Perfect Lies

by Liza Bennett

  And Meg had decided to take comfort these days anywhere she could find it. She stopped briefly in front of the bench where she had sat with Ethan. It seemed utterly impossible now that it had been only six weeks ago. Her world had changed in so many ways since then. No, she corrected herself, she had changed. In almost every area of her life, she could feel herself being more cautious. She thought twice before voicing her opinions. She took more time to think about problems at the office. She was now aware of things that she had previously taken for granted: her staff at the agency, the business itself, her friends, and, probably more than anything else, her family.

  Since returning from Red River after the funeral, she’d spoken to her sister on the phone at least a dozen times, sometimes for hours on end. She tried her best to feel Lark out about her feelings toward Ethan—the anger, the humiliation that might have led her to kill him. But Lark assiduously avoided any subject that was the least bit depressing. These calls were like their old conversations, rambling digressions, mostly about Lark’s day-to-day concerns—the girls, the Lindberghs, the studio, her writing.

  “It’s so hard to get back into it,” she’d confided to Meg during their phone session that afternoon. “I’ve been through so much… and my little characters are still exactly the same. They seem so innocent, so cute—I feel like kicking them in their adorable butts.”

  “I know what you mean,” Meg said. Ethan’s murder had also altered some of her relationships in subtle and sometimes subversive ways. She had been talking to an old college friend who had complained about problems she was having with her longtime boyfriend: He didn’t know how to be truly intimate; he was spending too much time at his brokerage firm; he’d forgotten their two-year dating anniversary. Had Meg really listened to this kind of whining with interest before? She just wanted to scream: “Grow up! You have no idea what real problems are like.”

  The old Meg would probably have responded with much less concern to the ongoing bad news about Frieda Jarvis. The new Meg was growing increasingly alarmed. While her phone calls to the wayward fashion designer went unanswered and her letters were ignored, three more articles on Jarvis appeared in the business and trade papers, each mentioning that the financially troubled apparel company was looking for prospective investors to staunch its hemorrhaging cash flow. The best-guess earnings that one of articles had given for Jarvis’s most recent quarters were a mere half of what Meg had been owed for the past six months. This finally made her pick up the phone to call Abe.

  “What if there’s no money left?” she had asked Abe, “I kept thinking that she was just slowing down on paying me because she knew I would be more lenient than her other creditors. Now I’m afraid I’ve waited too long.”

  “Welcome to the real world,” Abe said. “I won’t say I told you so.”

  “Oh, come on, you know you just did. But listen, Abe. I’m worried. I’ve been putting off suppliers for a couple of months now. Haven’t paid some of the bigger media, hoping they won’t notice. But I can’t go on like this. Bad credit for an advertising agency is the same thing as a death knell.”

  “We’ll have to sue her,” Abe said without hesitation. “Believe me, I’m sure others are lining up to do so as we speak. But you’re out a lot of front money here, more I’d guess than any of her other vendors. We’ll rush the papers through. We should have everything in order by the end of the week.”

  When Meg didn’t immediately respond, Abe continued in a more conciliatory tone: “I’m sorry about this. I know you two began as friends. But there’s literally no other recourse at this point than the law. I’m sure this is hard on you, but—”

  “The only thing that’s hard on me is the realization that I should have listened to you three months ago.”

  “Getting tough.”

  “Gotten,” Meg said. “About a lot of things.”

  “You know, one of the qualities I’ve always admired in you,” Abe said, “is that you’ve conducted business on your own terms. It’s true that you haven’t been particularly hardheaded. You’ve given people the benefit of the doubt when you probably shouldn’t have. But you’ve been strong without losing—you’re going to have my head for this—without losing your femininity. I think that’s one of the reasons so many of your clients are loyal. You’re you. Not some by-the-numbers advertising exec.”

  “And by this you’re trying to say?”

  “Don’t get too tough.”

