Even When You Lie to Me (19 page)

One Saturday, while I was coming back from an errand my mother had sent me on, I spotted his car in the parking lot of the community center. I knew it was his from the license plate number, which I had memorized long before, and the way the black trim on the passenger-side door slumped downward like a line charting a bad stock.

“Ha,” I said aloud. “So he does swim there.”

I was stopped at a red light, and I watched the front door of the building, wondering if he was inside.

“I bet he’s swimming now,” I said. I tapped my fingers on the steering wheel. I laughed. “This is stupid.”

The car behind me honked. I looked into the rearview mirror and saw that the driver behind me was making a
what are you doing?
gesture.

“What the hell,” I said, and pulled into the parking lot.

I turned off the engine and sat there for a few minutes, listening to the radiator tick. Occasionally people walked past; the drumbeat of footsteps seemed magnified in the cottony silence of the car. I was sure they were all looking through the windows at me and knew what I was there for. I realized I had to either get out or leave, because the longer I sat there, the creepier I felt.

I walked up and peered through the front door. There was a reception desk in the lobby, and Katie from my English class was standing behind it. She was flipping listlessly through the pages of a glossy magazine.

She looked up when I came in, and smiled in a perfunctory but not unfriendly way.

“Hi,” I said. “This is going to sound stupid, but I’m looking for a friend of mine and I wondered if you could let me into the pool.”

She frowned. “Are you a member?”

“Um, no,” I said.

“Like I care.” She grinned. “Yeah, go ahead.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Drummond’s in there,” she said as I was walking away.

“Oh,” I said. “Thanks for letting me know.”

“No problem,” she said. She raised an eyebrow at me and then turned back to her magazine.

The pool entrance was down a hallway and through two sets of double doors. A balcony ran around the outside of the pool, overlooking it from the floor above. The damp air clung to me as I watched from the corner, listening to squeaking and splashing and the occasional squalling laugh.

Then I saw him. He was at the edge of the pool, ready to dive in. He wasn’t wearing a Speedo after all; he had on short brown swimming trunks that sat low on his hips and traced the curve of his ass. His torso was much more muscular than I had expected it to be. He looked good.

I’d been trying not to think about how awful it would be if he didn’t, but now I let myself feel it: how pathetic he would have seemed; how embarrassed for him I would have been. It felt safe to think it now that it hadn’t come to pass.

He dove into the water in a clean arc and came up like a seal with his hair plastered back. I had never liked swimming myself, so I hadn’t realized how graceful it was: something about the explosive kick of his legs, the smooth muscular pull of his arms, the rhythmic power of each stroke, the way his body coiled and sprang open again at the end of a lap.

I watched him as he cut through the water like a blade slicing through a seam, back and forth, back and forth. After a while—I had lost track of time by that point—he reached the edge and pulled himself out in one quick powerful movement. He walked to a chair and started drying himself off with a towel. His chest hair looked darker now that it was wet. I followed the water’s path down his torso, until it reached the band of his shorts. They were so low that I could see the indentations on his hips that led down to his groin.

“All right,” I said. “Enough.”

When I walked back to the front, Katie was texting someone. She ignored me until I was almost past her, and then she said, “You find your friend?”

“Kind of,” I said.

I heard her laugh as I pushed through the doors.

I told myself I would leave after that, but I didn’t. Instead I hung around in the parking lot, pretending to text someone. He came outside a few minutes later. His hair was still wet and slicked back, and he was wearing the brown leather jacket I loved. He looked so handsome it made my lungs hurt. I watched him leave from a safe distance, wondering whether I could plausibly pretend to bump into him. He walked around the side of the building and leaned against the brick wall, digging for something in his pocket. He extracted it with practiced flair: it was a lighter and a half-empty pack of cigarettes.

“No!” I said aloud.

He tapped a cigarette from the pack, lit it, and took a long, lingering drag. I had to admit he did look
hot—nonchalant,
somehow, and older. He let smoke pool out of his mouth and looked into the distance. Unbelievably hot, actually.

I shook myself and ran over.

“What are you doing?” I said when I got close.

He was in the middle of taking another drag, but when he saw me, he froze. “Oh shit,” he said. Smoke curled between the words.

“You
smoke
?”

“No,” he said.

“I don’t believe this.” I put my hands on my hips.

“I don’t know, Charlie, I feel like ‘hello’ is more of a classic greeting.”

“I thought you said you quit in college!”

“Listen, I’ve been under a lot of stress late— Hold on a minute, why are you here?”

“I work out,” I said.

He eyed me as he took a final drag on his cigarette.

“I’m thinking about it,” I said. “Anyway, you smoke.”

He funneled the last of the smoke out of the side of his mouth and ground the butt into the wall. “Not anymore,” he said. “
Some
thing put me off.” He widened his eyes at me, but there was a teasing lilt to his voice.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Ironic that you’d be the one to stop me,” he said.

“Why’s that ironic?”

He shook his head, looking amused. “No reason. You know anywhere around here that’s good for lunch? I’m starving.”

“Yeah,” I said. “The Horseme—shoe. It’s five minutes from here.”

“Let’s go, then.”

I paused. “I’m…coming with you?”

“It’s the least you can do after you shamed me into quitting, I think.”

