“All these days. I thought you were running out on me,” he said.
“You don’t run out on people; you run out on yourself,” she said. “But it’s all right now?”
“Sure,” he said, “it’s all right now,” and danced her a cautious step or two. It was a curious trio that played for them: a silken Chinese youth (piano), a colored woman who peered respectably through steel schoolmarm spectacles (drums), and another Negro, a tall, especially black girl whose sleek splendid head shivered in the green pallor of an overhead light (guitar). There was no difference between tunes, for their music sounded all the same, jellied, jazzy, submerged.
“You don’t want to dance anymore,” Clyde said, as the trio rounded out a set.
“Yes, yes; I’m not going home,” but she let him lead her over to the corner where Gump had got them a table.
The guitarist joined them. “I’m India Brown,” she said, holding her hand out to Grady. It was a hand that felt like an expensive glove, but the fingers were thick and long as bananas. “Bubble says I should take you to powder your nose.”
Grady said, “Bubble bubble bubble.”
The colored girl leaned on the table; her eyes were like cuttings of dark quartz, and they filmed over, dismissing Grady; in a thin conspiratorial voice, she said, “It’s none of my business what you boys are up to. But see that fat man toward the end of the bar? Got this place spotted—just waiting for the chance to slap on a padlock. One little noise from chicken like her and we’re out. Sincerely.”
Noise? Singsong lurched in Grady’s head, and her eyes halted on the fat man: he regarded her over the rim of a beer glass. Standing next to him there was a tanned young man in a trim seersucker suit, who, carrying a drink, sidled across the room. “Get your things, McNeil,” he said, seeming to speak down from vast heights. “It’s time somebody took you home.”
“Look, my friend, let’s get this straight,” said Clyde, partly rising.
“It’s only Peter,” said Grady; like so much that was happening, his being there didn’t strike her as unreasonable, and she recognized him as though she were immune to surprise. “Peter, darling, sit down; meet my friends, smile at me.”
Simply, Peter said, “You’d better let me take you home,” and lifted her purse off the table. A waiter, bringing a tray of drinks, pulled back, and Bubble, his mouth a galvanized O, bent over the bar: the distant crash of a passing elevated vibrated the tinseled room. Clyde walked around the table: it was not a fair match, for, though Peter was taller, there was no muscle to him, nothing of Clyde’s scrappiness; and yet Peter met a measuring appraisal with ready-and-willing glances of his own.
Clyde’s hand shot out fast as a snake’s thrust; he snatched back the purse and put it down beside Grady, who, just then, saw his exposed wrist: “You’ve hurt yourself,” she said in a hardly alive voice, and touched the raw tattooed letters of her name; “for me,” she said, raising her eyes, first to Clyde, whom she could not see, and then to Peter, whose white, intolerably stern face seemed to whittle away. “Peter,” she said strangely, and sighing, “Clyde has hurt himself. For me.” Only the Negro girl moved; she put her arm around Grady, and together, weaving a little, they went to the ladies’ room.
As long as I am here, nothing can happen to me, she thought, letting her head loll against the guitarist’s hard breasts. “He brought me a butterfly,” she said, talking into a brown and peeling mirror. “It was in a peppermint sack.” The guitarist said, “There’s a way to the street: through that door, then out the kitchen,” but Grady smilingly replied, “I thought it was a peppermint, it tasted just as sweet: feel my head, feel it flying?”
To have her head held was pacifying, it lulled the sway there, the power-dive sound: “And sometimes it flies in other parts of me, my throat, my heart.” The door opened, and the little drummer, looking like a rather lewd schoolteacher, came in brassily snapping her fingers. “All clear,” she trumpeted. “Hooper gave those sonsabitches the bounce, and not a broken head so far. No fault of yours,” she added, turning on Grady. “You hop-heads give me a fucking pain, always messing round.” But the guitarist, gently smoothing Grady’s hair with her banana fingers, said, “Oh shove it, Emma—she don’t know what it’s all about.” The little drummer looked long at Grady: “Know what it’s all about, sugar? I’ll say!”
At the curb a sailor stood urinating; except for him, there was no one on the street, a brownstone street where they had parked the car; and yet the car was not there, so Grady circled under a lamp, soberly considering possibilities: that the car had been stolen, or: what? Funnel pipes, part of some street-construction project, spit gloomy gushers of steam, and the sailor, wreathed in these outpourings, seesawed over the pavement. She fled down to Third Avenue, where the slowly swinging headlights of a car struck her starkly.
“Hey, you!” shouted the driver, and she blinked: it was her own car with Gump at the wheel. “Sure it’s her,” he said; then she heard Clyde: “Hurry it up, put her in there with you.”
Clyde was in the backseat, and Peter Bell was there, too; together, each straining against the other, they seemed a solid, double-headed, tentacled creature: Peter, his arm jacked behind his back, was hunched over, and his face, wrinkled like tinfoil, and bleeding, so shocked Grady that something gave way: she screamed, and it was as if for months this scream had been accumulating, but there was no one to hear her, neither in the stony emptiness of spinning streets, nor in the car: Gump, Clyde, even Peter, they were bound together by dumb deaf rapture—there was joy in the stupefying smash of Clyde’s fists, and as the car screeched up Third Avenue, dodging El pillars, oblivious to red lights, she stared silently, like a bird that has stunned itself dashing against walls and glass.
For when panic emerges, the mind catches like the rip cord of a parachute: one goes on falling. Turning right on Fifty-ninth, the car skidded onto the Queensboro Bridge; there, above the hollow hootings of river traffic, and with a morning he was never to see changing the sky, Gump cried, “Damn it, you’ll kill us,” but he could not loosen her hands from the steering wheel: she said, “I know.”
Afterword
To Truman I was, almost from the first, the “avvocato”—his lawyer. But I was also his friend. When I first met him in 1969 he had many friends, both famous and infamous. He was hands down the greatest gossip of his day and people flocked to him. By the time he died in 1984, at Joanne Carson’s house in Los Angeles shortly before his sixtieth birthday, he had few friends left, having allowed his wit to turn poisonous and his imagination to distort reality almost beyond recognition.
Over the years I tried to rescue him from many ill-advised and sometimes downright scary relationships, at times more successfully than others. Over these same years, particularly near the end, I had the sad, often heartbreaking, task of placing him in various drug and alcohol rehabilitation centers from which he invariably escaped, often with a highly amusing and improbable tale to tell.
The last time I saw Truman alive was at a restaurant opposite his apartment at United Nations Plaza in New York, where we often met for lunch. As was his custom then, he arrived early and the waiter put before him what he claimed was a large glass of orange juice but what the waiter and I both knew was a glass half filled with vodka. And it was not his first. I had asked rather urgently for our meeting because the doctor who treated him when he had passed out in Southampton, Long Island, had called and told me that unless he stopped drinking he would be dead in six months and that in fact his brain had shrunk.
I reported this directly and pleaded with Truman to get back into rehabilitation and stop drinking and taking drugs if he wanted to survive. Truman looked up at me and there were tears in his eyes. He put his hand on my arm, looked straight into my eyes and said, “Please, Alan, let me go. I want to go.” He had run out of options and we both knew it. There was nothing more to be said.
Truman never wanted to make a will. As with many people, he found it uncomfortable to contemplate. However, as his health deteriorated I succeeded in making him realize that he had to do something to protect his work after he died. Finally, he agreed to a very short and simple will, which, after providing for his great friend and former lover Jack Dunphy, left everything including his literary properties to a trust of which he insisted I be the sole trustee.
His instruction was that I arrange for an annual award for literary
