The Liar's Wife Read online

  Hope and the dashing of hopes, rubbed out by blurred failures, cheap hoods. The hope. Ours, not yours. And the loss ours.

  Those days, those weeks of hurtling and falling, spinning, dropping, her head always aching and the bones of her face always fragile-feeling. The command in her mind when she woke next to Johnny, the voice saying: Flee, flee. He was a stranger to her now as she realized herself a stranger, and so one day she told Johnny she’d be coming home for Christmas and would not come back.

  She left a note on the deal table, “I had to go home,” and from America sent a letter in which she said, “It isn’t possible for me to be your wife. I must stay here. I don’t belong with you, or in Ireland. This is my home.”

  Did she imagine he’d come after her? No. They had become ghosts to each other in the weeks starting with his father’s death, leading to John Kennedy’s death, even as she was living in the rooms she shared with him, sleeping with him, sharing meals and making love, she was not there and he was not there. They were two ghosts, eating, sleeping, making love. Only one of them knew who she was. A ghost.

  Somehow the legalities were sorted out. They were divorced. The grounds: desertion. The word stirred her; it was simultaneously true and untrue. She did not desert him, as you would desert a child, leaving it on a doorstep. But it was true, deeply true. She had deserted a belief. A dream.

  And here they were now, fifty years later.

  Half a century.

  A lifetime.

  “What made you decide to go back to Dublin now?” she asked. She was feeling pleasantly light-headed, pleasantly irresponsible, knowing she was risking seeming prying, even rude. But she wanted to know. Alcohol is a disinhibiter, she told herself, and I am giving up my inhibition against possibly rude curiosity.

  But seeing Johnny go silent, she regretted that she had asked.

  “A lot of things, Jossie. A lot of things coming together all at once.”

  “Oh, come on, sweetheart, there’s no sense not being straight. It’s a little late for that. And Jocelyn can take it; I can tell she’s no wilting flower.”

  “No, certainly not,” Jocelyn said. “Certainly not.” Why did the two of them always make her feel unnatural in her speech? Why did they always seem to make her repeat clichéd phrases, so that they were twice as unnatural, twice as bad?

  “We don’t need to trouble her with our woes, Linnet,” Johnny said. “Not on our one night together.”

  “Well you have to tell her now. But I know you; you never want to be a downer. I’m not that polite though; I’m just going to barge right ahead like I always do. I’ll tell you why we’re going back to Ireland, Jocelyn. It’s the Big C.”

  For a minute, Jocelyn thought they were talking about the circus. The Big Tent. The Big C. She saw a big neon “C” in front of a tent, and then she saw a “C” in the sky, smoky, and a plane making the letters. Skywriting. Then it occurred to her, and she was ashamed at her own delay. She had to say the word.

  “Cancer,” she said. “Oh, Johnny, I’m sorry.”

  “Lungs,” he said. “Well, I came by it honestly. A lifetime of Marlboro Reds.”

  “We don’t have insurance,” Linnet said, pronouncing the word with the accent on the first syllable. “And in Ireland, it’s all on the state. The state’ll take care of him. It won’t cost him a thing.”

  Johnny. Cancer. She looked at him more closely now. She had to think of him differently, as someone who was dying. Was this why he was so thin? But why did he still look so young, so vital? Was this just another of his lies?

  She put her hand on his, and he squeezed her hand. The touch was so familiar, and so strongly evocative of youth and past love, that tears came to her eyes, and she didn’t try to stop them. He took several napkins out of the dispenser on the table and wiped her eyes.

  “I hate to break this up,” Tony said. “But it’s time to sing for your supper.”

  He handed Johnny a guitar, which he’d clearly left the last time he’d been here. Was it lunch, only a few hours ago? Had he earned such a welcome in one lunchtime, two or three hours? Tony walked up to the microphone and tapped it twice, making an unpleasant click.

