It paid, he thought sourly, to tip big. That was one thing the Paleys taught him.
But Babe was ill now, so ill she couldn’t make everything better through the sheer power of her beauty, her kindness, her understanding. She was frail and snappish and sick, sick, sick, and it tore his heart, made him want to vomit, just as he had the night poor Perry and Dick were hung, God, those boys, those poor boys with their imploring, accusing eyes—but there wasn’t anything he could do for them! He’d tried, he really had! And there really wasn’t anything he could do for Babe, was there? Other than call her, send her flowers, cards, and try to make her laugh.
And Bennett was dead. God, he’d almost forgotten. Bennett Cerf was dead, and Random House was breathing down his neck for this fucking book that he’d promised years ago. They never would have done that, before; they never would have insisted on him meeting a deadline, given his genius. Bennett had protected him. Just like Babe had. But no one wanted to protect him now.
And the world was repellent, the beauty was fading, and it wasn’t only the years advancing. Was it? The talent was receding from his fingertips; he could feel it seeping from him, and the panic it induced was like a sickness, a Saint Vitus’ dance, so that he had to go out there and talk and talk and sparkle and recount and sing, sing, sing for his supper in the only way that had never really let him down, not the writing, but the entertaining. Dance, monkey, dance in your caftan, your tight black Rolling Stones T-shirt tucked into your leather pants, tell the stories, tell all the stories, because that’s what they crave, isn’t it? To hear the tawdriness, to sniff the seediness that even Holly Golightly in her Meanest, Reddest state would find repulsive.
And face it, Truman, baby doll. Telling all the stories—all those delicious, decadent secrets—is what you enjoy the most, anyway. It’s what you’re the best at.
It’s who you are. The snake in the grass…why else do you collect snakes? That story about the cottonmouth biting him—God, he hadn’t told that story in years, but they’d all fallen for it, hadn’t they?
What they didn’t know was that he had bit the cottonmouth first.
Still, he had to write something, because that was who he was, too. He was a literary genius. Not a thieving shit like Mailer, who couldn’t write an original book if his sorry life depended on it—Truman poured himself more vodka, in the plain water glass. He didn’t even take time for the niceties anymore, the twist of lime, the chilled highball glass.
He was just as bad as everyone. Worse.
But he had been writing, some. Little sketches, picking away at this idea he’d had for more than a decade, his Proustian epic about society. Some of it was good; some of it was crap. Oh, maybe all of it was crap; Truman couldn’t really decide, anymore. Truth was, he was terrified of publishing again, because of the glorious success of In Cold Blood.
The knives were out; the knives were always out. But Esquire had just made him a lavish offer to publish a story. One story, that was all. And if it did well, maybe others. He could do that; he’d begun his career publishing stories, not novels, epics, opuses. Rivals to Proust.
Baby steps, baby. Baby steps.
He picked up his pen, turned a page, and began to scribble some of the best stories he knew; stories that were not his, but that just made them even juicier. He could tell them better than their owners could, and why else had they been told to him, if not for him to use them? Oh, those swans of his might be coy and say, “Now, True Heart, don’t you dare repeat this!” before telling him something particularly divine, and he might cross his heart and hope to die if he ever did.
But neither of them meant it. They couldn’t have. Or they wouldn’t have told the stories to him in the first place.
They wouldn’t have let him in.
—
THE FIRST STORY APPEARED in Esquire in June of 1975. “Mojave” by Truman Capote—an excerpt took up the entire cover, followed by “continued on page 38.”
Tennessee Williams declared it Truman’s best writing since the short story that had launched his career back in 1945, “Miriam.” All the critics loved it; it was received with rapture, cries of “He’s back!” and pleas of “More, more, more!”
“Well,” Truman drawled to one and all. “So you liked this? Maybe next I’ll give you a taste of my novel! It’s going to be grand, you know, my best yet! Maybe I’ll give you a little taste.”