Chapter 27 - Where the Truth Lies

NEW ORLEANS SQUARE had been laid out beautifully by its designers, who’d warrened the area with surprising little courtyards, serpentine galleries, and unexpected arcades, imparting to its abbreviated lanes the same sense of mystery and discovery as an aimless wander around Saint-Germain-des-Prés on a gray morning.

On such a wander in this New Orleans, built upon the former orange groves of Anaheim, you might easily walk right past a sedate sea-green-colored door recessed from the street and tightly flanked by two charming columns trimmed in warm gilt, handsomely fenestrated at the top with a subtle mosaic of stained glass. The only sign, demarcation, or explanation for this door is its address on Royal Street: the number 33, tastefully inscribed in an oval plaque to the right. To the left of the door (which you would find to be locked) is a small brass box behind whose hinged flap is a doorbell. If you were to ring it, a polite voice over a speaker in the box would ask how they might assist you. Were you to say anything but the right thing, you would be gently and respectfully encouraged to continue your walk with the expressed hope that you have a very pleasant day. And you would never know that you had come as close as you were ever likely to come to entering the most secret place in all of the Magic Kingdom. Club 33. The place, as Vince had promised, where we could get drunk in Disneyland.

He had wanted to take me there on our first visit, but he’d been told it was closed for the installation of some new ventilation. Today was the first date since then for which he’d been able to reserve a table. You had to be a member of the club to dine (and wine) there, for which you paid a sizable membership fee; it also didn’t hurt if you happened to be, say, the ambassador from Luxembourg, or the head of General Motors, or Vince Collins.

We were dressed more than appropriately for our seven P.M. dinner reservation. We had entered the park through Guest Services once again, and had drawn some stares for our elegant clothing amid a sea of T-shirts, madras shorts, and Goofy hats, but, luckily, people were lining up for the staged parade down Main Street; most visitors were more concerned with finding a place where little Tommy could see Mickey than watching a sunglassed Vince and me slither along the shortest route to Royal Street.

There was the buzz of an electronic lock, and the door of number 33 was opened by a uniformed attendant who might have been plucked from the first-class dining room of the QE2. Electric candles and a chandelier brought out the rosy hue of the paneled foyer. Seated at a concierge’s desk, an attractive young woman had picked up a French-style phone and, we would learn, was speaking to the maître d’ upstairs, advising him of our arrival.

She welcomed us, asking if we’d like to ascend via the stairs or the lift (the technically more accurate name for the style of Victorian wrought-iron cage elevator that rested snugly within the wide spiral of the staircase before us). I wondered if anyone had ever opted for the stairs.

The young man who’d let us in also operated the elevator, which let us out into Lounge Alley. Seated at a smaller writing desk was the maître d’, whose name was William. This room too was beautifully paneled and had original artwork on its walls from the Disney studio, mainly landscapes. Nowhere was there a sign of Donald, Goofy, or Mickey. We might as well have been in an anteroom of an elegant hotel in Oslo. We passed by a Victorian phone box and were told by William that it had been used in the movie The Happiest Millionaire. Vince leaned over to me and murmured, “When we finish our book, I’ll be the happiest millionaire.” It was just a silly joke, but it meant more to me at that moment than anything else he might have said. Our book. Finish. Together. We were back on track. Things were nearing normal.

Since it was my first visit, William suggested we take a look around the different rooms before the sun set. I didn’t realize it, but the restaurant crossed over Royal Street, so that one could look down (literally) upon those guests on their way to Pirates or the Haunted Mansion or standing in line in hopes of a table at the Blue Bayou, where they served a Bloody Mary without the booze, which I had called a Bloody Shame.

From other windows could be seen the Rivers of America and Tom Sawyer Island over the tops of Frontierland’s buildings. The fabulous thing was that, when seated, you couldn’t see the crowd at all. The forced perspective made the waterway and its island seem as if we were in a Michelin five-star hotel that had been improbably erected in some vast wilderness above the mighty Mississippi.

