Where the Truth Lies (11 page)

“This it?” Lanny asked.

“You tell me,” I moued.

He looked at the door. “4G. So it must be this way?”

He pointed in the other direction. I tried to look like I was playing the cutest little game, but actually I felt like a complete imbecile. He located a door at the far end of the hall. “4D,” he said. “Last stop. Now let me just see you get in the door okay and I’ll leave you alone till tomorrow.” He looked at his watch and corrected himself. “Or actually, later today.”

I saw that there were two locks on the door. I pulled out the keys I’d been fiddling with since we’d walked into the building. “This could take some time. I never get which key goes in which lock the first time.” God, I was depicting myself as a total ditz here. One key was new and brass-colored and I fitted it into the upper lock of the door, which was new and brassy as well. The key turned and I felt the lock give. Hosanna. I tried a duller key in the much older lock below it, and the door opened. Well done, O’Connor.

“Well, thank you so much for everything.” I smiled, stepping into the doorway. It was totally dark in the room. I reached for a light switch and didn’t find one. I made the mistake of reaching for it on the other side of the door and found nothing there. I was afraid I had snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by looking like I didn’t know where my own light switch was—I didn’t—so I did the obvious thing, which was to kiss him.

I probably would have kissed him anyway. He took my kiss as if it were the most natural thing—maybe it was—and reciprocated very nicely, I want to tell you. It was a good kiss as these things go, something of which we could both be justifiably proud.

In this particular epoch of American culture, it would have been the expected thing for us to now have sex.

He set down my garment bag in the still-dark apartment and said, as if giving instructions to himself: “Okay, I’m going to leave now because I have Reuben and Irv sitting in the limo downstairs, and I also really have to get some sleep for theToday show or I’ll look old enough to be your grandfather when they get me on camera. So I’m going to be well behaved now. But I want you to know that I have never hated Barbara Walters until this particular moment … and you should definitely not feel so safe with me again.” Barbara Walters was cohosting theToday show at that time, and I took this statement to be a compliment.

“Do you need my number?” I asked.

“Reuben has it, remember? He’s my human Rolodex, I’m terrible with numbers. If you want to call me at the Plaza—not tonight but anytime thereafter, I’m putting a ‘Do not disturb’ on my phone until fiveA .M.—you call and ask for ‘Lenny Merwin’ and they’ll put you through to me. Or you might get Reuben, but you can leave a message with him. He likes you.”

How Lanny knew Reuben liked me I wouldn’t know, but it was nice to hear. I repeated the name he had told me. “Lenny Merwin.”

“Right. If you forget, it’s my character’s name in my first movie with Vince.”

“Smithereens,”I said reflexively and foolishly.

“Yeah.” He looked at me. “Hey, you’re a bigger fan than you let on.” His expression was almost one of disappointment.

“I’m afraid I’ve never seen it,” I lied. “One of the people on the airplane mentioned seeing it when he was a kid. The name stuck in my head.”

Lanny looked relieved. “Oh. I guess I didn’t hear that. You get numb after a while. Well. I’ll call you tomor—” He looked at his watch again. “I’ll call you later. Lovely to meet you, Bonnie.” He hurried down the hall, stepped into the elevator, and was gone.

I fumbled around, finding that the long-lost light switch was on the other side of a portal leading to what had once surely been a decent-sized storage closet and now was an indecently minuscule kitchen. That innovation only a New York landlord could have envisioned, the combination refrigerator-stove, took up most of the space. I moved past the kitchen-bath experience and into the living quarters, if you could call this living. Some prints of flowers, some photos of someone else’s babies, and the scent of potpourri that managed to mask the dark odor of roach spray. Across half the room at a height of not quite six feet was a loft bed, a very full-sized one accessed by a ladder. It looked like an inviting expanse, but sitting up in bed would have to be negotiated very diplomatically with the ceiling. The underside of the bed also served as a ceiling for the area below it, where the occupant had an old writing desk, a gooseneck lamp, and what I sought more than anything else: a phone.

I picked up the Princess phone, which instantly lit (its best feature). Here in the darkness “under the arches” of the platform bed, its soft light helped me find the switch to the gooseneck lamp, and at last I could see a bit better around me.

