Lying

by Lauren Slater

  “Do you mind,” he said, “if I tell you how your stories make me feel?”

  “No,” I said. “I wouldn’t mind.”

  “Like,” he said, and paused. “Stirred and, and happily agitated. And,” he said, “this part about Janey in the red room, well,” he said, “like a I need a long cool shower.”

  I wasn’t sure what to make of his feedback. On the one hand, my aim as a writer was not to inspire my readers to bathe. On the other hand, I could see this was no ordinary shower of which he was speaking. This was a misty shower on heated skin, soap and a shot of vodka on wet tiles.

  “Your work,” he said, “has an effect. It has, sometimes, an unhealthy effect, and I think you should know that.”

  I felt giddy then. My fear turned to giddiness and if I’d been alone I would have whooped with joy. I wanted to hear, more than anything else, that I, my words, had an effect, the unhealthier the better. My physical epilepsy was so much improved, but this is what people need to know: epilepsy, at least mine, is a comprehensive style; it begins in the neurons and then travels up, up, travels into the hands, which curl like claws around tchotchkes, into the mind, which, due to the darkness and the dirtiness of disease, seizes at colors, at tall tales, at words like fodder to fill me up and bring me close to someone.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Would you like,” he said, “to take a walk with me this afternoon? We could talk more.”

  I looked up at him then, Christopher Marin. True, he was handsome. Also true, he was old. I don’t mean a little bit old. I mean smack in the middle of late middle age, with gray in his hair and a wedding band on his hand.

  “No thank you,” I said, but even as I said it I could feel the tingling move through me.

  “Jean,” he said. “Is that your full name?”

  “What do you mean?” I said quickly.

  “Oh, it’s a pretty name,” he said. “A very pretty name. I’m from the South, though, and in the South the names are usually longer, like Carol Ann or Norma Ray.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Actually, I’m from the South too. I mean, I was born in the South and my parents are … are southern, so you’re right.” I smiled. “My full name is Lauren Jean.”

  “Lauren Jean,” he said. “I can’t believe you won’t let me show you the trails around campus. I’ll be free after I meet with my other students this afternoon.”

  Then I remembered that he had other students; I wasn’t the only one. But I must have been—wasn’t I?—the only one he’d asked for a walk.

  “Are they, are your other students any good?”

  “Very good,” he said. “Some surprising talent. I have one woman I think should submit her work to The New Yorker.”

  I didn’t say anything. I just looked down.

  “But none of them,” he added quickly, “have your power. You’ll never be a New Yorker writer, Lauren Jean, but you will break ranks. Mark my words. You’ll break literary ranks.”

  I marked his words. I saw my own words, then, and they had a physical presence, bright blues, shards of light, gems.

  The sun was a gem in the sky. The trees were all emerald that afternoon, when we went for our walk.

  • • •

  He brought a thermos with him, and halfway up the trail he stopped to pour its contents into the plastic cup. I smelled Scotch. I said, “You drink whiskey when you hike?” and he said, “The sad truth is, I drink whiskey when I hike, I drink whiskey when I eat, I drink whiskey before I go to sleep.”

  I paused on the trail then and looked at him. The shadowy barn had, perhaps, been a more flattering backdrop for Mr. Marin. Out here, in the forest light, with the sun slanting down, with clear creek water blurting our reflections back to us, I could see him differently, and it should have made a difference. He had a tired look in his eyes, and an impalpable air of defeat. I could see how he had gray not just in his hair but in his nose too, and when he bent to scratch his sunburnt neck, a pale bald spot floated into view. Partly then, I was repelled, but partly I wasn’t. In a way I already loved him, simply because I thought he might love me. In addition, he had a thick cord of a neck, and a jagged Adam’s apple whose peak I longed to touch.

  We kept climbing. The higher we rose, the sparer the air. I worried that an altitude change might bring on a fit; I touched the scar hidden beneath my hair and said to myself, “Shhhh.” I did my ritual count to ten.

  “I need to rest,” he said. “I’m an old man, Lauren Jean. Let’s rest,” he said, “against this rock.”

