Chapter 14 - Where the Truth Lies

WE FOUND OURSELVES SCURRYING like laboratory mice through a maze of corridors that had been decorated by someone with a flair for submarines. We hung a left turn and raced up a concrete incline that held the promise of a clear blue sky at its end, until suddenly, as if in an agoraphobic’s worst nightmare, we burst out of the square tunnel onto a huge, flat lawn flanked by two walls of humanity, each wall composed of some twenty-five thousand faces. An usher in an orange sports jacket, cloud-white shirt, and sky-blue pants pointed us to our immediate right, where various New York Mets were lounging in their dugout. We sought momentary shelter there.

“Hey, Lanny!” cried a mustachioed fellow whom I recognized from hot-shaving-lather commercials. The rest of the Mets cascaded their greetings. One would have thought from their familiarity that Lanny did this on a regular basis, but I later learned he had never met any of the team before.

A stentorian voice rang out from all four corners of the globe, reading copy that had no doubt been supplied by Lanny’s P.R. agent.

“Ladies and gentlemen… if you will kindly direct your attention to the playing field… to sing our national anthem… please welcome one of the world’s most beloved comedians, film actors, and vocal artists… performing on behalf of his own charity, ‘Lanny’s Club.’… Would you give a magnificent New York Mets welcome to New York’s favorite native son… Mr. Lanny Morris!”

Lanny winked at me and strolled jauntily toward a microphone that had been placed halfway between home plate and the pitching mound. He gave a manly wave to the crowd, more like a ballplayer’s self-assured salute than a politician’s frantic acknowledgment. He stood at the mike and waited confidently for their silence. The crowd quieted down as much as a crowd can. I was close enough to him that I could hear his unamplified voice sing: “Oh, say can you see…”

I was alarmed to hear, or rather not hear, that the P.A. system wasn’t working. It may have been something as simple as the mike not being switched on. I was curious how a veteran like Lanny would handle such an awkward moment. Would he stop and wait for the mike to be fixed? Continue without amplification out of patriotic deference to the anthem itself? But after the half second it took me to ponder the above, Lanny’s amplified voice bombarded me from speakers all around the stadium: “Oh, say can you see…” I’d never realized how long the inherent delay in public-address systems was and suddenly found myself far more sympathetic to sporting-event vocalists who got themselves radically out of sync with marching bands, so that the band was playing “And the rockets’ red glare” somewhere around the time the vocalist reached “And the home of the brave!”

It was strange to stand there and watch Lanny’s lips mouthing words in advance of his own voice, which was blaring live over the stadium’s P.A., as if he were the leading man of a Godzilla movie. As he reached the last stanza, a roar began to build within the crowd, not so much in response to Lanny’s rendition (which was a surprisingly smooth-voiced interpretation, neither operatic nor croony) but because our national anthem was almost over and our national pastime was about to begin.

But in this instance there was an added catalytic force. A man in his early thirties with oily brown hair and an oily brown raincoat had vaulted over the right-field wall and onto the playing field. He quickly discarded his coat, beneath which he was stark naked. Lately, this had become a thing. Lanny was the last person in the stadium who could see what was happening, and as the noise of the spectators increased, he started to extend his arms to receive the seeming adulation of the crowd. The streaker dashed in front of the microphone and yelled into it, “Nixon is a warmonger! Kissinger is being used as a—” Lanny grabbed the microphone away from the streaker and the stadium was assaulted by the massively amplified sound of that grab, a veritable cannonade favoring the frequencies below 150 cycles. Someone in the press box had enough wit about them to close down the mike as Lanny began to wrestle for control of it. Lanny suddenly realized that he was struggling with a naked man, whose puny physique and not very awesome genitalia were evoking little of the Greco-Roman spirit. Wisely, he trotted away from the man, laughing and shaking his head to the crowd as if to position himself above this sorry spectacle, as the Mets players raced out of the dugout and began to punch and kick their naked victim. The Shea Stadium security force eventually got the players to calm down; the man’s raincoat was fetched from right field, and he was ushered to the locker room to a frightening wave of catcalls, most of which linked the streaker to Communists, peace advocates, civil rights activists, and people who copulated with their matriarch.