We were shown into the main dining room, which had all the starched prettiness of the Grill Room at the Connaught. The room was lined with pairs of French doors, each pair containing twelve paned squares of glass and spanned by a wide transom in an elliptical design of the Edwardian style. Each set of doors seemed to lead to a tiny terrace overlooking the park. We were seated at what seemed to be the best table for two in the room. From my seat, I could view only the more rustic parts of the park, for which I was grateful. I didn’t want to see any Rocket Rides or Flying Dumbos from this elegant room. I’d see the Flying Dumbos later.

“Well: Your first cocktail while seated in the heart of Disneyland!” Vince smiled. “Better make it something special. You won’t be able to get one next time you’re at the Sunkist Citrus House.” His comment, while sweet, added a tinge of unhappiness to the moment. It was a terrible curse of mine that I would pine for things even while they were happening. During my youth, I’d spent more time thinking how someday I would yearn for my lost youth than I’d spent having my youth. Vince’s comment reminded me that someday this place might be off limits to me (as well might Vince himself). I needed to shake this out of my head. Enjoy now. There is only ever now.

“What do you recommend?” I asked Vince. I was going to go wherever Vince went tonight. I was the self-appointed recording secretary of Vince’s Club. No feisty modern woman me. I was his date and I’d be a great date, I would, for this guy. If we hadn’t previously made a pact to the contrary, he could have had me that night on a silver platter and you wouldn’t have heard a word of complaint from me.

He ordered a vesper for me, an invention of Ian Fleming’s, named after one of James Bond’s first recorded romances. Vince’s modification was that it be made with Tanqueray’s Malacca gin, which was silkier and contained citrus. He had them garnish it with lemon peel instead of a slice of orange. Vince asked for his usual, a Jack Daniel’s on the rocks, and our waiter knew without being asked to bring him his usual side of club soda and a straw.

My vesper arrived just as evensong might have been sung at a nearby church and as the evening star of Venus appeared in the soft magenta sky. It was smooth and warm, a martini without the steely edge. Vince smiled as I voiced my approval. We ordered from the refreshingly short menu and had another round each. Venus was beginning to glow.

Would it have mattered if the food was any good? It was traditional French but perfectly rendered. And the wines. With our potage Saint-Germain, Vince had chosen a 1969 Puligny-Montrachet that was absolutely spry and, like all really fine wines, intoxicated me far more quickly than usual.

With the rack of lamb that we shared, Vince told the waiter to dispatch the remaining third of our Montrachet to the chef with our compliments and asked the sommelier for a bottle of the 1959 Château Haut-Brion. He asked the sommelier if he would mind decanting it for us, and the sommelier said he would have recommended exactly that had Vince not requested it first.

The sommelier extracted the cork, offered it to Vince to sniff, and set a candle upon the table about a foot away from a graceful crystal decanter he’d brought for the task at hand. Lighting its wick, he then slowly poured the Haut-Brion into the decanter while the candlelight glowed behind the neck of the bottle. He eyed the illuminated ruby liquid carefully, like a diagnostician of X-rays, and when the first dregs showed in the neck of the bottle, he stopped pouring, so that the wine in the decanter was now both well oxygenated and free from sediment.

Vince indicated that the sommelier should pour a trickle of the liquid into my glass for my sampling and our verdict. It was a continent of its own. It had met with the approval of Samuel Pepys in the 1600s, and it was now meeting with mine. No wine had ever been so complex on my tongue as this, and I must have moaned a bit.

“Anything the matter?” asked the sommelier, concerned.

“No… no, nothing. Heaven.” I looked at Vince. “Thank you, it’s wonderful.”

The sommelier nodded. “I suspect there will never be a year in this century as special as 1959. Do you agree, Mr. Collins?”

Vince frowned. “Yes, 1959 was a great year for French wines,” he concurred. I wondered if he was thinking that 1959 had not been a very great year for Maureen O’Flaherty, or for her mother.

