Chapter 25 - Where the Truth Lies

AT THE BACK of one of the bars at Miami airport, there was an unusual coin game called Pong. It was played on a black TV screen, the white outline of a rectangle representing a Ping-Pong table, two short vertical white lines representing two players’ paddles, and a small white dot representing a Ping-Pong ball. I thought it was absurd to put a kid’s game in a bar, but you couldn’t keep adults away from this thing. Two players could square off against each other or, if you were alone, you’d play the computer that controlled the game and if you did, you were dead.

Next to the machine they’d put in another machine for the sole purpose of changing dollar bills into quarters. I ordered a greyhound (such a whimsical person I am) and asked the bartender if I could have the change in singles, which I then took to the change machine by the Pong game. It swallowed my first dollar bill and spat out four quarters just as nice as you please. By my sixteenth dollar, a false sense of elation had come over me. I felt like I was playing the slots and winning with every spin.

I drank half my greyhound to bolster my nerves, then gathered up my sixty-eight quarters and went to a pay phone in the loudest part of the terminal, near the public-address system.

My first call was to Connie Wechsler, my editor at Neuman and Newberry. I had to give her some explanation as to why I’d abandoned my interview schedule with Vince and flown to Florida, so that she could then relay this explanation to Greg Gavin.

The best version of the truth I could present to her was that I’d made a possibly stunning breakthrough regarding the girl found dead in Lanny and Vince’s hotel suite in New Jersey, and that I’d had to fly to where Maureen O’Flaherty had lived in South Florida to get more background before I continued questioning Vince. This was, in a way, completely true. What I didn’t tell her was that I’d been motivated to leave because I couldn’t let Lanny Morris see me in any guise other than as Bonnie Trout, schoolteacher from New York, because I’d lied to Vince’s ex-partner about my identity just prior to having immense sex with him at the Plaza Hotel. No, were I to tell Connie that, she might feel she’d just possibly misplaced her trust in my professionalism and integrity. I did explain that, not wanting to delay the interview schedule any more than was necessary, I hadn’t even bothered to book through N&N but had headed straight to LAX and purchased a ticket for the next available flight, and I wouldn’t even think of requesting reimbursement (largely because they’d rightfully question why in God’s name I’d routed myself from Los Angeles to New York to Miami). And that, not wanting to arouse Vince’s suspicion, I’d improvised a cover story for his benefit.

“What was the cover story?” asked Connie, who’d been wonderfully understanding about all this.

“Just that my half brother was killed in an accident in New York and that I had to go to Florida for his funeral. His ashes were scattered over the Everglades. You see.”

I heard silence on the other end of the connection.

The operator kicked in, asking for three dollars and seventy-five cents. I dropped in the appropriate amount of quarters and faced Connie’s scorn.

“Boy, that’s a pretty god-awful story,” she said. “Remind me never to hire you to write fiction. Did Vince Collins buy it?”

“I’ll know soon enough. He’s my next phone call after this.”

“You’re back in L.A., I assume?” asked Connie.

I held the phone up so she could hear an announcement for Air Florida Flight 586 to Pensacola and Memphis, now boarding at Gate 4. “No, I’m at Miami airport.”

Connie hissed into the phone, “Dammit, I just this second agreed you’d do an awards ceremony tomorrow afternoon! When will you be back in L.A.?”

I told her I’d be home that evening and heard her emit a small sigh of relief. She explained that the P.R. woman who handled the West Coast for Neuman and Newberry had called asking if I could hand out a Scotty award, named after F. Scott Fitzgerald in honor of the myriad number of fine writers of fiction who’d been seduced and stomped out by Hollywood. The awards leaned heavily toward books about motion pictures. The first three years they’d had to tell people in advance that they’d won in order to get them to come, but although that meant the losing nominees didn’t come to the Event, it did in some instances guarantee that the winner would buy an entire table or, rather, that their publisher would. In a few scandalous cases, when a winner had told them in advance that they couldn’t make it to the Event, a different winner was chosen.

“I hate the Scotties,” I told Connie.

