Breakfast at Tiffany's and Three Stories: House of Flowers, A Diamond Guitar, and A Christmas Memory

by Truman Capote

You can love somebody without it being like that. You keep them a stranger, a stranger who’s a friend.”

She was never without dark glasses, she was always well groomed, there was a consequential good taste in the plainness of her clothes, the blues and grays and lack of luster that made her, herself, shine so. One might have thought her a photographer’s model, perhaps a young actress, except that it was obvious, judging from her hours, she hadn’t time to be either.

Also, she had a cat and she played the guitar. On days when the sun was strong, she would wash her hair, and together with the cat, a red tiger-striped tom, sit out on the fire escape thumbing a guitar while her hair dried. Whenever I heard the music, I would go stand quietly by my window. She played very well, and sometimes sang too. Sang in the hoarse, breaking tones of a boy’s adolescent voice.

There isn’t any grille, just a counter between you and them, and the kids can stand on it to be hugged; all you have to do to kiss somebody is lean across. What I like most, they’re so happy to see each other, they’ve saved up so much to talk about, it isn’t possible to be dull, they keep laughing and holding hands. It’s different afterwards,” she said. “I see them on the train. They sit so quiet watching the river go by.”

But apparently she’d meant what she said; I neither saw nor heard from her, and I gathered she’d gone so far as to obtain a downstairs key. At any rate she no longer rang my bell. I missed that; and as the days merged I began to feel toward her certain far-fetched resentments, as if I were being neglected by my closest friend. A disquieting loneliness came into my life, but it induced no hunger for friends of longer acquaintance: they seemed now like a salt-free, sugarless diet.

That night I left a message in her mailbox: Tomorrow is Thursday. The next morning rewarded me with a second note in the play-pen script: Bless you for reminding me. Can you stop for a drink tonight 6-ish?

The room in which we stood (we were standing because there was nothing to sit on) seemed as though it were being just moved into; you expected to smell wet paint. Suitcases and unpacked crates were the only furniture. The crates served as tables. One supported the mixings of a martini; another a lamp, a Libertyphone, Holly’s red cat and a bowl of yellow roses. Bookcases, covering one wall, boasted a half-shelf of literature. I warmed to the room at once, I liked its fly-by-night look.

I knew damn well I’d never be a movie star. It’s too hard; and if you’re intelligent, it’s too embarrassing. My complexes aren’t inferior enough: being a movie star and having a big fat ego are supposed to go hand-in-hand; actually, it’s essential not to have any ego at all.

I want to still be me when I wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany’s.

She was still hugging the cat. “Poor slob,” she said, tickling his head, “poor slob without a name. It’s a little inconvenient, his not having a name. But I haven’t any right to give him one: he’ll have to wait until he belongs to somebody. We just sort of took up by the river one day, we don’t belong to each other: he’s an independent, and so am I. I don’t want to own anything until I know I’ve found the place where me and things belong together. I’m not quite sure where that is just yet. But I know what it’s like.” She smiled, and let the cat drop to the floor. “It’s like Tiffany’s,” she said.

Some people call it angst.” “All right. Angst. But what do you do about it?” “Well, a drink helps.” “I’ve tried that. I’ve tried aspirin, too. Rusty thinks I should smoke marijuana, and I did for a while, but it only makes me giggle. What I’ve found does the most good is just to get into a taxi and go to Tiffany’s. It calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there, not with those kind men in their nice suits, and that lovely smell of silver and alligator wallets. If I could find a real-life place that made me feel like Tiffany’s, then I’d buy some furniture and give the cat a name.

She was a triumph over ugliness, so often more beguiling than real beauty, if only because it contains paradox.

“It may be normal, darling; but I’d rather be natural.”

Her bedroom was consistent with her parlor: it perpetuated the same camping-out atmosphere; crates and suitcases, everything packed and ready to go, like the belongings of a criminal who feels the law not far behind.

She was on her knees poking under the bed. After she’d found what she was looking for, a pair of lizard shoes, she had to search for a blouse, a belt, and it was a subject to ponder, how, from such wreckage, she evolved the eventual effect: pampered, calmly immaculate, as though she’d been attended by Cleopatra’s maids.

Passing a Woolworth’s, she gripped my arm: “Let’s steal something,” she said, pulling me into the store, where at once there seemed a pressure of eyes, as though we were already under suspicion. “Come on. Don’t be chicken.”

Holly picked up a mask and slipped it over her face; she chose another and put it on mine; then she took my hand and we walked away. It was as simple as that. Outside, we ran a few blocks, I think to make it more dramatic; but also because, as I’d discovered, successful theft exhilarates.

