The Liar's Wife

by Mary Gordon

  As Johnny could.

  My life, she wanted to say, not even knowing what she meant, my life. “Sometimes I think I don’t understand anything about life, Johnny,” she said. “Nothing at all.”

  “Isn’t that the great thing, then,” he said. “Isn’t that the great thing about it. Anything can happen, you never know what it’s going to mean.”

  She felt quite light-headed, and she very much wanted to be outside. “Come outside with me, Johnny,” she said. “Let’s have a look at the moon.”

  The moon was three quarters full. It fell on the blue-black grass, it lit the peach-colored geraniums so that they seemed newly daring; the yellow hibiscus blazed, remembering its jungle home. The white hydrangeas seemed larger than they had in daylight; someone’s cat slunk into a bush; there seemed to be no stars.

  They were standing in the moonlight; they would not see each other again. It ought to have been a solemn moment, but she felt not solemn at all, but giggly. She very much wanted to dance.

  Through her mind went the words of the nonsense poem, turned into a song she’d sung for her children. “They danced by the light of the moon, / the moon, / the moon, they danced by the light of the moon.”

  She heard herself beginning to sing.

  “Would you dance with me, Johnny?” she said.

  “Delighted, madam,” Johnny said. “I’d say Tony’s Chianti did you no harm.”

  “I never sing, Johnny. I have a terrible voice.”

  “There’s no such thing as a terrible voice if you have the love of singing.”

  “Well, Johnny, that’s just not true,” she said and began giggling, letting him twirl her across the dark lawn.

  Suddenly she felt quite dizzy. “I must sit down,” she said.

  “And I must say good night.” He kissed the top of her head.

  “Joss, you’re a great girl, a great girl. You always were. We had some great times, didn’t we, lass? No regrets.”

  “No, Johnny,” she said, “no regrets.”

  And she knew she’d spoken truthfully. She would have been less had she never known him, without the glimpse of something offered, something she knew she couldn’t hold on to. Didn’t want. Without Johnny she wouldn’t have known, really, who she was. Because he had taught her who she was not.

  And by coming back, he’d done something else for her. Some lightness had come about, as if heavy branches had been cut down, changing the whole look of the house.

  He had changed something. Moved some rock that had sealed something over. The sealed-up understanding that she’d had, as if she knew what life was and would always be.

  She thought of the word “unsealed,” and the thrill of it made her feel even more dizzy. But the dizziness pleased her now.

  She was awakened at 4:30 the next morning by a sound she couldn’t place: it was loud, unaccustomed, misplaced in the grey air which ought to have been still. She was unwilling to unloose the grip of sleep; she couldn’t yet commit to wakefulness. Alongside the loud noise, which she gradually understood to be the sound of an engine, or rather, underneath it, two words thrummed or drummed in her sluggish brain. Blood meal, someone was saying. A woman’s voice, no one she knew. Blood meal, the voice repeated. And then, hovering above it, the sound of Johnny’s voice singing, “We’ll all go together” and then Linnet’s, “I wonder if I could bother you to use the powder room.” And then Johnny’s voice, speaking this time, “Our Revels now are ended.”

  She forced herself awake, and then walked quickly to the window. The yellow truck was driving down the street.

  She felt a chill in the air. The sun hadn’t come up yet and the air was damp.

  He’d gone now. She remembered that he never liked goodbyes.

  She wouldn’t see him in her life again.

  She would have to explain to the neighbors why a Frito-Lay truck had been parked in her driveway.

  Of course she could never go back to the Tower of Pizza again. Or maybe she would, with Richard, and if anyone said anything about Mick, she’d just put her finger to her lips and then wink.

  But how could she tell anyone about what had happened last night? The visit of these two. Quite out of nowhere.

  People might say she’d dreamed it.

  But no one would suggest she’d made it up.

  No one would think she had it in her.

  Simone Weil in New York

  OCTOBER 7, 1942

  She looks ridiculous.

  Only a ridiculous person would be dressed like that.

  The black cape, overwhelming her in the high wind.

