Liars

by Steven Gillis

  The distance between the driveway and porch is only a matter of twenty feet, and yet walking toward him seems to take forever. She attempts to smile, attempts to steady her gait. The dirt from the day has gotten under her nails. She goes inside, stands at the sink, and scrubs. He heats the oven and removes the fish he’s prepared from the fridge. The kids come and go. Soon they will be back at school and the house will be quiet. “You’re quiet,” he says as the fish cooks. She has poured herself a glass of wine and taken it outside. He comes and sits on the steps beside her and asks about her day.

  She tells him that she is moving on from Eric’s garden and will leave her crew to finish. One of their neighbors passes and they wave. Sitting there, what she finds peculiar, what strikes her as most strange, is how even after this morning everything is the same. She thinks about this, of how she has no intention of telling Matt what happened, no plan to let her sleeping with McCanus do damage to her marriage in any further way. What happened is just that. An incaution. A once-in-a-lifetime mistake. But how can she dismiss it as nothing when her every thought now is filled with what she did?

  She gets up and moves across the front walk, between the bushes she has planted. Matt remains on the steps. She stands atop his shadow, recalls what Eric said about being steadfast in her marriage and how it may seem commendable but is actually something else. What if you wake up one day and realize the adjustments you made weren’t done for love at all? What if you’ve simply been stubborn and so attached to the idea of love that you’ve actually forgotten what love is all about?

  Matt goes inside and checks on dinner. He has cooked the fish in butter. He prefers beef but tonight he will eat as she does. The glass pan is set between them on a hot pad in the center of the table. He serves her first. She samples what is presented without comment. For a minute or more they are silent, the only sound coming from their silverware and the drape across the window moved by the breeze. She hasn’t showered before dinner, wishes now she had and wishes to wash herself and can’t quite understand why she didn’t.

  He thinks to tell her about the plan to turn one of his poems into a song but wants to save the surprise until there is actually something to hear. Since quarreling over the Zell he’s hesitant to promise anything; he doesn’t want to say too much too soon. “So,” he says and tells her just the same.

  She lifts her head slowly. What she hears first is “Eric and I” and nothing else. As the rest registers, as he describes the prospect of a song, she looks at him and laughs. The sound she makes begins low, like the rumbling of some powerful pressure working its way through clay and loam until it breaks the surface of the earth and expands loudly through the air. Her eyes are in a squint against her cheeks, lifted and swollen, made red as her mouth opens wide and he thinks that she is happy, ecstatic even, and so he joins her, laughs as well, believes what a joyous moment they are having until through her laughter she curses and begins to shout.

  Instantly she wishes she could stop herself and take everything back. She wants to start over, to do nothing more than acknowledge his news with a nod and say how nice and let it go at that. Instead she reacts to the mention of McCanus with a floodgate rush. Once released she can’t recover, while caught unprepared, he stares at her, tries to make sense of her reaction, which cuts at him like a jagged crush of ore.

  She has her hands down beside her plate, lays them flat and wants to keep them there, to steady herself as the echo of her laugh remains. He waits for her to explain and she does so viciously, says it’s wrong after turning down the Zell to take advantage of McCanus again, that this idea of creating a song from a poem is a gimmick at best and whatever was he thinking and why can’t he just leave Eric be? “Stay away from him, stay away from him, stay away from him!” She is slapping the tabletop now, about to burst into tears, all of this so unlike her, and startled he can only wait until she pauses long enough to breathe in order to ask what’s going on.

  Such a mystery. Such an exchange. She apologizes quickly enough, does not so much explain as say the matter with the Zell has left her worn and she doesn’t think it’s a good idea to trouble Eric anymore. “Let’s not do this again, all right?” She says this softly, no longer reproachful, though he takes it as such just the same.

  After dinner she goes upstairs to shower. He cleans up the kitchen, waits for her, busies himself with matters of no significance, then heads up to find her but she is already in bed. She has a copy of McCanus’s second novel with her. Hearing him on the stairs, she turns out the light.

  He stands late by the window. All is quiet. She sleeps. In the stillness he thinks of time, of what has passed and what remains. He thinks of how he feels, and how he feels what he feels, of the energy it takes now for what used to come naturally. That nothing is as before he understands. Everything is cumulative, each decision causing some incremental matter of change. In the morning he gets up when she does and fixes her coffee as she dresses for work. When she comes down, he tries to engage her in a pleasant way, doesn’t dwell on last night, wants all to be as it was before, only she doesn’t care to talk. His voice disturbs her and she tells him, “Hush.”

  Harsh, yes, she knows this, she realizes she is losing control and fast, right? What is she doing? Before leaving, she comes and gives him a hug. The embrace is more conciliatory than affectionate, though he accepts it just the same.

  He finds his shorts and running shoes and heads to the high school where he joins the boys in their sprints and in the weight room. He is both collegial and deferential with them, aware that this is their time, their turf, and he doesn’t look to interfere or defeat them. This morning, however, his mood is such that he gives them no comfort, no encouragement, nothing but his head down as they get ready, his back to them as they cross the line.

