The Liar's Wife (2 page)

She forced herself to go back outside. She forced herself to think of her mother, her mother's calmness. And her father, who, with every breath, every step, conveyed the sense to Jocelyn that she would always be quite safe.

She turned on the back porch light. The air was saturated with the seductive scent of nicotiana, tobacco plant. It was a scent her mother had loved. She walked into the dimness, comforted by the presence of her beloved ghosts.

We were a happy family, she thought, holding her glass to catch the last light, feeling the presence of her parents, loving ghosts, hovering beside her. There was a literal sense, she thought, in which she was trying to catch the last light, to make it sink into the gold of her wine so she could take it in, swallow it along with her Pinot Grigio. Quiet, quietly affectionate … perhaps a bit undemonstrative. No, she'd be honest.
We were stingy in our expression of affection. She'd learned that from Richard's family, Jews from Poland, Russia, who praised and kissed each other loudly and loudly argued and accused.

We were a loving family. And yet, she thought, somehow it seems that I was often sad.

Days spent sitting under the stairs sorting remnants of fabric her mother had saved for her. The sense that a day of clouds was her appropriate weather. The choked silence in the school yard: what if no one likes me? A desire to hide from the signs of misery: from the Down syndrome cousin, fully adult and yet a child. A story in
Life
magazine about a girl in an iron lung. The sound of the word “refugee” and images of piled bodies in concentration camps, and her night terrors that she would be taken, she the daughter of prosperous parents, and she knew she was not one of the marked ones, the ones who had been taken, so she was ashamed of her own terror, her own fear, ashamed to cry out, crying silently, both in fear and taken over by the question: What if the world is not a good place? So her parents had grown vigilant. She'd heard them: “Don't let her see that—keep it away from her.” The time she wept for the children in a puppet movie of Hansel and Gretel was a family joke. She'd cried because in winter the swings in the playground had been taken down. Where had they been taken? She hadn't believed her mother when she said, “You'll see, they'll be back in the springtime like the flowers and the birds.” She had believed her mother was trying to protect her, because she believed that her mother was very kind. But her deepest belief was that there was no real protection, no possibility of being fully safe.

Where had it come from, this overriding lack of courage? This sense the worst could always happen. Not from her parents: her forthright, accomplished father, who had been in the War, and liked nothing more than a good laugh. Her gentle mother, who she believed was always humming under her breath, a tender song, maybe something from an operetta or a ballad popular in the late nineteenth century. Nothing later than 1925.

She had not been courageous.

Her life had turned out to be far happier than what she had feared would be her fate.

A happy marriage. Healthy children, happier themselves than not. Work she enjoyed. More than enough money. And yet, sometimes, inexplicably, this sadness, this fear: What if the world is not a good place? What if the worst came to the worst?

It never resolved itself into a wish for death. Rather, now that the children were grown, the thought descended on her lightly, like a warm cloak on an early autumn day: It would be all right to die now. I wouldn't mind. I have had, in many ways, enough.

Enough is enough.

She had often heard her mother use that expression and only recently had she the impulse to ask the ghost, who was her mother: What does that mean, “Enough is enough”?

She had enjoyed her life, more than not. But she could not say she was avid that it should go on forever. She didn't think anything happened to you after death. She supposed it was something like sleep. That was all right; often, she quite enjoyed sleeping. She hoped it would come before she ended up like her mother, her sweet mother, who had died demented, raving, furious. From this she had learned that there were many things worse than death.

Was it all about sex? Was the sense that you'd had enough of life connected to the knowledge that sex was finished? People would be surprised how ardent she had been for sex. How she had loved the bodies of men. At a friend's sixtieth birthday party, to which only women were invited, some of the guests had carried on about their dislike of penises. When some of them—perhaps having had more wine than they were used to and feeling free because they were only with other women—had spoken of their distaste, she, perhaps a bit drunk herself, had said, “I have to say that when it comes to penises, I'm a fan.” And everyone had laughed, because she was pretty sure they hadn't thought of her as a passionate person. Even someone much interested in sex. “A cool customer,” she'd heard someone say about her once.