“So do we all, but when your book wins one, you’ll hate them a whole lot less,” Connie advised. “It will be a great way to serve notice about your book with Vince—they promise they’ll mention it when they introduce you, and the people who are there are exactly the people we have to hype. They originally had Rona Barrett announcing the winner of the Best Critical Book on Cinema. Then they decided maybe Rona was a little too trashy all on her own, so they figured, have two people present the award, Rona from the gossip side and someone from the journalism side. Rona is Miss Dish and Dirt and you’re Ms. Woodward and Bernstein. Do it, you owe me, you owe N&N.”

I did owe them, especially considering my incredibly shady behavior, which might at any moment backfire not only on me but on them. “Fine,” I said. “Just remember in the future that I was a team player. So who’s winning the award?”

“They don’t know. They’re doing the Scotties ‘legit’ this year. They’re a little worried that no one will show up, but they figure they have to go straight sometime or they’ll never have credibility.”

I sighed. “Okay, I’ll be there.”

She told me “there” was a luncheon at the Hollywood Roosevelt. I was secretly pleased to have been considered an acceptable presenter by the organizers of the Event. I was certainly not known to the public by any means. I could only imagine that if you interview enough celebrities, some of their notoriety begins to rub off on you, at least within the trade.

The next call I had planned to make was the one I most dreaded, because it involved sustaining more complex fabrications than the ones I’d inflicted on Connie, which were largely lies of omission. Procrastination being the one thing I rarely put off until tomorrow, I called Beejay instead. I needed to hear a friendly voice. More important, I had not had an extended conversation with anyone in the last twenty-four hours to whom I hadn’t been lying: Vince, Adolfo, Tony the doorman, Kef Ludlow, Connie… I wondered what it would feel like to speak the truth.

Beejay didn’t give me much of a chance to find out. She had a romantic triangle on her hands that, at the moment, was a lot more functional than my non-ménage with Lanny and Vince. Beejay had been seeing the vice principal of her school, who was married, and also seeing a New York actor who was not married to anything other than his mirror. Last Friday, she’d done the dirty deed, as Beejay so sensually put it, with the principal of vice in his office, and then gone home and bathed the scent of sex from her body so that she was virginal for Mr. Method’s big entrance. The next afternoon she’d received a spectacular bouquet of flowers. But there was no card. She said the hippie delivery boy, whose blond pageboy haircut made him look like Illya Kuryakin on The Man from U.N.C.L.E., hadn’t a clue as to who had placed the order, or anything else for that matter. “So what do I do?” she fretted to me. “I want to keep both of them for a while, but they’re both very jealous personalities. Do I thank them both for the flowers and see which one knows what I’m talking about?”

I told her that if she did and both of them said, “I’m glad you liked them,” she could be certain that one of the two was definitely a creep. Always the detective, I suggested she call each and fake sneezing at the very start of the conversation. “Then explain you’re highly allergic to flowers. The guy that sent you the flowers will immediately apologize.” She said she didn’t know if she could fake sneezing very believably. I told her that when we were roommates in college I’d heard her fake a lot more than sneezing while I stood waiting outside the bedroom we shared.

Finally we were allowed to get to my problems with my two men who didn’t know about each other. I explained why I’d had her call me at Vince’s home and what I’d done since.

My supply of quarters had now been halved, and I had no idea how long my next phone call, the most long-distance of the three, would take. I reluctantly signed off with Beejay, took several deep breaths, rolled my eyes heavenward in order to invoke an alpha state of relaxation, and dialed Vince’s number.

He was home, and he said he’d answered the phone in the hope that it might be me. I was glad I hadn’t gotten his service or office. I needed him to hear the airport behind me. Air Florida cooperated tremendously by announcing “Last call for Flight 586 to Pensacola and Memphis at Gate 4” just after I told him where I was.

“Miami? I thought your brother was in New York.”

“He was. But the funeral ceremony was here.”

There was silence on the line for a moment, during which Eastern Airlines announced that their 7:00 P.M. flight to Washington and Philadelphia would be delayed by a half hour.

“I’m very sorry, Kerry,” Vince said at last.

“That’s all right. We weren’t all that close. He was my half brother.”

“Older or younger than you?”

“Older.”

“So your mother was married twice?”

I didn’t like that idea. My own mother was devoted to my father. “No, Clifford was my father’s son from a previous marriage.” That was better. “Actually, he was my father’s stepson.”

“So he wasn’t even really your half brother,” Vince observed.

