Lying (14 page)

•  •  •

There was a dance midway through the conference. Chefs in towering white hats grilled chicken and corn on outside fires, and when darkness came, candles bloomed inside the barn. Also inside were small round tables with red-checkered cloths, and jugs of wine, and some people dressed up as pirates, I have no idea why.

Late in the night, Christopher came in. He had his own jug of wine with him, and the candles splattered shadows on his white shirt. Days in the sun had darkened his skin and made his eyes look like chips of green.

“There he is,” said Ellie.

A horsey woman named Liz went up and asked him to dance. Liz looked just like a riding teacher, or a horse. She had yellow hair and thick thighs, and she wore jodhpurs with suede pads on the inner knees. I didn’t see a sexy thing about her.

They danced together, Liz and Christopher, and when the music slowed down, so did they. She was a poet and a slut, that Liz. She pressed herself right up against him and he put his hands on her butt.

“He shouldn’t put his hands on her butt,” said Ellie, “when you can see.”

“I don’t give a flying fuck,” I said. “He can put his tongue on her butt, as far as I’m concerned.”

However, I was very concerned. I felt a fire eating up my heart. Inside I was slamming my head against a wall again and again. Why was this? I’ll tell you why. Liz was older than I, and supposedly a poetess with promise, and she had gotten into Bread Loaf on one of those fancy-schmancy scholarships, so she stood out.

The music stopped. The air smelled of hot Scotch, candle wax, and sweat. Christopher was sweating up a storm in the summer-dark barn. “Let’s have some jazz,” someone called.

“Let’s have a poem,” someone else shouted.

“A poem, a poem, a poem,” everyone started to shout, and Helen said, with a sneer, “These people really know how to rock ‘n’ roll.”

A poet with silver hair and elegant fingers, then, got up to read. His name was Mark Strand. He read a poem about a cat. I thought it was fair to middling.

“And now,” Mark Strand said, “I want to introduce to you, at this joyous occasion, at this raucous celebration, at this meeting of minds and swinging of stanzas, my student Liz Haloran. Liz, come up and read a poem.”

“No way,” Liz said.

“Go on, Liz,” Christopher said. “Give us a poem.”

“Do they bring poems to the dance?” Rebecca asked. “Were we supposed to bring poems to the dance?”

Liz clung to Christopher’s arm. Christopher took a swig straight from the bottle. Mark brought the microphone to
her, and Liz said, speaking into it, “I don’t have a poem with me, but I can recite Sharon Olds for you. I know her by heart.”

And then she did. The poem went like this:

Afterward, the barn was very quiet. Everyone was looking at her with wide, wet eyes, as though the words belonged to her, as though she had that power. “It’s not her poem,” I wanted to scream out loud to everybody, and maybe I would have if Christopher, at that moment, had not leaned forward and kissed her, full and with a lot of linger, on her mouth.

•  •  •

Sometimes, you just hit your limit. That was it. I stormed out of the barn. I crashed through people and maybe even tipped a table or two, but hardly anyone noticed because the music had started up again, and people were dancing.

Midnight, maybe even later. Bats with diaphanous wings darted through the air. A plane flew overhead, or maybe it was another bat.

“Stop,” he said, pulling on my arm.

“Don’t pull on my arm,” I said, whipping around and facing him in the field. I was crying, which I saw as both an embarrassment and leverage.

“Lauren Jean,” he said, and his breath was ripe with red wine and Liz’s spit. “Lauren Jean, I’m sorry. You’re just a kid. I should never have—” He stopped, wiped his brow with a crumpled cloth he pulled out of his pocket. “I should have left you alone. Christ,” he said. “What’s wrong with me?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think something is seriously wrong with you.”

“Do you?” he said, and he sounded genuinely curious. “What?”

I was surprised and also flattered that he actually wanted to know what a seventeen/nineteen-year-old might think about his fifty-something-year-old psyche. “Why are you asking me?” I said.

“Because,” he said, “you are precocious. You are wise beyond your years. I find myself genuinely drawn to you, Lauren Jean. And that’s a shame.”

