, to soothe, to comfort, to draw strangers close together; to link like hearts and minds.
To wound, to hurt. To destroy the one thing they each loved more than anything else—
Beauty. Beauty in all its glory, in all its iterations; the exquisite moment of perfect understanding between two lonely, damaged souls, sitting silently by a pool, or in the twilight, or lying in bed, vulnerable and naked in every way that mattered. The haunting glance of a woman who knew she was beautiful because of how she saw herself reflected in her friend’s eyes.