Telling Lies

by Wendy Hornsby

“Ask Lucas,” she said. “He gave me his number. In Pasadena, I think he said. I wrote it down.”

  I picked up the notepad beside the bed and tried to decipher my mother’s penciled scrawl. “Does this say St. Arnie’s? Only Lucas would have a church called St. Arnie’s.”

  Mother put on her glasses and took the pad from me. “St. Anne’s. Says so very clearly. And Lucas doesn’t have a church. He was defrocked ages ago. I don’t know what this place is.”

  There was no area code written down—Pasadena is outside L.A.‘s 213. The second numeral in the phone number Mother had written down could have been either a loopy seven or a half-formed nine. I tried nine, hoped it was local.

  “Hotline.” The answering voice sounded young, female. “I’m looking for Lucas Slaughter,” I said.

  I think he’s around. I can’t leave the phone to go look for him. He checks for messages.”

  “Are you at St. Anne’s?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Pasadena Avenue at Lacy Street. Lincoln Heights.” The address was only ten minutes away.

  I hung up and met my mother’s tranquilized gaze.

  “Do you need me?” I asked.

  “Don’t be offended, dear, but not at all. Go do what you have to do.”

  I wish I knew exactly what that was.” I bent to kiss her. “Call me when you get to Palo Alto. And Mom? Can I borrow some cash?”

  “That’s my girl.” She handed me a wad and patted my arm. “Be careful.”

  “You, too.” I went to the door. “Give my love to Dad.”

  “Margot, dear,” she called. “Max is driving Emily’s old Volvo. He has been patient about it, but he does seem concerned about his own car.”

  I laughed. “He should be.”

  St. Anne’s turned out to be a 1920s-era woodframe bungalow with a sloppy paint job and wrought iron bars on the windows. A couple of blocks further up the street was the Florence Crittenton Home, a juvenile facility for young mothers and their infants.

  The girl who answered the door at St. Anne’s was about Casey’s age, very thin and very pretty. She balanced a toddler on each hip. Somewhere deep inside the house, a baby cried.

  “Is Lucas Slaughter here?” I asked the girl.

  “Yes, he is,” she said. She turned and yelled over her shoulder, “Luke! Visitor.”

  Lucas appeared out of the darkness behind her, drying his hands on a kitchen towel.

  “Maggie,” he said, grinning, as he ushered me inside. “Welcome.”

  “You live here?” I asked.

  “Bite your tongue. The residents are all mothers under the age of eighteen. I don’t come through that door without both a caste-iron jockstrap and a chaperone. How was your head this morning?”

  “Leaden,” I said.

  “Mine still is. Can’t drink the way I used to. Your detective friend seemed able to hold his own.” Ever Lucas, he broke into a raucous hymn:

  There is a fountain filled with blood,

  Drawn from Immanuel’s veins;

  And sinners plunged beneath that flood,

  Lucas took a breath. “Do you remember the second verse?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I don’t either.” He shook his head. “Come into my office.”

  He led me through a living room crammed with mismatched furniture and into a small office with HEAD SHRINK painted on the door. Among the cartoons and notices taped to the door was a counseling sign-in sheet with a pen imprinted Hotel Bonaventure dangling from a length of twine.

  “The shrink?” I asked. “Is that you?”

  “Yep. Counselor and general dog’s body.” He perched on the corner of a battered desk. “Good to see you, Maggot.”

  In spite of his hymn singing, he seemed unusually reserved. Could have been the influence of his place of work, or something else. I didn’t have time to pursue it.

  “Lucas, I very much want to see Aleda. But she keeps slipping away from me. Any idea where she is now?”

  He frowned. “One of Rod’s staffers was assigned to take care of her, make sure she got the right medical treatment, didn’t take off again. Shit like that.”

  “The question was, where is she?”

  “I don’t know,” he sighed. “I never had a chance to see her.”

  “You told me last night that Rod kept his distance from people in the Movement. Seems to me he’s really stuck out his political neck by helping Aleda this way.”

  “Does seem uncharacteristically noble of old Rod,” he smiled wryly. “Still, it’s the best thing. Aleda’s sick, Maggie. She needs a little space out of the public eye to tie up some loose ends. When she’s ready, we’ll all get together.”

