Chapter 19 - Where the Truth Lies

SATURDAY STARTED LAZILY, much to my liking. It was great not to think for a while. I dropped off my edited pages at Cynthia Lehman’s place, so they could be retyped and mailed to the East Coast. I took some laundry to a place on Ventura Boulevard called the Soapermarket. I didn’t even leave once the washer started, but watched Dick Clark’s American Bandstand on a black-and-white set mounted on a shelf above the Coke machine. That’s how mindless I intended my afternoon to be. I’d interviewed Dick once in conjunction with a piece I was doing about the Philadelphia recording scene and had asked him the secret of his youthfulness. He said that he took an aspirin every day. He told me this in the course of the ninety minutes he spent in a barber chair while an ABC makeup artist plied her craft with his face.

After that, I went to do some food shopping. I never make a list. I just wait until I’m absolutely famished, go to the Safeway, and walk up and down absolutely every aisle. This way my ravenous hunger informs me what I might want to eat, if not today then certainly someday.

I wheeled up aisle two, very interested in their selection of herbed cheese spreads with French-sounding names. As I leaned into the open, refrigerated shelf to better examine garlic-chive and honey-jalapeño, my breath formed a condensed cloud in the chill, through which I was startled to discern the dignified figure of Reuben, valet for Lanny Morris.

He didn’t see me. He was in the produce section, examining tomatoes with a calm, efficient intensity. He rejected three before finding one that met his criteria. He moved along to pass judgment on red and green peppers in the same knowing way. Unlike me, he had a list, which he consulted like a methodical attorney citing legal precedents.

I reflexively pushed my cart away from him and made a sharp turn around the end of the aisle, swerving neatly into paper products and pet supplies.

I collected my thoughts. It wasn’t particularly odd that I’d crossed his path. I knew better than anyone that Reuben and his boss had left the East Coast. The particular Safeway I liked was almost as convenient to Lanny’s home address in Beverly Glen as it was to mine in Studio City. And certainly Lanny couldn’t venture into any supermarket in America without unintentionally inciting the public to riot, so Reuben clearly was entrusted with the household food shopping.

What would be the consequences of Reuben spotting me? Would he even recognize me—had I made that much of an impression? Or did Lanny have a revolving door/whore policy that made me a case of “if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all”? Maybe Reuben would look at me and draw a complete blank. It was this last part that made me want to confront him. How he reacted to me might tell me something about how I’d been appraised (and was now regarded) by both servant and master. Business, logic, diplomacy all flew right out the window—yup, there they go, farewell! I was seeing red, literally, for a red corona had framed my vision as I again thought of how I’d been fucked and shucked.

I tailed him all over the store. “Follow that cart” was my modus operandi, childishly shadowing him past preserves and canned soups, ducking up an alleyway of salad dressings and behind a display of Kellogg’s Sugar Smacks. One time he started back in my direction and I ducked my head into an open coffin freezer bin and extracted a marked-for-clearance Swanson Chicken Chow Mein TV Dinner. Tossing it into my rapidly filling cart, I then nosed my way slowly around a corner and saw him enter checkout lane number five. I smoothly glided into place behind him, cutting off a little old lady. She started to protest, but I glared at her with such intensity that she switched to an adjacent checkout.

Reuben finished placing his Safeway selections on the conveyor belt and moved the wooden divider bar to the end of his purchases. I started to casually place the contents of my cart behind his, dropping my Swanson Chicken Chow Mein TV Dinner on Reuben’s side of the divider. Then I sat back on my haunches and allowed the profound implications of my gambit to play themselves out. Reuben did an almost cartoonish double take as he saw the package in the checkout lady’s hands. My safe guess was that Lanny Morris did not eat many frozen TV dinners, and if he did, I doubted they’d be chicken chow mein.

“Excuse me,” demurred Reuben to the checkout lady. “I don’t think that’s mine.”

I dedicated myself to making a neat row of flatbread boxes on the black conveyor belt.

“Miss?” the checkout lady called to me. I pretended there were lots of other misses she might be talking to and continued to arrange herbed cheese spreads on my portion of the belt.

“Miss?” she repeated. I finally looked up. “Is this yours?” she asked, holding up the Swanson dinner. She wore a name tag that told me she was Lois.

“Oh yes, thanks,” I said, giving Reuben one snapshot of my face and then going back to the process of unloading my cart. There would be time for me to “recognize” him if I had to. First I would see if he recognized me.

Reuben was busy locating a BankAmericard in his wallet and handed it to Lois, who sighed at this rare mode of payment. “Really?” she asked. “You don’t have it in cash?”

