The Liar's Wife

by Mary Gordon

  It was possible he would not have children, and then she would never have a granddaughter. The female line ended. Perhaps it didn’t matter. She adored her grandsons. The love of grandchildren—embarrassing almost to speak of it, as if you were putting yourself in the category of retirees on tour buses, eating dinner at 5:00 p.m. It was not the tearing love of a mother: it lacked the element of terror, it was not up to you to keep them alive. Rather it was a swim in a temperate sea, with the occasional intoxicating, gentle swell. When they were babies, she could reenter the blissful moments of her own young motherhood; put her lips to their heads and necks, breathe in the yeasty smell and feel the old swoon. But they were twelve and ten now, and she couldn’t think of taking them in her lap. Their embraces now were rushed and guarded. As they should be. But it was another loss.

  She would not allow herself to go into the house to check to see if the truck was still there.

  Taking a drink from her glass, the glass that had been her mother’s, hearing the light breeze soughing through the trees, the trees she had loved as a child, she knew that she was happy. Now happiness felt like a piercing, a sharp point pressed against the heart, relieving some pressure, creating another kind of lightness: a relief from something, a suggestion of something. And accompanied by words now, “Thank you” (but to whom?).

  The doorbell’s ringing startled her. No one came to this house spontaneously; no one who knew anything about anything would ring this bell without a call first. The doorbell ringing at seven o’clock in the evening could only signal something wrong. An emergency. Her mind went first to her grandchildren. Then to Richard. A heart attack. A car accident. It was too late for Jehovah’s Witnesses. She walked quickly from the backyard to the front door, and with each step the two words pressed into her brain: Something wrong. Something wrong.

  She ran to the table in the front hall to get her cell phone. The doorbell rang again, louder this time, three rings now, more insistent. Then a woman’s voice. Southern. “Jocelyn. Yoo-hoo.”

  It was quite possibly a trap. She wouldn’t open the door. She went to the window, opened it a crack, and shouted, “Can I help you?”

  The minute she’d said these words, she felt a fool. Can I help you? Can I help you steal my things and leave me tied to the dining room chair? The woman knew her name. Was this a good sign or a bad sign?

  She switched on the porch light. The woman wasn’t young, although Jocelyn couldn’t quite fix her age. Her hair was blond, but badly dyed. “Tortured” was the word that came to mind. It looked fried: or like a kind of scorched grain. She was wearing low-rider jeans and a T-shirt that said BORN TO BE WILD. Her breasts were very large, disproportionately large for what seemed an almost distressingly thin body. Now that she was in her seventies and the looks of people her age varied so dramatically, Jocelyn often felt stumped to guess people’s ages. She’s my age, Jocelyn thought. Maybe a bit younger. Or older. But what did it matter? she asked herself. She could still be a gangster’s front woman, the granny who softened the potential victim.

  Whoever she is, Jocelyn thought, she doesn’t belong here. Whatever she’s doing here, she’s out of place on Phillips Road.

  She was struck with displeasure at her own snobbishness. This feeling took its place beside two other conflicting feelings: the terror of being hacked to death with a meat cleaver and the terror of seeming rude.

  “Now I know I’m a stranger,” the woman said, or shouted, “and believe you me I know it’s a little odd and I understand your suspicions, believe you me I do. A woman alone can’t be too careful. Who knows who’s out there these days?”

  If the woman was trying to reassure her, she hadn’t succeeded. How did she know Jocelyn was alone?

  Jocelyn allowed her tone to become sharper.

  “What is it that you want?”

  “I have a message from a friend,” the woman said, stepping back into the porch light. The yellow light was disastrously falling on what Jocelyn could see was a set of very bad false teeth. The overwhite smile made Jocelyn want to turn away.

  “A friend?”

  “A very old, very dear friend,” the woman said. And then, stepping back as if she were about to break into song, she dropped her arms to her sides, raised her palms to the porch ceiling, and said loudly,

  “Johnny Shaughnessy.”

