I parked Peaches’ cab beside a jacaranda dripping purple petals in the pinwheeling rain. The petals tumbled down and made a quilt across the windshield. Donna pressed her hands against the cumbersome glass.
It was three in the morning. High above, in St. Osyth’s, a light burned brightly, and figures cast shadows. The beeper kept beeping. I could hear somebody moving. Then a voice unraveled in the hollow of my ear:
Full fadom five thy father lies,
Of his lies is Toby made;
These are pearls that were my eyes:
Nothing of Eli that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Ian hourly rings his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear him — ding-dong, bell.
The rain stopped. Donna got out to gather flowers. Ian’s face blossomed in the rearview mirror. It was ashen. His left eye was gutted and weeping. His hands folded down across my face, like tattered wings.
“Toby, forgive me, for I have sinned. … It has been four years since my last confession, and these are my sins …”
I met Eli Scarcross at school in New Orleans. I was fourteen when he fucked me up the ass. I didn’t have to let him,, but I let him, Toby Sligh. We were in The Tempest. We didn’t tell a soul… .
“Three years later he was too sick to teach. We were in love, but he had to go away. When I tested positive for the HIV virus, I put a pair of sewing scissors in my left eye. I spent that Christmas at a psychiatric clinic. When I got better my family moved to Florida… .
“How did I know Fr. Scarcross would follow me? How did I know he would come here to die? When he spoke to us in chapel, I knew I had to see him. Love is an infection. It never leaves your blood.
“But I couldn’t face him, Toby. I couldn’t face his body. The way it looked that day in chapel was too much. This was the body I had touched, Toby Sligh. This was the body I had let touch me. Looking at it, I felt like I was looking at myself. I was looking at what happens when love and lies collide… .
“And so I made a plan — I’m deadly clever, Toby—I would use you as an earpiece for my lonely dying God. He would speak to you the final words he would have spoken to me had I found the strength to listen, which I knew I never would. And, to be fair, I would help you with your mother-—who had slept with two brothers, and who had married neither, and who, very soon, would be forced to choose again….”
“Did you sleep with my mother?”
“No, Toby Sligh.”
“Have you given me the virus?”
“If I have, will you forgive me? I forgave Elijah. I gave him your rose. Forgiveness is the only act greater than love.”
His hands smelled faintly of flowers and rain. Ian’s fingers opened, and I saw a purple lesion.
“I can’t leave till you forgive me, Toby Sligh. I know that you love me, but you have to let me go. You were so lonely, like I was before Eli. Eli was my lover. Eli was my lie….”
“Did he know he had the virus?”
“No. I don’t think so. He wasn’t sick then… . And I forgive him all the same.”
I looked at the rose and the artificial eye that lay scattered and shattered in the weathered brown bag.
“I’m going to New Orleans. I’m never coming back. You have to kiss me, Toby. You have to let me go….”
Outside, Donna’s arms were full of purple petals. The rain had started up again. She was laughing at it.
“He was Prospero… . I was Ariel… . It started with a kiss… . It always starts with a kiss… . Forgive me, Toby Sligh … Forgive us all, Toby… . Forgive Fr. Scarcross for sleeping with a child… . Forgive your parents for the secrets of their past… . Forgive Juice for dealing the drugs that killed his brother… . Forgive Angelina for being your friend… . Forgive us our sins… . Forgive our trespasses. … We’re lonely, like God is… . We’re liars, Toby Sligh —”
“I’m not a liar, Ian,” I said.
He was quiet. Outside, Donna Compton was laughing in the rain.
“That’s the only lie I’ve ever heard you tell, Toby Sligh,” Ian Lamb said, and pressed his mouth against my ear. “Kiss me, Tobias. Say that you love me… . Say that you forgive me… . Release me, Toby Sligh….”
I looked at his face in the rearview mirror. Lifting my lips, I kissed his reflection.
“Goodbye, Toby Angel,” Ian said, and got out.
And then I knew I loved him because I set him free.
Seated in a circle around Elijah Scarcross were Jerry Kickliter, Lucinda Delaney, Sr. Cynthia Rose, and Sr. Aloysius. Fr. Scarcross was breathing in great bursting breaths, like an ancient sea animal surfacing for air.
Kickliter stood, and Sr. Aloysius stood, and Lucinda said, “Toby, come say goodbye to Eli.” With Donna in my arms I approached the dying man and knelt down beside him and said, “Hello, Elijah.”
I felt somebody wrap a light coat around my shoulders. I was shivering, I guess. Donna giggled at the ceiling.
