Free Playland by John Gregory Dunne

I would prefer not to give. “I’ve slept with thirty-one men since my divorce. Once each. I mean, one weekend, one Super Bowl week, one night. I think every one of them had an open-return ticket. In the travel business, you tend to meet people with return tickets.”
    I wondered how many of those weekends she had spent at Humacao or Cozumel or that Club Med somewhere.
    “They never call the next time they come back through town. Adultery on the road.” I thought she was careering toward commitment, and her inability to attract it, perhaps even to give it. In my experience, conversations about commitment usually ended with tears, or recriminations, usually both. “Do you think I’m a slut?”
    “Of course not.” A discussion I would rather not have in a terrace condominium in a suburb of Detroit whose name I could not remember. As I had not remembered the name of the condo’s owner. I should have bailed out when I was asked my preference in condoms. Unlubricated was what she had bought, it turned out, lubricity not being her problem. And she had bought a dozen. Either she was expecting me to stay a long time, or her motto was
Semper Paratus
. Was I number thirty-one or thirty-two? And how could she remember so exactly? Did she keep a dossier on all of us? And know the cities we returned to?
    “I don’t think so either. Although I think I’d have a hard time proving it if I ever got involved in a custody fight. Which I won’t. Harry has the kids every Christmas and for three weeks every summer. He and Patty’ve gone skiing the last two Christmases, and left them with me, and he’s never kept them the full three weeks in the summer.”
    I thought, I am on information overload. Whatever happened to name, rank, serial number. Harry and Patty. Two new players. The ex-husband and new wife. Or maybe live-in?
    Lily felt me again. That was more like it. Or should have been. No luck. Suddenly she sat up, leaned over, and kissed me on the forehead. Her voice was insistent. “Would you please go? Just call a cab and go. Go. Please go.”

    It was not until later that I thought putting on your clothes in such a situation is at least as humiliating as taking them off.
    But:
    Had Lily White not told me to go, please go, I would not have been in that taxi, at nearly five o’clock in the morning,sitting behind a hopelessly lost Chaldean driver, a stranger in a strange land, a stranger to its customs and its language and especially to the geography of the city where he was plying his trade, illegally so, of course, without a green card and using the hack license of his wife’s cousin, violating in the process God knows how many ordinances in the transportation codes of metropolitan Detroit and Wayne County (the storyteller always accumulating stories and coincidences to explicate and preserve the moment); then, to repeat, I would not have been in that taxi out near Hamtramck, the cab heading in a direction exactly opposite that in which I wanted to be going, when at nearly five o’clock in the morning it hit a dog, a mangy mongrel dog that belonged to Melba Mae Toolate.
    “You murdering asshole” were the first words Blue Tyler ever spoke to me.

B LUE

    “… one of the most mysterious and potent figures in the history of cinema … she was that rare performer, and certainly the only child, to penetrate to the heart of screen acting … a wanton presence provoked by the idea of being seen.”
    —Barton Turnbull,
Sight & Sound

I
    M eeting cute” was the way Chuckie O’Hara described the way I met Blue Tyler. That most basic and most enduring (some might even say endearing) of Hollywood clichés. Meet cute, you save time and eliminate dialogue. Example: A man and a woman meet at a pajama counter. He only wants the bottom, she only wants the top. They share the pair, complications ensue, and when they finally make it to bed a hundred and twenty script pages later, the soundtrack plays “But if, baby, I’m the