Liars in Love

by Richard Yates

  Neither Jack nor Woody Starr had yet joined in the grief, but after quick self-conscious glances at each other they were able to murmur appropriate things.

  “Was there any history of heart trouble at all?” Sally demanded.

  “None at all,” Ralph assured her. “None at all.”

  And for once, in these endless cocktail times, they had something substantial to talk about. Cliff Myers was a man of iron, Ralph told them. If he hadn’t proved that in his professional career—and God knew he certainly had—then he’d proved it this morning. First he had tried and failed to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on the bathroom floor; then he’d wrapped his wife in a blanket, carried her out to the car and driven her to the hospital, knowing she was probably dead all the way. The doctors there wanted to give him a sedative after they’d broken the news, but you didn’t just go around giving sedatives to a man like Cliff Myers. He had driven home alone, and by nine-fifteen—nine-fifteen!—he had called the office to explain why he wouldn’t be in for work today.

  “Oh!” Sally cried. “Oh, God, I can’t bear this. I can’t bear this”—and she got up and ran from the room in tears.

  Jack followed her quickly into the living room but she wouldn’t let him put his arms around her, and he realized at once that he didn’t really mind the refusal.

  “Hey, come on, Sally,” he said, standing several feet apart from her with his hands in his pockets while she wept, or seemed to weep. “Come on. Take it easy.”

  “Well, but things like this upset me, that’s all; I can’t help it. I’m sensitive, that’s all.”

  “Yeah, well, okay; okay.”

  “A girl with everything to live for,” she said in a quavering voice, “and her whole life going out like that—click—and then whump on the bathroom floor; oh, God. Oh, God.”

  “Well, but look,” he said. “Don’t you think you’re overdoing this a little? I mean you didn’t even know the girl and you don’t know the man either, so it’s really like something you’ve read in the paper, right? And the point is you can read stuff like this in the paper every day, over your chicken-salad sandwich, and it doesn’t necessarily make you—”

  “Oh, Jesus, chicken-salad sandwich,” she said with loathing, looking him harshly up and down as she backed away. “You really are a cold bastard, aren’t you. You know something? You know what I’ve just begun to figure out about you? You’re a cold, unfeeling son of a bitch and you don’t care about anything in the world but yourself and your rotten self-indulgent scribbling and no wonder your wife couldn’t stand the sight of you.”

  And she was halfway up the stairs before he decided that his best reply was to make no reply at all. He went back into the den to finish his drink and try to figure things out, and he was doing that when Kicker came in with a lumpy, badly rolled sleeping bag on his shoulder.

  “Hey, Woody?” the boy said. “You ready?”

  “Sure, Kick.” Woody got quickly to his feet and knocked back his whiskey, and they left the house together. Jill, huddled with Ralph in an intense discussion of Cliff Myers’s tragedy, barely glanced up to wish them good night.

  After awhile Jack went upstairs, walked on mincing tiptoe past Sally’s closed door and struck off down an adjoining hall to gather up the screenplay and the other personal stuff that had accumulated in “his” room; then he went back downstairs and made a nervous departure past Jill and Ralph, who paid him no attention.

  He would wait a few days before calling Sally at the office. If they could make it up, that would be fine, though probably never as fine as before. And if not, well, hell, weren’t there plenty of other girls in Los Angeles? Weren’t there girls much younger than Sally who cavorted in marvelously scanty bathing suits on the sand beyond his window every day? Or couldn’t he ask Carl Oppenheimer to introduce him to one of the many, many girls Carl Oppenheimer seemed to know? Besides, there were only a few weeks left before he’d be done with the script and back in New York, so who the hell cared?

  But as his car hummed through the darkness toward Malibu he knew that line of reasoning was nonsense. Drunken and foolish or not, gray-haired or not, Sally Baldwin was the only woman in the world.

  Until an hour before dawn that night he sat drinking in his chill, damp bedroom, hearing the surf and breathing the mildew from his hundred-year-old mattress, allowing himself to entertain the thought that he might be a self-destructive personality after all. What saved him, enabling him to lie down and cover himself with sleep at last, was his knowledge that any number of sanctimonious people had agreed to hang that bleak and terrible label on F. Scott Fitzgerald too.

