Where the Truth Lies (45 page)

“They work evenbetter with alcohol. I would know, believe me.” His face was creased with the most inviting smile. “Hey, come on in, honey, the water’s fine.”

If he had suggested we get tattooed together, I would have been havingWidowmaker inscribed on my left buttock in a flash. To drop one little ‘lude on an evening that I wanted to last forever … this was not what you would call the Great Debate. I smiled, popped the pill in my mouth, drank from his cup of sweet wine as if this were part of a wedding ceremony, and looked up to him for approval.

As soon as I swallowed, I saw fireworks in clean, phosphorescent golds and reds and blues. Not because of the pill. There actually were fireworks, a mid-evening display over the Rivers of America. We stood on our little terrace and toasted the Chinese, who had been so civilized as to have invented fireworks without once considering using explosives as weaponry.

Vince wasn’t given a check (it went onto his club account, and God knows with the wines he’d ordered the meal was easily into four figures), but he distributed cash tips subtly and no doubt generously. Oh, how I hated leaving. At least outside the club it was dark now, and no one could see that the man I was with was Vince Collins. I got to hold his arm and press my head against his shoulder. I hadn’t been this wobbly-kneed-smitten with a guy since I’d given myself up to my high school boyfriend Todd. And one of the moody romantic albums we’d played in the background (to cover our immense embarrassment) had been a classic LP, lushly arranged by Nelson Riddle, calledTorch Songs for When the Lights Are Low … Sung by Vince Collins.

“Hey. Partner,” he murmured. I loved him calling me that. “Do you want to go on Adventures thru Inner Space?”

A shiver went through me. Did he understand that the closest thing to a Tunnel of Love in Disneyland was “Adventures thru Inner Space”?

“I would if you would,” I answered huskily.

We stepped quickly down the path that led directly to Tomorrowland. Vince was no longer afraid of tomorrow, it seemed, just as I was suddenly enamored with thenow.

The attraction bannered “Monsanto presents Adventures thru Inner Space” was never crowded, for which I had always been grateful, because I liked the ride a lot. Its main problem was that it was absolutely free, not even an A coupon. I suppose guests assumed that something free would be simply a commercial for Monsanto, but it was in fact a very cool ride. It was the first to feature Omnimovers, an endless conveyor belt of two-seater cars, each of which wrapped around its passengers on all sides but one, creating a nifty eggshell that limited what you could see of the ride, and others, and—more significantly—what others could see of you. In Adventures thru Inner Space your car was called an Atommobile. In the Haunted Mansion, the same cars were called Doom Buggies.

The conceit of the ride was that the “train” of Atommobiles entered the Mighty Microscope. Disney had devised this so that, from the outside of the ride, one saw the real cars with their real passengers entering a “real” giant microscope and then saw a miniaturized train of Atommobiles with miniature people seated in the cars coming out the other end of the microscope. (In reality, the moment your car entered the Mighty Microscope, the conveyor belt hung a hard left turn and you were carried through a series of dark tunnels for the remainder of the ride.)

Once embarked, you sat back snugly in your car, walled in and surrounded by stereophonic sound, as you were purportedly shrunk first to the size of crystals, then molecules, and finally atoms. You were truly surrounded by projections on the curved walls around you, and since you were limited to the peripheral vision of the car you were in, the effect was encompassing and hypnotic: floating in the middle of a drop of water, or entering a galaxy of electrons that circled aimlessly around you, or, with a loud heartbeat pounding in your ears as if it were the first moment of your life, entering the heart of an atom. It was quite a journey. But far more pragmatically, from the point of view of hormonal adolescents, two people could do almost anything they wanted in that snug little cupola, from the time they entered the good old Mighty Microscope until the time they emerged from the nucleus of that atom.

Disney rides tended to feature “gags” at their conclusion, as if to wink and say, “It’s not real.” In Adventures thru Inner Space, the gag was seeing the single eyeball of a scientist looking at little you through the other end of the Mighty Microscope. This was also the warning cue for couples to make themselves presentable to the world.

And this was the first ride Vince,my Vince, wanted to take with me? I was so ready. We walked into the pavilion (none too steadily, for we were magnificently buzzed) and there were some lonely Disneyland interns virtually ecstatic to see us.

