Lies You Wanted to Hear
Copyright © 2013 by James Whitfield Thomson
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for Elizabeth
another journey
New York City—January 1990
“I hate flying,” the woman in the seat next to Lucy says.
“Me too,” Lucy agrees, though it isn’t true. She never worries about her plane crashing, not with all the human failings that tear lives apart.
As the plane starts down the runway, the woman whimpers and crosses herself, and Lucy reaches out and takes her hand. When they are safely aloft, the pilot making a slow, gentle turn northward, Lucy lets go.
“Thank you,” the woman says. “I’m going to visit my daughter in New Hampshire and missed my connection. I didn’t want to fly in this weather, but…” She shudders and gives herself a hug.
Lucy nods but doesn’t respond. She is on her way home after three days at the midwinter conference of the American Library Association. She’d been hoping to catch the five o’clock shuttle to Boston but got stuck in traffic and ended up on the six; then the plane sat on the tarmac for nearly an hour waiting to take off and had to go back to the gate for deicing. If she’s lucky, she’ll be on the ground by eight.
The woman takes a sky blue ball of yarn from a canvas bag and goes to work, her knitting needles pecking like a pair of hungry birds. She’s about fifty, wearing a purple sweat suit and matching reading glasses.
“I’m going as fast as I can,” she says as she notices Lucy watching her. “But I don’t think I’ll finish it on time.”
“What are you knitting?”
“A sweater for my new grandson. My
fourth
. No girls yet.”
“Come on, you’re not old enough to have grandkids.”
“I got started early.” The woman rolls her eyes. “
Way
too early. What about you? Do you have children?”
“Two,” Lucy says. “A boy and a girl. Today’s my son’s birthday.”
“Wonderful. How old?”
“Nine.”
“Oh, that’s a great age. Same as my grandson Conor.” She wants to tell Lucy all about him and the other boys—long stories about their antics, one already a junior hockey star—and Lucy is grateful there are no more questions about herself.
When they land, the woman thanks Lucy for listening. Then she looks at her watch and says, “At least you’ll be home in time to see your son blow out the candles.”
Lucy smiles, trying to imagine what a joy that would be.
***
The taxi driver lets Lucy out at Le Lapin Vert, a little bistro on Centre Street a few blocks from her house in Jamaica Plain. She sits in the back with her suitcase under the table and orders escargots and a glass of chardonnay. There’s a map of France printed on the paper place mats. In the summer she likes to rent a car and explore the French countryside. She keeps to the back roads, no plans or reservations. The taste of the escargots brings back memories of a restaurant in Venasque, a late dinner where she was the only patron, the chef joining her afterward for a cigarette and a glass of wine. Lucy studies the map on the place mat and conjures up images from her travels: the wild horses of the Carmargue, the cave paintings at Les Eyzies, the brightly colored anchovy boats at Collioure. She’d like to buy a cottage in St. Benoit someday and plant a small vegetable garden, go to the abbey every evening and listen to the monks chant vespers in the ancient crypt.
A handsome man in an Irish fisherman sweater smiles at her on his way to the men’s room, as if they share a secret past. Lucy puts some money on the table and leaves without waiting for the check.
When she gets home, Frodo and Sam are asleep on the couch. Frodo yawns and tries to shake himself awake while Sam curls up against the light.
“Some watchdog you are,” Lucy says as Frodo comes over and wags his tail. He looks like a cross between a boxer and a corgi: reddish-brown coat, short legs and a blunt snout, one bent ear, a tail that sticks straight up. When a man at the dog park asked what breed he was, Lucy laughed and said,
Albanian
goatherd
.
Frodo goes to the back door, and Lucy lets him out into the yard. She takes off her heels and puts on a pair of slippers, checks the thermostat and turns up the heat. Sam comes into the kitchen and meows, and Lucy puts some fresh kibble in his bowl. The messages on the answering machine are from her mother and Jill and Carla—one melancholy, one anxious, one offhand—each in her own way acknowledging what day it is, but none of them willing to come out and say it. The mail is nothing but solicitations and bills. Lucy pours a glass of wine, then goes to the study and sits at her desk, its walnut surface scarred with nicks and glass rings and one long burn from a cigarette ash that could have set the whole house on fire. In the lower left-hand drawer, there’s a stack of leather-bound journals.
She takes out the one on top and opens it to the place marked by the thin red ribbon attached to the binding. For several years she wrote almost every day; now weeks go by without a word, her anger and sorrow shriveled to a hard kernel stuck permanently in the back of her throat. She smooths the journal open with the heel of her hand and does the math quickly on a slip of scrap paper, feeling guilty that she cannot recall the numbers instantly and recite them down to the minute. She writes with a fountain pen; there is something comforting in the permanence of the blue-black ink soaking into the page.