  After the mob scene at Fifty-seventh and Fifth, the crowd began to thin out. At the Plaza Hotel, Meg crossed over to the east side of Fifth and walked north along one of the most expensive stretches of real estate in the world. Doormen nodded to Meg as she strode past the canopied entranceways, chandeliers gleaming behind them in the marble-covered lobbies. Meg had the look of someone who might belong there. With her good eye and access to the sample sales of all the top designers, she dressed with conservative flair. Blacks and beiges and navy blues. Cashmere, linen, silk. The lines were what mattered, the magic of a perfect bias cut fluttering at the knee, the jacket collar resting on the shoulders like a mantle.

  Money. You could smell it on the chill night air. A subtle perfume, nothing too strong or memorable but lingering, elusive, like the cushioned interior of the chauffeur-driven Mercedes that stopped as Meg passed. The car door opening, the gloved hand on the upholstered handle, the casual way the occupant’s black leather heels touched—one, then two—the sidewalk. Money. And leisure.

  Leisure—Meg didn’t have it. The nonchalance of the brown-and-white striped Bendels shopping bags, the perfect posture of a woman who never had to make a deadline in her life. The surety that the world would wait for you. That when you were ready, someone blew a whistle, and a limo or taxi pulled up to the curb. Nothing had ever simply been there for Meg. She had to drive herself to go out and get what she wanted. She had to learn what it took to get things done. There was in her very walk a certain competence that comes only from working—and working hard. It was an attitude that would forever separate her from the woman who emerged from the Mercedes and, without a word to the driver or a smile for the doorman, sauntered through the gleaming double bronze doors.

  Don’t get too tough, Abe had said and yet, though Meg had always been a firm believer in creating your own destiny, sometimes life just blindsided you. That’s what Ethan felt like to her now: a bad accident that had left her both physically and emotionally damaged. Meg, who had never been afraid of anything or anyone, was now more than a little wary of the one person she thought she could always count on: herself. How she’d allowed herself to be duped by Ethan, how she had actually come to believe he was good for her sister she would probably never understand. It didn’t help that she hadn’t been alone in misunderstanding Ethan’s true character. The fact that he’d manipulated countless women over the years did not make it any easier for her. Because Meg had always prided herself on knowing about men. She could generally size up a man within the first three minutes of meeting him. And she had rarely been wrong. So how had her signals gotten so disastrously crossed with Ethan? How had she let him insinuate himself into her life? This destructive man had left an enormous amount of damage in his wake—a trail of distrust, betrayal, and emotional pain, the extent of which Meg was only beginning to fully comprehend.

  Meg had promised Lucinda that she would help her—though she’d admitted that she didn’t know how she would go about doing so. Red River and everyone associated with the murder were two and a half hours north of the city. Though she planned to visit Lark over the upcoming Thanksgiving weekend, she didn’t have much time these days for more than the occasional morale-boosting phone call to Lucinda, who remained in the hospital, mending slowly. For the time being, her hands were tied, though her mind kept returning to the subject of the murder and its aftermath.

  Recently she had begun to think about Hannah Judson. She had seemed so eager at the funeral to talk to Meg about Ethan—perhaps Hannah herself could cast some light on Ethan�
��s final weeks. She’d called Hannah and they’d chatted on the phone. At the end of the conversation, the gallery owner had invited Meg on a private tour of a new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum.

  “Boucher and Fragonard mostly,” Hannah had told her with a slightly bored air. “Mid-eighteenth-century French paintings. Not totally my cup of tea, but a friend of mine is a curator there and she’ll let us tour the collection after hours on our own. It’s bliss to see this sort of thing without all the crowds.”

  She met Hannah, as arranged, at the Eighty-third Street service entrance. With her was a tall, willow-thin woman in her late forties, sallow and oval-faced, her long black hair in a thick braid to her waist. Hannah introduced her to Meg as Frederica Gomez, “an old, old dear, dear friend” but when Meg held out her hand to shake Frederica’s, the curator seemed not to notice and led them without a further word down a long marble hallway. The exhibit was on the second floor, and even before Frederica nodded them into the stately high-ceilinged rooms, Meg could feel the giddy pleasure of the billowing, heaven-washed canvasses: the cerulean blues and salmon pinks, the carousing nymphs and satyrs, and the multitudes of chubby, forever-laughing putti.

