Lies You Wanted to Hear

by James Whitfield Thomson

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  “See you soon.”

  “Lucy?”

  “Yes?”

  “I love you.”

  She took a deep breath. “Oh, Matt.”

  I pushed the button down on the phone. I still had the receiver in my hand, and I wanted to smash it down on the desk. I’d just taken the cheapest of cheap shots, the dead mother pity plea. Poor little orphan boy begging for love. I had no idea I could stoop so low.

  Chapter 9

  Lucy

  Matt and I barely spoke on the long drive from Boston to Butler, no radio, just the dull whir of the highway, me trying not to chain smoke, trying not to feel like he wished I hadn’t come. Now and again he’d reach over and touch me and give me an almost-smile. We got to his house around two in the morning and went to sleep in the double bed in the guest bedroom. In the middle of the night, I felt him spoon against me, and I pretended not to wake up as I scissored my legs and he slipped inside me, so gentle and dreamlike I wondered if he was even awake himself.

  We were up early, and Matt started making phone calls, talking to relatives and the undertaker; then we went to the funeral home with his uncle Joe to pick out a casket. The “viewing,” as it was called, began Friday evening and continued all weekend, three hours in the afternoon and three more in the evening, a steady stream of mourners. Matt never cried or wavered in his kindness, giving comfort to those whose grief seemed even greater than his own. Aunt Sally had placed several framed photographs of Matt’s mother around the funeral home. She had a shy smile with a little V between her front teeth, the same round face as Matt, the same deep-set eyes—a face that seemed to have no connection with the body that lay in the coffin.

  Matt’s best friend, Dan Roble, told me Mrs. D’s house was always the most popular place for their crew to hang out. He said he’d stop by just to talk sometimes, even when Matt wasn’t home. Dan didn’t have many stories about their high school escapades. He said he and Matt were both too shy to do much dating, too busy working part-time jobs to get into trouble.

  When we weren’t at the funeral home, people congregated at Aunt Sally’s house where women brought endless supplies of food—pirogi, sausages, macaroni, dumplings, potato salad. Matt called these women The Ladies. They treated me like I belonged, their affection seemingly free of cattiness and suspicion, no snide remarks or probing questions, their goodwill so unconstrained I felt like I had wandered onto the set of an old television show.

  The funeral service Monday morning lasted for an hour and a half, followed by the slow ride to the cemetery, the procession of cars stretching for several blocks, then another service at the graveside where they lowered the coffin. I hung back while Matt threw the first shovel of dirt, then others did the same. Matt wanted to stay and finish the job, but his uncle Joe talked him out of it.

  We gathered at a restaurant where they’d set up a big buffet. I was sitting with Mr. Karski, who was Aunt Sally’s father and had worked in the mines with Matt’s grandfather. He started telling me stories about “the old country,” which people talked about like a distant matriarch, the formidable babushka you missed terribly and were just as happy never to see again.

  “Half my friends said they were Polish, the other half Russian,” Mr. Karski said. “The border was always moving. We used to joke about it. Go to bed in one country and wake up the next morning in the other.”

  Aunt Sally, who was short and wide as a beanbag chair, came over and gave me a hug. “Don’t believe a word he says, Lucy. The man could talk Satan into buying a crucifix.”

  “What would be wrong with that?” Mr. Karski said.

  Sally saw the restaurant manager and hurried over to tell him something. This was clearly her show.

  I said to Mr. Karski, “So you spoke both languages, Russian and Polish?”

  “Oh sure, Russian, Polish, Lithuanian. A little Serb, a little English.” He grinned, proud that he had only a slight accent. Some of the elderly people at the funeral seemingly spoke no English at all. “The Tsar, Nikolay Aleksandrovich Romanov, decided I was Russian and drafted me into the Imperial Army. I lasted four months before I deserted. I spent the winter hiding in a farmer’s barn. Never spoke to the man or looked him in the eye, but he left me a crust of bread or bowl of something every day, enough to get by. I always wished I knew his name, so I could write him a letter and say thank you.”