“You believe that bastard?” Lanny said to me after the game, when he could talk without being overheard. We were walking back to the limousine, which was parked in the fenced-in lot reserved for the players. “All I need is for one person in that crowd to have taken a decent snapshot of me wrestling with that guy and they’ll sell it to the tabloids. ‘That ugly rumor about Lanny Morris being caught in a clinch with a naked man is in the right ballpark—and we have the pictures to prove it!’”

“No one on earth is going to believe anything like that,” I assured him, as I spotted Michael Dougherty standing by his limousine. He was getting an autograph from Tug McGraw, who didn’t look too pleased about it.

“Oh, I’m not worried about people believing that. It’s just that there’s a zoning regulation in show business that you can publicly look stupid three times, and after that, guess what, people figure you’re stupid.”

I had expected us to get onto the same ugly highway that had led us from JFK to Manhattan the previous evening. But only a minute or two after we stole our way out of Shea Stadium, the limousine began ambling through some pleasant residential streets, small houses each with a tree on the front lawn. Then Michael Dougherty cut a sharp turn and we were back on another access road with large cracks in its pale, dirty concrete. We veered onto what looked like some sort of abandoned boulevard and now we were passing by the Unisphere, a steel-ribbed globe that had been the symbol of the 1964–65 World’s Fair. Shea Stadium was at our back and before us was a structure that looked like a one-story building that had been lifted from a corporate park and pointlessly placed upon four tall turrets no less than ten stories in height. The building bore the words TOP OF THE FAIR. (Even though, obviously, there was no longer a fair for it to top.)

Michael Dougherty stopped the limo and dashed around to my door. I looked at Lanny, puzzled.

“We’re dining?”

“Leaving.”

He strolled me onto the cement esplanade, which was totally deserted, and through doors marked PORT OF AUTHORITY NEW YORK. Beyond them was a small lectern manned by a middle-aged fellow in a business suit. He referred to a clipboard. “Hello, Mr. Morris. All set for you. If you’ll sign here.”

Lanny scribbled a signature. “Who’s driving?”

“Cubby.”

Lanny nodded approval and stepped to the already open doors of a narrow elevator, gesturing for me to enter. Once we were in, he pushed the only button other than G for Ground. It was discreetly labeled H.

“What’s ‘H’?” I asked as we ascended very quickly.

“Hroof garden.” The elevator stopped, the doors opened, and a stiff breeze hit us. Correction. Many stiff, measured breezes hit us. “And heliport,” he added in what I’m sure was intended to sound like an offhand comment.

We were standing on the roof of the building, and slapping its five rotary forearms against the air with its trademark chopping sound was a commercial helicopter. Lanny nodded toward it. “Our ride home.”

I happened to know that the helicopter was a Sikorsky S-61L. I knew that its cruising speed was 115 nautical miles an hour. I also knew that I was supposed to be impressed. I was, but enough already, I thought. Lanny was putting on an admirable floor show, no doubt designed to sweep me off my feet and him against my labia, but it was calculated for what he believed was a starry-eyed schoolmarm named Bonnie Trout. Meet the celeb at his Plaza suite, have an incredibly low-profile lunch at a delicious dive on Doyers Street where the yellow press won’t discover or publicize “Lanny’s New Lady.” Then on to watch Lanny be the darling of fifty-five thousand at Shea Stadium. After all, let’s give the devil his due: How many people can, on two hours’ notice, arrange to sing for a gathered multitude and be cheered despite performing only one musical selection, and an a cappella one at that? Then into a private whirlybird, where Lanny is taking his new bird for a little whirl—how to respond to all this?

Fuck. I’m Bonnie Trout.

“Wow,” I said.

“Oh, you like?” replied Lanny as if he’d hardly noticed the Sikorsky that was slashing at the air around us and requiring him to raise his voice about twenty decibels. “Yeah, it’s all ours. Hey, Cubby!”

He walked us toward the helicopter, thoughtfully putting his hand on the back of my head and gently pressuring it downward to ensure that it was well below the overhead blades. It was the first time a man had pushed my head down that way where I didn’t snap, “Don’t ever do that again!” in a voice that invariably reduced his erection by a good two inches.

