by Craig Smith
‘Not by much,’ Molly snapped. I liked it that she wasn’t backing down from a pseudo-intellectual.
When she asked me what I taught I said auto mechanics. Beth said I was lying. ‘He teaches English, badly.’
Molly looked at each of us trying to decide who was lying. Then she grabbed my hand and flipped it over. ‘Auto mechanics! I bet you can’t even change a tire!’
‘In theory, I can,’ I said, ‘but usually I just change cars. It’s a hell of a lot easier.’
‘He’s a used car salesman when he’s not in school.’
‘A professional liar!’ Molly laughed at this information, but she didn’t seem especially concerned.
‘I never lie,’ I told her.
Beth scoffed at this. I was famous in the department for my tall tales and constant run of nonsense, but Molly didn’t care. She was trying to read me.
‘You any good at selling things?’
‘I’ve been at it for five summers,’ I said. ‘Every month I’ve worked for the past four, I’ve been the second-best salesman on the lot.’
‘Second-best? Who’s the best? That’s a guy I want to meet.’
‘No you don’t. He’s an evil son of a bitch with the moral fibre of the cockroach.’
‘A liar like you?’
I shook my head. ‘No, but he can use the truth like a stiletto.’
She let me touch the palm of her hand. The skin was rough, but I couldn’t get enough of the feel of her. ‘I don’t care if something’s true or not, as long as it’s plumb.’
Beth Ruby said things were getting too thick, and Molly told her no one was stopping her from leaving.
After that it was just the two of us.
Molly tells me she liked me the first time she saw me. Of course she was three hours into a smash-up and there was no competition in the bar, but I think it was more than just chance. I think she liked the fact that I worked for a living, even if it was only dirty-white-collar work. For my part, the feeling was mutual.
Unlike almost every person I met in those days, Molly knew exactly what she wanted in life and was already pursuing it. She had just had her offer on an old Victorian house accepted, and she was planning on fixing it up and selling it for a profit by spring. And what was she going to do with the profit? I asked.
‘Buy two more. I like the work,’ she said, ‘but I’ll like it a lot better once I’m my own boss.’
I did not know Molly had a daughter or that she had been on her own since she was fifteen. It wouldn’t have mattered. Nothing but that moment mattered.
Molly was different from anyone I had ever known.
She was sexy, smart, straightforward, funny, unencumbered with pretensions, and totally self-reliant.
We left the bar for ‘a demo drive’ in my pickup around ten o’clock that evening and didn’t even get out of the parking lot. In the middle of what was starting to look like the inevitable, the rope I used to disengage the clutch on the truck Tubs had sold me got in Molly’s face. She sat up, swinging at the thing and laughing, more curious than irritated. What was a piece of rope doing hanging down from the roof of my cab? Her breasts were glorious and naked, swinging over my lips. The smell of her sex was intoxicating, and I probably should have pitched a story. Anything would have worked, but the truth would take some time. The truth involved some advice a car salesman had given me that I was naturally too proud to heed.
The night was dark. The rain had stopped. My windows were steamed up. Why did I have to tell her about Tubs?
I think to this day I was at a crossroads and didn’t realize it. As it happened, I decided to tell her about my old man, The Bandit of the Wastelands. And that was it. That was the thing we had in common. Molly had an old man just like him! Only hers peeled noses for conceited rich people. We were kindred souls, spir-itual orphans, alone and angry at the world. The rest did not matter. We were a perfect fit.
We never got back to what we thought we wanted that night. We ended up at her house and talked until dawn. The truth is we never stopped talking until Buddy Elder entered our lives. And I never again felt like I was wandering around just killing time until I figured out what I wanted.
‘FOR THE SAKE OF half-a-hand-job between us,’ I said to Walt that evening, ‘we’ve lost our marriages.’
Ever the philologist, Walt answered me: ‘Full hand, David, half-the-job.’
‘Why would he do that? What does Buddy get by ruining our marriages?’
