Where the Truth Lies (10 page)

As Kim was telling us over the P.A. to restore our trays and return our seats to their upright position in preparation for our arrival at JFK, Helen knelt at the side of my chair. The bandage around her hand bore a rust-colored stain.

“Hon, the captain wants the company to send you something as a thank-you for helping out Lanny and American Airlines during the flight.” She confided in a lower tone, “It probably will be something like a round-trip ticket somewhere, they usually do very nice things.” Helen had a notepad and she clicked the end of the pen, poised to write. “We just need your name, address, phone number …”

Lanny had switched seats with Reuben so as better to converse with me, and was now looking right at me. I took a breath. “Oh, sure … Bonnie Trout, that’s T-R-O-U-T, 235 East Thirty-third Street.”

“That’s a nice neighborhood,” Lanny commented. “There’s a CBS recording studio right in the middle of the apartment buildings. Can’t record after tenP .M.”

I nodded agreement.

Helen asked, “Is there an apartment number or …”

“Apartment 4D,” I answered. “New York, New York, obviously. Zip is, uhhhh, one zero zero one six.”

“Phone number?” asked Helen.

I gave her a number and saw that Reuben was leaning around from Lanny’s seat and writing all this in a notebook. Lanny asked, “You don’t mind if Reuben takes down your phone number as well, do you?” I said of course I didn’t. He added, “Great. Anyone meeting you at JFK?” I said there wasn’t and he said he’d give me a lift home. I couldn’t think of a reason to say no. He told me to give Helen the luggage claim check that was stapled to my ticket and I explained I just had my carry-on garment bag.

At JFK, we were allowed to exit before everyone else. The wordsecurity was invoked a few times to pacify the Brit and the businessmen, who were annoyed at having to wait until Lanny had “cleared the gate area.” There were cries of “Bye, Lanny” and “We love you!” from the economy passengers, and Lanny acknowledged them with a sideways wave of his hand.

I had apparently become part of Lanny’s entourage. Reuben insisted on carrying my garment bag and looked as if it would offend him if I didn’t allow this. Halfway up the gangway, an American Airlines employee opened a door in its side and the four of us descended a portable flight of stairs that had been rolled up to this side door leading down to the tarmac. A Lincoln Continental stretch limo was waiting not far from the very DC-10 we’d exited.

A big-chested driver stood with his hands clasped together. “Hi, Mr. Morris. Mr. Fleischmann. Hi, Reuben.”

Fleischmann handed his carry-on bag to the driver. “You’re uhm … ?”

“Michael Dougherty. From Dav-El. I’ve driven you a number of times. The airline says they’ll bring your bags by hand over to the limo, you probably would like to wait inside the car. I kept the A.C. on. You remember me, Mr. Morris?”

Lanny looked at Michael. “Your mother is a typist for Senator Javits, right?”

Michael nodded proudly. “That’s really nice you remember, Mr. Morris. I have no bigger fan than you.”

Michael had opened the car door for us, and we scooted in. It was nearly midnight in the late summer, and even minus the sun the evening was still warm. It was nicer in the limo. Cool and dark. Through the tinted glass, I saw a uniformed American Airlines worker pull up in a mini-train. He had a load of luggage and quickly set about putting some of it into the trunk of the Lincoln Continental under the supervision of Reuben and Mike Dougherty.

Irv needled Lanny, “You should have let me set up a press conference here. It would have been good publicity.”

Lanny rolled his eyes. “It’s not like I landed the plane, Irving. Please. You’ll get the word in a couple of columns that I’m a good scout, okay? End of story. To hold a press conference would imply I’d done something heroic. That would be ostentatious.” He produced this last word with some pleasure.

Mike sat himself down in the driver’s seat and called back through the dividing window, “The Plaza, folks?”

Lanny looked at me. “First we’re taking Miss Trout to …”

Two thirty-five was the number I had given Helen. “Two thirty-five East Thirty-third,” I said.

“And thanks for dealing so nicely with the luggage, Michael,” said Lanny.

“All I’d ever ask back is one question, Mr. Morris,” said Michael.

“What’s that?”

Michael steered the limo onto the Van Wyck Expressway. “When are you and Vince Collins gonna kiss and make up?”

“Make up what?” asked Lanny.

We all laughed, but a look of displeasure fluttered across Lanny’s features.