  “I’m not the public.”

  “Don’t get your back up. Remember, Aleda has been in hiding for half her lifetime. She survived by being cautious. You can’t expect her to open up all at once. Give her time.”

  A soft knock on the door interrupted.

  “Come,” Lucas called.

  A teenager with a little curly-haired boy clinging to her neck stepped into the room. She had tears running down her face. “What is it, Nicole?”

  “I forgot what you said about how long to cook the spaghetti.” Nicole burst into sobs. “It’s ruined.”

  “There’s almost no way you can ruin spaghetti,” he said with saintly calm. “Unless there are flames shooting from the pan. There aren’t, are there?”

  “What?” She wiped her nose on the child’s shirttail. “Flames.”

  She seemed confused, but she shook her head.

  “Wait for me in the kitchen. I’ll be right there.” Lucas pulled a tissue from a jumbo-size box on the desk and handed it to her. “Be careful that Stevie doesn’t get near the stove.”

  I started to follow Nicole, but Lucas caught me by the arm and held me back.

  “Give her a minute to figure things out by herself,” he said. “When she moves into a place of her own, she’ll have more than spaghetti to worry about.”

  I didn’t smell smoke, but I stepped into the hall and sniffed the air, anyway. I could see Nicole through the kitchen door. Lucas looked over my shoulder.

  “Mother told me you had left the church, Lucas,” I said. “Is this your church, the church of the here and now?”

  He chuckled. “It’s the only one that will have me. I like it just fine, too. Every time I take a pregnant twelve- or thirteen-year-old girl over to Planned Parenthood, I like it better. Damn it, Maggie, those old farts at the diocese in their dark suits and clerical collars don’t have the least idea what the reality is for children like Nicole, babies raising babies. Or two babies or three babies. Let the collars pontificate. I’m making spaghetti.”

  “St. Anne’s sounds religious Establishment to me.”

  “House used to be a nunnery, teachers at Sacred Heart High School lived here. Emily bought them out years ago.”

  “Emily?”

  “She raised the financing, anyway. This is one of her pet projects.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said. I should have. What I was seeing at St. Anne’s was totally consistent with Emily. Then I remembered a pro-choice sticker on an arrangement of flowers left for Emily at the hospital. And ugly graffiti on her apartment house wall. Controversy was Em’s morning coffee.

  Lucas nodded toward the kitchen. “Shall we check on chaos?”

  “Sure.” I walked with him. “Did Emily spend time here?”

  “Oh yeah. We have a couple of projects in common. We’re both on the board at Planned Parenthood.”

  With Stevie on her hip, Nicole was mopping up boiled-over pasta water. Lucas held out his hands and the boy reached up for him, happily transferring his grip from Nicole’s neck to Lucas’s.

  Nicole had turned off the heat under the spaghetti pot. I tweezed a long piece out of the water. It was long past al dente, but edible. I found a colander by the sink and drained the pot into it. There was enough to feed a multitude.

/>   “Can you stay for dinner?” Lucas asked.

  “Another time. I’m going to see Celeste tonight.”

  “Hah!” he barked. “But good luck trying.”

  I smiled, but I felt a sudden torque. I counted off the people on the old indictment with Emily.

  “Lucas,” I said, interrupting a game of patty cake. “There’s a great big world out there, with wrongs to right in every corner. How did so many of you end up in L.A.?”

  “Sometimes, I think they’se poison in th’ life in a big city. The flowers won’t grow there … “

  “I’m supposed to recognize that, right? Bob Dylan or Pete Seeger, maybe.”

  “Mr. Dooley. 1892.”

  “If it was 1892, he wasn’t talking about Los Angeles,” I said. “What’s the point?”

  “It’s simple. If you’re going to make flowers grow, then go where the sun shines.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Emily’s apartment had a cold, unused feeling. First thing, I switched on all the lights and turned up the radiator. Mrs. Lim had tidied up from the night before.

