Author: Emily M. Danforth
Category: LGBT
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/emily-m-danforth/page,14,568862-plain_bad_heroines.html
Some brisk member of the waitstaff had placed two chairs in front of their table, but for the first thirty minutes or so, those chairs remained empty. Harper’s bringing someone, Bo told them, while explaining she’d be late. (He offered no excuse for said lateness.)
Though all of the movie people were friendly enough, it was also clear they were waiting on Harper. They were all waiting on Harper. No one more than Merritt. She snatched looks at the door when she could. (But then so did the rest of their group, save for Elaine.) Merritt checked her phone for texts that weren’t there. She even tweeted things she wasn’t proud of.
Things like:
Merritt Emmons @SoldOnMerritt
Tonight it’s Spago a-go-go. You’ll know me because I’m the one not kissing @BoDhillon’s ass.
Bo immediately retweeted that. (Are you surprised?)
Mostly, Merritt felt young. She felt like she looked young and sounded young when she spoke. And the wrong kind of young, too: the no need to take me seriously, go ahead and dismiss me, I’m forty-five pounds too fat and not nearly connected enough to anyone in this town for you to know what to do with me variety.
She also alternately hated and was fine with, happy with, even, what she’d decided to wear: high-waisted, wide-legged navy pants and a silk T-shirt screen printed, then hand painted, by a designer she’d first found on Tumblr. The image was this kind of washed-out, sinister-looking motel in the desert, lots of pinks and oranges and sand colors, with the words A Bag of Boiled Sweets hand lettered in tiny purple across it.
She’d piled her hair up loosely, letting her curls fall out where they may. That night she still had many strands of color. She’d dyed them herself. It took a dumb amount of time to do, but she’d created an entire spectrum of pinks, from pale prom carnation to fuchsia. She also wore long, copper vertebrae earrings; they were intricate, delicate, weird. She was hoping that in concert she looked stylishly disordered.
But the longer she sat there not eating the veal appetizer and having little to add to the semigossip the studio people were batting about, the messier she felt. Not interesting messy—not Holly Golightly, messy-zany chic—but four-year-old with sticky hands wearing her mother’s lipstick and things from her sister’s closet messy.
(And just to be clear here, Readers, I’m talking about Truman Capote’s Holly Golightly—the one from his novella—that’s the look Merritt had been going for, which is decidedly different than the Audrey Hepburn movie version of the character made so popular in all those black-and-white posters hanging in dorm rooms.)
Merritt also didn’t know how much longer she could effectively tread conversational water without making clear that she loathed being forced to do so. She’d already managed to successfully skim over the requisite discussion about why she wasn’t in college without actually mentioning her single, failed semester at Holyoke or her breakdown and subsequent weeks-long hospitalization—and that had taken some real maneuvers. It was, maybe, somewhat impressive to have entered college with a book under her belt. It was certainly less impressive to then almost immediately drop out and go into a hospital. And then to come home and stay home for the next three years and not write anything else worth mentioning in that time.
“So the real question,” Heather-the-producer said, “is what are you working on now? Assuming you are.” Heather had a badass (Merritt thought) power-woman bob of shiny hair that shimmered when she moved her head, which she did a lot. Enough so that Merritt assumed she must know how cool it looked when she did so. Heather also had the right mouth to pull off the red lipstick she wore.
“Oh no,” Elaine said, patting her mouth with her napkin. “Here we go.”
“What?” Heather asked, turning to Elaine, her bob shimmering. “Is that a bad question?”
“Not a bad question. But you’ll get a bad answer.”
“Now I’m intrigued,” Bo said.
“Don’t be,” Merritt said, glancing at the door, hoping again for a Harper who wasn’t there. “She’s overselling. It’s not even really worth talking about—I’m not done.”
“Then you’re in good company,” Heather said. “All we do in this town is talk about the things we’re making that aren’t done.”
“That probably never will be done,” a studio person added.