  Jocelyn sat down heavily on the sofa.

  It was impossible.

  Johnny Shaughnessy.

  Her first husband.

  Her first love.

  She hadn’t seen him in fifty years.

  She had known him less than two.

  She had run from him, run away leaving only a note on the white deal table, “I had to go home.”

  She was suddenly struck at the oddness: in the years that had gone by, she had rarely thought of Johnny.

  How could it be that you had married someone, loved someone, and then never thought about them?

  And now, after all this time, he was here. Of course she’d have to let him in the house.

  But how would she say this in a way that was neither unwelcoming nor encouraging of too much—what? Intimacy? Friendship? Time? What could she say? “Bring him in. I’ll see him now. I’m ready.” What she decided to say was not quite true, but it had the virtue of seeming inoffensive.

  “I’d like to see him. Of course I would.”

  The woman reached into the back pocket of her jeans. She took out a lime green cell phone and pressed one key.

  “It seems you’re as welcome as the flowers in May, as one of your old songs goes,” she said.

  She stood on the porch, beckoning Johnny in, as if it were her house, as if she were the hostess. Jocelyn stood behind her, still in the living room.

  The door of the truck opened. The driver’s door. He walked towards the house.

  It was too dark for her to make out features, but even in this light his walk was familiar to her, that mix, that had once so aroused her, of confidence and hesitation, born of the sense that was nearly but not quite absolute: everyone would be glad to see him. And there was no need to thrust or push or even rush to make his presence felt. He was still thin; and although you heard that in age people got shorter, she hadn’t noticed it yet in her friends, and she didn’t see it in him. He had all his hair, and it hadn’t seemed to turn gray; it was still blond, golden even. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt whose inscription she couldn’t read … did it match the woman’s? Like her, he wore cowboy boots. The buckle of his belt was elaborate, but Jocelyn couldn’t read the lettering. Why was he trying to pass himself off as a cowboy? She remembered that he’d loved American Westerns, loved the part of America that she felt no connection to, that slightly embarrassed her. Elvis, for example. He was crazy about Elvis, whom she considered at best mildly mortifying, at worst a bore.

  From this distance, he appeared to be much younger than she knew he was. She saw that he had his right hand in his pocket, and she knew what he was doing; playing with a coin, turning it up and down. It was what he did when he was nervous, and of course, he would be nervous seeing her.

  He jumped up the three porch stairs—still, she thought, the master of the boyish gesture.

  “Well, Jossie, if you’re not a sight for sore eyes. You haven’t changed a bit.”

  And you’re still a liar, she wanted to say, surprised at her own bitterness.

  “Won’t you sit down,” she said, indicating the couch to them, displeased at her own diction.

  The woman sat down and patted the chintz fabric of the couch. “Johnny was as nervous as a cat that you wouldn’t want to see him. I said, ‘Johnny if she don’t want to see you we just start up the truck and just take off, like we never been here.’ But he says to me, ‘Linnet my love,’ he calls me that, I think it’s the Irish way, ‘Linnet my love,’ he says to me, ‘you go in first, to pave the way.’ I said to him, ‘For Lord’s sake, Johnny, after all this time there’s bound to be no hard feelings.’ ”

  Hard f
eelings. Jocelyn thought. No hard feelings. What would be the opposite of hard feelings? Soft feelings. The truth is, Linnet my love, she wanted to say, I have no feelings at all.

  She felt ashamed at her own nullity of heart. In place of sadness or regret there was simple curiosity. Johnny Shaughnessy was seventy-five. He’d been twenty-five when she’d last seen him. In her mind, he was still twenty-five, and Johnny had always been much more boy than man. And so, like some joke speeded-up film, the boy in her mind was the old man in her living room.

  “It means the world to him,” Linnet said. “I can tell you that for sure.”

  Johnny seemed to want to let Linnet talk. He was looking down at the carpet, as if the pattern were a code he might, with luck, break.

  “Linnet,” she said. “That’s a lovely name. Unusual.”

