The Liar's Wife

by Mary Gordon

  ALSO BY MARY GORDON

  Fiction

  The Love of My Youth

  The Stories of Mary Gordon

  Pearl

  Final Payments

  The Company of Women

  Men and Angels

  Temporary Shelter

  The Other Side

  The Rest of Life

  Spending

  Nonfiction

  Reading Jesus

  Circling My Mother

  Good Boys and Dead Girls

  The Shadow Man

  Seeing Through Places

  Joan of Arc

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by Mary Gordon

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Regal Literary for permission to reprint an excerpt from “The Problem of Freedom: The Crisis of Democracy” (“Das Problem der Freiheit”), by Thomas Mann, copyright © 1939 by Bermann-Fischer Verlag. All rights reserved by S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main. Reprinted by permission of Regal Literary.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gordon, Mary, [date]

  [Novellas. Selections]

  The liar’s wife : four novellas / Mary Gordon.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-307-37743-2 (hardcover).

  ISBN 978-0-307-90888-9 (eBook).

  I. Title.

  PS3557.o669L63 2014 813′.54—dc23 2013043926

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Jacket design by Linda Huang

  v3.1

  I would like to thank Leslie Vosshall of The Rockefeller University, who talked to me about mosquitoes, and Meredith Martin, who talked to me about art.

  for David Plante

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Dedication

  The Liar’s Wife

  Simone Weil in New York

  Thomas Mann in Gary, Indiana

  Fine Arts

  Afterword

  A Note About the Author

  Reading Group Guide

  The Liar’s Wife

  A YELLOW TRUCK WAS PARKED across the street, in front of the Chelford-Johnsons’.

  It looked all wrong.

  It was a delivery truck, but if the Chelford-Johnsons were having something delivered, why wasn’t the truck parked in the driveway?

  The truck, parked where it was, made Jocelyn uneasy. She was alone in the house. She had just come in from the back garden, closing the curtains for the night. Until she saw the truck she had been happy.

  It was early evening, August 7. She had been standing out on the lawn, holding her glass of wine, lifting it up so that the sun’s last rays were trapped in it.

  Summer evening, her favorite kind of weather.

  Heat was a presence, a companion, but not, as in the daytime, an oppressor. And the heaviness was potent; it reminded you that you were a creature with a body, and sometimes it made the body’s longing sharp for sex, food, simple touch, and sometimes it made the body feel at peace with itself. Sometimes a warm breeze skittered along the surface of the skin like a flame along pavement, a match dropped onto a thin, invisible stream of gasoline.

  When she was younger, these summer evenings had everything to do with sex. She had felt herself desirable on evenings such as this. Her sense of her own desire and her own desirability made her feel the simultaneous heaviness and lightness that made her love this weather. When no one was looking, she would fall to the ground, crouch on the grass or roll in it, or sometimes she literally flapped her arms, expecting to take flight.

  But that was over. She had the compulsion neither to drop down nor to fly up. Still she was happy. Very happy here, tonight.

  “Jossie,” her mother would call out from the back porch when Jocelyn was standing here among the trees, wanting to fall or fly. “Come have some lemonade.”

  She had loved her mother.

  I couldn’t sell this house because I loved my mother.

  Her mother. Always when she thought of her mother she thought of her lovely hands, always cool and the beautifully shaped nails, polished with clear varnish, and the exposed half-moons that she, as a child, had traced with her small, shapeless fingers. Her hands had become her mother’s, and she was grateful that, like her mother’s, her hands had not grown gnarled or twisted or spotted as she aged. She thought of the cool feeling of her mother’s hands on her forehead when she had a fever. And her mother sitting in her study, bent over her work. She made anatomical drawings to illustrate medical textbooks. As a child, Jocelyn had loved watching her create veins and arteries, then the larger projects: kidney, liver, lungs. Jocelyn couldn’t draw “for beans,” as she often said, sometimes wondering what beans had to do with it, and who had originally been paid in beans.

  Her mother had been dead two years. She had died in the house, her house, but not in her own bed; it was a hospital bed, metallic, mechanical, which had been brought in to replace the beautiful mahogany four-poster with the pineapple corner posts. But at least she had died among her own things. Her silver-backed hairbrushes, her scent bottles on a lace cloth on top of the Sheraton chest, below the oval mirror. The mirror in which her mother had seen herself a young bride, a young mother, then aging, and finally, old, near death. It would have been sensible to sell the house when her mother died, but Jocelyn had not. Because she hadn’t wanted to. Simply, she hadn’t wanted to give it up. She didn’t want to give up what she thought of as her trees: chestnut, oak, hickory, sugar maple. She didn’t want them to belong to someone else.

  So she had made up a kind of story. First to herself, and then she began saying it aloud. “We’re keeping the house in New Canaan as a weekend house. A getaway from the city. Nantucket is just too far.” Her husband’s family had bought a house on Nantucket in the thirties. Richard had inherited it.

