Toby's Lie

by Daniel Vilmure

  “It’s true,” Mrs. Lamb said. “Ian has a fund.”

  With a monumental effort Edith rose from the settee, bent down, and gave me a peck on the cheek.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, looking at me puzzled. “I thought you were Ian. I’m very sorry, Tony.”

  As Mrs. Lamb was leaving she cracked another egg and was just about to drink it when she stopped in her tracks.

  “Gawd! Look at this!” she said and turned toward us. Egg white was dripping down the veins of her wrist and she held the broken shell like an abdicated crown. “It’s an omen’s what it is!” Edith slurred and staggered forward. “Look, boys! I’ve never seen anything like it!”

  We rose from the settee, Ian set down the tuxes, and we approached Mrs. Lamb to see the omen in her hand. Within the broken crown of a single white eggshell, the contents of which she had very nearly swallowed, were two tiny yolks, two identical yolks, twin jaundiced eyes staring up at the world.

  “Beware the number two!” Mrs. Lamb intoned.

  “Mom,” Ian offered, “is awfully superstitious.”

  “Beware things in twos!” Mrs. Lamb repeated, her voice burdened down by the weight of prophecy.

  “It’s only an egg, Mom,” Ian Lamb stated, and snatched the broken crown from his mother, and gulped it.

  Looking at her son as if he had just been sentenced, Mrs. Lamb kissed him and turned her back on him. “You poor boy. You unfortunate child,” Edith Lamb said, and left the Parachute Room.

  “Mom’s a crazy drunk,” Ian said later on, when we were getting dressed, in the mirror in his bedroom. “Dad’s just a drunk. He isn’t really crazy.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  I wanted to help him.

  Ian Lamb shrugged.

  “Who cares? Let’s get dressed.”

  “Toby Sligh?”

  “What?”

  “Have you ever seen my Mickey?”

  We were lying naked in the backseat of his Benz. We were at the beach, and the windows were down. The night drifted in across our pale bodies. Ian’s face was next to mine. The moon was blue and wet.

  ‘Your what?”

  ’My Mickey … I’ve never shown you my Mickey?”

  I … I don’t think so.”

  Ian said, “Well, come on!”

  Ian got out and, without waiting for me, sprinted from the car to where the water met the shore. The beach was deserted. It was always deserted. No one would see us. It was our special spot. We’d go there on Friday and Saturday evenings when it started getting hot out. Our parents didn’t know. We’d say we were going to the library to study, but we would meet each other, and we would drink beer, and we would park the Benz, and undress, and make love.

  “Look,” Ian said. He wrapped his arms around me. We were naked in the water. A stingray glided by. “Look at my eye in the moonlight,” Ian said. He knelt in the water and he tilted back his head. “You see that little light? That little sliver of light? Where the moon hits my pupil? You see it, Toby Sligh?”

  I bent over Ian and stared into his eye—I was looking at his good eye, not the artificial one.

  “When the pupil is alive, it catches the light—and it makes a little sliver of moonlight, like that. Your eye has got it. Everybody’s got it, Toby! Now take a good look at my artificial eye.”

  Ian turned his head and cupped his hands around my bottom. He drew me down toward him. He was holding me tight. As I leaned down to look, saltwater from my body sprinkled his face and ran in streams across his cheek. He looked like he was crying. His mouth opened slightly. His tongue touched his lips. And he laughed beneath the moon.

  “Does my artificial eye have that same little sliver? Does the pupil in my artificial eye catch the light?”

  Something was alive in his artificial eye—a glimmer of something, a glimmer in the night.

  “Does my artificial eye catch the light, Toby Sligh? Does the pupil catch the light the way the living pupil does?”

  To be honest, it did; and I told him it did. There, in the corner of his artificial eye, in the corner of his pupil a sickle of moonlight glimmered like an ember, stubborn, inextinguishable, breathing with blue fire, inexhaustible with life.

  “That’s my Mickey,” Ian said, and plucked the glass eye from its socket. He held it up before me like a pebble from the moon. “See?” Ian said. He turned it slowly in the moonlight, then brought it down closer to my face, so I could see. “At the laboratories where they make artificial eyes, they put a little sliver of white in the pupil, just a little scratch, just a tiny little flaw, so it has the same shimmer, so it’s got the same sparkle, so it looks as alive as any ordinary eye. But it isn’t, Toby Sligh. It’s just an illusion. The glimmer’s only paint. There isn’t any life at all. The falsest things, Toby, have a bit of truth in them. Just a little bit of truth. To make the falseness seem real.”