  “My father was Canadian.”

  She wondered what that had to do with anything. She tried to remember what a linnet looked like, but she was pretty sure it was a small bird, rather delicate. But there was nothing delicate about this woman, with her tortured hair, her oversized breasts, her Born to Be Wild T-shirt, her long red nails. The stench of cigarette smoke clung to her. Jocelyn wondered if her breasts were real. It seemed unlikely, given the smallness of the woman’s frame. But what did it matter if she’d had—a phrase Jocelyn loathed—a boob job? She wouldn’t be spending enough time with her for it to matter one way or another. A few minutes, half an hour perhaps. Then she’d be gone from Jocelyn’s life, as quickly and easily as she’d entered it. Taking Johnny with her. Quickly and for good.

  “You’re probably surprised to see an old Frito-Lay’s truck parked in front of your house, on your nice street. But it’s our job. It’s a pretty common job for senior citizens. Pretty common for retirees trying to supplement a pension. Cross-country hauling, I mean to say. Of course we’re not exactly retirees. A musician never retires. For a musician, retirement and death are the same word. And the Lord knows neither of us have a pension.”

  “You’re still playing and singing, Johnny?” Jocelyn asked, glad to think of something to say.

  “We both do, Jossie,” Johnny said. “We call ourselves Dixie and Dub.”

  “On account of he’s from Dublin and I’m from Tennessee.”

  “Oh, yes I see,” she said, wanting to add, You were better than that when I knew you.

  It was the fourteenth of July, 1962, the day she met him. She remembered it was Bastille Day.

  He had come into their lives because her father had met him on the train. His usual train, the 5:38. Johnny had sat down next to him, out of breath, having only just made the all-aboard. She always imagined a conductor shouting “All aboard” and Johnny running down the track, jumping onto the train at the last minute. But she wasn’t really sure if anyone shouted “All aboard” on suburban commuter trains.

  Johnny had engaged her father in conversation. Had her father been reluctant, putting his face in his New York Times to seem discouraging? But no shield could withstand the thrusts of Johnny Shaughnessy when he was determined to make contact. Of course her father had been charmed. Perhaps it was his voice, the beautiful Irish cadences, making you feel you’d never heard English spoken properly before. Her father had been seduced. Johnny was a seducer. His seduction of her was in a way the least spectacular of the many she’d observed. He had seduced her, but it had been he who’d been abandoned. There was a category “seducer,” but none for the abandoner. That is who she had been.

  Johnny had missed his station: New Rochelle. What had got into her father, that he’d invited Johnny home for supper? It was quite unlike him; he was a careful, a reserved, a predictable man. But he arrived at the door with Johnny, Johnny with his rucksack and guitar. Like the wanderer in an adventure story.

  She had wondered later about her father’s unusual impulse, inviting a stranger to dinner. Was it a vestigial longing for the wildness and camaraderie of the War? Lieutenant Pemberton. Stationed in France 1941–45, an orderly in a wartime hospital. He never spoke of it.

  Or was it that in Johnny he saw the son he’d always wanted, lighthearted, free, so different from the careful women—wife and daughter—he’d come home to after the War?

  Summer of 1962. It might have been one of the best summers in the history of the world to have been young and in love. If you were healthy, prosperous, American.

  She had just graduated from Cornell, B.S. in animal physiology. She had wanted to be an entomologist, wanting to work in a laboratory, but not like her father: he was involved in cancer research, and she didn’t want to work at something where so much was at stake. She preferred the nineteenth-century model of scientist, naturalists they were called, whose métier was slow observation and precise recording. She took the job in the lab of Dr. Probst, her father’s friend, just to give herself time to figure out her next move. “Rest, you need your rest, after the ordeal of senior year and all those exams,” her mother said, having no real idea of what Jocelyn’s college life had been. She had worked hard, but certainly not to the point of exhaustion, like many of her friends. She never left things to the last minute, and she wasn’t given much to late nights. She dated, but the men she met didn’t interest her enough to become seriously involved. She was famous for refusing a fourth date, although if they were handsome she enjoyed the light kissing and fumblings in the backs of cars, the incomplete expressions of desire in the dormitory “parietal hours.” But no one interested her enough to give up her virginity, which was still, in 1962, something of a big deal for someone like her.

