Tell Me Lies

by Carola Lovering

  I stepped back out into the intensifying heat and walked east, toward the river. My mind was thick with something slow and heavy like tar; it swirled with the vivid images of CJ and Gabe Petersen that would never stop haunting me, and my feet pedaling backward and the smell of rain on the pavement and every microscopic never-ending detail of that day—and then it was the tender spot on the back of Stephen’s neck and his bottle-green eyes, and then Marilyn’s wide smile and Marilyn sleeping in huts with AIDS patients in Africa and her jewelry sitting in the dark backroom of Sal’s horrible shop, gone forever, like Macy and her Little Mermaid hair, and everything else that would never return.

  I didn’t stop walking until I had crossed one of the small bridges over the whooshing FDR traffic and arrived at the edge of the East River. The morning sun glittered over the water in front of Brooklyn as the sharp smell of salt rolled in. Runners in neon shorts flashed by, all too in-the-zone to notice me unlatch the clasp on the beautiful teak box and empty the remainder of Marilyn’s jewelry from the world—the junk Sal wouldn’t take—over the railing and into the murky, dark water below. I dropped the box in after everything else and watched it float for a moment, bobbing lightly in the sun, before disappearing under the oily surface.

  As I watched pieces of Marilyn’s life sink into the East River I felt that I was sinking, too, as though the most vital, densest sections of my brain had plummeted out from under me into the water, dragging the rest of my body down with them. The sadness inside me had morphed into something else, something that swapped between numbness and terror. It was the only thing left. I had disappeared from my own being.

  In the spaces between the emptiness, random memories pooled: CJ’s voice saying Up and at ’em every morning for thirteen years, followed by the sound of the shades snapping up; Georgia and me in red soccer jerseys. sucking orange slices at halftime; the sound of my father’s G- and L-shaped pancakes sizzling on the griddle; the smell of dirt and pine on his skin after he finished splitting wood in the backyard; the four of us taking Hickory for walks in Caumsett; Georgia and I stretched out on beach towels on the Cape; wobbling on my dad’s strong shoulders in the ocean and jumping off into the salty sea; maple-sugar snow in blue bowls; the feel of CJ’s thumb and forefinger gently pinching my earlobe—I made these ears, Sass.

  I felt far too sad to show up at my internship, sadder than I had all my life. Back on Delancey, I hailed a cab and told the driver to take me to the only place I could think to go, Saint Thomas Church on Fifty-Third and Fifth.

  Joining the Episcopal Church had been my parents’ compromise. My father was a born Catholic. CJ had grown up without religion and said that the Catholic Church put an especially bad taste in her mouth. But Marilyn had been Episcopalian, and my father promised it was the most lenient form of Christianity out there, so CJ obliged and Georgia and I attended just enough Sunday school and Confirmation classes to pass for practicing members of the Episcopalian faith. My parents used to take us to Saint Thomas, my father’s favorite Episcopalian church in the city, for nighttime mass the week before Christmas. CJ, Georgia, and I would take the train in from Cold Spring Harbor and meet my father after work. We bundled in layers—Georgia and me in matching peacoats and CJ in her elegant, cream-colored wool. I never got particularly excited about church, but I loved going to Saint Thomas, the four of us squeezed into a pew under the ninety-five-foot-high Gothic ceilings. The altar was grandly decorated with poinsettias and other Christmassy flower arrangements, and the readings were always wonderful, but the best was the music—glorious, holy Christmas melodies that filled every inch of the magnificent church, the sound of the organ reverberating all the way up the stone walls into the rib-vaulted ceiling. Sometimes there would be tears in my father’s eyes, and then in CJ’s, because whenever he cried her own tears followed, involuntarily. Back then there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that she loved him more than anything.

  After mass we always went downtown to dinner at Balthazar, my father’s favorite French restaurant. Georgia and I would play hangman with crayons on the white paper tablecloth and we always ordered steak frites and Shirley Temples with extra maraschino cherries. But I hadn’t eaten at Balthazar in years, and I couldn’t remember when it had stopped or why we didn’t go to Saint Thomas at Christmas anymore. All I knew was that the tradition was over, just a memory, and thinking about it made me feel strange and old.

