All the Beautiful Lies

by Peter Swanson

  Chapter 14

  Now

  Every time the front doorbell rang at the store the following day, Harry thought it might be Grace, returning to find out more about a possible job. He didn’t really believe she’d return—why would she when he’d told her he would call?—but he found himself disappointed, anyway. He’d been obsessing over their conversation the previous afternoon, telling himself that maybe she was just what she said she was—new in town, and looking for a job. But she wasn’t, was she? She had obviously come in for some purpose other than a job. Why else would she have been at the funeral, and walking past the house on his first night back in Maine?

  But each time the bell rang, it was either a customer—usually coming to offer condolences instead of buying a book—or Alice, who stopped by at lunchtime to bring chicken sandwiches and then again midafternoon, because she was shopping and wanted to see if Harry or John needed anything. Dinner at home the previous night had been less intimate, and less awkward, than the night before, but only because Harry told her he wasn’t feeling well, passed on a drink, and ate in record time. He spent the evening in his room, finishing the Ed McBain and starting another, but mostly just thinking about his father and what might have happened on the path that afternoon. He also thought of Alice, sexualized images of her flashing unwanted through his mind. He kept picturing her from that first summer when she was married to his father. The green bikini top and the denim shorts, so short that he could see the bottom curve of her buttocks. He realized that four years of college hadn’t managed to shake that image from his mind.

  At four thirty, when it became clear that Grace wasn’t going to drop by the store again, he got out his phone and punched in her number, adding it as a contact. He was about to call her, but decided to text instead.

  This is Harry from the bookstore. Want to get a drink tonight?

  He pressed Send, wondering anxiously if he was misleading her about the job possibility. Lew leapt onto Harry’s lap, startling him. Lew was not generally a lap cat, unless you’d ignored him for some time, and then he’d find a way to pounce into your lap when you weren’t looking. With one hand, Harry stroked Lew’s matted fur, writing another text to Grace with his other.

  No job here, at least not yet. Just wanted to get a drink.

  He shook his head rapidly at the two dumb texts. “You okay, my friend?” John asked. Lew flattened himself onto Harry’s lap, purring.

  “Oh, sorry. I’m looking at my phone.” Harry held it up, and as he did, it vibrated in his hand. It was Grace, texting back.

  Sure. When?

  They agreed to meet at the Village Inn in one hour. Harry left work early, considered going home to change out of his black T-shirt into something a little more date-like, then decided his time would be better spent waiting for Grace at the bar.

  The Village Inn was a large Colonial house refurbished into a small hotel. Harry had been inside a few times, to eat dinner with his father, or his father and Alice. He’d seen the bar, but he’d never had a drink there. It was a small alcove off the main lobby, wood paneled and with just eight padded stools along the bar. It was empty when Harry arrived, not even a bartender. He sat on a stool. The oak bar gleamed with polish, and low lighting illuminated the high-end bottles displayed behind the bar. Harry was used to college bars with Budweiser mirrors and Jägermeister dispensers. While he was trying to decide what to drink, the bartender came out. She was a heavyset woman with old-timey tattoos on both arms. Her hair was dyed a bottle blond and she wore thick glasses. She startled a little when she saw Harry.

  “Where’d you come from, sweetie?” she said, as Harry asked her if they were open yet.

  “We’re open. What can I get you, and can I see an ID, please?”

  Harry fished out his driver’s license, showed it to the bartender, and ordered himself a bourbon and ginger ale. She made his drink in a low tumbler, garnishing it with a thin sliver of lemon, then fiddled with her phone, which was attached to the speakers, selecting a song, a man’s deep voice over drums, bass, and a saxophone. Harry looked at his own phone as she began to prepare the bar, shifting bottles around, cutting up fruit. It was half an hour before Grace was due to show up. Harry told himself to sip his drink, and make it last. He was anxious to see Grace again, and he wondered what she thought about his invitation. He didn’t know what to think of it himself. Had he invited her out on a date, or was he trying to find out what connection she might have had with his father? Both, probably, although it was easier for Harry to consider it a fact-finding mission.

