Where the Truth Lies (23 page)

She took two menus and strutted her way down the restaurant’s interminable corridor. We followed. A very Kiwanis-looking man stepped away from the bar and pumped Lanny’s hand. “Mr. Morris, Jim Mackendorf, general manager, just want to say how delighted we are to have you here. If you need anything …” He forced his business card on Lanny, who pocketed it graciously. “Perhaps later we could take a photograph for our Wall of Fame … ?” Lanny said yes, on our way out, but please not while we were eating.

We continued to follow Gossamer Gertie for some time. When she’d reached what I assumed were the restrooms, she stopped in front of an inauspicious door labeledDRIVE -IN. A sign on a little easel outside the door said, “Our apologies. The Drive-In is closed for a private party.” She opened the door for us, gesturing within. “Please sit anywhere you like, obviously. Tracy will be your waitress. I’ll send her in now.” The private party was apparently a party of two.

I’d heard about the Drive-In. It was a tunnel of a room, dark and cool as elevenP .M. in September. Black light caused Lanny’s white shirt to glow. Instead of tables, the room had three single files of truncated mock automobiles mounted on three long platforms, the front seats of the cars with flat dashboards that served as one’s table. The truncated cars (all “tables for two” with side-by-side seating, as if you’d been placed in the front seat of a Chevy Nova) were pointed toward a movie screen at the end of the room. The back of each “car” had lit red taillights, so as you were led to your assigned convertible, you were immediately seduced by the illusion that the drive-in was full and that you were merely making your way back from the popcorn concession. All it lacked was a kiddie railroad ride. We slid into a vehicle five cars back from the screen.

“Hi, I’m Tracy,” said our waitress perkily. Everyone was named Tracy these days. Even people named Dawn were secretly named Tracy. She was dressed like a carhop attendant. “You pretty much have the run of the place, so do you want to see our menu … ?”

“Well, what do most people have when they come here?” Lanny asked.

“The Drive-In special. That’s a big cheeseburger, and it’s really big and really good, with shoestring fries and a martini. The martini is really big too.” She smiled.

Lanny looked at me. I noticed that he had really nice eyes and accompanying lashes. “That okay with you?”

I said it was. I had the feeling that a big hamburger was one of the items the Autopub’s culinary staff might handle best. And at this point I could use a big martini. Really big. Of course, I could have ordered a martini no matter what I ate, but the fact that it came with the hamburger made it seem almost unavoidable. “Vodka martini,” I said. “On the rocks.”

“Olive or onion?”

I thought of my breath and opted for the olive. (I was about to have a burger and I was worried about the scent of a cocktail onion!) Lanny ordered his martini with Beefeater gin, straight up, a little extra vermouth, four olives. Like me, he asked for his burger medium rare, without cheese. Maybe we were both thinking about our breath.

Tracy went hopping off to fetch our drinks, and the movie screen came to life. So there we were, parked in the fifth car from the screen, surrounded by other cars whose dashboard lights glowed warmly in the crisp blue night, but we were very much alone. If Lanny and I had decided to have it off right there in the front seat (and it was doubtful the management would have been likely to stop us), only Tracy and perhaps the projectionist would have known.

Lanny seemed the most relaxed he’d been today. Work (meaning theToday show and “The Star-Spangled Banner”) was over, he explained. “And I love drive-ins. When we first started making movies, Vince and I would go rent a Thunderbird convertible or a Caddy, and we’d take out some local girls to see our pictures. Sometimes they didn’t even know who we were until they started watching the movie. The girls would keep looking up at the screen and then back at us— God, if you could have seen their expressions!”

“I imagine you and Vince did quite well with those wide-eyed girls in those wide convertibles with their tops down,” I observed as Woody Woodpecker pecked out the opening title to one of his cartoons. “Referring to the convertibles, of course.”

He shrugged apologetically. “What should I say? We were young men with normal hormones who discovered there were only eleven women on Earth who wouldn’t sleep with us on a first date.”

I smiled. “Who were the eleven women?”

“Eleanor Roosevelt was one. Princess Margaret was fine about petting but nothing below the waist. You really want me to go on?”

Tracy returned with my martini, which came in something akin to a crystal horse trough. My lone stuffed olive looked like a green-and-red beach ball hopelessly adrift on an ice-filled silvery ocean, miles from civilization.

“My God,” I muttered in awe.

“Told you they were big,” chirped Tracy. “We’ve had people order second rounds, but I don’t know if anyone’s ever finished three of them.” She set down Lanny’s Beefeater straight-up martini, which trembled in a beaker about the size of an upright flügelhorn in both height and size of bell. “I’ll be back in a moment with your food.”