1-25-90 (6 years, 7 months & 15 days gone) Happy birthday, Nathan. Nine years old today! That is so hard to believe. I can almost see you laughing, a shock of dark brown hair falling across your forehead, your grown-up teeth still too big for your face. Did you have a party after school today or will you have to wait till the weekend? An afternoon of sledding on a snowy hillside (no girls allowed), hot chocolate and cake afterward, wet socks and gloves drying by the fire? Or will it be a picnic on a sunny beach, you and your pals playing Wiffle ball and riding your boogie boards in the surf? Is there a special present you’re hoping to get? A Game Boy? Baseball mitt? One of those flashy dirt bikes with a banana seat? I remember the day I turned nine. My grandmother took me to the Plaza for tea. I wanted to live there like Eloise and play tricks on the staff. Do you remember
Eloise
? That was Sarah’s favorite book. Yours was
Goodnight
Moon
. You were only two, but you knew every word by heart. You liked to snuggle up close to me at bedtime and pretend you were reading. That was always my favorite part of the day.
Sam jumps up on the desk and nuzzles Lucy’s hand. She looks at her watch. 9:53. She goes to the kitchen and refills her wineglass, doesn’t bother to turn off the light in the study before she heads upstairs. On the bookshelf in the hall, she finds
Eloise
and
Goodnight
Moon
. The copper washtub on the hearth in her bedroom is empty, no kindling or wood for a fire.
Lucy crawls under the covers in her clothes while Sam nestles beside her, purring and kneading. She opens a book and reads aloud. “In the great green room there was a telephone…” As the bunny is saying good night to the socks, Lucy hears Frodo barking in the yard. She groans and pulls the cocoon of blankets up around her neck.
“Sam?”
The cat cocks his ears and blinks at Lucy.
“Can you go down and let him in?” She scratches Sam under the chin. “
Please
, baby, go down and get him. I’m all tapped out tonight.”
Part One
Lucy
Cambridge, Massachusetts—July 1977
“His name is Matt,” Jill said. “He drives this great little yellow fifty-six Thunderbird. You know, the one with the spare tire sticking up in back.”
I was trying to ignore her, rearranging the uneaten cucumber slices on my plate while Jill scraped up the last few crumbs of cheesecake and licked them off her fork.
“You should see the looks on people’s faces when he pulls up in that car.” She let her jaw drop and made her eyes bug out. “Might as well be a gold carriage with four white horses.”
“Sounds like a prince.”
“Come on, Luce, don’t be like that. He’s a terrific guy. Just have a drink with him. What harm can it do?”
I shrugged one shoulder. Griffin took off four months ago, and Jill had been trying to fix me up ever since; any encouragement on my part and she’d have dates lined up for me like customers at a bakery on Saturday morning with numbered stubs in their hands. I lit a cigarette while Jill caught the waitress’s eye and gestured for another piece of cheesecake.
“Cody called,” I said. “He got us tickets for the David Bowie concert.” Cody was my best pal from college. We dated for a few months until he admitted he was gay.
“Just this one time,” Jill said, ignoring my attempt to distract her. “Please. For me?” She folded her hands like a beggar and tucked them under her chin.
“You little witch. You’ve set something up with him already, haven’t you?”
She laughed. “Wednesday after work. The piano bar at the Copley Plaza. Just one drink. You’ll thank me.”
The guy Jill wanted me to meet was a Boston cop who played softball with her husband Terry. He came with the usual bona fides: nice-looking, great personality, loves his job, not on the rebound, which was more than I could say for myself. So why wasn’t he already taken?
“Come on, Jill. A
cop
?”
“Yin and yang. You need a change. You can’t spend the rest of your life waiting for that asshole to come crawling back.”
“Funny, he’s crazy about you.”
“You have to forget him, Luce. The man skips town three hours after you have an abortion and you act like—”
“No!” I slapped the table and the dishes jumped and people nearby turned and stared. I lowered my voice. “Don’t start with that shit.”
“I’m sorry. I hate the way he treats you, that’s all.”
“I know I know I know. Believe me, Jilly, I don’t want him back. I really don’t. I just…I have to do this at my own pace, okay?”
She rolled her eyes, then plucked the cigarette from my fingers and took a guilty puff.