  For the services at La Placita, Max had taken the field jacket from the bag of clothes I had carried home from the hospital. The rest of the stuff, jeans, shirt, underwear, Mrs. Lim had rinsed out and hung up to dry. The sweats I had borrowed to wear while my own things dried were neatly folded on top of the dresser.

  I took off the jeans I had worn all day and slipped into the sweats again. I was feeling the lack of sleep and had begun to notice that I hadn’t eaten all day. Without much optimism, I headed for the kitchen to see what I could find.

  Mrs. Lim, bless her, had considerately laid out tea-making things for me on the kitchen counter. Silently, I apologized for any less-than-kind thoughts I had ever entertained about her.

  I turned on the fire under the kettle and looked in the refrigerator for something to eat, knowing how bleak the prospects were. Again, I had underestimated Mrs. Lim. Sitting next to a block of tofu, I found a beautiful, thick, chicken sandwich with sliced tomatoes on the side.

  I took Vivaldi off the CD, put in Phil Collins, and turned up the volume. Sitting on the floor with my back against the sofa, I ate the sandwich and washed it down with hot tea. If the room had been warmer, I would have fallen asleep right where I sat, with crumbs on my lap and an empty cup in my hand.

  But I was cold and grubby. I had a lot of repair work to do before I confronted Celeste Baldwin Smith at the Century Plaza.

  I went into the bathroom, stripped, and stood under a hot shower for longer than is kosher in drought-stricken California. I shampooed my hair with Emily’s shampoo, shaved my legs with her razor, wrapped myself in her terry robe when I got out. It felt very strange to be there, handling her things, without hearing Em rattling around in the next room or popping in and out to talk to me. I kept hearing noises that I knew existed only in my memory. It was spooky to be there alone, but it was also reassuring to be among her ordinary, private little essentials.

  The many dramatic events of our lives had, I think, overshadowed my recollection of the texture of our everyday routines. I regretted that. Emily was more than the radical peacenik, more than the sainted doctor. She could be incredibly funny. She sang off-key in the shower and left wet towels and dirty clothes all over the bathroom. On the few occasions when I had come to stay with her, or her with me, she would come into the bath-room while I bathed, sit on the toilet lid and talk to me. Generally with a glass of wine in her hand.

  Emily could be an incorrigible tease. She often made me furious. I thought about those times, too, because I needed to re-member everything about her. I dabbed on some of her L’Air du Temps and breathed in her scent from my skin.

  Emily was six feet tall. She had bought her robe at a men’s big-and-tall shop, the only place she could find one to reach her ankles. I had put on her robe because it was all there was other than a skimpy bath towel. The robe was so big that I kept trip-ping over the hem while I blew my hair dry and used her makeup to correct a night without sleep. The thing was a nuisance. I was tired and my fuse was very short. By the time I had finished with the bathroom routine, I was plain old cranky.

  I didn’t expect Garth with my clothes from Desert Mode for another couple of hours. So I went to the kitchen, opened Emily’s bottle of celebratory Chardonnay, and poured myself a glass. We had already shared so much, why not this?

  I turned on the television and sat down on the sofa with my glass of wine to watch the evening news. The Ken and Barbie news team told me nothing that I didn’t already know: Emily was being moved to Stanford, there was a new rainstorm on its way down the coast, Aleda had been bailed out and was in seclusion. The single new story was about the Vice President’s official Christmas card going out in the mail with an embarrassing typo. I don’t remember what the typo was, because I heard it just as I drifted off to sleep.

  Someone banging on the apartment door interrupted a dream I was having about swimming in a pool with no water. It all made perfect sense, until I woke up. Disoriented, I staggered through the apartment in the direction of the knocking and opened the door.

  “Jesus, Maggie,” Garth said, looking me over. In his perfect silk tux, he looked like the ornament from the top of a wedding cake. “I thought we had a date.”

  I was a mess, hair and makeup undone, the nubbly weave of the couch upholstery pressed into one cheek. I took the garment bag Garth carried and waved him in.

  “There’s wine in the kitchen,” I said. I won’t be long.”

  “Take your time, honey. Take your time. Party starts at eight. We don’t want to get there too early or too sober.

  “What time is it now?”

  “Eight-fifteen.”

  “I don’t want to miss Celeste. What if she decides to go home early?”

