Lying

by Lauren Slater

  “He shouldn’t put his hands on her butt,” said Ellie, “when you can see.”

  “I don’t give a flying fuck,” I said. “He can put his tongue on her butt, as far as I’m concerned.”

  However, I was very concerned. I felt a fire eating up my heart. Inside I was slamming my head against a wall again and again. Why was this? I’ll tell you why. Liz was older than I, and supposedly a poetess with promise, and she had gotten into Bread Loaf on one of those fancy-schmancy scholarships, so she stood out.

  The music stopped. The air smelled of hot Scotch, candle wax, and sweat. Christopher was sweating up a storm in the summer-dark barn. “Let’s have some jazz,” someone called.

  “Let’s have a poem,” someone else shouted.

  “A poem, a poem, a poem,” everyone started to shout, and Helen said, with a sneer, “These people really know how to rock ‘n’ roll.”

  A poet with silver hair and elegant fingers, then, got up to read. His name was Mark Strand. He read a poem about a cat. I thought it was fair to middling.

  “And now,” Mark Strand said, “I want to introduce to you, at this joyous occasion, at this raucous celebration, at this meeting of minds and swinging of stanzas, my student Liz Haloran. Liz, come up and read a poem.”

  “No way,” Liz said.

  “Go on, Liz,” Christopher said. “Give us a poem.”

  “Do they bring poems to the dance?” Rebecca asked. “Were we supposed to bring poems to the dance?”

  Liz clung to Christopher’s arm. Christopher took a swig straight from the bottle. Mark brought the microphone to her, and Liz said, speaking into it, “I don’t have a poem with me, but I can recite Sharon Olds for you. I know her by heart.”

  And then she did. The poem went like this:

  I knew little, and what I knew

  I did not believe—they had lied to me

  so many times, so I just took it as it

  came, his naked body on the sheet,

  the tiny hairs curling on his legs like

  fine, gold shells, his sex

  harder and harder under my palm

  and yet not hard as a rock his face cocked

  back as if in terror, the sweat

  jumping out of his pores like sudden

  trails from the tiny snails when his knees

  locked with little clicks and under my

  hand he gathered and shook and the actual

  flood like milk came out of his body, I

  saw it glow on his belly, all they had

  said and more, I rubbed it into my

  hands like lotion, I signed on for the duration.

  Afterward, the barn was very quiet. Everyone was looking at her with wide, wet eyes, as though the words belonged to her, as though she had that power. “It’s not her poem,” I wanted to scream out loud to everybody, and maybe I would have if Christopher, at that moment, had not leaned forward and kissed her, full and with a lot of linger, on her mouth.

  • • •

  Sometimes, you just hit your limit. That was it. I stormed out of the barn. I crashed through people and maybe even tipped a table or two, but hardly anyone noticed because the music had started up again, and people were dancing.

  Midnight, maybe even later. Bats with diaphanous wings darted through the air. A plane flew overhead, or maybe it was another bat.

  “Stop,” he said, pulling on my arm.

  “Don’t pull on my arm,” I said, whipping around and facing him in the field. I was crying, which I saw as both an embarrassment and leverage.

  “Lauren Jean,” he said, and his breath was ripe with red wine and Liz’s spit. “Lauren Jean, I’m sorry. You’re just a kid. I should never have—” He stopped, wiped his brow with a crumpled cloth he pulled out of his pocket. “I should have left you alone. Christ,” he said. “What’s wrong with me?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I think something is seriously wrong with you.”

  “Do you?” he said, and he sounded genuinely curious. “What?”

  I was surprised and also flattered that he actually wanted to know what a seventeen/nineteen-year-old might think about his fifty-something-year-old psyche. “Why are you asking me?” I said.

  “Because,” he said, “you are precocious. You are wise beyond your years. I find myself genuinely drawn to you, Lauren Jean. And that’s a shame.”

  “It is,” I said. “You’re married. And you probably have girlfriends all over the country.”

  “That’s true,” he said. “All over the country.”

