Liar (16 page)

China settled in for the flight to Prince Rupert to join Sam for a romantic interlude. China didn’t feel very romantic. Normally she loved to feel the plane gathering speed, the pressure of the acceleration in her body, the relief when the plane burst free of the earth’s gravity. She felt no pleasure this time. All she felt was the weight of Sam’s baggage in her bones, slamming her into her seat. She was surprised that the plane achieved liftoff.

The long absences from Sam caused trouble because she couldn’t keep an eye on him. There was no sex to diffuse her anger and smooth her confusion. They also got used to not being with each other, cut away the ties in order to carry on separate lives. Then when they came together it took a couple of weeks to become accustomed to each other’s stuff again. It was harder for China because she had more stuff. She had her stuff plus Sam’s stuff, the stuff he refused to deal with. Instead of lightening his load, he added to it. Either that, or repetition had made the same load heavier.

Sam was so good at hiding himself. China rarely saw him depressed. She wondered what he did for weeks on the road by himself. Did he lock himself in the motel room with the TV and his horrible thoughts, or did he not think at all? He didn’t read, other than newspapers and Fortune Magazine. Did he spend all day fiddling with the computer? Maybe he had drunken orgies. How was she to know? He said he was faithful, that he just turned desire off, as she did. Did he lie where his desire was concerned too? Did he lie about everything, or just most things? When he went to the office to work, did he actually work? His partner didn’t seem to think so. He did finish some things. Won a few cases. Lost a few. Had Larry constantly taken up the slack and finished what Sam was good at starting?

If only she knew what was an actual, bold-faced lie, and what was merely an evasion, or partial truth. Sam usually left a morsel of truth in each lie so that it was hard to get the picture, blurred as it was around the edges. He managed to confuse her quite often, especially when she had no way of checking, short of hiring a detective to follow him on his trips and into the courtroom. Did he laugh at her, secretly pleased that he kept her running in circles? Or did he actually stumble around in the dark, fooling himself as much as he fooled others? Did he also sometimes not fool himself and sit there in the dark, depressed and immobilized by the unknown, the not wanting to know?

China thought she would go mad trying to figure him out, make excuses, keep loving him. Constant forgiving erodes the heart. She was in a perpetual state of anguish keeping her discoveries in the journal a secret, and living with Sam publically. Was this why she could never fit in, feel comfortable? Did everyone know what she did to live with Sam? Did they all do the same, but differently, to live with each other? Is that what alcohol was all about? Keeping the truth from themselves and each other, numbing the brain, confusion becoming a welcome way of living? Much better than facing the demons and tearing apart the home, the pictures on the wall, exploding the family. Was denial the only weapon they understood? Did they not have journals to confide in?

Here was a weapon they could purchase for a few dollars. Much cheaper than a bottle of booze. China wondered what she was doing with her daily chronicle. Amassing the evidence? Keeping track of the descent into madness, or the descent into divorce, or both, so that when it happened, or something happened, she’d know the reason why? And when she knew the reason why, she’d never do it again. Right? China sighed with relief. At least now she knew she wasn’t descending into madness.

China wanted to believe that love would bring her to safe harbours but too often the light in the distance was a robber-pirate luring her into danger, onto rocks and reefs, to plunder, take everything she owned until nothing was left but driftwood and trust betrayed.

Sometimes the awfulness of her thoughts was frightening. The whole of Sam looked great, especially when dressed in a business suit. But the pieces, the irreconcilable pieces of him were nasty little trolls ready to bite her flesh from her bones. China questioned her image of Sam. Did his inability, or unwillingness, to tell the truth colour all her feelings about him? It didn’t in the beginning, but layer after layer of disappointments changed the colour of the first disappointment. A mere shadow had now become a huge, dark, threatening shape and her critical eye and tongue constantly reminded him that he wasn’t who he said he was. Did she terrify him with her insights, just as he terrified her with his inability to have one introspective moment? If he did have such a moment, did he bury it immediately?

