The Liar's Wife

by Mary Gordon

  Was she disappointed that her parents seemed so delighted? Or was it just her father? Her mother busied herself with plans for the wedding, only a few people, a judge who was her parents’ friend, right in the living room. Right here, she thought, I married him right here. She wondered if he remembered.

  “We have a favor to ask you, Linnet and myself, but we’d like to think we’d be able to do something in return.”

  Here it comes, she thought. How much money would he ask for? How much would she give him?

  “Could we park the truck here and spend the night in your home? We’ll be out of your hair in the morning. It’s nice for us to rest our old bones in a bed from time to time instead of dossing down in the back of the truck. And we’d be pleased to take you to dinner. We’ve just made great friends with Tony, who owns a fabulous restaurant right here in town. Of course you know it. The Tower of Pizza. Fabulous Italian food.”

  “No,” she said, feeling as if she’d missed something right under her nose, something wonderful he’d seen the first minute he laid eyes on it. “Richard and I rarely go out to eat when we’re here.”

  “Well then you’ve a treat in store,” he said, rubbing his hands. She understood that he understood that she’d already agreed to their spending the night. She couldn’t say no now without making a much larger point than she wanted to. And really, her impulse was to agree.

  “I wonder if I could bother you to use the powder room,” Linnet said.

  “The powder room.” The words made Jocelyn sad, making clear the woman’s unease, her desire not to appear unrefined, and the use of the words was the very thing that revealed their class differences, as if a spotlight had been shone on them.

  “Of course,” Jocelyn said, “I’ll just get you a hand towel.”

  “She’s a great girl, Linnet, a great soul, really,” Johnny said when the bathroom door closed. “The soul of loyalty. The most loyal woman I ever knew.”

  Did he mean that as an accusation against her? She knew very well that with Johnny anything that was hurtful was not meant. Unconscious malice, it might be called by a certain type. Passive-aggressive by another. But Jocelyn believed that neither of these terms applied to Johnny. No, it was simply a certain absence of mind. A certain lightness, a tendency to shift attention.

  But meant or not, the word “loyal” could not have been applied to her. She had left him. After only a little more than a year of marriage.

  “We’d better get a wiggle on,” Linnet said. “It’s after seven and they don’t serve all night. And we need to get an early start in the morning.”

  “I’m thinking you’d prefer to take your car than ride in the cab of the truck,” Johnny said.

  “Yes, certainly,” said Jocelyn.

  “So if you’ll move your car out of the driveway, I’ll just pull the truck in. We don’t want to leave it parked on the street. The last thing we need is a whopping great parking ticket.”

  “Of course,” Jocelyn said. She realized that, since they’d arrived, she’d done nothing but do what they asked. And why not? Everything they suggested made the best possible sense. But what sense did it make that she was driving her ex-husband and a woman who either was or was not his wife, fifty years since she’d last seen him? It made no sense at all.

  She realized she hadn’t called Richard to tell him where she was. She hoped he wouldn’t worry. Of course he wouldn’t worry. There was no reason to, no reason whatever.

  The restaurant was near the railroad station, the part of town, in all the years she’d lived in New Canaan, that Jocelyn had approached most rarely. The town had a dirty little secret, perhaps not well kept. Everyone thought of New Canaan as the home of upper-class WASPs, but there was a part of it that was not WASP at all, that had been, for many years, primarily Italian. None of her parents’ friends lived in this part of town. “They” had their own church, their own schools; as a child she’d seen other girls her own age in plaid jumpers and brown oxfords, the boys in blue jackets and grey trousers. In high school, some of her good friends had been Italian: Barbara Valone, who’d been her partner in the science project—she remembered it was something about bats—that had won them third place in the state finals, and Arthur Calonna, who sat next to her in Chemistry and taught her how to use a pipette. But when it came time for college, Jocelyn and her friends went to Ivy League schools and Barbara went to Manhattanville, Arthur to Fordham. It was understood that they would go to Catholic colleges. Jocelyn had never seen them after high school graduation. Not once. If they came home to visit their parents, it would have been to quite another part of town.