  I stared at him. The season was summer, but in my memory now it turns to winter. The field in which we stand is white with snow. Ripped pieces of snow fall from a blank sky. Wind howls and I shiver in my skin.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “The truth is,” he said, “I am married. And I have two young daughters. I am also sexually compulsive.”

  “What?” I said.

  “I love women,” he said. “Or I need women. I don’t know.”

  I felt tears rise again, real tears they were, hot and pressured. “Do you love her?” I said. “That, that Liz, that horse, how could you love her?”

  “No, no,” he said. “Liz I do not love.”

  Upon hearing that, the relief was so sweet, and mixed, as it was, with the salt of sure rejection, I didn’t have a chance, stupid me.

  “Do you love me?” I said.

  “What I love about you,” he said, “are your words. Your willingness to go deep, with words.”

  • • •

  I am genuinely sorry to report that I slept with him. Lauren Jean slept with him. Or Lauren Jean’s words slept with him. Or he slept not with Lauren Jean but with his idea of her talent, which was, I now see, an idea overwrought and ridiculous and possibly even entirely fraudulent, even though, dear reader, well, I do have some talent, wouldn’t you say?

  I put myself in your hands.

  In his hands.

  We went back to his room. He was faculty, so he had a good room, all glossy wood and painted lampshades. Of course I was a virgin, and I’d never had extensive contact with a penis, but I had an immediate affinity for it. I seemed to understand the penis intuitively.

  Afterward, I smoked a cigarette, a habit I’d acquired only recently from Helen. He propped himself up with pillows. Outside, the sky was lightening in barely perceptible levels, navy blue turning to turquoise around the edges as the moon merged into morning.

  I felt sad. The sadness had nothing to do with my recently lost virginity and everything to do with this man next to me. He smelled good, like just the faintest tang of aftershave and soap and sweat.

  “So you are sexually compulsive,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “How many girlfriends do you have?” I asked. Masochist that I am, I had to ask this naked and postcoitally.

  He was very honest and sad. He told me everything. He told me all over the country, because when he went to do readings, national figure that he was, there was always a woman who wanted to sleep with him, and so he did. In addition to that, he went to combat zones in different cities, watched strip shows and hired prostitutes. It was sordid, he said, he knew that, but there was a need, a need, and he hated himself and if I was smart I would hate him too.

  I was not smart. I did not hate him. Each encounter of which he spoke was a stab in my skin, and the stabs hurt so much I wanted him all the more to heal them. And as I was lying there, stabbed and oozing, an aura came to me—still no seizure but a preseizure aura—and it was the most beautiful one I had ever had. I heard an orchestra playing on a green lawn, and the notes had tastes—vanilla, snow, nutmeg—as though Dr. Neu had lodged a probe permanently in my brain, and the probe was a pen stimulating story after story after story.

  I saw how we would work then. I saw my way. If I wrote well enough, my auras would grace us, their heat would bind us, and he would so much admire me that through my words alone we would come to love.


  “And your wife?” I said.

  “And my daughters,” he said, his voice thick with pain. “Let’s not forget my daughters. I don’t know why,” he said, “they are not enough.”

  • • •

  Three days later the conference ended, I kissed Christopher good-bye in the privacy of his room, boarded the Peter Pan bus, and wept the whole way home. For those three days we had made love a lot; we had made love the morning of my departure, and when the bus hit the highway I felt his liquid leave me in a rush, running down my legs inside my jeans. I cried harder at that, and I was so besmitten I didn’t even find the sticky sperm disgusting, as well I should have.

  It was the end of August now, and the air had hints of autumn in it. The leaves were growing red in spots. I started college just one week after Bread Loaf had ended. I barely cared. My heart ached for Christopher, my crotch ached for Christopher, and I was going to Brandeis, which was only one mile from my house so it was no big deal. Why, you may wonder, did I choose a college one mile from my house, when my mother was such a bitchy and depressing figure, and my father, so ineffectual? Why didn’t I want to get away, go smack across the country, lounge in Palo Alto under palm trees, or study with the genius nerds at Swarthmore? I’ll tell you why. Every place rejected me but Brandeis, and the only reason I think I got in there was the Jewish connection.