But when she was young, she felt herself often in the grips of something she thought was an ugly word: “lust.” The final letters, “ust,” so unlike the crackling or flaming of what she felt. For a long time, having sex itself was wonderful; it took a while to realize that there was good sex and bad sex, that there was a range of performance options.
Oral sex, for example, was something she'd had to work up to slowly, whereas now it seemed to be the first thing teenagers did, and they didn't even think of it as sex. It wasn't until she'd married Richard that she'd become in any way expert.

And then, as strong as sex, as violent, as entirely absorbing, there'd been the searing love of children. Nothing of the nursery pastel about it: rich, dark as blood. In her work with mosquitoes, she had identified with the maligned female, who, in order to reproduce, required what was called a blood meal. When she first heard the words she found them exciting, arousing even: they seemed so plainly brutal. Blood meal. Each word one syllable. Each suggesting what was necessary to maintain life. Blood. Meal. Violent, destructive, voracious. Mother love.

Her children were grown now, and if she died now their lives would not be ruined. She worried about them less, but they were always at the front of her brain. Erika, headstrong, prone to wildness, an economist now, specializing in microloans for African women. Herself the mother of two sons, Benjamin and Nathan, twelve and ten. Vincent, her son, at thirty-nine, had not yet married. Drawn to beautiful, self-dramatizing girls (with whom Jocelyn always sympathized): none of them good candidates for happy marriage. She hoped he would someday be a father; she knew he would be wonderful at that. He worked too hard. He said he liked being his own boss. A landscape gardener. How much she'd learned from him; he'd allowed her to become a gardener herself, rather than simply reiterating her mother's old plantings. He was always bringing things to delight and surprise her. Deep red dahlias. Blue-black salvia. Left with a note on the table, “Mom: enjoy.”

It was possible he would not have children, and then she would never have a granddaughter. The female line ended. Perhaps it didn't matter. She adored her grandsons. The love of grandchildren—embarrassing almost to speak of it, as if you were putting yourself in the category of retirees on tour buses, eating dinner at 5:00 p.m. It was not the tearing love of a mother: it lacked the element of terror, it was not up to you to keep them alive. Rather it was a swim in a temperate sea, with the occasional intoxicating, gentle swell. When they were babies, she could reenter the blissful moments of her own young motherhood; put her
lips to their heads and necks, breathe in the yeasty smell and feel the old swoon. But they were twelve and ten now, and she couldn't think of taking them in her lap. Their embraces now were rushed and guarded. As they should be. But it was another loss.

She would not allow herself to go into the house to check to see if the truck was still there.

Taking a drink from her glass, the glass that had been her mother's, hearing the light breeze soughing through the trees, the trees she had loved as a child, she knew that she was happy. Now happiness felt like a piercing, a sharp point pressed against the heart, relieving some pressure, creating another kind of lightness: a relief from something, a suggestion of something. And accompanied by words now, “Thank you” (but to whom?).

The doorbell's ringing startled her. No one came to this house spontaneously; no one who knew anything about anything would ring this bell without a call first. The doorbell ringing at seven o'clock in the evening could only signal something wrong. An emergency. Her mind went first to her grandchildren. Then to Richard. A heart attack. A car accident. It was too late for Jehovah's Witnesses. She walked quickly from the backyard to the front door, and with each step the two words pressed into her brain:
Something wrong. Something wrong.

She ran to the table in the front hall to get her cell phone. The doorbell rang again, louder this time, three rings now, more insistent. Then a woman's voice. Southern. “Jocelyn. Yoo-hoo.”

It was quite possibly a trap. She wouldn't open the door. She went to the window, opened it a crack, and shouted, “Can I help you?”

The minute she'd said these words, she felt a fool. Can I help you? Can I help you steal my things and leave me tied to the dining room chair? The woman knew her name. Was this a good sign or a bad sign?

