Where the Truth Lies (44 page)

We went about our work, after a fashion. I asked him featherweight questions. Nothing today about the girl in New Jersey, whose name for the moment I couldn’t remember. To his credit, Vince raised the topic. I told him that, under the circumstances, I didn’t feel this was the day to embark on anything that serious. He understood. In my current state, I was not going to challenge Vince Collins, who I hoped still liked me and wanted me.

His answers to my powder-puff questions were as charming as ever. We laughed. I was just so happy to be laughing with him. Vince suddenly stood up. It seemed we were finished for the day.

“Hey. Come on, put on your fancy dress.” He smiled impetuously. “Let’s go get drunk in Disneyland.”

I thought he was joking. But oh, he was not. He was not joking at all.

TWENTY-SEVEN

New Orleans Square had been laid out beautifully by its designers, who’d warrened the area with surprising little courtyards, serpentining galleries, and unexpected arcades, imparting to its abbreviated lanes the same sense of mystery and discovery as an aimless wander around Saint-Germain-des-Prés on a gray morning.

On such a wander in this New Orleans, built upon the former orange groves of Anaheim, you might easily walk right past a sedate sea-green-colored door recessed from the street and tightly flanked by two charming columns trimmed in warm gilt, handsomely fenestrated at the top with a subtle mosaic of stained glass. The only sign, demarcation, or explanation for this door is its address on Royal Street: the number 33, tastefully inscribed in an oval plaque to the right. To the left of the door (which you would find to be locked) is a small brass box behind whose hinged flap is a doorbell. If you were to ring it, a polite voice over a speaker in the box would ask how they might assist you. Were you to say anything but the right thing, you would be gently and respectfully encouraged to continue your walk with the expressed hope that you have a very pleasant day. And you would never know that you had come as close as you were ever likely to come to entering the most secret place in all of the Magic Kingdom. Club 33. The place, as Vince had promised, where we could get drunk in Disneyland.

He had wanted to take me there on our first visit, but he’d been told it was closed for the installation of some new ventilation. Today was the first date since then for which he’d been able to reserve a table. You had to be a member of the club to dine (and wine) there, for which you paid a sizable membership fee; it also didn’t hurt if you happened to be, say, the ambassador from Luxembourg, or the head of General Motors, or Vince Collins.

We were dressed more than appropriately for our sevenP .M. dinner reservation. We had entered the park through Guest Services once again, and had drawn some stares for our elegant clothing amid a sea of Tshirts, madras shorts, and Goofy hats, but, luckily, people were lining up for the staged parade down Main Street; most visitors were more concerned with finding a place where little Tommy could see Mickey than watching a sunglassed Vince and me slither along the shortest route to Royal Street.

There was the buzz of an electronic lock, and the door of number 33 was opened by a uniformed attendant who might have been plucked from the first-class dining room of theQE2. Electric candles and a chandelier brought out the rosy hue of the paneled foyer. Seated at a concierge’s desk, an attractive young woman had picked up a French-style phone and, we would learn, was speaking to the maître d’ upstairs, advising him of our arrival.

She welcomed us, asking if we’d like to ascend via the stairs or the lift (the technically more accurate name for the style of Victorian wrought-iron cage elevator that rested snugly within the wide spiral of the staircase before us). I wondered if anyone had ever opted for the stairs.

The young man who’d let us in also operated the elevator, which let us out into Lounge Alley. Seated at a smaller writing desk was the maître d’, whose name was William. This room, too, was beautifully paneled and had original artwork on its walls from the Disney studio, mainly landscapes. Nowhere was there a sign of Donald, Goofy, or Mickey. We might as well have been in an anteroom of an elegant hotel in Oslo. We passed by a Victorian phone box and were told by William that it had been used in the movieThe Happiest Millionaire. Vince leaned over to me and murmured, “When we finish our book,I’ll be the happiest millionaire.” It was just a silly joke, but it meant more to me at that moment than anything else he might have said.Our book. Finish. Together. We were back on track. Things were nearing normal.

Since it was my first visit, William suggested we take a look around the different rooms before the sun set. I didn’t realize it, but the restaurant crossed over Royal Street, so that one could look down (literally) upon those guests on their way to Pirates or the Haunted Mansion or standing in line in hopes of a table at the Blue Bayou, where they served a Bloody Mary without the booze, which I had called a Bloody Shame.

