Answered Prayers by Truman Capote Read Free Book Online Page B

Rorem, had emptied that jackpot. Despite her defects—rippling jowls, bee-stung lips, and middle-parted coiffure that eerily duplicated Lautrec’s portrait of Oscar Wilde—one could see what Rorem saw in Marie Laure (an elegant roof over his head, someone to promote his melodies in the stratospheres of musical France), but the reverse does not hold. Rorem was from the Midwest, a Quaker queer—which is to say, a queer Quaker—an intolerable combination of brimstone behavior and self-righteous piety. He thought himself Alcibiades reborn, sun-painted, golden, and there were many who seconded his opinion, though I was not among them. For one thing, his skull was criminally contoured: flat-backed, like Dillinger’s; and his face, smooth, sweet as cake batter, was a bad blend of the weak and the willful. However, I’m probably being unfair because I envied Rorem, envied him his education, his far more assured reputation as a coming young fellow, and his superior success at playing Living Dildo to Old Hides, as we gigolos call our female checkbooks. If the subject interests you, you might try reading Ned’s own confessional
Paris Diary:
it is well written and cruel as only an outlaw Quaker bent on candor could be. I wonder what Marie Laure thought when she read that book. Ofcourse, she has weathered harsher pains than Ned’s sniveling revelations could inflict. Her last comrade, or the last known to me, was a hairy Bulgarian painter who killed himself by cutting his wrist and then, wielding a brush and using his severed artery as a palette, covered two walls with a boldly stroked, all-crimson abstract mural.
    Indeed, I am indebted to the Pont Royal bar for many acquaintances, including the premier American expatriate, Miss Natalie Barney, an heiress of independent mind and morals who had been domiciled in Paris more than sixty years.
    For all those decades Miss Barney had lived in the same apartment, a suite of surprising rooms off a courtyard in the rue de l’Université. Stained-glass windows and stained-glass skylights—a tribute to Art Nouveau that would have sent good old Boaty into mad-dog delirium: Lalique lamps sculpted as bouquets of milky roses, medieval tables massed with photographs of friends framed in gold and tortoiseshell: Apollinaire, Proust, Gide, Picasso, Cocteau, Radiguet, Colette, Sarah Bernhardt, Stein and Toklas, Stravinsky, the queens of Spain and Belgium, Nadia Boulanger, Garbo in a snuggly pose with her old buddy Mercedes D’Acosta, and Djuna Barnes, the last a luscious pimiento-lipped redhead difficult to recognize as the surly author of
Nightwood
(and latter-day hermit-heroine of Patchin Place). Whatever her calendar age, which must have been eighty and more, Miss Barney, usually attired in virile grey flannel, looked a permanent, pearl-colored fifty. She enjoyed motoring and drove herself about in a canvas-topped emerald Bugatti—around the Bois or out to Versailles on pleasant afternoons. Occasionally, I was asked along, for Miss Barney enjoyed lecturing, and she felt I had much to learn.
    Once there was another guest, Miss Stein’s widow. The widow wanted to visit an Italian grocery where, she said, it was possible to buy a unique white truffle that came from the hillsaround Turin. The store was in a distant neighborhood. As our car drove through it, the widow suddenly said: “But aren’t we near Romaine’s studio?” Miss Barney, while directing at me a disquietingly speculative glance, replied: “Shall we stop there? I have a key.”
    The widow, a mustachioed spider feeling its feelers, rubbed together her black-gloved hands and said: “Why, it has to be thirty years!”
    After climbing six flights of stone stairs inside a dour building saturated with cat urine, that Persian cologne (and Roman, too), we arrived at Romaine’s studio—whoever Romaine might be; neither of my companions explained their friend, but I sensed she had joined the majority and that the studio was being