Chapter 13 - Where the Truth Lies

I WALKED UP the Plaza’s main steps, at 768 Fifth Avenue. (Yes, it has a street number like any other building.) Above me the flags of whatever foreign dignitaries were staying in the hotel that day hung motionless in the heat between banners for Old Glory (Betsy Ross, 1775) and Old Money (the Plaza Hotel, 1909).

I never thought of the area just inside its Fifth Avenue entrance as a lobby. It wasn’t as if you could sit there and read a newspaper. It was simply the largest and most elegantly carpeted vestibule in midtown. Directly up one flight to my right were hair salons and a barbershop. I’d once been treated to a pedicure there as a gift from a rock singer whom I’d interviewed. Later he asked to see the results, and it wasn’t until I felt his tongue eeling its way between my toes that I realized he expected a gift in return.

On my left was the former entrance to El Morocco, recently closed while the management debated whether to make the nightclub into a discotheque or lease it out as a clothing store. Below me, I knew from past experience, were the mysterious yet graceful cloisters of an underground ballroom, floored in rosy marble and framed by creamy arches, as if it were a petite cathedral for society’s divine.

I crossed the threshold into the Palm Court, which I considered to be the Plaza’s true lobby, then passed the cloakroom for the Edwardian Room, now rechristened the Green Tulip. The management was hoping to somehow blur the line between nouveau design and nouvelle cuisine with a kind of hippie herbal attitude thrown in for good measure, as if when Oscar Wilde had walked about London with a lily in his hand, he had intended to smoke it. The overall effect was that of Bob Hope growing long sideburns to become relevant to the youth movement.

I reached the Plaza’s small reception area and a bank of manned elevators, one of whose exquisite cages opened to take on passengers. I stepped in.

“Twenty-three, please,” I murmured.

“Who do you want?” asked a mutty-looking attendant none too politely.

“Merwin.”

“Hold on.” Mutt the attendant took a step out of the elevator and signaled to a man in a blue suit standing near the check-in desk. “Bob? She wants to see Merwin.”

Bob stepped over. He could have been the long-term president of any junior chamber of commerce in the Midwest. He gave me the twice-over through steel-rimmed glasses and nodded to Mutt. “She’s okay.” The question in my mind was whether my being “okay” meant that Lanny had described me to the front desk and I fit the description, or whether it simply meant that Bob knew Lanny’s taste in women and I met those standards. Or maybe he just wanted to make certain I wasn’t too overt a hooker, meaning that I was properly attired and could pass for a schoolteacher as I circulated about the hotel. On the schoolteacher front, I had apparently been doing quite well since yesterday.

The twenty-third floor was swiftly reached. Mutt terminated the car’s ascent with a lackadaisical double-clutching of his hand throttle, and I felt that sick-making feeling as my stomach slightly overshot the elevator for a full second, then slid back down within me. It was a nauseating sensation achievable only by the ineptitude of human hands, one I’d not felt since automation had replaced elevator operators. Mutt pointed to the end of the corridor.

“End of the hall, the three doors after the uh—”

“Alcove?”

“Yeah. Center door is the living room. Tell him Mickey says, ‘Hi.’ ”

I walked down the hallway, waiting to hear the elevator cage close behind me, but it stayed open. I didn’t mean to flatter myself, but Mickey was no doubt checking out his rear view of me. I walked in as close to a military gait as I could muster in order to display minimal buttock-toggling for his viewing pleasure.

The hallway was not decorated all that beautifully, considering the hotel’s reputation. A major hotel chain had acquired the dowager Plaza and was more than pleased to call it their flagship, but beyond changing their corporate stationery to denote this, they didn’t want to do too much else about it. They’d splashed a coat of white paint everywhere, but it was that sloppy, thick slapping-on of paint that leaves the window jambs sealed and closets difficult to open.

The main door to Lanny’s suite had a doorbell to the right. I reached out to it, then hesitated, realizing I should collect my thoughts.

My name is Bonnie Trout. I am an elementary-school teacher, although we’re going to try not to talk about that anymore. A new school year will begin shortly. I’ve just come from a job interview at… well, if I had to name somewhere, Neuman and Newberry would do. Even if Lanny checked, he’d be asking about a girl named Bonnie Trout, wouldn’t he? My meeting could have been with any one of a hundred people there.