From other windows could be seen the Rivers of America and Tom Sawyer Island over the tops of Frontierland’s buildings. The fabulous thing was that, when seated, you couldn’t see the crowd at all. The forced perspective made the waterway and its island seem as if we were in a Michelin five-star hotel that had been improbably erected in some vast wilderness above the mighty Mississippi.

We were shown into the main dining room, which had all the starched prettiness of the Grill Room at the Connaught. The room was lined with pairs of French doors, each pair containing twelve paned squares of glass and spanned by a wide transom in an elliptical design of the Edwardian style. Each set of doors seemed to lead to a tiny terrace overlooking the park. We were seated at what seemed to be the best table for two in the room. From my seat, I could view only the more rustic parts of the park, for which I was grateful. I didn’t want to see any Rocket Rides or Flying Dumbos from this elegant room. I’d see the Flying Dumbos later.

“Well: your first cocktail while seated in the heart of Disneyland!” Vince smiled. “Better make it something special. You won’t be able to get one next time you’re at the Sunkist Citrus House.” His comment, while sweet, added a tinge of unhappiness to the moment. It was a terrible curse of mine that I would pine for things even while they were happening. During my youth, I’d spent more time thinking how someday I would yearn for my lost youth than I’d spenthaving my youth. Vince’s comment reminded me that someday this place might be off limits to me (as well might Vince himself). I needed to shake this out of my head. Enjoynow. There is only evernow.

“What do you recommend?” I asked Vince. I was going to go wherever Vince went tonight. I was the self-appointed recording secretary of Vince’s Club. No feisty modern woman me. I was hisdate and I’d be a great date, I would, for this guy. If we hadn’t previously made a pact to the contrary, he could have had me that night on a silver platter and you wouldn’t have heard a word of complaint from me.

He ordered a vesper for me, an invention of Ian Fleming’s, named after one of James Bond’s first recorded romances. Vince’s modification was that it be made with Tanqueray’s Malacca gin, which was silkier and contained citrus. He had them garnish it with lemon peel instead of a slice of orange. Vince asked for his usual, a Jack Daniel’s on the rocks, and our waiter knew without being asked to bring him his usual side of club soda and a straw.

My vesper arrived just as evensong might have been sung at a nearby church and as the evening star of Venus appeared in the soft magenta sky. It was smooth and warm, a martini without the steely edge. Vince smiled as I voiced my approval. We ordered from the refreshingly short menu and had another round each. Venus was beginning to glow.

Would it have mattered if the food was any good? It was traditional French but perfectly rendered. And the wines. With ourpotage Saint-Germain, Vince had chosen a 1969 Puligny-Montrachet that was absolutely spry and, like all really fine wines, intoxicated me far more quickly than usual.

With the rack of lamb that we shared, Vince told the waiter to dispatch the remaining third of our Montrachet to the chef with our compliments and asked the sommelier for a bottle of the 1959 Château Haut-Brion. He asked the sommelier if he would mind decanting it for us, and the sommelier said he would have recommended exactly that had Vince not requested it first.

The sommelier extracted the cork, offered it to Vince to sniff, and set a candle upon the table about a foot away from a graceful crystal decanter he’d brought for the task at hand. Lighting its wick, he then slowly poured the Haut-Brion into the decanter while the candlelight glowed behind the neck of the bottle. He eyed the illuminated ruby liquid carefully, like a diagnostician of X rays, and when the first dregs showed in the neck of the bottle, he stopped pouring, so that the wine in the decanter was now both well oxygenated and free from sediment.

Vince indicated that the sommelier should pour a trickle of the liquid into my glass for my sampling and our verdict. It was a continent of its own. It had met with the approval of Samuel Pepys in the 1600s, and it was now meeting with mine. No wine had ever been so complex on my tongue as this, and I must have moaned a bit.

“Anything the matter?” asked the sommelier, concerned.

“No … no, nothing. Heaven.” I looked at Vince. “Thank you, it’s wonderful.”

The sommelier nodded. “I suspect there will never be a year in this century as special as 1959. Do you agree, Mr. Collins?”