  The flapping trousers.

  The white hand, holding down the black beret.

  The wind has overwhelmed her.

  She is standing in the middle of the sidewalk, overwhelmed.

  Waiting for someone to tell her what to do.

  Her cape, that looks like it is good for nothing, certainly no good for protection from the cold. Or good only to carry her off.

  Away somewhere.

  Aloft.

  And then smashed down.

  And her trousers, as if they, too, were in the business, the enterprise of forcing her to take flight.

  Forced into flight when what she wanted was just: gravity.

  The wind is strong but her clothing makes the wind a much greater problem.

  Overwhelmed.

  Unfit.

  Unsuited.

  Genevieve doesn’t know: Does Mlle Weil see me? Or does she not see?

  Genevieve cannot order her impressions. Which was first?

  “This figure, man or woman, I can’t tell, is ridiculous.”

  “I will not grant this ridiculous figure the expenditure of my attention. Even for a second glance.”

  Or was it: “That is Mlle Weil, whom I refuse to see.”

  Or was the first impression not in fact a sight, but a cry, audible despite, or perhaps because, of the high wind.

  “Geneviève. Geneviève.”

  Her name pronounced as she had known it until two years ago. “Jahn, uh, vee, evv.”

  Her American friends call her “Jenn uh veev.”

  Her American in-laws, strangers to the French, but not the Yiddish tongue, prefer to call her Jenny.

  There is nothing to be done. She can’t run; she is pushing a perambulator.

  If she hadn’t had the baby with her, would she have run?

  Probably not. She is not that sort of person. To run. To run away from someone she had known, who calls her name. And she would not have run, because of that woman’s force.

  A force from whose field she had believed she had long ago freed herself. Mlle Weil, her teacher. Her revered teacher in the lycée of Le Puy, in the south of France, thousands of miles away. The year was 1933. Nine years ago. Now she is twenty-four, no longer Genevieve Le Clos, now Genevieve Levy. The wife of Dr. Howard Levy, fighting in the army of the South Pacific. The mother of a thirteen-month-old baby. Aaron. Her son. No longer the girl she was.

  And Mlle Weil? Is she the person she was in 1933?

  It is impossible to believe that Mlle Weil would not be the same.

  Genevieve waits for the light to change. Mlle does not wait; she is running. Even across the width of Riverside Drive, Genevieve can see the plain happiness on her face. Can she be smiling like that when I am feeling nothing but the urge to flee?

  She had known that Mlle Weil was in New York. Friends of friends had told her, colleagues of her brother, Laurent, professor at the university. Columbia, Department of Psychology. Mlle Weil is here because of her brother. The great mathematician André Weil. Older brother of the younger, in some ways more famous, sister.

  Mlle Weil is here with her parents. Saved from the fate of French Jews, sequestered on account of her brother’s gift for mathematics. In the safe bosom of the American academy. Teaching in a college in Pennsylvania, Genevieve had heard. But the Weils, Mlle Weil and her family, are living, she knows, quite near where she lives. On the same street,
though perhaps a quarter mile away. Riverside Drive. To herself, though she never says it aloud, Genevieve thinks of it as Riverside Boulevard.

  Genevieve had been afraid of just this moment. This moment of encounter, not only with this woman whom she does not wish to see, but with the whole of what has been lost.

  Of course her losses are not singular. The War. The War has stolen whole lives. Whole cities. Ways of living.

  But the sight of Mlle Weil reminds Genevieve that the loss had come before the War. And was in some ways singular. A loss unlike others brought about by the War. Perhaps not a loss, rather a relinquishment. A gift freely given. A relinquishment, yes, but drawn up from a well of love.

  Genevieve thinks of the sign over the door of Mlle Weil’s classroom in the lycée. ONLY MATHEMATICS MAY ENTER HERE. And yet she taught not mathematics but philosophy.

  It has been a very long time since Genevieve has entertained a dream of mathematical or philosophical proficiency. She can only even recall it vaguely: a dream figure walking on a shoreline, almost entirely consumed by fog.

