My Liar

by Rachel Cline

  Laura got up from the couch and turned off the VCR. As she did, Annabeth began nervously straightening the items on the coffee table: copies of Vanity Fair and Daily Variety, Laura’s barely scribbled-on yellow pad, the video box…

  “Do you have any idea how irritating it is when you do that?”

  “Do what?” asked Annabeth.

  “Oh, don’t mind me, I’ll just straighten up a few things,” Laura said in a squeaky voice. “I’m just a little mouse with obsessive-compulsive disorder.”

  “I just—” Annabeth’s voice sounded strangled. “I mean, we’re going to have to make the place neat again before we leave…so why not do it as we go?”

  “Because I’m here to relax, that’s why. And when we leave is hardly the point. You do it in the cutting room, too—you do it in my fucking office, for crying out loud.”

  Annabeth could feel her cheeks blotching red, the way they always did right before she started to cry.

  “Oh, no,” said Laura.

  “I can’t help it,” said Annabeth, her voice thick.

  “Why do I always end up taking care of you?” Laura said, getting up to find some tissues for Annabeth, mostly as a way to avoid watching her face crumple any further. But Annabeth’s reaction was arrested by Laura’s remark. She had said the same words to David the week before.

  The next morning, Laura took Annabeth to Lone Pine proper for a diner breakfast. As they sat at the table, waiting for their coffee, Annabeth wondered if this was going to be the Dear John breakfast. After she’d come out of her bedroom that morning, Laura hadn’t said much of anything except “Do you want to go to town and get something to eat?” The next thing she knew, they were in this little café that might as well have been on the Iron Range, ordering eggs and pancakes and bacon. Annabeth finally forced herself to look up and attempt to smile, but as she did so, she saw that Laura was staring out the window in a trance of abstraction. Then Laura refocused, smiling amiably. “Let’s go to Manzanar,” she said.

  “Really?” said Annabeth.

  “Yeah, it’s right there. I’ve never been. Let’s go.”

  But Manzanar had been erased. There was an obelisk, and a plaque, and a pervasive sense of desolation, but the scouring wind had taken care of the rest, whatever the rest had been. They couldn’t even tell how big the site was. The wind felt as though it were being piped in from some other climate, some arctic region just out of sight. Annabeth was wearing a wholly inadequate denim jacket, but she had a hat on, which helped. Laura, in leather, was better protected, but her hair was getting whipped into such a frenzy that she couldn’t even read the plaque and, anyway, she wasn’t wearing her glasses. She asked Annabeth to read the inscription aloud, which she did, yelling to be heard over the gale.

  “‘In the early part of World War II, a hundred and ten thousand persons of Japanese ancestry were interned in relocation centers by Executive Order No. 9066, issued on February 19, 1942. Manzanar, the first of ten such concentration camps, was bounded by barbed wire and guard towers, confining ten thousand persons, the majority being American citizens.’” Annabeth stopped reading to consider the number: one hundred and ten thousand? She looked at Laura, trying to picture how many people that actually was, how many families. Laura just nodded, as if to say “Go on,” so she continued.

  “‘May the injustices and humiliation suffered here as a result of hysteria, racism, and economic exploitation never emerge again. California Registered Historical Landmark No. 850. Plaque placed by the State Department of Parks and Recreation in cooperation with the Manzanar Committee and the Japanese American Citizens League, April 14, 1975.’” Well, if the state of California hadn’t put up a plaque until 1975, she wasn’t that ignorant for never having heard of the place.

  The two women took a silent walk around the site, seeing remnants of building foundations as well as some strangely incomplete examples of recent care—the one remaining building had black plastic sheeting in its window frames, and a small patch of garden seemed to have been recently fenced and weeded, though nothing grew. Ultimately, it was too cold to linger and too windy to talk and they got back in the Jeep, grateful for its blasting climate-control system and heated seats.

  When Annabeth got home the next day, she found David lying on the couch watching television. She had the feeling it was all he’d done all weekend.

  “What do you know about Manzanar?” she asked him.

