Book
Reviews
|
|||
|
Go to Executive Times
Archives |
|||
|
Where the
Truth Lies by Rupert Holmes Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
|
||
|
Click on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
|
||
|
|
|||
|
Secrets Rupert Holmes’ new novel, Where the
Truth Lies, presents a captivating story of friendship, betrayal, and the
secrets that can last decades. Readers learn slowly about events from
multiple perspectives, and eventually come to see what really happened in a
watershed event for two long-term partners and friends. In less talented
hands than Holmes, this novel would be shallow. Instead, Holmes unveils the
many ways in which we share and withhold from those we love. Along the way,
the story is a page-turner. Here’s an excerpt of a scene from Chapter
15 that captures Holmes mastery of character, plot and dialogue (pp. 143-50): … He hung up the phone
and appraised me. “Hope you like baseball. The Mets need somebody famous to
sing the National Anthem this afternoon. Vikki Carr was going to do it, but she didn't
make her connection in Denver." "So you're singing it?" "Yeah, it's no big deal. I do this for them,
they come up with eighty seats the next time they play an expansion team. You
like Chinese?" "There's a Chinese expansion team?" "Food. Or did you have lunch already?" I said I hadn't. He turned to Reuben. "Look,
we'll never get down to Chinatown on four wheels fast enough—we'll take the
subway. Call Dav-EI limos, we'll meet that Mike Whatever-His-Name-ls down
there." Lanny turned quickly to me and asked, "You were okay with him,
right?" as if such issues were subject to my approval. As he was saying all this, he did something that
was new to my range of experience. He put on a disguise, as if this were no
different from putting on a blazer and a tie. He reached into a hatbox near
the couch and adjusted a blond wig that gave him a coif not unlike that of
the late Brian Jones from the Rolling Stones. To this he added a pair of
granny glasses with smoked lenses. He took off his shirt in front of me (he
had a much nicer physique and quite a bit less chest hair than I had
imagined) and donned a silk one that bore a hand-painted western landscape,
over which he wore a light-navy sports jacket with gold piping. A beaded
choker around his neck completed what was, in that era, quite a smart outfit
and which, in any other era, would have caused him to be laughed out of town. We took the service elevator down to the Plaza's
kitchens, then up a flight of stairs that Lanny knew about and out a service
entrance onto Fifty-eighth Street. Soon I was doing the best I could to keep
up with Lanny, who kept his head bowed but chivalrously took my arm as we
plunged down the steps of the Lexington Avenue line. Amazingly, Lanny had a
platinum subway-token dispenser in his pocket (probably worth three or four
hundred times the price of the five tokens it contained). He put a token into
a turnstile and, ever the gentleman, gestured for me to pass through first.
As I did, a Number 4 train rasped into and against the platform; its doors
opened with the snorting sound of a Brahman bull. There were no two seats alongside each other free,
so we stood holding on to a pole by the doors, my hand and Lanny's hand and
the hand of a man who didn't know us stacked as if we were all swearing to
some solemn pact. Lanny obviously didn't want to speak for fear of betraying
his identity, so I occupied myself by reading the banner ads along the top of
the car. Channel II was now showing reruns of Perry Mason
every weeknight at eleven. Women were being warned in Spanish not to do some
particular thing if they were pregnant. It was apparently assumed that women
who spoke English already knew not to do this. Anbesol was recommended to
relieve the pain of those jagged red lightning bolts that so often float in
the air outside your jaw whenever you look pained. Alongside that, it was
fervently suggested that we not move between the cars while the train was in
motion and that we not spit on the train or platform. I had, of course, just
been about to spit in front of the mop-topped Lanny Morris, but somehow
managed to squelch the impulse. By now the Canal Street station had rolled into
place outside our sub- way car. We got off the train and headed up the
stairs. These were the days before Chinatown became overrun
with Asians. To be sure, there were lots of quaint Chinese men and women
neatly tucked away behind glass-topped counters by the cash registers of
Chinese restaurants, fronted by a bowl of after-dinner mints and a juice
glass full of loose toothpicks, or in little Chinese shops selling funny
things like Chinese daily newspapers or Chinese girlie magazines with pretty,
flatbottomed girls in pastel-colored bikinis on the cover. But it was still largely a place for Occidentals to
eat dirt-cheap Chinese food served by hurried, irritated waiters. Oh, on the
streets you'd see the occasional old Chinese man in a gray suit and brown hat
going to get a haircut, but mainly the neighborhood, like the country of
Jamaica, existed primarily for the amusement of white people. "Oh look,
a Chinese hamburger stand!" you'd hear. The pagoda roof on an outdoor
payphone was adorable. Lanny said his first sentence to me since we had
boarded the subway. "You ever had Sesh-wan cuisine?" I thought he had sneezed. "What?" I
asked. "Sesh-wan. Most amazing food you'll ever
have." I had no idea what he was talking about, but he was clearly
pleased that he did. "It's a place in China." "Oh. As in the Brecht play. The Good
Woman of Sze-chu-an." I said the word in three syllables,
the way I'd been taught by the same English professor who'd personally
introduced me to the word frenulum. Lanny
frowned. "I thought Brecht was German or something." "A good German," I advised. We turned a
