Lies You Wanted to Hear

by James Whitfield Thomson

  She grinned and let me off the hook.

  I told her about the retired Boston police lieutenant I met on the plane back to the States from Puerto Rico. When I mentioned my interest in law enforcement to the lieutenant, he offered to make a few phone calls on my behalf. Eight months later I had my shield.

  Lucy said, “Did you meet Terry on the job?”

  “No, through softball. He’s good friends with a couple other guys on the team. I actually know Jill better. She talked me into coming to school and speaking to her fourth-grade class.”

  “And talked you into going out with me.”

  “Well, there’re only three bachelors on the team.” I smiled and took a chance. “The other two turned her down.” It’s always tricky, making a joke like that with a woman.

  Lucy laughed. “The smart ones always do.”

  The waiter came by and asked if we wanted coffee or dessert. Lucy said just coffee. I ordered one of the house specials, chestnut purée with rum and whipped cream. She smoked her third cigarette. Sometimes when she took a drag, she’d hold the cloud of smoke in her mouth for a second with her lips parted, then curl her tongue and pull the smoke in. She seemed to do it unconsciously. I wondered if she had any idea how seductive it was.

  “Impressive,” she said, watching me dig into my dessert. She spooned a dollop of whipped cream from my plate and put it in her coffee. “I like a man with an appetite.” As soon as she said it, she made a funny face. “Oh my god—” She covered her mouth with her hand, but a giggle squirted through her fingers. “I can’t believe I just said that.” She tried to suppress her laugh for a moment, then threw her head back and let out a husky, wine-soaked howl that made other people in the restaurant turn and stare. I reached across the table and interlocked my fingers with hers.

  Sandor came to the table with a bottle of apricot brandy and insisted we share a glass. Lucy thanked him for his hospitality.

  Sandor said to me. “You must bring your lady back.”

  “I will, definitely,” I said.

  He put his hand on my shoulder. “You want me to call taxi for you?”

  “Yes, please,” I said. “Thank you for everything.”

  Sandor took the rose from the vase on the table and handed it to Lucy. “Here is souvenir of your first visit to Café Budapest. You must come back soon.” He looked as smitten as I was.

  On the sidewalk, Lucy twirled the rose between her fingers. She snapped the stem in half and gnawed on the tough fibers until she’d broken it in two. Then she stuck the rose in her hair and struck a pose, one hand on her hip.

  “What do you think?”

  “Me gusta.”

  She smiled. “Did that Puerto Rican señorita teach you Spanish?”

  “Look at that sky,” I said. It was dusk, the city bathed in a glow of red and purple.

  Two businessmen walked by with their briefcases. One leaned toward the other and said something, and they both laughed. If the joke was on me, I didn’t care. The cab pulled up to the curb. Lucy and I got in the backseat, and she gave the driver her address.

  Lucy sat close and rubbed her hand softly on my thigh. “What else did the señorita teach you?”

  I rolled down the window and let the warm air blow on my face. We drove along the river with the colors of the sky reflecting on the water. Couples were strolling along the Esplanade. I’d never seen the city look more beautiful. The driver crossed the bridge to Cambridge and made a few turns. Halfway down the block on Lucy’s street, she pointed at a ramshackle house with a lopsided front porch, most of the balusters broken or missing.

  As we got out of the cab, I asked the driver to wait.

  “You’re not coming in?” Lucy said, pouting.

  “I better take a rain check.” Since we’d left the restaurant, I had been debating with myself about what to do if she offered.

  She leaned against me. “It’s not raining, Matt.” It was the first time she had said my name.

  “You busy Saturday?”

  “Come on, you don’t want to wait that long.”

  She pulled my head down and kissed me. Her tongue tasted like brandy and cigarettes.

  I said, “I should go.” She tried to kiss me again. I held her shoulders, keeping her at bay. “I’m sorry, but I really need to go.”

  “Are you always so fucking controlled?”

  “Please, Lucy, can’t you see you got me dangling by a thread?”

  She measured me for a second, then her eyes softened. “What time on Saturday?”

