The Book of Lies

by Felice Picano

  Paul was trying to catch his breath, trying not to black out from the intense and now unceasing pain in his groin. Little cartoony stars danced in front of him, yellow and red and shiny blue. He was sure he’d have to be taken to the hospital, he hurt so bad.

  Francis had moved back almost into a standing position, looking down at his brother, as though to look at his handiwork: the fallen, the conquered Paul. Half leaning against the back of the front seat, smug and sneering.

  ‘You’re not hurt,’ he had the nerve to whisper. ‘You’re just faking it. Get up!’ he repeated. ‘Or I’ll do it again!’

  He dove for Paul. Paul turned his body to avoid having the punch land where it had been aimed. Francis tried again. By now, both of Paul’s knees where drawn up against himself for protection. So, when Francis grabbed one of his legs and tried to get around it and punch Paul again, Paul simply used the other foot to push Francis off, as hard as he could.

  It worked. Paul saw his brother slam back at an awkward angle against the car door. He noted the astonished look on Francis’s face as the door gave way behind him, and before either of them could say or do anything, Francis fell back and out. The very last of his brother Paul saw were the soles of his Keds.

  Paul didn’t believe it. Not even when the door fell shut again with a light thud and Francis was not in the car. For a few seconds more he was certain Francis was outside the car somewhere, hanging on somehow, just waiting for Paul to get up and feel better, before he made his appearance and came back punching even harder, getting even.

  Somewhere behind Paul heard the screeching brakes of a car. He sat up, afraid to look back, looking instead at the rear-view mirror, in which his father’s face was curiously peering, trying to see what had happened.

  His mother’s head rose too, sleepily. ‘What is it?’ she half yawned.

  ‘Car behind us stopped suddenly,’ Dad said. ‘Guess some animal must have run out onto the highway in front of it.’

  ‘Poor thing!’ she half yawned. ‘Did he run over it?’

  ‘I guess so. He’s completely stopped. Got out of the car.’ She turned and looked at Paul, then touched his face and peered past him, trying to see behind him out the car window. She lightly held Paul’s head next to her own and she smelled so nice and warm from sleep he hoped she would never let go of him. But a second later, when she looked away and into Paul’s eyes, she swiftly understood that something wasn’t right. She searched the back of the car, and, not seeing what she was looking for, raised herself to look out the back window.

  ‘Stop!’ she shouted. ‘Stop the car.’

  Dad swerved, braking to the side of the road, shouting, ‘Sit down. What’s going on!’

  ‘It’s Francis! Francis isn’t in the car! He’s fallen out. My baby Francis. He’s been hit. My baby! My baby!’

  Then she was out of the car, and so was Dad, and Paul looked out back to where they were running, to the object huddled up and wearing Francis’s jacket, now bunched up somewhat behind the left front wheel of what looked like a two-toned green Hudson Hornet.

  Hudson Hornet: a great car to name, Paul thought. Too bad they weren’t still playing the car game.

  ‘I’m sorry, but Dr St George isn’t in his office now,’ the assistant said. Hopkins, I remembered her last name, but what was her first name? Something odd, Eleetra or was it Aleeta? No, that had been Prince Valiant’s wife’s name. ‘I don’t have you down as having an appointment,’ she added defensively.

  ‘I didn’t have one,’ I admitted. ‘I was passing by and thought he might be free.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ she repeated. Now that it was clearly not her screw-up, she could afford to be compassionate. Also she knew how well Irian and I got along. ‘I believe he’s at home. If you’d like to call him?’ She moved the phone over.

  ‘Don’t bother. It’s not that important.’

  ‘Or set up an appointment for tomorrow. He did say something about wanting to speak to you.’

  ‘Don’t bother … Maybe we should set up something.’

  After some finagling with what looked from this angle to be a suspiciously blank schedule, it was worked out that I’d see St George the next day around noon – if, I glossed it – he bothered to come into the office at all.

  In the hallway, I noticed a familiar back coming out of the little chamber that held faculty mailboxes. Although he was wearing yet another oversized, baggy rugby shirt, this time the shorts were light denim cutoffs, and so close-fitting I could easily see the squared-off concavity of his gluteus maximus. I resisted the impulse to grab one of those large shoulders to find out exactly how muscled and hard it was.