  “You’ve about an hour,” Meg heard Frederica mutter to Hannah.

  “Thank you, darling,” Hannah replied, and the two women gave each other air kisses, European-style, one blown to each side of the cheek.

  “I do adore her, but…” Hannah said when Frederica was barely out of earshot. She took Meg’s elbow and led her to an enormous canvas that acted as the introductory centerpiece to the show. “She is so very intense. Incredibly knowledgeable, though. And totally connected. She knows simply everybody.”

  Meg couldn’t help but wonder who “everybody” consisted of and whether she herself was included among Hannah’s chosen ones, but she refrained from questioning Hannah’s snobbishness. There was no point in antagonizing someone she wanted to understand. They wandered slowly from room to room, examining the seductive landscapes of Boucher, Fragonard’s dramatic views, the intimate scenes of Chardin. From time to time Hannah would comment knowingly on a painting or artist.

  “They say that Chardin began to paint these domestic pictures,” she told Meg when they stopped in front of a portrait of two women sewing, “because he was annoyed when someone said painting a still life was easy. Thank God for the idiot who made that pronouncement. I adore Chardin’s interiors.”

  Meg kept trying to find a way to introduce Ethan into the conversation. But as they entered the final gallery and stopped in front of a large, richly colored Fragonard, Hannah did it for her.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about Ethan lately,” Hannah said, as they took in the canvas before them. It was a bedroom scene. A red velvet canopy unfurled from somewhere above and outside the painting, its deep color and soft fabric taking up almost the entire left side of the canvas. White sheets and pillows, slightly mussed, shone darkly beneath the lush fall of velvet. The right half of the painting depicted a man and a woman, their eighteenth-century dress in dishabille. The man had his left arm around the woman’s waist. She was arching back from him, her blond, powdered head seeming to draw away from his body and yet, if you looked closely you could see beneath the folds of her satiny gown that her legs were spread and her hips just starting to curve toward his tautly muscled thighs. This half of the canvas was brightly lit, a semicircle of intense white heat, accentuating the movement of the man’s right hand just as it found the tip of the bolt on the bedroom door. The woman’s hand, reaching blindly beneath his, was stretching to find the lock as well, but it was difficult to tell if her gesture was one of protest or complicity. It was a passionate, complexly textured painting, infused with ambiguity. How easy it is to misread other people’s signals, Meg reflected.

  “I imagine we all have been thinking about him,” she said.

  “I was recalling our conversation at the funeral,” Hannah went on. “That dreadful noisy basement. You were surprised, Meg. That Ethan would confide in me about your affair.”

  “No, I was surprised that you’d thought there had even been an affair,” Meg corrected her.

  “It struck me later that you didn’t know about Ethan and me,” Hannah continued, “that you didn’t realize we had been lovers, too.”

  Meg turned and stared at the older woman, her expression obviously revealing her surprise. In her mind, she had for some reason confined Ethan’s affairs to Red River.

  “Please, don’t look so aghast.” Hannah laughed nervously. “Knowing the kind of man he was I can’t imagine why you’d be surprised, unless it was my age. And that, frankly, I’d find insulting.”

  “I’m sorry,” Meg said, trying to pull herself together. “But I didn’t know. And you’re right—it should have occurred to me.”

  “I’m relieved to have it out, one way or the other,” Hannah told her. “Though I suppose a small part of me had hoped that Ethan had told you—that he’d talked to you about me … about us.” Meg could not help but hear the hurt and regret in Hannah’s usual plummy and unemotional voice.

  They had a dinner at a northern Italian restaurant on upper Madison that was so new it didn’t yet have a sign. Hannah assured Meg that the food was delicious and that they’d better enjoy it now because the Times was scheduled to review the place glowingly the following week. Over a glass of wine before they ordered, Hannah told Meg about how she and Ethan had first met.