  Then, as if his glass eye were an unimpressive seashell he’d suddenly discovered on the floor of the Gulf, Ian, without looking, pitched it over his shoulder. Then he started coughing—Ian never cried, he coughed. And he held me. Ian held me tighter than he ever had.

  “Swear you’ll never leave me!”

  “I swear I’ll never leave you!”

  “And that you’ll never let me go!”

  “I swear I’ll never let you go!”

  “Hold me tighter, Toby!”

  “This tight?”

  “Even tighter!”

  “Like … this?”

  “Like that! I swear to God I love you so!”

  And we must have remained in that water for hours, the dying tide receding around our naked bodies, because before we knew it, we were kneeling in the open, our bodies together, listing underneath the moon. And I helped Ian up, and I led him to his car, and I drove him to his house, and I tried but couldn’t wake him. And in front of his mother and father’s house I dressed him and looked once again at his desecrated face—the eyelid collapsing around the empty socket that fluttered and twitched in the throes of some dream, the envelope of skin where the false eye had been in a desperate pucker, like a kiss-hungry mouth. I covered him and left him asleep in the driveway, and I walked for an hour through the night to my car. When I got home I swept the sand off my body, and I crept inside the house, and I looked at my parents. They lay sleeping in the static of the television screen, on the floor, in their bathrobes, tangled up in each other. Their bodies looked slightly submerged underwater, as mine and Ian’s had been before the tide had drawn away. Their bodies, as always, looked complete with each other. I wondered if Ian’s and mine had looked that way.

  “We never go to the beach anymore.”

  We stood in our tuxedos in the mirror in Ian’s room. We’ll go there tonight,” Ian said, “after the prom.”

  He came around behind me and kissed me on the neck. You’ll dance with me, Ian? You really will? You promise? I promise,” Ian said, and he stepped out of the mirror.

  “But I want to know one thing,” I said to Ian Lamb as we sat in the frontseat of his folks’ Mercedes-Benz, in our tuxes, in our closets, and waiting to come out. “Why did my mother move out of the house?”

  Ian looked at me, and he looked at his hands, and he wiped a clot of mucus from his eye, and he coughed.

  “Maybe you should wait until after the prom, Toby.”

  “I want to know now.”

  Ian trembled a little. “Why do you want to—”

  “You promised me, Ian.”

  “After we waltz.”

  “I want to know now.”

  I could tell Ian Lamb was thinking of something. His face was like a clock without hands keeping time. He started to speak, and then his voice failed him. When the words finally came, most of them were in pieces.

  “Go to your mother’s,” Ian said, softly. “Don’t let her see you. Just go there, Toby Sligh. If you want to know the truth, it’s there, waiting for you.”

  Ian drew his lower lip between his teeth and bit it.
/>   “Ian … Do you love me?”

  His lower lip was bleeding. I got out of the Mercedes. He was watching me go.

  “Ian … Do you love me?”

  “I love you,” Ian said. But he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking in the mirror.

  “Could you stop by St. Osyth’s?” I said, before I left. I explained about the beeper and that Scarcross was dying. When I said Scarcross was dying, Ian flinched like he’d been hit, and his hand drifted up as if to ward away a blow. “Just call the social worker, Lucinda, from the lobby, explain who you are, and she’ll bring the beeper down.”

  “If the beeper goes off while we’re waltzing, Toby Sligh, will you go and see Scarcross?”

  “I promised I would.”

  “You don’t have the courage,” lan said, and drove away. “You’ll never have that kind of courage, Toby Sligh.”

  “The falsest things, Toby, have a bit of truth in them. Just a little bit of truth. To make the falseness seem real.”

  As I drove to my mother’s I remembered the photos my father had shown me the night Mom went away. Who’d taken the pictures of the two of them together? And the ones where they were naked—who had taken those?