  ‘We do terrible things to students who put anonymous letters into our boxes,’ I said, in a mock-threatening tone of voice.

  Ray Rice spun around. A clear look of guilt on his fine features: a creasing of his abundant dark eyebrows, a narrowing almost to slits of those jet eyes, nostrils flared.

  ‘It’s not anonymous,’ he said. ‘And it wasn’t for you.’

  ‘Oh? For Dr St George perhaps? A letter of complaint from your male parent about my conspiracy to subvert Mom, apple pie and Mother Church and pervert you through our reading list?’

  ‘It’s not my idea,’ Rice said, surprising me by affirming what I’d only that second come up with as an explanation for his presence here. ‘And I don’t agree with it.’

  ‘Don’t you? I got the idea in class that you did?’ When he didn’t answer, ‘Or were you saying all that to establish your credentials for the female students and the other athletes?’

  ‘You’ve got me all wrong.’ Rice’s words came out hard, as though compressed by how tight-lipped he was being.

  ‘I trust a copy of that letter went to the Dean?’ I asked.

  Rice got even tighter-lipped. Meaning one had.

  ‘It won’t work,’ I said.

  ‘Gotta go!’ Rice said, and took off.

  ‘It won’t work!’ I repeated, following him. ‘St George and the Dean will both support me.’

  We’d reached a turn in the hallway. This opened to a lobby of two elevators and next to it a stairway. Ray Rice had already punched the elevator button for ‘down’ when I arrived.

  ‘St George and the Dean will both support me,’ I repeated. ‘Then where will you be?’

  Seeing that I wasn’t about to leave him, he turned resolutely toward the stairway’s door. I got to it first.

  ‘When they support me, where will you be? Have you thought of that?’

  Rice looked at me, then said, ‘He did. My dad. He thinks if I do this, you can’t give me a failing grade in class.’

  He pushed past me into the stairway, and in my surprise I let him do so. But I followed him down the stairs, catching up with him on the next landing and using my surprise to edge him into the wall.

  Before he could react I said, ‘Let me get this straight. If you set up a complaint now, at the beginning of the course, because of the course’s content, and I give you a failing grade, then you can file a formal complaint with the university board demanding a reversal and claiming what? That I was prejudiced against you from the beginning because of your so-called religious beliefs?’

  Rice looked down.

  ‘Answer me!’

  ‘Something like that,’ he slowly admitted, without looking up. ‘My dad’s a hot-shit attorney. He figured it all out.’

  I let that sink in, then asked, ‘Is that what you think?’ When he kept his head down. I repeated, ‘I asked you, Mr Rice, is that what you think? That I’m against you.’ And when he didn’t answer, I said, ‘I’m not, you know.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter whether you are or not,’ he said in that same tight, aggrieved tone of voice. ‘He and the coach looked up your specialty. They found what you’d done your master’s thesis on. They know what topic you’ve said you’re planning to do a book on as a PhD candidate. They’ve worked it all out so that you’re caught and you have to let me pass this course … so
I’ll make the team next fall.’

  This plethora of information came fast and landed hard, as he’d intended it to. But I wasn’t so easily intimidated.

  ‘If I’m caught in this net … if I’m being manipulated by them … then, well, aren’t you?’ I tried to make him see reason. ‘Even more manipulated and caught than I am?’

  ‘You think I don’t know that?’ Rice amazed me by saying, and now he looked at me right in the eye, and I could see those jet eyes weren’t all one shade of black but instead contained tiny specks of dark green, gray, olive green, hazel. ‘You think I’m so stupid I don’t know all that?’

  ‘No, no, of course you’re not stupid,’ I said. ‘I mean, if you do the class work, read some of the list, you’ll pass. I never expected anything else, really. And I don’t know what you’ve heard of me from other students, but I’m not a monster with grades. So I don’t even begin to see why you would go through all this trouble … Why let them do this to you?’

  Rice sighed and said, ‘You don’t understand. How could you? It’s different for you.’

  ‘How is it different? Explain. Try me.’