I also had to remember that I had not read what I’d read in Hillman’s offices. That I had no special insights into Lanny’s personality, that all I knew of him was what I’d encountered on the plane and at Beejay’s—my—apartment. That Vince Collins was a total stranger to me. That I wasn’t even a particularly big fan of the duo. And I knew nothing about the Girl in New Jersey, not who she was, nor what her connection was to the two men, nor anything at all that was mentioned in the second chapter that Lanny had sent to me.

But why had he sent it to me?

Then again, he hadn’t sent it to me. He’d sent it to a journalist named O’Connor who lives in Los Angeles. He’d had no idea that I was—

Did he know who I was?

I had made a convincing case for why it was not all that odd for a celebrity and a civilian, both flying first-class to New York, to end up sitting next to each other.

But would it be that hard for someone like Lanny Morris to hire some bright young fellow with a master’s degree in criminology and personal security to find out which flight I’d booked and to purchase the three seats next to mine? Was a flirtatious Lanny really interested in the seemingly susceptible Bonnie Trout, or was he more—

The door opened. I hadn’t rung the bell.

Reuben was standing there with a wastebasket in his hand. His golden skin seemed even more saturated in hue against the white houseboy jacket he was wearing, apparently oblivious to its “Hey boy, chop-chop” connotations. I couldn’t imagine Lanny forcing him to wear it. It must have been what Reuben felt most comfortable or appropriate in. It did have a stylish look to it, the line between a busboy’s outfit and a Nehru jacket at that time being thinner than Gandhi.

Reuben seemed as flustered as his Sea of Tranquility face would allow. “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you ring,” he said, instantly setting down the offending wastebasket. “Won’t you come in, please?” He really had the warmest voice. He gestured for me to enter, looking guilty that he’d been derelict in his duties.

“I didn’t ring,” I reassured him. “I was just composing my thoughts, as Mozart was wont to say.” My cajolery registered nil on him, as my cajoleries often register on people from Earth. “After all, it isn’t every afternoon you meet the Lanny Morris.” The regret I felt at this schoolgirl simpering was in the next moment replaced with a much greater regret as I realized that this comment could be overheard by the Lanny Morris, who was seated on a couch to my extreme right and engaged in an energetic phone conversation with someone.

“Okay, but if I do it, you got to have a Lanny’s Club Day next season,” he negotiated, giving me a lovely wave. “For all my club members.” Lanny’s Club was the dread tag phrase for preteen burn victims, who had become Lanny’s new charity since polio had been regrettably stopped in its tracks. The phrase “Lanny’s Club” still brings horror to my heart. Believe me, the last thing in life you ever wanted was to be a new inductee into Lanny’s Club, unless debriding dead skin from your own body was your idea of a hobby. “And I don’t mean you put my club members in the grandstand, either… field box. Yeah, you heard me. In the shade, under the press-level overhang. Okay, deal. I’ll be at the players’ entrance at three.” He hung up the phone and appraised me. “Hope you like baseball. The Mets need somebody famous to sing the national anthem this afternoon. Vikki Carr was going to do it, but she didn’t make her connection in Denver.”

“So you’re singing it?”

“Yeah, it’s no big deal. I do this for them, they come up with eighty seats the next time they play an expansion team. You like Chinese?”

“There’s a Chinese expansion team?”

“Food. Or did you have lunch already?”

I said I hadn’t. He turned to Reuben. “Look, we’ll never get down to Chinatown on four wheels fast enough—we’ll take the subway. Call Dav-El limos, we’ll meet that Mike Whatever-His-Name-Is down there.” Lanny turned quickly to me and asked, “You were okay with him, right?” as if such issues were subject to my approval.

As he was saying all this, he did something that was new to my range of experience. He put on a disguise, as if this were no different from putting on a blazer and a tie. He reached into a hatbox near the couch and adjusted a blond wig that gave him a coif not unlike that of the late Brian Jones from the Rolling Stones. To this he added a pair of granny glasses with smoked lenses. He took off his shirt in front of me (he had a much nicer physique and quite a bit less chest hair than I had imagined) and donned a silk one that bore a hand-painted western landscape, over which he wore a light-navy sports jacket with gold piping. A beaded choker around his neck completed what was, in that era, quite a smart outfit and which, in any other era, would have caused him to be laughed out of town.