  I pictured us resting against the rock. We were, of course, in the woods. I, of course, had come out here of my own volition, so there was no one to blame but me. Once we stopped moving, I knew what would happen. The rock was a slab on the ground, a slate altar with a worm on it.

  “Let’s keep climbing,” I said.

  “Lauren Jean,” he said. “Look at you,” he said. “So strong. Look at your legs,” he said.

  I looked at my legs. They were strong. They were also tanned. I felt the ripple of my muscles, the rise of my breasts, and I knew no matter how hard Christopher peered, he would never be able to see my sickness, and for once I was glad.

  The tingling moved through me again. How is it that a person can be aroused and repelled at the same time? In fact, the repulsion seemed to fuel the arousal, as though both sprang from the same source deep inside me.

  I sat down on the rock.

  He sat down on the rock.

  “Can I have some whiskey?” I said. I don’t know why I said that. I didn’t drink whiskey.

  “How old are you?” he said.

  “Nineteen,” I said.

  “Nineteen,” he said, and shook his head. “You’re just a little one,” he said, and I nodded, and my own littleness so excited me, and at the same strange time, I knew his desire for me made him smaller still, and I felt strong. All these things mixed together.

  He handed me the cup of whiskey, but when I went to take it with my hands he said, “No, it’s the least I can do.”

  So he held the cup while I sipped it, and fire moved into my mouth and my throat turned red.

  We were quiet for a while. The wind danced around. There were pretty things, like butterflies and buttercups. Then came a slug.

  “Look at that, a slug,” he said.

  The slug was snoozing on its side. I don’t know, maybe it was dead.

  Christopher sighed. “Sometimes,” he said, “I would like nothing better than to be a slug, and not have to get up in the morning.”

  “You want to be a slug?” I asked. My mother and I, true, had grown distant over the years, but somewhere in me I was still her girl. I had the heat of epilepsy, the speed of snapping neurons. I had will, too, and knew perfect pirouettes on frozen ponds, the striving that makes the world worthwhile.

  “Yes,” he said, “a slug.”

  The fact of the matter is he didn’t kiss me then. He kissed me later, on the way back down the mountain. But in my emotional memory, which is not the same as my factual memory, he said, “Yes, a slug,” and kissed me, his lips like two wet bars of pressure on my mouth, my stomach faintly sick while my crotch was wet.

  • • •

  I came back to my cabin before dinner. Everyone crowded around me, even Helen. They seemed as eager to know the matters of my heart as Dr. Neu had been to know the matters of my brain. They stared and probed, questioned and circled, all but took notes, and it was, truly, like being a patient again, under a lovely and elevating scrutiny.

  “I didn’t sleep with him,” I said.

  “But you will,” Helen said. “And it will be such a cliché when it happens.”

  “He really likes my work,” I said.

  “Did he say you’re publishable?” asked Ellie.

  “He said I’m a—”

  “What?” said Rebecca.

  “A genius,” I said. “He said I should write about my epilepsy.”

  In fact, I hadn’t told him anything about
my epilepsy, or the operation, and for the whole of our affair, I never did. Why is that? I should have told him, given who I was, given how much I mined my condition for stars.

  And yet, the first person I was ever physically close to did not know about my history with epilepsy. Why is that? Sex itself is a convulsion, a kind of tortured twist when, for a few seconds, your head arced back, you’re ugly. Sometimes, later, when I did have sex with Christopher, I would find him staring up at me, a look of distaste in his eyes as I came, hard and true. And part of me, at those moments, went far away, because I saw, however much he craved a woman, a woman was cunt to him. I mean that. And if he ever, ever knew how not only my body but my brain too, my whole damn being, could turn into froth and spasm, I think he would have hated me.