“I’m sorry. I’m purchasing the food for someone else,” said Reuben. “Here is my identification, if you need it.” He offered his driver’s license.

Lois left the register. “I don’t have the thing. Hold on.” She went off to a counter marked CUSTOMER SERVICE to fetch the swiping device and a triplicate carbon-copy form, giving Reuben a dirty look in the process.

Reuben turned away from Lois’ glare and found himself looking at me again. He smiled as if to apologize, and then recognition dawned over his golden face. He ventured, “Excuse me… aren’t you Miss Trout? We met on the plane to New York.”

I allowed slow realization to dawn upon me, but I couldn’t overplay my surprise too much. “Reuben!” I said. “Hello. Yes, my gosh, what a surprise. Who would have thought I’d see you so soon after the Plaza…”

I paused, keeping my face in neutral while keeping my eyes on his. I wanted to see what he knew of how I’d been dealt with. God love him. He blushed, turning an autumnal orange. “Oh, I’m so deeply sorry, Miss Trout. The way you were treated…” He couldn’t finish the sentence, but his shame was eloquent. It seemed as if he felt that, like a dedicated servant from a different time and place, he must bear or share responsibility for his master’s behavior.

I murmured in a hurt tone that was not a distortion of how I really felt, “Well, yes, I do think something should have been said to me. At least—and I mean at the very least—a note, a call.”

Reuben nodded painfully. “Of course.”

“I realize he’s a big star and that big stars can rewrite the rules of nature—”

“No, you don’t understand,” he interrupted. “There’s a saying: ‘No man is a hero to his valet.’ I’m valet to Lanny Morris.”

Lois arrived with the credit-card device and angrily jammed Reuben’s card and the carbon-copy form into it. After signing with his own pen rather than the one proffered, Reuben waited a respectful few feet from the checkout while I paid for my groceries. He then offered to help load my bags into my trunk. We walked our carts out into the cheerlessly sunny afternoon and stopped at my inexcusable car. Orange and yellow pennants were tied to the light posts in celebration of nothing, unflappable in the still heat. As I opened the loathsome trunk of my leprous convertible, he asked what I was doing in Los Angeles. I said I’d been looking into the possibility of a new job, perhaps editorial work, and that I’d had a few signs of interest from a company in the Los Angeles area. I was staying with a friend for a few days. I was curious to see if he would ask me where I could be reached. It would indicate that I might have at least achieved the status of “serviceable lay” in Lanny Morris’ Book of Books. (Look at me, look at what I’m saying!)

He did ask for my local contact information, and I’m horrified to admit I was relieved by this, but I told him I didn’t want Lanny to contact me again.

He pushed his shopping cart forward and back a few inches on the hot asphalt as if rocking a baby in a pram. He was clearly uneasy to be speaking so openly about Lanny, but to his credit, personal honor won out over professional duty. “Miss Trout, telling you this—it’s quite a breach of my position, which is one of trust, but I would like you to understand. I’m getting older; pretty soon I will retire, if he’ll ever let me. I look forward to that. I have on the one hand great loyalty to Mr. Morris. He has shown generosity to myself and to my family whenever we have needed his help. I am very grateful. He has done wonderful things for many people, including such a simple but important thing as to make them laugh. I have been privileged to be in his employ.”

I said I understood. This was clearly difficult for him. He continued, “But I have certain principles. Some of us in the Philippines descend from Spanish nobility, and though the fortunes of our families may have declined, we still have strong feelings about how women are to be treated and respected. It has been the most difficult part of my work over the years to accept his pattern of behavior with women. And I’d like to believe that our paths crossed at this store not without some greater intervention.”

I didn’t bother to explain that our paths had crossed today at this store primarily because I’d been stalking him up, down, and all around the condiments aisle for the last quarter hour.

He continued, “I want you to know that the way Mr. Morris behaved had nothing to do with you personally. Not with anything you are, did, said. The truth is, he does this with all the women he meets. This is his way. He can be very attentive and genteel, but once he has a woman… I think it’s almost a sickness.” He touched my arm. “When he left you that morning, you may have felt bad for a moment. Perhaps even for days after that. But I am telling you, Miss Trout, to have him out of your life… it is the best thing that could ever have happened to you. I understand you may have felt your life was shamed, but it was not. It was saved.”

He wheeled his cart away. I watched him load his groceries into a ten-year-old beige Ford Falcon; it was as spotless as the day it had been purchased. Giving me a gentle wave of goodbye, he drove away.

I looked at my ridiculous selection of groceries, each item chosen only to track Reuben around the store, and decided to return to the Safeway to see if I could get my money back.