  She enjoyed working in the lab; everyone was young and enthusiastic. Often they went out for drinks after work. She couldn’t remember what they talked about. Nothing very serious. Five years later, it would have been impossible not to talk about politics. But in June 1962 it was certainly possible. It was, in fact, the norm. John Kennedy was in the White House. Everything would be all right.

  Her work was interesting but not taxing; her colleagues were pleasant, but she knew that none of them would be lifelong friends. What pleased her most was walking the streets of New York, and having a paycheck. And it was pleasant to meet her father for a drink at Grand Central as they got on the commuter train together, workers on their way home for a good meal. She hadn’t been on the train with her father the day he had met Johnny. If she had, things would have been very different. She would have been sitting next to her father. There would have been no free seat beside him for Johnny to fall into, at the last moment, in the nick of time. Her life would have been different. Although she wasn’t sure how very different it would be. If her marriage to Johnny had changed her very much. She was not sure it had changed her at all.

  She thought it was important to set the right tone. She didn’t want to sound unfriendly. But how did she want to sound? She didn’t want to spend much time with him, but to turn him away would be to suggest something that was not true: that what had happened had been powerful enough to cause her to recoil. He had once been part of her life. No, she told herself, tell the truth: he had once been her whole life. Was it possible that he was nothing to her; was it possible that memory, which was meant to be so powerful a force, growing stronger in its pull with every year … was nothing to her? She had to understand that, in fact, she didn’t remember him very well.

  It had been nearly fifty years ago. Their time together had been only seventeen months.

  Three months in New York City and New Canaan, Connecticut. July, August, September 1962. And fourteen months in Dublin, October 1962 to December 1963. What fraction of her life was that? Less than one seventieth. Still, she had loved him. They had been married. She ought to be feeling more than this.

  When he smiled, she saw that, like Linnet, he had a very bad set of dentures. For the first time, she felt sadness. She remembered she had loved his mouth; the slight upper lip, the very full lower, which expressed his moods much more clearly than his eyes: sad or delighted, she could tell in a moment by his mouth. When he was
troubled, he jutted his lip out, and tucked his upper lip behind it. And when he was happy, the lip seemed to grow even fuller, as if his joy in whatever was pleasing him had spilled over and filled that lovely lower lip.

  But now his mouth was just the mouth of an old man with a bad set of dentures. She remembered he had always complained about his teeth, envied hers. American dentistry, she’d said, apologizing for her lack of dental troubles. Our greatest achievement. Sure, we gave the world the atom bomb, but we’re second to none in orthodontia. But then she’d come to understand, he brushed his teeth only rarely. She’d worried about this, urged regular toothbrushing on him. With horror, she remembered herself testing his toothbrush for wetness in the morning. Well, he’d paid for it now.

  She didn’t want to be thinking this way, thinking about toothbrushes and dentures when she ought to be feeling something great. But she couldn’t get thoughts of teeth out of her mind. She remembered a conversation she’d once tried to have with her dental hygienist, whom she very much liked. She’d said, “So much comes down to dentistry. I mean, if you have good teeth, you are sexually viable, young, employable, socially acceptable, and if not, well, not. What we’re doing, you and I, Suzanne, is in some way unnatural. At my age you’re supposed to be dead or wearing dentures.”

  The hygienist, who was very young, looked at her strangely and began blinking hard. “But you don’t want to die and you don’t want to have dentures. So it’s all good, right?”

  Jocelyn had regretted the conversation, because she liked the girl, and she thought she had made her uncomfortable, feared that perhaps Suzanne would now find Jocelyn strange and they would lose the easy bond she had enjoyed. And so she said, “Right, Suzanne. All good.”