Chapter 20 Breakfast at Tiffany's-20

"Never love a wild thing, Mr. Bell," Holly advised him. "That was Docs mistake. He was always lugging home wild things. A hawk with a hurt wing. One time it was afull-grown bobcat with a broken leg. But you cant give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until theyre strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Mr. Bell. If you let yourself love a wild thing. You'll end up looking at the sky." "She's drunk," Joe Bell informed me. "Moderately," Holly confessed. "But Doc knew what I meant. I explained it to him very carefully, and it was something he could understand. We shook hands and held on to each other and he wished me luck." She glanced at the clock . "He must be in the Blue Mountains by now."

"What's she talkin about?" Joe Bell asked me. Holly lifted her martini. "Lets wish the Doc luck, too," she said, touching her glass against mine. "Good luck: and believe me, dearest Doc -- its 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." TRAWLER MARRIES FOURTH. I was on a subway somewhere in Brooklyn when Isaw that headline. The paper that bannered it belonged to another passenger. 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 Greenwichyesterday 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. But Id been wishing that before I spotted the headline. For a headful of reasons. I hadnt seen Holly, notreally, since our drunken Sunday at Joe Bells bar. The intervening weeks had givenme my own case of the mean reds. First off, Id been fired from my job: deservedly, and for an amusing misdemeanor too complicated to recount here. Also, my draftboard was displaying an uncomfortable interest; and, having so recently escaped the regime of a small town, the idea of ​​entering another form of disciplined lifemade me desperate. Between the uncert Ainty 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. All this, combined with the city heat of the summer, had reduced me to a state of nervous inertia. So I more than half meant it when I wished I were under the wheels of the train. The headline made the desire quite positive. If Holly could marry that "absurd foetus ," then the army of wrongness rampant in the world might as well march over me. 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 Id once been in love with my mothers elderly coloredcook and a postman who let me follow him on his rounds and a whole family namedMcKendrick. That category of love generates jealousy, too.

When I reached my station I bought a paper; and, reading the tail-end of that sentence, discovered that Rustys bride was: a beautiful cover girl from the Arkansahills, Miss Margaret Thatcher Fitzhue Wildwood. Mag! My legs went so limp with reliefI took a taxi the rest of the way home. Madame Sapphia Spanella met me in the hall, wild-eyed and wringing her hands. "Run," she said. "Bring the police. She is killing somebody! Somebody is killing her!" It sounded like it. As though tigers were loose in Hollys apartment. A riot of crashing glass, of rippings and callings and overturned furniture. But there were noquarrelling voices inside the uproar, which made it seem unnatural. me. "Tell the police murder!"

I ran; but only upstairs to Hollys door. Pounding on it had one result: the racket involved. Stopped altogether. But leading to let me in went unanswered, and my efforts to break down the door merely culminated in a bruised shoulder. Spanella commanding some newcomer to go for the police. "Shutup," she was told, "and get out of my way." It was Jose Ybarra-Jaegar. Looking not at all the smart Brazilian diplomat; butsweaty and frightened. He ordered me out of his way, too. And, using his own key, opened the door. "In here, Dr. Goldman," he said, beckoning to a man accompanying him.

Since no one prevented me, I followed them into the apartment, which wastremendously wrecked. At last the Christmas tree had been dismantled, veryliterally: its brown dry branches sprawled in a welter of torn-up books, broken lamps and phonograph records. had been emptied, its contents tossed around the room: raw eggs were sliding down the walls and in the midst of thedebris Hollys no-name cat was calmly licking a puddle of milk. In the bedroom, the smell of smashed perfume bottles made me gag. I stepped on Hollys dark glasses; they were lying on the floor, the lenses already shattered, the frames cracked in half. Perhaps that is why Holly, a rigid figure on the bed ,stared at Jose so blindly, seemed not to see the doctor, who, testing her pulse,crooned: "Youre a tired young lady. Very tired. You want to go to sleep, dont you?"

Sleep." Holly rubbed her forehead, leaving a smear of blood from a cut finger. "Sleep," she said, and whimpered like an exhausted, fretful child. "Hes the only one would ever let me. Let me hug him on cold nights. I saw a place in Mexico. With horses. By the sea." "With horses by the sea," lullabied the doctor, selecting from his black case ahypodermic. Jose averted his face, queasy at the sight of a needle. "Her sickness is only grief?" he asked, his difficult English lending the question an unintended irony. "She is grieving only?"

"Didnt hurt a bit, now did it?" inquired the doctor, smugly dabbing Hollys arm with a scrap of cotton. She came to sufficiently to focus the doctor. "Everything hurts. Where are myglasses?" But she didn't need them. Her eyes were closing of their own accord. "She is only grieving?" insisted Jose. "Please, sir," the doctor was quite short with him, "if you will leave me alone with the patient." Jose withdrew to the front room, where he released his temper on the snooping, tiptoeing presence of Madame Spanella. "Don't touch me! Ill call the police," she threatened as he whipped her to the door with Portuguese oaths.

He considered throwing me out, too; or so I suspected from his expression. Instead, he invited me to have a drink. The only unbroken bottle we could find contained dry vermouth. "I have a worry," he confident. "I have a worry that this should cause scandal. Her crashing everything. Conducting like a crazy. I must have no public scandal. It is too delicate: my name, my work." He seemed cheered to learn that I saw no reason for a "scandal"; demolishing ones own possessions was, presumably, a private affair. "It is only a question of grieving," he firmly declared. "When the sadness came, first she threw the drink she is drinking. The bottle. Those books. A lamp. Then Iam scared. I hurried to bring a doctor."

"But why?" I wanted to know. "Why should she have a fit over, Rusty? If I wereher, Id celebrate." "Rusty?" I was still carrying my newspaper, and showed him the headline.