  Two sledgehammers—the kind on the baking soda boxes—lay crossed before the threshold of my mother’s apartment. They were coated with a fine white powdering of dust, like the sugary stuff on Danish wedding cookies. I would have walked through the frontdoor if it had been there; it lay on its back, completely off its hinges, and my mother’s bridal slippers lay akimbo atop it as if they’d flown off from the force of her kick. In the minuscule bedroom in Mom’s efficiency her wedding dress squatted on a mattress stripped of bedding like a prehistoric moth pinned and mounted by the past. By the head- board, a hammer-sized hole in the plaster allowed a ray of sunlight to laser-beam through. The portraits of Ian had fallen off the wall, and the purple shag carpeting was dirty with plaster. In the kitchen, a bucket of Popeyes Chicken and a pyramid of beer cans formed an altar on the stove. The wall in the kitchen had been half obliterated, plaster and rubble made a jigsaw on the tile, and through a man-shaped silhouette in the devastated wall I could make out my mother on the hood of Christ’s Chevy catching some rays in the dwindling light. Evening was approaching, but the sun was still out, and even though all I could see were Mom’s feet astride a loaded shotgun metronoming time, I knew, as before, Mom was absolutely naked, and that the boy who was once an uninvited castaway was now little more than a rude conquistador.

  The raffle Cadillac commandeered by Fr. Diaz arrived and dropped Dad off with wine and roses in his hands, and I wondered whether I should warn my dad about my mother as he stumbled up the driveway to the free-fire zone. Sure enough, a shotgun shell shattered his Chianti; and as the blast died away I mounted the trellis and took to the roof to view the carnage from above. Dad crouched behind a willow tree, quaking in his tux. “How do I know,” my mother slurred, “that it’sh you!” “It’s Timothy!” he shouted. “Who else would get this close?” My mother let off another startling warning shot—she was making my poor father earn his transgression. Dad wound his way to her, bobbing in and out of bushes like a lovesick civilian infatuated with a sniper. I couldn’t see Mom; she was holed up in the house. She didn’t want to talk; she let her shotgun do the talking. Dad, who was bawling throughout the ordeal, whose red roses lay like fallen buddies behind him, was slowly removing every piece of his tuxedo, and tossing each high in the air, like a skeet, so Mom could take aim while he gained his advantage: just one step, two steps closer to his love. “Jesus, it’s our wedding night!” my father caterwauled, crouched behind a willow tree in Cuddle Puppy boxers. And Mom let out a blast that slashed through the willows till Dad ripped off his boxers and naked as God made him charged kamikaze through the doorless frontdoor. Then: all was silence. All except the sound of kissing. This was their ceasefire. Peace, at last, had broken out. …

  As I lay belly down, chin in the raingutter, eyes like Kilroy’s peeking out at the world, I saw the most amazing thing that I had ever seen—my mother and father waltzing naked in the yard. They didn’t waltz like champions; they didn’t waltz like amateurs; they didn’t waltz like anyone: they waltzed like a couple. Happy and drunken and shameless in love, they took their sweet time and never once stopped kissing. I was sure Dad was glad he had braved my mother’s buckshot. All of the terror of combat had gone; everything, from then on, would be blissful armistice. So when Diaz returned (in formal wedding vestments), and Dad put on his tux, and Mom put on her wedding gown, and the three of them stood in the moonlight together, and Diaz said some things, and my parents said some things, and the two of them swapped rings, and then hugs, and then kisses, I climbed down from the roof just as quiet as I could and drove across town to pick up Angelina… .

  Funny, they always used to call me a bastard, but I thought that they were being, um, figurative.

  The Fishbacks lived in a split-level ranch house in the city’s newest and most prestigious neighborhood. From the outside, their residence was tasteful and impressive. The grass was luxuriant, the oak trees were noble, even the lawn jockey seemed glad to be alive. Ivan Fishbacks Ferrari—entirely paid for—posed in the driveway like a testament to money. Dr. Fishback never drove it, Angelina confided. He would polish it and sit in it and take pictures of it, but it never once budged. It was only a symbol. A clear plastic sheet imperceptible to the eye had been stretched between branches above the parked Ferrari to ensure that errant sparrows didn’t foul its perfect paintjob, and a white plastic tarp tucked away in the trunk robed the idle beauty during inclement weather. Parked on the side of the house was a Lincoln with a Sacred Heart Mothers’ Club bumper sticker on it. This was what the Fishback family used to get around in; it was their only car, apart from the Ferrari. And Angelina said they would get in awful fights about who got to drive it when her dad came home from work. Affluent families always made a habit of using one and only one car to get around in, as if this were their concession to a middle-class existence, as if to say, “See, we’ve got our hardships too!”

