Truth and Consequences

by Alison Lurie

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES

  Alison Lurie is the author of many novels, including The War Between the Tates, The Truth About Lorin Jones (winner of the Prix Femina Étranger), Foreign Affairs (winner of the Pulitzer Prize), and The Last Resort. Her most recent book was Boys and Girls Forever: Children’s Classics from Cinderella to Harry Potter. She teaches writing, folklore, and literature at Cornell University and divides her time between Ithaca, New York, and Key West, Florida.

  Praise for Truth and Consequences

  “A delightful writer whose novels are a pleasure to read, Lurie [is] . . . a writer well worth cherishing for giving us novels that are as gracefully edifying as they are incontrovertibly entertaining.” —Los Angeles Times

  “There is not one wasted word in Truth and Consequences. . . . Lurie’s language is as sharp as the claws of pain that rule Alan’s life and the pangs of guilt that threaten Jane’s. The book is delightfully readable. You are into it and out of it before you know it, but not without a fresh look at the maneuvers inside marriage.” —Chicago Tribune

  “This is a comedy of adultery with a comedy of academia thrown in . . . as in the best comedies, everyone gets justice, and no one escapes it.”

  —The New Yorker

  “Amiable, quietly witty and readable.” —The Washington Post

  “Lurie . . . is back doing what she does best.” —The Miami Herald

  “Another razor-sharp satire of upper-class social norms and male-female relationships . . . a fascinating peak at the complexities of love and marriage . . . a brilliant romp . . . Lurie has created a novel that both pokes fun and commiserates with her characters, a tough feat and a wonderful read.” —Rocky Mountain News

  “Alison Lurie is a master at writing about how relationships—even the best of them—can come unraveled faster than you can say ‘affair.’ Truth and Consequences strikes a chord because its protagonists must answer a difficult question we can all relate to: What happens when, as Jane repeatedly says, life is ‘all wrong’? Lurie’s characters are believable because they force us to ponder this. . . . Her ability to probe the complexity of human relationships becomes apparent, and the story offers plenty of tough insights about what it means to love someone and about the often illogical nature of human relationships.” —Star-Telegram (Fort Worth)

  “Lurie’s direct writing makes her novel a compelling read, and her plot drives her characters successfully. The reader is allowed the near-voyeuristic pleasure of watching old ties die while new ones begin. Even readers who aren’t fans of romance will be enticed by Lurie’s ability to fill her story with engaging characters.” —Richmond Times-Dispatch

  “A biting, funny glimpse behind the scenes of a prestigious college. . . . Lurie . . . has a light touch with college comedy, here, and her characters are true to life—spend any time around a campus and you’ll know them all . . . fun reading.” —Buffalo News

  “The characters are what make this book flow. Lurie is whip-smart and very funny.”—The Associated Press

  “Truth and Consequences is wise and funny, with a sublimated sexiness that keeps the pot bubbling in a way that transcends the narrowness of academic novels. Lurie is at her best when she’s sly, and she’s plenty sly here. In Truth and Consequences, she’s in top form, carefully portraying a range of deluded people but never subverting them.” —Palm Beach Post

  “Lurie is a poison-pen satirist who particularly enjoys skewering academics and writers. In this tightly wound, fairy-tale parody about the ruthless self-regard of creative people and the revenge of the good and steadfast, Lurie toys with the conventions of romance. Lurie is wickedly entertaining as she mocks everything from the ego of the artist to the bossiness of the meek, and everyone lives happily ever after.” —Booklist

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  PENGUIN BOOKS

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  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2005

  Published in Penguin Books 2006

  Copyright © Alison Lurie, 2005

  All rights reserved

  Photograph courtesy of Brand X Pictures/Getty Images

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN : 978-1-4406-2734-7

  1. College teachers—Fiction. 2. Back—Wounds and injuries—Patients—Fiction.

  3. Chronic pain—Patients—Fiction. 4. Married people—Fiction.

  5. Older people—Fiction. 6. New England—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3562.U7T74 2005

  813’.54—dc22 2005042253

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  FOR ALISON VAN DYKE

  ONE

  On a hot midsummer morning, after over sixteen years of marriage, Jane Mackenzie saw her husband fifty feet away and did not recognize him.