  He finished his whiskey, his plate of food untouched. He was tiny with a full head of white hair and a tic in his eye, which I first mistook for a wink. I asked if I could get him another whiskey.

  “No, no, one is enough for me,” he said. “When an old man drinks, either he starts thinking he’s young again and makes a fool of himself, or remembers how old he is and ends up getting sad.”

  I excused myself and went to get another glass of wine. One of The Ladies intercepted me and asked me to come meet her daughter, who had just arrived from out of town last night. The people of Butler, Pennsylvania, were probably as corrupt as people everywhere else, bigoted, backbiting, quietly committing the seven deadly sins—gluttony seemed to be the local favorite—but the way they accepted me with open arms put to shame the vain, judgmental world I’d grown up in. Who are his people? my Virginia-bred grandfather used to say. I tried to imagine Matt coming home with me under similar circumstances, members of the country club making snotty inquiries about his peculiar last name, most of them dismissing him out of hand as soon as they learned he was a cop. Not that the people in New Canaan, Connecticut, had anything against the police, per se. My parents’ crowd was staunchly Republican and firm believers in law and order, but cops, to them, were simply part of the large contingent of worker bees who trundled in from the vast elsewhere, people who were paid to keep our town safe and clean and educated.

  Drinking had begun in earnest. A man got out his violin, and a group of spongy middle-aged men gathered around him and began to sing a doleful Russian song. Then the fiddler picked up the tempo, and the men started to dance, squatting like Cossacks, falling and laughing and trying again. The children quickly joined in, spinning and sliding across the polished wooden floor in their good clothes, the women looking on with mock disapproval and oceans of love in their eyes, a celebration of what was lost and what remained.

  Matt smiled at me from across the room. The Ladies liked to tell me he was a catch (the kind of man your mother would want you to marry if you had a normal mother), and I’d nod and say, Yes, he is, as if it were all but settled, nothing but this tragic circumstance preventing us from making the announcement of our impending nuptials. For the past four days, I had been trying to imagine a future with him. Matt had told me he loved me, and I was touched that he’d taken the chance, but there were quiet moments when I found myself sitting alone, wondering only how fast and far I could flee. Maybe this was exactly what Griffin felt with me, a sense that, whatever we had, it was not quite right, not quite enough.

  The closer I grew with Matt, the more I seemed to talk about Griffin with my therapist. A few weeks ago, Carla said she wanted me to make a list comparing the two men and bring it to our next session. I thought it was a ridiculous exercise, but once I got started, it became intriguing. I took a yellow legal pad and made two columns: Matt/Griffin, tall/short, plain/handsome, dark/fair, sweet/acerbic, working class/privileged, Butler County Community College/Princeton, frugal/generous, loyal/philandering, loves me/probably doesn’t. The list went on and on.

  I didn’t write it down, but nowhere was the difference between them more pronounced than the way they made love. Griffin was demanding and inventive and uninhibited. He laid claim to me, took me, and did whatever he wanted. He took other women too and never tried to deny it. He would tell me who it was if I asked, which I did sometimes, wanting not just a name but details—every lick and hole, the pornographic montage—until I felt utterly debased and aroused and we fucked like it was the l
ast days of Pompeii. I had kept most of this from Carla, out of shame, I guess, or maybe I was afraid she’d find a way to make me stop. It was reprehensible behavior, especially for a woman who liked to think of herself as a feminist. The only excuse I can offer is that I found him captivating, like Patty Hearst and other victims who become attached to their kidnappers. On an intellectual level, I knew I shouldn’t let him treat me the way he did, just as I knew I shouldn’t love him (if, as Carla would say, it was even love at all), but Griffin, for all his considerable faults, took me places I had never been. Places I wanted to go back to again.