  “I’ve got a special treat for you tonight. Just to show that we’re not stuck in the Italian ghetto, we’ve got two real special people for you, singers on their way to Ireland from sunny California. Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce Dixie and Dub.”

  Linnet ran to the stool and hopped on it like a girl. Johnny said, “Good evening, folks. We’d like to start out telling you a little bit about ourselves.” He struck a few chords, and then they began, “We got married in a fever / hotter than a pepper sprout …”

  They begin with a lie, Jocelyn thought, but she realized she didn’t care. They weren’t married. They would never marry. What did it matter? What had it ever mattered? The song made everybody happy; Johnny made everybody happy. And he was dying now.

  The next song was Linnet’s. The tough girl singing “We got married in a fever” had disappeared; the purity of her voice was shocking, piercing, disturbing coming from someone with that ruined hair, those disproportionate breasts, the Born to Be Wild T-shirt. “I am a maid of constant sorrow. I’ve seen trouble all my days.”

  Jocelyn believed that she had seen trouble, that they had both seen trouble. She felt suddenly smaller than the two of them with her safe life, her safe home, her safe marriage. The light fell on them, and she noticed that their hair was exactly the same color, and she wondered if that was why Johnny’s hair hadn’t greyed; because he dyed it. She saw them buying Clairol in a drugstore and grooming each other in the tiny bathroom of a cheap motel. She touched her own hair, disliking it now, disliking everything about herself.

  The next song was Linnet’s too, and she was a different person yet again. “Stand by your man,” she sang or belted, defiant, proud. And then Johnny took the mike. “This is for a very special lady, and some very special memories.”

  She knew what it was from the first chords. “Oh, the summertime is coming / and the trees are sweetly blooming.”

  She was glad that the restaurant was in the dark, because she could feel free to weep without constraint, invisible.

  He invited people to sing along, and they did, a surprising number of them knowing the words. And then he put down his guitar and stood by the mike. “Our revels now are ended,” he said, and went into the speech from The Tempest, ending the way he always had, “Which is Shakespeare’s way of saying, ‘Have ye no homes of your own to go to?’ ”

  She let the tears flow, and looking around, she could see others were weeping, though none of them would know what she was weeping for, and she didn’t know why they wept. She looked at Johnny and Linnet. What did it matter that their hair was dyed, that their teeth were false, that her breasts were silicone, that they’d abandoned wives and husbands or been abandoned by them, that the “nest egg” that settled itself between Linnet’s false breasts might have made its way there by less than entirely honest means? They had made something happen in this ugly room, with its turquoise faux leather benches and its plastic gondolas. They had given people something; whatever else was false, the tears were real, real tears. What was it they had given? Hope? Belief? A sense that we are not alone, that we will not be left, finally, unaccompanied.

  Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

  As I foretold you, were all spirits and

  Are melted into air, into thin air:

  And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

  The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

  The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

  Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

  And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

  Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

  As dreams are made on, and our little life

  Is rounded with a sleep.

  Johnny was dying.

  And he had come back to her. To say goodbye.
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br />   The place went wild. Tony came up to the mike. “You’ve got to let them go. You don’t want their manicotti to get cold.”

  And he escorted Johnny and Linnet back to the table, where Jocelyn sat, as she so often had, not knowing what to do with her face.

  Katerina, the Romanian waitress, kept bringing them plates of food, variously shaped pasta covered by tomato sauce. Jocelyn enjoyed everything she ate, much more than the pan-seared scallops or chicken under a brick she might have had in the restaurants she and Richard occasionally went to on the other side of town. People from adjoining tables kept coming by, slapping Johnny on the back, the men kissing Linnet, the women kissing Johnny. “Fabulous.” “Fantastic.” “When are you coming back?” people were saying.

  “Ah, well, you never know,” Johnny would say.

  And she wanted to say: You’re never coming back. You’re dying.