  She was in the garden picking lettuce when the sound of a car stopping on the road by the house made her look up. Someone was getting out of a taxi, paying the driver, and then starting slowly down the long driveway: an aging man with slumped shoulders, a sunken chest, and a protruding belly, leaning on a cane. The hazy sun was in her eyes and she couldn’t see his face clearly, but there was something about him that made her feel uneasy and a little frightened. He reminded her
of other unwelcome figures: a property tax inspector who had appeared at the door soon after they moved into the house; an FBI official who was investigating one of Alan’s former students; and the scruffy-looking guy who one summer two years ago used to stand just down the road where the ramp to the highway began, waving at passing cars and asking for a lift downtown. If you agreed, before he got out he would lean over the seat and in a half-whiny, half-threatening way ask for the “loan” of a couple of dollars.

  Then Jane’s vision cleared, and she saw that it was her husband Alan Mackenzie, who shouldn’t be there. Less than an hour ago she had driven him to the University, where he had a lunch meeting at the College of Architecture, and where she had expected him to stay until she picked him up that afternoon. Since he’d hurt his back fifteen months ago, he hadn’t been able to drive. Jane snatched up her basket of lettuce and began to walk uphill, then almost to run.

  “What’s happened, what’s the matter?” she called out when she was within range.

  “Nothing,” Alan muttered, not quite looking at her. His cane grated on the gravel as he came to a slow halt. “I didn’t feel well, so I came home.”

  “Is it very bad?” Jane put her hand on the creased sleeve of his white shirt. Crazy as it was, she still couldn’t quite believe that the person inside the shirt was her husband. Alan wasn’t anything like this, he was healthy and strong and confident, barely over fifty. This man had Alan’s broad forehead and narrow straight nose and thick pale-brown hair, but he looked at least ten years older and twenty pounds heavier, and his expression was one of pain and despair. “You said at breakfast you were all right—anyhow, no worse than usual. . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “If you want to know, I had a fucking awful night, and now I’m having a fucking awful day.” He moved sideways so that Jane’s hand fell from his arm, and made a slow detour around her.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry. Is there anything I can do?” She was following him now, speaking to his long stooped back. How could I not have known him? she thought. It wasn’t my fault, it was because the sun was in my eyes and he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was surprised, that’s all, the way you are when you run into neighbors when you’re abroad, so at first you can’t quite identify them. But Alan is your husband, her conscience said. You should know him anywhere.

  “No.” He paused by the kitchen door. “Well, maybe. You could help me off with my shoes. It just about kills me to bend over. And if you’re going upstairs, you could bring down my pillows.”

  “Yes, of course.” It occurred to Jane for the first time that there was a pattern here. Lately, Alan usually refused any offer of assistance at first, but soon corrected himself, asking for various objects and services. On other occasions he would wait longer, until she was somewhere else in the house and in the middle of some other activity, and then he would call for help.

  “I can’t go on like this. It’s worse every day,” he muttered, leaning over the kitchen sink, gulping water and pills. He wiped his mouth on the cuff of his shirt, which should have been thrown in the laundry basket two days ago.

  “I’m so sorry.” Jane put her arms around the soiled shirt and began a hug—but Alan winced, and she let go. “Sorry,” she repeated.

  Not acknowledging either her sympathy or her apology, he shuffled into the sitting room and slowly, with a muffled groan, began to ease himself onto the big flowered sofa, which was now placed diagonally across the middle of the room. It had been moved around last fall so that Alan could watch television while lying down, and an end table and coffee table had been positioned awkwardly beside it. The sitting room of their hundred-and-fifty-year-old farmhouse was low-ceilinged and small, and now resembled a crowded antique furniture store. It was difficult to have more than two people over, because with Alan stretched out on the sofa there was nowhere for them to sit. They hadn’t had a dinner party for months, and they couldn’t have had one anyhow because Alan couldn’t sit in a straight chair for more than five minutes without excruciating pain. He had to eat standing up, or balance a plate on his chest as he lay on the various squashed pillows and cushions that now covered the sofa.

  Only five—or was it already six?—years ago, Jane suddenly remembered, Alan had lain on this sofa in almost this same disarray of cushions, and she had lain there with him. The sofa was new then: it had just been delivered. After the man from the furniture warehouse left, Alan and Jane stood there admiring it. Then they sat on the sofa, bouncing a bit on the thick down cushions, laughing lightly. They congratulated themselves on their purchase; they kissed, and kissed again.

  “We should launch it,” Alan said presently, pressing closer.

  “What? Oh yes.”

  “Let’s.”

