Telling Lies

by Wendy Hornsby

  “Jaime ain’t married,” she said, widening her stance.

  “When he was married, I was his sister-in-law.”

  “I know,” she said. “Max called and said you was coming.”

  “You know Max?”

  “Sure. Don’t you?” She outweighed me by a few stones, and had a lower center of gravity, but I decided that if push came to shove—and at that point, I almost hoped that it would—I had speed and reach on my side.

  I tried once more. “May I please see Jaime?”

  “Sure”—she shrugged—“why not?”

  She led me through a small reception room and into Jaime’s brightly lit examination room.

  “What is it, Lupe?” Jaime had his back to the door, bent over a patient in his chair. From behind, he looked wonderful. Tall, slim, firm. There was more gray in his black hair than I expected, and his long ponytail was gone, but overall he wasn’t much changed. In his 501 jeans and cowhide boots, he seemed more natural to the desert environment than the Polo-clad golfers I had seen waiting on the greens for enough daylight to tee off.

  The dental chair was enormous and the patient in it very small. From where I stood, I couldn’t see much of him except skinny elbows on the armrests and a stiff thatch of very straight, blue-black hair above Jaime’s hands. Whatever Jaime was doing to him required all of his concentration. I moved into the small room and found a spot between the spit bowl and a magazine rack.

  Lupe waited for Jaime to notice me by himself, then gave up and announced, “She’s here.” Then she left.

  “Thanks, Lupe.” Jaime glanced over at me. First he registered surprise, then pleasure. “Yep, she really is here. Heard you had a rough night, Maggot, took a pretty good shot.”

  “Max talks a lot,” I said. “You’re at it early.”

  “It’s grapefruit season. I have to be available before these kids go out to pick in the morning. They won’t give up a day’s wages to see the dentist. Right, Rafael?” He grinned at the boy in his chair, showing off a good number of his own perfect teeth.

  “Hey, Rafael,” he said. “You know who this is? An honest-to-God TV star, Miss Margot Eugenie Duchamps MacGowen. You ever heard of her?”

  The boy leaned around and took a long, very doubtful look at me. He had a beautiful face, smooth oak-colored skin, huge, liquid brown eyes. It was his mouth, however, that caught my attention; he had a bite like an alligator. His teeth, top and bottom, protruded at such acute angles that his lips wouldn’t close over them.

  “You really a TV star?” he said. He sounded as if he had a mouth full of straw.

  “Dr. Orozco’s teasing you.” I took out the Dodgers cap I had stuffed in the raincoat pocket and put it on his head. “You have my permission to bite him.”

  Rafael laughed and made a few experimental nips at Jaime with his deformed choppers. Jaime picked up a plaster cast of those same teeth and nipped back. Then, manipulating the plaster teeth like a puppet, Jaime said, “Tell your mother we’ll be ready to start putting the bands on your teeth Thursday, the day after Christmas.”

  “We’re going south to pick lettuce.”

  “You come here before you leave. Promise?”

  Rafael’s smile faded.

  “If you wait as long to come back as you did this time, your face will grow some more,” Jaime said. “We’ll have to start all over again, make new casts and everything.”

  Rafael, looking depressed, unclipped his paper bib and started to rise from the chair. Jaime leaned over him, putting his hands on the child’s shoulders. “What do the kids call you now?”

  Rafael said something that I think was Scissors Mouth.

  “When your teeth are fixed, they will call you Rafael,” Jaime said.

  Rafael turned his soulful eyes on Jaime’s rugged face. “Promise?”

  “You bet. Give those braces two years and you’ll be as cute as me.”

  Rafael shook his head, smiling his distorted smile. “Cuter.”

  “Don’t push it.” Jaime laughed. He gave Rafael a hand out of the chair. “You tell your mother to bring you here before you go south for lettuce. No matter what.”

  “I will.”

  “Good. Lupe’s cooking chorizo. You better hurry and get some before this TV star goes in and eats it all.”

  Clutching the Dodgers hat to his head, Rafael paused to give Jaime a quick, shy hug before he ran to find Lupe.

