Real Life & Liars

by Kristina Riggle

  Max and Mira are suddenly in the spotlight, having been outfitted with their very own table, a brainstorm of Katya’s, to avoid having to decide who gets the privilege of sitting there.

  Someone starts tapping silverware to glass, and others start hooting and hollering for a kiss. Van’s parents stare at each other in the yellow light. Max grips Mira’s hand, and she breaks his gaze, looking down like a blushing girl of twelve.

  To Van, something about her looks brittle, and he’s relieved when she finally looks up and Max kisses her firmly on the mouth.

  He can’t quite believe it when Barbara grabs his face and smashes his own lips with a kiss, right there in front of the gay couple, just as his cousin and her husband are pulling out a chair to sit. His ears are still ringing from all the tapping on glassware when Patty lets out a loud hoot, whether for his parents or himself, Van can’t be sure. He’s still working out whether his breath was rancid, when she breaks off the kiss and sits back in her chair with a quick exhale, like she’d just completed a satisfactory task. Like a crossword puzzle or a knitted sweater.

  “Wow,” is all Van can muster, with a quick glance around the table. Samir and Mark smirk at each other. Patty has already launched into a good-natured interrogation of Barbara while Vicky rummages in her purse, and Van’s cousin Fancy is standing agog. Her mouth hangs open so long, it’s all Van can do to keep from reaching up and nudging her lower jaw back in place. She always was a pain in the ass.

  “Fancy, this is Barbara, my…” here Van pauses for the briefest moment and hopes no one notices, “…date. This is my cousin, Fantine, and her husband, Tom.” And so go the introductions around the table. In one way, it’s just like Van had hoped, back when he first invited Barbara, before she dumped him, requesting “space.” Back then he imagined everyone staring with great admiration, and even wonderment, that dumpy old Van managed to land himself such a great catch.

  The politically correct synapses fire off to remind him that Barbara is not a fish to be landed. Van blames his unfortunate analogy on the nautical setting and the presence of Darius, who still makes him unaccountably nervous.

  He turns to glance over his shoulder at Jenny and, in doing so, notes that Barbara has turned to look as well. She casts a fluttery wave back over her shoulder and faces the center of their table again, where Samir and Mark are arguing good-naturedly about the last film they saw.

  Jenny is talking to someone else since Darius seems to be absent. Jenny glances up at Van, and he shrugs, hands up, apologetically. She turns back to the other guest without acknowledging the gesture.

  “Congratulations, dear heart,” says Patty, standing up to reach across Fancy and her rotund husband—whose round face has gone red with the heat, so that he looks like an apple—to slap Van in the arm. “You’re going to be an uncle.”

  “I’m already an uncle,” is his first response, because he is, though Katya’s kids have never really taken to him. Probably because he used to buy them children’s adaptations of great works of literature, complete with drawings and big print. It’s not like he could compete with their own parents, gift-wise. Katya has never denied them anything. Then he remembers that a new niece or nephew should be a happy occasion, and he says finally, “Thank you.”

  “Reenie will be just fine,” she says, though no one has suggested otherwise. Not out loud, anyway. “That Afro-American she married seems nice, and it’s good that he’s so much older. She’ll need that, now. And she’ll have help, won’t she? Especially if she lives somewhere near Katya, or maybe they could even move in with your mother…”

  Patty had been tearing apart a dinner roll like a lion with its kill, but as her sentence trails off, she drops a piece of it into her salad. Her hand remains, pincerlike, over her plate. “Oh,” she says. “I’ve got to…um…” She pushes back her chair and almost falls backward out of it.

  “Mom?” Vicky gets up and tries to follow, but Patty assures her she just needs “the loo.”

  Van feels the skin on the top of his head crawling around with the sensation that something critically important is just outside his comprehension.

  Then he remembers with a jolt that he has to give a speech in a few moments. With the shock of Barbara’s arrival, he had forgotten, and his hastily scribbled notes don’t yet amount to much.

  He takes out the old grocery receipt he was using and a nearly exhausted ballpoint pen and sets to writing.

