“My wife and I are so happy for Sara and Ajit,” he said, smiling. “I apologize for not getting in touch with you sooner to send my good wishes.”
“Likewise. I’d like to take the two of you out to dinner together sometime.”
“Yes, thank you, that would be wonderful.” We chatted for a while. Then he said, “You know, we are very proud of Ajit for winning a fellowship to Oxford University. He will be coming home for spring vacation in March, and we were thinking about giving a party in his honor. Ajit suggested that it would be appropriate to use the occasion to celebrate his betrothal to your beautiful Sara as well. Kill two birds with one stone as they say. Ha ha.” I could tell he’d been rehearsing the lines.
“Sure, that would be great.” I had a feeling this was more Sara’s doing than Ajit’s. “Were you thinking of a dinner party?”
“Oh yes. Traditional Bengali food. It will keep my wife busy planning the menu. Some music perhaps, so the young people can dance.”
“That sounds terrific. Shall we split the cost?”
“Thank you. That is most generous of you.” He seemed relieved.
I called Sara’s cell phone on my way back to work and left a message. “Hey, kiddo, I just had lunch with Mr. Banerjee. I guess you already know about the party they’re planning for you and Ajit. Just tell me the date and time and I’ll be there with bells on my toes.” I was smiling to myself as I hung up.
Sara waited nearly two weeks to tell me she was inviting Lucy to the party, something I should have guessed all along. She said she hoped I didn’t mind, though she knew how much I did. I suppose I could have issued an ultimatum. Her or me. I never want to be in the same room with that woman again. But I didn’t want to back Sara into a corner.
As the day of the party approached, Sara acted as an intermediary. She said Lucy was coming to California two days early and wanted to get together with me “to clear the air.”
“That isn’t necessary,” I said. “We’re both adults. Neither one of us wants to make a scene.”
“Please, Dad. I think she’s right. You guys need to talk. Do this for me, okay?”
I was dreading it, but I felt like I had no choice. Sara arranged for us to meet at the bar in the hotel in Del Mar where Lucy was staying. I was seated in an out-of-the-way table in back when she came in. She was wearing a pair of gray slacks and a lavender blouse. She looked around and spotted me. No smile. I thought about the first time I saw her crossing the street in Copley Square. She still carried herself with that slow, catlike grace. Men still turned their heads. I stood up to greet her.
“Hello, Lucy.” I pulled out a chair.
“Hello, Matt.”
“Adam.”
She shrugged, her eyes fixed on mine. We were like two boxers at a weigh-in, sizing each other up, neither of us wanting to show any fear.
“This seems like a nice hotel,” I said. “Is your room okay?”
“Yes, fine. Wonderful view.”
“Have you ever been here before? To the San Diego area, I mean.”
“No, it’s lovely. Seems like a great place to raise children.”
It was a solid body blow. I tried not to let it show. “Yes, terrific weather. Sara can play golf year-round. Did she tell you how good she was?”
“She did.”
The waitress came over and asked for our drink orders. I said I’d have a soda water with a lime. Lucy asked for white wine.
“Well,” I said, “you look as lovely as ever.”
“Thank you. You look good yourself. Maybe we should think about getting back together.” Another hard shot to the ribs.
“Sara said you wanted to clear the air. How nasty do you want this to be?”
“I don’t know.” She paused. “One part of me wants you to die. I don’t mean that figuratively. I’ve had fantasies about murdering you myself. Another part tells me to try for forgiveness. I’m having trouble getting traction on that one.”
“Fair enough. You want to go first or should I? How far back do you want to go? How about the night you went off with Griffin and came back and told me you were pregnant with Sara?”
“Wow, that is far back.”
“You slept with him that night, didn’t you?”
“I did.”
“And started our marriage with a lie.”
“Which you never really believed. The lies you wanted to hear were the easiest ones to tell.”
I didn’t respond. The waitress brought our drinks.
She said, “I was a terrible wife, Matt. I’m sorry. You deserved better. But I wasn’t a terrible mother.”
I curled one corner of my mouth. “Right.”
“No, I’ll never accept your judgment of me on that.”
“Would you like me to start enumerating your failings?” I tapped my finger hard on the table. “Isn’t that why you told the kids you don’t want to deconstruct the past? Because you don’t want them to know what a fuck-up you were?”
Her eyes never left mine. “Oh, you don’t have to do any enumerating for me. I’ve gone over my failings more times than you ever will. I’ve bored therapists, written about them in my journal, had the most egregious ones etched in stone so I could beat my head against them. You can’t tell me anything bad about me I don’t already know.” She took a sip of wine. “I’m sure you believe that what you did was right, Matt. That no jury would convict you after hearing what a horrible mother I was. You think I’m the criminal, not you. Okay, fine. Guilty. I won’t try to defend myself. So, tell me, what should my penalty be?”
She waited. I said nothing.
“I mean it. I want an answer. What’s my punishment?”
“I couldn’t risk leaving the kids with you, Lucy. The stakes were too high.”
“Answer the question.”