“You ever been on a helicopter?” he asked me as Cubby, a nice-looking guy in his twenties, helped me up some steps. The interior looked as if it could easily seat a dozen or more (I’d been on commuter airplanes that had smaller cabins than this), but we were the only passengers.

“No, never,” I replied truthfully. Not that I hadn’t had the opportunity once or twice, but I’d always managed to find a reason to decline the invitation. And now here I was on an S-61L. Oh good.

I’m by no means knowledgeable about aviation, but my journalism thesis had been a piece I’d written (which actually ran in The Christian Science Monitor) about the estimable Sikorsky S-61L and its two accidents in California, causing the deaths of all on board. Passengers and crew. Both times. No survivors. In 1968, the S-61L had been a commercial shuttle from LAX to Anaheim. I called it the Disneyland Death Train. Within six months, the S-61L had twice decided to drop out of the sky en route. Metal fatigue was cited as a possible cause. Gee, don’t you just hate it when metal gets tired?

“So where are we taking this?”

“Just back to Manhattan. You should sit on the left side.” He indicated a window seat. Cubby stepped into a kind of pilot’s cabin separated from the passengers’ seats. “No copilot?” I asked.

Lanny laughed. “The whole flight takes less than ten minutes.” I was about to comment that, in the event of metal fatigue or pilot stroke, it would probably not take us all of ten minutes to plummet to where the ground would provide all the stopping power we’d ever need. But as if to illustrate the brevity of our trip, the copter immediately buoyed itself into the air. We scooted off the rooftop as carelessly as Peter Pan and were already passing by Shea Stadium, at an altitude not much higher than its cheapest seats. Ah, that incredibly attenuated island toward the west, the one with all those ridiculously tall buildings—would that be the fabled Manhattan now? The hot orange sun was currently playing peekaboo with us, popping out from behind the cover of the Chrysler and Empire State buildings.

I assumed we’d be landing at the Heliport on the East River, which we were already closing in on. I pointed in its general direction, below a phalanx of polka-dot-painted cement trucks that were huddled a little north of Ninety-Sixth. “We landing down there?” I asked.

Lanny shook his head. “Not down. Up.”

As if on cue, the trustworthy S-61L seemed to take off again and trampolined us into the thick of New York’s tallest spires. We were above them, but only just slightly, and it felt as if we were dodging the buildings rather than scraping by above them. Then it seemed as if we had stopped (we had, more or less), and I saw to my horror that we were poised above midtown Manhattan at an elevation equivalent to, say, the ninety-ninth floor of a building, except that said building had ceased to exist and we were now in its lone remaining office, supported by nothing.

When I look down from a terrace mounted to a high apartment building, where I can see the laws of perspective in action, the side of the building dropping away beneath me and my feet… this is the kind of vertigo from which I suffer. To suddenly be a hundred feet above the top of the Pan Am Building, which was now yawing up at me, its facade like a ninety-degree ski slope of glass terminating in the grid between Lexington and Vanderbilt avenues…

“You okay?” asked Lanny. I closed my eyes for a second, swallowed. There was a very strong bump as we dropped onto our tiny perch, and I correctly assumed we’d landed. Instantly there was a change in the volume of the motors. All confidence now, I chattily commented, “I thought the Pan Am heliport had been closed down.”

“They closed it in sixty-eight because there just wasn’t enough business. But there’s a new group wants to reopen it. In a year or two. I’m a stockholder. Meantime, you can get clearance to land four hours in advance if you know who to ask and you don’t mind paying for the privilege.”

Cubby had already opened the door and slid some steps up to it, and Lanny walked me out. Again he placed his hand above my hand and pressed gently down until we cleared the rotors. It was something like the hands-on blessing the priest would give you as a child in lieu of Christ’s blood and body. I had always found it very comforting.

I was currently feeling quite weak, grateful to be alive, and tough as runny Camembert. A private elevator dove us down to the street, the same fall I’d been afraid the helicopter might make. Context is everything. The ugly lobby of the Pan Am Building was easy to leave, and Lanny quickly nabbed us a cab on Vanderbilt.