Sam made no connections. He didn’t thread past, present and future thoughts or actions together. He didn’t seem to understand that the consequences of one action led to another. He wandered through life on his myopic path, never seeing the forks, the branches that fed into his road, altering his path. Sam forgot as China recorded. He feared her journals as she feared his lies, his non-connectedness. Fear had become a major presence in their marriage. He feared that he would lose her; she feared that he would do nothing to stop her. She also feared that if they fell apart forever, Sam wouldn’t know why and their life together would have been a waste.

China arrived at the airport in Prince Rupert at 9pm and Sam was waiting for her with a big smile on his face. They went through the usual chitchat about the flight, the weather, all the drivel usually said to avoid what couldn’t be voiced in public. China felt so strange she didn’t know who she was. The body was hers but the person inside it felt like a stranger. Her husband was a stranger. He looked like Sam but he wasn’t the Sam she had fallen in love with.

He dumped China’s luggage on the spare bed.

“Are you hungry?” asked Sam. “I didn’t eat yet. We could go downstairs to the diningroom and have some soup or a salad or something.”

“Sure,” said China. “The food on the plane was awful. I couldn’t eat it.”

China ordered a chicken salad and picked at it. Sam ordered a club sandwich with french fries and wolfed it down. She struggled to choose the right words.

“Sam, have you heard from Larry lately?”

“Yeah,” said Sam casually. “Why?”

“Is there anything you’d like to tell me?”

“I want to tell you that you’re beautiful and I love you and I’ve missed you very much,” said Sam as he picked up her hand and kissed her fingers one by one. China withdrew her hand and continued questioning Sam.

“We were talking about Larry, not me.”

“All right, China, what do you want to hear? Larry has quit. So what? I suppose he called to whine to you, did he?”

“He sent a fax to your office. I assume he also sent you a copy?”

“Yup. Look, China, Larry doesn’t have a life. Just because he wants to spend every waking moment in front of the computer doesn’t mean that I have to.”

“Did you withdraw money without telling him?”

“What do you mean?” stalled Sam uselessly.

“I mean, that Larry has accused you of money roulette!”

“It’s my account too. I must have forgotten to tell him,” lied Sam.

“What about all that work you were supposed to do over Christmas?” continued China relentlessly.

“I guess you forgot that we had guests. Everyone slows down over Christmas. Larry is a mother hen. He gets his shorts in a knot over nothing and I’m glad to be rid of him. I’ll do much better on my own without him nagging me every day. He won’t find work with the First Nations without me.”

Does Sam lie with evil intent,
wondered China,
like a serial killer, or just mild, careless intent, and the result is evil? I wonder if I can purchase a how-to book on how to discuss lying with a lawyer who defends the guilty as well as the innocent. Maybe after a while the borders between good and evil become blurred and blend into one big bottomless bog.

“Sam,” asked China carefully. “When you read
People of The Lie,
did you see anything of yourself in the book?”

“What?” replied Sam, bristling with indignation. “That I’m evil?”

“You don’t think lying is evil?”

“It depends. Not if you’re lying to protect yourself.”

“When you lie to protect yourself, does it ever occur to you that you’re not protecting me?”

“I guess I never thought of it that way. You’re right China. You’re always right,” said Sam with a defeated look about him.
Shit,
thought Sam,
she’s going to kill me with her questions. She acts like the prosecution. How can she be so truthful and so trusting? Sometimes a lie is the only way to survive.

“I don’t want to be right, Sam. I want you to be right.”

Sam looked down at the table, took out his pen and signed the bill.

“Come on,” said Sam. “Let’s get out of here.”

She allowed Sam to make love to her because it was the only way he knew how to talk to her, to beg her for forgiveness. His warm hands on her skin felt like soothing whispers. The touch of his lips on hers sent coded words to the stars. The stiffening of his hot penis in her cool hand promised the truth and as he lifted China’s hips she could feel her body open wide to receive him. Her vagina wrapped around him like a warm, silken blanket. She could feel every inch of him and it was the most wonderful thing in the world, but her body didn’t cry out. Her body wanted to, tried so hard to, but her mind wouldn’t let her, and so she sighed, she lied, and faked it. Did Sam know? Or did he believe it and pretend that it was a good lie, to protect her and him.