  Sally called up two days later and said, in a shy and guarded voice, “You still mad at me?”

  And he assured her that he wasn’t, while his right hand gripped the phone as if for life and his left made wide, mindless gestures in the air to prove his sincerity.

  “Well, okay, I’m glad,” she said. “And I’m sorry, Jack. Really. I know I drink too much and everything. And I’ve felt awful since you left, and I miss you an awful lot. So look: You think you might come in this afternoon and meet me at the Beverly Wilshire? You know? Where we had our first drink together, way back whenever it was?”

  And all the way to that well-remembered bar he made heartfelt plans for the kind of reconciliation that might make them both feel young and strong again. If she could get a little time off from work they could take a trip together—up to San Francisco or down to Mexico—or else he could move out of the damned beach house and find a better place to stay with her in town.

  But almost from the moment Sally sat down with him, when they were holding hands as tightly on the table as they’d done that other time, it was clear that Sally had other ideas.

  “Well, I’m furious with Jill,” she began. “Absolutely furious. It’s been one ridiculous thing after another. First of all we went to the hairdresser yesterday—we always do that together—and on the way home she said she thought we ought to stop going places together. I said, ‘What do you mean? What’re you talking about, Jill?’ And she said, ‘I think people think we’re lesbians.’ Well, it made me sick, that’s all. Made me sick.

  “And then last night she called Ralph and asked him—oh, and in this very low, suggestive voice too—asked him to invite Cliff Myers over for dinner tonight. Can you believe that? I said, ‘Jill, that’s tasteless.’ I said, ‘Look: a month or two from now it might be a thoughtful gesture, but the man’s wife’s only been dead two days. Can’t you see how—how tasteless that is?’ And she said, ‘I don’t care if it is.’ She said, ‘I’ve got to meet that man. I’m helplessly attracted to everything that man stands for.’

  “Oh, and it’s even worse than that, Jack. Because you see Woody Starr has this lousy little apartment in the back of his studio? Where he used to live before he moved in with Jill? And I think it’s against the law—I mean I think there’s a city ordinance that merchants aren’t supposed to sleep in their shops—but anyway, sometimes he takes Kicker down there to bunk in for a night or two with him, and they cook breakfast for themselves and stuff; I guess it’s sort of like camping out. So they’ve spent the past couple of nights there, and today Jill called me at the office in this terrible fit of giggles—she sounded about sixteen—and said, ‘Guess what. I’ve just conned Woody into keeping Kicker in the studio another night. Isn’t that neat?’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ And she said, ‘Oh, don’t be dense, Sally. Now they won’t be here to spoil everything when Cliff Myers comes over.’ I said, ‘Well, in the first place, Jill, what makes you think he’ll come over at all?’ And she said, ‘Didn’t I tell you? Ralph called this morning and confirmed it. He’s bringing Cliff Myers to the house at six o’clock.’”

  “Oh,” Jack said.

  “And so listen, Jack. It’ll probably be awful, watching her try to seduce that poor guy, but will you—will you come home with me? Because the point is I don’t want to go through it alone.”

  “Why go
through it at all? We can get a room somewhere—hell, we can get a room right here, if you like.”

  “And not even have clean clothes in the morning?” she said. “Go to work in this same terrible dress? No thanks.”

  “That’s dumb, Sally. Make a quick run up to the house, get your clothes and come back, and then we’ll—”

  “Look, Jack. If you don’t want to come along with me you certainly don’t have to, but I’m going anyway. I mean everything may be sick and degenerate or whatever you want to call it in that house, but it’s my home.”

  “Oh, shit, you know better than that. Whaddya mean ‘home,’ for Christ’s sake? That fucking menagerie couldn’t be anybody’s home.”

  She looked at him in an offended, willfully humorless way, like someone whose religion has been held up to ridicule. “It’s the only home I have, Jack,” she said quietly.

