Where the Truth Lies (8 page)

I wondered whether he’d asked for the mask in order to reduce visibility fromhis side of it or to reduce his own visibility to the surrounding passengers. He was certainly lucky in that those seated in the two rows ahead of him hadn’t seemed to have noticed his entrance just prior to takeoff. The two Hindustani gentlemen on his left didn’t show any signs of recognition, perhaps becauseTwo Flatfoots from Flatbush had never played at the Raita Rialto in downtown Vindaloo. The Brit and his Nordic model citizen were seemingly far more interested in themselves than anyone else, and it looked like a trip for the two to the loo to do the dirty deed was all but inevitable. For the moment, everyone in first class was by design or by ignorance playing it very cool about Lanny’s presence in their midst.

Stewardess Kim gifted me with my complimentary headphones, which were simply hollow plastic tubes that sent sound stethoscopically to one’s ears. I put them on, heard the thrilling strains of Paul Mauriat and His Orchestra performing “Love Is Blue,” and wondered what, if anything, I should do about this unusual situation.

Introducing myself was an option, but it was hard to know where I ranked on Lanny’s hit list, based on our asymmetrical correspondence. Was I enemy, nuisance, rival? Did he really know of me or had this all been the doings of John Hillman, Esquire? I had never actually received a letter signed “Lanny Morris,” but surely I wouldn’t have been given access to his memoirs without his knowledge and consent.

For an instant, I entertained the narcissistic notion that Lanny was following me: that he’d pulled a few strings easily accessible to someone of his status, learned when I was flying back to New York, and booked these seats specifically to observe me—but if he wanted to have me shadowed, he could have hired someone to do it. I suddenly had a disconcerting thought accompanied by a chill, which I at first took to be the overhead air vent blowing directly upon me. I half-reached to adjust it before I realized that the frisson I felt was internal.

Forget thinking that Lanny Morris was following me. Much more likely he’ll think I’m followinghim. Like an obsessed fan, or the paparazzi, or the “journalist” Moe Cohn, whose Miami-based column had dug up dirt on people like Lanny right up through the late fifties, raking them into the muck with a sharp-edged hoe.

Here I am, having written repeated letters to Lanny and his representatives, pleading my case, sending him excerpts from my published oeuvre, negotiating an agreement with Lanny’s ex-partner, poring over Lanny’s offered memoirs … and now a mere three days later I’m sitting in the midst of his entourage en route to New York. If I were Lanny, wouldn’t I be suspicious?

I tried to remember if any of the articles that I’d sent to Lanny’s lawyers carried byline photos of me. As best I could remember, they hadn’t. There was a piece I’d done forViva in which I’d tried to uncover the secret identity of “J.” (the author of the recent best-sellerThe Sensuous Woman ). The magazine had made much of “K. O’Connor” (my usual billing) searching for “J.”—but I’d been photographed wearing a harlequin’s eye mask while supposedly scribbling notes at the bedside of three men who were cavorting with a lanky, identically masked woman—purportedly the aforementioned “J.” but in reality a model named Menorah.

I flipped audio channels and detected an anemic rendition of the Grieg Piano Concerto, to which I vaguely listened as I filtered the issues at hand through the wadded cheesecloth I laughingly call my brain.

Midway through the Adagio, senior stewardess Helen came back to Lanny and murmured some words in his ear. His seat back straightened and I saw his hand returning the sleep mask to her. She asked him a question and could not quite hide her simultaneous glance in my direction. Oh, Helen was very professional and the soul of discretion, but it certainly seemed as if she was talking about me. My favorite expression is “Even paranoiacs have enemies,” and I was about to be proven at least partially correct.

Helen nodded to whatever Lanny’s reply was and stepped back to me as if one thing led to another. “You’ll be having dinner with us today?”

I refrained from saying, “No, I’ll just go down to the corner and pick up a fried-egg-and-bacon sandwich,” and replied that yes, I would be dining in today. Helen recited, “As part of our American Admiral service this afternoon, we’re offering our exclusive in-flight table dining, which consists of two center tables seating four each. Will this be all right?” I assumed that Helen’s conference with Lanny had been to ask if he minded dining with a civilian (me), and since he apparently was fine about that, who was I to reject dining with Lanny Morris (him)?

“Fine by me,” I smiled.