But the wine fueled and infused my happiness, which grew to be delight, which by my third glass had become bliss on the outskirts of rapture. The food was sensual and reassuring, as was our conversation. I was out of the woods and I was in love. It had taken nearly losing Vince to make me realize how warm and strong he was within me.

For dessert, I had ordered a chocolate raspberry soufflé an hour earlier and Vince a simple crème caramel. To go with it (yes, the decanter of Haut-Brion was empty and the wine was singing to me from deep within my bloodstream), he ordered a half bottle of a dessert wine, Château d’Yquem, perhaps the most famous dessert wine in the world. I needed only a glass.

While they were making us café diablo (by trickling flaming cognac down the skin of an orange that had been peeled in one long coil until the cognac’s blue flames dripped slowly into a waiting cup of French espresso), Vince told our waiter we just wanted to step out onto the terrace off the Trophy Room for a few minutes and would it be all right if we took our wineglasses with us? The waiter said he was sure that would be quite all right and understood why we’d like to take in the view.

Vince took my arm and stepped us out onto a small balcony. The Haunted Mansion glowed merrily in the night, as did I, I was sure. I sighed, “You deliver on your promises, don’t you? I’m drunk in Disneyland, Vince.

“Tell me we can still go on some rides tonight?”

Vince nodded. “What would be the point of achieving this divine state and not going on some rides?”

I was worried all of a sudden. “How long before this buzz wears off, do you think?” I was doing it again, dammit, living in the “it’s over” while the thing was still happening. “I mean, once we leave the club, we can’t come back later, right?”

“Right, you’re not allowed to come here and just have drinks. But I think I have a way we can stretch the buzz right up to when the park closes. Look.” He unfolded his beautiful hand. He held two small capsules. They looked like little bumblebees in their yellow-and-black jackets. He popped one in his mouth in a flash, hiding his face so no one would see, and swallowed it with a sip of the flinty but luscious Château d’Yquem.

“Want to join me?” he asked good-naturedly. He still had one capsule left.

Wherever he was, I wanted to join him. “What are they?”

He shrugged. “They’re like very, very mild-mannered quaaludes. You must have done a few ’ludes in your time, right?”

Right, I had. These days people were getting busted for not doing drugs. Health fanatics in San Francisco would show you the device they had to deionize the air, they’d drink nothing but water melted from subterranean ice caverns, they’d serve you a meal consisting solely of steamed desert-grown kale, and they’d finish off with this really superior cocaine studded with little yellow dots. An active, healthy lifestyle included vigorous exercise, consistent meditation, and amphetamines. Heroin was gauche, booze was an embarrassment, but whatever came out of a pharmaceutical lab had to be okay—I mean, that’s why we have the Food and Drug Administration, right? Girls in their twenties who weighed no more than ninety-one pounds easily convinced physicians to prescribe them black beauties to help them get their weight down. And a quaalude was merely an entire bottle of codeine cough syrup in convenient tablet form.

What I’d enjoyed about them was the way they affected time. If you were feeling good, they made you seem to feel good a lot longer. Like if you love a hit record played at forty-five RPM, imagine how much you’ll love it at thirty-three! Oh, and what do you know! We’re here at Club 33. An omen. I never needed much more than an omen when it came to Vince.

“You’re sure they’re okay with alcohol?” I asked.

“They work even better with alcohol. I would know, believe me.” His face was creased with the most inviting smile. “Hey, come on in, Kerry, the water’s fine.”

If he had suggested we get tattooed together, I would have been having Widowmaker inscribed on my left buttock in a flash. To drop one little ’lude on an evening that I wanted to last forever… this was not what you would call the Great Debate. I smiled, popped the pill in my mouth, drank from his cup of sweet wine as if this were part of a wedding ceremony, and looked up to him for approval.

As soon as I swallowed, I saw fireworks in clean, phosphorescent golds and reds and blues. Not because of the pill. There actually were fireworks, a mid-evening display over the Rivers of America. We stood on our little terrace and toasted the Chinese, who had been so civilized as to have invented fireworks without once considering using explosives as weaponry.