  CHAPTER 31

  Irina

  IRINA LUXURIATES IN THE SOLITUDE LIKE IT’S A DOWN BED WRAPPED in silk sheets.

  It’s too hot and muggy for comfort, and her stomach still quivers with a seasick kind of nausea, but she’s alone.

  Outside the open windows of the house, she hears the chugchug of boats motoring to their docks, the merry braying of the gulls. The hum of tourist chatter melds with the traffic on Bridge Street into a white-noise hum that’s not unpleasant. The slicing light of midday has been blunted with dusk and clouds. Everything feels candlelit.

  Thunder cracks and even that, though startling, is a welcome sound, because it brings the promise of change—cool air, refreshing breeze.

  Then a baby cries.

  On the sidewalk, a family must be walking by. Irina can’t see them, but she hears the shrieks of an inconsolable child pierce the evening. The baby screams like it’s being scraped with sandpaper. At first the wheels of the stroller, or carriage, or whatever it is, stop, and she hears some murmurs from the parents. Then they apparently decide to just keep moving, and the stroller wheels roll more quickly. The keening and wailing recede into the evening. Rain has begun to slap the windowpanes in the wake of the thunder.

  As the screaming child fades out of the range of her hearing, Irina notices her heart slamming into her breastbone. She’s clenched her fists, and her fingernails have dug creases into her palms.

  She pulls herself up off the bed and sips some of the water Katya left on the side table, steadying the glass with both hands. She’ll have to get back to the party and face Darius. She feels a pang of guilt that she abandoned him there without knowing anyone. Van is probably reciting the “I Have a Dream” speech to convince Darius they’re not bigots.

  Also, she’s probably missing dinner, and her hunger is overpowering her nausea.

  She hears the downstairs screen door whap shut and footsteps coming across the screened-in porch.

  Now her heart pounds for a new reason. She doesn’t recognize the footfalls. No one is calling out to announce themselves, like her family would. The steps are tentative and unfamiliar in the house, cautious, rather than deliberate.

  Fear seizes up her throat, and she freezes with her hands on the glass. She could climb out the window, but she’s on the second floor. She would survive the drop, but what about the baby? The footsteps are coming up the stairs now, slow and halting. It’s the sound of sneaking.

  Irina moves off the bed and winces as the springs creak. Still holding the glass—fearing she won’t be able to put it down soundlessly—she fumbles with the knob on the old wardrobe in the room. She could fit into it. The door flings open and Irina screams, letting the glass fall and shatter on the hardwood.

  “Irina! It’s just me!”

  “Goddamn it, you asshole, why are you sneaking up on me?”

  Darius grasps the doorframe with both hands, his eyes wide. “I didn’t want to wake you up. I just wanted to check on you.”

  “All I hear is someone creeping through the house, and you’re not supposed to be here…For fuck’s sake.”

  Darius finally comes into the room, stepping around the glass. He folds Irina in his arms, but the adrenaline won’t let her relax, and she stands stiff as a coatrack in his embrace. “Baby, it’s OK. I’m sorry I scared you. I shouldn’t have let you come back to the house alone.”

  “I didn’t want you to come. I wanted to be alone.”

  “You don’t always know what’s best, do you?”

  Irina wants to slap him for that.
Instead she slumps into his chest. It’s true; she doesn’t know. She hasn’t ever known.

  They decide to wait out the cloudburst together, hoping the rain will let up—or at least slow down—long enough to walk back to the party. Irina had been starting to feel guilty about ditching her parents on their big night. Also, she’s still hungry and all Mira has in the house is muesli and a whole lot of flavor-sapped hippie food.

  So, they lie down on the bed, with Irina curled in the crook of Darius’s arm, to wait for the storm to end.

  Irina watches the white filmy curtains in the storm breeze. They look like dancers twisting their way around the room. Darius’s heart thrums reassuringly under her hand.

  “Irina? Do you want to be with me?”

  “Of course,” she answers quickly.