“It is,” I said. “You’re married. And you probably have girlfriends all over the country.”

“That’s true,” he said. “All over the country.”

I stared at him. The season was summer, but in my memory now it turns to winter. The field in which we stand is white with snow. Ripped pieces of snow fall from a blank sky. Wind howls and I shiver in my skin.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“The truth is,” he said, “I am married. And I have two young daughters. I am also sexually compulsive.”

“What?” I said.

“I love women,” he said. “Or I need women. I don’t know.”

I felt tears rise again, real tears they were, hot and pressured. “Do you love her?” I said. “That, that Liz, that horse, how could you love her?”

“No, no,” he said. “Liz I do not love.”

Upon hearing that, the relief was so sweet, and mixed, as it was, with the salt of sure rejection, I didn’t have a chance, stupid me.

“Do you love me?” I said.

“What I love about you,” he said, “are your words. Your willingness to go deep, with words.”

•  •  •

I am genuinely sorry to report that I slept with him. Lauren Jean slept with him. Or Lauren Jean’s words slept with him. Or he slept not with Lauren Jean but with his idea of her talent, which was, I now see, an idea overwrought
and ridiculous and possibly even entirely fraudulent, even though, dear reader, well, I do have some talent, wouldn’t you say?

I put myself in your hands.

In his hands.

We went back to his room. He was faculty, so he had a good room, all glossy wood and painted lampshades. Of course I was a virgin, and I’d never had extensive contact with a penis, but I had an immediate affinity for it. I seemed to understand the penis intuitively.

Afterward, I smoked a cigarette, a habit I’d acquired only recently from Helen. He propped himself up with pillows. Outside, the sky was lightening in barely perceptible levels, navy blue turning to turquoise around the edges as the moon merged into morning.

I felt sad. The sadness had nothing to do with my recently lost virginity and everything to do with this man next to me. He smelled good, like just the faintest tang of aftershave and soap and sweat.

“So you are sexually compulsive,” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

“How many girlfriends do you have?” I asked. Masochist that I am, I had to ask this naked and postcoitally.

He was very honest and sad. He told me everything. He told me all over the country, because when he went to do readings, national figure that he was, there was always a woman who wanted to sleep with him, and so he did. In addition to that, he went to combat zones in different cities, watched strip shows and hired prostitutes. It was sordid, he
said, he knew that, but there was a need, a need, and he hated himself and if I was smart I would hate him too.

I was not smart. I did not hate him. Each encounter of which he spoke was a stab in my skin, and the stabs hurt so much I wanted him all the more to heal them. And as I was lying there, stabbed and oozing, an aura came to me—still no seizure but a preseizure aura—and it was the most beautiful one I had ever had. I heard an orchestra playing on a green lawn, and the notes had tastes—vanilla, snow, nutmeg—as though Dr. Neu had lodged a probe permanently in my brain, and the probe was a pen stimulating story after story after story.

I saw how we would work then. I saw my way. If I wrote well enough, my auras would grace us, their heat would bind us, and he would so much admire me that through my words alone we would come to love.

“And your wife?” I said.

“And my daughters,” he said, his voice thick with pain. “Let’s not forget my daughters. I don’t know why,” he said, “they are not enough.”

•  •  •

Three days later the conference ended, I kissed Christopher good-bye in the privacy of his room, boarded the Peter Pan bus, and wept the whole way home. For those three days we had made love a lot; we had made love the morning of my departure, and when the bus hit the highway I felt his liquid leave me in a rush, running down my legs inside my jeans. I cried harder at that, and I was so besmitten I
didn’t even find the sticky sperm disgusting, as well I should have.