Vince wasn’t given a check (it went onto his club account, and God knows with the wines he’d ordered the meal was easily into four figures), but he distributed cash tips subtly and no doubt generously. Oh, how I hated leaving. At least outside the club it was dark now, and no one could see that the man I was with was Vince Collins. I got to hold his arm and press my head against his shoulder. I hadn’t been this wobbly-kneed-smitten with a guy since I’d given myself up to my high school boyfriend Todd. And one of the moody romantic albums we’d played in the background (to cover our immense embarrassment) had been a classic LP, lushly arranged by Nelson Riddle, called Torch Songs for When the Lights Are Low… Sung by Vince Collins.

“Hey. Partner,” he murmured. I loved him calling me that. “Do you want to go on Adventures thru Inner Space?”

A shiver went through me. Did he understand that the closest thing to a Tunnel of Love in Disneyland was “Adventures thru Inner Space”?

“I would if you would,” I answered huskily.

We stepped quickly down the path that led directly to Tomorrowland. Vince was no longer afraid of tomorrow, it seemed, just as I was suddenly enamored with the now.

The attraction bannered MONSANTO PRESENTS ADVENTURES THRU INNER SPACE was never crowded, for which I had always been grateful, because I liked the ride a lot. Its main problem was that it was absolutely free, not even an A coupon. I suppose guests assumed that something free would be simply a commercial for Monsanto, but it was in fact a very cool ride. It was the first to feature Omnimovers, an endless conveyor belt of two-seater cars, each of which wrapped around its passengers on all sides but one, creating a nifty eggshell that limited what you could see of the ride, and others, and—more significantly—what others could see of you. In Adventures thru Inner Space your car was called an Atommobile. In the Haunted Mansion, the same cars were called Doom Buggies.

The conceit of the ride was that the “train” of Atommobiles entered the Mighty Microscope. Disney had devised this so that, from the outside of the ride, one saw the real cars with their real passengers entering a “real” giant microscope and then saw a miniaturized train of Atommobiles with miniature people seated in the cars coming out the other end of the microscope. (In reality, the moment your car entered the Mighty Microscope, the conveyor belt hung a hard left turn and you were carried through a series of dark tunnels for the remainder of the ride.)

Once embarked, you sat back snugly in your car, walled in and surrounded by stereophonic sound, as you were purportedly shrunk first to the size of crystals, then molecules, and finally atoms. You were truly surrounded by projections on the curved walls around you, and since you were limited to the peripheral vision of the car you were in, the effect was encompassing and hypnotic: floating in the middle of a drop of water, or entering a galaxy of electrons that circled aimlessly around you, or, with a loud heartbeat pounding in your ears as if it were the first moment of your life, entering the heart of an atom. It was quite a journey. But far more pragmatically, from the point of view of hormonal adolescents, two people could do almost anything they wanted in that snug little cupola, from the time they entered the good old Mighty Microscope until the time they emerged from the nucleus of that atom.

Disney rides tended to feature “gags” at their conclusion, as if to wink and say, “It’s not real.” In Adventures thru Inner Space, the gag was seeing the single eyeball of a scientist looking at little you through the other end of the Mighty Microscope. This was also the warning cue for couples to make themselves presentable to the world.

And this was the first ride Vince, my Vince, wanted to take with me? I was so ready. We walked into the pavilion (none too steadily, for we were magnificently buzzed) and there were some lonely Disneyland interns virtually ecstatic to see us.

Giggling, Vince and I ducked into the cocoon of the car. Paul Frees—the voice of half of the Disneyland rides, from the Haunted Mansion to Pirates of the Caribbean—began in his ersatz-Orson Welles voice to tremulously describe the awe and wonder of being reduced to the size of a single snowflake.

Vince put his arm around me as if we were in the last row of the Bijou Theatre in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and with nobody twenty cars ahead of us or behind us, we entered the Mighty Microscope.