  He gave me a theatrical sigh: stock in trade of the American adolescent. ‘I let them do it to me because I have no choice. Because …’ He sighed again, half shrugged and his eyes roved. There was no doubt about it: words were failing him.

  Rice glanced up and down the stairs, then abruptly pushed me against the wall. At first I thought, he’s unbalanced. He’s going to punch me out, or shove me really hard out of his way and make good his escape. So you can imagine my astonishment when he did neither but instead grabbed my shoulders and then kissed me hard, and when, in my surprise, I gave way, he increased his grip on my shoulders and even held my head, pushed his tongue into my mouth and ranged around, kissing me with such force and completeness and need to invade me, I felt unable to respond at all.

  ‘That’s why!’ He pulled away just enough to whisper furiously into my ear. ‘I’m not the man they want me to be. Instead …’

  Rice let go of me and bounded away, down the stairs, out into the splash of bright sunlight he created flinging open the door, which he uncreated as quickly into even greater obscurity as the door slammed closed, leaving me alone and stunned on that stairway landing, totally in the dark.

  ‘… leave a message at the beep. I’ll try to get back to you.’

  Von Slyke’s voice on the library answering machine. I’d not yet figured out whether or not to change it, although I’d done so on the machine in the bedroom I stayed in.

  I was stretched out on the fainting sofa, a copy of Rowland Etheridge’s Desperately, Yours open across my chest. I’d located it on the shelf in the library that held signed copies of most of the Purple Circlers’ books. Spotting it, I’d noticed it was an original casebound publication, with the since then often reproduced photo of the two young men – the one in front’s beautiful torso, the one in back enfolding him within his muscular arms and bent head. A glance at the copyright page told me this was a first – now rare edition. The message on the flyleaf read, ‘For Dame – from an avid worshipper. This excrescence of an offering. Be not too harsh!’

  That so-Etheridge voice, and the astonishing first sentence – ‘Semen does not, as has been often averred, taste like sea water, but instead like the stuff out of which is made the rings around Saturn!’ – had pulled me into the book, but after a few pages the warmth of the early June day had conspired against me and I’d fallen asleep.

  Only to be awakened by the answering machine, and by Von Slyke’s voice itself saying, ‘… probably locate it in the …’

  I leapt up and grabbed the receiver. ‘Hello! Hello!’

  Delight. ‘You are there! How fortunate. I told Puddles you’d be out gallivanting in one of those Silver Lake bathhouses or perhaps simply extending your net of charm and beauty in one of those wonderfully trashy lounges on the Sunset Strip.’

  ‘I was reading. I fell asleep a minute.’

  ‘Reading?’

  Did he want me to say one of his books or to be honest? Who could tell?

  ‘Desperately, Yours,’ I said. I didn’t know whether or not to apologize I never could recall the intricacies of how the surviving Purples had gotten along with those Purples now dead.

  ‘That opening line!’ Von Slyke turned out to be pleased; I’d made the right choice. ‘When Rowland first read it at a Purple Circle meeting, Dom De Petrie kept murmuring something. I was next to him and I could just about make out what he was saying – it was “Rocks”. Finally, Rowland, who’d been going on gamely, ignoring Dom’s muttering, had enough. He stopped his reading with a great show of annoyance and asked what in the hell Dom was nattering on about. Dom looked embarrassed a second, then obstinately said out loud what he’d been saying under his breath and at me, “Rocks! The stuff around Saturn is composed of rocks. Ice and rocks.” We were all flabbergasted, I mean totally nonplussed for what was a very long minute, then Rowland said in the sharpest and edgiest tone of voice he could muster – and believe me that voice of his could etch basalt – “Rocks! Schmocks! It’s a metaphor, you nitwit!”’

  When he was done laughing, I said, ‘I was going to call you.’

  ‘Is everything all right?’

  ‘Oh, sure. The house is fine. Everything’s great. I mean living here is … Well, I could really get used to it, as the saying goes. No emergency. But I did have a question …’

  ‘Conchita’s there?’ Von Slyke interrupted. ‘Everything’s working out well with her? And Anselmo?’