  David shrugged. “I’ve never been there, but there are some great photographs. Ansel Adams, or someone like that. People there making the best of it, dancing, playing softball…” He could rattle all this off without removing his eyes from The X-Files.

  “For how long?”

  “I don’t know. Forty-one to forty-three or -four?”

  “What do you mean, ‘dancing’?”

  She could see him struggling with his disinclination to abandon the exploits of Dana Scully. The show was on tape, though, so the conversation with the returning girlfriend obviously trumped it. He sat up and pressed the pause button on the remote.

  “Didn’t you learn about this in school?”

  “No, I didn’t,” Annabeth said, collapsing into the canvas butterfly chair beside the couch.

  “Well, you know, they moved whole families there, whole neighborhoods, so people did their best to build up some kind of normal life, I guess. There are pictures of, like, people gardening, and high school proms, and young men in uniform making brave good-byes…the whole thing.”

  “What kind of uniforms?”

  “Military uniforms? You know, the war?” Now he sounded sarcastic, which made Annabeth want to throw something. But she didn’t. The idea of having to re-create “normal” life from scratch in that desert of creosote and alkali was fascinating to her. She pictured herself as a young girl, playing alone in an imaginary shantytown at the Manzanar site. She pictured herself scrubbed clean and dressed in the 1940s version of a prom dress, on the arm of a skinny Japanese boy. She pictured herself weeping, saying good-bye to the boy, now in uniform. Then she emended—not weeping, waving stoically. Looking again at David, she remembered his mother’s murdered parents. It was disgusting to invent tragedy, she told herself, but the Japanese boy still looked back at her with sad eyes.

  18

  One morning in March, Annabeth found Simpson sitting on the couch in her cutting room, returning phone calls. It was not the first time; he seemed to like having the background noise on his calls, frequently apologizing to his callers in very specific terms (“Sorry about the playback,” “Forgive me, I’m calling from the cutting room here”). What was unusual was that when he saw her on this particular morning, he started gesturing furiously for her to wait, indicating that he had something important to tell her, or perhaps that the building was on fire—all she could really figure out was that he was excited and, for some reason, she was the one he wanted to tell about whatever was exciting him. She walked up to the Avid and switched it on, still watching him, nodding, smiling, not sure whether or not she was supposed to sit down and start working.

  “No, no, that’s unacceptable,” Simpson was saying, grinning like a jack-o’-lantern. “I’ll get it from somewhere else then.” And then to Annabeth, with his right hand still holding down the telephone’s hook switch: “It looks like I’ve got Oscar tickets. Wanna come?”

  It was not a question anyone in their zip code, or in any of the five surrounding zip codes, would even blink before answering in the affirmative. Only after he’d left did Annabeth begin to ponder the ramifications of having accepted: Why hadn’t he asked Laura first? How could she drive up to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in her battered Honda? What on earth would she wear?

  She was saved the trouble of explaining the circumstances to Laura by Simpson himself. “I hope you don’t mind—I’m taking your editor to the Oscars with me,” he told her over lunch at Campanile, secretly gleeful as her cool gold eyes widened noticeably, which had been the whole point. He’d heard that
Jon Golden had recently been shopping around a project with Laura attached, a project that they wanted to start as soon as Trouble Doll wrapped, reportedly. Taking Annabeth to the Oscars was his way of letting Laura know that her disloyalty had consequences.

  The next morning, Simpson was back in Annabeth’s room to commence preparations. “Hey, what’s your dress size?” he said.

  “My what?”

  “I’ve got a friend at Calvin Klein—they’ll comp you a dress if your size hasn’t been all grabbed up by the stampede of ingenues.”

  “What do you mean, comp me a dress?” “Loan it to you, for free, to wear to the Oscars. Everyone does it.”

  “What if I spill something?”

  Simpson laughed. Annabeth didn’t. “I won’t let you near anything that stains, how’s that?”

  Gifts always made Annabeth uncomfortable, but was this a gift or just a professional courtesy? She was on a tight schedule, she was supposed to be working—didn’t he get that?