China lay for a few minutes in Sam’s arms and then she got out of bed. Sam rolled over and seemed to be sleeping but he wasn’t snoring. She took her journal into the bathroom to seek the only comfort she could find, with her portable, willing friend.

Feb. 25/98

This is killing me. My body wants him so much but my mind is a cruel whip striking each time I reach out to touch him. I can’t continue to forgive him and turn a deaf ear to the lies he cannot hear. I can’t continue to be two people. I don’t know why he believes his lies can hide the truth from me.

China started to cry. She ached unbearably for the love she knew she had to deny if she wanted to survive.

My darling Sam, I forgave you because I loved you. My love threw a cloak over your lies, spread the balm of peace on my tensing, doubting bones. But my love doesn’t heal you. What does my love do for you, other than give you leave to lie again?

~ ~

China awoke the next morning with her bones aching and her head stuffed up with the flu. Sam went to the courthouse and returned lunch time with some chicken soup from the deli on the corner. He was tender but distant, his mind on important matters. China wondered, not for the first time, if a lot of her trouble stemmed from the fact that she was alone most of the time, but that was Sam’s fault too, his insistence that it was a good thing for her to live in isolation even though he could not. One of them had to keep the home fires burning on that god-forsaken, beautiful island.

She stayed in bed for two days, slept and read and tried not to think. Sam watched TV at night and slept in the other bed. On the third day China decided it was time to go home. She was feeling a bit better and was tired of watching Sam channel surf or fiddle with his computer in the stifling hotel room.

“But I thought you’d stay for a couple of weeks,” Sam protested.

“Sam, for God’s sake, stop being so oblivious. I’ll go insane if I stay here one more minute.”

“I thought we’d talk,” said Sam stupidly.

“You’re the one who has to talk Sam and you spent the last two nights watching TV and playing with the computer. I’m going home. If you want to talk to me, try writing a letter. In fact, I insist. I want a letter a week from you until you get home. I don’t even want you to call me. Maybe you can write what you can’t say. Send it by express post.”

~ ~

China flew to Halifax and took the ferry back to Grimshaw Island. The winds were too high for the seaplane to land. She found the bumpy ride to the island almost soothing. The ferry was nearly empty. She saw one or two familiar faces she nodded to as they drifted into sleep or watched the movie. The pale grey sky met the pale grey sea as a fitting tribute to China’s frame of mind. She stared off into space, let the ferry rock her gently, and wrote some scattered thoughts.

Feb. 28/98

I’m on the way back to Grimshaw and what? What does a stranger see of Sam? Big, cheerful and friendly. Am I the only one who sees the troll under the bridge? He is guilty of only one crime but there are many sub-crimes under the heading of lie speaker. Unfortunately they’re difficult to see. Only an intimate partner of several years can see these crimes, and not just a mere wife, but a wife who records the daily crimes. Surely by now, even Deny-It-Again Sam must be a tad worried, must be looking over his shoulder trembling each time the detective wife picks up her pen. Then again, maybe not. Any man who can read a book entitled “People of the Lie,” shake his head at the deceits of others, and not attach any words at all to himself, any man who can do that probably isn’t the least bit worried that the woman who sleeps with him is quietly slitting his throat, only because she doesn’t want to slit her own.

~ ~

The day after China returned home she knew it was time to re-read her journals and the two years with Sam. She had to find out why and just how often he had betrayed her. She had reached the wall. She couldn’t advance and the past was what it was. She could no longer live in limbo with Sam. He either had to change or she had to leave.

She went to the box and reluctantly dragged out the journals containing the beginning of Sam and China. He would be back in a couple of weeks and she wanted to have the evidence documented on a piece of paper she would place in front of him. Perhaps he’d listen if she removed emotion and presented a cool, clear document of the truth.

