Lies You Wanted to Hear

by James Whitfield Thomson

  It was twilight when we exited the theater. We strolled through the Common to the Public Garden and talked about the movie. Matt said he liked it, but he thought Bananas and Sleeper were funnier. I said I thought it was Woody Allen’s best film yet. I liked the way he kept reminding you it was a movie, turning to the camera and talking directly to the audience, then stepping back into the story. Matt and I began quoting our favorite lines from the movie.

  I said, “I loved the part where Annie and Alvy are walking down the street and he stops and suggests they kiss for the first time so they can get it over with.”

  “Yeah, great line,” Matt said. “I wish I’d’ve thought of that with you.”

  “When would you have said it?”

  “When would I have had the courage? On the sidewalk after dinner, maybe, when you put that rose in your hair. When did I want to say it? About two seconds after I saw you crossing the street.”

  “I probably would’ve slugged you.”

  “Yeah?” He put his arm around me. “Then I would’ve cuffed you and taken you in.”

  I laughed. “Promises, promises.”

  We crossed the footbridge over the pond where the swan boats were tied up for the evening. A fat man was sitting on a bench playing “The Tennessee Waltz” on an accordion. I started singing along with the music, and Matt put a dollar in his instrument case.

  “Milady,” he said with a deep bow.

  I curtsied and took his hand, and we began to waltz. It could have been a scene from a movie, more Frank Capra than Woody Allen, Matt a little ungainly, but his spirit trumping his awkwardness. I knew at that moment he was not going to sleep with me tonight to get it over with; he wanted a storybook romance, an old-fashioned courtship full of restraint and longing. A week ago I would have scoffed at such a notion as artificial and demeaning to women. Now I found myself thinking, Why not give it a chance? It would be something different, anyway. Like going to live in a commune, or being born again and putting your faith in Jesus. I had no illusions (or delusions) that this was True Love, not for me anyway, but it felt like happiness—pure, simple-minded joy. The trick was not to question it, or belittle it like Amanda; just put on my fool’s cap and follow Matt’s lead.

  ***

  It was summer, the sun shone brightly, and I rarely felt blue. Matt called me every day. He took me to a Red Sox game and a Bee Gees concert. I went to a few of his softball games and met some of his friends; Jill and Terry had us over for a cookout with a bunch of other couples. Matt was at ease socially, and everyone seemed charmed by him.

  I loved riding in the Thunderbird with the top down and the radio blasting, Matt shifting gears like a race car driver. One Sunday morning we were on the way to the beach at Plum Island—I was wearing shorts over a low-cut bathing suit—when a police car pulled us over in Ipswich. The cop was bald with a big potbelly. Matt showed him his BPD badge and the cop grinned. The cop’s eyes were crawling all over me as he and Matt made small talk, but if Matt noticed, he didn’t let on. Griffin would have reached over in mid-sentence and put his hand on my bare thigh. Eat your heart out, pal. She’s mine. The thought made me wonder where he was right now, what he was doing. Probably tiptoeing out of some woman’s apartment the morning after, on his way to someone else. He hadn’t called in a few weeks. There were nights I wished he would.

  The Ipswich cop patted the fender of the Thunderbird and tipped his hat goodbye. Matt said something to me as we drove away, but I was thinking about Griffin, remembering all the crazy places we’d made love: in a canoe on the Charles River, in the shadows at the far end of a subway platform, behind an armoire in a dusty antiques store while the shopkeeper and a woman haggled over the price of a Biedermeier chest. Sometimes I think we were hoping we’d get caught, as if we were trying to prove that our need for each other carried us beyond the usual boundaries of decorum and common sense.