  Harry had had two major relationships in college. The first had been with Florence Lee, a girl he’d met his first week at Mather when they were both volunteers at the student-run movie theater. Their first night together they had stayed up till dawn talking about the French new wave and Vonnegut novels. She’d done most of the talking, actually, but it was like she was speaking both his thoughts and her own out loud. The next night they stayed up till dawn having sex. Those two nights combined to convince Harry that Florence Lee was the one and only true love of his life. They were inseparable until the following spring, when Harry discovered that she’d never stopped fucking her high school boyfriend back on Long Island. Harry had been inconsolable, even considering leaving Mather. Paul Roman, claiming he’d never liked Florence, had finally gotten Harry out of the funk.

  Then Harry had started spending time with Paul’s friend Kim, so different from the cerebral, depressive, highly sexual Florence. She was a very sarcastic theater major who wore retro dresses and smoked American Spirits. They stayed close all through sophomore year, Harry coaching Kim through her own complicated, emotionally abusive relationship with a fellow theater major named Antoine. When Kim finally shed Antoine, at the beginning of junior year, Harry and Kim started fooling around, jokingly at first. They agreed to keep it quiet, and they agreed to take it slow, each having been damaged by previous sexual relationships.

  “How slow?” Harry asked, the first morning after Kim had spent the night in his bed.

  “When it snows we’ll do it. How about that?”

  Harry pulled up his dorm room’s blind and looked out at a blue sky. It was early November, and most of the trees were still holding on to their changed leaves.

  “First snow, really?”

  “Sure. Sounds about right. When it snows I’ll let you put your penis in my vagina.” She was hooking her bra behind her back and smiling widely.

  “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  By the middle of December, there hadn’t been so much as a snow squall, and the weathermen were predicting a decidedly nonwhite Christmas. The mild fall had become a constant joke between Harry and Kim, the weather conspiring to keep them apart. On the last night of fall semester, Harry had one paper left to write, five pages on the Protestant Reformation. He was just finishing up when he received a text from Kim.

  Done yet?

  Almost.

  Come over when you’re finished.

  After giving the paper one last reread, then e-mailing it to his professor, Harry wrapped a scarf around his neck and walked across campus to Kim’s single in Hubbard Hall. It was cold, the sky filled with stars. He checked his watch before knocking on her door—it was just past midnight—but he knew she’d still be up. She opened the door, her eyes bright and nervous. Harry walked into a room entirely plastered in cutout snowflakes—it must have been hundreds—taped on the walls, the ceiling, even scattered on the floor.

  “Ta-da,” she said, her voice quavering, and Harry knew instantly that the waiting had been a mistake. He felt it in his stomach, and put a smile on his face that he hoped looked genuine.

  Kim threw him onto the bed—also covered in snowflakes—and told him to “make love” to her, and Harry felt all desire leave his body. Whether it was the gimmickry of the moment, or the fact that he’d never had intense feelings for Kim in the first place, he knew it wasn’t going to work. Still, he tried, and by dawn, when i
t was clear that nothing was going to happen, he pretended to fall asleep, listening to Kim quietly cry into the pillow next to him.

  The following semester, Harry and Kim agreed to just be friends. It was awkward for a while, but eventually they went back to the way they’d been before. Harry told himself that their failed consummation had been a product of a mismatch—that they never should have tried—but secretly he worried about it. Was he only sexually attracted to the girls who didn’t want him, or to the women he could never have, like his stepmother?

  Toward the end of senior year, Harry and Kim had begun to occasionally fool around again, and one night, Kim, as drunk as he’d ever seen her, told him that he was the only boy she’d ever loved. Harry responded with silence. The following day Kim claimed she’d blacked out the night before, but Harry wasn’t so sure. He told himself he needed to stop misleading her, and he had, for the most part. But now it didn’t matter. She was doing Teach for America for a year in Baton Rouge, and Harry was in Maine.