  “It’s that damn ferry,” she would say, as if she needed to justify herself, though no one had accused her. “You wouldn’t think of going there for a weekend, even a long weekend, even a very, very long weekend,” she would say, cocking her head as if to make a joke of her own position, which she knew to be extreme. “This way, we can just nip up here anytime for a little R & R. Just a nip,” she said, using, she knew, the alcoholic’s diction of evasion. Just a nip.

  Her next-door neighbor, seeing her at the house, had brought a small bunch of sweet peas. She’d been moved by her neighbor’s kindness. Janet Wilkinson, who had lived next door for more than twenty years, and kept an eye out, always, for Jocelyn’s mother. What was her work? Jocelyn tried to remember. Telecommunications. That was the kind of word that stopped the mind making pictures. Or at least her mind.

  The sweet peas were a dark purple that seemed almost navy blue, almost not a proper color for a flower. Such a saturated darkness, and weren’t flowers supposed to invoke brightness, not the dark? But they were lovely in their saturated darkness, and the graceful folding of their petals, leaning inwards, almost touching, tender on their light green, fragile stems.

  Janet Wilkinson had brought her purple sweet peas in a plain glass bottle which might very well have once held medicine. But the shape was pleasing.

  What did Janet Wilkinson make of
Jocelyn’s uneven habitation of the house? It almost shamed her, with its hint of wastefulness, of laxity. The house was large. A large house in New Canaan, Connecticut. “Worth a fortune” is the phrase she knew would come first to people’s minds.

  “I love the scent of sweet peas,” Janet Wilkinson had said, putting her face (which was almost a perfect oval, tan now: she’d had two weeks in Martha’s Vineyard) close to the elegant flowers. Jocelyn had been surprised. She hadn’t thought of sweet peas as having a scent. And the scent was, in itself, surprising. Neither sweet nor sharp, subtle but direct, a kind of simple presence with a plain insistence on itself.

  People didn’t credit the sense of smell nearly enough. Jocelyn believed that firmly. For thirty-five years, she’d worked in a lab that was involved in the study of mosquitoes, and the life, the fate, the impact on the world of mosquitoes was inextricably connected with their extraordinarily well-developed sense of smell.

  Standing on the back porch, Jocelyn could see Janet Wilkinson walking around in the half-light of her kitchen. Had Janet Wilkinson ever married? She had come to Phillips Road as a woman in late middle age. She could have married and divorced; somehow it was something that neither Jocelyn nor her mother had felt free to ask, and Janet had never spoken of it. Was Janet Wilkinson a lesbian? Or not very sexual? Or just unlucky in love? Not being very sexual was, Jocelyn had come to believe, a much more common, much more deeply kept secret in these post-Freudian, post–sexual liberation days. She had come to believe it only recently, when she’d experienced it herself.

  She preferred to think that Janet loved women. She preferred thinking of it that way, she didn’t like the word “lesbian,” with its swampy sound, although she liked lesbians, had loved some, though she hadn’t gone so far as to make love to another woman. Not yet, she’d always said. Certainly the excitant of a loved, an admired woman, made the skin ripple in a way that was something like what one felt for a desired man. But only something like. Well, she would never know now. Although she’d seen surprising things among her cohort, she believed there would be no new surprises in her life. Not good surprises, anyway. It was, perhaps, another instance of her lack of courage.

  Was it lack of courage that kept her from selling the house?

  She had long ago come to terms with the idea that she was not a courageous person. A courageous person would not be made uneasy by a yellow truck parked on the street. But the truck had wrecked her peace; she could no longer keep herself from peeking from behind the curtains to see if the truck was still there.

  It had not moved. In the dim light she could make out the writing on the truck’s side. FRITO-LAY, it said. The words alarmed her. There was no reason for a Frito-Lay truck to be parked on Phillips Road in New Canaan, Connecticut. Dire thoughts raced through her brain. She began with the simplest. They were burglars. Or it could be much worse. They could be kidnappers; the Chelford-Johnsons were a young couple; they had two children, both, Jocelyn was sure, under ten. Or it could be even worse than that: perhaps they were terrorists, perhaps in the yellow body of the enormous truck there was an arsenal that would destroy the neighborhood, the town. She saw the street littered with arms and legs strewn on the pavement like leafy branches after a violent storm. She thought of calling Janet Wilkinson. But that would be absurd, it would be shaming. She was seventy-two years old, and at her age, one had to be careful of many things, not the least of which was appearing to be a scared old lady. A crazy old lady. A crackpot. A pain in the neck.

  She forced herself to go back outside. She forced herself to think of her mother, her mother’s calmness. And her father, who, with every breath, every step, conveyed the sense to Jocelyn that she would always be quite safe.

  She turned on the back porch light. The air was saturated with the seductive scent of nicotiana, tobacco plant. It was a scent her mother had loved. She walked into the dimness, comforted by the presence of her beloved ghosts.

  We were a happy family, she thought, holding her glass to catch the last light, feeling the presence of her parents, loving ghosts, hovering beside her. There was a literal sense, she thought, in which she was trying to catch the last light, to make it sink into the gold of her wine so she could take it in, swallow it along with her Pinot Grigio. Quiet, quietly affectionate … perhaps a bit undemonstrative. No, she’d be honest. We were stingy in our expression of affection. She’d learned that from Richard’s family, Jews from Poland, Russia, who praised and kissed each other loudly and loudly argued and accused.