  “I don’t mean ‘of course,’ I mean, do you really?”

  “I married you. And I didn’t have to do that.”

  “Hmmmm.”

  Irina can feel his muscles taut under her arm. He doesn’t believe her, and why should he? She hasn’t exactly been brimming with joy since their honeymoon.

  Irina pulls herself up on one elbow so she can look Darius full in the face. She studies the slight creases near his eyes, and that close she can see slivers of gray among the curls of his hair. It makes her feel tender and caretaking toward him.

  She is jarred by a sudden image of elderly Darius bedridden, mouth slack, with a vacant stare, and she’s at his side, old beyond her years.

  Why didn’t she ever think of that? How he’ll be old while she’s still in her prime? Who is she kidding? She never even thinks more than a week ahead, obviously, which is why she hadn’t refilled her birth-control prescription. Katya pops up in her head now, wagging her finger and yammering about safe sex. Not that Irina has ever known her to wag an actual finger. Still, it would be just like her.

  Sex is never safe, though. Irina knows that better than anyone.

  Darius hasn’t relaxed. The tension in his body spreads through the room like vapor, until she can no longer stand it. She breaks off staring at his hair and face and closes her eyes. At her first kisses, he doesn’t respond right away—not frozen exactly, but not active, either. She ignores the frisson of anxiety at this change in him and carries on. Finally, he yields and returns her kiss. His arms wrap more tightly around her and in a smooth movement, he hoists her body on top of his. She feels like a hood ornament; she’s so small compared to him.

  “Is this OK?” he asks in his voice that only goes husky like this when they’re about to make love.

  “Oh yes.” She moves over his body to demonstrate how “OK” it is. He is a beautiful man.

  “No, I mean for you, with the baby. Are you comfortable?”

  At “baby,” it’s Irina’s turn to freeze. The baby can’t be bigger than a field mouse, and it’s already invading their most private spaces.

  “It’s fine. I feel fine.”

  Irina kisses him deeply again, but she can only think of that screeching baby on the sidewalk, as if it was right there in the room with them.

  Irina switches on her inner porn star, moaning when she should, moving as if someone stood in the wings to direct her. “Push here, touch there, arch your back just so…”

  It’s enough for Darius. Irina fakes a good loud orgasm in sync with him, and they fall back to the bed. They’re both slicked with sweat.

  She never would have guessed that she’d have to fake it with Darius.

  When she walked into the BMW dealership, her breath caught in her chest. He cut an impressive figure in a light tan suit, and he was standing behind the main reception area, on the phone. His face lit up when he saw her, as if he knew her. In fact, Irina looked behind her to see who he was smiling at. He finished his conversation with his eyes trained right on her, that smile never leaving him.

  “Well,” he said, hanging up. “What can I do for you?” He put the emphasis on you.

  Irina tucked one piece of hair behind her ear and shifted her weight to one hip, one of her most coquettish gestures. “I’m here about the receptionist job.”

  “Let me get you an application,” he said, still smiling. Irina was pleased to note that he continued his warm gaze, even after realizing she wasn’t there to buy a car and thus not worth a commission to him.

  She left him with her phone number, and she left the blank application sitting on the counter.

  They met for sushi the following Saturday. Irina had a few too many Sapporos and couldn’t stop giggling at her failed attempts with the chopsticks. She was also entranced by the grace of Darius’s hands as he deftly clicked his chopsticks around the platter, even picking up the smallest bit of rice he might have left behind.

  He didn’t call every weekend, and it was three more weeks before they slept together, after a night at a club. Irina was having fun, but Darius had looked bored until he finally suggested they head back to his place for a nightcap.

  Irina had never had such an attentive lover, and she thought that night that she’d be spoiled for sex with anyone else.

  She never imagined she’d end up married to him, without a chance to test that theory.

  Darius stirs next to her and strokes her belly, which still lies flat when she’s on her back. Irina starts to push his hand away, realizing at the last moment how that will look. Instead she clasps his fingers.