  At Fifty-Third and Fifth, I paid for the cab and stepped back into the blazing heat. The midtown block was quiet for a Friday morning. I walked inside the church, inhaling something familiar, and a schedule told me that the next service started soon, at half past ten.

  I took a stack of envelopes from the lobby, then made my way into the enormous chapel and sat down at one end of a pew near the back and waited. I knelt on the floor and pressed my palms together. I hadn’t been inside a church since Easter—we really only went on Christmas Eve and Easter now—and despite being confirmed I had never felt wildly religious in the first place, but I decided I should pray anyway. The guilt that was frozen somewhere inside me knew that I had just committed the worst sin of my life, made worse by the fact that doing it had been easy and seamless and disappointingly unsatisfying.

  But the hard kneeler hurt my knees, and I couldn’t remember how to pray, so I sat up, pulled out Sal’s paper bag and got to work. By the time good, God-loving people of Manhattan had begun to fill in the seats around me I had already placed twenty hundred-dollar bills in each of the ten offering envelopes, totaling the twenty thousand dollars I’d received from Sal that morning in exchange for Marilyn’s irreplaceable possessions.

  The reverend began the service, proceeding through the opening hymn, then the lesson and the gospel and the epistle, and then a reading of Psalm 23, which I remembered was my father’s favorite as the words were spoken:

  The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

  He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters

  He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake . . .

  I held the Holy Bible in my hands and felt something move through me, like grace, and maybe I was feeling God, or maybe I was just one of those people who mistook emotion in a church for God; I didn’t know for sure. I just knew in that moment that I needed to get better, and that nobody was going to do it for me, and when the big silver plate passed my pew during the offertory I placed my ten envelopes among the rest, and the usher met my eyes with curiosity but not conclusion, and I nodded, signaling him to continue forward, and the offertory hymn boomed through the chapel, loud and great, and for the first time all morning I was finally crying, thick tears sliding down my cheeks in unrelenting sheets. I buried my face in my lap, and I didn’t care if anyone around me saw, because you were allowed to cry in a church, and for the first time in a long time I felt the temporary respite of not being judged, not by anybody and not by myself, and I let myself feel it, and it felt so good that I cried more healing tears into my hands until the music stopped and the minister said a prayer to close the offertory.

  I slipped out of Saint Thomas before Communion, before anything about the money could be remotely suspected. I walked all the way down to the garage on Houston, fifty-three blocks to clear my head, the tears streaming intermittently. I got the Audi and got out of the city as fast as I could, blasting Stevie Nicks on the way home, already feeling just the tiniest bit clearer. I drove straight to Dr. Wattenbarger’s office in Cold Spring Harbor, an hour early for my appointment, finally ready to talk.

  34

  STEPHEN

  NOVEMBER 2013

  Several months into our relationship Alice began to bother me in an array of ways. For example, the other morning I was taking a shower and noticed an enormous clump of her hair clogging the drain. It had stopped up the whole shower—I was standing in half a foot of bathwater and had to manually pull gobs of her hair out of the drain with my fingers. It was disgusting.
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  My first semester of law school was bombarding me with work, and the other night Alice came over while I was trying to finish the outline for my civil-procedure class. She snuggled up against me on the couch, crinkling the notes I had neatly spread out around me in a systematic order. I asked her to please move over, and she looked at me like I’d just kicked her in the face. That’s the problem with girls like Alice—they’re like dogs, so insecure they need your fucking affection all the livelong day.

  My feelings of annoyance were a side product of being in a relationship, as I’d learned over the years. Boredom followed by exceeding boredom. Life morphs into a monotonous slide show, each day identical to the one before it.