“What’s it look like on the other side, Eli?” I whispered to Scarcross, and listened to his rattling breathing. “Do children who lie go to paradise, Father? Or is there only room for the ones who tell the truth? I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner, like I promised. I would have come sooner, but …” I reached for his hand. “Would you hear my confession if I told it, Fr. Scarcross? Is it even worth telling? Would anybody hear?”
Donna laughed aloud and scattered petals on the bed. Eli started nodding and his chest began to heave. Then he stopped and his hand shot up, and Donna caught it like a bird, and he said, “Ariel.” He was still. Donna laughed. Somebody said, “It’s over.” And Sr. Aloysius crossed herself and left the room.
In the bed beside Eli’s, Magda was crying. Her voice was unwinding like a siren in the night. From the window, through the rain, which was starting up again, I could see Ian Lamb hitchhiking on the roadside, and Peaches’ yellow taxi parked beside the jacaranda, and then a Ferrari, an immaculate Ferrari, pulled up into the parking lot and idled with its brights on.
“See ya, Fr. Scarcross,” I said and bent to kiss him. “You can have my forgiveness, if God will have mine.”
In the parking lot Angelina sat on the Ferrari with a copy of Don Quixote smearing in her lap. In the backseat, her brother Bubba Fishback was snoring. It was four in the morning. The rain was pissing down.
“I saw it on television,” Angelina began. “Who would have thought Grace Cage and her girlfriend? … I’m sorry I thought you were gay, Toby Sligh.”
“I am gay,” I told her.
Angelina said, “I know.”
In the biggest drug bust in local media history, Santo Rondi and his men were rounded up and arrested. Juice was acquitted, became a local hero, and received an award for community service, which meant he had to give a speech on graduation night. Because Juice was enrolled in the Witness Protection Program, his speech was recorded on a video cassette and projected on a gigantic television screen above the craning heads of friends and family. My father was there. Mom was still AWOL. Juice’s dad was in rehab. Det. Thomas was in jail. And Valilian Compton sat among federal agents in the front row of the civic hall, nodding at the screen.
Juice said, “I wanna dedicate this to my father, and to my late brother E-Eye, and to my mom, and Toby Sligh. And I would also like to dedicate this speech to Jerry Kickliter, the best high school counselor a crack dealer ever had. And I would also like to thank Sacred Heart High School for teaching me what it means to take part in your community. Whatever else you heard about the Jesuits, forget it. They a righteous bunch of fellas. And they got it going on… . Now I’d like to begin this graduation address by telling you the story of two boys and a statue. And how they knocked it over. And how they picked it up again. It may sound made-up, but it’s a true story. Like all the best stories, it only sounds like a lie….”
Toward the end of summer I helped Juice play hooky from the Witness Protection Progr
am in which he was enrolled. We shook off the agents and played Scrabble with my father and rented Bruce Lee movies and drank Magnum malt liquor. Then, when we were sober, we drove to Dr. Wu’s, where Wu had been waiting for over three months to give us the results of our HIV tests.
We went in.
“You’re negative,’” Dr. Wu announced. We kissed her.
“But you should get tested again.”
“My mother was moving out of the house, and she took me out of school that afternoon to help her….”
One night, the week before I headed off for college, at the end of a summer of insufferable heat, when my father and I slept blanketless in our beds in only our underwear, with all the windows open, I felt a clammy hand applying pressure on my thigh, and I woke to see her seated like a shadow at my bedside, her slender arms folded, a suitcase at her feet.
“Hi, Toby,” Mom said.
Her bangs were in her eyes. I brushed them away. We could hear my father snoring.
“You back?” I asked.
“I guess.”
She sort of sniffled. Outside, a cat was moaning. Mom was shaking in the heat.
“Where have you been?”
“Away,” my mother whispered.
“Where is away?”
“Anywhere … is away.”
Mom rose up and floated over to a window. The curtains bloomed about her and moonlight flooded in. Her skin looked blue and incredibly fluid. She sat back down. She was looking in my eyes.
“Toby,” she began, “you know I love your father—”
“Is he my father?”
She took my hands in hers.
“I guess he is, Toby. I guess he’s your father. He loves you like a father.”
I listened in the dark.
“Tell me—”
“I made some mistakes when I was younger.”
“Tell me the truth.”
She wove her fingers into mine.
“I kinda I fell in love with your uncle and your father. We did things, Toby. We did things—together. And when I got pregnant I was mad at everybody. Mad at those two, and mad at myself, and mad at my parents—who didn’t give a shit. I remember I stole my mom’s wedding dress and the Chevy Corvair your dad and uncle used to cruise in. I drove here, Toby. I drove to this city. And I said, ‘Whoever finds me, that’s the one I want—’ ”
“Who found you?”
“Your dad did. A week before I had you. He wanted us to marry, but I didn’t see the point. I told him to go, but he wouldn’t go, Toby. And then you came along. And he’s been with us ever since.”