  The light changes. Green to red. The cars stop; it is now legal for Mlle Weil to be crossing the street.

  Before Mlle Weil reaches the sidewalk, the baby cries. My baby. My baby cries. The cry an entirely meaningful utterance. Or: an utterance with a few possible, radically limited meanings, but each entirely meaningful. I am hungry. I am cold. I am dirty. I need to be held.

  Meaningful utterance.

  The meaning of meaning.

  Those kinds of words indicate a habit of mind Genevieve has long since given up. Brought back by the sight of the ridiculous woman.

  Mlle Weil.

  “Genevieve.”

  The harsh voice, a crow’s, as her flapping cape makes her a crow. Worn out, worn down. Abraded. These are the words for the skin on her face. Too many cigarettes, too much shouting at workers’ meetings, shouting over the heads of those who probably don’t understand her.

  And there had, of course, been illnesses. Mlle Weil suffered from headaches. Her mother had told Genevieve’s mother that she suffered greatly.

  But how had Mlle Weil even recognized her from so far away? It has been nine years. Nine years of the difficulties of war, of terrible displacements. Genevieve knows that she has aged. Sometimes, looking in the mirror, she doesn’t even recognize herself. And yet Mlle Weil had known her.

  “Genevieve.”

  Now they are on the same side of the street.

  Mlle Weil’s fierce eyes, unblinking behind thick glasses.

  Seeing everything.

  Except what she doesn’t wish to see.

  “I knew, Genevieve, that you were living here. Close to where I am living. I knew, even, your address. But I didn’t want to contact you. I was afraid you wouldn’t want to see me.”

  So she has said it: the most uncomfortable thing. The thing that ought not to be said, that no one would say. The truth. Plain. Causing the greatest possible discomfort. Did she consider discomfort a form of suffering? She had understood the contemplation of suffering to be her life’s work. Of course, she wouldn’t consider discomfort. She would consider the consideration of discomfort a form of self-indulgence. Bourgeois falsity.

  Mlle Weil had almost been fired from the lycée for referring to marriage as “legalized prostitution.”

  What would she know of it? Of any of it? Marriage. Prostitution. Even, perhaps, the law.

  Most likely she believed in some universal law that had never been seen or practiced on this earth.

  Genevieve would honor her old teacher by not telling a polite lie. She would honor her by silence. And by making a simple statement of fact.

  “And so, we meet here.”

  The present tense. Suggesting a continuum.

  Eternity.

  Genevieve remembers that among those who mocked Mlle Weil, and there were many, were those who called her the Red Virgin. Because of her left-leaning politics, because of her refusal of traditional feminine allure, feminine attachment. They thought it doubly amusing to call her the Red Virgin, because in Le Puy, the town where Mlle Weil was teaching in the lycée, the town that was the home of Genevieve and her mother and her brother, there was a statue of the Red Virgin, the Madonna. A mother but still a virgin. This was called a mystery, but you had to believe it or be guilty of sin. It was for things like this that Genevieve’s family counted themselves among the non-, or unbelievers.

  The statue had been cast from iron that came from guns taken at Sebastopol. An abomination, Genevieve’s mother had called it: abominable to form a statue of a mother, the source of life, from the machines of death. Genevieve’s mother did not believe, but, a mother herself, though not a particularly tender one, she liked the tenderness suggested by the idea of the Madonna.

  As a young child, Genevieve had done what many children, she later learned, had done. Made a list of words representing her place in the universe: the universe being the highest possible term in her imagination.

  Genevieve Marie Le Clos

  14 Rue de la Gazelle

  Le Puy

  Haute-Loire

  France

  Europe

  The Earth

  The Universe

  It was beautiful, Le Puy, the town where she had been born, the town that it was very possible she would never see again. A region of stone: the stone faces of the houses, the climbs up and down the stony streets. She had loved the high outcroppings, the cascades.

  Her mother had admired Mlle Weil. She had been amused by Mme Weil, Simone’s mother.