  It had been this way for a month or two, the back-and-forth battle in my head over my need for Alice and my desire to get rid of her. Generally I liked having her around. But then there were days, more frequent lately, when all I wanted was to be alone, and Alice would call and whine that we should order dinner and that I didn’t spend enough time with her. So then we’d order takeout, and when it arrived she’d complain about the food but devour it nonetheless, her upper arms looking flabbier than they had when we’d first started dating. I wondered why she didn’t join a gym.

  It was at such times that I became most interested in having sex with someone else. The thought would enter my mind slowly, like a slug, and lodge itself there for the foreseeable future.

  I’d only cheated on her once, in Miami in August, the weekend of Luke’s bachelor party. Everyone was shitfaced and I ended up doing lines with a girl named Gabrielle or Gabi or something, who I met in one of the clubs. She was the type Luke had written off as “super trashy,” but I didn’t think she was bad. Bleached hair, a skinny body. A blurred image came to mind when I tried to picture her that night on the hotel bed. Mostly I just felt like having sex with a girl who wasn’t Alice, not even because I was mad at Alice or even irritated at her. We’d been on great terms that weekend, actually, because I remember talking to her in the bathroom of Gabrielle’s hotel room and telling her how much I missed her, and then after we hung up I walked out into the room and fucked Gabrielle until five o’clock in the morning. The precise reason eluded me. All I knew was that I felt a hell of a lot better after I did it, like I’d shaken something from my system that had been eating me alive for months.

  The next morning I’d tiptoed into the hotel room I was sharing with Luke, but he was already awake, sitting in bed talking to his beloved bride on the telephone. Of course Luke would spend his bachelor party on the fucking phone with his fiancée; the antithesis of the very essence of a bachelor party. I didn’t know why I’d bothered to plan the event for him in the first place.

  “You sleep with that chick?” Luke murmured after he hung up with Kathleen. “No judgment,” he added, frowning.

  “No way. We were doing lines and I fell asleep.”

  “Isn’t cocaine a bit outdated? And isn’t that sentence an oxymoron?”

  I closed my eyes and the sockets burned with exhaustion. “Don’t be an ass, Luke. I’m hungover as hell.”

  “I’m not judging you, Stephen. I know you and Alice aren’t super serious.”

  If there was one way Luke knew how to get under my skin it lay in his ability to backhandedly put me down. Luke was well aware that I viewed my relationship with Alice as a serious one. His justification of what he assumed to be my infidelity was only achieved by trivializing my relationship. My perceived failure was another pat on the back for Luke, the ultimate committed fiancé and embodiment of loyalty; the only real man in the DeMarco family.

  I grabbed a half-empty Poland Spring bottle off the nightstand and chugged what was left.

  “As a matter of fact, Alice and I are serious,” I informed Luke, my head pounding. “We’re probably going to move in together.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Luke stared at me with his mouth open.

  “Nope.”

  It had been Alice’s idea, which she’d brought up over brunch earlier in the summer. I’d been complaining about how expensive going out to meals was, which turned into a conversation about the expensive nature of New York in general, and how it had only become worse now that I was an unemployed law school student. We were squeezed into a booth at Freemans, and Alice rubbed my back and told me about her grandfather’s apartment, a rent-controlled one-bedroom in Kips Bay. She explained how her grandfather, who lived in Myrtle Beach full-time, had given Alice permission to use the apartment once the current renter moved out in January. He would only charge her a fraction of the rent—a thousand bucks a month at most.

  “Anyway,” Alice had said that morning. “I know it’s barely been a year, so maybe I’m getting ahead of us, but I was thinking . . .”

  I reached for her hand. “You were thinking?”

  Her face relaxed into a smile. “I was thinking that maybe, if it feels right, we could live there together. Rent would only be five hundred each—we could both save so much money. And you’re only subletting right now, so it’s not like you’d have to worry about getting out of a lease. Plus, it would be a way to guarantee that we’d still see each other all the time. You know what they say about what happens to couples when one person starts law school.”

  I nodded. I had already heard the stories from some of my classmates; there was no denying it, law school ruined relationships, especially the first year. The 1Ls who were serious about getting good grades didn’t have time for their significant others on top of a heavy workload.