  “Balls!” And several people at neighboring tables looked quickly up and around at him, with startled faces. “I mean goddamnit, Sally,” he said, trying and failing to lower his voice, “if it gives you some kind of perverse pleasure to lie back and let Jill fucking Jarvis parade her depravity through your life, that’s something you really ought to take up with some fucking psychiatrist instead of me.”

  “Sir,” a waiter said at his elbow, “I’ll have to ask you to keep your voice down and watch your language. You can be heard all over this room.”

  “It’s all right,” Sally told the waiter. “We’re leaving.”

  On the way out of the place, torn between more reckless shouting and abject apologies for having shouted at all, Jack hung his head and walked stiffly, in silence.

  “Well,” she said when they reached her parked car in the dazzling afternoon sun, “you were really attractive in there, weren’t you? You really gave a memorable performance, didn’t you? How can I ever go in there again without getting funny looks from the waiters and everyone else?”

  “Yeah, well, you can write it all down in your memory book.”

  “Oh, good. And my memory book is getting so wonderfully full, isn’t it? What a pleasure it’ll be when I’m sixty years old. Look, Jack. You coming or staying?”

  “I’ll follow you,” he said, and he wondered at once, as he moved away to his own car, why he hadn’t had the guts to say, “Staying.”

  Then he was following her among the slender palms of the first shallow rise of Beverly Hills, and then they were bringing their cars to a halt in Jill’s big driveway, where the cars of two other visitors were already parked. Sally slammed her car door a little harder than necessary and stood waiting, ready to deliver a smiling speech that she’d probably prepared and rehearsed during the short drive from the hotel.

  “Well, if nothing else,” she said, “this should be interesting. I mean wouldn’t any woman want to meet a man like Cliff Myers? He’s young, he’s rich, he’s going places, and he’s available. Wouldn’t it be funny if I snare him away from Jill before she even gets her hands on him?”

  “Ah, come on, Sally.”

  “Whaddya mean, ‘come on’? Whadda you got to say about it? You really take a hell of a lot for granted, you know that?” They had made their way up onto the pool terrace and were approaching the big French doors of the den. “I mean in four more weeks you’ll have gone back to wherever the hell you came from, so what am I supposed to do in the meantime? Am I really supposed to sit around and knit while every halfway decent man in the world passes me by?”

  “Sally and Jack,” Jill said solemnly from a leather sofa, “I’d like you to meet Cliff Myers.” And Cliff Myers rose from his place close beside her to accept the introductions. He was tall and thick, in a rumpled suit, and his short hair stood upright in the blond bristles of a crew cut that made him look like a big, blunt-faced boy. Sally went to him first and told him of her sorrow for his terrible loss; Jack hoped a similar message might be conveyed in the dead-serious way he shook hands.

  “Well, as I was just telling Jill,” Cliff Myers said when they were all settled, “I’ve sure been racking up a lot of sympathy points. Walked into the office yesterday and a couple of the secretaries started crying; stuff like that. Went out to lunch with a client today and I thought the maiter dee was gonna start crying on me too. The waiter too. Funny business, this sympathy-getting bit. Too bad you can’t put it in the bank, right? ’Course, it prob’ly won’t last, so I may as well enjoy it while I can, right? Hey, Jill? Mind if I help myself to a little more of the Grand-dad?”

  She told him to sit still, and she made the fixing and serving of his drink into a little ceremony of selfless admiration. When he took the first sip she watched carefully to make sure it was just to his liking.

  Then Ralph came staggering into the room on rubber legs, comically exaggerating the heaviness of a load of firewood he held against his chest. “Hey, know what?” he said. “This really takes me back to old times. Jill used to work the hell out of me when I lived here, you see, Cliff,” he explained as he crouched and dropped the wood in a neat pile on the hearth. “That was how I paid my rent. And I swear to God, you’d never guess how much work there is to do around a place like this.”

  “Oh, I can imagine,” Cliff Myers said. “You got a really big—a really big place here.”

  Ralph straightened up and brushed shreds of bark from his rep tie and Oxford shirt, then from the lapels and sleeves of his trim hopsack jacket. He might still be a funny-looking little guy, but he no longer wore the wrong kind of clothes. Dusting his hands, he smiled shyly at his employer. “Nice, though, isn’t it, Cliff?” he said. “I knew you’d like it here.”