And the pill I’d taken kicked in.

Oh, Lordy me. My guess was that I felt the effects before Vince, being lesser in weight and size than my wonderfully tall fellow. I think the slightly psychedelic effect of the ride may also have helped the chemicals take hold, the way hypnotic music can amplify and augment the effects of a joint. We were entering the tunnel as part of this giant, endless caterpillar, snug as a bug in a Monsanto rug, and as the darkness of the tunnel surrounded us, that’s when I first felt it. The pulsations started in my groin, not my head. They rose up through me like a fountain of forbidden feelings, up into my breasts, my shoulders, my neck. And then they gently rushed into my brain and I had never understood but now I did. I might once have been scared by these feelings, but I’d been readied for them by the nectareous wine I had drunk, and now the wine was drinking me. And Vince was with me, so I had nothing to fear. “Do you feel it?” I asked him softly. He told me it was just beginning.

The tunnel promised warm, glowing light ahead. This was the true Alice in Wonderland ride. Oh yes. I was definitely crawling along the dark rabbit hole, and now I was falling gracefully with Vince into a vast and expanding space. Straight and sober and unstoned, the ride would still have been somewhat hallucinatory, so imagine experiencing it from within my current sensory state. “Do you feel it?” I asked. He kissed me. He kissed me and held my head in his hands and kissed me again. Our faces were illuminated by a billion water crystals whirling their lyric dance around us. I was happy. Could I please be this happy always?

His hands groped for me. They were strong and big. I wanted him to have everything of me. I wanted my breasts to nurture him and my legs to coil tightly around him and pull him to me as if I were some alluring creature of the sea drawing him toward a glorious death in my arms and then we both would live. I needed him to have more hands so as to touch me more places at once. “Oh Vince,” I said so cleverly, my higher education coming into play. “Vince.” It was such a beautiful word and the molecules agreed with me, swirling as they talked to me. We, the molecules and I, noticed the V at the beginning of his name, so valiant and victorious, and the modest i, and by the time we had reached the nnnnnnnnnnnn, it was me making that sound as he c for caressed one part of me with the strong, expert heel of his hand in such wonderful ways that I thought—But then I forgot what I’d been thinking. Apparently the long assembly line of cars (we had become all humanity; this was Heaven’s escalator and we were rising to be with Our Maker) had gently pierced the wall of the tunnel and was now emerging into the larger universe that lay outside Disneyland where we were in the endless rhapsodic daylight of the stars. And then the giant eye of the good scientist who had helped us find this world could be seen, and Vince, who was always so much wiser and stronger than I, was helping me adjust my clothing back to respectability and we emerged, miraculously, once again in the pavilion in Disneyland. Vince’s strong arm helped me get up out of the car. “Must I leave?” I asked, somewhat wrenched out of my happiness.

“You okay, miss?” asked a Disney intern as I made a slightly shaky transition onto the moving walkway that ran alongside the disembarking zone of the ride. He was just the most wonderful fellow—short of Vince, that is.

“That’s so like you to be concerned,” I said graciously. He gave me a goofy smile. “He’s very nice, isn’t he, Vince?” I asked Vince, who assured me the Disney fellow was very nice, indeed. We were walking now and I asked Vince if we could go on another ride. He said he wanted to sit still for a while, but I pointed out to him that the Haunted Mansion was another slow cozy ride and we could sit in that. I just wanted to be in the dark with him some more, I wanted him to have his hands on me again; he hadn’t even touched my nipples—how hard he would find them. “Haunted Mansion, Vince,” I said, my choice of words inarguable. “Haunted Mansion.” We were passing by a ticket booth and he put down a ten. He was so very smart. He knew how to handle money and talk to people. I could only watch in awe. “E,” I said, because one needed an “E coupon” to get on the Haunted Mansion ride and also because “E” was the letter I had never reached in the name “Vince.” That was good, that I had now finished his name. Now he could finish me. “Haunted Mansion, Vince,” I said, eager for him.