  He jogs home, showers, then takes a pad and pen and sits out on the porch for a change and writes. Without his laptop, seeing the sampling of his own hand drafting his words makes him even more intimately aware. He thinks about last night, as he came up the stairs and saw the glow from their bedroom extinguished before he reached the landing. He whispered for her and waited for her to answer, writes of this now, his words drawn through the letters of his own hand causing him to feel exposed as he composes: I call her name ask if she’s okay. Are you? She tells me sleeping. Says she is.

  Chapter Thirteen

  This morning, when Cara rings the bell, I don’t answer. At this point I’m thinking we need to establish some rules of engagement and how we’re going to proceed from here. I’m already tired, having gone out last night—restless and hoping I might run into Gloria, I drove downtown. The rain had started and I parked inside the structure on Fourth then jogged across the street to The Grotto for a drink. I was thinking about going to Caber Hills and seeing if Lidia was there, though I really didn’t want to confuse myself further so I finished my drink then headed back outside and drove to Colossal.

  Frankie was there with Rose Grayne and two guitarists, Billy Sweet and Ricky Perl, whom I’d worked with before. Rose was with Verve, a great singer, jazz stylist, a Dinah Washington meets Jill Scott sort of serious talent with a CD about to drop, including three songs we worked on together. Sweet and Perl sat on the couch, each with their instruments held in their laps like natural extensions. I asked how everyone was doing and Frankie told me, “Rose got ripped off.”

  “Hard truth,” Sweet piped in.

  “Boyfriend troubles,” Frank again.

  “Always, right?” Perl added. “Uh-hum.”

  “Sorry to hear,” I said.

  “Is what it is, you know?” Rose heaved a sigh. “But thanks.”

  “Fucker stole her money,” Frank said.

  “Copied her signature on a check and cashed it to himself.”

  “Nine thousand.”

  “Shit.”

  “Gone like the wind, right?”

  “The cash and the boyfriend.”

  “Did you tell the bank the check was forged?” I
asked. “The bank is liable. They have to pay you back.”

  “Assuming Rose can prove it.”

  “He copied her hand,” Sweet said. “Laid it right down so it’s hard to tell.”

  “Bank’s already skeptical.”

  “Black woman and all, you know?”

  “Least ways they’re going to make her prove she wasn’t part of it or didn’t actually sign.”

  I took all this in, I looked from Frank to Rick to Bill to Rose who sat with her head tipped back, the set of her jaw raised tight while her eyes flashed hurt in a way that made clear the money stolen wasn’t the only thing on her mind. Rose’s woe hit home, the comedy of every relationship, the macabre slapstick, which played out whenever two people attempted to come together. “The things people do,” I said. “Stole your money and broke your heart.”

  “On and on.” Sweet picked up the thread on his guitar, followed by Perl, and played us through until Rose began to sing and Frank set the mics so we could record.

  Around ten, I called my lover and she met me at our motel. “Lucky for you,” she said of her being able to get out, she told me next time she wanted to fuck at my house. I said we’d see, I knew I wouldn’t let that happen, would instead bribe her with a better hotel. After we screwed, I told her about Cara, about Lidia and Gloria and everything that did and didn’t connect the three. My lover laughed at all my news and how tortured I seemed to be. “Come here, lover,” she said, “and tell me again.”

  I didn’t get home until late and then Fred and I walked out back in the yard. The floodlight shined into the garden. Fred was happy to have me home, ran around, took a dump somewhere near the new cherry tree. I made a mental note of where the shit fell, told myself I would clean up the mess in the morning.

  •

  Cara turns to knocking next. Fred barks. The front door is unlocked after our morning walk but I don’t expect Cara to try the handle.

  She tries the handle, sticks her head inside, and calls my name.

  “Working!” I shout down.

  “Eric!” she yells back.

  It is this already. I curse loud enough for her to hear, hit save on my computer, and come downstairs.

  The makeup Cara wore yesterday is not there now. She walks toward me. I stand with hands on hips and let her approach. “I thought you were done here,” I say.

  Cara ignores my statement. Outside, the boys from SunGreen arrive to work the yard. Cara has parked at the curb, for a quick getaway, I suspect. She addresses me tersely. “What are you doing?” she wants to know.

  I reply, “Writing, I told you.”

  “With Matt.”

  “What with Matt?”

  “His poems. Your music. What is this?” she asks, louder this time.

  I explain what she apparently already knows, that Matt and I discussed using one of his poems in a song and how, “This was after the Zell, before you and I got together.”

  “We’re not together,” Cara snaps back, and when I correct myself and say that isn’t what I meant, she heaves up her shoulders and tells me to stay away from Matt. “You’re not his friend. You can’t work with him now.”

  Her demand rankles me, the insinuation that I am somehow singularly to blame for our sleeping together, and to this I say, “What about you?”

  Cara stands two feet in front of me. In her work boots, in her cut-off bibbed overalls and green T-shirt beneath, she appears stern and impervious, fields my question and tosses it back. “We’re not talking about me,” she says.

  “But shouldn’t we? If I can no longer claim to be Matt’s friend where does that leave you?”

  “Where it leaves me is none of your concern.”

  “I never said I was concerned. I’m just asking.”