  “He’d come by to drop off slides of his work,” Hannah said, smiling thinly. “Just a cold call. He was looking for representation and I generally never see anybody like him—I mean anyone with absolutely no connections. My secretary was at lunch and I was at the reception area. He pretended he thought I was the secretary and went on and on about how he heard how wonderful Hannah Judson was, what an eye she had, a sixth sense about talent. Of course he knew that I knew what he was up to … but, Lord, he was so charming. I looked at his work just to appease him. I was quite surprised to see how good it really was.”

  “And you could tell? Just from a slide?”

  “Well, of course, in the beginning it was a little confusing. Ethan himself is … was so vital … and disarming. I’ll admit that in the beginning, I cared a great deal more about him than his work. That first month? When we were talking about mounting the show, what to include, how to display the pieces? I began to see how closely he was tied to his art, how to a very large degree he was his work. It’s what gave him fierceness, his passion. And I began to see what he saw in the pieces—the compressed energy, the risk, the masculinity.”

  “And if he’d been less … appealing? Would you have given him a one-man show like that?”

  “Oh, probably not. But the line between talent and personality has always been rather blurred, don’t you think? One feeds on the other, fires the other. I mean, think of Picasso or Hemingway? Surely their looks, their sex appeal have played a part—an important one—in keeping their cult status alive. A strong, brooding photograph of an artist sells just as much as a glowing review. People want to see, to feel an artist’s creativity—his pain, his loves, you know. People, buyers, want to have that—whatever it is that drives the process—sometimes as much as the art itself. And Ethan? He was a walking embodiment of an artist. He had my clientele just eating out of the palm of his hand.”

  “A regular poster boy for creativity.”

  “That’s a bit cynical. I’m just saying the two things—talent, personality—are simptico.”

  The meal, as Hannah had promised, was delicious.

  “Did Ethan know all this?” Meg asked after they had finished. They had both ordered espressos, and Meg waited until after the two little white cups arrived before adding, “I mean—how you really felt?”

  Hannah produced her strange, carrying laugh. “And how did I really feel? I’ve told you a few things, because you’ve asked. But it’s just a rough sketch, Meg, hardly the full truth. I took Ethan as a lover because he seemed so wild—so fresh—only
to find he was also a truly talented man. So what does that say about us? We were adults. On a certain level I think we both knew exactly what we were doing—and what we could do for each other. But, no, I don’t think he ever realized that it was more for me than that. He was such a passionate man.” Hannah toyed with her spoon. Under the restaurant’s flattering light Hannah looked younger and more vulnerable.

  “Didn’t it bother you to learn about his other women?” Meg asked. “Weren’t you jealous when you heard about his feelings for me?”

  “Sad, perhaps. But I understood what Ethan was like from the beginning. And why should I hold him to a standard different from the one I set for myself? I believe in life in its fullest, most unrestrictive way. I look at nature as my guide—the animals, the seasons, the cycles of dormancy and renewal. I say, jump in, take what you can, give back what you will—take pleasure in it all. I like that part in the beginning of Genesis when God ends each ‘Let there be’… with ‘and he saw that it was good.’ It is good, Meg. And it’s meant to be enjoyed.”

  “That’s how you interpret what Ethan was doing? Simply taking pleasure in life?”

  “Exactly. He did what every man really wants to do. He just had the nerve and the energy to do it. That’s why I loved Ethan so. He had such drive! He was a romantic, in the truest sense of the word—thoroughly emotional, larger-than-life, a lord of nature.”

  “Think of all the people he hurt,” Meg said. “The women whose lives he ruined. The marriages he wrecked.”

  “So, what were they—lambs to the slaughter? Is that how you see it? A hoard of innocent, dumb girls, without any say in the matter, without any power, going under Ethan’s ax? Please! Don’t be so naive. These women—whose lives you say Ethan ruined—as far as I’m concerned, they were asking for it. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Ethan was the single most exciting thing that happened to each and every one of them.”