  “Right here,” Linnet said, indicating a neon sign that flashed TOWER OF PIZZA. How had she never noticed it? She noticed once again that Johnny had, if not actually lied, then exaggerated. He’d certainly got the name wrong. It wasn’t an Italian restaurant. It was a pizzeria. But when they approached she saw that the menu on the door indicated that lasagna, manicotti, and baked ziti were also served. So perhaps she was being unfair.

  Johnny and Linnet walked into the restaurant ahead of her. She saw how he did it, making an entrance, certain that everyone would be glad to see him. And the owner came out and put his arms around first Johnny and then Linnet. “I was so afraid you wouldn’t show up,” he said. “We’ve got everything all set up for you.”

  He pointed to two chairs and a microphone, a small table, a pitcher of water, a vase with two daisies in it, and an overlarge chrysanthemum.

  “This is the friend I told you about,” Johnny said. “Do you believe she’s lived in New Canaan all these years and never been here?”

  “It’s just that we’re only here on weekends and, well, we like to stay at home.”

  “No problem, honey,” the owner said. “Anything you do is fine by me, after what Johnny told me about you. By the way, say hi to Mick next time you see him.”

  Jocelyn nodded, not knowing what she’d agreed to.

  “What did he mean by that, ‘Say hi to Mick’?” Jocelyn asked.

  “Well, I just told him a little story, just to pass the time. I told him you and I had been friends when you were traveling in Europe in the sixties, boyfriend and girlfriend I said, but I told him you left me to go off with Mick Jagger. Before he joined the Stones.”

  “Why would you do that, Johnny?” Jocelyn said. “What can I possibly say to him if he asks me?”

  “Just say everything was great, that Mick was great, a very sensitive fellow,” Johnny said.

  “Isn’t he just a hoot?” Linnet said, putting her arm around Johnny’s waist.

  “You see, now, Tony has a story to tell his family and you’ll always be welcome.”

  “Except, Johnny, that it just isn’t true,” Jocelyn said.

  Johnny shrugged, and a waitress came up with two menus.

  “Katerina, love,” he said, kissing her on the top of her head, “great to see you. I was hoping you’d be on. Katerina’s from Romania.”

  “I understand the song ‘Ruby Tuesday’ was written for you,” she said.

  “I guess so,” said Jocelyn. It was a set of muscles she hadn’t used for fifty years, the muscles that allowed her to pick up the thread of Johnny’s stories so that no one would be embarrassed, disappointed, shamed. Linnet started singing “Goodbye, Ruby Tuesday” and Johnny joined in, and then Katerina, and then Tony, the owner. Jocelyn looked down at the floor, hoping to suggest that the memory was bittersweet.

  When she sat down, she realized she was trembling. She was slightly shocked at how glad she was to see Tony approaching with a bottle of wine and three glasses.

  She drank rather faster than she was used to. Johnny and Linnet were holding hands. She found this vaguely embarrassing, and she disliked herself for the feeling. She felt that the silence made their handholding more portentous than it might have been. She noted that neither of them had asked her anything about herself. And then she remembered; the Irish didn’t ask you about yourself, they considered it rude.
But of course Linnet wasn’t Irish, but maybe she wanted to let Johnny take the lead. Well, Jocelyn told herself, I’m not Irish, and there’s no one but me to take the lead. And there were things she wanted to know. She felt she had a right to know certain things; they had imposed upon her privacy, her hospitality. She should get something in return. She should be given information about the last half century of her ex-husband’s life.

  “How long have you two been driving trucks?”

  “Well, not that long, it’s just our latest way of surviving,” Linnet said. “We met when we were working a county fair in Wisconsin; we were an introductory act for Arlo Guthrie.”

  “Oh, yes,” Jocelyn said, “Alice’s Restaurant.”

  “Fabulous guy, fabulous. He wasn’t just a one-trick pony. He’s really grown as an artist. Great stories, great stories. Great gas it was being on the road with Arlo.”