  “Well stop,” she insists.

  “All right.” I consider saying goodbye and returning upstairs, but here is Cara in my house, in the center of my living room, barging in uninvited and disrupting my day. Her vehemence creates resistance and strikes me now as necessary to address. I fold my arms across my chest as if to demonstrate my resolve, and starting back in I say, “If you’re worried about my saying something to Matt about what happened, you needn’t. I’m well-practiced in this sort of thing and have no intention of saying a word. Matt asked for my help after the Zell, is all. He wanted to make you happy and who am I to say no? We thought doing something different with his poems might be a way to impress you. And, yes, I understand that my looking to help your husband while sleeping with his wife is a bit incongruous, but we all make up our own reality, isn’t that right?”

  “I don’t even know what that means,” Cara shouts. “What does that mean?”

  “It means your truths and my truths and Matt’s truths are not the same. Our realities and perceptions are different. People live in ignorance every day. People live with lies, both told and concealed, all the time.” I confess to not being a good friend, and that I’ve slept with other men’s wives before, though I do not do so to hurt anyone but simply because I can. I enjoy distorting other people’s realities, I am inclined for sport to carry out a bit of harmless manipulation, and tell Cara then of how I carried on at a recent barbecue with members of my university department, that I purposely pitted three graduate students against one another with a fabricated claim of having Martin Amis to dinner and an invitation I planned on extending to one of the students. The whole of the evening was a carnival show as the three fawned and vied for opportunities to impress me. Eventually the night ended with the two male students in a near brawl while the female student used that moment to pitch me in the privacy of an upstairs bathroom. Such incidents are innocuous enough, though with Cara now the penalties are more long-lasting, I understand.

  “I’m not oblivious.” I tell her this as I must, without apologizing for anything, and explain how it is not my way to feel bad about the things I’ve done, that I believe in the firmament of free will and that we act as we do because we choose to, and why feel bad then when we make decisions? I answer my own question, I tell her that free will does not suggest sound judgement, that being free means we are unimpeded for the most part in our actions but those actions aren’t guaranteed to be sound, and as we are equipped with reflection and the capacity to evaluate our conduct through hindsight, it is essential that we not lose track of this ability. “I feel bad for Matt,” I say, “but that’s all, and honestly even that I wish I didn’t feel.”

  For her part, Cara doesn’t want to hear about me. “I’m his wife.” She says this in a way that is at once ridiculous and gloomy. She repeats her demand, does not want me working with Matt, as if this rather than our sex is the most sordid thing she can imagine. I consider her mandate misguided and say that I have no intention of quitting on Matt now, that what’s done is done and as for the rest, “Matt is excited about doing the song. He believes it will make you happy. Maybe the possibility is no longer valid, but he doesn’t know that and I think preserving his happiness for a little while longer is not such a bad thing.”

  Cara is standing much as before, hands on hips, her head in an endless pivot, as if dodging the words I am sending her way, and she hollers, “It doesn’t matter what you think. I told Matt last night.”

  “You told him what?”

  “The same thing I’m telling you.”

  “You told him you didn’t want us working together?”

  “After everything, after the Zell.”

  “After everything?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “But I don’t. Did you tell him about us?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “And still you said you didn’t want him working with me?”

  “I don’t want you near him.”

  “And he didn’t find that strange?”

  “Why should he?”

  “He’s not suspicious?”

  “There’s no reason for him to be.”

  “Well,” I shouldn’t but can’t keep myself from saying, “
there is a reason. He just doesn’t know.”

  Outside, we hear the sound of a truck as the gazebo arrives and Cara’s crew begins to unpack and transport the sections into the yard. Cara goes to the window in my kitchen. I do not follow her. When she returns her mood is unchanged and doubling down she says to me, “I don’t like you much. And not just because of what happened. I don’t trust you.”

  “I never suggested you should.”

  “You shouldn’t have to. People should be able trust one another.”

  “And when I kissed you?” I ask. “Did you trust me then? You could have stopped any time. I have no power over you.”

  Cara considers this then replies, “Whatever I did find attractive about you was a mistake. You’re not Matt.”

  She says this and I answer at once, “Isn’t that the point?” to which she curses me and says that I’m an ass. Turning from me, she starts back to the door, tells me that she has said all she came to, that she expects me to do as she’s asked and stay away from Matt, and when the garden is finished I can pay my bill and not see her again and that will be the end of it.

  As ever, I can’t resist, because I am who I am and remain determined to know exactly how things will end, assuming this isn’t the end just yet; because of this, I do not acquiesce and let things go, don’t allow Cara to walk away, but am curious still, as I have a narrative to construct and no way to do this without asking Cara, “Then you don’t want to talk about us? You don’t want to explain why you slept with me?” I call after her, I am thinking of where things started, of what I saw the first day I spotted Matt and Cara at the market, and where things are now. Whatever my sleeping with Cara proves, whatever this confirms about Gloria’s claim that all relationships are vulnerable to being fucked with, I need to know more and go ahead and repeat my question. “Why did you sleep with me? You owe me this much,” I say purposely, knowing this will piss Cara off, and it does.