We spent several lovely years together in the Haunted Mansion that evening. We got into our Doom Buggy and moved along the shadowy corridors of the handsome Victorian manor. On prior visits, I had enjoyed the ominous promise of the hallways past which the ride drifted but did not explore. Now we explored them, Vince and I. We got off the ride (I was very sure we had) and walked the corridors. I wasn’t frightened, not I. I have always been a part of this house, I’d sensed that when I first arrived here. The tormented Lord of the Manor needed me more than he knew. Others might find the ghostly apparitions troubling, but I knew that they were, like Vince, merely seeking rest and release. And I was there to help them and him. He had his hands on me again and it was not what we had vowed, it was wrong in the eyes of the church, but—We had found our way back into our car somehow and we were outdoors, in the graveyard, a million ghosts (or protons and neutrons) whirligigging around us again. There was not as much privacy on this ride; others could see us, the townspeople—they had always disapproved but I had known. Outdoors, in front of his mansion, Vince held me. The estate was ours now. I felt another upward rush of the warmth inside me and the light went wilder in my brain.

“Vince. I need you,” I told him. Did he understand? He would have to.

“I need you too,” he said.

“Oh, Vince-voice,” I teased him wittily.

He walked us (but of course we didn’t need to walk because our feet had been turned into Omnimovers) in the direction of the Monsanto ride, but when I got all sentimental about it, he told me no, we were going on a better ride. “How long have we been here?” I asked. “Is this our—is this still the same night?” He assured me this was still the same night. He knew everything. Now we went up an inclined walkway and a giant snake hissed up to us. It was the Monorail. “Oh, Vince, everyone will see us,” I complained. I knew the Monorail was lit and there were no private compartments. We would not be able to neck the way we had on the other rides. He reassured me that the ride would get better soon.

The Monorail stopped at the Disneyland Hotel, and we got off there. We passed the Monorail Bar and I said I wanted a drink, a vesper or maybe a ginger ale. Suddenly I was dying for a ginger ale. He said he’d have them bring me a ginger ale.

Then we went from Bar Land to Elevator Land. We were alone at last. “Vince, stop the elevator,” I told him. He said he had a better stop in mind. We were now in Hall Land. There was an elderly couple, and they watched us with curiosity. We would be that couple someday.

“Weren’t we in Disneyland a while ago?” I asked. “Or was that the other day?” Vince assured me that we had been in Disneyland just five minutes earlier. Now we were in Door Land. Vince produced a key and opened it. And there it was. Room Land. “Oh, for us?” I asked. He said yes. I started to sing ecstatically, “This room is your land, this room is my land, from the New York forests, to the red tree waters…” and I grabbed him. Vince was so wonderful. We kissed. Then he sat me down on the bed. “Have to get you that ginger ale,” he said, picking up the phone. I was busy taking off the clothes I’d been wearing for, oh, I guess several years now. “Five minutes?” said Vince to what I assumed was room service. He turned and saw me naked from the waist up and laughed sweetly. His hands went instantly to my breasts. “Everywhere,” I said. “Put them everywhere.” He pulled back the bedspread, pulled back the sheets. I watched him take off his jacket. (He had long ago tucked his tie into his pocket.) Now he took off his shirt. He was as I had imagined. I loved him. I didn’t ever want to lose him.

He took out his pack of cigarettes and, searching inside it, pulled out a joint. I had never seen him smoke pot before. He used that lustrous gold lighter to give it a glow and took a good hit on it. He winced as he held in the smoke and handed me the J. I hadn’t done grass in a while, but I’d do whatever he was doing. It was toasty and strong. Vince was a star. His grass would be really good, would it not?

The joint inspired the drug I’d taken to explode a few more time-release capsules. I felt the surge again, but this time from the center of everything that was sexual in me, rushing up to cannonade within my brain. Pow-pow-pow. I needed Vince to start doing things to me, right away. Then I remembered all the mistakes I had been making lately, all the very good advice I had never followed. “Vince, what about our agreement?”