I sat down in a beanbag chair against the wall opposite the desk and dialed the operator, who asked how she might direct my call. I told her I wanted to make a collect call to Los Angeles, and when asked, I gave the operator my own West Coast number. I heard a few rings on the line through the steady surf-noise of a transcontinental call. I knew those rings were sounding now on my own telephone. I imagined it purring in my somewhat overplush bedroom, filled with art nouveau prints and myriad decadent little touches, multicolored miniature perfume bottles, unusual drapery, perfect peacock feathers, leaded amber glass hanging in front of the window with an uninteresting view of the pool, a fountain gurgling just outside my kitchen window, and everywhere the lightest scent of Jungle Gardenia. Despite how pleasantly most of the day had gone, from this grim little Manhattan garret I envied the person who would be answeringthat phone in L.A.My phone.

On the fifth ring, Beejay, my roommate from college, picked up the receiver of my phone, told the operator she’d accept my call, and said hello.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m in.”

We’d remained friends after we left college and had always tried to see each other whenever I came back to New York. After I’d learned that Neuman and Newberry wanted to meet with me, I’d immediately called her to make plans. To our mutual chagrin, Beejay told me she’d just that afternoon taken advantage of a price war between American and TWA and bought herself a round-trip ticket to Los Angeles, good for the next twenty-one days, excluding Fridays and Sundays. That was when I suggested we swap apartments for a week, which would give her free use of my place in Studio City (which she had sort of planned to have anyway) while I would use her place in Fun City, which would give me Neuman and Newberry’s sizable, Manhattan-calculated per diem to spend on something other than a matchbox-sized hotel room whose nightly cost was equal to the price of a Dunhill lighter.

She had flown into L.A. just the day before. I’d shown her how to open the valve to the gas fire under my ceramic logs and how to open the gas tank of my convertible. We’d exchanged keys and had dinner at Yamashiro, a restaurant some 250 feet above Hollywood Boulevard. It was a replica of a Kyoto castle of the same name and served not only as a restaurant but as a de facto Hollywood standing set, frequently used for TV and movies and as close to a Japanese fortress as you were likely to find within three miles of the Burbank Studios.

We had the most wonderful time at dinner, and I picked up the tab. I wasn’t about to let Beejay pay any part of her first night out in Los Angeles. I knew what a big expenditure the discount plane ticket had been and how little her job paid, probably little more then sixteen to twenty thousand a year. I called her Beejay, because her initials were B.J. and she hated her full name, which was Bonnie Jean Trout. She was a public-school teacher at P.S. 29 on Orchard Street. Second grade.

TEN

Beejay was not all that entranced with me when I explained what had happened. She pointed out that when she’d offered to trade apartments with me for a week, she hadn’t actually intended to throw in her birthright as a loss leader.

“I mean, what was on your mind, kiddo?” she asked in what had become a native New York accent—tragic, because she had grown up in Savannah, Georgia, among some of the world’s most graciously spoken people. “Why the hell didn’t you just make up a name?”

I tried my best to give her a rational reason. “I always try to work as much truth into a lie as I can. The thing a journalist learns early on is that the truth propagates a million details. Say a bank is robbed and the police ask me where I was at the time it happened. I say I was standing outside the A & P. Now, if Ireally was there, I saw lots of silly inconsequential things that you could never invent. The chicken on top of a Chicken Delight van parked outside was missing its head. Its driver wore a shirt with a mug of beer on it that readVIRGINIA IS FOR LIVERS . Four kids on a bus from Albertus Magnus High School mooned a cop. This is all stuff you could corroborate that you would never invent. But if you’re lying, when you say you were outside the A & P, then that’s all you’ve got. This afternoon, I was looking at a five-hour flight with Lanny Morris. If I had made up who I was, I’d have had to improvise a life story that wasn’t attached to anything on earth—I couldn’t have supported that. On the other hand,you’re real, Beejay, your story comes equipped with all those little details, and I know a lot of them. So suddenly I could tell him where I work, where I live, where I was born, my father’s name … instead of having to invent each fact question by question and, worse, keep track of it all.”

I thought my explanation was reasoned and understandable.

