Answered Prayers by Truman Capote Read Free Book Online Page A

of drugs; it was Denny’s derelict life that frightened me, and I wanted to emulate him not at all. Strange to remember, but I had preserved the faith: I thought of myself as a serious young man seriously gifted, not an opportunistic layabout, an emotional crook who had drilled Miss Langman till she geysered Guggenheims. I knew I was a bastard but forgave myself because, after all, I was a
born
bastard—a talented one whose sole obligation was to his talent. Despite the nightly upheavals, the brandy heartburns and wine-sour stomachs, I managed every day to turn out five or six pages of a novel; nothing must be allowed to disrupt that, and Denny was in that sense an ominous presence, a heavy passenger—I felt if I didn’t free myself that, like Sinbad and the burdensome Old Man, I’d have to cart Denny piggyback the rest of his life. Yet I liked him, at least I didn’t want to leave him while he was still uncontrollably narcotized.
    So I told him to take the cure. But added: “Let’s not make promises. Afterward, you may want to throw yourself at the foot of the cross or end up scrubbing bedpans for Dr. Schweitzer. Or maybe that’s
my
destiny.” How optimistic I was in those sheltereddays!—battling tsetse flies and scraping bedpans with my tongue would be honeyed nirvana compared to the sieges I’ve since withstood.
    It was decided that Denny would travel alone to the clinic in Vevey. We said good-bye at the Gare de Lyon; he was somewhat high on something and looked, with his fresh-colored face—the face of a severe, avengeful angel—twenty years old. His rattling conversation ranged from filling stations to the fact that he had once visited Tibet. At the last Denny said, “If it goes wrong, please do this: destroy everything that’s mine. Burn all my clothes. My letters. I wouldn’t want Peter having the pleasure.”
    We agreed not to communicate until Denny had left the clinic; then, presumably, we could meet for a holiday at one of the coastal villages near Naples—Positano or Ravello.
    As I had no intention of doing so, or of seeing Denny again if it could be avoided, I moved out of the rue du Bac apartment and into a small room under the eaves of the Hotel Pont Royal. At the time the Pont Royal had a leathery little basement bar that was the favored swill bucket of haute Boheme’s fatbacks. Walleyed, pipe-sucking, pasty-hued Sartre and his spinsterish moll, De Beauvoir, were usually propped in a corner like an abandoned pair of ventriloquist’s dolls. I often saw Koestler there, never sober; an aggressive runt very free with his fists. And Camus—reedy, diffident in a razory way, a man with crisp brown hair, eyes liquid with life, and a troubled, perpetually listening expression: an approachable person. I knew that he was an editor at Gallimard, and one afternoon I introduced myself to him as an American writer who had published a book of short stories—would he read it, with the thought of Gallimard printing a translation? Later, Camus returned the copy I sent him, with a note saying that his English was insufficient to the task of passing judgment but that he felt I had an ability to create character and tension. “However, I find these stories too abrupt andunrealized. But if you should have other material, please let me see it.” Afterward, whenever I encountered Camus at the Pont Royal, and once at a Gallimard garden party that I gate-crashed, he always nodded and smiled encouragement.
    Another customer of this bar, whom I met there and who was friendly enough, was the Vicomtesse Marie Laure de Noailles, esteemed poet, a
saloniste
who presided over a drawing room where the ectoplasmic presences of Proust and Reynaldo Hahn were at any moment expected to materialize, the eccentric spouse of a rich sports-minded Marseillais aristocrat, and an affectionate, perhaps undiscriminating, comrade of contemporary Julien Sorels: my slot machine exactly.
Mais alors
—another young American adventurer, Ned