“Come now, dear,” Elaine said. “If you’re determined to sail such ruinous waters you might as well boast about the voyage.”
“Boast away,” Bo said. “We want you to.”
Merritt sighed. She did not like the pressure of this setup. “Do you know Truman Capote’s unfinished final novel?”
Bo nodded and Heather said, “Maybe?”
“So I’m finishing it,” Merritt said. She stopped. Waited. They didn’t give her much to work with in the way of reactions. “Kind of. It’s hard to explain if you haven’t read it, but I’m rewriting parts and adding my own story lines—it’s like a companion novel more than it is a true completion of his.”
“That’s because Truman’s was never actually a novel,” Elaine said, twisting the band of her simple watch. “It was a face-painted collection of tawdry gossip columns done up as literature.”
“Sounds promising,” Heather said.
“When we do the one-name thing, the Madonna, Beyoncé thing, for Truman Capote, don’t we say Capote, not Truman?” Bo asked. “It’s confusing otherwise because of President Truman.”
“I don’t know what you do,” Elaine said. “But I always knew him as Truman.”
“Wait, did you know him?” Heather asked. She seemed excited about this, which Merritt found endearing given that they were in the town that made name-dropping an art before simply relegating it to a fact of existence.
“Not well,” Elaine said.
“Oh, now you c’mon, Lainey,” Merritt said. “You did too know him.”
Elaine used both hands to smooth the tablecloth in front of her. “For a number of years our social circles overlapped,” she said. “I was living in New York then, predominately, and society there is of course just one elaborate Venn diagram.” She shrugged. “Well, it was once, at any rate. Often enough, Truman and I found ourselves in one of these troubling intersecting regions.” She made two small circles with the thumb and pointer finger of each hand and held them up to her face, almost as if she were about to do the goofy upside-down-hands-into-a-party-mask thing that everybody’s uncle teaches them at some point, but instead she placed one circle behind the other and peered through the space where they overlapped.
“Right in here,” she said, still looking at everyone at the table through that overlapping section, “in the stuffed pied-à-terre of this person or that, worlds colliding and all the rest.” She undid her fingers, raised her eyebrows once, and when she lowered them, tipped her head as if to say, You know how it is.
“I love that,” Heather said, though her face was one of both pleasure and bemusement, as if she was reconciling Elaine anew compared to the vision of Elaine she’d formed previously. “I love all of that.”
If you’re wondering why Merritt wasn’t reacting similarly, it’s because she already knew about Elaine’s brief history with Mr. Truman Capote and had previously teased out every detail of personal knowledge that Elaine would relinquish to her. It was Elaine, after all, who gave Merritt her first Capote book (the first novel he’d published), Other Voices, Other Rooms, inscribed to Elaine thusly in black ink:
To sticky-rich, violet-eyed Lainey-Janey: What troubles have you seen this week? Tell me, but first let me fix me a drink.
Yours,
Truman
Merritt had spent more time than she would admit running her fingers over that inscription, sniffing it, trying to take in some lingering essence of Capote.
“Are you one of the ones he wrote about?” Bo asked. “That’s what he got in trouble for, right? Gossiping about you society ladies?”
“He got in trouble for all kinds of things,” Merritt said.
“Oh, I never ma
de it into print,” Elaine said, waving her hand once as if to shoo that notion from the air hovering over their table. “Remember, he was ten years or better my senior. When Truman was skewering his swans I’d yet to ring up enough transgressions to be worthy of his pen.” She paused, thinking, and added with a slow-blooming smile, “Now if he’d waited for another decade or so to smash his sandcastle, maybe by then my stories would have suited his tastes.” She held that smile there for them to enjoy before she said, “Well, but then he died, as people tend to do. It’s consistently disappointing how consistently that happens.”
“What does that mean—smash his sandcastle?” a studio person asked.
“Would you prefer poop on his doorstep and complain about the flies?” Merritt said.
Elaine clapped her hands once and laughed a real laugh. “Truman’s is a very old, very brief tale,” she said. “You can tell it in two words: he told.” She took a drink and let them consider that.
