Would I Lie to You

by Mary Lou Dickinson

  When she did hear his voice, Sue was speechless.

  “Hello,” he said.

  And then again, “Hello.”

  “I was wrong,” she said.

  “Is that you, Sue?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’d like to see you.”

  “You mean you miss your husband.”

  “Yes, I do. Of course I do,” she said. “But I think I miss you, too.”

  He hesitated. “I’ll come over,” he said. “If that’s what you want.”

  When Sue greeted him at the door, what she saw first was the smile that widened his face and took in his eyes. Almost dancing into the room, he raised his hands toward the ceiling.

  “Hallelujah,” he said.

  “Hey,” she said. “Hello.”

  He reminded her of a large puppy. He saw things, he knew things, and yet he seemed such a boy. Such a delightful man. He was full of optimism and enthusiasm, looking skyward with a sense of wonder that suggested the world was treating him well. She wished she could be like that.

  “It’s nice to see you,” he said.

  “I’m glad.” She would not tell him how afraid she had just been that he would be angry.

  She moved into the kitchen. “Beer?” she asked. “Juice? Coffee?”

  He shook his head. “No thanks,” he said. “I don’t want anything to drink. I came to see you.”

  She let him put his arm around her. “Hey,” he said, slipping his hand under her blouse. She moved back a little. “There are a couple questions I’d like to ask,” she said, feeling that she was about to become almost ridiculously formal. “I don’t have any right to and obviously you don’t have to answer. Like how you deal with your marriage.”

  She could see his eyes veer off to the left. But it was important to her even though she knew she had acted without really considering it, as if they lived in a bubble that would protect them. Now she had asked him to return, said she missed him, knew she wanted him. She thought she needed to know even though when he did answer, it did not clarify anything.

  “They’re quite separate.” It was clear this was all he was about to offer about his overlapping relationships with two women. “Have there been others?” she continued. Was she special in some way? Or was he a philanderer? But if he were, surely he would not tell her.

  He looked at her sadly, as if he were disappointed she had to ask. “I don’t screw around,” he said softly. “But there was one once. At a conference. She went back to Hawaii afterwards. Those two weeks at a retreat in California were like a dream.” He remembered the ocean, he said. Rocks with shells embedded in them. The sun drenching their bodies. “I knew I would never see her again.” Although she had written later to tell him how her life had unfolded after their encounter, that she had finally made the choices she needed to make.

  “What was it for you?” Sue asked, not at all clear as to why she imagined there might be a simple answer.

  “It was about flying,” he said.

  She thought she probably looked as baffled as she felt. Flying? What on earth did that mean?

  “Finding out I could still fly.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Is that what this is about?”

  “No, this is a gift. And I wouldn’t want to clip your wings. You need to grow them again. You need to be free.”

  Sue did not comment. Like a bird, she thought. Jerry’s bird. This conversation felt as if it had proceeded as far as it was ever going to. If she fell deeply in love with him and he went on keeping his life in boxes, how would that feel? All she could do for now was to drop it all.

  “Do you want to listen to music?” she asked.

  “I wasn’t thinking of music, but we can just talk if that’s what you want.”

  What would they talk about? She wondered if he shared her love of travel, he who had come to a strange country and built a whole new life here. What else did they share? She had no idea.

  “I remember a story you told me about riding your bicycle around Europe,” she said. “About living with gypsies for a while.”

  “Where would you like to go?” he asked as if he knew this was a question that masked what she really wanted to ask.

  “Maybe New Zealand.”

  “It’s beautiful.” He had hiked some major trails there and driven around rocky cliffs above the sea.

  He mentioned Russia.

  “I’d like to go to South Africa,” she said. “But I wouldn’t have wanted to go in the days of apartheid.”

  He could understand that, he told her, although he remembered visiting the former Yugoslavia when Tito was still in power. “It was one of my best trips. The people were so friendly.”

  They were close to each other again and he bent down and kissed her breast through her blouse. She watched his long fingers with fine hair on them stroking her as if she were watching a tableau as well as being part of it.

  “Is that all right?” he asked.

  She nodded. That part of her that was open to loving again could not do otherwise.

  After they made love again, he looked at his watch. “That was wonderful,” he sighed “But I still have to drive back to the country. It takes over an hour.” He stood up and started to pull on his trousers.

  Sue fingered his green silk shirt on the chair beside her. “Would you give me an old shirt some time?” she asked, knowing he would soon be gone and if she did not see him for days or weeks her memory of these moments would fade and she did not want that to happen. She wanted to hold onto them.

  “A shirt?” he asked, his tone bewildered.

  “Just something of yours to wear,” she said. “Something that makes me feel close to you when I do.”

  He did not say anything. When he was dressed, he started down the stairs, stopping halfway down to look at a group of paintings on the wall.

  “My shirt,” he said.

  It took her a few seconds to figure out what he likely meant was the paintings created images with the same impact on him as his shirt would create for her. Then she smiled.