Vince frowned. “Yes, 1959 was a great year for French wines,” he concurred. I wondered if he was thinking that 1959 had not been a very great year for Maureen O’Flaherty, or for her mother.

But the wine fueled and infused my happiness, which grew to be delight, which by my third glass had become bliss on the outskirts of rapture. The food was sensual and reassuring, as was our conversation. I was out of the woods and I was in love. It had taken nearly losing Vince to make me realize how warm and strong he was within me.

For dessert, I had ordered a chocolate raspberry soufflé an hour earlier and Vince a simple crčme caramel. To go with it (yes, the decanter of Haut-Brion was empty and the wine was singing to me from deep within my bloodstream), he ordered a half bottle of a dessert wine, Château d’Yquem, perhaps the most famous dessert wine in the world. I needed only a glass.

While they were making uscafé diable (by trickling flaming cognac down the skin of an orange that had been peeled in one long coil until the cognac’s blue flames dripped slowly into a waiting cup of French espresso), Vince told our waiter we just wanted to step out onto the terrace off the Trophy Room for a few minutes and would it be all right if we took our wineglasses with us? The waiter said he was sure that would be quite all right and understood why we’d like to take in the view.

Vince took my arm and we walked out of the main dining room. When we got to the lobby lounge, he put his arm around my waist. I felt as comforted by this as a little girl who, after being in trouble with her father all day, is reminded by him that he loves her more than anything on earth. My Freudian slip was at the moment spun from clingy, diaphanous silk, thigh-high and slit nearly to the waist.

He stepped us out onto a small balcony. The Haunted Mansion glowed merrily in the night, as did I, I was sure. I sighed, “You deliver on your promises, don’t you? I’m drunk in Disneyland, Vince. Only I wish there were a different word for the state I’m in other thandrunk. I’m not giddy; I feel calm. I’m not slurring my speech or saying foolish things, am I?” He reassured me I was not. “I’m not pickled, or plastered. I’m not dizzy. What can I call it? Heady?”

“Under the influence?” he suggested.

I shook my head. “Too many negatives attached. We’ll have to work on this, Vince. Tell me we can still go on some rides tonight?”

Vince nodded. “What would be the point of achieving this divine state and not going on some rides?”

I was worried all of a sudden. “How long before this buzz wears off, do you think?” I was doing it again, dammit, living in the “it’s over” while the thing was still happening. “I mean, once we leave the club, we can’t come back later, right?”

“Right, you’re not allowed to come here and just have drinks. But I think I have a way we can stretch the buzz right up to when the park closes. Look.” He unfolded his beautiful hand. He held two small capsules. They looked like little bumblebees in their yellow-and-black jackets. He popped one in his mouth in a flash, hiding his face so no one would see, and swallowed it with a sip of the flinty but luscious Château d’Yquem.

“Want to join me?” he asked good-naturedly. He still had one capsule left.

Wherever he was, I wanted to join him. “What are they?”

He shrugged. “They’re like very, very mild-mannered quaaludes. You must have done a few ‘ludes in your time, right?”

Right, I had. These days people were getting busted fornot doing drugs. Health fanatics in San Francisco would show you the device they had to deionize the air, they’d drink nothing but water melted from subterranean ice caverns, they’d serve you a meal consisting solely of steamed desert-grown kale, and finish off with this really superior cocaine studded with little yellow dots. An active, healthy lifestyle included vigorous exercise, consistent meditation, and amphetamines. Heroin was gauche, booze was an embarrassment, but whatever came out of a pharmaceutical labhad to be okay—I mean, that’s why we have the Food and Drug Administration, right? Girls in their twenties who weighed no more than ninety-one pounds easily convinced physicians to prescribe them black beauties to help them get their weight down. And a quaalude was merely an entire bottle of codeine cough syrup in convenient tablet form.

What I’d enjoyed about them was the way they affected time. If you were feeling good, they made you seem to feel good a lot longer. Like if you love a hit record played at 45 RPM, imagine how much you’ll love it at 33! Oh, and what do you know! We’re hereat Club 33. An omen. I never needed much more than an omen when it came to Vince.

“You’re sure they’re okay with alcohol?” I asked.