Empire of Lies (2 page)

So it gave me a lot to think about. On the one hand, I thought about breaking the heart and losing the trust of the woman I loved; about shattering the idol of my two sons who looked to me for their image of manly strength and integrity; and about disintegrating the emotional universe of my daughter which rested primly, like a ruby on a turtle's shell, atop her parents' affection for each other. On the other hand, I thought about twenty golden minutes with Tanya, with the youth and heat of her flesh against my flesh. Twenty yahoo-screaming minutes with those glossed lips parting to gasp at the force of my urgent entry, until our mutual climax which, who knows, might never end, might never dump me from its height into the black tar pit of shame and remorse. My family or Tanya. It was a tough choice to make.

Maybe women will call me shallow for saying that, but that's women for you. Men wrestle with these matters at a deeper level than women know. In the end, though, a deal is a deal. Cathy had lived up to her part of it. She'd been a full-time mother, a dedicated homemaker, a wife of endless tenderness and surrender. I adored her. And—yes—a deal's a deal.

So bye-bye, what's-your-name—Tanya—bye-bye. I avoided her for the rest of the summer. No more of her quick, gentle touches. No more imaginary lint on my chest, no more massages. And hold the flattery, thanks, just go type up the application forms and get me a cup of coffee while you're at it.

She ended up sleeping with Stan Halsey instead. He was one of our environmental-impact experts, a thirty-five-year-old idealist with a social-worker wife and a brand-new baby girl. By the time Tanya went back to college, Stan was living in a motel, trying to grovel his way out of a separation. All the same, he was a lucky schmuck for those twenty minutes, I had to admit.

Well, it's a world of choices, that's the thing. I'd always have my fantasies. Plus I still had my wife.

And that's what I was musing about when the whole thing started. Sitting on the cushioned chair, on the brick patio, watching my kids play in the backyard.

At some point then, the wife in question brought me a glass of lemonade and kissed me.

"What the hell is this game anyway?" I asked her, tilting the glass toward the kids on the lawn. "I mean, they never actually seem to play it. They've just been making up the rules for the past half hour."

"I think that
is
the game," Cathy said. She sat down in the chair next to me, one leg tucked up under her.

I sipped my lemonade. "Strange creatures."

"Our children?"

"You think if we put them in cages out front, people'd pay a dollar a pop to see them?"

"If we include the Cavanaughs' kids, they'd probably pay us a dollar just for putting them in cages."

I laughed. "The get-rich-quick scheme we've been looking for."

"Has anyone ever told you that you have the nicest laugh in the world?" Cathy said. "I love that about you. The way you laugh all the time."

"Ah, you're just saying that to get me to have sex with you."

"Speaking of which, the kids are all going over to the Matthews house later for pizza and a video. We should have a couple of hours to ourselves."

"I'm going to run you to ground like a cheetah running down a deer."

"Ooh," she said.

"Like a panther. I may even wear my panther costume."

"You know your panther costume drives me wild."

We held hands and drank lemonade and watched our children for a while in companionable silence.

That, in brief, was my life before the End of Civilization as We Know It. And I loved it. I loved her, Cathy, and to hell with all the Tanyas of the world, let them go. I loved our children. I loved our neighborhood, Horizon Hill, the Hill for short. Big yards, Craftsman houses, lake views. Friendly, mostly like-minded people, hardworking dads, housewife moms, not too many divorces, lots of kids. Most of us were white and Christian, I guess, but we had a good number of Jews mixed in and a few blacks as well. In fact, I think we were a little overfond of them—our Jews and blacks—a little overfriendly to them sometimes because we wanted them to know they were part of the gang, that it was our values that made us what we were, not the other stuff. It was a place of goodwill—that's what I'm saying. I was very happy on the Hill.

Now, after a few moments, Cathy spoke again. It was the last thing she said to me before the phone rang, before the lies and the violence and all the craziness started.

She said, "Have you decided yet what you're going to do about the house?"

