Lying (12 page)

And then the letter came. “Dear Ms. Slater,” it read. “Your work has been reviewed by one of our readers, and while she feels it shows promise, she suggests you mature a bit and apply again at a later date.”

Clearly, I thought, this is a mistake. Clearly, the reader, a she and probably ancient too, had lacked my sense of erotic style. I knew how the admissions committee worked from reading the Bread Loaf pamphlet. I knew each piece was assigned a reader and your fate depended on whatever that particular person thought. I wanted a new reader, someone
very hip, and then I thought of how I might accomplish this. I picked up the phone.

“Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference,” Carol said.

“Yes,” I said, making my voice very, very high so she would not recognize it. “Is it too late to apply?”

“We have one reader who still has time to review a few manuscripts,” Carol said.

“Oh,” I said, my voice like Minnie Mouse, “who is she?”

“He,” the secretary said. “This reader is a he. But we don’t give out names.”

“I would like to apply,” I said, still squeaking.

“You may,” she said.

So I did. I had a clean copy of the application, and where it asked for my name I wrote Jean Levy, and I said I was nineteen again, and I sent in the exact same story, about Janey and her pimp Raymond, and he, whoever he was, my new hip reader, liked it a lot, and two weeks later the letter came, and it said, “Dear Jean. Welcome.”

•  •  •

I took the bus. I was seventeen, but not allowed a driver’s license even though the operation had made my epilepsy so much better. Still, the RMV said no, first because there was still a 10 percent chance I might have a seizure and second because of the little side effects left over from the surgery. You would think an operation as dramatic as a corpus callostomy would cause some serious damage to the mind, and it’s amazing that that’s not the case. The brain is an incredibly
adaptive organ. In some instances a doctor can literally scoop out one whole epileptic hemisphere, leaving the person with just the other hemisphere, literally half a brain, and the person is fine, fine!

Well, I didn’t have half a brain, I had a whole brain, thank God, but it was split, and if I parted my hair I could see the scar, a tiny pink thing, a cesarean scratch, all glossy to the touch. My most prominent side effect was psychological; it’s hard to feel comfortable knowing your brain has been halved. You can’t believe you feel so normal, but you do. The most distressing physical problem after such surgery involves the eyes, which is why the RMV wouldn’t give me a license. If I closed my left eye, for instance, I couldn’t read any road signs. I couldn’t read anything at all with my left eye closed. This was because only the right side of my brain knew language, and when my left eye was closed the right side, disconnected from the left, went to sleep. I didn’t actually experience this as an impediment, however, especially because I wasn’t planning to drive with one eye closed, but the RMV thought maybe I might have to someday.

So I was not a driver. I bused myself everywhere those days, to Newton Center for Raspberry Sea Breeze Freezes and to Chestnut Hill, where I bought exfoliating scrub and pore minimizer at the Rix drugstore. And to Vermont, where Bread Loaf was.

“Jean Levy,” I said to myself over and over again on the Peter Pan bus going to Bread Loaf. “Remember, your name is Jean Levy.” The ride was long, ten hours long, because we had to stop and pick up so many people on little winding back
roads and horse farms too. I didn’t mind. I had time to practice my new name, getting used to the feel of it in my mouth.

Also, I had time to exercise my creativity. I had been reading a book about how to write, and the book said you should observe everything around you, take a lot of notes, and always try to see through your neighbor’s eyes. I had a lot of neighbors on that bus ride up, and, therefore, a lot of eyes to try to see through. At every stop people got off to stretch or smoke or eat a hot dog, and when they did, I sat in their seats and felt the way the foam cushions had molded to their specific shapes, and I became their specific shapes, a whole series of shapes and smells in those different seats. When the black lady got off the bus to get a soda in the Ho Jo’s, I sat in her seat, and I tried on the sunglasses she’d left behind. I was in her world then, her eyes my eyes, a place dark green, every leaf a mint.

I tried on an old man’s fedora hat and smelled his scalp and saw two strands of his hair on the silk lining. I studied the hair carefully, and then made note of it on my pad. “Details,” the book on writing had said, “are an essential aspect of your creative craft,” so I paid close attention. “Hair,” I wrote. “Two silver strands of hair, with a masculine smell.”