  It was a mild, sunny autumn day, and their clothes came off easily, falling to the carpet like the bright leaves outside. And then something strange and wonderful happened: the sofa, though of course it did not actually move, seemed to slide into a warm sea, to be borne through gently turbulent waves, which lifted and dropped them, raised and rocked them. When she was a small child, Jane had used to pretend sometimes that the big sagging green couch in the sitting room was a ship, sailing over the carpet. Now her story had come true.

  “Look, we match the slipcover,” Alan had said afterward, raising himself on one elbow. Jane sat up, and saw that it was so: the creamy beige and soft brown and subdued crimson of the eighteenth-century flower pattern were echoed in their nakedness.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You’re so beautiful, and so lovable,” Alan said.

  “You too.”

  That sea voyage, that afternoon, had been one of their best moments. And now, again, Alan lay there on the same sofa in a confusion of cushions, but he was no longer beautiful, and the expression on his face was one of pain and despair.

  It wasn’t fair that he should suffer like this, Jane had told her mother only last week, it wasn’t right. But Jane’s mother, who went to the Congregational church almost every Sunday, did not agree. “We can’t understand these things, dear,” she had said, as she had said before in other circumstances. “We just have to accept them, and ask God to give us the strength to bear them.”

  In a moment of despair, Jane had passed on this advice to Alan, who thought her mother a well-meaning ninny. He also did not believe in God and, as far as she knew, had never asked him for anything. “Yeah?” he had said. “And what if he doesn’t give us the strength? Even among true believers, the record for answered prayers isn’t that good.”

  Now, with a cheese-grater groan, Alan turned over on the sofa. He stuck out his feet, and Jane sat on the narrow edge of the sofa beside him. Awkwardly, she untied and removed the oxfords she had put on and tied earlier that morning. It was like taking care of a giant toddler, she thought—but this child’s bare feet were not soft and smooth and lovable, but hard and knobby, with horny toenails. “Is it really bad?” she asked.

  “I already said it was bad.” He spoke impatiently, angrily.

  “Where does it hurt?”

  “The back. Always the back. And I’ve got that shooting pain in my left leg again.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Jane repeated weakly.

  “It just won’t quit. Fifteen months.” Alan eased himself over onto his side, facing away from her, and in the process rucking up his shirt and revealing the back brace he now habitually wore, a kind of stiff heavy white plastic corset, all straps and Velcro, that made him look even more overweight than he was.

  “Could you get me the pillows now? And maybe a couple of icepacks out of the freezer.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Jane stood up. Who is this man lying on our sofa? she thought as she looked down at him. He’s still called Alan Mackenzie, but he’s not the same person. And I’m not the same person either, she thought as she climbed the stairs. I’m tired and worried and no fun for anybody, including myself. In a way we’re not really husband and wife anymore. We’re housekeep
er and employer. Or maybe, in the language of a blandly instructive pamphlet she had read while waiting for Alan in some doctor’s office, caregiver and caregetter.

  At first they had both thought his back trouble couldn’t be anything major, anything permanent, because it had begun in such a small way. Last year the departmental Memorial Day picnic had been held at one of the local parks, and Alan had joined his graduate students in a vigorous game of volleyball. It was a hot day, alternating sun and brief showers, and most of the other faculty members weren’t playing—he was the oldest person on the court by at least ten years. But watching him you would never have known that: he was so tan and strong and he moved so lightly and quickly.

  The ball came over the net, and Alan reached for it—a long elegant reach, too long. He skidded on the bright wet grass and fell in an awkward heap, with one leg out sideways. Everyone stopped playing; people gathered around and asked if he was all right. Alan stood up at once, a little awkwardly but smiling and replying, “Fine, just winded.” But he didn’t go on with the game—instead he came to sit on the bench by Jane, saying something about getting his breath back. After a while, he suggested that they leave. He thought maybe he’d pulled a muscle, he told her, and wanted to get into a hot shower.

  The shower had seemed to help, and Alan was cheerful the rest of the evening, but the next morning his back was worse. It would get better in a few days, they kept assuring each other, but it did not get better.

  For a while life went on more or less as before. Alan was uncomfortable and impatient to be well, but good-natured and affectionate, just as he had been after other, earlier minor accidents or during brief illnesses. But instead of moderating, his pain grew worse. He began to move more slowly, to favor the injury. One day, Jane caught him dragging a garbage can across the floor of the garage rather than lifting it as usual; she heard the coarse scraping sound of plastic on cement that she was to hear again so often—louder after a few months, when she took over the job.