“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.
“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…”