  At the front door, he grinned. “See you in New Zealand.” He turned to wave from the sidewalk before crossing the street to his car.

  It was then Sue realized he had not said he would call, although she thought he had intended to. And as the days went by, she was baffled. She began to worry that maybe she had annoyed him. She could imagine him looking at his calendar to see when appointments were slotted in. At the first opportunity, he would call. What would he say? “I’m sorry. Can we meet and talk?” But that did not happen either and as more days went by, then weeks, Sue did not know what to do. She felt the dilemma of being a new widow overwhelmed by the implacable strength of her desire. Hans had said something about not hurting people. Yet she suspected he did not think he would hurt either his wife or her as long as they were both in their distinct compartments. She had known enough men to know they could create these separations more easily than most women could. If he wanted to find time, he could. She knew that. Maybe he realized it was not actually possible to carry on without someone getting hurt.

  He had filled some of the emptiness after Jerry’s death, but she also realized that by now there was more to it than that. She carried on conversations with Jerry still, but also ones with Hans. And it was Hans she yearned for. She told no one, her life replete with compartments also, like the mailboxes standing by the roadside in a rural community.

  *

  Hans looked in his agenda to find out who his next client would be. The name written there was “Elizabeth.” He remembered adding it himself when the answering service had called to give him his most recently booked appointments. When he opened his door, he was surprised to see Sue look up at him. For some reason, he thought of a woman he had seen some years earlier who had her paper open to a section that looked like international events. Before
she dropped it on the table next to her, he had seen a headline about the Americans starting to deploy troops to Kuwait. Not a good omen, yet he had already known from the flashes of the future he had received from the universe that day that it would all soon end in a withdrawal of Iraqi troops. At least for the time being. He wondered why this crossed his mind now, perhaps a foreboding sense about Sue’s presence.

  There was no one else in the waiting area and he realized the last time he had seen Sue in his office was in early summer after the memorial for her husband. He was embarrassed now, knowing she would have expected him to call her. He cleared his throat. “Do you have an appointment with someone in the building?”

  “I have an appointment with you.”

  “My next client is…”

  “Elizabeth,” she said. “That’s the name I gave. You didn’t call. You didn’t seem to want to see me and this was the only way I could find out why.”

  He stepped aside as she went into his office to sit in the armchair on the other side of the tape recorder. She put a package down beside her. In his mind’s eye, he could see and touch the curves and lines of her body. Shaking his head, he turned to the task before him, to read for her when he knew so much about her on an intimate level. Maybe he should start with something he had not told her in her first reading.

  “Did you bring a tape?” he asked quietly. “Because, as you know, I wasn’t expecting you.” He could tell she was nervous, but then he was also.

  “No. Maybe you have an extra one.”

  “There must be one around somewhere.” He reached into his desk drawer. “No,” he said. “I don’t think so.” But he continued to reach further back and finally brought out an unopened tape. He ripped off the plastic wrap, then put it in the machine on the table.

  “Actually, I’m going to do the talking,” she said, suddenly displaying a confidence he had not previously witnessed.

  He squirmed in his chair, but at the same time it pleased him to see her like this.

  “I see your life changing,” she said. “Everything. You’re going to question everything. Someone from your past, your not so distant past, is going to turn up and it would be wise for you to reflect carefully on how you handle it.”

  When she finally stopped, he was quiet. “Why not turn off the tape?” she asked. “You can tell me what happened.”

  “This is difficult,” he said. “I didn’t intend that things would be so murky and to leave you wondering. But you were right. You knew about turning a life upside down. I didn’t believe you. Or didn’t want to. Everything is still pretty unsettled and maybe I’m a coward.”

  She picked up the package from the floor and handed it to him.

  When he opened the mauve paper fastened at the top, he smiled at the sight of the single iris with a long stem.

  “Van Gogh.”

  As she stood up, he wondered if he would let her go down the stairs without saying anything or calling out to her. He was not even sure he was capable of simply listening to her footsteps disappear, of watching through the window as she walked along the sidewalk and vanished in the distance. He might never see her again.

  The leaves on the maple were starting to change. Were he about to take the trip to Russia, by the time he returned, the leaves would be a mass of brilliant crimson. But he no longer wanted to go there without Sue. He could see the two of them standing at a check-in counter at an airport, smiling as the man behind the desk put destination tickets on their luggage.

  He had to discern whether this was an imaginary story or something his psychic sense intuited. What about Heather? This story was not unlike the ones he had created for himself as a child. No one had to know. He had sat in the concentration camp and visualized what it was like outside the prison, the fields he would have to cross to escape this horrid place. It had stunk, he had heard people moaning, and there had not been enough food. He had been hungry. But that story he had created for himself of what was outside the prison had led to his escape. Most of his stories had preceded some action.

  “Are you leaving?” he asked quietly. Would she really leave after all the trouble she had taken to come here?