We took the service elevator down to the Plaza’s kitchens, then went up a flight of stairs that Lanny knew about and out a service entrance onto Fifty-Eighth Street. Soon I was doing the best I could to keep up with Lanny, who kept his head bowed but chivalrously took my arm as we plunged down the steps of the Lexington Avenue line. Amazingly, Lanny had a platinum subway-token dispenser in his pocket (probably worth three or four hundred times the price of the five tokens it contained). He put a token into a turnstile and, ever the gentleman, gestured for me to pass through first. As I did, a Number 6 train rasped into and against the platform; its doors opened with the snorting sound of a Brahman bull.

There were no two seats alongside each other free, so we stood holding on to a pole by the doors, my hand and Lanny’s hand and the hand of a man who didn’t know us stacked as if we were all swearing to some solemn pact. Lanny obviously didn’t want to speak for fear of betraying his identity, so I occupied myself by reading the banner ads along the top of the car. Channel 11 was now showing reruns of Perry Mason every weeknight at eleven. Women were being warned in Spanish to not do some particular thing if they were pregnant. It was apparently assumed that women who spoke English already knew not to do this. Anbesol was recommended to relieve the pain of those jagged red lightning bolts that so often float in the air outside your jaw whenever you look pained. Alongside that, it was fervently suggested that we not move between the cars while the train was in motion and that we not spit on the train or platform. I had, of course, just been about to spit, but somehow managed to squelch the impulse.

By now the Canal Street station had rolled into place outside our subway car. We got off the train and headed up the stairs.

These were the days before Chinatown became overrun with Asians. To be sure, there were lots of quaint Chinese men and women from Central Casting neatly tucked away behind glass-topped counters by the cash registers of Chinese restaurants, fronted by a bowl of after-dinner mints and a juice glass full of loose toothpicks, or in little Chinese shops selling curiosities like Chinese daily newspapers or Chinese pin-up calendars with pretty, flat-bottomed models in pastel bikinis.

But it was still largely a place for Occidentals to eat dirt-cheap Chinese food served by hurried, irritated waiters; like the country of Jamaica, the illusion was that the neighborhood existed primarily for the giddy amusement of tourists. “Oh look, a Chinese barber shop!” you’d hear. The pagoda roof on an outdoor payphone was adorable.

Lanny said his first sentence to me since we’d boarded the subway. “You ever had Sesh-wan cuisine?”

I thought he had sneezed. “What?” I asked.

“Sesh-wan. Most amazing food you’ll ever have.” I had no idea what he was talking about, but he was clearly pleased that he did. “It’s a place in China.”

“Oh. As in the Brecht play. The Good Woman of Sze-chu-an.” I said the word in three syllables, the way I’d been taught by the same English professor who’d personally introduced me to the word frenulum.

Lanny frowned. “I thought Brecht was German or something.”

“A good German,” I advised. We turned a corner into Doyers Street, which curved beyond our sight line.

“My favorite street in Manhattan,” he commented. “You know why? It looks like a movie set.” It did, but I remarked that, other than the Chinese neon signs and the shop windows featuring gnarled medicinal roots and gnarled roasted pork carcasses, I couldn’t tell just why.

He explained for my edification: “Every backlot wide shot in every Hollywood movie that’s set in New York shows either a T-shaped intersection or a curved street. That’s because if you showed a real intersection, you’d have to show block after city block going back to infinity. So when I grew up, to me the real Manhattan—meaning the one in the movies—was full of T-shaped streets where gangsters’ cars come screeching around the corner… or curved streets where some guy standing by a lamppost casts a long, arcing shadow across the wet pavement.”

He trotted up three steps into an unpromising canteen named Szechuan Garden. Its decor was a cross between that of my high school cafeteria and a travel agency for slow boats to Mandalay.

Lanny pulled off his wig and greeted the obvious owner, who had been standing by a counter in a wash-and-wear short-sleeved shirt and rumpled slacks, picking his teeth. “Oh, Missah Morris!” the restaurateur cried with an accent, jargon, and elated demeanor I fully suspected to be a guise he’d perfected for the uptown crowd. “Me so happy see you. Got picture you up on wall, see? That make it ‘Great Wall’!” It was surely not the first time he had said this. He indicated an eight-by-ten glossy of Lanny over the register, autographed, “Thanks, Lee, for a HOT time in Chinatown!” Lanny nodded, introduced me, and murmured a food order to Lee, who showed us to a large table toward the back of the room and scurried off to the kitchen.

