Where the Truth Lies (30 page)

As a kind of a test, I had casually asked Vince that night if he liked lobster. His response had no special tinge to it. He said he loved cold lobster, served in a salad, loved the look and feel of the red shell and red radishes set upon a bed of green leaves. Loved lobster bisque, especially at Wheeler’s in London, where they would flambé cognac and literally ladle the mysterious blue flames into the soup as it sat before you. He wasn’t nuts about boiled lobster, the meat sometimes getting too mushy or stringy, but split and char-grilled, that was heaven. Didn’t like dipping it in butter, though. “Then it just tastes like good popcorn at the movies, so why not have good popcorn and see a movie?” Enjoyed the act of cracking the lobster for the first few bites, but then it became simply too much work, considering that he was paying for the lobster in the first place.

He answered me in such a genuine, balanced way that I gratefully took this as further reassurance that if lobsters had been a part of any dark episode in his life, Vince probably didn’t know about it.

We had started our work on a Tuesday. At the end of Friday, as we unwound from reliving his first year in the army (he was almost courtmartialed for addressing a colonel as “Kern”), he asked me if I wanted to continue through the weekend. I opted not to, for my own sake. I thought it was important I have the weekend to myself, to stay in touch with that world where people do laundry, buy groceries, and park their own cars. It would be too easy to lose all context, and that might take me off my game.

He seemed to understand but stressed that he was blocking all other activities out of his schedule to accommodate the book, and said that anytime I wanted to work straight through the week would be not only fine with him but preferable. I suggested Sunday as a possibility, but asked if he could give me until Saturday afternoon to confirm because it would require moving some things around. In point of fact, I had nothing planned for Sunday but simply wanted to keep my options open.

That evening I dropped off my four cassettes at the offices of Cynthia R. Lehman Stenographic Services, which were located in the dining room and sometimes also the kitchen of Cynthia R.’s little stucco house on a street called Formosa in West Hollywood. When I got home, I poured myself a white Graves and sat powwow style on my bed with Cynthia’s transcribed pages from the day before. Flanked by my Klimt prints and antique perfume bottles, I read them with some satisfaction. I had drawn out Vince quite nicely, I thought, bobbing and weaving during his narrative like a sheepdog moving his flock through the paddock gate with a minimal amount of backtracking. None of what I’d acquired so far would cause Greg Gavin to click his heels and deem it a best-seller. But things would perk up next week when I asked Vince about Maureen O’Flaherty. I’d let him have smooth sailing as we began another week. But then I would ask him, perhaps on Wednesday. After that, I expected I would know much more. Oh yes I would.

NINETEEN

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

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

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

He didn’t see me. He was in the produce section, examining tomatoes with a calm, efficient intensity. He rejected three and then found another that met his criteria. He moved along to pass judgment on both red and green peppers in a similarly expert and assured way. Hedid have a list, and he consulted it now and then with the methodical manner of a respected attorney citing legal precedents.

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

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

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

I tailed him all over the store. “Follow that cart” was my modus operandi. I was ridiculous, shadowing him past preserves and canned soups, ducking up an alleyway of salad dressings and behind a display of Kellogg’s Sugar Smacks. One time he started back in my direction and I cleverly leaned into the frozen foods and extracted a Hampton’s Hog Wild Pork Chop Dinner with a side of macaroni and cheese, carrots, and a small square of applesauce. Tossing it into my rapidly filling cart, I then nosed my way slowly around a corner and saw him enter checkout lane number five. I smoothly glided into place behind him, cutting off a little old lady. She started to protest, but I glared at her with such intensity that she switched to an adjacent checkout.

Reuben finished placing his Safeway selections on the conveyor belt and moved the wooden divider bar to the end of his purchases. I started to casually place the contents of my cart behind his, positioning the Hog Wild Pork Chop Dinner on Reuben’s side of the divider. Then I set back on my haunches and allowed the profound implications of my gambit to play itself out. Reuben did an almost cartoonish double-take as he saw the package in the checkout lady’s hands. My safe guess was that Lanny Morris did not eat many frozen TV dinners, and if he did, they were probably not pork chops with a side of cheddar macaroni.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I murmured in a low, hurt tone that was in no way a distortion of how I truly felt, “Well, yes, I do think something should have been said to me. At least—and I mean at thevery least—a note, a call.”

Reuben nodded painfully. “Of course.”

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

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

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

He did ask, and I am horrified to admit that I was relieved, although I had no intention of giving him my address. I told him that in light of what had happened, I didn’t think I wanted Lanny contacting me again.

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

I said I understood. This was clearly difficult for him. He continued, “But I have certain principles. Some of us in the Philippines descend from Spanish nobility, and though the fortunes of our families may have declined, we still have strong feelings about how women are to be treated and respected. It has been the most difficult part of my job over the years, to let his behavior go by.”

A security guard of the Fresno redneck variety pulled up alongside us in an unmarked car. “How you doin’ here, miss?” he asked.

It was so gratingly obvious that his inquiry was simply because he saw a youngish white girl being talked to at close quarters by a man with darker-colored skin. “Just fine, thanks,” I replied.

He nodded dubiously and asked of Reuben, “How about you, sir?” He leaned on the word “sir” with condescension. Reuben said that he, too, was fine and thanked the guard for his thoughtfulness. The guard gave me one last look, checking to see if I was trying to signal for help by blinking my eyes to the beat of the International Distress Signal, then reluctantly continued on his never-ending quest to protect the loins of California girls from the onslaught of mongrel races.

Reuben shrugged at me as if to say, “This is what I deal with every day.” He turned his shopping cart around to indicate to the redneck that he was indeed hitting the trail. He said, “I’d like to believe that our paths crossed at this store not without some greater intervention.”

I didn’t bother to explain that our paths had crossed largely because I’d been stalking him past boxed cereals and bottled beverages for the last fifteen minutes.

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