  But that of course could not be said. And maybe it wasn’t even true. Maybe he wouldn’t die anytime soon. Maybe a miracle would happen. Maybe he would be back. And why would anyone say anything to leave everyone unhappy? Everyone in the room was so happy now. Johnny had made them happy. Johnny and Linnet.

  It took them a very long time to get out of the restaurant. She remembered it always took forever for Johnny to leave a place because no one ever wanted to let him go. Everyone always wanted to hold on to him.

  Except for her. She had run from him as if she were running for her life.

  And she had always believed it was a good thing, the only thing for her to do.

  She fished for her keys at the bottom of her purse. She hoped she was all right to drive. She thought it was at least possible that she wasn’t. Well, it wasn’t very far. She prayed the police wouldn’t stop her.

  “I must get you fresh towels,” she said, the moment they got in the door. In the bathroom, she turned on the light and stood at the sink, splashing cold water on her face. The sight of her face disturbed her. She looked florid. Wild. She turned out the light and reached for the towels in the dark.

  “I’m going to turn in,” Linnet said. “We’ve got to get a really, really early start.”

  “Yes, well, good night then,” Jocelyn said, admiring Linnet’s tact, thinking how kind it was for her to give her and Johnny some time alone.

  “Would you like some ice water?” she asked.

  “You were always mad for ice water in Dublin and no one could understand your craving for it. They thought it was very odd of you Americans, this mania for ice.”

  “And I couldn’t get used to drinking tepid water. Although I remember there wasn’t much water drinking in your crowd.”

  “Have you ever gone back to Ireland?”

  “No, Johnny, I never wanted to.”

  “Do you think about it much?”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t.”

  She wondered if that sounded brutal, but it was just the truth.

  But she was back there now, that young girl, Johnny’s wife. The American girl. The deserter. The one who fled.

  “I don’t go back much myself,” he said. “And when I do, I don’t stay for long.”

  “You’ll be all right going back there now?”

  “Oh yes, right as rain. You remember Moira O’Connell. She’ll look after me.”

  “I thought she was a nun.”

  “Well she is, but you know she’s a doctor, too. And quite the media star. She was in Africa for many years, and very involved with AIDS work. Came back to Ireland, stood up to the bishops about condoms and their treatment of AIDS patients. And your woman Claire, you know she was an anchorwoman on the TV, she did a film about Moira, put her on the map. The two of them, thick as thieves, like always. No, Moira’s taken me in hand, she’s got all kinds of treatments and places set up for me. Practically the whole of Dublin eats out of her hand, and the ones that don’t eat out of her hand do what she wants because they’re afraid of her. Funny, she and Claire and Diarmid are big wheels in AIDS things in Dublin. It turns out Diarmid is gay. Would you have credited it, Joss? Diarmid’s a homosexual.”

  “Oh,” Jocelyn said. “But he and Claire are still married?”

  “Happiest couple I know, though God knows it’s not in the ordinary way. I’d say Claire’s known her share of happiness outside the marriage. They’re great pals though, great pals.”

  She remembered that that was what Claire had said of herself and Diarmid. That they were great pals. She wondered if that was to be hoped for in a marriage, that after fifty years you could still say you were the greatest of pals.

  “And Rory?”

  “Moved to Australia. Teaching something there. I’m afraid he fell out of touch, the only one of us not to keep in touch. I suppose he was bitter about Moira. But you know that was a foolish thing to do, a waste of time and energy. No sense being bitter about the past, Joss. The past is the past. You let it go, or it just eats at you.”

  “Yes, I suppose you’re right,” she said, not knowing if she believed what she was saying. She would have said you had to hold on to the past, or you’d keep repeating the same mistakes. But she’d let go of the part of her past that was Johnny … and it had, after the first little while, not been difficult at all. She didn’t know what that meant. About her. Or the past.