  • • •

  My bunkmates and I went to dinner that night, and then a reading, and afterward we sat on the farmer’s porch and smoked clove cigarettes. The following August days were readings and workshops. Ellie had Francine Prose as her reader, and Francine criticized her. She thought the poison ivy in the vagina could be toned down. In the afternoons we played tennis or swam in the pond, and in the early evenings we looked in the windows of the Authors’ house, where only the faculty were allowed to enter. I saw Stanley Elkin and Nancy Mairs chatting over white wine; I saw a woman named Nancy Willard with a long hemplike braid sitting with her feet up on a coffee table. We spied in those windows and Helen said, “The only genius here is Stanley Elkin,” and that hurt my feelings. Still, it was okay, because Bread Loaf was beautiful, with Queen Anne’s lace flowing in all the fields, and darting bees, and the fresh smell of grass. Sometimes, as we were peering through the windows at the literary stars, Christopher would see me, and wave.

  Every night he came to my cabin and asked me to walk with him, and every night I went. “I’m not going to sleep with you,” I said. “I’m not making myself a cliché.”

  “Okay,” he said, but each night we went a little further. And each day after each night, my longing grew. Sometimes I would look at him during breakfast, or standing on the podium when he read his work, which was excellent, sharp, and smart, and I couldn’t believe he liked me. And I felt so happy to be picked. And while I felt that his age was a problem, it was also a plus, because he could guide me down the rocky road of Life, he holding my hand, I, for once, feeling sure and safe and also strangely strong. I remember kissing on a road where cars raced by, our bodies pressed against the guardrails. I remember him saying, “Be careful of me, Lauren Jean,” but knowing he didn’t quite mean it. I remember how numerous and defined were the stars in Vermont, hard as nailheads up there.

  And I, well, I was coming unnailed. I was slipping piece by piece. It was the slowest seizure I’d ever had, a new kind of epilepsy sex was, and the storm, for once, started not in my brain but in other parts of my body.

  One night, he brought a blanket with him. “I’m not going to walk with you if you have a blanket,” I said, and he said, “It’s just in case we want to rest and the ground is wet.”

  I was wearing my Levi’s 501 jeans, the kind with buttons for a fly, and an embroidered peasant shirt. We walked down the road and into a field.

  He spread the blanket on the ground. “Stand on this blanket with me,” he said.

  I did.

  He took off my shirt. He unbuttoned my jeans. He did this slowly and with an almost abstracted air, looking up at the stars while his fingers worked. That excited me a lot, the fact that he seemed not to need me there, that my face was irrelevant.

  I lay down. “You don’t have to do a thing,” he said. “This is all for you, sweet girl.”

  He rubbed my arms and legs. He turned me over and traced his fingers up and down my spinal cord.

  For a long time we lay there, and when he finally turned me back over he looked unbearably excited, sweat rolling off his skin and dropping onto me. He moved my legs apart.

  “No,” I said.

  He stopped, moved up to my belly, and began to stroke it circularly, around and around, until I felt dizzy. Then he went to part me again.

  “No,” I said, with considerably less conviction, and I hated the sound of my “no,” all flimsy and clotted, and, again, I felt sick and stirred all at once.

  “No?” he said, smiling, “No? No? No?” As he moved my thighs around.

  “Very easy now,” he said, and he went between me, stroked me with his fingers, tiny touches, barely touches, like giving a beggar tidbits from a banquet, the feeling made me gasp, the hunger made me gasp, and my eyes felt wet, and then, like nothing I’d ever had before, and I tried to regain myself but I was gone, girl gone, for good, kiss yourself good-bye, and then hard waves rolled through my body, burning my shins, my head knocked back, oh yeah, ba de boom, and Christopher whispering, “Yes, yes,” a hundred times or more.

  Then it was quiet. Nothing was left of me except for smoking skin, liquefying bone. Terrible sounds had come from my throat, and he had heard it. And he had seen it. I might as well have had a seizure in front of him. I wanted to cry, not just for this, but for all the times I’d pissed and thrashed and stunk myself in public. All the times. I curled up in a ball away from him.

  “All right?” he said, and rested a hand on my hip. I pushed him away.

  “I’m going,” I said, speaking into the blanket. “I’m getting dressed and I’m going good-bye now.”

  “Did I scare you, little one?” Christopher asked. “I’m sorry. I would never want to scare you.”