  “You’re such a softy,” I said. “You fix their teeth, fill their bellies, feed their self-esteem. I hope you have a few paying customers.”

  “Not enough,” he said. “You wouldn’t happen to have ten thousand dollars, would you?”

  “Not on me,” I said. “Or anywhere else. I’m paying retail for Casey’s braces.”

  “Casey,” he sighed. “God, I haven’t seen her for so long. How is she?”

  “She’s fine, Jaime. She’s with her dad for the holidays,” I said. “How are you?”

  “How am I?” He went over to the sink and began lathering his hands. “At the moment, I feel old. Ever since Max called last night, I’ve been thinking about Emily, and the old days, the people we knew, the vision we had. I vowed I would always keep the flame alive.

  “Max kept talking about old friends, old shit we’d gone through together. I finally had to say to him, ‘Twenty-two years is a long time. Who can remember so far back?’ Yesterday, I probably wrote December twentieth eight or nine times, before I made the connection. How could I forget what that date meant to us? It started me thinking. Time and again, Em and I risked so much, but I think I’ve forgotten that thing that was so damned important to us. Maggie, I think it’s young people who are meant to fight the good fights. And I’m not young anymore.”

  “You’re just tired.”

  “God bless you.” He smiled. “If I had said all that to Emily, she would have diagnosed some hormonal skip and given me a chemical adjustment. But Maggie, the problem is in my heart. If you put your hand on my chest, you wouldn’t find anything beating in there.”

  “Jaime,” I said.

  “More proof,” he said, slowly drying his hands in a white towel. “Old men get morose. I’m morose.”

  “You’re not old. You’re not morose.”

  “What then?” he demanded.

  “Simply, grief,” I said. “How much did Max tell you?”

  “What he knew—not enough. How is Em?”

  “No change. I called the hospital from Max’s car about an hour ago. Mom and Dad are with her.”

  “How are they?”

  “Numb,” I said. “Emily called them yesterday and told them she was bringing someone home for Christmas. Someone very special.”

  “Who?”

  “She didn’t say. They decided she was getting married again.”

  “Ouch,” he said.

  “Didn’t she call you?” I asked. “She seems to have called everyone else.”

  “She called. I wasn’t here yesterday was my day up at the Tahquitz Reservation. She left a message with Lupe. I never got back to her.”

  “Did you try?”

  He started piling used instruments on a tray and tidying up, and making a lot of noise doing it.

  “Jaime?”

  He sighed as he dropped the tray beside the small sink. “No. I didn’t call her back.”

  “Still hurts, huh?”

  “Bleeds,” he said.

  “Max said something bizarre last night.”

  “Not unusual for Max.”

  “He said Emily had been behaving so strangely that he wouldn’t have been surprised if she had shown up with Marc.”

  Jaime grew very still. He looked at me the way a parent looks at an idiot child, baffled, worried, fond.

  “How have things been with you, Maggie? You’ve had a pretty full dance card yourself lately: divorce, teenage kid to raise alone, big job, earthquake through your living room. Now Emily. Adds up to a lot of pressure.”

  “I’m fine, Doctor Freud.”

>   “There’s no way around it, Maggie. Marc died in Vietnam twenty-two years ago.”

  “Identification mistakes were made all the time. We both know deserters who came back to the States and disappeared into the underground.”

  “It’s a tempting idea, Mag, but it won’t wash,” he said. “Marc knew we loved him unconditionally. Thinking from your head only,” he said, “is it in any way possible that Marc is still alive, and in all that time he never contacted us?”

  “I can’t think from my head only right now,” I said. “You may feel empty inside. But if you put your hand on my chest, you would certainly find the heart beating.”

  Jaime sighed and covered his face. He seemed to be over-come. Then I saw a slow smile curl around the edges of his lips. “What?” I said.

  “If I put my hand on your chest, my love, I wouldn’t be looking for your heartbeat.”

  I laughed. “You’re not old yet, Jaime.”

  “Maybe there’s hope. Okay kid, either hop into the chair and let me look at your teeth, or come into the kitchen for some of Lupe’s chorizo and eggs.”