For the first time since I’d known her, she seemed to feel a need to justify herself: “Well, I had to. Doc really loves me, you know. And I love him. He may have looked old and tacky to you. But you don’t know the sweetness of him, the confidence he can give to birds and brats and fragile things like that. Anyone who ever gave you confidence, you owe them a lot. I’ve always remembered Doc in my prayers.

“Never love a wild thing, Mr. Bell,” Holly advised him. “That was Doc’s mistake. He was always lugging home wild things. A hawk with a hurt wing. One time it was a full-grown bobcat with a broken leg. But you can’t give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they’re strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky. That’s how you’ll end up, Mr. Bell. If you let yourself love a wild thing. You’ll end up looking at the sky.”

Holly lifted her martini. “Let’s wish the Doc luck, too,” she said, touching her glass against mine. “Good luck: and believe me, dearest Doc—it’s better to look at the sky than live there. Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes and things disappear.”

The only part of the text that I could see read: Rutherfurd “Rusty” Trawler, the millionaire playboy often accused of pro-Nazi sympathies, eloped to Greenwich yesterday with a beautiful—Not that I wanted to read any more. Holly had married him: well, well. I wished I were under the wheels of the train.

Between the uncertainty of my draft status and a lack of specific experience, I couldn’t seem to find another job. That was what I was doing on a subway in Brooklyn: returning from a discouraging interview with an editor of the now defunct newspaper, PM.

Or, and the question is apparent, was my outrage a little the result of being in love with Holly myself? A little. For I was in love with her. Just as I’d once been in love with my mother’s elderly colored cook and a postman who let me follow him on his rounds and a whole family named McKendrick. That category of love generates jealousy, too.

Rusty’s bride was: a beautiful cover girl from the Arkansas hills, Miss Margaret Thatcher Fitzhue Wildwood. Mag! My legs went so limp with relief I took a taxi the rest of the way home.

“Oh, that.” He grinned rather scornfully. “They do us a grand favor, Rusty and Mag. We laugh over it: how they think they break our hearts when all the time we want them to run away. I assure you, we were laughing when the sadness came.” His eyes searched the litter on the floor; he picked up a ball of yellow paper. “This,” he said. It was a telegram from Tulip, Texas: Received notice young Fred killed in action overseas stop your husband and children join in the sorrow of our mutual loss stop letter follows love Doc.

Moreover, she stopped calling me Fred. June, July, all through the warm months she hibernated like a winter animal who did not know spring had come and gone. Her hair darkened, she put on weight. She became rather careless about her clothes: used to rush round to the delicatessen wearing a rain-slicker and nothing underneath. José moved into the apartment, his name replacing Mag Wildwood’s on the mailbox.

Eleven. Does that make me a whore? Look at Mag Wildwood. Or Honey Tucker. Or Rose Ellen Ward. They’ve had the old clap-yo’-hands so many times it amounts to applause. Of course I haven’t anything against whores. Except this: some of them may have an honest tongue but they all have dishonest hearts. I mean, you can’t bang the guy and cash his checks and at least not try to believe you love him. I never have. Even Benny Shacklett and all those rodents.

Actually, except for Doc, if you want to count Doc, José is my first non-rat romance.

If I were free to choose from everybody alive, just snap my fingers and say come here you, I wouldn’t pick José. Nehru, he’s nearer the mark. Wendell Willkie. I’d settle for Garbo any day. Why not? A person ought to be able to marry men or women or—listen, if you came to me and said you wanted to hitch up with Man O’ War, I’d respect your feeling. No, I’m serious. Love should be allowed. I’m all for it.

I do love José—I’d stop smoking if he asked me to. He’s friendly, he can laugh me out of the mean reds, only I don’t have them much any more, except sometimes, and even then they’re not so hideola that I gulp Seconal or have to haul myself to Tiffany’s: I take his suit to the cleaner, or stuff some mushrooms, and I feel fine, just great. Another thing, I’ve thrown away my horoscopes.

I’d steal two-bits off a dead man’s eyes if I thought it would contribute to the day’s enjoyment—but unto-thyself-type honest. Be anything but a coward, a pretender, an emotional crook, a whore: I’d rather have cancer than a dishonest heart. Which isn’t being pious. Just practical. Cancer may cool you, but the other’s sure to. Oh, screw it, cookie—hand me my guitar and I’ll sing you a fado in the most perfect Portuguese.”

once, we walked all the way to Chinatown, ate a chow-mein supper, bought some paper lanterns and stole a box of joss sticks, then moseyed across the Brooklyn Bridge, and on the bridge, as we watched seaward-moving ships pass between the cliffs of burning skyline, she said: “Years from now, years and years, one of those ships will bring me back, me and my nine Brazilian brats. Because yes, they must see this, these lights, the river—I love New York, even though it isn’t mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it.” And I said: “Do shut up,” for I felt infuriatingly left out—a tugboat in dry-dock

So the days, the last days, blow about in memory, hazy, autumnal, all alike as leaves: until a day unlike any other I’ve lived.