Walt didn’t believe we were innocent victims. I suppose he needed his guilt, but I kept thinking there had to be some way of figuring out what Buddy really wanted. It couldn’t be just spite! Not with the elaborate set-up he had used to nail me.
I tried different theories on. I played the amateur psychologist, muttering Freudian platitudes, but nothing quite held together.
Walt listened politely, but he knew the reason Buddy had come after us. He had no doubt. We tried to sleep with his girlfriend, one of us actually had, apparently, and he paid us back with interest. ‘He hit us where it hurt.’
‘I didn’t sleep with his girlfriend, Walt.’
‘You wanted to.’
He had me there. Walt studied me in his own peculiar way. He knew I was an inveterate liar. He knew I enjoyed summoning up the ridiculous and offering it as gospel. Still, he was reluctant to call me a liar while I was at low ebb. If I wanted to pretend it was only a fantasy that was fine with him. Fantasy, reality, it didn’t matter. Buddy Elder had not authored our misfortunes. We had.
My friend, my lawyer, my wife: they all asked themselves why Denise Conway would write about an affair that did not actually occur. When there was no logical explanation they could only conclude I was lying, as I was known to do from time to time. It occurred to me that their response was exactly what Buddy Elder had anticipated. He had even arranged matters so that Denise’s complaint against me made no sense until the diary exposed her real motive. No one doubted it because Denise had not even wanted to admit the affair when she had filed her complaint.
Had he staggered his attack on me knowing the evidence would have greater effect if it came after the investigation had gathered some momentum? Was the son of a bitch that smart?
Around midnight it hit me, not the reason, the reason still did not make sense, but the method. The method Buddy Elder had employed came from reading Jinx.
He had confirmed that the first story was a lie by introducing a second story. Because the second story discredited the first, nobody doubted its veracity. I had summarized the principle as Larry the Liar’s mantra: Never tell a lie. Always tell two.
TUBS HAD NEVER SUBSCRIBED to Larry the Liar’s method, though he recognized that a great many people thought you had to lie to persuade people to do something. He knew the method worked, but he didn’t believe it worked as well as his own. Tubs said truth was its own reward. As a child, like all children, I had imagined he meant the reward would come in the form of feeling good about myself if I said only the truth.
I didn’t understand that Tubs cut and measured by the dollars and cents of a deal. He meant reward in its most literal and immediate sense.
I finally learned what he meant when I went to work with him. The summer I was out of high school, Tubs made me get what he called ‘a real job’ with the city.
It was mowing and grounds keeping and landscape work, long days of sunshine, heavy lifting, and a whole lot of sweat. And it didn’t pay very well. The next summer, Tubs said I could do anything I wanted. I said I wanted to sell cars with him. He just smiled, like he was proud of me, and muttered, ‘Too lazy to work, too nervous to steal. You must be my son after all, Davey!’
He set one condition for my employment. He said he didn’t care what I did off hours, but when I was on the lot or working a deal, even at midnight over a beer, I was never to lie. Absolutely never. I made the promise and I kept it as long as I wandered around in the wastelands, but I sure didn’t think it sounded like fun.
And it
wasn’t. For two weeks I kept bouncing into people and losing them. I talked and I shook hands and I smiled a lot. I was a hell of a nice guy and so honest people even complimented me on it, but they never bought anything. They bought from Tubs. They bought from Larry the Liar. They never bought from me. Then one night, before I had landed even a bad deal, trudging off the lot with the rest of the salespeople and thinking landscaping wasn’t such a bad summer job after all, Tubs called me back. He pointed toward the back lot and said, ‘There!’ I looked, but I couldn’t see anything. ‘A man and woman,’ he said and he had the reverent intensity of a fisherman about to get a strike. ‘They think we’re closed.’ I couldn’t see them, but I knew Tubs was a fisher of men, and he knew when the Big Ones came to feed. ‘Davey,’ he said, and took my shoulder in his big hand like a coach about to send a player in, ‘I want you to go up to them and tell them we’re closed for the evening. Give them your business card and tell them to come back tomorrow and you’ll take care of them. And if you say it like a total prick and walk away without another word, I’ll give you ten bucks.’