  “Don’t say ‘great gas,’ I told you that, baby,” Linnet said. “It makes people think you’ve got a flatulence problem.”

  Johnny laughed and kissed Linnet on the mouth. Jocelyn remembered she had thought the same thing fifty years ago in Dublin when people said “great gas,” when they meant they were having a good time.

  Jocelyn felt herself laughing more than she knew the comment was worth. Why not enjoy the evening? she asked herself. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s good to widen your horizons. Get out of your rut. God knows, Johnny was never in a rut.

  “For a while, we had a really good gig, a good paying gig, not a musical gig but, you know, like a job. We had it for two years. We were a live-in couple for a terrific old lady. We really loved her. Out in New Mexico, near Taos. Beautiful country. I just love the desert,” Linnet said.

  “I do too,” said Jocelyn, with an enthusiasm that suggested that the bond between them was profound.

  “Adelaide Harrison, what a great lady. A really great lady. We lived in, you know. I was the handyman and Linnet did the cooking and cleaning and the errands—she had a gorgeous place near Taos, incredible views of the desert, unbelievable sunsets. We lived there for two years, and we were like family. We couldn’t do enough for her, she couldn’t do enough for us,” Johnny said.

  “It’s because of her we have this nest egg,” Linnet said, reaching into the neck of her T-shirt. She pulled something out, a silver chain, and lifted it over her head, cupping it in her hand as if it were a literal, fragile bird’s egg, robin, perhaps, or plover, Jocelyn thought. She brought her hand close to Jocelyn’s face and then opened it slowly. “This is our nest egg,” she said. Attached to the chain was a diamond ring; the stone, Jocelyn could see, even in the darkness, was enormous.

  “Adelaide gave this to me and Johnny. It was her engagement ring. She said she’d give it to us if we’d promise to make it legal someday. We said we would, although, as a matter of fact, that’s not going to be happening anytime soon, because neither of us is exactly what you’d call divorced.”

  “Ashley’s mother?” Jocelyn asked. She was listening to what they said as if they were people with whom she had no connection, from another very distant country, with another set of customs, fascinating, but far from her concern.

  “No, no, Ashley’s mother was much too organized not to get properly divorced. You were organized in that department, Jocelyn, or I guess the family lawyer was. I was quite grateful at how easy it was.”

  She’d had to sue him for desertion, and she’d disliked that very much, because he hadn’t deserted her, she’d deserted him, although she found the word grotesque, as if they were infants left on some doorstep. She knew that he wouldn’t mind, though, and it was much easier. Quite easy, in fact, she remembered now.

  “No, it was a lady named Melody, but we did not make beautiful music together,” Johnny said.

  Linnet raised her glass, and they clinked.

  “And me,” she said, “well I got out by the skin of my teeth, let me just tell you that. I don’t know what it was but for a while there, bipolar types just levitated towards me.”

  “I think you mean ‘gravitated,’ sweetheart,” Johnny said. “Although knowing you, you’re such an angel, maybe they did levitate.”

  “Whatever,” Linnet said. Jocelyn noticed she took no offense at Johnny’s correction of her diction. He had cared about words; she wondered if Linnet’s carelessness with language was troubling to him.

  “But you let your friend Adelaide think you would get married someday.”

  “Well, we didn’t want to worry her. It would have just worried her if she knew about all our legal complications. And she was worried about what to do with the ring. She knew her daughter didn’t want it. She kept saying, ‘Rowena’s just too sporty for this kind of ring.’ ”

  “What she meant,” Linnet said, “was that she was a lesbian.”

  “Rowena was a great girl, her and her friend Beth. We had some marvelous evenings with them, watching the sun go down with a glass of wine. It was great crack, great crack.”

  “That’s another thing you can’t say, Johnny, like I’ve told you maybe like, what, a million times. You can’t say ‘great crack.’ People will think you’re a drug addict.”

  Jocelyn laughed out loud, a laugh she thought would have embarrassed almost everyone she knew. It would definitely have embarrassed Richard.