  We were a loving family. And yet, she thought, somehow it seems that I was often sad.

  Days spent sitting under the stairs sorting remnants of fabric her mother had saved for her. The sense that a day of clouds was her appropriate weather. The choked silence in the school yard: what if no one likes me? A desire to hide from the signs of misery: from the Down syndrome cousin, fully adult and yet a child. A story in Life magazine about a girl in an iron lung. The sound of the word “refugee” and images of piled bodies in concentration camps, and her night terrors that she would be taken, she the daughter of prosperous parents, and she knew she was not one of the marked ones, the ones who had been taken, so she was ashamed of her own terror, her own fear, ashamed to cry out, crying silently, both in fear and taken over by the question: What if the world is not a good place? So her parents had grown vigilant. She’d heard them: “Don’t let her see that—keep it away from her.” The time she wept for the children in a puppet movie of Hansel and Gretel was a family joke. She’d cried because in winter the swings in the playground had been taken down. Where had they been taken? She hadn’t believed her mother when she said, “You’ll see, they’ll be back in the springtime like the flowers and the birds.” She had believed her mother was trying to protect her, because she believed that her mother was very kind. But her deepest belief was that there was no real protection, no possibility of being fully safe.

  Where had it come from, this overriding lack of courage? This sense the worst could always happen. Not from her parents: her forthright, accomplished father, who had been in the War, and liked nothing more than a good laugh. Her gentle mother, who she believed was always humming under her breath, a tender song, maybe something from an operetta or a ballad popular in the late nineteenth century. Nothing later than 1925.

  She had not been courageous.

  Her life had turned out to be far happier than what she had feared would be her fate.

  A happy marriage. Healthy children, happier themselves than not. Work she enjoyed. More than enough money. And yet, sometimes, inexplicably, this sadness, this fear: What if the world is not a good place? What if the worst came to the worst?

  It never resolved itself into a wish for death. Rather, now that the children were grown, the thought descended on her lightly, like a warm cloak on an early autumn day: It would be all right to die now. I wouldn’t mind. I have had, in many ways, enough.

  Enough is enough.

  She had often heard her mother use that expression and only recently had she the impulse to ask the ghost, who was her mother: What does that mean, “Enough is enough”?

  She had enjoyed her life, more than not. But she could not say she was avid that it should go on forever. She didn’t think anything happened to you after death. She supposed it was something like sleep. That was all right; often, she quite enjoyed sleeping. She hoped it would come before she ended up like her mother, her sweet mother, who had died demented, raving, furious. From this she had learned that there were many things worse than death.

  Was it all about sex? Was the sense that you’d had enough of life connected to the knowledge that sex was finished? People would be surprised how ardent she had been for sex. How she had loved the bodies of men. At a friend’s sixtieth birthday party, to which only women were invited, some of the guests had carried on about their dislike of penises. When some of them—perhaps having had more wine than they were used to and feeling free because they were only with other women—had spoken of
their distaste, she, perhaps a bit drunk herself, had said, “I have to say that when it comes to penises, I’m a fan.” And everyone had laughed, because she was pretty sure they hadn’t thought of her as a passionate person. Even someone much interested in sex. “A cool customer,” she’d heard someone say about her once.

  But when she was young, she felt herself often in the grips of something she thought was an ugly word: “lust.” The final letters, “ust,” so unlike the crackling or flaming of what she felt. For a long time, having sex itself was wonderful; it took a while to realize that there was good sex and bad sex, that there was a range of performance options. Oral sex, for example, was something she’d had to work up to slowly, whereas now it seemed to be the first thing teenagers did, and they didn’t even think of it as sex. It wasn’t until she’d married Richard that she’d become in any way expert.

  And then, as strong as sex, as violent, as entirely absorbing, there’d been the searing love of children. Nothing of the nursery pastel about it: rich, dark as blood. In her work with mosquitoes, she had identified with the maligned female, who, in order to reproduce, required what was called a blood meal. When she first heard the words she found them exciting, arousing even: they seemed so plainly brutal. Blood meal. Each word one syllable. Each suggesting what was necessary to maintain life. Blood. Meal. Violent, destructive, voracious. Mother love.

  Her children were grown now, and if she died now their lives would not be ruined. She worried about them less, but they were always at the front of her brain. Erika, headstrong, prone to wildness, an economist now, specializing in microloans for African women. Herself the mother of two sons, Benjamin and Nathan, twelve and ten. Vincent, her son, at thirty-nine, had not yet married. Drawn to beautiful, self-dramatizing girls (with whom Jocelyn always sympathized): none of them good candidates for happy marriage. She hoped he would someday be a father; she knew he would be wonderful at that. He worked too hard. He said he liked being his own boss. A landscape gardener. How much she’d learned from him; he’d allowed her to become a gardener herself, rather than simply reiterating her mother’s old plantings. He was always bringing things to delight and surprise her. Deep red dahlias. Blue-black salvia. Left with a note on the table, “Mom: enjoy.”