  ***

  The cabbie drove me home to Mission Hill. When I tried to pay him, he said it was already taken care of. Sandor again. My roommate Kreider was asleep in his ancient recliner with the TV on, three empty beer bottles and an empty pizza box beside him on the floor. I turned off the television and carried the box and bottles out to the kitchen and put them in the garbage. Kreider was a cop in the harbor patrol division. A great guy and an unapologetic slob. He wandered around the apartment leaving trash and dirty clothes and wet towels behind like a molting lizard. I cleaned up after him and tried not to complain. Two years ago he asked me if I wanted to room with him. He had a terrific deal from the landlady who loved having cops as her tenants. The apartment was much larger than my old place and the rent considerably less. I had always been frugal. I put half the money I saved on rent in the credit union and the other half in a mutual fund. In another year or two, I’d have enough to make a down payment on a house or condo of my own.

  I went to my room and tried to read, but all I could do was think about Lucy. I didn’t like her asking if I was always so controlled, but I knew I’d done the right thing. She was drunk and I wasn’t. I wanted to make love to her, not simply get laid. I was twenty-eight years old and I’d been around the block enough to know that sooner or later every romance turns into a negotiation. It’s a matter of give and take. Give too little and you breed resentments, take too little and you start feeling used. How does a candlelight dinner stack up against changing the oil in her car? Is getting a blowjob worth the same as giving her a back rub? Before long you’re both keeping a ledger. Tallying things up. I didn’t want Lucy to wake up tomorrow with a hangover, wondering if she’d given too much. I wanted her to look forward to our next date as much as I was.

  Chapter 5

  Lucy

  I was tempted to call in sick the morning after my blind date with Matt, but it was the slowest time of the year in our office, so I figured I could fake it through the day. Wearing sunglasses to hide my bloodshot eyes, I poured a cup of coffee and carried it to my desk, my coworkers giving me friendly, knowing looks but no one saying a word, not like that sadistic little dwarf pounding on the inside of my skull with a hammer—Did-it-again. Did-it-again. I lit a cigarette, straightened a pile of papers, and moved it from one side of the desk to the other. I picked at the callus next to the fingernail on my left thumb and tore it off with my teeth. Anita answered the phone at her desk across the room, then buzzed my line.

  “So, how’d it go?” Jill said, all bright and cheery.

  “It was all right.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  “No, it was fine. He seems like a decent guy.”

  “Wow, you should get a job writing cards for Hallmark.”

  “What the hell do you want me to say? He’s nice. We had a good time. He’s just not…”

  “Griffin.”

  Exactly, but I wasn’t going to admit it. “It was one date, for Christ’s sake. Why do you care so much?”

  “About you? Sometimes I wonder.”

  “I’m sorry, Jilly. I haven’t even had my coffee yet. He took me to the Café Budapest. It was lovely. They roll out the red carpet when he goes there.”

  “The red carpet?”

  “I’ll call you later and tell you all about it.”

 
“Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  I hung up the phone. Shit shit shit. Why was I so nasty to Jill? Matt was precisely what I needed in my life. I woke up this morning thinking about our date, how he jabbered away at dinner and didn’t ask me a million questions, how he seemed, in the best sense of the word, like a regular guy: forthright, congenial, eager to please, but certainly no pushover. I liked the way he held his ground when I tried to seduce him into coming up to my apartment. He said I had him dangling by a thread, but I didn’t believe that in the light of day any more than I did last night. He wanted to show me that he was in control, that he was going to take me to bed on his terms, not mine. That seemed to bode well for good times to come, but the possibility of good times with Matt made me feel like I was losing Griffin, losing not only what I wanted but what I knew: that ache, the habitual sting, like tearing the skin around my thumbnail till it bled.

  All Jill wanted was for me to be happy. The key, according to my therapist, was for me to want it myself. My mother told me happiness was overrated. Any fool can be happy, she liked to say. The hard part is feeling like you matter.

  ***

  Three years ago, the morning after that first impromptu date with Griffin, I was the one calling Jill, trying to make the whole episode sound amusing, though I left out the part about the Lord & Taylor bag of marijuana.

  Jill said, “The guy is obviously a jerk, Luce. Be thankful you found out before you started going out with him.”