Lanny explained that he needed to save his voice a little for “The Star-Spangled Banner” (which he described as the worst waltz ever written) and apologized in advance for making me do most of the talking. Of course, I was eager to talk about anything under the sun as long as it wasn’t about myself, since I was already completely compromised on that topic. This led us into a strangely abstract and esoteric monologue on my part, punctuated now and then by Lanny’s “Oh really?” New lovers talk only about themselves. (This is one of the great appeals of a new love.) But no one listening to our conversation would have mistaken us for lovers, nor should they have.

I’d heard that the reason for the cooking style of Chinese food, the ingredients diced small in advance to cook in a flash over high heat spread across the width of a wok, was the lack of firewood in China. You had to make the most of the heat while you had it. The verity of this (as well as Lanny’s priority as a customer) was demonstrated by the fact that within minutes, our dishes were being brought to our table, presented not in the usual silver tureens with silver tops but simply on open oval plates. And the dishes contained something I had never before seen in a Chinese entrée: the color red. Not the usual pale gray-green-white-brown palette of every Cantonese American restaurant’s dishes (the principal ingredients of which were always cornstarch and bamboo shoots with a little julienned meat sprinkled on top) but livid, troubling colors. Red bell peppers, strange sienna husks I could not identify, blood-orange peel alongside the shrapnel of corrugated cabbage—and peanuts, for God’s sake!

In the midst of all this, I found myself saying three words hitherto unspoken by me in a Chinese restaurant: “I smell lamb.”

Lanny nodded. “That’s lamb in tea sauce, this is twice-cooked pork with shredded pickled cabbage, and this, my friend, is kung-pao chicken.” He looked at me blissfully. “I really envy you. You’re about to meet a whole bunch of flavors you’ve never tasted before.”

The next half hour was a truly hallucinogenic experience. Flavors cascaded and tumbled around my mouth like a troupe of Chinese acrobats and fire jugglers performing a noisy circus there. Salt and tang and sharp and deep—I found myself forking white rice into my mouth directly from the individual bowl provided, using it like a sorbet between courses in a swank restaurant, restoring my tongue to a semblance of neutrality between bites, rather than making the rice into a bland flatbed for one’s entrées, as was the American custom.

“Well?” asked Lanny with a grin. We’d not talked much once the food was served, other than my fevered oohs and aahs. I felt as if he’d brought me to an orgy dedicated solely to my pleasure. He intently studied the rapturous expressions on my face. It was sexual, a bit perverse, and thoroughly enjoyable.

These men, I thought. And by “these men,” I meant Lanny and Vince. I wondered what it would be like to spend time with either in a normal place. Or would a normal place instantly be made abnormal simply by their presence?

Lee approached the table with a long plate upon which lay a nearly two-pound lobster, its most abundant locations of meat skillfully plumed up and blooming from within its cracked and unfolded shell, drowned in a livid red sauce that made the carapace of the lobster modestly rosy by comparison. The sauce was flecked throughout with tons of diced scallion.

Lee announced, “I make my special lobster in chile sauce with tangerine peel for you and your lovely lady friend, Missah Morris.”

To my surprise, I heard Lanny snap: “You shouldn’t have done that, Lee. I don’t eat lobster. I’m a Jew.”

Lee looked bewildered. “But… you eat pork.” He gestured to the shredded-cabbage dish Lanny had already ladled onto his own plate.

“I’m a New York Jew, we get dispensation from Milton Berle. I’m allowed spareribs and meatball-parm wedges, but I don’t eat shrimp or lobster. They’re roaches on plutonium, Lee, they’re disgusting. I’ll pay for the dish, but take it away.”

Lee shrugged. “If you’re offended, there’s no way I’d consider charging you for it, Lanny,” he said in absolutely unbroken English, affirming my suspicion that his caricatured delivery was for those who expected it, commensurate with flirtatious waiters at Italian restaurants or funeral directors who never crack a smile. He carried away the dish, slighted.