  So Brandeis it was. On Orientation Day a lot of Long Island–looking kids showed up with shiny luggage sets, and I hopped off the train, hiked up the hill to campus with just a laundry bag. I hated it from the get-go. I hated everything and loved nothing but Christopher. My dorm looked like an army bunker, all concrete and centipedes. My roommate was Israeli, an army gal, and, along with her toiletries, she actually brought bullets to show us. Did I give a flying fuck? No. “How about some germ warfare?” I said. “You tote any of that through customs too?”

  I had no friends I made no friends I didn’t care. Orientation week was a series of parties with watery beer and boys who were not men like Christopher. I thought of him back with his wife. It killed me. I thought of him holding his two-year-old daughter on his lap. That killed me more. It should have been me he was holding on his lap, me he was nurturing along.

  We had left it vague. We hadn’t said we were going to see each other again, but we hadn’t said we wouldn’t. “Maybe I’ll write you, Lauren Jean,” he had murmured in my ear.

  He didn’t write and he didn’t write. Three weeks passed. I didn’t write. What I mean by that is I didn’t write him and I didn’t write myself; not a story, a stanza, a single word would leave the crusty nib of my ballpoint pen. At last, when I couldn’t bear my condition any longer, I called him at the university where he taught.

  “This is Lauren Jean,” I said. “I’m calling you long distance.”

  “Lauren Jean Lauren Jean,” he said. “Sweet girl. How are you? I’ve missed you!”

  A door flew open in my heart then, and tropical birds flew out. Ooo la la.

  “I’ve missed you too,” I said, and then I started to cry.

  “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I’m going to be reading in Brattleboro in three weeks. Why don’t you come up, we’ll spend the weekend together.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “How’s your writing going?” he said.

  “Excellent,” I said. And then, “I have three stories under consideration at Granta.”

  “Bring your work with you,” he said. “I want to see it.”

  “You bring yours too,” I said. “I want to see it.”

  We hung up. To say I was ecstatic, well, that would be an understatement. I was complete. I was a half-moon and now I was a whole moon, and the lie about Granta was at once part of that wholeness and the force that threatened its fracture. I was a plump and fragile planet, and the penumbra I cast was silver and gold. Ooo la la.

  I sat down at my desk in my dorm bunker to write. I could feel, I could feel an aura coming on. I could feel a pressure in the air, and I could scent cinnamon. My left hand felt weak. My mouth was dry. I thought, this time, I might have a small seizure too.

  No seizure, but the aura, when it came, hit hard and crushingly clear. It was an aura different from any I’d experienced before. It was a series of memories I had never known I’d had, but they were there, and I knew they were true. Once I had climbed a cherry tree. A blue bottle used to sit on the window ledge in our back hall. A dog by the name of Yahoo jumped and jumped on me, and his thick white belly fur filled my nose with warmth while my toddler heart hammered from fear. We were in Barbados, and a huge wave came, a wave topped with white, a wave that showed like a window its inner goods, starfish, seashells, a loose water ski, and when it crashed onto the beach it left behind a live shark with blood on its mouth.

  I had never felt anything like this before. So much of our lives we forget, and, forgotten, the past ceases to exist. The pieces came back—at least I thought they did—and I wrote them out, rushed them out in a series of autobiographical stories I knew were the best I’d done.

  Epileptics experience many different kinds of auras. Some have premonitions of terrible events, others have smells or headaches or free-floating panics. There is also a kind of aura, particular to epilepsy, that is called involuntary recall, or, as some neurologists have named it, nostalgic incontinence. It happens, doctors say, because temporal areas of the brain get stimulated from preseizure firings, and a door opens, and through it pours the past.

  Some neurologists say that the memories are meaningless and not even accurate, random spurts from a hyperactive brain; others say the scenes that rush up are loaded with deep clues as to who and what we are.