  “How about just coffee, black.”

  “Not in Lupe’s kitchen.”

  He took my hand and led me, and it felt very nice, very familiar. But nothing more.

  Jaime had been my first adolescent crush. I was about fourteen when Emily had brought him home to meet the family. He had been a lot like her, a head taller than the crowd and full of fire. In comparison, the pimply-faced boys my own age seemed incredibly dull and immature. Jaime was unfair competition.

  Seeing Jaime again after a space of time, I saw that he was attractive, but I didn’t feel it. For one thing, he smelled like a dentist. I’m sure now that when I was fourteen, I fell for Jaime primarily because he was Emily’s boyfriend. She had weaned me on competition.

  Being with him again, I realized how much I had missed Jaime, and how much Emily had lost out on. But you can never know what happens between two people. I know for a fact that there are many intelligent, discerning souls who still believe that my ex is a wonderful man, and that I am an idiot for cutting him loose. They may be right on both accounts. Doesn’t make me wrong.

  Lupe was just seeing Rafael out when we walked into the kitchen. She cleared the boy’s dishes from the table before she set in front of us plates heaped with a mixture of scrambled eggs and fried chorizo sausage. It was a spicy, greasy-looking mass. My stomach was as iffy as my head, and there was no way I could eat the stuff. I took a hot tortilla from the basket on the table and used it to push the eggs around my plate.

  Lupe watched to make sure we were eating, then picked up a broom and went out the back door.

  Jaime swallowed his mouthful. “Lupe will know if you don’t eat anything,” he said.

  “Could be.” I put down the tortilla and looked up at him.

  “So?” he asked.

  “I saw Aleda last night.”

  “Max told me.”

  “What else did he tell you?” I asked.

  “That he was worried about his car,” he said. “If he’d been sober he wouldn’t have given you the keys.”

  I smiled. “If I’d been sober, I wouldn’t have asked for them.” He poured me fresh coffee. “How did Aleda look to you?” “Ragged. Older.”

  “Too bad. She was such a doll. Everyone was in love with her.”

  I held the warm cup to my forehead, a small comfort. I had to push the plate far enough away so I couldn’t smell it.

  “Do you believe in coincidence?” I asked.

  “Now and then.”

  “On December twentieth, Emily is shot and Aleda Weston comes in out of the cold. Suggest anything to you?”

  “Old wounds,” he said. “If you keep picking at them, they never heal.”

  “Whose old wounds?”

  “I wouldn’t know where to start.”

  “Try,” I said. “I asked Aleda who would hurt Emily. She said, ‘Any of them.’ Tell me who she meant.”

  “You were around, you remember all that.”

  “I wasn’t there, I was in a convent, for chrissake.”

  “Any of them, huh?” He got up and started stacking dishes in a distracted way. “Them covers a lot of territory, unless she meant them as opposed to us. Think about 1969 and everything we were involved with: we made a trip to Hanoi, we organized a big peace demonstration in Berkeley, the death of Tom Potts, our indictment, then Marc. If them is anyone who opposed us, wanted to arrest us, was offended by us, you could have a list half as thick as a phone book.”

  “And us?”

  “The core group. The seven of us indicted for conspiracy, inciting to riot, manslaughter, and whatever else was trumped up. You could throw in our families—at least some of them—attorneys, fellow-travelers of one stripe or another. That would net you the other half of the phone book.”

  “The seven of you were close, like a family?”

  He laughed. “More like the Hatfields and the McCoys. We feuded all the time. About the moral extent of the use of violence, and political bedfellows, over whose turn it was to make the coffee, and whether Camus or de Beauvoir was more correct, what to watch on TV, and over rumors that one or more of us was on the FBI payroll. It was always a fractious group.”

  “But you stayed together,” I said.

  “We came together for a moment, for one cause that intersected all our ideologies on the same axis: a tiny point in time and space. By early 1970, we had split up.”

  “Just like that, you split up?” I helped him carry the dishes to the sink and scrape the remains of eggs into a plastic bowl. “I don’t hear the angst I expected.”