  ‘Conchita’s fine. No problems I’m aware of. She’s not here right now. Do you want to leave her a message?’ Evidently not. So I went on, ‘Anselmo was here the other day, but I was on campus all day and missed the noise of the leaf-blower. But everything green around the place looked neat and trimmed when I got back.’

  ‘Lucky you. Listen, the reason I rang you up, besides of course to hear your creamy voice and to see if you were doing all right, is because when we got to Claridges and we went through our bags, Puddles couldn’t find his international telephone book. He thinks he left it at home. He’s desperate for the phone numbers and addresses of his sexy little friends all over Europe and he simply has to have it. Could you be a dear and go look for it? I’ll give you my agent’s FedEx number and you can send it by international overnight mail. He thinks he left it … Where, exactly, dear?’

  A moment, while I sat poised over the pad of yellow foolscap I’d found on the wickerwork chaise-longue and taken indoors the day before, thinking it might rain overnight. Was this the one Von Slyke had finished a letter upon the afternoon we’d met?

  ‘Puddles isn’t all that clear. You’ll have to go into the West Wing.’ Then, speaking into the room where he was again, ‘Do you have to shave now, dear? Can’t you come to the phone and … Oh, bother the child! Ross, love, Puddles is paranoiac about international trunk calls. He thinks the CIA is listening in all the time or something. We’ll have to do it ourselves.’

  I was across the width of the hacienda and in the bedroom in a few minutes. It still smelled of cologne: I didn’t recognize the scent, but neither did I associate it with the author, so I guessed it was the boyfriend’s – Patrick? Peter? What was his name? I must ask Conchita some time.

  I lifted the receiver and identified myself. I was trying to think how to bring up the MS I’d found when Von Slyke said, semi-exasperated, ‘And to make matters worse, Puddles has only the vaguest idea where it is. Where are you, Ross, exactly?’

  ‘Your bedroom. Sitting on the bed, left side, facing the curved wall and the window looking out to the motor court.’

  ‘A writer’s accuracy of description. There’s hope! It’s small and dark red. Check around the bed table where you picked up the phone.’

  I did. A few automobile magazines.

  ‘Nothing here. The drawer?’ I suggested. He assented.

  I found pornographic magazines with centerfold erections so lar
ge you could see every pore and count the pubic hair stubble. Plastic-covered coins of condoms. A box of over-the-counter sleeping pills. Another of antihistamines. Earplugs (which of them snored?). A tube of ‘Lube’.

  ‘Not here. Maybe the drawer on the other side of the bed?’

  That table contained the TV and VCR remote. I flipped them on and instantly – muted – came on a pornographic videodisk of a bisexual scene. A big, long-muscled, square-butted blond with his single long braid over one shoulder, being fellated by a slender, cute, avid, naked, mahogany-haired younger man while he was also being anally licked by a lithe, attractive red-headed woman wearing black leather bra and V-shaped open-front panties. The man standing was swiveled toward the camera, so one arm and hand reached out to direct each of their heads, front and behind, to his pleasure. I freezeframed it. And his figure, in fact all of their figures, seemed ancient somehow, mythic, or as though in imitation of some old artwork, a Cretan mural, a pre-Attic Greek vase painting. Were kouros ever blond or was it the bleached-out state of the found statues that made them appear so?

  I continued to search in the bed-table drawer. This contained more foolscap pads, obviously Von Slyke’s morning-in-bed writing material, pens, pencils. One pad looked as though it had been written in ballpoint and quite hard, I could make out some of the impression of lettering beneath. If I rubbed a pencil along it … Sure enough there was the word ‘everything’. And the next sentence began ‘Ross Ohrenstedt’. Wait a minute. Could this be the letter he’d been writing?

  ‘Find it yet?’ Von Slyke.

  ‘Not yet. But I feel kind of weird going through all this,’ I said. ‘It’s all so personal.’

  ‘Oh, please,’ Von Slyke demurred. ‘I’m sure it’s no different than what you’d find in the bedside-table drawer of any self-respecting homosexual in the universe.’

  ‘I don’t know about that.’

  ‘It’s not as if you haven’t already been through all of my manuscripts. What is it Ruskin said, “Once rummaged, twice raped”? Did Ruskin say that? Did I just make it up?’