  I myself don’t know what to think. All I do know is that after that conversation with Christopher the nature of my auras changed forever. They were almost all, after that, involuntary recalls, and thus I became a memoirist, what else could I be? But here’s the rub. Later on that night, still writing in a frenzy, preparing my portfolio for my visit with Christopher, I had a memory of falling out of a cherry tree and cracking open my head, and I wrote a short memoir about that.

  “It never happened,” my mother said when I asked her the next day on the phone. “You never fell out of a cherry tree.”

  “I remember that I did,” I said.

  “You didn’t,” she said. “We’ve never even owned a cherry tree.”

  “Yes we did,” I said. “I remember we once had a cherry tree and because it got something called Dutch worm disease you had the gardener take it down.”

  “None of my trees,” my mother said, “have ever had something called Dutch worm disease.”

  She was so full of denial, she’s not to be trusted. Then again, neither am I. And anyway, just because something has the feel of truth doesn’t mean it fits the facts. Sometimes, I don’t even know why the facts should matter. I often disregard them, and even when I mean to get them right, I don’t. I can’t. Still, I like to write about me. Me! That’s why I’m not a novelist.

  That night, I wrote late. The moon came out complete, the lights in all the dorms went off, and my words shimmered. When he read my words, he would want to make love to me forever. I was a sorcerer, my spell a mix of clattering consonants, my language a series of links that could close any chasm. Complete.

  • • •

  Hours later, I turned out my light. The soldier was snoring away in the top bunk. Her hand dropped over the side of the bed, and before I climbed in beneath her, I paused to look. I wondered whether she’d ever done combat hand to hand, and, if so, what it would be like to palm the life right out of a person.

  I pulled the covers up to my chin. Then a lonely feeling, lonely and spooky, with that disembodied hand hanging down. In the coming of dawn the room looked dusty, and my sleepless eyes stung.

  I closed my left eye. Because of my corpus callostomy, whenever I close my left eye, I am unable to read or understand language. Language lives in the right side of the brain, for most people anyway. The
left side of the brain knows space and shapes, but not words. If the two hemispheres in the brain are separated, like mine have been, any words you take in with your right eye only get stuck in the left side, and the left side is the silent side. Losing words is a common side effect of epilepsy surgery, and it’s no big deal because we usually look at the world bifocally.

  But I had a game I sometimes played with myself, a game that spooked me, which made me want to play it all the more. With my left eye closed I would stare at a wordless world, and the feeling was weird and clotted beyond what you could believe. Now, I saw my roommate’s dangling hand, dangling all the more because I knew it was a hand, but I could not have named it for a trillion dollars. Silence snowed down.

  I might be reading a book, and close my left eye, and see before me not words but a scrabble of black ants in a meaningless march. Or I would hold an apple in my right hand, a fine fruit to hold, a perfect palm object, utterly graspable, cool, slick and sensuous. With both eyes open I knew I held an apple, but with my left eye closed, again, I could not name the apple, or eat the apple, and so there was no apple.

  And so there was no Lauren.

  And so there was no Christopher.

  And so there is no you.

  • • •

  I was only seventeen, and this was a heavy philosophical load to cart around. Sometimes I imagined the chasm Dr. Neu had cut into my brain, my severed hemispheres floating in fluid, ghostly, gray, and crying for their twin. Perhaps this is why I longed for Christopher, why, as I grew older, my longings intensified, spiraled up. What else might explain it? That my mother didn’t love me well enough? A lot of people’s mothers don’t love them well enough, and not a lot of people develop Munchausen’s, into which I still sometimes relapse when the going gets tough; not a lot of people develop bad depressions, or take psychiatric medications, or have crack-ups. I’ve had several crack-ups, which I’m omitting for the sake of this story’s structure. I have been driven crazy, I think, by the existential truth made manifest in my flesh. Sartre says we must learn to live in space, and the fact of our groundlessness so terrifies us we flee into brittle sanity. I cannot flee, because the space, literally, is engraved in my skull. I cannot cross over. Lauren A stands on one hemisphere, Lauren B on the other hemisphere, and they reach across, trying to touch; air.