She switched on the porch light. The woman wasn't young, although Jocelyn couldn't quite fix her age. Her hair was blond, but badly dyed. “Tortured” was the word that came to mind. It looked fried: or like a kind of scorched grain. She was wearing low-rider jeans and a T-shirt that said
BORN TO BE WILD
. Her breasts were very large, disproportionately
large for what seemed an almost distressingly thin body. Now that she was in her seventies and the looks of people her age varied so dramatically, Jocelyn often felt stumped to guess people's ages. She's my age, Jocelyn thought. Maybe a bit younger. Or older. But what did it matter? she asked herself. She could still be a gangster's front woman, the granny who softened the potential victim.

Whoever she is, Jocelyn thought, she doesn't belong here. Whatever she's doing here, she's out of place on Phillips Road.

She was struck with displeasure at her own snobbishness. This feeling took its place beside two other conflicting feelings: the terror of being hacked to death with a meat cleaver and the terror of seeming rude.

“Now I know I'm a stranger,” the woman said, or shouted, “and believe you me I know it's a little odd and I understand your suspicions, believe you me I do. A woman alone can't be too careful. Who knows who's out there these days?”

If the woman was trying to reassure her, she hadn't succeeded. How did she know Jocelyn was alone?

Jocelyn allowed her tone to become sharper.

“What is it that you want?”

“I have a message from a friend,” the woman said, stepping back into the porch light. The yellow light was disastrously falling on what Jocelyn could see was a set of very bad false teeth. The overwhite smile made Jocelyn want to turn away.

“A friend?”

“A very old, very dear friend,” the woman said. And then, stepping back as if she were about to break into song, she dropped her arms to her sides, raised her palms to the porch ceiling, and said loudly,

“Johnny Shaughnessy.”

Jocelyn sat down heavily on the sofa.

It was impossible.

Johnny Shaughnessy.

Her first husband.

Her first love.

She hadn't seen him in fifty years.

She had known him less than two.

She had run from him, run away leaving only a note on the white deal table, “I had to go home.”

She was suddenly struck at the oddness: in the years that had gone by, she had rarely thought of Johnny.

How could it be that you had married someone, loved someone, and then never thought about them?

And now, after all this time, he was here. Of course she'd have to let him in the house.

But how would she say this in a way that was neither unwelcoming nor encouraging of too much—what? Intimacy? Friendship? Time? What could she say? “Bring him in. I'll see him now. I'm ready.” What she decided to say was not quite true, but it had the virtue of seeming inoffensive.

“I'd like to see him. Of course I would.”

The woman reached into the back pocket of her jeans. She took out a lime green cell phone and pressed one key.

“It seems you're as welcome as the flowers in May, as one of your old songs goes,” she said.

She stood on the porch, beckoning Johnny in, as if it were her house, as if she were the hostess. Jocelyn stood behind her, still in the living room.

The door of the truck opened. The driver's door. He walked towards the house.

It was too dark for her to make out features, but even in this light his walk was familiar to her, that mix, that had once so aroused her, of confidence and hesitation, born of the sense that was nearly but not quite absolute: everyone would be glad to see him. And there was no need to thrust or push or even rush to make his presence felt. He was still thin; and although you heard that in age people got shorter, she hadn't noticed it yet in her friends, and she didn't see it in him. He had all his hair, and it hadn't seemed to turn gray; it was still blond, golden even. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt whose inscription she
couldn't read … did it match the woman's? Like her, he wore cowboy boots. The buckle of his belt was elaborate, but Jocelyn couldn't read the lettering. Why was he trying to pass himself off as a cowboy? She remembered that he'd loved American Westerns, loved the part of America that she felt no connection to, that slightly embarrassed her. Elvis, for example. He was crazy about Elvis, whom she considered at best mildly mortifying, at worst a bore.

From this distance, he appeared to be much younger than she knew he was. She saw that he had his right hand in his pocket, and she knew what he was doing; playing with a coin, turning it up and down. It was what he did when he was nervous, and of course, he would be nervous seeing her.