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?”