  He continued: “I think a dove gray or a very pale yellow. Or white? What do you think?”

  “I have no idea?” Her rising inflection seemed to imply something else, but what she said next was “I generally stick with white, black, and locker room grey.”

  “Black would wash you out completely—we have the same coloring, in case you haven’t noticed.” And then he left, as suddenly as he had appeared. A few hours later, Laura appeared in the doorway, noisily swirling an iced coffee.

  “I think yellow is a good idea,” she said to Annabeth’s back. Annabeth didn’t know what she was talking about. Laura continued, “For the dress. It’s television—you need a color to even be visible.” She seated herself on the spare swivel chair and crab-walked it up beside Annabeth’s.

  Annabeth didn’t want to discuss her Oscar date with Laura. It didn’t feel safe at all. Which was too bad, because she didn’t know anyone with better taste in clothes. “Really?” she tried, weakly.

  “Oh, come on, live a little, Annabeth. You’re going to the Oscars!”

  “What would you wear?”

  “Something fabulous.”

  Annabeth nodded, trying to translate “fabulous” into an item she could picture.

  “What about pink,” Laura went on. “You can wear pink, can’t you?”

  “Can we talk about something else?” said Annabeth. Laura laughed and swayed back and forth a bit, using her feet to pivot.

  “Is he hiring a limo?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What parties are you going to, after?”

  “Oh, come on, Laura. I’m not going anywhere. I feel bad enough about leaving David home as it is.”

  “David’s not in the industry—what does he care?”

  “Wouldn’t you bring Greg if you could?”

  Laura considered. “No,” she said, biting her lip as though it hurt her to admit it. “I’d bring someone I could order around, who would step back when the photographers queued up…someone like you.” It was an evil remark, but Laura delivered it with a lightness that belied that.

  “Are you mad at me?” asked Annabeth.

  Laura snorted, then stood up. “What is this, fifth grade?”

  This was one of those no-win conversations. She used to have them all the time with her mother. “Well, if you ever are, I hope you’ll tell me,” she said, but the line reading seemed unconvincing.

  A few days later, Annabeth and David were looking at the Sunday paper. The Calendar section was full of Oscar-related stories.

  “Maybe I should just beg off,” said Annabeth. David didn’t have to ask what she was talking about.

  “Do you think he’s going to make a pass at you or something?” he asked.

  She didn’t. The thing that made her uneasy about Simpson was less obvious than that, although sexual discomfort was also part of it. There was something about the way he treated her that was so…avuncular? As though he’d known her all her life, read her diary, seen her naked—none of those were it, but all of them were close. She even sometimes imagined that he was her half sibling, a member of the family her father must have decided he liked better in the end. She’d never told anyone about the other-family theory, though, and now seemed like the wrong time.

  “So, I don’t get it,” David said. “Isn’t this the senior prom? Haven’t you always wanted to go?”

  She had. Annabeth nodded and looked again at the newspaper page in front of her. The Best Actress nominees were pictured: Holly Hunter, Emma Thompson, Stockard Channing…Lion-faced Laura would’ve wiped the floor with any one of them, looks-wise. Annabeth had never seen Laura in a dress, let alone a gown, but she was sure the effect would be stupendous. David hadn’t shown any interest at all in what Annabeth was going to wear—she hadn’t perceived the first sign of jealousy on his part. She would have been insanely jealous if the shoe was on the other foot. David smiled at her as he reached for the Sports section. Everything looked jolly, over at his end of the table. Why was she so uptight?

  “Do you think it’s too late for me to ask Laura to go in my place?”

  “Uh, isn’t that Simpson’s call? I mean, they’re his tickets.”

  “I could tell him I thought it was a bad career move for me.”

  “Yeah, but wouldn’t that kind of imply that dissing him was more acceptable than dissing Laura?” He had a good point.