“Fifty-Ninth and Fifth,” he told the driver, keeping his head down so as not to be recognized. That was the Plaza. Would we eat there? Would we eat at all?

We got out of the cab, however, by the General Motors Building, on the other side of the Grand Army Plaza from Lanny’s hotel. Lanny handed the driver a more than handsome tip, the driver said, “Hey…” in the first dawning of recognition, but Lanny smiled and scooted us away.

Lanny took my hand, which was all right I suppose, and trotted us down a long flight of white steps that verged onto an open-air café one floor below street level. It was already quieter on this level beneath the traffic, and it got better as Lanny walked us over to a revolving door directly underneath the General Motors showroom and we entered the Autopub.

In Manhattan, theme restaurants were blooming like plastic flowers in winter. I confess to enjoying such places: Trader Vic’s, which made me feel like I was in the Enchanted Tiki Room in Disneyland; Chateau Henri IV, where you crossed a bridge over an indoor stream to reach your table by a stained-glass window; the Monk’s Inn on Sixty-Fourth, where the waiters were dressed in cowled robes and your Emmenthaler fondue and dusty bottle of red wine were accompanied by a Gregorian chant; or A Quiet Little Table in the Corner, where every booth was as the name implied, each hidden behind a beaded curtain, to which you summoned your waitress by pulling a cord that illuminated a red lightbulb. The Cattleman had set the stage, or rather the stagecoach, for such funhouse eateries, supposedly patterned after a Kansas City steer palace, as was also (surprise) the Steer Palace. The ubiquitous Steak and Brew chain’s mock-British publican atmosphere offered you all the beer you could drink and all the lettuce you could assemble. Enrico E Paglieri offered the same deal but with all the sangria you could drink (“red wine and 7UP,” translated the waitress) and all the antipasto you could eat (Oscar Mayer cold cuts and health salad). Some lunatic soul opened a similar restaurant named Chicago with the astounding offer of All the Booze You Could Drink, but apparently in its third month one frat party from Princeton buried the place for good.

The Autopub’s theme was cars. Get it? General Motors Building? When you walked in, you were directed (by a gossamer young thing—my, how they get around) to one of several dining areas within the long, low-ceilinged, windowless facility. There was the Pit Stop, a brightly lit white Formica area with orange banquettes, delineated by trendy globular white lights. Very Euro. Behind the wide bar, with its decorative racing helmets, were the more-coveted booths, where four people could dine inside replications of a Model T or vintage Oldsmobile. Some of the cars were hard-tops, meaning that you dined under their roofs and within their rolled-up windows, making it the coziest, most claustrophobic sit-down dinner in Manhattan.

“Merwin,” murmured Lanny to the hostess, who was clearly expecting him.

“Oh yes, Mr. Mer-win,” she delivered like a stripper enlisted into a burlesque routine. “Your table is waiting.”

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 labeled DRIVE-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 eleven P.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 the Today 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 “Exeunt, 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 confessed, “Okay, so they told me at the Today show—they’re just down the street—that it was playing here. 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 of Smithereens.

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 with Smithereens’ 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 one-liner. 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 crème 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 words The 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 disoriented me. After all, at an outdoor drive-in movie, if the “overhead lights” came up, it might at best indicate the aurora borealis or the end of a horror marathon that ran until dawn; at worst, the explosion of the sun and the end of the world. 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 nearly twenty-four near-hallucinogenic 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 Hollywood, 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 building 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 hotel was 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 in Smithereens, 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 about you, 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 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 outline in the fabric of his pants that I more than held 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 hurriedly undressed himself beneath me. Our curious, adroit tongues were everywhere, delighting with one lovely discovery after another. Either we were both very good together or he was good enough for the both of us. As he finally entered me and God I felt so filled, his steady, confident thrusts that showed no sign of ever ending caused a scarily ecstatic pressure deep within me, and yes I began to give myself over to this unceasing engine we’d together constructed on this bed in this hotel room, and it was using me, as I so wanted it to, and I thought, I thought as I gave myself up to it, “Now am I part of the story? Was this what you wanted?” and as I began to scream wordlessly in glorious despair, I had no idea to whom this thought was addressed.