Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [223]
I offered to come back another time, if he wasn’t feeling well. Tennessee waved away the suggestion. He was feeling well enough. There followed a long pause, interrupted from time to time by somebody whistling “You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman” off-key in the kitchen, or possibly the bedroom, it was hard to be sure of the geography of the apartment. One sensed that there was a world beyond this room, but like characters on a stage in a play, we were cut off from it.
Had I had breakfast? Tennessee wanted to know.
I nodded. I was almost ready for lunch, in fact.
Tennessee sighed. “Ah have not,” he said gravely, and picking up a glass he emptied the contents of several other glasses into it, swirled it carefully to mix it up, and took a gulp. I wondered what it contained. For all I knew he might have been mixing vodka, bourbon, and curaçao, or for all he knew, for that matter. He smiled. “That’s better,” he said. What were we going to talk about?
I pulled the manuscript of one of the short stories out of my briefcase, together with some notes that John Herman and I had made. Tennessee glanced at them with a combination of deep suspicion and alarm. He did not seem to be in any state to go over them.
The phone beside him rang. He picked it up and listened intently. “Uh-huh,” he said, “uh-huh, uh-huh, baby.” He listened some more. I could hear the voice on the other end—a thin, angry, electronic squeak. Tennessee closed his eyes, wincing. “I’m real sorry,” he said. “Uh-huh … No, real sorry, baby … I mean it.…” He listened some more, then drew a card from the pocket of his dressing gown. He held it up close to his eyes, but was unable to focus on it. He held it as far away as he could, at arm’s length, but still didn’t seem able to read it. He turned it upside down, then, in a pleading voice, reading it as desperately as a man on television who had forgotten his glasses might look helplessly toward the TelePrompTer for the words of his speech, unable to make out a word on its screen, he said very slowly, “No, baby, I can’t talk about it now, I’m in the middle of a meeting with …” He frowned, and tried turning the card the other way around. “With mah editor …” A long, anguished pause as he searched for the name, then, finally, with an audible sigh of relief, he thought he had it and gave it the old college try: “With mah editor Michael Kop-ta …” He gave me a questioning look over the top of his crooked glasses, and I shook my head. He put down the receiver.
“Michael Korda,” I said.
He nodded. “I know, baby,” he said softly. “It was on the tip of mah tongue.”
He sent me a very nice letter a few days later, just to make sure my feelings hadn’t been hurt by his lapse of memory, but, as I assured him, I didn’t mind a bit. Tennessee was a sweet man, and now that I’m closer to the age he was then or past it, I’m having trouble remembering people’s names, too, even without a hangover. About the confusion in the two stories I had come to discuss with him, Tennessee later commented: “Maybe [they] got mixed up a bit in your office. Offices do that to Mss., viz ICM … Sorry they didn’t make your Fall list … Fondly, Tennessee.”
He sent me a draft of a new story, “Old Sweetheart of the Keys,” about two cousins who own a decrepit bar on Dry Bone Drive, one of whom sits rocking on the veranda. Toward the end of the story, Tennessee had added in his unsteady handwriting a warning from one of the cousins to the other: “You can’t rock faster than death.” It was an image that appeared in my mind, not long afterward, when I heard that he had died in that cluttered apartment in February 1983, from a lethal, and perhaps