On and on we drove. My ears popped as we entered the mountains. When I opened the Peter Pan windows, cool air flowed in, and I saw two deer standing on a slope by the side of the road, their slender heads lifted, their eyes, infinite pools.

•  •  •

Most of the conference participants stayed in the main house, but I, plus three other girls, all of us the youngest, were bunked in a small cabin across from the dining hall and next to the genteel building where the famous faculty went each night to drink alcohol.

Our cabin was cute. It had its own farmer’s porch, and two little rooms with iron beds and blue blankets and blue painted wooden floors. Beneath the bunk lived a family of animals we never identified, raccoons, probably, their claws scrabbling, the sound like pencils scratching on paper, a long, midnight story. We slept to the sound of the animals, and woke to their cooing, and smelled their mysterious fur.

I liked my bunkmates. I could have, should have, even grown to like them a lot, if only events had turned out differently. Of course the whole time they never even knew my name; they thought I was Jean. Still, they were the first girls my age who not only accepted oddness but coveted it. In short, they were either rejects like me or so completely artistic that they had transcended all adolescent categories. There was Helen, nineteen going on forty, a poetess with waist-length black hair and high heels. There was Ellie, my roommate, the opposite of Helen, pale and plump, with soft red hair; she was writing a novel and the only thing I now remember about it is that the heroine got poison ivy in her vagina. Rebecca was from the South, and she, like me, wrote short stories.

We all ate dinner together the first night, huddling at our own table in the cafeteria while waitresses with armpit hair served us lentil soup and thick slices of brown bread. We
talked about writing and our futures as writers, and, here, I fit right in. I told them about my preseizure auras, and how it was in an aura that I discovered my creativity. I talked about wanting to someday write a whole book about my epilepsy and my surgery, a book called
Lying
, I said, and everyone was impressed. Outside the day grew dark and we were so far north the aurora borealis was faintly visible, the sky shining, and on the way back to our bunk later on, an owl soared over us, pure white and looking for mice.

•  •  •

The whole point of the conference was to have a famous writer read your work and give you feedback. I would like to tell you who my famous writer was, but, because of the unhappy and damning events that came to pass, I have had to change his name and identifying features.

I saw him the next morning, in the barn, where I and my bunkmates went for a late breakfast of bagels and coffee. Let’s say his name was Christopher, and his last name, well, let’s call him Christopher Marin.

He was older, this Christopher Marin, and very famous, with two books under his belt and a Guggenheim. He was from the South. He had green eyes sunk in facial wrinkles, and broad arms tipped with hairs bronzed by the sun. He was a well-dressed older man, and the morning I met him, he was wearing a crisp white oxford cloth shirt, and a pair of Levi’s jeans faded to fringe and white.

I sipped my coffee, a strong, black brew. He sat over in the corner of the barn, on a tattered red couch with a story
that could have been mine spread out before him. He looked up and saw me. He squinted his eyes and stared.

“That’s Christopher Marin,” Ellie said. “Isn’t he your reader? He’s staring at you.”

“God am I starving,” I said, trying to act like I didn’t care. “Do you think they have any Pop-Tarts?”

“He looks lecherous,” said Helen. Helen, if I haven’t already mentioned it, was from Manhattan, and knew these sorts of things. She snorted, lit up a Marlboro.

“Do you think that’s my story he’s reading?” I said.

Meanwhile, Christopher Marin kept staring. He would look down at one of the pages—my pages?—read a little bit, look up into the air as though considering something profound, and then swing his gaze in our direction.

“A lot of people,” Helen said, “come to this conference just to fuck.”

“I know,” I said, even though I didn’t. I did know, however, a few things about sex. Just because I didn’t dance with boys didn’t mean I’d never been touched by one. A year ago, my parents and their friends and their friends’ fifteen-year-old son and I had all spent a week in Acapulco. The son’s name was David and once he had taken me to the hotel room and pulled down my underpants and put his finger up me, which I very much enjoyed.

I also enjoyed that I had grown up nearly pretty. I had clear skin, brown eyes, and what everyone called high cheekbones. I wore rouge on my cheeks to emphasize their height.