“Okay,” I said. “You’ll follow me?”

“As ever,” he said.

It was odd letting him tag behind me, catching angles of his face in my rearview mirror, knowing I could have led him anywhere I wanted to, for a while at least. It was even odder being in public with him, not just because I was worried someone would see us together—a lot of people from school went there—but because it threw him out of context. I was used to seeing him talk to students and sometimes to other teachers, but I’d never seen him smile at a hostess or ask what was in the meat loaf (“You’d be better off staying ignorant,” I said) or just exist outside of our school. It was almost embarrassing, to see him not be in charge, not know exactly what he was doing—even if it was just to ask an ordinary question or exchange a pleasantry with a waitress, things I realized only later he must do every day when I wasn’t around—and I wasn’t sure whether I liked seeing him this way or whether I couldn’t stand it.

“So,” he said after we’d ordered, “what’s up?” He leaned back and rested his elbows on the edge of the booth. He looked far too comfortable for my liking, as if this wasn’t weird for him too.

I fiddled with my straw, which was still in its paper wrapper. “Other than you being a secret smoker?”

“What can I say? I missed coughing up black tar every morning.”

“Seriously,” I said, “why would you do that to yourself?”

“I’ll tell you when you’re older,” he said.

“It couldn’t be to look cool, because you didn’t.”

“Honesty is not one of your better qualities, Charlie.”

“It can’t be part of your training regimen.”

“It’s actually an essential element of my training,” he said. “Otherwise my lungs become too capacious from swimming. I was actually blowing houses down when I whistled.”

“I think it’s because of Ms. Anders,” I said. “Peer pressure.”

“Tracey smokes?” he asked. “I didn’t realize.”

“Yes,
Tracey
smokes,” I said.

His eyes glinted. “Not a fan of her, huh?”

I pushed down the wrapper and stuck the straw in my drink. “What makes you think that?”

He shrugged elaborately. “Just a wild guess.”

“I’ll tell you why I don’t like her if you tell me why you started smoking again.”

“Ah,” he said. “We seem to have reached a stalemate.”

Our waitress arrived with our food, relieving me of the need to respond. We chatted a little while we ate—even watching him eat was strange—but mostly he was quiet, apparently lost in thought, though I caught him looking at me more than once. I wondered whether he was regretting this.

“How’s the meat loaf?” I asked.

“It tastes like the inside of a mattress,” he said.

“Hmm. Must be the good chef today.” I looked at the counter, where a bearded man was slumped above his plate like an old jacket thrown over a chair. “Are you sure you’re all right? You’re being, I don’t know, worryingly unobnoxious.”

He smiled. “I’m fine, I promise,” he said. “The smoking’s just…I don’t know. Maybe I’m having a midlife crisis.” He laughed softly, like he thought he sounded ridiculous.

“You’re a little young for a midlife crisis, aren’t you?”

“An existential crisis, then. Something profound.”

What kinds of problems did adults have? Unfathomable things, full of lust and envy and rage—all the sins, probably. He had a whole life outside us, almost certainly filled with sex in grubby bathrooms and arguments where plates smashed against the wall and thrillingly dark depressions and
Doonesbury
and mortgages. The number of things I didn’t know, hadn’t experienced, seemed like a gulf I’d never be able to bridge.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, though I knew he wouldn’t tell me.

He rubbed his eyes. They were bloodshot from the chlorine, veined like marble. “It’s not important,” he said. “But thank you for asking. I’m more curious how you’re feeling about Oberlin.”

“Oh,” I said. “It seems very far away.”
Please stop talking about college,
I wanted to say.

“Well, you still have a few months left to enjoy the humorous stylings of Sean et al.” He balled up a napkin and put it next to his plate.

“Your class is what makes me worried,” I said. “I’m starting to realize how much I don’t know.”

“All intellectually curious people feel that way,” he said. “Only incurious people feel comfortable with how little they know.”

“You’re confident about your intelligence,” I said.

“Charlie, I’m an idiot. That’s the only thing I’m confident about.”

“You have whole passages of
King Lear
memorized.”

“I also have the Ewok song from the end of
Return of the Jedi
memorized.”

“The ‘Yub Nub’ song?”

His eyes lit up. “Yes! How do you know that?”

“My dad’s a dork,” I said.

He laughed. “I only have it memorized because I’m reasonably sure it’s the nadir of human existence. Worse than Las Vegas.” He tapped his finger on the table for emphasis. “But the thing is, the more you learn, the more you realize how much there is that you’ll never know. The point of education is not to teach you everything there is to learn but to teach you
how
to learn—how to interpret meaning.”

“Good meaning or bad meaning?”

“Stories create meaning,” he said. “The only meaning anything has is what you give it.”

“Hmm.” I traced the map of the states on my paper place mat. “Can I ask you something weird?”

He raised his eyebrows.

“Do you ever think about her?”

“About who?” he asked. He was smiling, like he was ready to be pleased at whatever I said next.

“Rachel,” I said.

He kept smiling, laughed even, but the worry lines between his eyebrows folded in. “Rachel? Why do you…Why would that occur to you?”

“I just wondered,” I said.

“I’m surprised you even remember that.” He looked away, out the window at the gray parking lot. “No, not really. It’s not exactly a part of my life I want to dwell on.”