  When Annabeth had first arrived in L.A., she had been astounded by the beauty and abundance of the place: the flowers, the palm trees, the almost pornographic displays of produce at the market—it seemed to promise an endless parade of more and better. And to some extent it had delivered. Eight weeks ago she had been on the threshhold of everything, of the life she thought she’d always wanted, and now she was even going to the Oscars. But somehow the exaltation, the adrenaline and wonder, had burned off as mysteriously as the morning fog. Anyone could go to the Oscars, it turned out, even Annabeth—so then what? “You come looking for Hollywood,” Janusz had once told her, “but you wind up in Los Angeles, and this is the problem.”

  19

  The day he heard that Kurt Cobain was in a coma in Italy, David reopened the wound on his foot to clean it with a penknife. The skin had healed over but badly, and it still felt tender. It gave readily under the less-than-razor-sharp blade, but he couldn’t find anything trapped there—no pus, no pebble, no excuse for limping around.

  He had been asleep when the radio came on, so the news about Kurt (he thought of him as a friend) reached him in that state where dreams mix easily with information from the world outside. In David’s half sleep the news about Kurt’s coma resulted in a dream about a heart-shaped reliquary—a jeweled box containing bits of jagged bone and gouts of flesh. He knew that the item was precious and closed it up again, quickly hoping he had not harmed it—maybe the box itself was an organ, a life. In David’s childhood home, too much attention to one’s body was frowned upon, even when one was spanking clean and in robust health, perhaps especially then. He was not supposed to be naked, except in the bath. Kurt’s songs felt like the antidote to that sense of physical shame. They brought the body’s effusions and illnesses into the daylight. He didn’t like the thought of their author in a Roman hospital.

  And, though he had carefully sterilized the knife blade on the front burner of the old O’Keefe and Merritt stove, David’s foot was soon infected.

  Annabeth drove her beat-up Honda only as far as Simpson’s case-study-style house in Mount Washington on Oscar night. As it turned out, Simpson’s Calvin Klein connection was not as solid as he had hoped, so he had rented Annabeth a gown from a resale shop in Beverly Hills, correctly assuming that she would never know the difference. It was extraordinarily simple, a beautiful pale gray, and if it had been properly altered for her it would have swooped where it unfortunately sagged. Annabeth had no ass to speak of. Simpson had also hired Inga, the makeup “artist” from Trouble Doll, to do Annabeth’s face while she sat on a barstool in his kitchen and he
chatted inanely. It was the first time she had ever been professionally made up and the sensation was so intimate she almost couldn’t bear it. When Inga was finished with Annabeth, she also dusted some sparkly stuff on Simpson, who giggled like a schoolgirl. It was then that Annabeth realized they were both high on coke.

  Sitting in the Town Car a few minutes later, Annabeth knew she should be feeling like Cinderella but she kept thinking of Maria in Lost Horizon, whose illusion of youthful beauty was destroyed as soon as she stepped across the invisible boundary between Shangri-La and the real world. The drive to the Music Center seemed endless. For almost an hour, they spasmed along—going five miles an hour, then twelve, then seven—even after they were within easy walking distance of their destination. No one would dream of walking up to the Oscars. Annabeth doubted that it was even possible. Instead, they sat in their little metal box surrounded by other cars—all spewing exhaust and radiating heat—and Annabeth could feel her makeup start to melt and her nervous sweat start to soak the armpits of the dress (which she still mistakenly believed was worth more than she earned in a month). She looked over at Simpson. Thank God it wasn’t an actual limo, she thought; if she’d had to sit facing him the whole time she would have given up before they even got there, or would at least have broken into the cut-glass decanter of cheap vodka in the fold-down bar. Of course that was probably just a prop.

  Simpson, meanwhile, was gazing out the window quite happily, tapping out a little rhythm on the knee of his disinterested-looking Jil Sander tux. He felt her gaze, but didn’t turn. “Isn’t this wicked cool?” he said.

  “I’m a little bit intimidated,” said Annabeth, and thought, Duh.

  “That’s the fun part.” Then he turned toward her. “Couple of kids from the Great Plains at the big tent.”