Lanny looked back at me with a wisp of contrition in his face. “Sorry. Forgot to ask—maybe you love lobster.”

“Well, not after the analogy to roaches I don’t,” I said with what I hoped was a wry smile.

“Sorry,” he said again.

Today I’d been waiting for the slightest sign of vulnerability in Lanny, and this was perhaps as close as I might get. “I feel sorry for you, actually. If you complain to the manager of a restaurant, you’re not some bastard at table five. You’re Lanny Morris. You have no cloak of anonymity. If you buy rubbers at a drugstore, the man behind the counter will spend the rest of his life talking about how he once sold Lanny Morris rubbers. I’ve read lots of books about the lives of famous people, but what would be truly interesting would be a book on what it’s like to forever relinquish all anonymity. The way you’ve done.” I placed some food in my mouth and intentionally spoke with my mouth full to make myself sound even more casual. “You ever think about writing a book?”

Lanny drank some tea. “When I’m dead.”

I ventured that this sounded moderately challenging, and he explained, “No, I mean, if I ever wrote the book I’d like to write, it would have to be published after I died. When I wouldn’t care what anybody thought about me. Man, that would be something. To write a book where I just… told the truth. Not put a nice face on everything.” He signaled to Lee for a fresh pot of tea. “Can you imagine? Like, I’ve met four presidents and the truth is, each one seemed to me totally out of it. As if they hardly knew what was going on. Like meeting the principal of a high school where the kids are smoking hash and getting knocked up, and he’s in a blue suit talking about young minds. Even JFK left me unimpressed. Felt like I was with the boss’s son.”

“But you don’t think you could say that.”

“Not if I was planning to live in this country. I don’t think Edith Piaf was such a great singer. I’d get killed for saying that. Or that Marilyn Monroe didn’t act any better after she got with Lee Strasberg than before. Oh God, just saying what I really felt. That would be something. Having to be a nice guy is the toughest job in the world when you’re not.”

“You don’t think you’re a nice guy?”

“You think you’re a nice girl?” he parried with the inflection of a Jewish mother. I bit down upon what I thought was a piece of lamb crackling and was immediately assaulted by hot spears of pain in my mouth, not unlike the radiating red lightning bolts from the Anbesol ad in the subway. I gasped and reached for a tumbler of water.

“Oh, no, you don’t eat those, honey,” he admonished. “Those are dried chile peppers.” My eyes streamed and my nose began to run as if I’d been servicing a proportionately endowed basketball star. “Here, just eat more of the rice, and—” He summoned Lee with a wave of his hand. “Club soda, quick.” (It had been discovered in recent times that all things were solved by club soda: stains, damage to silk, gangrene… “Could you bring me some club soda, please?”) Lee returned with a glass of sparkling water, which I downed. The cold and carbonation bit into the burn in a helpful way.

“I should have warned you,” Lanny apologized, pouring tea for us very much in the manner of a nice guy. “You know why Chinese teacups have no handles? Because the Chinese are smarter than we are. If the cup is too hot to hold with your fingers, then the tea is too hot to drink. But what do we do? We put a handle on the teacup, so we can’t tell how hot the tea is. That way we get to pour boiling hot tea right into our mouths, cauterizing our tongues.”

As my mouth still burned from the chile peppers to which he had so very nicely introduced me, I entertained the thought that perhaps men like Lanny and Vince were cups with handles, who would nicely stroll you down unreal streets and feed you full of dreamy food until you allowed yourself to be nicely manhandled by them and suddenly felt the surge of their boiling brew scalding your mouth. But I had a rule about going three deep on any metaphor and promptly exited the thought as we were brought orange segments for dessert, instead of the standard lump of melting ice cream in a small silver bowl. Two fortune cookies were nestled among the orange slices and Lanny invited me to pick one, which I did. Lanny took the other and cracked it open. I asked him what his fortune said. “Well, it’s supposed to be a joke, but…”

He pushed it across the tablecloth to me. Its red ink was no doubt intended to read “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you diet.” But it had been printed off center to the right and the t in diet was missing.

Lanny smiled. “What about yours?”

I cracked mine open and tried to locate the slip of paper that revealed my fate, but disconcertingly, I discovered that the cookie was empty.