She bravely opened the first journal and knew what Pandora felt like. She would find good and evil. The evil would be disguised with charm and it would also be enabled by the good. She wondered if there existed a chapter of Liars Anonymous? Perhaps Hilary would start one in the basement of the White House. Maybe Sam could start one on Grimshaw Island.

Jan. 14/96

What am I to do? I’m madly in love! His fierce black eyes burned like fire. When his big hand enveloped mine, desire coursed through my body like a flame.

Oh Lord,
thought China,
this is going to be more painful than I thought.
She gritted her teeth and read on.

How am I going to sleep tonight? I’m so attracted to his warmth, to his very obvious huge heart. Every time I looked at him I wanted to grab his face and kiss him. I wanted to run my fingers through his thick black hair and jump his bones forever. How can I be in love so fast? I thought I’d never again fall in love the way I did when I was seventeen. I feel like crying and I’m ready to pack and follow him right now!

Pathetic, criminal! She was going to need a Valium to read the garbage. She decided to just scan the drivel and get to the lies. Better to be angry than embarrassed.

Wait,
thought China.
Don’t be such a wimp. You meant it all when you wrote it. You were there and you lived it. Read it and weep!
She read the first poem she wrote to Sam.

Eagle

If you were here I’d devour you,

strip your bones, fuck you,

make you beg for gentle and then

I’d turn and melt you, form you,

take you in my arms

and stroke your feathers,

press my lips to your wounds,

heal you with my tongue,

entwine your limbs in mine,

slide your healing snake between my thighs,

enjoin your soul, invite your sighs,

unfold your wings, and watch you fly.

China wondered what a healing snake was doing mixed in with an eagle? Somewhere in the back of her besotted brain was a fierce Griffin, waiting to impale her. Was this a pre-cognitive poem? She slammed the journal shut. It was time for something more soothingly aggressive and sensible, like carving.

She opened the door to the shed and considered her latest carvings. They were almost finished. Four lying versions of Sam lay on the sawdust-strewn floor mutely waiting for the faces she had decided to carve later in case Sam visited the shed, which he never did. Her art projects kept her out of his hair, occupied harmlessly, or so he thought.

She entered the liar’s lair unhappily now. Her innocent creations had become more and more sinister as she tried to find a reason for life with Sam. A reason other than sex.

She had devised hidden springs in the sculptures. The latest addition to a Sam in a loin cloth was a hidden spring that released his penis, semi-erect. She wondered if it would be possible to install a motor that would twirl the wooden shaft like a helicopter blade into a full erection. She picked up her carving knife and plunged it into the wood.

The worst thing about it all was that she’d never write like that again. She would never be that passionate and trusting again. She couldn’t even read a Harlequin Romance so why on earth did she write one? Want to live one? There was only one explanation. She’d been driven mad by lust and loneliness. Sam released the powerful endorphins that ripped her from a comfortable, grandmotherly life in Toronto to Grimshaw Island and life on an Indian reserve.

After an hour of cadaverous carving, China bravely returned to the grim, sometimes amusing, task of remembering life with Sam. Did other people forget the past as quickly as she did, or did she forget quickly because she committed her memory to paper?

Feb. 26/96

I miss Sam. I need his male energy to heat me up. I want his muscles, his hugs, his rude maleness to mess up the bed, throw the comforter on the floor. In the morning I want the bed to be in total disarray so that I’ll have to spend five minutes fixing it instead of thirty seconds which is all it needs when I sleep quietly alone with no Sam cyclone beside me. Enough peace and quiet. I want passion and noise!

You enter me

on a search for the truth

My body responds to such worship

time and time again, poetry in motion

This pillowing love, I always felt

was beneath consideration,

A fleeting thing

A mortal game

A third priority

following money and fame;

You enter me

and I cry with joy,

cynicism abandoned to muscular thrust

that just leaves me, wanting more

A true, blue convert

to missionary steel.

