Volume 27, Number 14 · September 25, 1980
Tiny Coffins
By James Wolcott
Music for Chameleons
by Truman Capote
Random House, 262 pp., $10.95
Unsightly hair seems to give Truman Capote the shudders. One of Holly Golightly's hangers-on in Breakfast at Tiffany's was depicted as a pushy, vulgar hobbit. 'Tufts of hair sprouted from his ears, from his nose; his jowls were gray with afternoon beard, and his handshake almost furry.' In 'Mojave,' a story from Capote's new collection, Music for Chameleons, a well-to-do female neurotic whose life has been fogged with Seconal and post-partum depressions has an affair with a pudgy psychoanalyst, Dr. Ezra Bentsen. As a lover, Bentsen is a coarse sweaty thumper—'he grimaced, he ground his dentures, he whimpered like a frightened mutt'—and poor Sarah is grateful when his 'lathered carcass' finally slides off her. (She never considers getting on top.) After suffering through one of these spasms of rancid lust, Sarah gives Bentsen a tart kiss-off, telling him that he has 'hairy heels.' I don't have hairy heels, Bentsen complains. Oh, yes you do, she counters. 'All ordinary horses have hairy heels. Thoroughbreds don't. The heels of a well-bred horse are flat and glistening.'
Review, 3181 words
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