Jill was my oldest friend. We grew up two houses apart in a small town in Connecticut, dancing a
pas
de
deux
in the ballet recital, getting suspended in eighth grade for putting a dead mouse in Betsy Farrell’s locker, coediting the high school yearbook. We both went to college in the Boston area—she to Lesley, I to BU—and shared an apartment for a year after graduation until she got married.
The waitress brought another slice of cheesecake. Barely five-two, Jill was five and a half months pregnant and had gained at least forty pounds already. Her appetite seemed to defy some basic law of physics.
“Look,” I said, “it’s not like I sit around every night, bawling my eyes out, waiting for Griffin Chandler to call.”
“That’s good to hear,” Jill said. “You’re down to what, five nights a week?”
I laughed and squeezed her chubby hand. A couple weeks ago, she had to go to a jeweler and have her wedding ring snipped off because it was cutting off the circulation and she couldn’t slide it over her knuckle. Still, sometimes I’d look at her and feel sick with envy; if I hadn’t had the abortion, our babies might have been born on the same day.
***
My college roommate Rhonda got pregnant junior year. She had been dating two guys at the time and wasn’t sure which was the father. It seemed odd to talk about the “father” when Rhonda had no intention of telling either boy about the pregnancy or including them in her decision. Rhonda’s parents (like my own) had money, so even though this was before
Roe
vs. Wade
, she didn’t have to worry about going to some back-alley quack. For a few weeks it was all we could talk about. We considered ourselves feminists and railed about laws written by men to control our bodies and limit our options. Rhonda went to the Bahamas over spring break and came back with a tan. She said it was easier than getting your tonsils out; she had been expecting to feel some sense of guilt and loss, but mostly what she felt was relief. I can’t remember if the topic ever came up between us again.
I had always assumed if I ever had an unwanted pregnancy I would handle it with the same aplomb as Rhonda, but the key word in that phrase is
unwanted
. When I realized I was going to have a baby, I was more ambivalent about having an abortion than she had been. The father in this case was Griffin, the man I loved, and if I carried the child to term, my life would be tied inexorably to his.
“Accident, my ass,” Griffin said when I told him I was pregnant.
I had been on the pill but got mixed up and missed a day or two. He had no doubts about what I should do about the baby. Our quarrels got nasty. I cried and broke things and wouldn’t let him touch me.
Jill found out she was pregnant about a week before I did. The happiest day in her life, she said, but when it came to my predicament, she was torn. She had been raised Catholic, and while she wasn’t strictly opposed to abortion, she thought it should be an option of last resort. In spite of my feminist bent—which, for me, was more about how I wanted the world to be than how I actually lived my life—I found it hard to disagree. I was never comfortable with the die-hard stance of women who seemed to regard abortion as a high-priced form of birth control. Jill wanted me to have a baby, but not Griffin’s; she hadn’t wanted me to get involved with him in the first place.
Once I made up my mind to go ahead with the abortion, I didn’t flinch. I found the clinic through a friend. Griffin drove me there on a Friday morning and paid the bill in cash. There were various forms and waivers, which the staff offered to explain, but I signed them all without a second glance. The doctor was a bald, middle-aged man who took my hand and asked if I was certain I wanted to go ahead with the
procedure
. It was the same word I’d been using when I thought about what I was about to do, trying to make something so elemental and irrevocable into something banal. I told the doctor yes.
I was home by noon, feeling groggy but not much pain. Griffin made me tea and sat on the edge of the bed; he said he’d been thinking about taking a road trip, a little alone time to get his head together. Jill had predicted he would bolt. I was afraid she was right, but I thought he’d have the decency to wait until I’d had a chance to shower and brush my hair, maybe hang around for a week or two and take me out to dinner, pretend our happiest days were yet to come. I told him to go, I could use some alone time myself. He didn’t wait for me to change my mind. When I thought about it now, some part of me knew he had proven how heartless and selfish he could be; another (bigger) part kept hoping he’d realize how much he needed me and come running back.
I called Jill and she came to my apartment, and we talked and laughed and cried and slept in the same bed like we were back in junior high. I had some cramping and bleeding over the weekend but went back to work on Monday. Ten days later I crashed: night terrors, crying jags, the tapeworm of guilt. Griffin didn’t call for over a month.
***
I forgot the name of the cop Jill wanted me to meet five seconds after she said it. Tom? Bob? Something short and common. Some people I knew still called the police
pigs
, but I wasn’t as put off by the idea of going out with a cop as I’d acted with Jill. When I was in college, Rhonda and I got picked up by some off-duty cops who took us bowling and didn’t act like jerks when we refused to let them take us back to their apartment. I had gone skeet shooting a few times with my dad, so I wasn’t freaked out about the idea of dating a guy with a gun. As for the handcuffs…well, I tried that with Griffin once and liked it—a bonding experience, one of those little kinks in my sexual history I never divulged to Jill.