She skipped ahead to the honeymoon which was in a cabin by a lake in northern Ontario. This was easier reading. She had gotten over the mushy, teenage love stuff. Already after a few short months of life with Sam an underlying thrum of cynicism and doubt had reared its perspicacious head. She read the honeymoon poem and remembered them dragging the single bed out on the little balcony over the lake and making love under the blankets.

It was quite funny actually. Larry living like a lonely monk in one cabin trying to get a lot of work completed, and Sam and China in the other cabin trying to get a lot of fucking completed. Sam would come downstairs for a cup of coffee, and back China up against the wall. She would whisper protests and giggle and push Sam away, while Larry called down and asked Sam questions and Sam would put his wet penis back in his pants and dash upstairs.
God,
thought China,
we must have been reeking of sex. Poor Larry.

China took a deep breath and gave herself a few moments of grief for her pitiful, trusting, sensual self. She had to forgive herself for allowing sex to become the most important thing in her life and blinding her to reality, at an age when she should have known better. It was weird to read about herself heading towards disaster and then living it. Like stepping into a book that she couldn’t put down. Myrna Loy in “The Red Shoes.”

She returned with grim determination to her depressing task. Yup, there it was, the first lie. China took her hi-liter and marked the page where she described Sam and Larry’s swanky apartment, when Sam had somehow made it seem that the lovely furnishings were his. The apartment was really Larry’s and Sam had been ‘house sitting.’ So, the furniture wasn’t his and he had nothing to sell to Larry, and therefore, he didn’t put the so-called furniture profit into the business. Three lies over a few sticks of furniture.

China flipped through a few pages that described the beauty of yet another goddamned walk on the beach and more of Sam’s demented dick, and came upon another lie. The time the phone had been cut off. The lies Sam told to cover up. China had read Sam’s bank statement when he was away. There was no mention of an NSF cheque. Sam hadn’t even tried to pay the bill because he couldn’t, but thought it was better to lie that he had. Then the lie that he was waiting for payment from the Band Council and Sam finally confessing that the Band Council didn’t give him a cheque because he hadn’t done some needed revisions for a proposal. So he borrowed money from Larry to pay the phone bill, and then Granny died, so that further delayed the finishing of the proposal and payment from the Band Council. Just reading about it exhausted China. The only truth in that whole mess was that Granny had died.

And so on and so on. In the beginning China hadn’t even bothered to record Sam’s evasions, but when she started to doubt her own memory, her journal entries became more detailed. She slammed the journal shut and gave up the useless, depressing task. What was the point? She already knew Sam was sick. All the lies she recorded, at first innocently, were probably only the tip of the iceberg.

~ ~

China went into town to collect the mail and opened the letter from Sam with an odd mixture of eagerness and reluctance.

Dear China,

Hi my sweetheart. The room is empty without you. I miss not having my little love bunny grumping around.

I cannot honestly understand what is going on, but am certainly confused by events.

I’m sick of this life in a suitcase. Same clothes, piles of paper not possible to file not possible to throw out. The finances are a mess. The bills are old and again we seem to be in the same situation. Well I hope it ends this month.

I didn’t realize how obsessed I was getting with my work while I was on the job. Sometimes it is a plus to be able to concentrate and block out everything else and sometimes it is a fault. It is especially a fault when it comes to relationships.

I was thinking the last year was good from the perspective of discovering some things about myself but it was only myself.

I need some time to reflect and get back into a more positive frame of mind. The more I think about the departure of Larry the more I feel good about it. I wish it was for better reasons but I’m still glad he’s gone.

I look forward to walks and snuggles with the gal of my dreams.

Love, Sam

China’s eyes filled with tears and disappointment flooded her soul. She stupidly thought that getting Sam to write a letter would help him try to express his feelings, but he wrote the way he thought. All was disconnected.
Were all our conversations a mere figment of my imagination,
China wondered?
This letter is pathetic and very disturbing.
She didn’t receive another letter from Sam because he wound up the case a week early and came home.

~ ~