As if responding to some Shakespearean “Exuent, flourish” cue, she departed with an accompanying brass fanfare that actually emanated from the movie screen, as appeared the monochrome proclamation “Our Feature Presentation.”

Now there was the logo of Republic Pictures, followed by the breathless news that Harold Stolman and George Piselli present:A Republic Picture under the supervision of E. Bennett Lodge. Then (single title card, festive theme): SMITHEREENS! New card:Starring John Derek, Vera-Ellen … and introducing Vince Collins and Lanny Morris as “Vince and Lanny.”

I looked mock-accusingly at Lanny, who rushed to assure me, “They were showing this anyway, I swear to you. I thought you might enjoy it with a running commentary. Hey, I’m trying to impress you, all right?” He gave me a sheepish grin that was either sweetly studious or studiously sweet. “Now let me tell you how we did this opening dolly shot.”

And he did. As we sat side by side in our Naugahyde love seat, reflecting pools of vodka and gin gleaming before us, Lanny relived for me the making ofSmithereens.

It was a little eerie, as you can imagine. Lanny was on the screen, selling ice cream to kids in a Hollywood rendition of Central Park. Then his warm breath, with a pleasant scent of cool juniper laced with olive, would make some comment into my right ear. I’d turn and see the right profile of Lanny, almost as monochromatic in the blue light of the Drive-In as the slightly green-tinged image onscreen, whispering who in the cast had been evil, who’d had a drinking problem, and who’d been doing whom during principal photography.

My hamburger arrived, the size of a forty-five RPM record—or, rather, a stack of about fifteen such records—and it was a really good one, tasting of Memorial Day picnics. I took demure bites and, combined withSmithereen ’s unassuming charms, Lanny’s inside stories, the extremely long french fries, and most of my second martini, the evening floated along like a dreamy rowboat ride up the Thames. When Lanny wasn’t narrating, he’d watch my reactions to the movie the way a novice writer watches his girlfriend’s face when she reads his latest story. Every now and then, he’d give me a gentle nudge, or murmur “This” to alert me to a particular sight gag or oneliner. It might have been annoying, but his boyish enthusiasm for his early work was so sincere and affectionate as to be almost enviable.

By the unspooling of the last reel, we were sipping liqueurs, as of course people so often do at a drive-in. I’d ordered a crčme de menthe for the sole purpose of freshening my breath, a Scope mouthwash you can swallow. The film ended with an astounding twist: over the image of Vince crooning the last chorus of “Just My Pal and My Gal,” the wordsThe End appeared, upon which Lanny slapped a big question mark as suffix while winking broadly at the camera. Fadeout, cast credits,A Republic Picture.

With the movie’s end, the overhead lights came up, which startled and momentarily disoriented me. After all, at an outdoor drive-in movie, if the overhead lights came up, it would indicate the aurora borealis, Armageddon, or the conclusion of a horror marathon that ran until dawn. I had, in fact, forgotten for the moment exactly where we were. The two bountiful martinis had nestled me into the most comfortable cocoon. Now I looked with vodka-infused affection at this man with whom I’d been spending a near-hallucinogenic twenty-four hours within my already surreal life. Vince Collins had strolled me around the cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces of the Burbank Studios and elicited from me the guarantee of a sweet and easy lay at the end of our intended work together. Then, with hardly time to return to whatever passes for reality in Los Angeles, I’d been catapulted into this strange, long arc of a first date with his ex-partner, Lanny.

He’d really been funny in the film. The script itself was disgracefully clunky, even for its time, but Vince and Lanny had their own unscripted movie percolating within the film, one that consisted of looks and takes, the love-hate of their brotherly love, and, particularly, Lanny’s outrageous mugging, which seemed to have been filmed at a different frame rate than the rest of the cast. He made a five-syllable word out of “Hello,” a punch line out of “Why’s that?,” and he was unable to take three steps without knocking something down, which he then caught, then dropped as he reached to catch something else he’d knocked down. Onscreen, he was also an awful lot more like the man who’d written the two chapters that I’d read than the sometimes pensive fellow in the seat next to me.

I looked at him. In repose, his face really was quite lovely. Somebody kisses clowns after they take off their makeup, I thought. Emmett Kelly must have gotten laid in his lifetime or there wouldn’t have been an Emmett Kelly Jr. Maybe Lanny was very good in bed. Why wouldn’t he be? To be a clown is to take on a calling, isn’t it? Like being a surgeon or a counselor. Such people can be sensitive, expressive … some of the qualities you might hope for in a bed partner.