I was tired and frustrated. It was easy to be rude.
I figured Tubs knew them, and just wanted to piss them off. I didn’t care. It was more fun than being nice. I heard the woman rumbling behind me as I walked away. She had never! And the man yelled loud enough for me to hear, ‘You just lost yourself a sale, young man!’
Tubs ran into them on the way to his car, the perfect accidental meeting. They were so mad they had to tell someone about the rude young salesman they had just encountered. Tubs wanted to know who it was. When they gave him my business card Tubs admitted a hard truth, because he could not tell a lie. The impertinent young salesman was his son, and he was mighty sorry he had brought me up so poorly.
When Tubs gave me the ten dollar bill the next morning, he handed me back my business card, too.
It was torn into four pieces. He had had both husband and wife rip it once, just to show me what they thought of my salesmanship. He had promised them he would give the thing back to me, and he was, he told me with the straightest of faces, a man who kept his promises. Of course, after the ceremony of the card ripping, it was only natural that the folks had seen just the car they couldn’t live without. And wouldn’t it teach me a lesson I’d never forget if they bought the thing right on the spot!
It was a lesson I never forgot all right.
My brothers hated Tubs because he was such a righteous old fart who couldn’t tell a lie, but I was the baby. I went out summer after summer to be close to the old man and learn his great wisdom. I even practiced his brand of truth on the lot. I never lied out there, but it was the only virtue I respected. I couldn’t wait to put the tie on and be there with him, to beat him just one time, one month! That was all I wanted, and he taught me how to do it, too, though I never quite pulled it off. I was always second to the old man, and Larry the Liar was somewhere back in the pack, imagining we just told a better story. Tubs showed me that at the bottom of it all the rich and the poor all come down to the same thing: when they want something they get small and greedy and full of fear. You get people to want a thing, and there is no folly they won’t commit in the cause of their desire. Their greatest fear, their only fear really, is that you’re lying. You tell them only the truth and convince them that you never lie, no matter what the personal cost, and they will jump into fire to have what they lust for. That was the secret of Tubs’s greatness.
As the summers passed, I lost the passion that comes with the kill. My soul got farther and farther from the wastelands the more I read the poets. The poets and storytellers of this world lied for the beauty of a good story, lied for the sake of a higher truth, and when I finished reading their tall tales I had a better feeling about what it was to be a human being.
Of course, I also knew that even the greatest of them all would just be another sucker on the car lot. John Keats rises from the dead and lands his skinny ass in DeKalb, Illinois. Poet or not, you’ve got to have a car in DeKalb, so he sneaks up at the back of the lot at closing time to avoid the salespeople, and Tubs is there waiting for him like God.
‘...a wordsmith are you, Johnny? My son’s a poet.
It’s a beautiful life and we need more like you to sing its praises. Now, tell me, and be honest with me, what kind of a car does a poet drive?’
Young Johnny Keats grabs for the antique purse he’s tied to his belt, but it’s too late. The strings are already cut.
Chapter 12
I MET MOLLY AT A CAFE about a week after my suspension. The talk was money and the best way out of some rather complicated property holdings, if it came to divorce. That was my position. As far as Molly was concerned divorce was the only reasonable response to my infidelity.
We added things up, subtracted mortgages, and talked through the most intelligent ways to dissolve our holdings. The problem was the farm. It was Molly’s but she had leveraged a number of loans with it. If my income suddenly stopped, as it was very likely to, we could be caught short. The option was to dip into our retirement accounts or sell off enough at fire sale rates that we could limp along with the other properties until we got our price on the apartment houses.
The best way to handle it really came down to my prospects at the university.