“Sara’s broken arm, Amanda driving them around drunk. Dropping cigarette ashes on—”
“Guilty, guilty, guilty. The accused has freely admitted to her crimes and thrown herself on the mercy of the court. All you have to do is render a sentence.”
“I did what I thought was best for the children.”
“Why can’t you say it? Why can’t you tell me what my punishment should be?” She looked at me with disgust. “You didn’t drag me into a court of law, Matt. You played God. And the judgment you handed down was that I should never see Sarah and Nathan again. Never hear their voices, never know where they lived or what became of them.” Tears were rolling down her cheeks. “I spent sixteen and a half years waiting, wondering if my sentence would ever end. I would have spent less time in prison if I had committed manslaughter.”
“You were out of control. I couldn’t sit around for a year or two, waiting for the justice system to figure out that you were an unfit mother. Like you just said, you were guilty. What do you want from me? Do you want me to tell you I’m sorry?”
“What I want from you is this. I want you to go home tonight and look in the mirror and say, Lucy got what she deserved. Have you ever done that, Matt? Talked to yourself in the mirror? I’ve tried, and let me tell you, it’s really hard. Hard to tell yourself the truth. Even harder to believe your own lies.”
“I have no regrets, Lucy. Sometimes you have to make a decision, and once it’s made it can’t be changed.”
“Try it, Matt. Lucy got what she deserved. Five little words. Look in the mirror and see if you can make yourself believe them.”
Someone laughed loudly at the bar, and we turned our heads to the sound. When I looked at Lucy again, something in her eyes seemed to soften. She swirled the wine in her glass and put it down without drinking.
“Thank you,” she said. She stood up. “I feel much better now. I don’t have to hate you anymore.”
I watched her go. I felt hollowed out, not angry or sad or guilty or hopeful. Just empty. Wondering how s
he could still do that to me.
***
The party was at a small club in Encinitas. Lucy and I weren’t seated at the same table and didn’t talk to each other. The food was great, a sitar player providing background music. When it came time to make toasts, no one spoke too long or said anything embarrassing. They’d hired a DJ to provide the dance music. Sara and Ajit got things started, jitterbugging to “Oh Boy” by Buddy Holly. I’d never been much of a dancer, and I went out to the terrace to get some air. Three Indian gentlemen were out there smoking cigars. They offered me one but I declined. I listened to them talk about cricket but didn’t know enough to join the discussion.
When I went back inside, there were about twenty people on the dance floor. Marvin Gaye’s “Heard It Through the Grapevine” was playing. Sara was dancing with Elliot. It was uncanny how she moved her body like her mother, quiet shoulders and snaky hips. Like me, Elliot was an awkward dancer, but he was having a great time. Lucy was talking with a man who made her laugh. She was wearing a sexy green dress. I thought about the night we met. I could still see her standing outside the Café Budapest with one hand on her hip and a rose in her hair. Did she ever have a clue how much I loved her? The song ended and the DJ put on “What a Feeling” from Flashdance. Sara let out a squeal and grabbed Lucy’s hand and the two of them spun each other around. Elliot and Ajit joined in, all of them dancing in a pack. As she twirled around, Lucy scanned the bystanders and caught my eye. Her smile was luminous. Unconquerable.
I walked out to the parking lot and got in my pickup. I headed north on the 5, my hands tight on the wheel. I couldn’t get that image of Lucy out of my head. The way she looked at me with that smug smile. I’m sure everyone else could see it.
A deputy sheriff’s car raced by with its blue lights flashing, and I eased off the gas.
I tried to ratchet up my anger, but the more I thought about it, the more I started to wonder if she really was being smug. I never could read her very well. Maybe it was her way of asking me if I wanted to come join the dance. Wouldn’t that be something? All of us bopping around like one big happy family?
Just past Oceanside, traffic slowed to a crawl. Up ahead the deputy’s car was stopped in the middle lane behind an old Dodge station wagon with its hood up and smoke pouring off the engine. Cars were jockeying for position to get past the tie-up. I let another driver merge in front of me, and the guy behind me honked impatiently. I looked at him in the rearview mirror for a second, then looked away.
Traffic picked up speed after I got past the broken-down station wagon. As I settled back in my seat, I looked in the rearview mirror again, but all I saw were my own eyes.
“Lucy…” I said aloud, but I couldn’t make myself finish.
It was a beautiful evening, the moon hanging over Mt. Palomar. I thought about turning around as I approached the next exit. But I kept going.
Reading Group Guide
1. From the first date on, it is clear that Matt is more taken with Lucy than she is with him. Is it the norm in most romantic relationships that one person falls more deeply in love than the other? After the confrontation in the bedroom with Lucy and Griffin, Matt says to Lucy, “I never had a chance, did I?” Do you think Lucy ever really tried to make the marriage work? Does Matt bear responsibility for their breakup?
2. Matt says that taking the children was his “fate” and he had no other choice. Is this simply a rationalization, or was the kidnapping justified? In the end, would you say Matt has been a good father or a bad one?
3. Lucy feels as if she can’t quite figure out how to be a good mother, yet she is unable to broach the subject even with her best friend, Jill. Do you think this is a common feeling among women? How do Lucy’s relationships with other women define who she is and what we think about her?