  “That’s definitely something to think about,” I said, the seed planted in my mind, my eyes scorching Alice’s. I watched joy flood through her and knew that she truly loved me. People who are harder to access pose a challenge, and the challenge makes them easier to love. By not always yielding answers but deliberately hinting at them, I challenged Alice’s score with herself, her own assessments and convictions. I had driven her to love me; I’d watched her love for me take shape with my own eyes.

  Why shouldn’t I move in with Alice? She was, for the most part, a great girlfriend. Being with Alice often felt like it had with Diana during the good old days, before she found out about the cheating, before Lucy came into the picture.

  The fall blew by. On Thanksgiving I took stock of the state of my life. Though I was thrilled to be done with my shithole days at BR3 Group, the first three months of law school had been the most demanding of my academic career. We’d given up our lease when Luke moved in with Kathleen and Geoff got a one bedroom closer to his office, and I was subletting a studio on Waverly near NYU. It was overpriced but temporary—Alice’s offer had proven too good to pass up, and we were moving in together after New Year’s. Luke had gotten married in September, although that seemed to change nothing except for Kathleen’s last name. Now that Vivian and Luke were both married, my nosy relatives spent Thanksgiving dinner probing me about my love life.

  “So, Stephen, are you next?” they cooed.

  “Time will tell,” I replied. “But I’m going to visit my girlfriend in Pittsburgh tomorrow, and we’re moving in together in January.” I liked the way it sounded; I watched my relatives nod in approval and knew I’d said the right thing.

  Alice had bought me the plane ticket to Pittsburgh for our one-year anniversary—she wanted me to meet her family and see her childhood home. She picked me up at the airport, standing outside despite the cold, wearing an oversize gray wool coat that made her look older than she was. Seeing her made me think of Lucy for some reason, and I wondered where in the world Lucy was, right that minute.

  The Edwardses’ house wasn’t a mansion, but it wasn’t small, either. Alice mixed us whiskey gingers in the kitchen before giving me a tour. The glass chandelier hanging in the foyer and the faux zebra carpet lining the upstairs hallways told me both that her father did well in banking and also that the Edwardses were a bit nouveau riche.

  In Alice’s bedroom I studied the framed photographs, each one tucked neatly into a polished frame—Alice
skiing, Alice in a ballerina outfit, Alice and her brother, Duncan, at Disney World, standing between Mickey and Minnie. Alice’s hair had once been a darker, indistinct shade of dishwater blond, and I suddenly understood the urgency behind her periodic trips to the salon. As Alice discovered more in her room to show me, I placed my arms around her middle and felt that familiar pull from below, the never-ending desire for sex.

  “Alice in Wonderland, can we?” I whispered into her apple-shampooed tresses. I hadn’t had sex in a week, and my body was tense and tender all over.

  “Not now, Stephen. My parents are downstairs waiting for us. Later.”

  We gathered around the dining room table for dinner. The Edwardses were extremely average people. Mrs. Edwards did most of the talking, while her husband and son concentrated on their steaks.

  Midmeal I excused myself to the bathroom; the whiskey was running through me. On the way I nearly tripped over a dog lying in the entrance to the dining room, the Edwardses’ old collie.

  “Aw, don’t mind Nellie, she doesn’t move around much,” said Mrs. Edwards sadly. “She has cancer; we found out recently.”

  “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.” I glanced at Alice, whose bottom lip trembled.

  The dog looked up at me expectantly with shiny black eyes like marbles, and I had the sudden urge to kick the dumb creature in its face.

  On the bathroom wall was a framed picture of Alice and Duncan as children in matching overalls and turtlenecks, sitting side by side on the front porch of what I took to be this house. It struck me how typical everyone turned out to be, how rare it was for somebody to make a life that had more to show than an old photograph of kids on the wall. All people ended up caring about was some stupid dog or some ugly painting their kid made in art class. And the thing that really got me was that people were satisfied with this outcome, even happy that they turned out like every other schmuck on the block who assembles a swing set and thinks it’s extraordinary.