Close as Jill and I were, she didn’t like to talk about sex. She had gone steady with Robby Durant all through high school but refused to say how far they went. Not far enough for Robby, I guessed, seeing him droop along beside her like a lost puppy. (As for me, I surrendered my virginity in the tenth grade to a boy so sweet and desperate he cried afterward, and it almost felt like love.) Jill dumped Robby for Scott Fowler freshman year of college; Bernie Katz stole Jill from Scott. Bernie was the captain of the Harvard squash team, a great guy who was crazy about her but not crazy enough to risk alienating his rich father by marrying a shiksa. Next up, Terry O’Shea. Jill never went six weeks without a boyfriend, convinced each time that this was
the
one
. This time she was right. Terry was in his final year of law school at BC when they met; now he worked as an assistant district attorney. He was good-looking, thoughtful, incorrigibly cheerful, and one of the most boring men on earth. Terry could spend ten minutes telling you about the great deal he’d gotten on a new rider mower from Sears with a sixteen-horsepower engine, detachable grass catcher, and a three-year service guarantee. Being a friend of Terry’s didn’t automatically disqualify the cop from consideration, but I had a feeling he wouldn’t be my type.
Of course, when I was being honest with myself, I knew there wasn’t any type; there was only Griffin.
***
I hadn’t mentioned it to Jill, but I had started going out again, not on dates, just drinking and dancing at some of the upscale bars and hotel lounges in Cambridge and Back Bay, lots of gigolo wannabes with their gold chains and bad cologne, out-of-town businessmen with silver money clips and pale outlines of wedding bands on their fingers. Occasionally I’d meet someone interesting and give him my number then kick myself if he didn’t call back or turn him down if he did. One night I met a pilot who flew corporate executives around the country in a private jet. He was easy to talk to and told me a great story about learning to fly a crop duster from his father when he was still a kid. At the end of the evening, he drove me home and wrote down my phone number, ready to leave, it seemed, without so much as a good-night kiss. I asked him in for a glass of wine and put Van Morrison on the stereo. The pilot studied the prints on my living room wall—six framed woodcuts in bold colors depicting various Tarot cards—discreetly ignoring the photographs of Griffin and me on the bookshelf below.
“These are great,” the pilot said. “Who’s the artist?”
“My friend Cody. He’s very talented. My favorite is the magician.” I pointed.
“
Le
bateleur
. My mother likes to give Tarot readings for fun.”
“She’s French?”
He nodded. “A war bride. She and my dad only knew each other for nine days when they got married.”
The pilot’s mother had been part of the French resistance and sounded like a fascinating woman. She was from Rennes, not far from Saint-Malo, where I’d spent two weeks as a teenager visiting a friend who had been an exchange student in our high school. The pilot and I were sitting on the couch. He kissed me tentatively; I responded in French. My sweater and bra were on the floor, my nipple in the pilot’s mouth when he sat up abruptly.
“We don’t have to rush into this,” he said. “I really
like
you. I don’t want to mess things up.”
Great line, I thought. He may even have meant it. It was a caution worth noting; the self-help books don’t advocate having sex with a guy you’ve known for less than three hours if you’re interested in building a long-term relationship. But I wasn’t thinking long-term. After months of wallowing in anger and self-doubt, I needed to be desired. I needed to find a way to put Griffin behind me. I got up from the couch and led the pilot into the bedroom.
Our lovemaking was quick and pleasant, nothing I’d celebrate or regret in the morning. Afterward, we were sitting on the bed, smoking, my head on his shoulder, his hand idly caressing my thigh when the telephone rang. I tried to ignore it, but my body grew taut, each ring more insistent than the last.
“You better get that,” the pilot said, dejection in his voice, as if he knew as well as I did who was calling.
I picked up the phone and cradled it to my ear. “Nothing much,” I said. “Just sitting here, thinking of you.” Which was true.
I was still on the phone with Griffin when the pilot let himself out the door.
***
“Wear something sexy,” Jill said. “That white Charlie’s Angels one-piece or the salmon mini-dress.”
“I thought you said this was just for a drink.”
“Yeah but, you know…first impressions.”
“What exactly have you told him about me?”
She laughed. “Very little. I didn’t want to scare him off with the truth.”
“So what if I really like him?”
“What do you mean?”
“Can I take him home with me?”
“You do and I’ll wring your skinny little neck.”