  She was feeling dizzier now, and her sense of well-being had suddenly disappeared, replaced by a disturbing notion that if she got up and tried to walk she would fall down. She remembered feeling that way all the time in the last days of her marriage to Johnny. It was navigating the choppy seas of what they would call stories and what she could only call lies. Not knowing what was firm, dependable ground, the ground of fact, the ground on which words and facts met—it had made her woozy; some days she felt she could do nothing but take to her bed. It was why she’d needed to leave him; she needed to be on firm ground again. And she had been, living her life, one foot before the other on the sweet firm earth. Until tonight. Once again she had to navigate the sea of untruths. Johnny telling the restaurant owner she had been Mick Jagger’s girlfriend. Pretending that she wasn’t more than slightly queasy about the way in which they’d got their “nest egg,” this extraordinarily valuable ring. He had pulled her back, back into those treacherous waters.

  They never called anything a lie, but they lied all the time, even to each other, even to their best friends. Lying to each other didn’t seem to tarnish their sense of friendship. But she had believed that if you were really friends with someone, you didn’t lie to them, and so if you lied to someone, that person could not be a real friend. She thought she had made real friendships until the end, when she couldn’t believe anything, when she thought nothing was real, and she had been terrified and fled for home.

  She had thought Claire and Moira were her friends. She was fascinated by them, by a way she’d never known of being a woman. They talked as she had never heard women talking before. In the fog of talk, the tempest of talk, the tornado of talk, the furniture shop of talk, the flood of talk, the firestorm of talk—men talking, talking, these two women would send up a flare, and there would be a clearing because always they were surprised that it was a woman talking. And the talk of these women was deliberately not kind.

  She and Johnny had lived first with Claire and her husband, Diarmid, when they arrived in Dublin. The ease, the kindness of Claire and Diarmid … “You’re very welcome,” they had said, and she did feel welcome, nothing begrudged, everything offered—laughter, talk, cigarettes, whiskey, wonderful brown bread and butter-boiled eggs for breakfast; tea, which she had to learn to like, and did. They had actual jobs; they left the flat early … Claire to work at The Irish Times, Diarmid at his architectural firm. He was taking a courageous position, a position against the time of the tide: trying to preserve the beautiful old Georgian buildings against the rush of new development, buildings of a shocking ugliness, an ugliness, he said, that gave him a physical pain, made him want to take to his bed. He was quieter t
han Claire, and Claire talked even more than Johnny. But she, Jocelyn, was the quietest of them all. She thinks now that with her, Claire took on the male part: the talking part, and she became the woman, the wife, the little sister, listening. Listening to the real story. What was really there behind the ornate, colorful, so decorative screen.

  Claire and Moira: best friends since childhood. Jocelyn came to see they didn’t really take men seriously. For them men were always boys to be put up with or put off or teased or indulged. A luxury item. They never asked men for advice; they never asked men their opinion. And they had important work, Claire at the paper, and Moira a doctor. How surprised Jocelyn had been that someone her age, twenty-three, would already be a doctor. The training was different, she learned soon; you trained as a doctor the minute you entered college. Tropical medicine was her specialty. And Rory, so in love with her, getting his Ph.D. in French, but film was his passion. What was most important to him was writing film criticism for small journals. They were all mad about film … Sometimes they forgot themselves and pronounced the word “film” with two syllables—“fillum,” they would say. There were enormous queues around the cinemas that showed the latest films from Europe. The whole town seemed movie mad. But no one was more mad about films than Rory. Serious, always the butt of their jokes, perfectly accepting, even relishing in his role as the one to be teased.

  So much is coming back to her now. She remembers Moira making fun of an article he had written. “Marian Imagery in the Work of Ingmar Bergman.” He had asked if they would listen to it, give him “constructive criticism.” Jocelyn had no idea what the words “Marian imagery” might mean. It became clear to her (she had learned by then not to ask, to wait until she got the code) that it meant something about the Virgin Mary.