“Told what?”
“What didn’t he tell?” Elaine said, “Murder, adultery—”
“Vindictive menstruation,” Merritt interrupted.
“Well come sit next to me,” Heather said, laughing.
“Everything awful he could fit on a page,” Elaine said, ignoring them. “Truman told the world what he’d been trusted to keep to himself. He’d been welcomed into the homes, which of course means the extraordinarily private lives, of a certain social set.” She paused to shake her head. “He called those women his swans. Isn’t that plainly infantile? Who on earth wants to be someone’s swan?”
“The ugly duckling, for one,” Merritt said.
Elaine smiled and raised her eyebrows at Merritt before continuing. “Of course this was not Truman’s own bracket, let’s say—he was a guest—he would have told you that he was their court jester, that’s what he told everyone at the end, that they wanted him to entertain and then leave them be, close the door on the way out and pretend to forget what he’d seen and heard. And I suppose that’s more accurate than not. They were his swans, you know, but he was their pet. Whenever I saw him, one or two of those women would be huddled around him, on his arm, at his side on the divan, devouring his attention and all the scraps of gossip he tossed them like so many chocolate-covered cherries.”
“Do swans eat chocolate-covered cherries?” Bo asked.
“These particular swans did,” Elaine said, her eyes, I swear it, Readers, twinkling. “And they grew fat and contented with the way Truman fed them. But of course, they’d open their mouths to feed and while doing so tell him everything.” She shook her head at the idea, seemed to be increasingly bothered by her own story.
“Everything, everything—all their secrets told to a sharp-tongued, filthy-minded storyteller with a worldwide audience. And worse, one who thought that it was his sacred duty—I really do believe this—to take us all down a peg, or more, as soon as he had enough material. And such temerity, such gall, to believe he’d keep us as friends while he did so.” She seemed to rest, then, on this thought, shaking her head and again smoothing the tablecloth.
Elaine was more worked up than Merritt would have thought she’d let herself get. Merritt was surprised to hear her use the word us rather than them. In all the times they’d spoken of Truman Capote, Elaine had never seemed to Merritt very invested in what he’d done. That pronoun—us—bothered Merritt. It seemed an embarrassing slip, for Elaine, to be so consumed by such old, peripheral memories.
“But, Lainey,” Merritt said, “why does it matter anymore? Especially since he’s the one who got the worst of it in the end.”
“Do you think that’s true?” Heather asked.
“Well he certainly thought so,” Elaine said. “And he was cast out. His swans changed their numbers and forgot his name. After he published those first stories it was as if he simply ceased to exist. Oh, it was a nasty business.” Her eyes were unfocused, her mind on the past. “And he never recovered. Not really.” She seemed to be done, but then she added, somewhat conspiratorially, “Do understand, it was all just gossip. This was the kind of slimy stuff better left oozing in the pool drain than published in the pages of Esquire.”
“Gossip containing more truth than fiction,” Merritt said.
“So late-stage Capote was America’s warm-up for TMZ?”
“No,” Merritt said, before Elaine could. (Though she wasn’t sure Elaine even knew what TMZ was.) “You can’t erase the fact that he knew these people. He really did consider some of them his friends, like real friends, and they’d have said the same about him. Before he did it, I mean. Besides, Truman Capote was an artist.”
“We’ll agree to disagree, as we always have, about the level of art on display in that book,” Elaine said.
“Yes, we will,” Merritt said.
“I believe it’s what ruined him,” Elaine said. “I do. He published the short stories but he never finished the novel, did he? All that bluster about how we would hail it as his greatest book and he never even finished it. And now it’s part of his legacy, and such a sad part. Even you must see that, Merritt.”
“See, you could ruin your reputation before Twitter,” Bo said.
“Just not as fast,” Heather said.