  Matt and I had been dating for a month and were still making out like high school kids. I made no initiatives and asked for no explanations, waiting to see how far he’d go. Close, but (alas, Dr. Freud) no cigar. Sometimes it felt like a game, silly and frustrating, but the anticipation kept my hormones percolating. The chemistry between us seemed fine, but I began to worry. What if it wasn’t worth the wait? What if, after this great buildup, our lovemaking was a dud? Not a full-blown fiasco—one of those spectacular misfires we could both acknowledge and maybe even laugh about somewhere down the road—but something numbingly pedestrian, the sexual equivalent of Muzak or instant coffee, a vapid facsimile that only proves just how great the real thing can be.

  When we got to the beach, I spread a blanket out on the sand and took off my shorts, my white bathing suit cut high on my hips. When I’d tried it on in front of the mirror that morning, I noticed that if I raised my arms or twisted my torso, you could see a tiny portion of my tattoo, which was on my lower tummy near the bend in my hip. Griffin had talked me into getting the tattoo one night in Portsmouth. At first I thought he was joking, but he said he’d get one too. Neither of us was drunk or high.

  “You mean we each get a heart with an arrow through it? Mine says Griffin, yours says Lucy?”

  “Whatever you want. They don’t have to be the same.”

  We looked at the samples on the wall and leafed through a sketchbook of the artist, who said he could draw anything. I saw some birds and butterflies I liked, but nothing that caught my fancy. I wanted it to be unique to Griffin and me; I also wanted it to go someplace on my body that only he would see. Griffin went first, agreeing to get his in the same place as mine. He chose his birth sign, Scorpio, which seemed a bit trite. I decided on a pink and green Chinese umbrella. The needle burned a little but didn’t really hurt. The artist covered the tattoo with a bandage and warned me not to itch it or pick at the scab. A week later it looked beautiful. Even after Griffin left, I couldn’t say I regretted it—in fact, quite the opposite—but I still felt self-conscious about Matt’s seeing it and asking the inevitable questions.

  Matt tried to talk me into going into the ocean at Plum Island, but it was too cold for me. He had long, well-defined muscles and a thatch of dark hair on his chest. I watched him dive into the waves and swim far out. When he came out of the water, he toweled off and sat down beside me.

  “Would you like me to put some suntan lotion on you?” he said.

  I was lying on my stomach. “That would be wonderful.”

  He dabbed some lotion between my shoulder blades, massaging my neck and shoulder muscles as he rubbed it in. His hands were strong and patient as he worked his way down my back and started on my thighs. I turned my head, one eye scrunched against the sun.

  “You can do that all day,” I said.

  “Maybe I will.”

  I rose up on one elbow. “And night.”

  He kissed me softly and said, “Okay.”

  Walking along a secluded stretch of beach twenty minutes later, we detoured into the dune grass where we groped and fumbled and gasped. When we were done, we looked at each other and laughed with relief. It was far from perfect—sand where sand was never meant to be—but good enough to make me want to try again, soon. If he noticed my tattoo, he didn’t say.

  Chapter 8

  Matt

  I knew I was acting silly, but there were moments every day when I’d think about Lucy and get a big smile on my face. She and I saw each other three or four times a week, and I often stayed over at her apartment. Our sex life was better than anything I had ever dreamed of, though it annoyed me that she usually smoked a joint before we made love. She said she was like Annie Hall, marijuana made her relax. She tried to get me to try some, but that was a line I didn’t want to cross. I was too straight, too much a cop. I never asked where she bought the stuff and didn’t want to know. I figured if that was my only complaint, I had none at all.

  Every Sunday without fail, I called my mother, but it w
asn’t until after Labor Day that I felt confident enough to mention Lucy.

  “So,” Mom said, “when will I get to meet her?”

  “Sometime soon I hope. We could come to Butler for a long weekend. Better yet, why don’t you come up here? It’s been awhile. Let me buy you a plane ticket for your birthday.” She was turning fifty-four in October.

  She said that sounded wonderful. I liked hearing the excitement in her voice, as I knew she liked hearing it in mine. She wouldn’t come right out and say it, but most of her friends had become grandparents and she was feeling left out.