His hands slid my dress off the slopes of my body. Why had I worn panties to the luncheon? Foolish me, they were all in the way now. Vince explained, “We agreed that we would sleep together when we finished the book, but not before. And I think we both knew that ‘sleeping together’ meant ‘intercourse.’ But there’s lots we can do other than that.”

I yielded to the drug again, allowing it to take control of time in a way that would have pleased Einstein to no end. There were now more electrons in my brain than stars in a planetarium, and each was pulsing its own ecstatic message semaphorically. I wasn’t sure what Vince had in mind or where he was going to draw the line and if he had the self-control to resist being drawn into me when my hands pulled at him. It was hard to think specifics as another wave of the drug swept over me. I couldn’t take just kissing, necking—I was far too aroused, it would demolish me to stop at that.

We were on the bed now. I pulled him onto me, I ground my hips into his groin like the most obscene of strippers, and this went on for months and yet his pants were not even off yet. I was about to beg him please, out of compassion if nothing else, to just bend me across the end of the bed and take me when there was a light knocking sound at the door.

I couldn’t remember whose house we were in. I remembered I had a vibrator in my house and I wanted to get it now, because if I didn’t find some release soon, I was going to die. Vince could be so mean sometimes. Now he was getting up off the bed and going to the door, and I remembered we were still at the Disneyland Hotel. “Is that the ginger ale?” I asked, because at this point I was almost ready for room service to do me, if Vince would at least hold me while it happened.

I was naked across the bed, my hair disheveled, my face and breasts and belly beaded with sweat. I would have to let room service see me this way because I’d forgotten how to move. Vince gently pulled a sheet to cover me from the shoulders down, kissing me tenderly and stroking my face. He could be so thoughtful sometimes, except when he wouldn’t put his cock in me.

Vince opened the door. A young woman stepped into the room. Was she from room service? They had very strange uniforms. A shiny white plastic raincoat down to her knees. She stepped over to the side of the bed.

“Oh, I remember you,” she said. “We met in Disneyland.”

Everything I do takes place in Disneyland. She was lovely. Her hair was long and fine and blond.

Vince asked her, “Are you wearing it?” The girl nodded and unfastened the raincoat, tossing it onto a chair. I remembered her now. She was Alice in Wonderland, in the blue dress and white pinafore and white stockings.

“You like?” she asked Vince. “It wasn’t hard sneaking it out, because they didn’t know I’m not coming back.”

“Lie down,” said Vince to her. She lay down beside me. Her face was exquisite.

Vince lit another joint and offered it to her. She laughed. “I don’t know. I’m really a little stoned out of my head already. Is it good?” She took a hit. “Oh Jesus, wow.” She offered me the joint, but I wasn’t sure I would be able to hold on to it and I certainly didn’t want to set fire to the bed. “You’re really attractive,” she said to me. She drew a line with her finger along my face. “I love faces with character.” She took another hit on the joint and giggled. “Oh, this is like monster grass, Vince, do you get this all the time?”

Vince just smiled. He could be very modest. Bing-bing-bing went the medicine in my brain. I wished Vince would explain more to me, but for the moment I was willing to let the afternoon slip by, keeping such pleasant company. I knew it was the afternoon because her hair was so golden.

“You’re Alice,” I said.

She nodded and looked slyly at Vince. “Want to see what every guy in Fantasyland wants to see? It’s an F coupon.”

She slowly raised the hem of her blue dress, riding it up along her slender, white-stockinged legs. She revealed white thighs, of a slimness she would have for only another year or two. And then she revealed a golden mound, curved like the gentlest slope of a riverbank, covered in a small, soft coat of golden down as strokable as the fur of a white rabbit. The lightest and palest of pink lips were sweetly puckered as if for a kiss. She wriggled out of the rest of the outfit and started to peel off her stockings.

“She’s so beautiful, Vince,” I said.