  Matt was a gentle, diffident lover: patient, intent on pleasing me, his stamina heroic. He touched me as if I were something precious, something he was afraid he might break. At times he seemed to regard his own satisfaction as an afterthought. He never knew when I was faking, or perhaps he chose not to call me on it. I tried to nudge him into more aggressive, adventurous sex, a bit of fantasy and role-playing, which he did sometimes, but it made him uncomfortable. Yet, for all his solicitude and self-control, when Matt finally let go, he did so with complete abandon—grunting, snorting, roaring—no faking on his part. Matt gave himself to me, got lost in me and let himself be vulnerable, and when he was spent, he always said thank you. Then he would hold me or, more remarkably, let me hold him, content as any man could ever be. One night he said, Forget the story about the snake and the apple. This is what got Adam and Eve kicked out of the Garden of Eden. God knew He couldn’t compete. How, in the name of reason, could I not love a man like that? As if reason had anything to do with love.

  “Matt is Steady Eddy,” I told Carla. “What you see is what you get. Griffin is always surprising me. He keeps me guessing. There’s something about his unpredictability that pulls me in.”

  Carla shrugged.

  “Is that wrong?” I said.

  “This isn’t about right and wrong, Lucy. It’s about the kind of life you want.” She handed me the list. “You missed one important difference.”

  “What?”

  I guessed at one thing and another before she took the list back and wrote at the bottom: here/gone.

  ***

  Matt and I were alone in his house the evening after the funeral. He started to go through his mother’s papers, trying to sort out what he should take back to Boston when we left the next morning. The files were neat and well organized (like mother, like son), notes on the documents written in a small, precise script. She had left everything to him in her will, no outstanding debts, the mortgage and car paid off. Matt picked up a black leather folder with a brass clasp, his mother’s insurance policies.

  “Check this out and tell me what you think.” He handed me a policy.

  It was a thick document with lots of fine print and legalese, but all you needed to know was on the first page.

  “It’s for fifty thousand dollars,” I said.

  “You’re sure?”

  “That’s what it says.”

  He shook his head in disbelief. “There’s two more here, one for fifteen thousand, another for forty.”

  “That’s incredible.”

  “I know. It’s way too much money. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “But that was her business, right? She knew what she was doing.”

  “I guess. She worked for the agency for twenty-six years. I talked to her boss, Barry Ledyard, at the funeral home. He wrote the policies, but he never said anything about this.”

  “That’s not the place to talk about money, Matt. It’s only seven-thirty. Why don’t you call him and ask?”

  Matt seemed hesitant.

  “I’m going to get a glass of white wine,” I said. “You want anything?”

  “Wine sounds good.”

  When I came back from the kitchen, he was on the phone. I heard him saying goodbye to Mr. Ledyard, thanking him for his help.

  “It’s what we thought,” he said. “The policies have a total value of one hundred five thousand dollars. The money’s all tax-free. He said I should have a check in a few weeks.”

  I handed him the glass of wine. “That’s wonderful. What an amazing gift.”

  “Yeah, pretty fucking ironic, huh?” He spread his arms wide, wine sloshing onto the rug, and let out a self-mocking laugh. “Here I am, an orphan in Fat City.”

  He ground the wine spot into the rug with his shoe. I led him to the couch, and he leaned his head on my shoulder, the wineglass still in his hand. I stroked his hair, hoping he would let go and cry.

  “This is crazy,” he said. “First I meet you and fall in love. Then the captain calls me in and says he wants me to serve on some new task force.” I hadn’t heard about that before but didn’t interrupt. “Just to make sure things don’t get too routine, I chase down some kid and break his arm so bad he needs a plate and umpteen screws. Ten days later my mother drops dead. Now I find out I’ve inherited more money than I ever thought I’d have in my life.” I kept stroking his hair. “It all seems so fucking random.” He lifted his wineglass as if he were making a toast, his hand wrapped around the bowl. “Just life, I guess.”

  The glass exploded in his hand.

  “Matt!”

  He rolled off the couch and stood up, looking at his hand as if it were a curiosity, some bloody urchin dredged up from the deep. A shard of glass protruded from his palm.

  “I’m going to need stitches,” he said.