It was my mother's house she was talking about. My mother—my poor old crazy mother—had finally died about eight months before. Her will had just cleared probate, and now her house had to be sold so my brother and I could split the money. Someone had to go back east and clean the place out and arrange to put it on the market. Cathy's question: Was I going to go now, or wait for my brother to turn up so he could help me?

We'll never know what I would've answered. Even I don't know. Just then, the phone rang inside the house.

"I'll get it," I said.

My children's voices, the sough and birdsong of the world outside, were muffled as the sliding glass patio door whisked and thudded shut behind me. I walked two steps across our back room, our family room, to where the phone sat beside the stereo. I picked up the handset before the third ring.

"Hello?"

"Is this Jason Harrow?" It was a woman, a voice I didn't recognize.

"Yes?"

I heard her give a quick breath, a sort of bitter laugh. "It's funny to hear you talk after all this time."

"I'm sorry. Who is this?" I still didn't know. My mind was racing, trying to figure it out.

"This is Lauren Wilmont," she said. "Formerly Lauren Goldberg. Formerly your girlfriend, if that's what I was."

It was a strange feeling. Standing there with the phone in my hand, with the family room around me and that voice I barely remembered speaking in my ear. My eyes flitted over the sofa and the stuffed chair; over the rug that was a blended tweed so it would hide juice stains and pizza and soda stains. There was a 36-inch flat-screen Sony TV in one corner. Shelves with board games stacked on them; Monopoly, Pictionary, Clue. Some of Nathan's cars and a couple of Terry's dolls were lying around. Outside, through the glass doors, I could see the tops of the kids' heads moving at the bottom of the slope of the backyard. I saw Cathy, in the foreground, turning in her chair, pointing a finger at her chest and raising her eyebrows to ask:
Is the call for me?
I smiled thinly. I shook my head no.

And all the while that voice on the phone was talking on:

"You have to come back east, Jason. You have to help me. Please. Come back. I need you."

I had been honest with my wife about Lauren. I hadn't told her all the details, but I'd told her as much as she wanted to hear. She knew about The Scene and That Night in Bedford. Sometimes in church she saw me make a fist, and she knew I was holding fast to Christ's hand, and she knew why. I had been honest with her about all that.

I didn't really start lying to her until after I'd hung up the phone, until I'd settled back into the patio chair beside her.

And she said, "Who was it?"

And I said, "Just someone from the office with a question."

"You'd think they could give you your weekend, at least."

"It was nothing. What were we talking about?"

"About your mother's house..."

"About the house—right," I said. I gazed down the slope of grass to the children playing around the swings. They were laughing loudly, chasing each other around in circles. The Frisbee was lying in the grass, and as far as I could tell, the elaborate structure of their game had already collapsed into hilarious confusion.

I sat and gazed at them as if I were considering my answer, but my mind was blank.

And then I said, "I think I'll go back east. I might as well. I might as well just go and get the whole thing over with."

The jet dropped out of low clouds and there was Manhattan, the dense skyline thrusting toward the mist. I gazed out the porthole, watching the spires sail past. I thought of Lauren down there somewhere. What could she want? I wondered—wondered for the umpteenth time. What could she want and why call me about it? She wouldn't tell me over the phone, and I couldn't stop trying to figure it out. Was it money? That was the only thing I could think of, the only thing that made sense. She must need money. She must've heard I'd done well and figured I could help her. It had to be that—or why call me?

After all these years, why call me?

My gaze focused on the Empire State Building—and then went beyond it over the undulating fall of stone to the island's southern tip, to the place where I had seen her last. My mind went back to that day and to all the days before it until, as the plane descended, I was lost in another life—a life that used to be my life.

I said I would tell you everything, so here it is:

When I was twenty-eight, I went a little mad. There were good enough reasons for it, I guess. My mother's illness, my father's suicide, my own guilt about both because of my discovery of the Spiral Notebooks. My brother's cruelty had twisted me. The company I kept had led me astray. There were plenty of reasons.

Still, in the end, it was me, my thoughts, my actions, my choices that sent me down the road into darkness until I became sick—morally sick; lost and mad and desperately unhappy.