“She’s ours, honey,” said Vince. “Isn’t that so, Alice?”

Alice nodded slowly, her blue eyes wide and honest and true. “I’m yours,” she said to me. She looked at Vince for approval. He nodded and she assured him, “I’m mainly straight, you know, but I love doing scenes.”

Vince slowly pulled the sheet that covered me away from my body. It felt like the stroke of a cool, huge hand as it unveiled me. I felt shy. “Vince, no, I’m naked.”

Alice soothed, “Oh, it’s okay, I’m a girl.”

I took note of this and Vince reassured me, “It’s all right, Kerry, she’s over eighteen—aren’t you, Alice?”

Alice nodded. “Twenty last month. Oh, I like your body,” she said, taking me in.

“Thank you very much,” I said. Pinpoint explosions in my brain this time.

Vince slowly rubbed my thighs and my stomach and he teased a little, brushing the back of his hand against me. As long as his hand was somewhere on my body, I guess I wasn’t completely exposed.

Alice looked as if she’d just had a bright idea, and she shared it with Vince. “Let’s have fun.”

Vince took me in his arms. “Oh, Vince,” I whimpered, and his mouth and tongue met my mouth and stayed there, as simultaneously there transpired a searing explosion of spring at the epicenter of my grateful groin. Vince ravaged my lips, while a second tongue, playful and industrious, made gleeful pirouettes around my clitoris—but surely Vince had only one mouth and one tongue and they were still pressed warmly against my lips. He was staring into my eyes, watching me react. He seemed to be richly enjoying this, especially as he could see my realization that it was Alice’s mouth and tongue that were having their mad little tea party with me… but Vince approved, and this was all for him, wasn’t it? I could give this to him and that would be loving of me. As long as I kept my eyes fixed only on his face. This was Vince making me feel this, and I was feeling this for him. For him.

I was building to the strangest orgasm. I raced up and down the corridors of our haunted mansion, trying to avoid a tidal wave that was sweeping toward me. If I could get to the tunnel, if I could get smaller, if I could—The tunnel was blocked. I turned and saw the wave coming at me, blue as Alice’s dress, foamed with froth as white as her pinafore, the same blue and white as her eyes, but then I saw Vince’s eyes, brown and dark and immense. My orgasm was going to be so powerful that I now laughed at the drug I’d taken, scoffed at its pallid euphorias as I approached the threshold of cataclysm.

And then the feeling stopped. Vince had pulled Alice away from me. I screamed in torment.

“Not yet, honey,” he said. There was no way to measure my desolation.

Alice laid her head down on the pillow beside me. Her face was glossy but still angelic. “Hi,” she said to me. “I like you.”

“Let’s kiss her, honey,” Vince said to me. He kissed Alice’s cheek tenderly.

Alice scrunched her face close to mine. “You’re so pretty.”

“No, you’re the beauty,” I said.

“Show me how you love him,” Alice said. “Show me what you can do to him.”

Vince had backed into the shadows, away from the bed. “Show her,” he counseled. “Show her what you’ll do to me.”

I’d never been with a girl in my life, other than a silly game at a slumber party and one awkward episode in college.

But Alice was fair and downy and pink…

“It’s okay,” said Vince, now behind me. His hands were on my shoulders, massaging me warmly but also moving me closer into her. “Show me,” he urged.

I touched Alice lightly with my tongue where I liked to be touched. She gasped a light, girlish gasp, instantly responsive.

I felt Vince’s hands leave me. I needed to show him how I would make him feel. So I gave her more of the same.

Soon Alice was breathing deeper. I knew the sound from whenever I’ve reached a plateau from which my own orgasm will begin. Behind me, Vince offered quiet words of encouragement. I heard a repeated clicking-whirring sound, and there were flashes of light in the room that weren’t emanating from my brain. But I was focused on my work.

Alice in Wonderland urged me not to stop. “Eat me,” she murmured in a half sob, half sigh. “Drink me.”