corner into Doyers Street, which curved beyond our sight line. "My favorite street in Manhattan," he
commented. ""You know why? It looks like a movie set." It did,
but I remarked that, other than the Chiriese neon signs and the shop windows
featuring gnarled medicinal roots and gnarled roasted pork carcasses, I couldn't
tell just why. He explained for my edification: "Every
backlot wide shot in every Hollywood movie that's set in New York shows
either a T-shaped intersection or a curved street. That's because if you
showed a real intersection, you'd have to show block after city block going
back to infinity. So when I grew up, to me the real Manhattan—meaning the one
in the movies—was full of T-shaped streets where gangsters' cars come
screeching around the corner. . . or curved streets where some guy standing
by a lamppost casts a long, arcing shadow across the wet pavement." He trotted up three steps into an unpromising
canteen named Szechuan Garden. Its decor was a cross between that of my high
school cafeteria and a travel agency for slow boats to Mandalay. Lanny pulled off his wig and greeted the obvious
owner, who had been standing by a counter in a wash-and-wear short-sleeved
shirt and slacks, picking his teeth. "Oh, Missah Morris!" the
restaurateur cried with an accent and jargon and elated demeanor I fully
suspected he employed because Caucasians expected it. "Me so happy see
you. Got picture you up on wall, see? That make it 'Great Wall'!" It was
surely not the first time he had said this. He indicated an eight-by-ten
glossy of Lanny over the register, autographed, "Thanks, Lee, for a HOT
time in Chinatown!" Lanny nodded, introduced me, and murmured a food
order to Lee, who showed us to a large table toward the back of the room and
scurried off to the kitchen. Lanny explained that he needed to save his voice a
little for "The Star-Spangled Banner" (which he described as the
worst waltz ever written) and apologized in advance for making me do most of
the talking. Of course, I was eager to talk about anything under the sun as
long as it wasn't about myself since I was already completely compromised on
that topic. This led us into a strangely abstract and esoteric monologue on
my part, punctuated now and then by Lanny's "Oh really?" New lovers
talk only about themselves. (This is one of the great appeals of a new love.)
But no one listening to our conversation would have mistaken us for lovers,
nor should they have. I'd heard that the reason for the cooking style of
Chinese food, the ingredients diced small in advance to cook in a flash over
high heat spread across the width of a wok, was due to the lack of firewood
in China. "You had to make the most of the heat while you had it. The
verity of this (as well as Lanny's priority as a customer) was demonstrated
by the fact that within minutes, our dishes were being brought to our table,
presented not in the usual silver tureens with silver tops but simply on open
oval plates. And the dishes contained something I had never before seen in a
Chinese entre: the color red. Not the usual pale gray-green-white-brown
palette of every Cantonese-American restaurant's dishes (the principle
ingredients of which were always comstarch and bamboo shoots with a little
julienned meat sprinkled on top) but livid, troubling colors. Red bell
peppers, strange sienna husks I could not identify, blood-orange peel alongside
the shrapnel of corrugated cabbage—and peanuts, for God's sake! In the midst of all this, I found myself saying
three words hitherto unspoken by me in a Chinese restaurant: "I smell
lamb." Lanny nodded. "That's lamb in tea sauce, this
is twice-cooked pork with shredded pickled cabbage, and this, my friend, is
kung-pao chicken." He looked at me blissfully. "I really envy you.
You're about to meet a whole bunch of flavors you've never tasted
before." The next half hour was a truly hallucinogenic
experience. Flavors cascaded and tumbled around my mouth like a troupe of
Chinese acrobats and fire jugglers performing a noisy circus there. Salt and
tang and sharp and deep—1 found myself forking white rice into my mouth
directly from the individual bowl provided, using it like a sorbet between
courses in a swank restaurant, restoring my tongue to a semblance of
neutrality between bites, rather than making the rice into a bland flatbed
for one's entries, as was the American custom. "Well?" asked Lanny with a grin. We'd not
talked much once the food was served, other than my fevered oohs and aahs. I
felt as if he'd brought me to an orgy dedicated solely to my pleasure. He
intently studied the rapturous expressions on my face. It was sexual, a bit
perverse, and thoroughly enjoyable. These men, I thought. And by "these men,"
I meant Lanny and Vince. I
wondered what it would be like to spend time with either in a normal place.
Or would a normal place instantly be made abnormal simply by their presence? Lee approached the table -with a long plate upon
which lay a nearly two-pound lobster, its most abundant locations of meat
skillfully plumed up and blooming from within its cracked and unfolded shell,
drowned in a livid red sauce that made the carapace of the lobster modestly
rosy by comparison. The sauce was flecked throughout with tons of diced
scallion. Lee announced, "I make my special lobster in
chile sauce with tangerine peel for you and your lovely lady friend, Missah
Morris." To my surprise, I heard Lanny snap: "You
shouldn't have done that, Lee. I don't eat lobster. I'm a Jew." Lee looked bewildered. "But . . . you eat
pork." He gestured to the shredded-cabbage dish Lanny had already ladled
onto his own plate. "I'm a New York Jew, we get dispensation from
Milton Berle. I'm allowed spareribs and meatball-parm wedges, but I don't eat
shrimp or lobster. They're roaches on plutonium, Lee, they're disgusting.