4. Lying is a key element of this novel. Who do you think lies more, Matt or Lucy? What is the worst lie each of them tells? For most people, there have been times when they would rather have heard a lie than the truth. In what situations has this been true for you? When have you lied because you felt that is what the other person wanted to hear?
5. When Lucy goes to the GrieveWell meeting, she finds that one woman feels that Lucy’s is “a second-class sorrow.” Is it possible to compare one person’s grief to another’s? Do you think that most people measure and compare their losses to those of others?
6. Once the children learn the truth about their past, Sara remains fiercely loyal to her father while Elliot is pulled in the opposite direction. Why do you think this is so? Have you ever encountered a startling revelation in your own life or in that of someone you know that caused you to rethink your entire world?
7. Lucy quotes her mother as saying, “Any fool can be happy. The hard part is feeling like you matter.” What do you think about this statement?
8. Lucy’s journal-keeping has a profound influence on her life. Do you keep a journal yourself? How has it affected your own life?
9. Is there any validity in Matt’s contention that the court system is biased toward a mother? When adjudicating domestic disputes, does the legal system today give fair consideration to the rights of both parents?
10. Did Lucy give up too quickly in trying to find her children? The children’s disappearance takes place before the age of the Internet. How would Lucy’s search be different today?
11. The last thing Lucy says to Matt is, “I feel better now. I don’t have to hate you anymore.” But she doesn’t offer him forgiveness. Are there some acts that are simply unforgivable?
12. Matt cannot make himself say the words “Lucy got what she deserved.” Did she?
13. When talking about the difference between movies and films, Matt says, “Movies were entertainment, stories that made you laugh or cry and kept you on the edge of your seat. Films had meaning and subtitles, slow, tortuous stories with bleak endings or no ending at all.” He likes movies; Lucy likes films. Which is true for you? If Lies You Wanted to Hear were made into a motion picture, would it be a movie or a film?
A Conversation with the Author
1.Jim, at 67, you are one of the oldest first-time authors we’ve published at Sourcebooks. Tell me a little about your journey. Did you always want to be a writer?
Yes, I guess I did. I wrote some poems in high school, mostly your typical teenage stuff about love and angst, then one long, obscure poem in college that I kept revising and revising. My roommate used to joke with me about publishing it in a chapbook called The Collected Poem of James Whitfield Thomson. After college, I spent three years as the navigator of a Navy supply ship off the coast of Vietnam, then I went to grad school and wrote my dissertation on the work of Raymond Chandler, but I never tried to do any creative writing myself. I landed a job as an assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Miami but quickly realized I wasn’t cut out for academia. I joined a start-up company as a salesman and loved it. It was such a relief to be able to measure my performance in terms of dollars and cents. Our company grew fast and I was very driven, but I still had dreams of becoming a writer.
2.What inspired you to make that dream a reality?
In 1985, I was turning forty and a close friend died, so that provided the motivation. I wrote a short story called “The Spice of Life” about a man who’s trying to decide how to dispose of a dead friend’s ashes. The story wasn’t autobiographical, but I was obviously thinking about my friend. I sent the story out to a few magazines but got discouraged after a few rejections and stuck it in a drawer. Three years later, Christopher Tilghman invited me to be a guest at a workshop led by the great short story writer Andre Dubus. At the end of the evening, Andre asked me if I wanted to come back the following week and read to the group. I was thrilled. This was my big chance to find out if “The Spice of Life” was any good. I don’t remember a single comment anyone made about the story, but the consensus was clear: Not bad for y
our first effort, pal; now go write another one. It was like the proverbial light bulb went on in my head. Writers write. Time for me to get to work.
3.Did it take you long to discover your own style?
Yes and no. I could always construct good sentences, but I think my academic background hurt me a lot. I wanted to write serious literature, so I kept trying all these stylistic flourishes to prove how clever and lyrical I could be. It took a long time to realize that the goal is to keep the reader engaged in the story—anything that distracts the reader and makes him think about the author is just a writer’s way of showing off. Let me give you an example from another art form. No matter what role Jack Nicholson is playing, there always seems to be a moment when he cocks an eyebrow and gives the camera that devilish grin of his, and everyone in the audience suddenly thinks, There’s Jack. Jack Nicholson the actor, not the character he’s portraying on the screen, which completely breaks the spell. I can’t say I never give my readers that same sort of grin, but I try to do it as little as possible. I want them thinking about the story, not about me.
4.If you could describe your style in a single word, what would it be?
Clear.
5.Are you a fast writer or a slow writer?
Painfully slow. It took me four years to write Lies. There are plenty of days when I’ll spend several hours working on a single paragraph. In an interview, Ernest Hemingway told George Plimpton he wrote forty-seven endings to A Farewell to Arms. Plimpton was dumbfounded and asked him why. Hemingway said he was “trying to get the words right.” That pretty much sums up the struggle for most writers. I have no idea how prolific authors like John Irving and Joyce Carol Oates do it. If my full-time job were to type the stuff that Stephen King writes, I’d be a year or two behind.
Lies You Wanted to Hear Page 31