Helen gave a go-ahead nod to steward Karl, who had moved up behind me. He gushed, “Well, then it looks like you’re having dinner with Lanny Morris!” as if this were a feature of American Airlines’ Admiral service along with carved roast beef. With that, he rotated my chair twenty-three degrees clockwise toward the center of the plane, where it locked in place. Likewise, Reuben’s chair was rotated by Kim toward me. Fleischmann was then quickly rotated by Kim in my direction. We were beginning to emulate the Mad Tea Party ride at Disneyland. Helen, of course, saved for herself the final honor of swiveling Lanny into position at our table for four. A large circular tabletop was snapped by Helen and Kim onto the smaller circular table that had been in front of me and on my right, which now served as the base of our dining table. Karl whisked a salmon-colored tablecloth around the table like an artful barber and fastened whatever kept it in place. Immediately a low weighty vase of silk flowers was plonked down in the center of the table, as matching dinner service was laid down … and there we were, as precise and compasslike a table for four as you’ll ever see.

Lanny turned and spoke to me for the first time. He neither smiled nor frowned.

“Hi.”

“Hi,” I returned. So far, I was every bit his equal.

He took the tabletop in both of his hands and gently tried to toggle it. It wobbled a bit. “Guess we should get the waiter to slide a matchbook under the airplane,” he smiled. He peered under the tablecloth, adjusted something that wentsnap, and reappeared. This time the table was steady. “That should hold. Guess we’re dining together. That okay with you?”

“Fine by me.” I’m justso fucking good in these situations.

Lanny nodded across the table. “This is my friend Reuben.” Reuben nodded graciously. “And this is also my friend—technically speaking—and business manager Irv. My name’s Lanny.” I was surprised to discover that Lanny had a very intelligent face. Quite sensitive, to be honest. Most of the simian expressions for which we’d come to know him, especially in cartoons and on posters, were not in evidence, at least for the moment. He looked a little like a Jewish Danny Kaye, except that of course Danny Kayeis Jewish. And of course his hair was not red. Then again, I assume neither was Danny Kaye’s. “What’s your name?” he asked.

“Bonnie,” I lied just as natural as can be. “Bonnie Trout.” I listened to my voice lying to him with a keen but detached interest. I hadn’t consciously decided to lie until the moment in which I did. There was still time, I thought, to take it back, pretend it was some kind of joke, although one would be hard-pressed to find its punch line.

Ah, but now it reallywas too late to retract it. In the time it took me to remove the napkin ring from the linen at my place and spread the napkin upon my lap, the falsehood had jelled very nicely into an official regulation lie. I felt as if I were standing on the rear platform of a caboose, looking back at a switch in the tracks, and watching one pair of rails curving away from the other, out of sight, behind trees, now gone forever.

“Nice to meet you, Bonnie,” said Lanny simply. I thought about all the jokes that anyone named Bonnie Trout has heard from people to whom she’s just been introduced. I thought it showed some class that Lanny moved along without comment. I suppose when you’ve spent your life making and writing jokes, you have too much self-respect to hit lobbed pitches out of the park.

Over my shoulder, Kim inquired, “Would you like wine, a cocktail, or would you prefer to stay with the champagne?” As I was the woman at the table, apparently all questions and service would be directed first to me. Chivalry over Celebrity. I opted for a Sancerre, as did Lanny. Irv asked for a Cutty and soda, which was made for him on the spot. Irv’s voice was like his looks: pinched, pointed, New York. Reuben waved away the offer of a drink and replied, “Just ice water, please,” in a low, mellow voice that hardly bore an accent.

“What do you do, Bonnie?” asked Lanny as they poured his wine.

“I teach,” I said.

“Where?”

“In Manhattan. P.S. 29 on Orchard Street.”

“What do you teach?”

“Second grade.”

“Really? How old is a second-grader these days?” he asked.

I tasted my wine and calculated. I’d been five in kindergarten, six in first grade … “Seven years old. Sometimes six or eight, for part of the year, depending on when they were born.”

“Well, we have a lot in common. You teach second grade, I went to second grade. Irv, you went to second grade, didn’t you?”

Irv buttered his club roll. “Many times. Tell me, Miss Trout, what do they pay a second-grade teacher these days?”

God, how would I know? Enough to afford a one-bedroom apartment on Thirty-third Street on the East Side. How much would that go for, three seventy-five a month? You should never pay more in rent than one week’s salary. Fifty-two times three hundred and seventy-five is … “About twenty thousand a year.” I sipped some wine. “With tips.”

Lanny gave a pleasant single laugh at this. It was not his trademark cackle. As a matter of fact, except for the name, the general timbre of his voice, and certain aspects of his looks, I’m not sure I’d have recognized this man as being Lanny Morris.

Irv shrugged. “I don’t mean to be impolite, but I was wondering how a second-grade schoolteacher affords to fly first-class.”