I'll pay for the dish, but take it away." Lee shrugged. "If you don't want it, I'm not
going to put it on the bill," he said in absolutely unbroken English. He
carried away the dish, slighted. Lanny looked back at me with a wisp of contrition
in his face. "Sorry. Forgot to ask—maybe you love lobster." "Well, not after the analogy to roaches I
don't," I said with what I hoped was a wry smile. "Sorry," he said again. Today I'd been waiting for the slightest sign of
vulnerability in Lanny, and this was perhaps as close as I might get. "I
feel sorry for you, actually. If you complain to the manager of a restaurant,
you're not some bastard at table five. You're Lanny Morris. You have no cloak
of anonymity, lf you buy rubbers at a drugstore, the man behind the counter
will spend the rest of his life talking about how he once sold Lanny Morris
rubbers. I've read lots of books about the lives of famous people, but what
would be truly interesting would be a book on what it's like to forever
relinquish all anonymity. The way you've done." I placed some food in my
mouth and intentionally spoke with my mouth full to make myself sound even
more casual. "You ever think about writing a book?" Lanny
drank some tea. "When I'm dead." I ventured that this sounded moderately
challenging, and he explained, "No, I mean, if I ever wrote the book I'd
like to write, it would have to be published after I died. When I wouldn't
care what anybody thought about me. Man, that would be something. To write a
book where I just. . . told the truth. Not put a nice face on
everything." He signaled to Lee for a fresh pot of tea. "Can you
imagine? Like, I've met four presidents and the truth is, each one seemed to
me totally out of it. As if they hardly knew what was going on. Like meeting
the principal of a high school where the kids are smoking hash and getting
knocked up, and he's in a blue suit talking about young minds. Even JFK left
me unimpressed. Felt like I was with the boss's son." "But you don't think you could say that." "Not if I was planning to live in this
country. I don't think Edith Piaf was such a great singer. I'd get killed for
saying that. Or that Marilyn Monroe didn't act any better after she got with
Lee Strasberg than before. Oh God, just saying what I really felt. That would
be something. Having to be a nice guy is the toughest job in the world when
you're not." "You don't think you're a nice guy?" "You think you're a nice girl?" he
parried with the inflection of a Jewish mother. I bit down upon what I
thought was a piece of lamb crackling and was immediately assaulted by hot
spears of pain in my mouth, not unlike the radiating red lightning bolts from
the Anbesol ad in the subway. I gasped and reached for a tumbler of water. "Oh, no, you don't eat those, honey," he
admonished. "Those are dried chile peppers." My eyes streamed and
my nose began to run as if I'd been servicing a proportionately endowed
basketball star. "Here, just eat more of the rice, and—" He
summoned Lee with a wave of his hand. "Club soda, quick." (It had
been discovered in recent times that all things were solved by club soda.
Stains, damage to silk, tumors . . . "Could you bring me some club soda,
please?") Lee returned with a glass of sparkling water, which I downed.
The cold and carbonation bit into the burn in a helpful way. "I should have warned you," Lanny
apologized, pouring tea for us very much in the manner of a nice guy.
"You know why Chinese teacups have no handles? Because the Chinese are
smarter than we are. If the cup is too hot to hold with your fingers, then
the tea is too hot to drink. But what do we do? We put a handle on the
teacup, so we can't tell how hot the tea is. That way we get to pour boiling
hot tea right into our mouths, cauterizing our tongues." As my mouth still burned from the chile peppers to
which he had so very nicely introduced me, I entertained the thought that
perhaps men like Lanny and Vince were cups with handles, who would nicely
stroll you down unreal streets and feed you full of dreamy food until you
allowed yourself to be nicely manhandled by them and suddenly felt the surge
of their boiling brew scalding your mouth. But I had a rule about going three
deep on any metaphor and promptly exited the thought as we were brought
orange segments for dessert, instead of the standard lump of melting ice
cream in a small silver bowl. Two fortune cookies were nestled among the
orange slices and Lanny invited me to pick one, which I did. Lanny took the
other and cracked it open. I asked him what his fortune said. "Well,
it's supposed to be a joke, but. . ." He pushed it across the tablecloth to me. Its red
ink was no doubt intended to read "Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow
you diet." But it had been printed off center to the right and the t
in diet was missing. Lanny smiled. "What about yours?" I cracked mine open and tried to locate the slip of
paper that revealed my fate, but disconcertingly, I discovered that the
cookie was empty. One interpretation of the title is finding
the truth where it is; another is pointing to where the “truth” can really be
a lie. Read
Where the Truth Lies and enjoy some fine writing and a story that unveils
the consequences of self-interest in relationships. Steve Hopkins, October 28, 2003 |
|||
|
|
|||
|
ã 2003 Hopkins and Company, LLC The
recommendation rating for this book appeared in the November 2003
issue of Executive
Times URL
for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Where
the Truth Lies.htm For
Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins
& Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
|||