Giggling, Vince and I ducked into the cocoon of the car. Paul Frees—the voice of half of the Disneyland rides, from the Haunted Mansion to Pirates of the Caribbean—began in his ersatz–Orson Welles voice to tremulously describe the awe and wonder of being reduced to the size of a single snowflake.

Vince put his arm around me as if we were in the last row of the Bijou Theatre in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and with nobody twenty cars ahead of us or behind us, we entered the Mighty Microscope.

And the pill I’d taken kicked in.

Oh, Lordy me. My guess was that I felt the effects before Vince, being lesser in weight and size than my wonderfully tall fellow. I think the slightly psychedelic effect of the ride may also have helped the chemicals take hold, the way hypnotic music can amplify and augment the effects of a joint. We were entering the tunnel as part of this giant, endless caterpillar, snug as a bug in a Monsanto rug, and as the darkness of the tunnel surrounded us, that’s when I first felt it. The pulsations started in my groin, not my head. They rose up through me like a warm fountain of shameful feelings, up into my breasts, my shoulders, my neck. And then they gently rushed into my brain and I had never understood but now I did. I might once have been scared by these feelings, but I’d been readied for them by the nectareous wine I had drunk, and now the wine was drinking me. And Vince was with me, so I had nothing to fear. “Do you feel it?” I asked him softly. He told me it was just beginning.

The tunnel promised warm, glowing light ahead.This was the true Alice in Wonderland ride. Oh yes. I was definitely crawling along the dark rabbit hole, and now I was falling gracefully with Vince into a vast and expanding space. Straight and sober and unstoned, the ride would still have been somewhat hallucinatory, so imagine experiencing it from within my current sensory state. Vince and I drifted through a light field light-years away from everything. “Do you feel it?” I asked him. He kissed me. He kissed me and held my head in his hands and kissed me again. Our faces were illuminated by a billion water crystals whirling their lyric dance around us. I was happy. Could I please be this happy always?

His hands groped for me. They were strong and big. I wanted him to have everything of me. I wanted my breasts to nurture him and my legs to coil tightly around him and pull him to me as if I were some alluring creature of the sea drawing him toward a glorious death in my arms and then we both would live. I needed him to have more hands, to touch me more places at once. “Oh Vince,” I said so cleverly, my higher education coming into play. “Vince.” It was such a beautiful word and the molecules agreed with me, swirling as they talked to me. We, the molecules and I, noticed theV at the beginning of his name, so valiant and victorious, and the modesti, and by the time we had reached thennnnnnnnnnnn, it was me making that sound as he was pressing the strong heel of his hand against myc in such wonderful ways that I thought— But then I forgot what I’d been thinking. Apparently the long assembly line of cars (we had become all humanity; this was Heaven’s escalator and we were rising to be with Our Maker) had gently pierced the wall of the tunnel and was now emerging into the larger universe that lay outside Disneyland where we were in the endless rhapsodic daylight of the stars. And then the giant eye of the good scientist who had helped us find this world could be seen, and Vince, who was always so much wiser and stronger than I, was helping me adjust my clothing back to respectability and we emerged, miraculously, once again in the pavilion in Disneyland. Vince’s strong arm helped me get up out of the car. “Must I leave?” I asked, somewhat wrenched out of my happiness.

“You okay, miss?” asked a Disney intern as I made a slightly shaky transition onto the moving walkway that ran alongside the disembarking area of the ride. He was just the most wonderful fellow—short of Vince, that is.

“That’s so like you to be concerned,” I said graciously. He gave me a goofy smile. “He’s very nice, isn’t he, Vince?” I asked Vince, who assured me the Disney fellow was very nice, indeed. We were walking now and I asked Vince if we could go on another ride. He said he wanted to sit still for a while, but I pointed out to him that the Haunted Mansion was another slow cozy ride and we could sit in that. I just wanted to be in the dark with him some more, I wanted him to have his hands on me again; he hadn’t even touched my nipples—how hard he would find them. “Haunted Mansion, Vince,” I said, my choice of words inarguable. “Haunted Mansion.” We were passing by a ticket booth and he put down a ten. He was so very smart. He knew how to handle money and talk to people. I could only watch in awe. “E,” I said. It was the kind of ticket we needed to get on the ride and also the letter I had never reached in the name “Vince.” That was good, that I had now finished his name. Now he could finish me. “Haunted Mansion, Vince,” I said, eager for him.