  “I suppose I’ve been given a death sentence, Joss, but you see I just don’t believe it. I just don’t think it will end like this. I can’t believe that I’ll just give it up. Life, I mean. I love it so much. I can’t believe it will be over. Not when I love it so much. Always have, Joss, always have. I can say that about myself, I’ve always loved life.”

  She closed her eyes.

  “I’ve always loved life,” he’d said, and for once she knew she could believe him.

  What she didn’t know was whether she could say the same words herself and know that she spoke the truth.

  She knew she had been fortunate, been spared the larger, more dramatic tragedies. War, illness, natural disaster, fire, flood, the deaths of children. She would say she had been happy. But always she felt that her luck was just a trick. It wasn’t that life was good. It was that she’d been lucky. And at any time the luck could run out.

  And often now, she was tired of making it up. What was called a life. A life of meaning. Children, grandchildren, a husband, houses, gardens, friends, her pitiful efforts at volunteering (trying to tutor inner-city kids in science). When she thought of life as a pile of coins or a necklace of pearls, she never had the image of abundance. Everything in her life had been carefully chosen, carefully tended. Contained.

  Johnny had not contained his life or been contained. He had loved women, left them and been left. He had a child whom he hardly knew. He hadn’t even enough money for proper medical care. His musical dreams had ended up in what he had to know was an embarrassment: an opening act for a minor star at county fairs in parts of the country no one but the natives knew about. And ending up with Linnet, with her fried hair and her fake breasts and her tacky clothes and her murdering of the language. But that was not all Linnet was. Linnet was that and then there was the Linnet of the miraculous voice, clear and pure, light on water. All that that voice suggested and called up. So he had had that too. They had had it. The both of them.

  He had loved life. He had lived it abundantly. “Brimful” was a word that came to her. No, not just brimful, she thought; overflowing.

  And of herself, the words that came were “meager.” “Mere.”

  She thought of the fable of the grasshopper and the ant. Maybe it was all wrong. Maybe the ant withered away alongside his store of dried-up grain. Sated but desiccated. Maybe the grasshopper got some other creature to take him in at the last minute, glad of the company, happy to provide.

  She could not have made a life with Johnny. And yet he had made a life. A life he loved.

  “I’ve always loved life.” She would never forget his saying that. And behind those words other words came to her, from where? The Bible? Some long-dead poet
. Love casts out fear. If love casts out fear, does it follow that fear casts out love? More than loving life, she’d feared it, not what it was, but what it could bring. She had not been able, ever, for long, to put out of her mind the things people had to endure. The things they lost.

  Perhaps it was genetic; perhaps she was born the child who wept when the swings were taken down for the winter.

  She had always somehow known that life was capable of striking blows that crippled, mauled, maimed, even killed. Always she had been prepared for the great blow.

  But the great blow had not come. Rather there had been a series of diminishments. She couldn’t say, if she were honest, that age brought anything but loss. The muscle’s firmness, the keen tooth of desire blunted or ground down, the ardent flame of the first years of marriage banked, coals in a stove, the heat steady, dependable, the embers lively, but the flame, the flame, the thrilling dangerous climb and crackle nowhere to be seen. And the soaring love of children, the exhausting days when you wept for sleep that you couldn’t have, days when you knew every act was meaningful—diluted now to a weekly call, a monthly visit. The belief that the work that you were good at was somehow important, mattered terribly to the fate of the world—you knew others would take up what you’d done, perhaps be better at it, or perhaps the work would become obsolete, and no one would remember what you’d done or how you did it. And the fate of the earth itself, degraded by the greed, the carelessness of people who would not see. Would her grandchildren kill or be killed for drinking water? Would New York be drowned? She often had these thoughts, and when she did, what she hoped was to die before these things happened, before she had to see the horrors that she knew might come.

  She believed that the best possible course in the face of these things was to see clearly, to see what was there. Not to pretend that what was there was not. So that you wouldn’t find yourself ambushed, struck down on a dark road. She had tried to see clearly. And because of this she couldn’t say, “I love life.”