Somewhere across the house we could hear my father snoring. My mother wove her fingers through my fingers in the dark.
“So imagine how I felt when your uncle shows up after seventeen years—just imagine, Toby Sligh! He said he was a cop, but I knew he was a liar. He wanted me back. I could see it in his eyes. He said he had pictures of you and Leonard Compton. He said you two were dealing crack cocaine across the city—”
“That’s a lie.”
“I know it is. But your father, he believed him. Juice had tried to sell us marijuana, after all. And when your uncle promised to bust Leonard Compton and extricate you, I knew it was a ploy. He wanted me, Toby. And I still had feelings for him. And when your father tried to help him—”
“You ran away. Again.”
“I said, ‘Whoever finds me, that’s the one who loves me.’ And this time I’ll get married. This time ‘I’ll thee wed.’ And you know who found me, Toby? You know who found your mother? The boy who loved my baby … Ian Lamb did.”
“Ian never loved me!”
I was suddenly bawling.
“Of course he loves you, Toby!”
I was crying in her arms.
“It’s okay. Shhh! It’s okay, Toby Sligh. It’s okay to be gay. And it’s okay to love somebody. But just because you’re gay, and just because you love somebody, don’t expect anybody but yourself to understand. First you gotta figure yourself out, kiddo. That’s why I went away. And that’s why I’m back again. Stand up,” my mother said.
I stood up in the darkness. I was crying in my underwear. Mom snapped back the elastic.
“Where’s your father?”
“Snoring.”
“Does he need me?”
“Do you love him?”
She nodded. “Uh-huh.”
“All right, then. Follow me…”
I led her to the bedroom where Dad lay on the mattress, his arms above his head like a kid on a rollercoaster relishing the biggest and most delicious dip.
“You sure you wanna do this?” I said to my mother, in the darkness, in the bedroom, underneath my father’s breathing. “If you love Det. Thomas, if you love my uncle more, you could always steal away and I wouldn’t tell a soul. You can trust me, Ma. It would be, you know, our secret. I’ve lied for you before; I can lie for you again. Faggots, you know, we’re excellent liars. It’s, like, our second nature. We got it in our blood.”
“No more lies, Toby Sligh,” my mother said, and kissed me on the forehead, and crept in bed beside him. Already my father was coming alive, like Lazarus, like a patient arising out of ether. “Close the door behind you,” Mom whispered. And I did. And I heard my father speaking. And I heard the boxsprings sing.
Before I went to bed I opened up my mother’s suitcase, and I sat there in the moonlight, and I looked at all the pictures.
They were Kodak Instamatics of Mom and of Ian, in New Orleans, on a streetcar, in a steamboat, in a bar. They were pals, I could tell. They were sitting having coffee. They were buying gladiolas. They were by the Mississippi. And Ian Lamb’s eyes were dark and scarred with circles, his dimpled chin forever averted from the camera. But in one, just one photo, Ian Lamb was looking at me, and holding up a rose, and smiling through his fear. Here, his eyes said, his smile said, his flower said, I don’t know if it’s love, I can’t say that it’s true, but it’s yours, Toby Sligh. Will you take it?
And I took it.
And I dreamt of him that night. And I dreamt of Fr. Scarcross. And I dreamt of Angelina. And of Juice. And of my parents. We were waltzing. Really waltzing. All together, we were waltzing. It was true, every bit of it… .
And for now, the lies were over.
“Toby’s Lie is a raucous, biting, captivating novel by a young writer with a maverick sense of language and word play. From his very first line, Daniel Vilmure seduces the reader with a riotous yet beautifully executed narrative that is distinguished by moments of great comedy.”
—Joseph Olshan, author of Nightswimmer
“A true novel of the nineties — edgy, intense, often hilarious, frequently painful and heartbreaking, and finally wise. Out of a mesh of lies, Toby Sligh encounters the kind of bone truth we might all hope to discover, one rooted in love and compassion and forgiveness. A superb fulfillment of the promise of Vilmure’s debut novel, Life in the Land of the Living.”
—Christopher T. Leland, author of
Mean Time and Mrs. Randall
“Toby’s Lie had me up all night, completely in the thrall of its generous and exuberant vision. Daniel Vilmure seems to take glee in all of life’s little lies, and the result is a novel filled with razor-sharp characterizations and gripping suspense.”
—Armistead Maupin, author of Tales of the City
Daniel Vilmure was born in Tampa, Florida. He is a graduate of Harvard and Essex Universities. His first novel, Life in the Land of the Living, was published in 1987. He currently resides in Venice, California.
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JACKET PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT FLINT/SWANSTOCK
Toby's Lie Page 25