  But I was already second-guessing myself, wondering what I’d said or done to drive him away, what I could have said or done to make him stay. I’d had my fair share of boyfriends up to that point, but no one who left me yearning. I didn’t envy Jill for having Terry, but I envied her certainty that he was her one and only. It seemed so arbitrary, a trick she played on herself. Why him when the possibilities were limitless?

  As the week dragged on, I began to think I might never see Griffin again. Then, late Friday afternoon, I was standing by the copy machine at work when a man’s voice behind me said, “Buy you a drink?”

  I turned around and glanced at the clock on the wall. “If I don’t get a better offer in the next eleven minutes.”

  Griffin grinned. He was wearing a starched white shirt with the top two buttons unbuttoned, jeans with a pressed-in crease, and an alligator-skin belt. I could feel my coworkers watching me. I wanted to kiss him; I wanted to kick him in the shins. He was smaller than I remembered, about my height and whippet-thin.

  “I’ll wait for you outside,” he said.

  I gave him a skeptical look.

  “Honest.” He put his hand on his heart. “Till Hell freezes over.”

  My own heart was pounding as I stood in the bathroom and brushed my hair. I smiled at myself in the mirror, feeling like I was fourteen again.

  Spring had finally arrived; people were out in shirtsleeves and tank tops, pastel leaves unfolding on the trees. We tried one bar, then another, but they were so crowded we couldn’t get in the door. Griffin and I walked across the Square to Harvard Yard and sat on the steps of Widener Library. He asked me how I’d been, and I said fine, keeping busy.

  “What about you?” I smiled. “Got any more dope deals lined up?”

  He grinned. “Nah, that was just a favor I was doing for friend. I like to consider it as an act of civil disobedience, my way of undermining the establishment.”

  I bumped his tassel loafer (no socks) with my foot. “Come on, you look just like the establishment.”

  “It’s all a big disguise. Makes it easier to operate behind enemy lines.”

  “Seriously, what do you do?”

  “I have my own one-man PR firm—Griffin Chandler Strategies. Companies hire me to help them get publicity and improve their image, come up with clever ways for them to market their products.”

  “Do you enjoy it?”

  “It can be interesting. Depends on the client. Sometimes I can’t believe how much people pay me to tell them things they could have easily figured out for themselves. I’ve got plenty of work, but I’ve been getting antsy lately. I’m thinking about trying something new.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. See if I can get into promoting. Write the great American screenplay. Go out to Hollywood and try to swim with the sharks.”

  “What will your screenplay be about?”

  “Serendipity. A tragically bored young man meets a beautiful girl while he’s talking on a pay phone, and they connect for one magical afternoon before fate intervenes.”

  “I can’t wait to find out the rest of the story.”

  “A happy ending, for sure. That’s what sells.”

  “Let’s go back to the part about fate. Why did you leave me by the river like that?”

  “Sorry, the dog with the Frisbee got into a fight with a schnauzer, and I had to help the guy take him to the vet.”

  I grinned. “Please. You can do better than that.

  “No, really. I knew where to find you.”

  “You’re not going to tell me, are you?”

  “You want to know the truth?” He fixed those pale blue eyes on me. “When I came over and saw you sleeping on the grass, I felt like I’d stepped into a dream. You had one hand folded under your chin, your hair spread out around you like a silk cape. You looked so amazing. Like a pre-Raphaelite painting or a vision out of a Fellini film. I stood there for about five minutes just watching you sleep, thinking, ‘Be careful, Griff. This is the real deal. You’ve never known a woman like this before. One kiss and all your hard-earned insouciance could be gone in a heartbeat.’ I don’t have any excuses, Lucy. I wasn’t sure I could handle it, so I just…” He made a motion with his hand like an airplane taking off.

  I narrowed my eyes for a second, then burst out laughing. “I can see why you went into PR.”

  “A little heavy-handed, was it?”

  “Better than a sharp stick in the eye.” I leaned over, kissed him softly on the lips, and waved bye-bye. “There goes all your hard-earned insouciance.”

  He flicked his hand. “Good riddance.”