  “I’ve said what I came to say,” Sue said.

  “You didn’t say everything.”

  “Like what?”

  She can’t say that she’s begun to love me, he thought. It did not take a psychic to know that. Or that she felt she was betraying her husband. Jerry’s his name, he recalled. She still loves Jerry. She’ll always love Jerry. That much was clear.

  “Sometimes you’re angry with Jerry for dying.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Oh yes, you are. And about what he never told you.”

  She sighed.

  “A double-edged sword, isn’t it? Because from that secrecy has come something of value.”

  “You know too much.”

  “That’s my job.”

  She smiled slightly as she turned to leave. “And anyway if he’d told me sooner, we would have been able to share it,” she said over her shoulder.

  “There’s something I didn’t tell you in your last reading,” he said, willing her to stop and listen. “Do you remember when I saw a trip across water? I thought you had enough to handle when I saw you then.”

  “It doesn’t look as if I’m going to take any trip.”

  “You will. And when you do, something will happen. But that’s not what I didn’t tell you. Let me reassure you about the trip. Afterwards, you’ll have trouble walking for awhile, but it will be all right.”

  “Oh gee, thanks.”

  “It’s better to know,” he said. “Then you’ll know that you’ll be all right.”

  “But I’m not taking any trips.”

  Ah well, he was used to her now, always rejecting anything he told her that she did not already know. “As I said, you will,” he said.

  “And what about you?” It was clear she wanted to know his intention.

  “I think I need longer,” Hans said. “Will it be too late to call you then?”

  “I don’t know,” she said with a tinge of sarcasm. “I’m not psychic.”

  “Listen,” he said. “Coming here and saying what you said took a lot of courage and I don’t want to take away from that, but I’m getting something right now.” He peered off into the distance. He knew this was important and was part of what he had not told her before.

  She brushed her hair back impatiently, but she waited.

  “Don’t let all your disappointment become focused on me,” he said, returning his gaze to her. “There’s something else you haven’t looked at underlying everything you’ve said to me. When it surfaces, you’ll have to deal with it. Don’t try to push it away.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Nor do I. But I think you do know.” That was as much as he felt he could say if he did not want to frighten her.

  She squeezed her eyebrows together. He could tell she was back in time now, thinking about what it was that troubled her. Her secret. He knew she had one, but not what it was.

  “It’s funny,” he said. “I see this picture.” He did not think this had anything to do with what he had just said because it seemed innocuous enough to be irrelevant. But it did have to do with her and it might distract her enough to help her look sooner at the deeper secret. “There are two swans,” he continued. “Very graceful. I can see their reflections in the water. I’m getting them very clearly. It reminds me of telling a woman her life was going to have a great deal to do with horses.

  “‘I hate horses,’ she said. ‘They make me ill. My life couldn’t possibly have anything to do with horses.’ I didn’t hear from her for a long time and then she came back and said, ‘You know, Hans, you were right after all. I met a man not long after I came to see you and we married. He’s a jockey. Horses run my life now
.’ So you see, I may not know the significance of what comes to me, but I know when it’s important.”

  “Sure,” Sue said, visibly trembling now at the same time as she struggled not to show it. “I’ll let you know.”

  He smiled, his eyes and nose crinkling up even though she was no longer looking at him and was moving swiftly to the door. When she reached it, she turned again. “Do you miss me?” she asked.

  “That’s beside the point,” he said. “Of course I do, but I can’t give you what you want or what you deserve. And there’s nothing wrong with wanting it. I was wrong to think I might be able to in spite of all the odds against it. I was naïve, too. I’m sorry.”

  He was not prepared to leave Heather and even though he had vaguely considered that possibility, he had decided against it. So he had not called Sue. And as he watched her leave, he felt relieved he had said what he had. Also, he felt very sad. Their paths had overlapped for what he thought must have been a reason, but it did not feel as if there would be another intersection. Her pride, her dignity, or something of that ilk would prevent her from contacting him for even as profound a reason as what she discovered about herself when she eventually faced what lay buried. He wondered if she even knew what it might be. No, she knew. He was convinced she did.

  *

  The message on Sue’s machine came a few weeks after her visit to Hans’s office. She had not anticipated a call this time, feeling from what she now knew that he was not someone to toy with her feelings. His voice, raspy as if choked with a cold, was nonetheless easily recognizable.

  “Hello, Sue, this is Hans. It may not sound like me, but it is….”

  It had not dawned on her the first time she had gone for a reading that she would ever see him again. Preoccupied with survival, she had been like someone hanging onto a life raft or trying to hold at bay a horse rushing toward her in headlong flight. Nonetheless, she had to acknowledge, if only to herself, that she had noticed his rugged good looks then and had been slightly disappointed to find that he wore a gold wedding band. What struck her now was how she had assumed, at the time, that any world he inhabited would be very different from hers.