“He’ll marry me, all right. In church. And with his family there. That’s why we’re waiting till we get to Rio.” “Does he know you’re married already?” “What’s the matter with you? Are you trying to ruin the day? It’s a beautiful day: leave it alone!” “But it’s perfectly possible—” “It isn’t possible. I’ve told you, that wasn’t legal. It couldn’t be.”

“Mention that to a living soul, darling. I’ll hang you by your toes and dress you for a hog.”

Holly helped hoist me into the saddle, then mounted her own horse, a silvery animal that took the lead as we jogged across the traffic of Central Park West and entered a riding path dappled with leaves denuding breezes danced about. “See?” she shouted. “It’s great!”

Suddenly, watching the tangled colors of Holly’s hair flash in the red-yellow leaf light, I loved her enough to forget myself, my self-pitying despairs, and be content that something she thought happy was going to happen.

THAT EVENING, PHOTOGRAPHS OF HOLLY were front-paged by the late edition of the Journal-American and by the early editions of both the Daily News and the Daily Mirror. The publicity had nothing to do with runaway horses. It concerned quite another matter, as the headlines revealed: PLAYGIRL ARRESTED IN NARCOTICS SCANDAL (Journal-American), ARREST DOPE-SMUGGLING ACTRESS (Daily News), DRUG RING EXPOSED, GLAMOUR GIRL HELD (Daily Mirror).

The caption read: Twenty-year-old Holly Golightly, beautiful movie starlet and café society celebrity D.A. alleges to be key figure in international drug-smuggling racket linked to racketeer Salvatore “Sally” Tomato. Dets. Patrick Connor and Sheilah Fezzonetti (L. and R.) are shown escorting her into 67th St. Precinct.

“Where is José?” He repeated the question, as though translating it into another language. “Ah, where she is! She is waiting,” he said and, seeming to dismiss me, resumed his valet activities. So: the diplomat was planning a powder. Well, I wasn’t amazed; or in the slightest sorry. Still, what a heartbreaking stunt: “He ought to be horsewhipped.” The cousin giggled, I’m sure he understood me.

It was then that she asked about José. The instant she saw the letter she squinted her eyes and bent her lips in a tough tiny smile that advanced her age immeasurably. “Darling,” she instructed me, “would you reach in the drawer there and give me my purse. A girl doesn’t read this sort of thing without her lipstick.”

“Maybe this will come in handy—if you ever write a rat-romance. Don’t be hoggy: read it aloud. I’d like to hear it myself.” It began: “My dearest little girl—” Holly at once interrupted.

“My dearest little girl, I have loved you knowing you were not as others. But conceive of my despair upon discovering in such a brutal and public style how very different you are from the manner of woman a man of my faith and career could hope to make his wife. Verily I grief for the disgrace of your present circumstance, and do not find it in my heart to add my condemn to the condemn that surrounds you. So I hope you will find it in your heart not to condemn me. I have my family to protect, and my name, and I am a coward where those institutions enter. Forget me, beautiful child. I am no longer here. I am gone home. But may God always be with you and your child.

Holly, however, did not want to admit that she saw; yet her face, despite its cosmetic disguise, confessed it. “All right, he’s not a rat without reason. A super-sized, King Kong-type rat like Rusty. Benny Shacklett. But oh gee, golly goddamn,” she said, jamming a fist into her mouth like a bawling baby, “I did love him. The rat.”

So scram,” she said, dropping him; and when he did not move away, instead raised his thug-face and questioned her with yellowish pirate-eyes, she stamped her foot: “I said beat it!” He rubbed against her leg. “I said fuck off!” she shouted, then jumped back in the car, slammed the door, and: “Go,” she told the driver. “Go. Go.” I was stunned. “Well, you are. You are a bitch.”

“I told you. We just met by the river one day: that’s all. Independents, both of us. We never made each other any promises. We never—” she said, and her voice collapsed, a tic, an invalid whiteness seized her face.

Then she had the door open, she was running down the street; and I ran after her. But the cat was not at t...

Holly darted up and down the block, ran back and forth chanting: “You. Cat. Where are you? Here, cat.”

“Oh, Jesus God. We did belong to each other. He was mine.” Then I made her a promise, I said I’d come back and find her cat: “I’ll take care of him, too. I promise.”

“But what about me?” she said, whispered, and shivered again. “I’m very scared, Buster. Yes, at last. Because it could go on forever. Not knowing what’s yours until you’ve thrown it away. The mean reds, they’re nothing. The fat woman, she nothing. This, though: my mouth’s so dry, if my life depended on it I couldn’t spit.”