  On the way to the hospital, he made me promise I would corroborate his story, saying that he stumbled and fell. In the emergency room, he joked with the doctor and nurses about being a klutz. The doctor said he was fortunate he hadn’t cut an artery; it took eleven stitches to close the wound.

  I tried to talk to him about it when we got back to the house.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t explain what came over me.”

  “It’s normal. You just needed to feel something.”

  He gave me a contemptuous look. “Believe me, I’ve had way too many feelings already.”

  “Matt, I’m sorry. I—”

  “Forget it.”

  “No, that was an idiotic thing for me to say.”

  “Forget it, okay?”

  I let it go. But part of me wanted to provoke him and have one of those fights we’d both been so careful to avoid, the kind where ugly thoughts get spoken aloud and you are knocked back by what you’ve heard and what you’ve said, unsure how much was true, both of you knowing that the fight was not simply inevitable, but necessary. I wanted to quarrel and get it over with and find out what we were really made of. But not now, not after all that Matt had been through. The next day we drove back to Boston and acted like the incident with the wineglass had never happened.

  ***

  Three days after we got home from the funeral, Jill had her baby, a little boy named Terrence Kyle O’Shea Jr. They planned on calling him TK. When Matt and I went to visit them in the hospital, Matt looked at the baby and beamed. He asked Jill if he could hold him, then picked him up with gentle nonchalance like it was something he did every day.

  “Hey, TK,” he said. “What do you think about your first day out here in the big wide world? Everything fine so far? This is easy living, kid. Enjoy it while you can. Pretty soon your old man’s going to turn you into a Red Sox fan and make you miserable for the rest of your life.”

  Jill’s mother and sister were in the room with us. They smiled at me the way The Ladies did, reminding me that this guy was a catch.

  Matt and I went back to my place and made love. The next day I realized I’d forgotten to take a pill. I wasn’t sure when, sometime in all the commotion of the past week. I felt a twinge of guilt but didn’t say anything to Matt. It wasn’t like I wanted to get pregnant. Not like the last time.

  Chapter 10

  Matt

  The new task force was called Together with
Trust—TWT. Good name, bad acronym. Rank-and-file cops, who viewed us with a tinge of jealousy and suspicion, quickly dubbed us the “twits.” My partner was a nineteen-year veteran named Javi Veliz. The two of us hit it off immediately. We were assigned to the Roslindale and West Roxbury neighborhoods, which Javi knew well. He had a great knack for drawing people out and getting them to vent. We spent a lot of time talking to small-business owners, listening to their problems and trying to get them to hire some of the neighborhood kids part time. Javi was an entrepreneur himself. Over the years he had built up two businesses of his own, a flower shop and a three-car limousine service.

  One evening Lucy and I went out for a drink with him and his wife, Colleen. Colleen was first generation Boston Irish. She was tall and skinny, with green eyes, red hair, and a face that turned pretty when she smiled. Javi and his family had come to Boston from Guatemala when he was six. With his long nose and copper skin, ink-black hair and trim goatee, he could have passed for a Saudi prince or a South American drug lord. He and Colleen told us they were high school sweethearts.

  “The only girl I’ve ever kissed,” Javi said.

  Colleen rolled her eyes. “My father wasn’t exactly happy with the situation. He called Javi the blankety-blank little spic the first two years I went out with him.”

  “Now it’s just the spic,” Javi said, laughing.

  “The only thing that saved him was being Catholic,” Colleen said.

  They had three daughters and a son. Colleen said they’d been having trouble with their boy recently. He got caught skipping school, and she and Javi were trying to decide how to punish him.

  “He’s a good kid,” Javi said. “A little dreamy, that’s all. I was a criminal when I was his age.”

  Lucy and I chuckled.

  “He isn’t kidding,” Colleen said.

  Lucy said, “Do tell.”

  “Master cat burglar,” Javi said. “I’d find a cellar door unlocked, crawl up a fire escape to an open window. In and out quick, though things got dicey once in a while.” The waitress came by, and we ordered another round. I’d already heard a lot of Javi’s stories, but he seemed to be ratcheting things up for Lucy.