“Mmmmm,” Elaine said, shaking her head no. “It was much more than that. I think he let all that spite be the vinegar that stewed his talent, so much so that he could never wash it clear and start again.” She turned to Merritt and said this last part pointedly: “You can’t ever turn a pickle back into a cucumber, Merritt.”
“But sometimes you need a pickle, Lainey,” Merritt said. “Sometimes what you’re after is brine and bite.”
“Hear! Hear!” Bo said with that good smile of his.
“I think it’s a significant mistake,” Elaine said, shaking her head and taking a drink from her cocktail, though it was mostly melted ice in the glass. She swallowed and said, “But you’re still young and that is the best time to make them.”
“I think it sounds great,” Bo said.
“Makes me want to read his version first,” Heather said. “To set the stage.” She was back on her phone.
“You’ll need a tetanus shot after you finish,” Elaine said.
“Well now I have to read it,” Heather said.
“I’m on its Wikipedia,” one of the studio people said. “It says some people think there are long-lost chapters in a bus station locker here in LA.”
“Yeah, they don’t exist,” Merritt said. “People love a treasure hunt.”
“I dunno,” the studio person said in singsong while holding up their phone even though it was pointless—Merritt couldn’t read its tiny print from where she sat. “Some editor swore that he saw them back in the day.”
“Wikipedia sure knows a lot of things,” Merritt said.
“Does it know where the hell Harper Harper is?” Heather asked.
Everyone half laughed at that, but you could tell their patience was wearing. The sommelier came to ask about wine selection and Elaine chose for the table. “Sparkling to celebrate?” she asked without waiting for or wanting an answer.
The studio person started to read aloud something else from Wikipedia and Merritt thought she might excuse herself for a moment, but right then Harper Harper came strolling into the restaurant. She stopped on her way over to greet people at another table, but they saw her. They all saw her. She’d made her entrance at last.
Whatever Happens: Know They’ll Always Have the Dumpsters
So now let’s have at it, shall we? Really there can be no more keeping it from you. Let’s do now talk about the striking, the stunning, the hot-damn-arch-eyed-strong-jawed-lip-stung-long-limbed-celesbian elephant in the room: the looks of one Harper Harper. I mean, everyone else is always talking about them. Why not Merritt? (And so why not me?)
That night at Spago, Harper was alone. The aforementioned date was just that: mentioned, but not present.
Instead, she was alone and smiling, saying something to ano
ther table of stylish people, then tilting her head toward her waiting party, her strawberry-blond hair (could it actually be that color all on its own?) the kind of purposefully messy that Merritt had been going for with her own, only Harper succeeded. Hers had that tousled look of a hero in a surfing movie. Do you get what I’m saying here? Pieces this way and that, but all of it light and textured and sportily, attractively rumpled. Let’s not just say bed head to be done with it. Let’s get our collective mental picture where it needs to be. This was Brad Pitt in A River Runs Through It meets Rosemary’s Baby–era Mia Farrow meets Tintin by way of k.d. lang divided by Twiggy. This was Harper Harper, leather jacket and everything. (Everything being the cigarette tucked behind her ear, Merritt saw, as she reached them. Perhaps an inch gimmicky, that, but let’s not hold it against her, Readers.)
They’d been talking about Truman Capote, and Merritt had already been thinking about Holly Golightly, so this line from Breakfast at Tiffany’s flashed across her brain: “For all her chic thinness, she had an almost breakfast-cereal air of health, a soap-and-lemon cleanness, a rough pink darkening in the cheeks.”
Bo got up and slid from his position behind the table to give Harper a hug. Then the two of them stood before their group (most of the restaurant now watching, by the way, pairs of eyes turning toward them, waiting for content as though they were opening an app on their phones—the Harper Harper Meets and Greets app).
“Sorry, everybody,” Harper said, a little breathless but not in an overdone way. “I’m a real goat to keep you waiting.” She paused, seemed to think over her words, grinned. She had that matchstick-sized gap between her two front teeth. Merritt saw it then and something twitched inside her, some flinch of recognition at seeing this famous attribute up close.