  We kissed again on the stairs leading up to my apartment, then tumbled in the door and made love on the couch. His body was lean and wiry, almost no hair on his freckled skin. He had a tattoo on the back of his left shoulder, the first I’d seen on someone of his ilk—a lion with an eagle’s head and wings, the gryphon from Alice in Wonderland. I traced the black lines with my fingernail. He took out a joint, and we smoked and drank wine and made love again.

  It was after nine when we went out to dinner at a little Greek restaurant. Alan Griffin Chandler III told me he had grown up in Cincinnati and, like his father and grandfather before him, had gone to St. Mark’s then Princeton. He said he’d majored in partying with a minor in English literature, his only regret being that he was never quite good enough to make the varsity tennis team. His father wanted him to go to law school and join the family firm, but Griffin said he had no interest in the law and even less in living in Cincinnati. Two weeks after graduation, he married his longtime girlfriend.

  “I think we did it out of inertia,” he said. “We came home from our honeymoon, moved into an apartment, looked at each other, and said, Now what? She worked as a buyer for a department store; I got a job with an ad agency. I don’t think we had one whole week when we were really happy. We had so little in common. I wanted to travel; she didn’t. She wanted kids; I didn’t. Thank God, she never got pregnant. We lasted almost two years before calling it quits.”

  “Do you ever see her now?”

  “About once a year. She lives in Belmont with her perfectly boring husband, cute little twin daughters, and a fat chocolate Lab. Everything she ever wanted.”

  When we got back to my apartment, my cat Rory was waiting at the top of the stairs. She had a long white coat with a regal black t
ail and an intricate black patch on her back. I picked her up and stroked her under the chin, and Rory purred like an old refrigerator. Griffin said he loved cats; his family always had at least three or four of them. He told me a long, funny story about a blue point Siamese named Minx, which Griffin’s black sheep uncle Baxter claimed he had won in a poker game in Chicago. Minx supposedly had a cry that could hit high C and a knack for warning Baxter when bill collectors or angry women came to the door.

  We smoked another joint and made love again. The first two times he had been rough, oblivious to my cues and muffled yelps of pain, but I reveled in the thrill of it, the proximate danger; no man, it seemed, had ever wanted me more. Then he slowed down and began to explore my body, bringing me to the edge and pulling back, teasing me, making me beg.

  When I woke up Saturday morning, he was gone again. The note on the kitchen table said: Had to run. I’ll give you a call. No tender closing, no name, not even a G.

  ***

  I sat at my desk, drinking my third or fourth cup of coffee, wishing I hadn’t promised Jill I’d call her back. I didn’t want to talk about Matt, not with Jill and certainly not with Carla, my therapist, with whom I had my regular appointment later that afternoon.

  I started seeing Carla after I’d been dating Griffin for about four months. Being with him could be wonderful. He was well-read, loved opera and foreign films and avant-garde theater; he was a terrific skier and a patient instructor on the tennis court. We spent glorious afternoons sailing on the twenty-seven-foot sloop he kept at a dock down in Quincy. He liked to go shopping and buy me clothes and jewelry; he took me to Morocco, the Copper Canyon in Mexico, to Italy for my twenty-fifth birthday. We were from similar backgrounds, a world of money and privilege we sometimes scoffed at but never rejected. The first time we slow danced it felt like we’d been partners at the country club since we were eight years old.

  But for all the good times, I never felt secure. He slept over at my place three or four nights a week, but rarely wanted me to stay at his—his way, I guessed, of maintaining a retreat that held nothing of mine. He had no office, only an answering service, and when he traveled on business, he often went for days without calling me. I assumed that he was being unfaithful, but I didn’t ask, not in the beginning; I wanted to prove that I wasn’t some possessive, demanding bitch. We experimented with various drugs, though plain old cannabis worked best for me. In time our lovemaking grew bolder, grittier. We coaxed and dared each other into trying new things, including a ménage à trois (which was basically a bore, the girl dull and mechanical and completely uninterested in me). But no matter how good the sex was, I couldn’t shake the apprehension that something was missing. Oneness. The feeling after we made love that lying in bed next to me was the only place on earth he wanted to be. Maybe that was why I kept going back to him—or letting him back in—the hope that someday everything would be so perfect he’d never want to leave.