Трумен Капоте: Answered Prayers

I have a friend, who isn't queer but dislikes women, and he has said: "The only women I've got any use for are Mrs. Fist and her five daughters." There is much to be said for Mrs. Fist-she is hygienic, never makes scenes, costs nothing, is utterly loyal and always at hand when needed.

"Thank you," Miss Langman said when I returned. "Amazing, someone your age to know all that. To have such confidence. I had thought I was accepting a pupil, but it would seem he has nothing to learn."

The last sentence is stylistically characteristic—direct, felt, yet a bit enunciated , literary. Nevertheless, I could more than see how valuable and flattering it was for an ambitious young writer to be the protégé of Alice Lee Langman, and so presently I went to live in the Park Avenue apartment. Boaty, upon hearing of it, and because he didn't dare oppose Miss Langman but all the same wanted to bitch it up, telephoned her and said: "Alice, I'm only saying this because you met the creature in my house. I feel responsible. Watch out! He'll go with anything—mules, men, dogs, fire hydrants. Just yesterday I had a furious letter from Jean [Cocteau]. From Paris. He spent a night with our amigo in the Plaza Hotel. And now he has the clap to prove it! God knows what the creature's crawling with. Best see your doctor. And one thing more: the boy's a thief. He's stolen over five hundred dollars forging checks in my name. I could have him jailed tomorrow." Some of this might have been true, though none of it was; but see what I mean by a killer fruit?

Not that it mattered; it wouldn't have fazed Miss Langman if Boaty could have proved I was a swindler who had swindled a hunchbacked pair of Soviet Siamese twins out of their last ruble. She was in love with me, she said so, and I believed her; one night, when her voice waved and dipped from too much red and yellow wine, she asked—oh in such a whimper-simper stupid-touching way you wanted to knock out her teeth but maybe kiss her, too—whether I loved her; as I'm naught if not a liar, I told her sure. Happily, I've suffered the full horrors of love only once—you will hear about it when the time comes; that's a promise. However, to revert to the Langman tragedy. Is it-I'm not certain-possible to love someone if your first interest is the use you can make of him? Doesn't the gainful motive, and the guilt accruing to it, halt the progression of other emotions? It can be argued that even the most decently coupled people were initially magnetized by the mutual-exploitation principle—sex, shelter, appeased ego; but still that is trivial, human: the difference between that and truly using another person is the difference between edible mushrooms and the kind that kill: Unspoiled Monsters.

What I wanted from Miss Langman was: her agent, her publisher, her name attached to a Holy Roller critique of my work in one of those moldy but academically influential quarterlies. These objectives were, in time, achieved and dazzlingly added to. As a result of her prestigious interventions, P. B. Jones was soon the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship ($3,000), a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters ($1,000), and a publisher's advance against a book of short stories ($2,000). Moreover, Miss Langman prepared these stories, nine of them, groomed them to a champion-show finish, then reviewed them, Answered Prayers and Other Stories , once in Partisan Review and again in The New York Times Book Review . The title was her decision; though there was no story called "Answered Prayers," she said: "It's very fitting. St. Teresa of Avila commented, 'More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.' Perhaps that isn't the precise quotation, but we can look it up. The point is, the theme moving through your work, as nearly as I can locate it, is of people achieving a desperate aim only to have it rebound upon them-accentuating, and accelerating, their desperation."

Prophetically, Answered Prayers answered none of mine. By the time the book appeared, many key figures in the literary apparatus considered that Miss Langman had oversponsored her Baby Gigolo (Boaty's description; he also told everyone: "Poor Alice. It's Chéri and La Fin de Chéri rolled into one!"), even felt she had displayed a lack of integrity appalling in so scrupulous an artist.

I can't claim my stories were one with those of Turgenev and Flaubert, but certainly they were honorable enough not to be entirely ignored. No one attacked them; it would have been better if someone had, less painful than this grey rejecting void that numbed and nauseated and started one thirsting for martinis before noon. Miss Langman was as anguished as I-sharing my disappointment, so she said, but secretly it was because she suspected the sweet waters of her own crystalline reputation had been seweraged.

I can't forget her sitting there in her perfect-taste parlor, with gin and tears reddening her beautiful eyes, nodding, nodding, nodding, absorbing every word of my mean gin-inspired assaults, the blame I heaped on her for the book's debacle, my defeat, my cold hell; nodding, nodding, biting her lips, suppressing any hint of retaliation, accepting it because she was as strong in the sureness of her gifts as I was feeble and paranoid in the uncertainty of mine, and because she knew one swift true sentence from her would be lethal-and because she was afraid if I left, it would indeed be the last of any chéri .

Old Texas saying: Women are like rattlesnakes—the last thing that dies is their tail.

Some women, all their lives, will put up with anything for a fuck; and Miss Langman, so I'm told, was an enthusiast until a stroke killed her. However, as Kate McCloud has said: "A really good lay is worth a trip around the world-in more ways than one." And Kate McCloud, as we all know, has earned an opinion: Christ, if Kate had as many pricks sticking out of her as she's had stuck in her, she'd look like a porcupine.

But Miss Langman, R. I. P., had completed her segment in The Story of P. B. jones-A Paranoid Release in Association with Priapus Productions; for P. B. had already encountered the future. His name was Denham Fouts-Denny, as his friends called him, among them Christopher Isherwood and Gore Vidal, both of whom, after his death, impaled him as a principal character in works of their own, Vidal in his story "Pages from an Abandoned Journal" and Isherwood in a novel, Down There on a Visit .

Denny, long before he surfaced in my cove, was a legend well-known to me, a myth entitled: Best-Kept Boy in the World.

When Denny was sixteen, he was living in a Florida crossroads cracker town and working in a bakery owned by his father. Rescue—some might say ruin—arrived one morning in the fattish form of a millionaire driving a brand-new built-to-order 1936 Duesenberg convertible. The fellow was a cosmetics tycoon whose fortune largely depended upon a celebrated suntan lotion; he had been married twice, but his preference was Ganymedes between the ages of fourteen and seventeen. When he saw Denny, it must have been as though a collector of antique porcelain had strayed into a junkshop and discovered a Meissen "white swan" service: the shock! the greedy chill! He bought doughnuts, invited Denny for a spin in the Duesenberg, even offered him command of the wheel; and that night, without having returned home for even a change of underwear, Denny was a hundred miles away in Miami. A month later his grieving parents, who had despaired after sending searching parties through the local swamps, received a letter postmarked Paris, France. The letter became the first entry in a many-volumed scrapbook: The Universal Travels of Our Son Denbam Fouts .

Paris, Tunis, Berlin, Capri, St. Moritz, Budapest, Belgrade, Cap Ferrat, Biarritz, Venice, Athens, Istanbul, Moscow, Morocco, Estoril, London, Bombay, Calcutta, London, London, Paris, Paris, Paris-and his original proprietor had been left far behind, oh, away back yonder in Capri, honey; for it was in Capri that Denny caught the eye of and absconded with a seventy-year-old great-grandfather, who was also a director of Dutch Petroleum. This gentleman lost Denny to royalty-Prince Paul, later King Paul, of Greece. The prince was much nearer Denny's age, and the affection between them was fairly balanced, so much so that once they visited a tattooist in Vienna and had themselves identically marked-a small blue insignia above the heart, though I can't remember what it was or what it signified.