No matter how excited I may be whenever I return to New York, the drive from either of its airports into Manhattan—past abandoned tenements, overcrowded cemeteries, and decrepit warehouses with rotted wooden facing only an arsonist could love—is enough to make me pine for the Santa Ana Freeway. At this hour, though, darkness served as a drop cloth over the worst of the view, leaving to be seen only the lovely cliché of the illuminated Manhattan skyline, promising absolutely everything.

“I hate New York in June, how about you?” Lanny asked, staring out the window. It was August, but I assumed he was paraphrasing the song.

“I like it,” I said. “What’s the matter with it?”

He shrugged. “My life here, as a kid in Brooklyn, wasn’t very pleasant. I was brought up as a nice, middle-class Jewish boy, which was not the greatest idea since we were extremely poor and lived in a rough Puerto Rican slum. A handful of Italians, a few tough Irish. My aunt couldn’t afford to live anywhere else. I owned two always clean white shirts, two pairs of corduroy pants, two black yarmulkes, and one green corduroy zippered jacket. Imagine if in Nazi Germany there had been only one Jew, and he was me. There you have my childhood.”

He reached into a small ice bucket by the decanters, tossed a couple of cubes into a cut-glass tumbler, took out a decanter of vodka, and poured it over the ice. “This isn’t vodka, it’s bottled water,” he advised. “You want some?”

I was dehydrated from the flight and joined him. As he fixed me a water on the rocks, he continued, “Look,I’ve met a few Jews I didn’t like. My second wife, for example, was Exhibit A for the defense at the Nuremberg trials. What I minded was that not only did everybody in my neighborhood hate me, but they all tried to do something about it. Cheers.”

I clinked water glasses with him.

“Every part of my career has been an effort to escape that neighborhood, those gangs— You ever have the dream that you’re back in high school?”

“Once or twice a year,” I confirmed. “Usually naked.”

The limo slipped into the Queens Midtown Tunnel. The lighting was so brightly fluorescent that it penetrated our tinted windows, turning Reuben a sickly color and making Lanny pale. He mused, “Every week or so, I dream I’m a kid again, and I’ve made the mistake of coming back to New York. They’ve got me. All of them, in the alley behind the chop shop with the high wall and barbed wire on top, and this time they’re going to use knives, not fists, and this time old man Quinn isn’t going to see what’s happening, so he won’t run to get a cop.”

We sipped our water until we came out of the tunnel and turned up a dark, narrow street of nondescript apartment buildings. There were no storefronts, restaurants, or (at the moment) pedestrians. There were only a few streetlamps, and one of those had burned out. Imagine if you had waited all your life to see Manhattan and someone told you this was it.

I could hardly see Lanny’s face now. He was lost in another borough, another time. He downed the last of his water. Michael Dougherty lowered the divider window and asked over his right shoulder, “Number 235, miss, is that between Third and Second Avenue?”

“Mmmmm,” I said in what I hoped was a noncommittal voice that might be taken for affirmation or negation, because I honestly wasn’t sure of the answer.

Lanny continued softly, “One of the reasons I’m telling you this is because sometimes when you talk about something, you don’t dream about it.”

He didn’t have my full attention. I was straining to see which side of the street 235 was on. I saw 217. It was a Laundromat. The next doorway led to apartments above the Laundromat.

“Along here?” asked Lanny.

A lit sign in an opaque storefront window readTHE VELVET TOUCH —MASSAGE$12AND UP and below it the wordsLet our fingers do the walking. (The presence of a massage parlor was, by the way, no indication that the neighborhood was bad; they had sprung up absolutely everywhere in the last few years.)

“I see 237, but not 235,” Lanny murmured.

I looked back and barely perceived an unlit doorway, very old-fashioned, that looked like it was part of the massage parlor. “We overshot it,” I said casually. “It’s not very well lit, I’m afraid. But, well, it’s home.”

Michael Dougherty backed up the limo a few feet, popped the trunk, and hustled out and around to open my door. I got out and followed him back to the trunk, where Lanny was already standing, my garment bag in his right hand.

“Let me see you inside,” he offered.

“It’s not necessary.”

“I’d feel bad if I didn’t.” He strode toward “my” apartment building, leaving me no chance for debate. I followed as he pushed open the outer door, which was not locked, and stood by the inner glass-and-steel doorway, which was. He nodded toward the lock. “Your turn, I think.”

I started fumbling in my bag, making much of looking for a set of keys. Lanny smiled, in no particular hurry.