  “Same again?” the bartender asked.

  “Uh, sure,” Harry said, checking the time on his watch. It was exactly the time that Grace and he had agreed on. He turned and there she was, walking into the bar, wearing a dark blue dress, the hemline over her knees.

  “Fancy,” she said, looking around as she slid onto the stool next to Harry.

  The bartender placed his drink in front of him, and asked Grace what she wanted. She glanced toward the small selection of draft beers, and ordered a Shock Top.

  “Any luck on the job front?”

  “Not yet. I’m not in a rush, though. How’s the bookstore?”

  Harry, partly from nerves, found himself telling Grace not just about the work he’d been doing at the store, but also about his anxiety regarding the store’s future. His own future, as well.

  “You’re not interested in taking over?” Grace asked.

  “No, not really. And if I was, I’d be interested in working at the Ackerson’s in New York, even though it doesn’t belong to my father . . . didn’t belong to him, anymore. I guess I’m not interested in living up here in Maine, with Alice, for the rest of my life.”

  “Alice is your . . . stepmom?”

  “Yes, sorry. She’s my father’s second wife. My mother died when I was in high school.”

  “So what’s Alice like?” Grace had finished her beer, and must have signaled the bartender, because a full one was being placed in front of her, along with a small bowl of Chex Mix.

  “She’s . . .” Harry searched for a word, finally coming up with “. . . fine.”

  Grace laughed. “Faint praise.”

  “Honestly, I just don’t know her that well. She married my father just as I was getting ready to head off to college. It was pretty much all about me, then, and I didn’t really bother to get to know her”—a flash of his father’s young bride in her bikini went through Harry’s mind—“at least not in any significant way. She’s very sincere, and that’s always made me a little bit uncomfortable. My father was always closed off about his emotions, my mother not so much, but she was also sarcastic, and that goes a long way. Alice doesn’t really have a sense of humor. I sometimes think my father fell in love with her because she reminded him of Maine, and he really wanted to return here.”

  “Why did she remind him of Maine?”

  “I don’t know. She’s straightforward, not complicated, or neurotic. She’s old-fashioned. She took care of him the way his mother took care of him, maybe. This makes him sound terrible.”

  “Not really,” she said, licking some foam from her upper lip.

  “Tell me about yourself,” Harry said, sipping at his drink, surprised to find it was nothing but ice.

  “Do I have to?” Grace said, and laughed.

  “You don’t have to do anything. I’m just curious. How old are you?”

  “You’re not supposed to ask that, but I don’t mind. I’m twenty-five.”

  “Where did you grow up?”

  “I grew up in Michigan, then I went to school in New York City, and now I live right here in Kennewick, Maine.”

  “And you dream of working in a bookstore?”

  “Truth is, like I told you, I know the Ackerson’s in New York City. I used to live on the same block and go in all the time. I like old books. And I knew that there was a second Ackerson’s here, and that’s partly why I picked Kennewick. Not to work at the bookstore, although obviously I would love to do that, but because I wanted to move to the coast of Maine, and when I found out that the bookstore on my block had a sister store in Kennewick, it felt like fate. That’s why I picked here, and that’s why I went to your father’s funeral. You look like you don’t believe me.”

  “Do I? No, keep going.” But Harry had been having trouble believing her. Her story sounded rehearsed, and as she told it, her eyes shifted back and forth, never settling on any one point. She was lying.

  “That’s it. That’s my story.”

  “Why did you leave New York?”

  “Why do you think?”

  “Boy troubles?”

  “Ha. That’s one way to put it, but yes, that is why I left New York.”

  The bartender asked Harry if he wanted another drink. He hadn’t eaten since the chicken sandwich at lunch, and the two bourbon and ginger ales had felt pretty strong. He ordered a beer instead, the same kind that Grace was drinking. After serving it with an orange slice on the rim of the pint glass, the bartender pointed a remote and turned on the flat-screen television built into the bar. Red Sox players were running onto the field at Fenway.