  One afternoon on the job, I saw a skinny black kid snatch an old woman’s purse and knock her down. Several people on the sidewalk rushed to the woman’s side, and I took off after the kid. I had nearly lost sight of him as he ran through Chinatown when he tripped on a dolly stacked with orange crates and dropped the purse. I yelled for the truck driver pushing the dolly to grab him, but the trucker only managed to tear off the kid’s T-shirt. The kid was limping as he took off again. I thought I was in pretty good shape, but my lungs were heaving and my leg muscles burned. I made one last burst and caught the boy, but he was sweaty and kept slipping out of my grip. I finally got my left arm wrapped around his neck.

  “Hold still,” I said.

  “Get off me, motherfucker!”

  I tightened my grip on his neck. “Just calm down. I’m gonna cuff you.”

  “Stop choking me, you fucking pig.”

  He kept kicking and flailing, and his elbow struck my cheek. I saw stars but didn’t let go. Hooking the fingers of my right hand under the kid’s belt, I lifted him off his feet and slammed him down on the sidewalk. There was a loud crack, and the boy screamed. I stood over him for a second then staggered away a few steps, put my hands on my knees, and vomited. I couldn’t say if I was sick from all the running or the sight of the jagged bone protruding from the boy’s arm.

  The next day, several black community leaders went down to City Hall decrying police brutality, hoping to get their pictures in the newspapers. The department withheld my name from the press. The boy, who was fourteen years old, had been arrested several times before. Two officers from internal investigations interviewed me and told me not to worry. They said there were several witnesses to back up my story, and the old woman had broken her hip when the kid knocked her down. Despite these assurances, the incident shook me up. I remembered throwing the boy to the ground and wanting to hurt him. I knew there was a split second when I could have stopped myself and didn’t. Lucy suggested I visit him in the hospital, but that was taboo, almost an admission of guilt.

  A week went by. No one had filed a formal complaint with the department, but I was still worried about the repercussions. I didn’t think I would lose my job, but the incident could cost me a spot on Captain Antonucci’s task force. This wasn’t something I could discuss with Lucy or anyone else. I didn’t sleep well at night.

  One afternoon I was standing on the corner of Tremont and Boylston, listening to a homeless man tell me about the fortune he’d lost in the rare coin business, when Sergeant Barker pulled up in a squad car.

  “Hey, boyo,” he said. He got out of the car, and the homeless man shuffled off. “Can you believe that?” Barker pointed at a billboard advertising The Spy Who Loved Me. “How could they pick a fag like Roger Moore to replace Sean Connery? You telling me that’s the best actor they could come up with? Sean Connery is a legend. Did you see The Man Who Would Be King? Greatest fuckin’ movie ever made.”

  “I’ll second that,” I said. Sean Connery and Michael Caine, a Rudyard Kipling story with John Huston directing. How could it not be great? I’d seen it three times and had been telling Lucy about it recently. I was hoping it would come on TV so we could watch it together.

  We both loved to go to the movies but rarely agreed on what to see. I liked movies, she liked films. Movies were entertainment, stories that made you laugh or cry and kept you on the edge of your seat. Films had meanings and subtitles, slow, tortuous stories with bleak endings or no ending at all. Films were supposed to make you think, but they usually put me to sleep. We settled on a compromise, alternating between her choice and mine. A few weeks ago she dragged me to a double feature of Persona and Cries and Whispers. On the drive back to her place, I asked her if she’d noticed the bowl of free razor blades in the lobby for people who wanted to go home and slit their wrists. It took her a second to realize I was joking. We ended up having an argument, then laughed about it later.

  I wanted nothing more than to make Lucy happy. For her part, she rarely showed that edge Jill had told me about. If she was hiding it, I didn’t care. We treated each other with uncommon tenderness. Never bickered or took a stubborn stand over some petty principle or demand, as if we were afraid one ugly fight would tear us apart. It wasn’t something we talked about. I didn’t spend much time thinking about it either. We’d been together for two and a half months. The more trust and goodwill we built up in happy times, the better off we’d be when we hit the inevitable rough patch.