“Mmm. As you say. But still, it felt—For example, he had a crush on me when I was a teenager, and there was nothing genetically stopping us from pursuing the relationship, yet I told him it just felt wrong.” This was getting much too richly hued for my comfort. I’d meant to simply distance myself from “Clifford,” to explain why I would resiliently be back to normal by tomorrow, but instead I was on the verge of scripting a Bergman film.

“The funeral was so soon,” noted Vince.

“It wasn’t a burial. It was a private ceremony. He had asked that he be cremated as soon as possible and that his ashes be scattered over the Everglades. He loved the Everglades. He grew up there.”

“But when he had a crush on you, he was up north? Or were you—”

“He visited my family, to see my dad, who was his”—what was he again?—“his stepfather, in the summer months. He was cremated this morning, and I accompanied the ashes down here. Tomorrow a private airplane will distribute them.” I was tired of saying “scatter.” “There was a ceremony today for his mother and my father. His biological father is no longer alive.”

“How did he die?” asked Vince.

“I have no idea, he passed away before I was born.”

“No, I—Not how Clifford’s biological father died. I meant Clifford.”

This part I’d planned in advance. “He worked for the government. The project he was involved with is a classified matter. I was given very few details, but it was clearly an accident and, thankfully, he didn’t suffer.” I changed my tone to apologetic. “Vince, my feelings need time to sort themselves out, and I think it would help if I didn’t talk about this for a while. Is that okay?”

“Sure, I understand,” said Vince in a very reassuring tone.

“I think the best remedy for me is to focus on the book and our work together. Will you help me with that?”

He said he would and we scheduled to meet the next afternoon, after the Scotty Awards luncheon. Now I had to make a larger request. I had to ask him not to involve Lanny in any of our meetings. To broach this, I began, “By the way, before I hang up, it’s been very much on my mind: Can you tell me a little of what you felt seeing Lanny again, after so long? What was that like, Vince?”

“He didn’t show up. I never saw him.” He sounded disappointed, perhaps even hurt. “After all that buildup. So anticlimactic.”

He told me that Lanny had called him about five minutes after I’d left to tell him he was unbelievably behind schedule doing a Morris the Cat commercial out at the Sunset-Gower Studios and wouldn’t be done until early evening. Vince had told him about my brother and they’d both agreed to reschedule the meeting for another date.

I told Vince that, as per our contract, I was respectfully going to exercise my editorial jurisdiction over the project and stipulate that Lanny not be invited to any of our meetings again. He made some bewildered sounds and I explained: “Look, I’ve thought about it, and whenever I tell a story about something funny that happened to me and a friend, I always tell it differently when my friend is with me. She’ll interrupt, saying, ‘No, it was the other guy who wanted to dance,’ or ‘You left out why we went there in the first place.’ And sometimes she’s right, so I back up the story a bit, or I disagree with her and we get caught up in a mini-debate, or I adhere so strictly to the truth that it ruins the story. We end up with a flat, lame, compromised, confused rendition of what either one of us individually could recount in an extremely funny way. That’s what I’m afraid will happen if you and Lanny jointly answer any of my questions. Even if he doesn’t say a word, his presence alone would influence what you say. I don’t want that. You’re contractually obligated to answer my questions, but Lanny isn’t. He can pull a ‘no comment’ and get away with telling me only what he wants me to hear. You can’t. He can put something off the record, but for you and me, everything’s been on the record since I first met you. It would be like a tennis game where one player observes all the boundaries and regulations—”

He cut my explanation short and said he understood. He apologized for having invited Lanny in the first place and said he looked forward to seeing me directly after the Scotties ceremony.

I hung up the phone and, scooping up my remaining quarters, went back to the bar, where I purchased myself another Greyhound. I had an hour to kill before my flight to Los Angeles. I paid for my drink, tipping the bartender a generous eight quarters, and took the remaining change over to the Pong machine. The bar was pretty empty now, as there were only a few evening flights left. No one was playing the game. It looked remarkably simple and easy to beat. I popped in a quarter and squared off against the computer, which knew all the boundaries and regulations of the game. It gulped down my quarters like a ravenous slot machine and gave me a sound thrashing, beeping and blipping as it boffed me over and over again.