  Mrs. Fishback, a muffin-sized woman in a muumuu, was disposing of a stack of grease-stained schiacciata boxes behind the Continental when I pulled up in the driveway. Tied to her wrist was a bunch of balloons that looked capable of launching her small body into orbit. She removed a pin from a bun in her hair and with a dozen quick pricks reduced the toy balloons to shreds. When she had disposed of the soiled schiacciata boxes, she lifted her head and saw me waiting in the drive. “Toby!” she cried. She was overjoyed to see me. She loved everybody. She was that kind of mom. “Where have you been?” I got out of the car. She hugged the daylights from me. “And what happened to your tux?” Removing a handkerchief from the bosom of her muumuu, she began to dab messy clumps of tar from my lapel.

  “You come inside and I’ll get a damp washcloth and tidy you up,” she said, lugging me toward the house. “You did have an accident, didn’t you, Toby?” I was thinking that the accident my parents had was me. “You’re coming inside and you’re having some schiacciata! Gosh, you look like you been dragged by a truck! If you say another word, I’ll tan your silly tuckus! Ivan! It’s the boy who broke Angelina’s hea-art!”

  From the outside, like I said, the Fishback home was impressive. But on the inside, well, it was an absolute dump. The wallpaper was discolored, paintings hung crooked, couches were tattered and covered with trash, a warehouse of unused Sharper Image gadgets cluttered the rug, which reeked of dog urine, and a platoon of outrageously well-groomed poodles converged on our ankles like canine piranha. “Mitzi! Tasha! Pinky! Fifi! Sissy! Kiki! Give Mommy room!” Mrs. Fishback squealed as we bustled down the hall. Dr. Fishback was sitting on a stool in the kitchen eating schiacciata and guzzling buttermilk. He extended his hand without looking at me: “Ivan Fishback,” he said. I took it and shook it. “Scooch over, Ivan!” Mrs. Fishback shouted, and punched her husband’s shoulder. Dr. Fishback scooched over. “Have some schia
cciata.” He shoved the plate toward me. I sat on a stool and started scarfing up the stuff. “This guy is hungry,” Dr. Fishback observed.

  “Then get him some more, you big lazy lummox!” Dr. Fishback rose from his stool with a groan; he was shaggy and ungainly, like a housebroken woolly mammoth. “Imagine showing up for the senior prom such a slob! Doesn’t your mother take care of you, son?” Mrs. Fishback was stationed beside me on a barstool stabbing at tarballs on my tux with a washcloth. “Here, have some buttermilk,” Dr. Fishback said. He poured me a big glass and force-fed me more schiacciata. “Wanna live to be a hundred? Drink lotsa buttermilk. Tastes like clotted urine. But it’s the key to fucking health.” “Don’t just sit there!” Mrs. Fishback screamed. “Go get the camera! We gotta take pictures!” “Pictures?” I said. “What about Angelina?” “Oh, she’s still here.” Dr. Fishback yawned. “She’s crying in the bedroom. She thought you stood her up. My daughter is in love. I’ll go get her… . Angelina!”

  I pictured Angelina in the bathroom mirror, cursing guys and regulating her breathing and swabbing fresh scars of mascara from her cheeks. I was a shit for being late for the prom. Angelina was a pal; she didn’t deserve this. And I’d be a double-shit sometime around midnight when I’d abandon her, as planned, to dance with Ian Lamb. I never should have waltzed with her that night in the library. You waltz with somebody, they always fall in love—girls especially; girls are love-happy; girls fall in love just like guys get erections: all the time, constantly, for everything they see. I would have to tell her right away about Ian. I owed Angelina my honesty, at least. But when at last I saw her on the elbow of her father, striding in measured steps down the lighted hall, in a zinger of a dress like an emerald gumdrop, her bosomy body like a bauble in the rough, I felt my courage falter: Why’d she have to be so pretty? And I took the corsage her mother handed to me, and I pinned it to her breast, and we posed for photographs, and I said I was sorry, “Angelina, my parents—,” and Dr. Fishback coughed and pressed some car keys in my hand. “Take the Ferrari! Go ahead! Just take it! But you bring it and my daughter back in one whole piece, capisce?”