On the other side of the glass door, from a street-level apartment, came an old man in his eighties with a nicely manicured poodle on a short leash. He had on a plaid tam-o’-shanter (the man, not the poodle, although it would have looked quite a bit better on the dog). The old man wore a thin trench coat that he’d belted, not buttoned. The front of the trench coat flapped as he walked, and I could see he was wearing only blue boxer shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt beneath it. His feet were tucked into long, thin white socks and fluffy blue slippers. He opened the door, and I made a big deal out of keeping it open for him as he got the poodle out of the building.

“Hi there!” I chirped. “It’s still pretty warm out tonight for you, thank goodness.”

Any old man, straight or gay, will talk to any reasonably attractive girl who smiles at him. He sighed. “Thank goodness. Pepé doesn’t keep banker’s hours.”

“Don’t I know!” I said as if I did know, and as if I knew him and Pepé as well. I knelt down and scruffed up his head. The dog’s, that is. “Pepé, have you been a good dog while I was away? Have you? Have you?” Pepé barked. Having established my longtime relationship with Pepé, I stood and warned the old man, “Don’t be out there too long, now. Is the elevator working?” The question spoke of a familiarity with the place, and there could be no wrong answer unless (my heart jumped) the apartment was a walk-up. Luckily, I saw a lone elevator at the end of the drab hallway.

“Yes, thank goodness,” he said as he left the building. “Took them long enough. Night,” he added to Lanny, who kept his head down—to avoid an “Aren’t you Lanny Morris?” scene, I assumed.

Lanny stood in the hallway with me. “Bet he’s nuts about you.”

“Oh, we’re only acquainted by that kind of exchange; I don’t even know his name,” I replied with absolute accuracy. I looked up at Lanny. He was virtually the same height as Vince, which surprised me because in their movies it seemed as if Vince was always looking down at Lanny. “Well, this has been a remarkable day in my life.”

“I’m seeing you inside your apartment door.” He smiled, pressing the button for the elevator. Immediately I heard it start to descend. It was loud, like the conveyor belt in a silent melodrama’s sawmill that is bearing the heroine to her certain doom.

“There’s really no need,” I said.

“Don’t be silly—I won’t try to come in, promise. But you’ve been away from your apartment for—how long now?”

“Ages,” I admitted with that candor for which I’m known.

“Okay, well, you don’t know if someone has broken in while you were gone. Let me just see you to your door. Believe me, I’m not trying to seduce you. I have to do theToday show at sevenA .M. and they want me in makeup by six-fifteen.” This was surely the first time anyone had ever used that particular line on me.

The elevator door opened and we stepped inside. It had the faint aroma of boiled cabbage, sautéed onions, and cigarette smoke. Lanny’s hand poised over the buttons. “Which floor … ?”

For a second I couldn’t remember. “Why, um … four.” That was right, 4D, I’d said, and I saw that the elevator only went up to four. “The penthouse.” I tried to make my hesitation seem like I’d been formulating a joke. He pushed the button and the elevator rose slowly as if being cranked up by hand. It had been designed for a maximum of only four people. My garment bag guaranteed we were fairly close to each other.

Lanny said, “I’m going to be in town for about a week. I’d like to see you again. How old are you?”

“Twenty-six.”

“Well, look, okay, I’m old enough to be your father but only just barely. And for it to have been legal, I would have had to have been married in the state of Georgia with my parents’ written consent at that. Is the age difference a big problem for you? We could double-date with the old fellow and his poodle downstairs. I’ll seem like a spring chicken by comparison.”

“How old are you?” I asked, knowing from his current press kit that his official admitted age was forty.

“Forty-two,” he answered.

I liked that a lot. That he was honest with me, not that he was forty-two.

“No, I’m okay about that,” I said.

The elevator stopped on the fourth floor. We stepped out into a short hall that went both left and right. “Which way?” asked Lanny. I looked for a helpful sign indicating which way 4D might be. There was none. But of course, if I really lived in Apartment 4D, I wouldn’t need a sign to know which way it was, would I?

“Guess,” I said coquettishly.

“Why?” he asked reasonably.

I leaned against the wall. “Oh, because if you have to search, we’ll have another minute to talk.”

He pulled my bag over his shoulder and trudged down the hall. I stayed by the elevator, looking all cutesy-poo. I must have been setting back the cause of women’s rights by about twenty years.