  Mme Weil had confided in Genevieve’s mother, who was a teacher in the lycée where Mlle Weil taught, where Genevieve was a student. She had come to Le Puy for a visit. That is what Mme Weil had said, but really she had come to check up on her daughter. She was very worried. Her daughter took shockingly little care of herself. She was eating only boiled potatoes. She liked to think of herself as living like the poorest workers, but the truth, said Mme Weil, was that her palate was quite refined. Especially sensitive. If there was the smallest spot on a piece of fruit, she couldn’t even touch it. And she could tolerate only the finest cuts of meat. Would Mme Le Clos consider helping Mme Weil—of course, it was really her daughter who would be helped, though it would involve some subterfuge. Would Mme Le Clos give some extra money (provided to her by Mme Weil) to the butcher so that when Simone ordered horsemeat she would be given filet mignon?

  Mme Le Clos laughed, and Mme Weil laughed with her. The two mothers were laughing.

  “Of course, Mme Weil. And I will do more than that. When she comes to give lessons to my son, I will provide her with dinner. And I will make sure it’s something that she will like to eat. I will tell her it’s horsemeat, of course.”

  “She particularly likes my way of cooking mashed potatoes,” Mme Weil said and made some notes on the back of a used envelope. Which Genevieve’s mother put in one of the kitchen drawers. The one where string was kept, along with the screwdriver and pliers.

  And Genevieve had been appalled. Tormented that she was somehow involved in deceiving Mlle Weil.

  Whom she revered.

  Whom she admired.

  Whom she loved.

  Was it possible that Mlle Weil was the only person at that time not related to her by blood whom she could say, in complete confidence, that she loved?

  She loved her mother.

  She loved her brother.

  But her mother was her mother.

  Her brother was her brother.

  And Mlle Weil was … what?

  Her teacher.

  A hero.

  A saint.

  She could invoke that category, although she was an unbeliever. Mlle Weil was a saint of the mind.

  And yet she had always seemed in need of some protection.

  It had to be said that what Genevieve felt for Mlle Weil was a kind of love.

  They had all loved her. All her students, all Genevieve’s friends. The combination of her ex
treme purity of mind, her extraordinary learning, her extreme devotion to them, her students, and her clumsiness brought out the gallantry that rests in the hearts, Genevieve had come to know, of all young girls. Behind the eyes of each French girl: La Pucelle. Jeanne d’Arc. The dream of knighthood. A participation in a valorous undertaking. The vulnerable foot shod in iron, ending in a metal point, knife sharp, pressing hard into the soft earth. Relinquishing her girlhood, the girl sheds, Genevieve had come to understand, her dream of armor. She takes on breasts, hips: no longer the valorous knight. So perhaps Mlle Weil brought out our early gallantry, or we gave her the last of it, before it was required to transform itself into the smaller compass of maternal ardor.

  She had demanded a great deal of them. Everything. And she would give them everything. She was, for all her brilliance, surprisingly patient. Generous with her time, never humbling the slower girls, always kindly. Yet rigorous in her pursuit of truth.

  Only mathematics may enter here.

  Her idea was that the mind could be best trained by geometry, geometry as it was practiced by the Greeks, that the attention required to solve a problem in geometry was the best possible training for any kind of difficult intellectual work. She had talked often about the virtue of attention. She had described it as a moral good.

  But sometimes she was ridiculous. One day she came to class with her sweater on backwards.

  Genevieve had been the one to see it first, had been the one to rise to her feet. She gestured to her three best friends: Hélène, Colette, Chantal. Where were they now? Starving? Dead? Collaborators with the cabal of Pétain?

  They made a guard in front of the blackboard so that Mlle Weil could disappear behind it and turn her sweater around.

  Had Mlle Weil laughed?

  Made fun of herself?

  Genevieve cannot remember seeing Mlle Weil laugh.

  But no, that isn’t true. She had seen her laugh. She had laughed that day …

  She had come from behind the blackboard with the sweater on the right way and said, “Young ladies, you have spoiled my great effect. Do you not know that the most fashionable women in Paris are wearing their sweaters backwards this season?”