We spent several lovely years together in the Haunted Mansion that evening. We got into our Doom Buggies and moved along the shadowy corridors of the handsome Victorian manor. On prior visits, I had enjoyed the ominous promise of the hallways past which the ride drifted but did not explore. Now we explored them, Vince and I. We got off the ride (I was very sure we had) and walked the corridors. I wasn’t frightened, not I. I have always been a part of this house, I’d sensed that when I first arrived here. The tormented Lord of the Manor needed me more than he knew. Others might find the ghostly apparitions troubling, but I knew that they were, like Vince, merely seeking rest and release. And I was there to help them and him. He had his hands on me again and it was not what we had vowed, it was wrong in the eyes of the church, but— We had found our way back into our car somehow and we were outdoors, in the graveyard, a million ghosts (or protons and neutrons) whirligigging around us again. There was not as much privacy on this ride; others could see us, the townspeople—they had always disapproved but I had known. Outdoors, in front of his mansion, Vince held me. The estate was ours now. I felt another upward rush of the warmth inside me and the light went wilder in my brain.

“Vince. I need you,” I told him. Did he understand? He would have to.

“I need you, too,” he said.

“Oh, Vince-voice,” I teased him wittily.

He walked us (but of course we didn’t need to walk because our feet had been turned into Omnimovers) in the direction of the Monsanto ride, but when I got all sentimental about it, he told me no, we were going on a better ride. “How long have we been here?” I asked. “Is this our—is this still the same night?” He assured me this was still the same night. He knew everything. Now we went up an inclined walkway and a giant snake hissed up to us. It was the Monorail. “Oh, Vince, everyone will see us,” I complained. I knew the Monorail was lit and there were no private compartments. We would not be able to neck the way we had on the other rides. He reassured me that the ride would get better soon.

The Monorail stopped at the Disneyland Hotel, and we got off there. We passed the Monorail Bar and I said I wanted a drink, a vesper or maybe a ginger ale. Suddenly I was dying for a ginger ale. He said he’d have them bring me a ginger ale.

Then we went from Bar Land to Elevator Land. We were alone at last. “Vince, stop the elevator,” I asked him. He said he had a better stop in mind. We were now in Hall Land. There was an elderly couple, and they watched us with curiosity. We would be that couple someday.

“Weren’t we in Disneyland a while ago?” I asked. “Or was that the other day?” Vince assured me that we had been in Disneyland just five minutes earlier. Now we were in Door Land. Vince produced a key and opened it. And there it was. Room Land. “Oh, for us?” I asked. He said yes. I started to sing ecstatically,“This room is your land, this room is my land, from the New York forests, to the red tree waters …” and I grabbed him. Vince was so wonderful. We kissed. Then he sat me down on the bed. “Have to get you that ginger ale,” he said, picking up the phone. I was busy taking off the clothes I’d been wearing for, oh, I guess several years now. Before Vince and I were a married couple and had lived in England. When we went … I wanted him to see my breasts. They weren’t huge, but they were very nicely shaped and my nipples … I pinched them to primp them up. “Five minutes?” said Vince to what I assumed was room service. He turned and saw me naked from the waist up and laughed sweetly. His hands went instantly to my breasts. “Everywhere,” I said. “Put them everywhere.” He pulled back the bedspread, pulled back the sheets. I watched him take off his jacket. (He had long ago tucked his tie into his jacket pocket.) Now he took off his shirt. He was as I had imagined. I loved him. I didn’t ever want to lose him.

He took out his pack of cigarettes and, searching inside it, pulled out a joint. I had never seen him smoke pot before. He used that lustrous gold lighter to give it a glow and took a good hit on it. He winced as he held in the smoke and handed me the J. I hadn’t done grass in a while, but I’d do whatever he was doing. It was toasty and strong. Vince was a star. His grass would be really good, would it not?

The joint inspired the drug I’d taken to explode a couple more of its time-release capsules. I felt the surge again, but this time from the center of everything that was sexual in me, rushing up to cannonade within my brain.Pow-pow-pow. I needed Vince to start doing things to me, right away. Then I remembered all the mistakes I had been making lately, all the very good advice I had never followed. “Vince, what about our promise?”