What was I doing? I knew what I was doing. I was making the case for becoming one of the women in his memoirs, and having very little problem doing so.

Outside the Autopub, as we mounted the stairs up to Fifth Avenue, the night and I were warm and susceptible to anything that might happen. What is the halfway mark between giddiness and drunkenness? I was there. Lanny didn’t say where we were going next, but gee gosh, his hotelwas just across the street. He wrapped his arm around my waist and we walked slowly across Fifth Avenue toward the southern boundary of Central Park. At this relatively early hour of the evening, the hansom cabs were still lined up across from the Fifty-ninth Street entrance to the Plaza. The farmlike smell of horses and their hay created in me a sensory conflict as my retina processed images of the cosmopolitan facades of Central Park South while my olfactory lobes told me I was back in the barnyard.

Lanny turned to a driver of a hansom cab, a bearded young man in an Ascot cutaway suit whose long hippie hair was crowned by a dove-gray top hat.

“Cleopatra’s Needle and back?” he asked the cabby.

“Fifty,” he was quoted.

“Thirty,” Lanny countered.

“Forty,” offered the driver.

“Sixty,” Lanny smiled, completely confusing him. He handed the driver some money and helped me into the cab, which was a true hansom (whereas most of the others were carriages). The swing door closed in front of us and we were obliged to snuggle together more tightly than in our convertible at the Drive-In. I leaned against his chest and he wrapped his arm around my shoulders.

I hardly knew which Central Park this was: the one seen inSmithereens, where Lanny was a Good Humor salesman, or the one that Vince had strolled me by at the Burbank Studios. There was even the laughable possibility that this was the real Central Park.

“You know, we’ve hardly talked aboutyou, Bonnie,” murmured Lanny. It was probably a sentence he had considerately learned to say to women over the years, since he obviously was going to be Topic A in any conversation with most civilians.

As you can imagine, the last thing I wanted to be talking about with Lanny was Bonnie Trout.

“Oh, do we have to talk?” I asked and kissed him. I’ve heard tell that I’m a pretty good kisser, but whatever I was, he was easily my match. We found enough to keep us occupied until the hansom cab pulled up to the Plaza’s main entrance.

“I can take you home now,” Lanny said. “Unless you’d like to come back to my suite.”

I nodded slowly. “Oh … of course, yes, have me,” I heard myself say, without even a tinge of sarcasm. “By all means,” I added.

We didn’t say a word on the way up to his suite. He let himself in. Reuben was nowhere to be seen. (My impression was that he had a room of his own, apart from Lanny’s suite.) I let Lanny lead me to his bedroom, where Reuben had laid out a neatly folded silk robe for him. I took the liberty of filching it, and excused myself to the attached bathroom with the assurance that I’d be but a minute.

After little more than that, I stepped back into the bedroom, making sure the bathroom light was already off, so that I wouldn’t be seen backlit in shadow, which would have ruined the effect. Lanny had thoughtfully turned off all the lights except a lamp near the bed. He’d kicked off his shoes and was lying atop the blanket and sheets; the bedspread was now heaped in the room’s far corner. His incredibly expensive watch was on the night table.

He could see that I was wearing his robe. I stood by his side, looked down at him, and let the robe drop to the carpet. I’d left my bra and panties back in the bathroom, so in that instant, Lanny became very much better acquainted with me.

The air-conditioning in the room had been left on high, and that, combined with the voluptuous internal shiver induced by the boldness of what I was doing, gave my skin what I hoped was a desirably goose-bumped texture. My nipples were hard, but that would have been the case without the air-conditioning. I was aroused by my own forwardness, and I could see from the ridge outlined in the fabric of his pants that I more than had his interest as well. He tugged me down to him on the bed with just the correct amount of forcefulness … and soon my breasts, my arms, my stomach, my sex (as I’d come to call it), my neck, my ass, my back, my lips were brushing against his shirt, his pants, his skin, his cock (as I’d come to call it) as he so hurriedly undressed himself beneath me. Our curious, adroit, gliding tongues were everywhere, delighting with one lovely discovery after another. Either we were both very good together or he was so incredible that he was good enough for the both of us. As he finally entered me and God, God I felt so filled, his steady, confident thrusts that showed no sign of ever ending causing a scarily ecstatic pressure that I could feel all the way back to my cervix and yes I began to give myself over to this unceasing engine we’d together constructed on this bed in this hotel room, a turbine with him and me as mindless pistons, and it was using me, as I so wanted it to, and I thought, I thought as I gave myself up to it, “Nowam I part of the story? Wasthis what you wanted?” and as I began to scream wordlessly in a hosanna of glorious despair, I had no idea to whom this thought was addressed.