  And Cliff Myers assured him that it was very nice, very fine indeed.

  “I suppose it may seem funny to have a fire in the summertime,” Jill said, “but it does get chilly here at night.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Cliff said. “Out on the Palisades we used to light fires in the evening all year round. My wife always liked to have a fire.” And Jill conspicuously squeezed his heavy hand.

  Dinner was on time that night, but Jack Fields ate almost nothing. He brought a full drink to the table and went back once or twice to replenish it; as soon as the unusually elaborate meal was over he sank into a shadowed corner of the den, well away from the party, and went on drinking. He knew this was his third or fourth consecutive night of drunkenness, but he could worry about that some other time. He couldn’t rid himself of Sally’s saying, “He’s young, he’s rich, he’s going places, and he’s available,” and whenever he looked up now he could see the profile of her pretty head on its elegant neck, glowing in the firelight, smiling or laughing or saying, “Oh, that’s marvelous,” in response to whatever dumb, dumb remark this bereaved stranger, this asshole Cliff Myers, had just made.

  Soon he found he couldn’t even watch her anymore because a heavy dark mist had closed in on all four sides of his vision, causing his head to droop and hang until the only thing he could see at all—and he saw it with the terrible clarity of self-hatred—was his own left shoe on the carpet.

  “… Hey, uh, Jack?”

  “Uh?”

  “I said wanna gimme a hand?” It was Ralph’s voice. “Come on.”

  “Uh. Uh. Wai’ second. Okay.” And with energy that came from nowhere, or from the desperate last reserves of shame, he forced himself up and followed Ralph rapidly out into the kitchen and down the cellar stairs, nearly falling, until they came to a heap of firewood against the cellar wall. Off to one side, by itself, lay a log cut to fireplace length that must have been two feet thick: it looked like a sawed-off segment of telephone pole, and it held the full weight of Jack’s drunken scrutiny. “Son of a bitch,” he said.

  “What’sa matter?”

  “That’s the biggest fucking log I ever saw in my life.”

  “Yeah, well, never mind that,” Ralph said. “We just want the little stuff.” And with double armloads of the little stuff piled to their chins they went back upstairs, all the way up to the second floor and into the high, wid
e emptiness of Jill’s bedroom, or Jill’s and Woody Starr’s bedroom, which Jack had never seen before. At the far end of it, well away from the hearth where Ralph squatted to unload the wood, many yards of white cloth were hung from the ceiling and draped partly around the borders of a great “Hollywood” bed to form a bower that might have been dreamed by an adolescent girl as the last word in luxury and romance.

  “Okay,” Ralph said. “That’ll do the job.” And though he was plainly drunk himself, swaying on his haunches, he began the meticulous task of building and lighting a fire between the polished brass andirons.

  Jack did his best to leave the room quickly but kept veering sideways against the near wall; then he decided it might be helpful to use the wall for support and guidance, letting one shoulder slide heavily along it while he gave, his whole attention to lifting and placing his feet in the deep champagne-colored carpet. He knew dimly that Ralph had finished at the fireplace, had lurched past him muttering, “Come on,” and gone away into the hall, leaving him alone in this treacherously unstable but mercifully open room; he could see too that the bright doorway was very near now—only a few more steps—but his knees had begun to soften and buckle. He thought he could feel his shoulder sliding down the wall, rather than along it; then the tilting yellow carpet came slowly closer until it offered itself up as a logical, necessary surface for his hands, and for the side of his face.

  Sometime later the sounds of low voices and laughter brought him awake. He lay staring at the open door and calculating whether he’d be able to make a run for it, knowing suddenly that Jill Jarvis and Cliff Myers were huddled together on this same carpet at the fireplace, ten or fifteen feet behind his head.

  “So what’s with this character on the floor?” Cliff Myers inquired. “He live here too?”

  “Well, sort of,” Jill said, “but he’s harmless. He belongs to Sally. She’ll come get him out in a minute, or else Ralph will, or else he’ll get himself out. Don’t worry about it.”