Why Men Lie (17 page)

She asked herself how she would avoid encountering Sextus at home. Tomorrow or the next day. And the day after that. JC would have been her shield, her triumph. She felt a spurt of irritation.
You can’t depend on anyone
.

She slept in semi-conscious episodes, part dream, part memory.

“Effie, what are you doing, hiding in there?”

She stared back at him. He squatted down in front of her
.

“You didn’t go with the others …”

“I didn’t feel well.”

His hand was on her brow. “You’re warm.”

She turned her head away
.

“I have to go to town,” he said. “You’ll be all right?”

She heard the truck pull up outside
.

He stood, turned and walked away
.

She watched him go, watched him walk toward Sandy’s truck, climb in and slam the door
.

Exhaled slowly
.

From Rivière-du-Loup to the New Brunswick border, the road was basically unchanged from 1970, so the memories came flooding back intact, fully shaped sequential scenes from the movie of her life, strung together on the frame of retrospect. They were in his father’s car because his father was dead. At first, Jack had died slowly, with the cancer in his lungs, but then death had become
impatient. Jack’s great, kind heart just stopped. Did Sextus use the sorrow they all shared to take advantage of her? She was suspicious at the time, but her suspicion vanished in a flame of guilt. It was just too cynical—even Sextus would not manipulate such a situation, cloak the raw seduction in the cloth of grief. His dad was dead and she was in his bed. Guilt reduced to doggerel.

She remembered the cheap, intoxicating drama of it all. Was it really all his fault? Did he really have to try so hard, to lie so hard? Was she really such a challenge, her virtue such an obstacle? Or was it simple exploitation of the willing? She imagined a small green Volkswagen on a long hill, labouring westward, the direction of the future, and the eastward road to yesterday blurred briefly.

And now the trees pressed closer on the potholed two-lane highway. Maybe that’s why thoughts of home were looming like the spruce and pine and juniper, full of menace. Eastern Ontario and most of Quebec had been wide open, free of small constraints, bound only by an oceanic lake, a river long and broad as history, eternal towns of stone huddling around their spiky churches, indifferent to time and passing strangers. She remembered the intoxicating freedom she’d felt years before, driving westward, in her sinful liberation from those dark and gloomy trees.
Fhuair mi’n t’aite so’n agaidh naduir
. The despairing words of the long-dead bard from Nova Scotia flooded her with gloom. “My place, at war with nature,” was how he saw it. The suffocating truth.

The silhouette was at her bedroom door again. She followed the glow of the cigarette, the ember moving, a tiny point of light from the unseen hand to where she knew his face would be. The truck had returned in darkness, but she knew
.

From behind him, in the kitchen, the disembodied alcoholic growl. “Hey, Angus, come away from there.”

Silence, ember moving upward, flaring again
.

“I said, get away from her door.”

Chair legs scraped on the floor. The silhouette turned, revealed the familiar profile and was gone
.

“Hey, Angus, what’s your fuckin’ problem, anyway?”

Sunday at noon she called home from a pay phone in a coffee shop in Fredericton, New Brunswick. There was one message.

“Hey … guess where I am. Davy Crockett country, but only for a day or two. Be well. Drive safe. Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

She was suddenly hungry, ordered a burger and a coffee, bought a paper from the day before. Fires in Florida. Clinton and Lewinsky—did they or didn’t they? Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. The Oval Office. Clinton should be fired, they were saying.
Who cares?
Tampa Bay was scheduled to play the Jays on Sunday at the SkyDome. And now it was Sunday. Staring out the window of the coffee shop, she was trying to remember why he went to Texas.

The voice on her answering machine was untroubled. He was working, that was all. That was the way he was. She felt a glow, and the newsprint disappeared. JC Campbell. After so much disappointment, decades of disillusionment, could she now believe in someone?

Even Conor, precious though his memory might be, had been a mystery. He told her at the outset that he’d be honest about the need for some dishonesty. And somehow she understood. Dishevelled Conor with the slept-in face; Conor of deceptive softness, in
his body, in his voice; Conor of the contradictions. Except in appearance, they were so alike, Conor and JC, and she was, at once, warmed and frightened by the recognition.