I told Molly I had filed an appeal to my suspension.
That was immediately rejected by the VP, based on what he called ‘accumulating evidence of inappropriate behaviour.’ I had pushed another appeal forward, but it amounted to nothing more than symbolic defiance.
I was getting paid. I had been replaced. No one was going to bring me back into the classroom again until the following semester.
The real issue was the main investigation against me, the charges filed by Denise Conway and Johnna Masterson. The VP had scheduled a hearing to review Affirmative Action’s recommendation for disciplinary action. Comprised of faculty from across campus, the committee would review the evidence and make its recommendation. The VP would then forward this along with his own opinion to the president. While I would have the opportunity to appeal the VP’s finding and even the president’s decision, my best chance, short of court, was at the initial hearing.
How did that look? Molly asked. I ran through a few of the names on the committee. Molly understood what I was saying. I was looking at a stacked deck.
Settling both arms on the table, I told my wife, ‘Gail thinks the best approach is to admit wrongdoing. Given the circumstances, I’d probably get away with nothing more than a letter of censure.’
Molly’s eyes flashed. She was suddenly very interested. ‘What are the circumstances?’
‘They have a copy of Denise Conway’s diary,’ I said.
‘According to it, the affair started before she was a student of mine. Gail thinks if I grovel, really do it up right, talk about the problems in our marriage—’
‘We didn’t have problems in our marriage, David.’
‘And I didn’t have an affair. We’re talking about strategy.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘I know you don’t. What I’m saying is if I tell the committee we were having problems and that I started an affair last summer this entire investigation becomes something they can understand. Plus, it ceases to be part of a pattern of behaviour. I get counselling and I’m back in the classroom in January.’
‘What kind of problems are you going to tell them we had?’
‘I don’t know. Problems. It doesn’t matter. If I don’t admit to doing something wrong and give them a convincing reason for it, Gail thinks the committee will be, in her words, “less than sympathetic”.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning the suspension will continue without pay.’
‘Do what your lawyer tells you, David.’
‘It’s a lie, Molly. Everything in that diary.’
Molly shook her head, tears brimming. ‘Don’t do this to me. I don’t want to hear it.’ She tossed her napkin o
n her plate and reached for her purse. ‘This was a bad idea.’ She stood up and stared down at me with nearly the same ferocity as the night she had pointed her .22 at me. ‘If we had been having troubles, problems, I could understand what you did. I wouldn’t like it, I might still leave you, but it would be different! I wouldn’t feel so stupid! I wouldn’t stay up nights asking myself why you thought you needed her!’
Up to this point, other than sorrow, my emotions had been in check. I did not consciously decide to let go. I just snapped. She wasn’t the only one losing sleep and asking why, I said.
Molly bristled the moment I raised my voice.
‘Goodbye, David.’
With that, she turned and walked away with absolutely nothing between us resolved. I did not try to stop her. There was no point really.
AFTER THE FIRST FEW DAYS of isolation, I had been able to call Lucy. With her mother’s permission, she had met me for dinner a couple of times. I had gone out to her school to watch a football game with her. We talked about the fall races, the people who had asked about me, and all the usual stuff that comes with belonging to a tightly knit group, such as the people she raced against every weekend.
Lucy was her mother’s daughter, but she was trying not to play favourites. She knew by now I had been charged with sexual harassment by two women and that I was allegedly having an affair with one of them.
She also knew I was denying it. Molly had not given her the details. Lucy had not asked me about any of it. My guilt was too generally accepted, I suppose.
Her real fear was that I would lie to her as she assumed I was already lying to her mother and the people at school. As long as we didn’t talk about it, I wasn’t lying to her. Avoidance was her mother’s game.
My methods were more complex and certainly more devious. Blame it on the blood. I did not think it wise to proclaim my innocence to Lucy directly. It hadn’t worked with Molly or Walt or my lawyer. I had no reason to think it would work with Lucy. That did not mean I had nothing to say.