  “You a baseball fan?” Grace asked, clearly hoping to change the subject.

  “Fair-weather, I guess. When the Red Sox make the playoffs I start to pay attention. My dad was a huge fan.” And suddenly Harry realized that his father would never see another Red Sox game again, never read another box score, or complain about a pitcher. “How about you?”

  “Not really. I’m a football fan. Soccer fan, I mean. I follow Man United.”

  “How did that happen?” Harry asked.

  He listened to her talk about soccer, how she’d played her whole life, and how she’d started watching the Premier League games when they’d begun airing them on American television ten years earlier. She talked about players as though Harry had heard of them. Now that she wasn’t hiding anything, she was making eye contact, and her voice had altered slightly. She’d relaxed and Harry could see her at fifteen, a feisty, freckled soccer player with long dark hair on some playing field in the Midwest.

  Harry finished his beer and ate the orange slice.

  “You hungry?” Grace asked.

  “I am. I should go home, probably, because I’m sure that Alice has cooked a three-course meal. It’s what she’s been doing since my father died.”

  “I should eat something, too.”

  “I’d invite you, but—”

  “No, no. Please. I have food at home. I should get going as well.”

  Outside, it was still light, but the sun was hidden behind a bank of dark clouds coming in from the west. There was a distant roll of thunder. “I’ll walk you home,” Harry said.

  “You don’t have to.”

  “It’s sort of on my way.”

  They walked up the hill from the village, stopping outside the large redbrick Victorian where Grace had rented the room. There was an old Mazda RX-7 in the driveway and Harry wondered if it was hers.

  “Let’s do this again,” Grace said, as a few fat drops of rain started to hit the sidewalk.

  “I’d like that,” Harry said.

  He turned and began to walk toward home, wondering if he’d get there before it really began to rain hard, when he heard Grace’s footsteps following him. “Wait up,” she said, and he turned.

  For one brief moment, Harry thought she was going to keep coming and kiss him, but she stopped, a little breathless, and said: “I did know your father, a little bit, from down in New York. From Ackerson’s.”
/>   “Oh,” Harry said.

  “I felt bad lying to you about it.”

  “Why did you?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t want you to think . . . We didn’t know each other well.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “Good night again,” she said, walking backward, smiling, nodding her head slowly, a gesture that seemed to say that she felt better now that she’d told the truth. But she hadn’t told the truth, at least not the whole truth. Harry was sure of that.

  Chapter 15

  Then

  They sat on the beach together, up near the wall, each on one of the flat stones that clustered along the high-tide mark. It was high tide now, an occasional wave lapping at their feet.

  Gina had wanted to come inside the condominium, but Alice had stepped out through the door, pulling it shut behind her, and said that they should go talk on the beach. It was clear that Gina was either drunk or seriously messed up on some kind of drug. Her eyes were red rimmed and unfocused, and her words sounded gluey in her mouth. Alice held her arm as they walked toward the water.

  “I’m sorry, Al,” Gina said, “but I had to say something, because if I hadn’t then I’d keep thinking it, but now it’s ruined us and you’re my only friend in Kennewick, only real friend, and now you hate me.”

  “I don’t hate you,” Alice said.

  “You don’t know what it’s like in New York. I, like, don’t trust anyone. Anyone. Everyone tells me I’m beautiful, and everyone tells me how I’m this big star, but I’m not, Al. Margery, you know Margery?”

  Alice didn’t, but nodded anyway. They were near the beach, the ocean’s pulsing roar muffling Gina’s words. Alice let her talk. She told a long, rambling story about her manager, Margery, and how she’d thought Margery was the only one she could trust, but how it turned out that she couldn’t trust anyone. While she spoke, Alice looked at Gina’s hand where she had bitten her. It had been swaddled in a white bandage, and even in the dim moonlight, Alice could see dark spots where the blood was seeping through. I did that, she thought. She remembered what it felt like, her teeth sinking into Gina’s flesh.