Beejay replied casually, “I found a bag of Campfire marshmallows in your cupboard and I’m roasting them over the gas jets in your fireplace. They seem to be making quite a mess, you’re going to have some cleanup job when you get back here. Tell me, how long do you plan to keep this scam going?”

I told her that this depended a lot on Lanny. Perhaps I’d never hear from him again. But if I did, I asked for her permission to—well, I was going to say “preserve the illusion” or “maintain the charade,” but I suppose “continue to lie” was what I really meant. I said I’d promise to only be “Bonnie Trout” for a little while longer and only within his immediate circle.

“Well, for crying out loud, I hope so,” she said. “So did you kiss him?”

I told her I did, and if a cringe is something you can hear over the phone, I heard her cringe. “Listen, kiddo: yuck. Lanny Morris is such a weasel-faced middle-aged wanker.” I told her Lanny was very far from that. “Yeah yeah yeah, isn’t it wonderful that out of all the world, Cupid singled out you and a considerably older, wealthy, internationally known grating entertainer. I guess true love conquers all. Oh, listen, you got a package. Not the post office. Messenger service. I signed your name.”

“Aha! Thereby impersonating me, in my apartment.”

“Yeah yeah yeah, the delivery guy had a clipboard with a space above your name so I signed it that way or else I got the feeling he wouldn’t have left it.”

I was curious about the package and asked what the return address on it was. She said there was none. I asked her to open it. She did. I heard a rustling, tearing sound. “It’s a manuscript. About fifty pages long. Entitled ‘Excerpt from the Memoirs of Lanny Morris.’ Hey, he’s writing you love letters already.”

I reminded Beejay that when the manuscript had been sent, I hadn’t even met Lanny. I didn’t see any reason at this point to tell her about the previous manuscript I’d seen at Hillman’s office. I asked if the package included a cover letter from anyone—Lanny, John Hillman, Warren Richter …

“Nothing. Just these pages, typed on an IBM, if I’m any judge and I am.”

I wanted desperately to see those pages now. But there was no way to get printed matter across the country in an instant or even overnight. There were telex machines, but these were only good for telegram-length messages. There was first-class airmail but that would be two, maybe three days at best and I was dying to know what was in those pages before I next saw him, if that was to happen. “Beejay. You’re going to hate me. I need you to read me that manuscript. Now. My dime, remember?”

It was only ten-thirty her time. I tried to think of the most persuasive words I could use. “Please? I’ll give you half my sandwich.”

There was silence on her end of the phone.

I added, “You don’t actually have to read everything, just skim it and let me hear whatever looks significant.”

I heard her sigh. Then: “I have to get some water.”

“There’s a water cooler with four gallons of Arrowhead spring water sitting in the kitchen.”

“Okay. And I have to pee.”

“Fine, fine, I’ll wait.”

I heard her scurry off. I went to get some New York tap water for myself from the kitchen. It was excellent if, like rice, water is healthier when it’s brown.

“Okay, ready?” she asked, as I could hear her rustling into position within the down-filled comforter and the loving folds of the silky sheets on my lovely bed. “Just the highlights, okay?”

“More than okay,” I said, trying to find some part of her beanbag chair that didn’t contain beans.

The manuscript did not seem to pick up directly where the chapter I’d already read left off. A few days later, I would have the actual manuscript in hand, and that is what I will share with you here. It would almost certainly have been more helpful for me if I’d been able to read it in full the first time, rather than hear Lanny excerpted and paraphrased by Beejay. I will tell you in advance that in either format, Lanny’s voice once again seemed nothing like the voice of the man I’d met that day, nor could I fathom why these words were being shared with me. But these were easily the least of the puzzles I faced.

ELEVEN

Let me explain to you here why two guys doing as good as we were doing at this point would find ourselves working in the state of New Jersey.

I’m old enough that I can remember trolleys. Tin cracker boxes on tin wheels heading down the middle of the street like they owned the place, which you found out they did if you ever stopped to tie your sneakers in front of one like poor Anthony Tedesco. In my grandmother’s time, there were so many of them rolling around that they called the local baseball team the Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers, although by the time I was a kid the team had dropped the wordTrolley. By the time I was a teenager the city had decided to drop the trolleys as well.