  She wants to say “I love you,” because that’s what a wife would say. It’s what a mother should say to the father of her child. She takes a breath in, preparing to say it, feeling like she’s bouncing on the highest diving board, moments from springing into the in-substantial air.

  “Oh look,” Darius says. “The rain stopped.”

  “Huh,” Irina says, propping up on one elbow and searching for her crumpled yellow dress. “So it did.”

  CHAPTER 32

  Mira

  THE CLINKING OF GLASSES AND MERRY CHEERS OF THE CROWD STILL ring in my ears as Max breaks off the kiss. I can hear his thoughts broadcast by the scrunched-up forehead, the way he bites his lip.

  After that one terrible argument, he hasn’t breathed a word about it. He hasn’t pressed, suggested, guilted, or pushed me toward getting my breast sliced off. Which saint was that? Oh yes. Poor martyred St. Agatha, walking around in medieval paintings with her tits on a plate.

  I’m no saint, nor am I Catholic or any particular religion. I was raised in a general Christian way, but to Maman, church was social convention, a place to wear pretty hats on Sundays. Papa didn’t care for it, and never attended, though my mother still asked him every single Sunday for the whole of his life, as if it were really an open question. Was that optimism? That would be unlike her. Or just her way of needling him?

  “How is your meal?” asks Max.

  I have barely tasted it. I suppose it’s exquisite, because everything Katya does is exquisitely perfect. She looks perfect tonight, truly. She probably thinks I don’t give her any credit, and maybe I don’t say it enough out loud, but she always was a beauty. No, I wouldn’t choose those same clothes, or hairdo. But I’m not blind.

  Now Ivan, he is the blind one. From my vantage point I can see nearly every table, and this Barbara girl is stuck to him like lint. When just yesterday she wanted nothing to do with him? Something is rotten, as the bard said.

  But Jenny. A girl after my own heart. Anyone with eyes could see she loves him. And she ends up relegated to a rear table next to Darius’s empty chair.

  Darius could be good for Irina. He seems stable. “Unflappable,” is the word that comes to mind. Just the right person to take care of my youngest baby. Irina has always seemed so loosely moored. One wave will rip her away and toss her into the open water.

  I’d almost feel good about leaving the world if I knew Darius would stay, watching over my Reenie.

  Ivan stands up to give his toast, pulling on his ear. I look down at my plate and push it away. I try to listen, I should concentrate on the speech he’s crafted just for us
, likely agonizing over every phrase.

  But…A new grandchild. Just when I’d marshaled my defenses against Max and the anticipated arguments of my children, as I’m holding off the doctor and her knife.

  The knowledge of this new life causes the sand to shift underneath my stone-carved resolve.

  I smile at the memory of cradling baby Charles Jr., tiny Chip. I felt none of that new-parent panic, none of that trepidation and coronary over every little pimple and whimper. It was like joy shot right through my veins. There’s no love like the easy rapture of grandparent love, at least in those early days.

  Later, as the grandchildren grew more remote and frustrated with my lifestyle and boring, no-cable-TV house, the love became tinged with sadness. They wouldn’t sit still for me scooping them up for hugs anymore. And they’re all too big for that, anyway.

  Now Irina brings me another chance.

  Laughter ripples through the crowd as thunder claps behind us. Rain, which had been sputtering through the evening, is again rapping at the windows in earnest. I catch a glimpse of canary yellow at the back of the room, and see that Darius and Irina are coming back in. She’s smiling, and much more rumpled than when she left. Maybe that’s just from her nap. Or, maybe not.

  The crowd applauds, and they all raise their glasses to us, beaming like little candle flames in the room now dimmed by the outside dusk and the inside ambient lighting.

  I think of those who aren’t here, not because they RSVP’d with a decline, but because they’re dead. My parents, some aunts and uncles. Max’s brother Stephen, dead of liver disease. Patty had a melanoma removed last year and casually mentioned another appointment to get a funny mole checked.

  Control is an illusion. I may not have religion, but I do believe our time is up when it’s up. We can’t choose when to go, but some of us are lucky enough to choose how.