Lanny and Reuben both looked at me with interest. I used my knife to spatula one of the three petite medallions of smoked salmon that Kim had set before me and transfer it onto a round of toasted English Hovis bread. “Well, I have a pass that allows me free use of the subway on weekdays … and the hot lunches at school, while pretty deplorable, are only fifty cents … and I’m the mistress of a wealthy married man, and when he and his wife go on vacation, he treats me to a first-class trip in the opposite direction. But look at me, talking only about myself.” I turned to Lanny. “What doyou do for a living?”

Lanny froze for a moment, then nodded his head, acknowledging my zing. Reuben and Irv both looked confused.

Lanny replied lightly, “I’m a French impressionist painter. Mainly out of Tahiti. But I just do that to pay the bills. My real ambition is to become a stockbroker in Paris.”

Irv shook his head disapprovingly. “Don’t get it,” he said.

I thought it might be politic to show that I did. “Paul Gauguin,” I enlightened Irv. “He gave up being a successful stockbroker to become a painter in the South Seas.”

Irv frowned at Lanny as if his client had made a bad career move. “You think the average person knows that?”

Lanny looked irritated. “I’m making idle conversation, Irv, I didn’t realize the meter was running. Okay, how about:Good evening, mesdames, messieurs, I’m a French impressionist, and for my first impression, let’s hear from my good friend Toulouse-Lautrec. I could drop to my knees for this, and if my sports jacket is long and thin enough to spread out on the floor, it’ll help the gag. Then I say,Ah l’amour, l’amour, I paint with Benjamin La Moore, usually in a shade of sacré bleu, and if I run out of that I use some Dutch Boy—not the paint, you understand, I mean I like to usesome poor little Dutch Boy in my strange little Frenchie way —okay, Irv? You know, sometimes I actually go off duty.” This wasn’t said bitterly or venomously.

“Sorry,” offered Irv. He tasted his Scotch smoked salmon on Hovis and asked Kim if she could find some cream cheese. She went to see what they had in the galley.

I said to Lanny, “I guess people expect you to be funny all the time.”

“Not if they get to know me, they don’t. I’d much rather do your kind of work.”

I shook my head. “We all need a good laugh.”

Lanny grimaced. “Yeah, well, that’s what I tell my writers, but they keep coming up with the same bad jokes.”

Irv hastily explained, “Lanny doesn’t have any writers. He writes all his own material. I wish he wouldn’t, because it eats up his time, but that’s how he is.”

Lanny hissed, “Quiet, Irv, I’ve been blaming my bad jokes on my nonexistent writers for years now.” He mock-glared at me. “Don’t ever repeat what he just said or I’ll have to have you destroyed.”

Kim took away our hors d’oeuvres plates and laid down some lovely sea-blue china in the shape of fluted seashells filled with their rendition of coquilles Saint-Jacques.

Lanny continued in the most conversational of tones, “For nearly two hundred million years, the dinosaurs had dominion over this planet. We’ve been around for, oh how long has it been now, fifty thousand years? SoHomo sapiens will have to survive until the year 199,950,000A .D. before we can call ourselves as successful a race as your basic dinosaur. And yet, Bonnie, in all that time, not even once is there the slightest evidence that any dinosaur ever went into show business.”

He added gravely, “There is nothing, for example, to suggest that one dinosaur made all the other dinosaurs sit around the fire at night and watch him as he said,You know, I think if we ever met a stegosaurus, he’d look a little something like this… . No tummling Triassics, no juggling Jurassics—aTyrannosaurus rex was the closest they had to a stand-up act.” He reminded me a little of Vince talking about Euclid, which had reminded me a lot of Lanny. “But why second grade, Bonnie?”

“Well, my children don’t know how to use drugs or weapons yet. I can still take the kids in a fight, including even the most muscular of the boys. Some of them may be in love with me, but none of them want to have sex with me, including the most muscular of the girls. The disparity between the bright ones and the dumb ones is not so great yet, so the results of my work or lack thereof are not so depressing yet. They have no homework that I have to correct in the evenings. Some of their fathers are only a little older than I am, and some of those fathers are already divorced—those parent-teacher conferences can be an excellent way to meet eligible men in a private setting without having to sit around a bar all night. I get ten weeks’ paid vacation, excellent pension and medical plan. In one more year, I’ll have such solid tenure that I could molest the winner of a spelling bee with a field hockey stick and theystill wouldn’t be able to fire me. The question isn’t why I decided to teach second grade, the question is why everybody else doesn’t.”