It was the end of August now, and the air had hints of autumn in it. The leaves were growing red in spots. I started college just one week after Bread Loaf had ended. I barely cared. My heart ached for Christopher, my crotch ached for Christopher, and I was going to Brandeis, which was only one mile from my house so it was no big deal. Why, you may wonder, did I choose a college one mile from my house, when my mother was such a bitchy and depressing figure, and my father, so ineffectual? Why didn’t I want to
get away
, go smack across the country, lounge in Palo Alto under palm trees, or study with the genius nerds at Swarthmore? I’ll tell you why. Every place rejected me but Brandeis, and the only reason I think I got in there was the Jewish connection.

So Brandeis it was. On Orientation Day a lot of Long Island–looking kids showed up with shiny luggage sets, and I hopped off the train, hiked up the hill to campus with just a laundry bag. I hated it from the get-go. I hated everything and loved nothing but Christopher. My dorm looked like an army bunker, all concrete and centipedes. My roommate was Israeli, an army gal, and, along with her toiletries, she actually brought bullets to show us. Did I give a flying fuck? No. “How about some germ warfare?” I said. “You tote any of that through customs too?”

I had no friends I made no friends I didn’t care. Orientation week was a series of parties with watery beer and boys who were not men like Christopher. I thought of him back
with his wife. It killed me. I thought of him holding his two-year-old daughter on his lap. That killed me more. It should have been
me
he was holding on his lap, me he was nurturing along.

We had left it vague. We hadn’t said we were going to see each other again, but we hadn’t said we wouldn’t. “Maybe I’ll write you, Lauren Jean,” he had murmured in my ear.

He didn’t write and he didn’t write. Three weeks passed. I didn’t write. What I mean by that is I didn’t write him and I didn’t write myself; not a story, a stanza, a single word would leave the crusty nib of my ballpoint pen. At last, when I couldn’t bear my condition any longer, I called him at the university where he taught.

“This is Lauren Jean,” I said. “I’m calling you long distance.”

“Lauren Jean Lauren Jean,” he said. “Sweet girl. How are you? I’ve missed you!”

A door flew open in my heart then, and tropical birds flew out. Ooo la la.

“I’ve missed you too,” I said, and then I started to cry.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I’m going to be reading in Brattleboro in three weeks. Why don’t you come up, we’ll spend the weekend together.”

“Okay,” I said.

“How’s your writing going?” he said.

“Excellent,” I said. And then, “I have three stories under consideration at
Granta
.”

“Bring your work with you,” he said. “I want to see it.”

“You bring yours too,” I said. “I want to see it.”

We hung up. To say I was ecstatic, well, that would be an understatement. I was complete. I was a half-moon and now I was a whole moon, and the lie about
Granta
was at once part of that wholeness and the force that threatened its fracture. I was a plump and fragile planet, and the penumbra I cast was silver and gold. Ooo la la.

I sat down at my desk in my dorm bunker to write. I could feel, I could feel an aura coming on. I could feel a pressure in the air, and I could scent cinnamon. My left hand felt weak. My mouth was dry. I thought, this time, I might have a small seizure too.

No seizure, but the aura, when it came, hit hard and crushingly clear. It was an aura different from any I’d experienced before. It was a series of memories I had never known I’d had, but they were there, and I knew they were true. Once I had climbed a cherry tree. A blue bottle used to sit on the window ledge in our back hall. A dog by the name of Yahoo jumped and jumped on me, and his thick white belly fur filled my nose with warmth while my toddler heart hammered from fear. We were in Barbados, and a huge wave came, a wave topped with white, a wave that showed like a window its inner goods, starfish, seashells, a loose water ski, and when it crashed onto the beach it left behind a live shark with blood on its mouth.

I had never felt anything like this before. So much of our lives we forget, and, forgotten, the past ceases to exist. The pieces came back—at least I thought they did—and I wrote
them out, rushed them out in a series of autobiographical stories I knew were the best I’d done.

Epileptics experience many different kinds of auras. Some have premonitions of terrible events, others have smells or headaches or free-floating panics. There is also a kind of aura, particular to epilepsy, that is called involuntary recall, or, as some neurologists have named it, nostalgic incontinence. It happens, doctors say, because temporal areas of the brain get stimulated from preseizure firings, and a door opens, and through it pours the past.