She re-engaged with the broad page of the paper, resumed the Clinton story, the travails of power. The president of the United States had been alone with this young woman, this intern. Frequently. Something had happened. Some exchange of favours. A story old as human nature. It was in the book that Conor gave her once.
The Book of Leinster. The Táin Bó Cúalainge
—the Cattle Raid of Cooley. The book that sent her back to school, launched her down the road to scholarship. “What caused the pangs of the men of Ulster. It is soon told.” That was how the book began. Sex caused the pangs of Ulster. Sex was the cause of everything.

“I’m Conor Ferguson. And what would your name be?”

“You can call me … Faye. Faye Gillis.”

The story in the newspaper was accompanied by a photograph of Clinton and his wife, Hillary, loyal and defiant. There was an inset of Lewinsky, smiling, big-haired, more than slightly stunned. Effie tried to imagine the scene in the Oval Office: Lewinsky on her knees, Clinton talking business on the telephone, this mountain of hair concealing mischief in his lap, Clinton trying not to gasp while setting the world’s agenda. Kings and queens and mistresses. Power and sex and dreams of immortality. Moral authority blown away, for what?

She carefully examined the photograph of Hillary for evidence of pain as she studied Bill’s for signs of deceit. It takes a psychopath to hide deceit completely. Bill Clinton was no psycho. You could see it clearly, fear in his eyes, though he seemed serene enough in contrast to the brittle indignation of the faithful wife.

Maybe he was innocent. Maybe it was exactly what Hillary called it: a right-wing plot. She wouldn’t put it past them. But in the end, she felt for both of them. She’d been there. Been everywhere and every one of them. She’d been Monica. She’d been Bill. She’d been Hillary. She’d boxed the compass of emotional entanglement, circumnavigated every possible betrayal. Now, at middle age, liberated and alone, she could freely calculate the benefits and costs. What role was worse? Betrayer or betrayed? Her brother wasn’t any help, the priest, the comforter of strangers.

“If you’re having a personal problem, just spit it out,” he’d said impatiently. “I don’t have time for metaphors.”

That was the end of that. But now, on July 5, 1998, sitting alone in a coffee shop in Fredericton, she could with confidence declare a preference. She’d rather be betrayed than betray.

But at the end of the day, who really cares? In the long run it’s the dustbin for us all. Conor Ferguson’s philosophy, again.

Sextus had probably begun his infidelities when she was immensely pregnant—1971. “As early as that? Because of that?”

JC was guarded, obviously sorry to have obliged her with his insight. “It’s ancient history now,” he said. Why would she insist on revisiting something that could only be a source of pain? She reminded him that she was a historian. She wanted to approach her own past with the objectivity she’d bring to any scholarship. History was only painful for the amateurs. And there were things he deserved to know about her.

He scoffed. “You can’t investigate yourself objectively. It’s a fundamental rule in journalism. The same applies to history.”

“Okay,” she said. “You tell me. You were there for most of it. You were a reporter then. Give me the cold hard facts.”

He knew he was trapped.

Sextus’s first betrayal was with someone they all knew, someone so unlikely that the knowledge made her laugh.

“You find it funny?” JC said in disbelief. “I thought it was pathetic at the time.”

The philandering became so commonplace that it was no longer interesting, even to the gossips in their crowd, as it was only peripherally interesting to her now, a lifetime later. Still, he told her what he knew.

“You know the way it was back then, in the seventies?”

“I hear a lot about it now,” she said. “The zipless encounters and free love horseshit. As if anything is free.”

“But back then, it was pretty meaningless. Casual entanglements, often triggered by booze or dope and kind of sanctioned by a lot of junk sociology—the age of Aquarius and all that garbage. I’d have thought you knew about it.”

“I was a homebody. Remember? I was becoming a mom. My so-called husband worked all hours. He travelled. I took fidelity for granted. I was naive.”