We drank our coffee and started to leave. That morning
a literary agent was lecturing on how impossible it was to get published, and we all wanted to hear. We passed Christopher Marin as we were walking out of the barn and he said, “Excuse me.”

“Yes?” said Helen.

“You,” said Christopher, looking at me. “Did I hear you yesterday, during sign-in, say your name was, was Jean Levy?”

My heart went wild then. It did an elevator drop down to my ankles and the room started to spin, like right before a seizure.
Oh my God
, I thought.
He knows I have an alias. He’s found out the truth. I’m going to be expelled
.

I cleared my throat, spoke slowly. “Yes,” I said. “My name
is
Jean Levy.”

He smiled. “Sit,” he said, patting the cushion next to him.

“Why?” I said, my voice coming out as a croak.

“Why not?” he said.

“I’m going to hear a lecture,” I said.

“But I have your story here,” he said, rattling the sheaf of pages. “And I would love to talk with you, Jean.”

I felt such a sweet relief then; I hadn’t been caught. The spinning stopped. I wasn’t going to have a seizure. I smiled at him. I looked at the other girls. Ellie was grinning; Helen glared.

“You guys go on,” I said, and so they did.

•  •  •

The barn was just like a barn should be, the smell of sundried hay, birds in the rafters, poles of light shining in
through dusty windows. The light fell at our feet, like a beautiful piece of yellow glass.

“Jean,” he said. “I have been reading you all morning.”

“Oh,” I said. I was suddenly so shy I could only look at the floor.

“Don’t be shy, Jean,” he said.

“I’m not shy,” I said.

“Good,” he said, “because in order to discuss your work with full artistic integrity, we will both need to not be shy.”

“Okay,” I said. I wasn’t totally sure what he meant, but I was pretty sure. My work was avant-garde and explicit, which did not mean I was avant-garde or explicit, but he thought so. Both he, and I, made the mistake of confusing the writer with her words.

“Do you mind,” he said, “if I tell you how your stories make me feel?”

“No,” I said. “I wouldn’t mind.”

“Like,” he said, and paused. “Stirred and, and happily agitated. And,” he said, “this part about Janey in the red room, well,” he said, “like a I need a long cool shower.”

I wasn’t sure what to make of his feedback. On the one hand, my aim as a writer was not to inspire my readers to bathe. On the other hand, I could see this was no ordinary shower of which he was speaking. This was a misty shower on heated skin, soap and a shot of vodka on wet tiles.

“Your work,” he said, “has an effect. It has, sometimes, an unhealthy effect, and I think you should know that.”

I felt giddy then. My fear turned to giddiness and if I’d been alone I would have whooped with joy. I wanted to hear,
more than anything else, that I, my words, had an effect, the unhealthier the better. My physical epilepsy was so much improved, but this is what people need to know: epilepsy, at least mine, is a comprehensive style; it begins in the neurons and then travels up, up, travels into the hands, which curl like claws around tchotchkes, into the mind, which, due to the darkness and the dirtiness of disease, seizes at colors, at tall tales, at words like fodder to fill me up and bring me close to someone.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Would you like,” he said, “to take a walk with me this afternoon? We could talk more.”

I looked up at him then, Christopher Marin. True, he was handsome. Also true, he was old. I don’t mean a little bit old. I mean smack in the middle of late middle age, with gray in his hair and a wedding band on his hand.

“No thank you,” I said, but even as I said it I could feel the tingling move through me.

“Jean,” he said. “Is that your full name?”

“What do you mean?” I said quickly.

“Oh, it’s a pretty name,” he said. “A very pretty name. I’m from the South, though, and in the South the names are usually longer, like Carol Ann or Norma Ray.”

“Oh,” I said. “Actually, I’m from the South too. I mean, I was born in the South and my parents are … are southern, so you’re right.” I smiled. “My full name is Lauren Jean.”

“Lauren Jean,” he said. “I can’t believe you won’t let me show you the trails around campus. I’ll be free after I meet with my other students this afternoon.”

Then I remembered that he had other students; I wasn’t the only one. But I must have been—wasn’t I?—the only one he’d asked for a walk.

“Are they, are your other students any good?”

“Very good,” he said. “Some surprising talent. I have one woman I think should submit her work to
The New Yorker
.”