It was seventeen years before all this began, before that autumn afternoon on the patio and the End of Civilization as We Know It. Picture me handsome, edgy, dripping with urban sophistication. I smoked in a curt, defiant way. I was quick-witted and funny. I had a good line in irony and sneering left-wing cant.

All in all, I would say I was deceptively presentable back then, considering what a mess I was inwardly. I dressed conservatively, in a pressed, preppy style. I thought it made a piquant contrast with my opinions and my job. I was an investigative reporter for the
Soho Star,
a radical weekly with an office on lower Broadway. I spent my working hours hunting down obnoxious landlords, highlighting cultural offenses against blacks and homosexuals, and seeking out corruption in any official who did not believe in the state as a sort of Nanny Robin Hood, stealing from the rich to fund its infantilizing care for the poor. I liked to claim that my creased khakis and my button-down shirt, my navy blue jacket and school tie were a sort of clever disguise to help me mingle with the ruling class and get the goods on them. But I'm afraid the ugly truth was: I liked the way I looked in that outfit. And the upshot was I appeared in those days as every inch the solid pillar of society I would one day come to be.

But oh, my soul.

I was miserable. I was miserable and I was proud of it, the way intelligent young people often are. I wore my inner pain like a badge of honor. It showed I was too sensitive for the harsh world, too honest for its corruption, too independent for its iron chains of conformity. Oh, I had all sorts of ego-polishing notions about my unhappy self. And I had theories, too. What, after all, is a depressed intellectual without his theories? I can't reconstruct the
details of them now. It would be too boring to try. But there was a lot of Nietzsche involved and Freud, too—oh, and Marx. That was it, my trinity: Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx. Which is to say I believed that power, sex, and money explained all human interactions, all history, and all the world. To pretend anything else, I thought, was rank hypocrisy, the worst of intellectual sins. Faith was a scam, Hope was a lie, Love was an illusion. Power, sex, and money—these three—were the real, the only stuff of life.

And the greatest of these, of course, was sex.

I don't remember how I worked all this out philosophically. But for some reason, the other two persons of my trinity—power and money—were things to be disdained. They were motive forces for
them,
you know, for society's evil masters, the greedy, the corrupt, the makers of orthodoxy.

Sex, though—sex was for
us.
It was the expressive medium of the liberated, the unconventional, the unbowed, the Natural Man. When it came to sex, there was nothing—nothing consensual—that could repel or alienate such enlightened folk as we. Anyone who questioned that doctrine or looked askance at some sexual practice, anyone who even wondered aloud if perhaps, like any other appetite—for food, say, or alcohol or material goods—our sexual desire might occasionally require discipline or restraint, was painfully irrelevant, grossly out of the loop, unhip in the extreme. No, no. A free man, a natural man, a new man—so my theories went—threw off hypocrisy and explored his sexuality to its depths.

My depths, unfortunately, had been forged in the fire of a very unhappy youth. Rage at my mother's fate, confusion at my father's, a wellspring of pent violence opened by my brother's bullying brutality all played a part. And when I really delved into the nature of my desires—and how, given my theories, could I do otherwise?—I discovered I had a simmering penchant for cruelty. This had to be
developed—so I decreed in the name of liberation and integrity—not to mention the fact that it turned me on.

Which brings me to Lauren Goldberg.

Lauren was the child of a teacher-slash-filmmaker and the paralegal-slash-wannabe-artist whom he divorced. The years of their marriage, of course, were Lauren's golden era. Till the age of eight, she could trust and believe in family and love and the gentle guidance of the teachers at her private school. After that, her world was all recriminations and disillusionment and shifting sand—plus the cold chaos of public education when the parental breakup sent the family budget to hell. The contrast between these two periods was the source of—or at least the excuse for—all Lauren's bitterness and all her yearning.

She had long black hair, a small, thin, nicely proportioned body, a harshly attractive face with her father's aquiline Jewish features and her mother's white German-Irish skin. She was young, like me. Smoked, like me. Saw sneeringly, like me, into the grimy heart of the pseudo-immaculate American dream or whatever it was we were sneeringly seeing into the heart of. She worked as a photographer's assistant. Her ambition was to become a photographer herself.