  Barker jerked a thumb at the squad car. “Hop in, boyo. We have to run.”

  “What’s up, Sarge?”

  “Captain wants to see you.”

  “Now?” My mouth suddenly felt dry. “Is this about that kid whose arm I broke?”

  He shrugged. “No idea. But you don’t have to worry about that. ’Nucci won’t hang you out to dry over that bullshit.”

  Not unless someone from City Hall was leaning on him. Captain Antonucci must have seen the concern in my face as I took a chair across from his desk.

  “Listen, Drobyshev, that thing with the kid? The scumbag purse-snatcher?” His face was grim. “You don’t have to worry about it affecting that other thing we talked about. I got your back all the way.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “But look, that’s not why I called you in here.” He started playing with a hockey puck on his desk, rolling it back and forth between his thumb and forefinger. “I got a call from your Aunt Sally a little while ago. Your mother…I’m sorry, I’m afraid she passed away.”

  I stared at the captain blankly. No words came into my head.

  “She was at work. They said she just put her head down on the desk like she was taking a nap, and the next thing anyone knew, she was gone. She didn’t suffer.”

  Blood pooled in my arms and legs, anchoring me to the chair. The captain kept talking, but I didn’t hear what he said. He came around the desk and patted my shoulder. Then he walked me to an empty office with a couch and a desk and a telephone. Someone brought me a cold soda. I asked if I could be alone.

  I sat on the couch and closed my eyes and thought about the last time I’d seen my mother. It was early April, a beautiful spring weekend. I helped her work in the yard and repaired the trellis for her roses. My last morning home I woke to the smell of bacon. When I came downstairs, I heard her singing a Fleetwood Mac song. She had a lovely voice. She was the only parent I knew who listened to pop music. My friends used to call her Mrs. D and liked to come to the house and hang out. I walked into the kitchen and said good morning, and she poured me a cup of coffee. She was making my favorite omelet with cheddar cheese, chopped onions, and red peppers. When the food was ready, Mom sat down, and we ate and talked and laughed as we always did. An ordinary morning together. I couldn’t believe there would never be another. Surely if I conjured up enough details, piling them up like talismans, I’d go home and find that nothing had changed.

  I went to the desk and called Aunt Sally, who wasn’t actually my aunt but my mother’s best friend. She sobbed the moment she heard my voice. I wanted to sob too, but I sat there holding the phone, saying nothing. Sally said they’d reached my uncle Joe in the mine, and he was going to help arrange things. She asked if there was anything special I wanted done, and I said I couldn’t think of anything. I told her I’d be home as soon as possible. />
  “You call the minute you get here, honey,” she said. “I don’t care what time it is. And if you don’t…if you feel strange being in that house all alone, you come stay with us.”

  I phoned Lucy next.

  “Oh my god, Matt!” she said. “That’s horrific. I’m so sorry. Where are you now?”

  “Still at the station. I need to go back to my apartment and pack some clothes. I’m not sure whether I should fly or drive.”

  “How long does it take to drive?”

  “Eleven, twelve hours. I guess there isn’t any rush.”

  “You don’t want to be on the road alone at a time like this. I’ll go with you. I’ll leave work right now.”

  As soon as she said it, I knew I didn’t want her to come. I had no idea how I was going to act, whether I was going to break down or fly into a rage or plod through the whole thing like a zombie. Probably a little of each and none of it pretty. Besides, I didn’t want Lucy’s only memory of my mother to be a corpse lying in a coffin. It would be better if Lucy didn’t come at all. But how could I tell her that? Wasn’t this a time when I was supposed to need her most?

  “Matt?”

  “Sure, okay.”

  “Unless you’d rather be by yourself.”

  “No, no, I want you to come. I’m sorry. This is all…”

  “I can’t even imagine what you’re going through. Listen, why don’t we take my car so we’ll have more room? I’ll come to your place and pick you up. I’ll drive. We’ll talk—or not. Maybe you can get some sleep. Whatever you want.”