  “People change, evolve, have different destinies to pursue. Some of our group split off into other movements, became more radical, found Jesus, disappeared like Aleda. Whatever.”

  “That’s it?” I asked. “You evolved away from the Movement? I’m looking for the source of a festering wound that may have led to murder. What you offer me is Jesus?”

  Jaime chuckled softly. “Maybe Jesus has better answers than I do.”

  “Try again.”

  “You want old wounds?”

  “Yes. As you said, open, bleeding wounds.”

  “Where to start? We all took some pretty good licks,” he said. “Going to Hanoi was a big mistake. We got a glimpse of the real world over there, and came home damned scared, with a message to share that no one seemed to want to hear. We were tailed, bugged, harassed by the Feds. From the pulpit, Billy Graham called us Satan’s children. There were death threats. Your parents’ house was firebombed. We organized a demonstration at Berkeley that got out of hand, and a perfectly innocent kid died as a result. We were indicted on charges that ranged from conspiracy all the way to murder. We did some jail time - jail time being the one essential rite of passage for an organizer. Police and National Guardsmen thumped us now and then. Is that enough?”

  “What about the other side, them?”

  “That’s vast territory. Far and away the biggest hurt, as you know, was the death of Tom Potts. He was an only child, a grad student on a hardship fellowship. That’s a lot of hope dashed.”

  He became very thoughtful. “The rest seems petty in comparison. At least one of us was an FBI informant; there was some foundation to the rumors. I have my suspicions, but I don’t know for a certainty who it was. If that came out even now, it could be damned embarrassing.”

  He poured himself the last of the coffee in the pot, tasted it, then dumped it into the sink. The bitter residue showed on his face.

  “We weren’t caught for everything we did that was illegal, or immoral,” he said. “We slept with each other, did some drugs together, plotted mischief together, went to court ensemble. How serious it might be to have some of that old shit made public depends, I suppose, on one’s career or position. Or, maybe, family.”

  “Starting at the beginning,” I said, “I guess the big question is, whose idea was it to set the bomb that killed Tom Pot
ts?”

  “Oh, God,” he moaned. He spent a lot of time putting dish soap in the sink, running water, getting out a fresh towel. He avoided looking at me.

  “Are we picking at the old wounds yet?” I asked.

  He looked at me sideways, almost smiling. “You were always the most persistent kid.”

  “Who made the bomb?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. Anyone can make a bomb.”

  “I can’t,” I said, feeling some heat.

  “If you have the right cookbook you can.” Jaime picked up the dish towel and wiped his hands as he headed out of the room. “Hold on a minute. Maybe I have something.”

  The collie waited until Jaime was out of sight, then came over and laid his head against my leg. I took the bowl of table scraps off the counter and sat down on the floor beside the dog. He was a clever creature; he refused the bits of chorizo I offered him, but eagerly ate clumps of egg and a few pieces of tortilla. I didn’t know if doggie snacking was allowable, but it gave us both something to do while we waited for Jaime to come back. Besides, Lupe’s feelings might be hurt if she saw how much of her breakfast had been rejected.

  For me, there was some uncomfortable deja vu involved in being left behind to wait for Jaime. Time does distort reality, but it seems to me that, as a kid, I was always being left behind by big people dashing off to do endlessly interesting and mysterious things. Em and Marc, because they were so much older than I was, and thus bigger, more competent, more independent, used to infuriate me. No matter how much I grew and matured, they always had a head start. Whenever I hit a milestone, they had already been there and were long gone. Especially Emily, primarily because we were the same sex. For instance, by the time I finally entered school, Emily already had a bra. When I got my first bra, Em had thrown hers away and was taking the Pill. I was doomed to always miss the good stuff.

  I was certainly left out in 1969. I was shielded, given an expurgated version of everything because of my tender age. It made me mad. Even twenty-two years later, no one had told me the whole truth. Maybe that’s why I was always so nosy—I just wanted to know what was going on. I still do.

  The dog was a big help merely by being warm and available. He sighed contentedly and was just closing his eyes with his head in my lap when Jaime came back into the kitchen.