  “Fuck you,” I said.

  I wanted to say all the vile things in the world to him. “You’re a fucking pervert,” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. He looked genuinely grieved.

  I dressed and went. In my brain there was a gap where Dr. Neu had separated the sides, and in my body there was a gap, a barely stitched together rip, and all you had to do was press its seams and it would split, and then a hungry girl would howl without pride. I hated him. I hated her. That night, I dreamt of his hands.

  • • •

  For the next several days I wouldn’t let him near me. Instead I became a full and willing participant in writers’ conference activities, even though, out of the sides of my eyes, I looked at Christopher all the time. The lectures I attended seemed to be about how impossible it was to get published. A fancy New York editor stood at the podium and gestured across the audience and said, “Of all you sitting here, the one hundred and twenty of you, less than five one-hundredths of a percent will get a book published by a commercial house in the next decade.” All of us looked around at each other like we were wolves. A few things about that comment upset me. First of all, I didn’t like the wolf feeling. Second of all, the percentage seemed so small that it couldn’t contain even a whole person. Five one-hundredths of a percent of this audience amounted to, at most, maybe someone’s head, an arm or two, that was it. I saw us all in pieces, our hair drifting up in strands and rays.

  I started to feel depressed. I started to feel like maybe staging a seizure. Certainly, if I staged a seizure while the editor was here, and then told her later I wanted to write a book called Lying, she would pay attention.

  But I couldn’t stage a seizure, because, since my surgery, seizures were harder to have. Anyway, I wouldn’t have wanted Christopher to see.

  Instead, I moped around. During meals I talked to other conference members as much as I could about my past sickness, about my split brain, and my stories got stranger and stranger—I told people my epilepsy had been caused by a rabid raccoon bite in my tenth year, how by the time they discovered the rabies it was too late for shots, and so they had split open my skull, let my infected brain swell to twice its normal size, Jesus, I don’t even remember the rest of that one. I told people I came from a long line of epileptics, that I could trace my family tree back to the sixteenth century, to an ancestor whose spasms made people think she was a saint. In our house we had her picture hanging, a charcoal sketch from the family coffers, my a
ncestor with her hair in a bun, a tiny cross clutched in her hand.

  I told people more and more. Like writing, the talking stories were fast and smooth and oh so slippery; I never thought about them beforehand; out they flew, like flocks of starlings, sunlight on their wings.

  And I felt bad, because, finally, lying is lonely. No one knows you. When people are interested in you, you understand it’s for false reasons, and you get depressed. I looked at my hand and saw it did not belong to me. I told myself I could not help my lies, (a) because I was a genius, and (b) because I had the epileptic personality style, my brain more myth than matter.

  Often, I felt like I was floating. I felt lonely and craved Christopher. I was hollow and numb. I dog-paddled in the pond, like a dog, like a lower life-form, although I was not a lower life-form, because only human beings can lie. Perhaps I was a higher life-form, the art of story raised to a new level of living in me, maybe. But the fact is, I dog-paddled in the pond. I craved Christopher. I went to craft workshops and no one paid much attention to me. I questioned whether I was a genius, or not.

  • • •

  There was a dance midway through the conference. Chefs in towering white hats grilled chicken and corn on outside fires, and when darkness came, candles bloomed inside the barn. Also inside were small round tables with red-checkered cloths, and jugs of wine, and some people dressed up as pirates, I have no idea why.

  Late in the night, Christopher came in. He had his own jug of wine with him, and the candles splattered shadows on his white shirt. Days in the sun had darkened his skin and made his eyes look like chips of green.

  “There he is,” said Ellie.

  A horsey woman named Liz went up and asked him to dance. Liz looked just like a riding teacher, or a horse. She had yellow hair and thick thighs, and she wore jodhpurs with suede pads on the inner knees. I didn’t see a sexy thing about her.

  They danced together, Liz and Christopher, and when the music slowed down, so did they. She was a poet and a slut, that Liz. She pressed herself right up against him and he put his hands on her butt.