  “She won’t. It’s her bash.”

  “Just the same.” I tripped over the robe and he caught me by the elbow.

  “How much of that wine have you had?” he asked, laughing.

  “Obviously, not enough. Go away. I’ll only be five minutes.”

  My hands were filled with the long garment bag, but I managed to gather up enough of the robe’s hem to stumble into Em’s walk-in closet. I spent some time repairing the hair and face, in essence girding my loins before I braved a look at the creation Desert Mode had sent me. At last, I pulled the zipper on the garment bag.

  I had been right: sequins and shoulder pads. That is, one shoulder pad. The basic dress was a slinky, black-sequined tube that covered one arm to the wrist and left the other one bare, as well as a good part of the chest. A massive red-sequin poinsettia bloomed atop the single shoulder and leafed across the cleavage. The flower’s stem was a spangley green-and-silver vine down the front of the dress, ending where the slit in the skirt began, about five inches below my crotch.

  I didn’t know whether I could walk in the thing, much less sit. This confection was almost funny to me, whose only after-five attire is a well-cut black-silk suit I bought on sale at Saks six years ago. The suit looks great and no one ever remembers it. If it didn’t get wrinkled in a suitcase, it would be perfect.

  There was a fur coat in the bag. I hung it up and intended to leave it behind. A paper sack in the bottom of the garment bag held the rest of the costume essentials: three-inch silver sandals, metallic silver hose, underwear, accessories. I started with the strapless bra. It was too small around the back, and too big up front, so I tossed it aside and did without a bra. Everything else fit beautifully, to use beautifully loosely.

  The piece de resistance was a pair of crystal earrings long enough to dust the top of my single bare shoulder.

  When I was in full regalia, I took a long look in the mirror on the back of the closet door. As a whole, it was okay, certainly not to my taste, but what the hell? I have worn jungle fatigues in El Salvador, a chador in Iran, Laura Ashley in England, medium gray on Wall Street, all to blend into the environment. Reminding myself that this rig was only another
form of camouflage, I opened the closet door and slinked out to dazzle Garth.

  “Yo, baby,” he grinned, twirling me around. “Why waste this gorgeous creature on some boring-as-shit fundraiser? Let’s go dancing.”

  “Let’s just get this over with. Are you ready?”

  “Get your coat.” He tilted his wine glass to drain it. When he saw me drape my camel coat over my arm, he froze. “Desert Mode should have sent over some fur.”

  “They did. But there’s no way I’m going to take responsibility for a full-length mink. If some animal rights nut doused me with paint, I couldn’t pay for the repairs.”

  “I’ll be responsible for the coat,” he said.

  “It’s useless to argue,” I said, taking his arm. “How many times have you been able to change my mind?”

  I can remember a few little victories,” he said, holding my camel coat for me. “But Pyrrhic victories, every one.”

  I kissed his cheek as I went past on my way out the door. “Have I told you how nice you look?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You are elegant, Garth,” I said, taking his arm as we walked down the hall. “A credit to your sex.”

  “Thank you.” He kissed the hand that I had tucked into his arm. “I brought the videotapes you wanted. They’re in the car.”

  I don’t have words to tell you how much I appreciate what you’re doing for me.”

  He bumped my shoulder. “Try.”

  “I thought I just did.” I laughed.

  “You’re a wordsmith. You can do better.”

  “I’ll work on it,” I said. “Sorry I’m such miserable company. The whole idea of going to this party, even if it’s the only way I can get at Celeste, seems all wrong when I think about Emily. This dress makes me feel like an absolute ass.”

  “Emily would get a kick out of your efforts on her behalf. You’re doing the right thing.”

  “Did I forget to tell you how nice it is to see you again, Garth?”

  “For some messages, you don’t need words.”

  Garth’s latest car was a black Jaguar XJS with a buff-colored ragtop and chrome wire wheels. It little more than purred as he sliced through traffic along Sunset and down to Santa Monica Boulevard. “Thus Spake Zarathustra” blasted on quad speakers. I folded my coat across the gape-front of the dress, leaned into the smooth leather upholstery and tried to get into the spirit of things.