Lying

by Lauren Slater

  • • •

  The day before my weekend with Christopher in Brattleboro, I had an appointment with Dr. Neu. True to his word, he continued to follow me, although I think he’d lost some interest in me. Or maybe, after Christopher, I had lost interest in him. Our sessions were always the same. He always had the same beard, and he was short. He was cute, actually, a cute little Dutch doctor.

  We did tests. I would close my left eye and he would flash a picture to my right visual field. Never could I name what I saw.

  Occasionally, my symptoms were spectacular. Once Dr. Neu put in front of me a dead fish and a chocolate Kiss. “Pick up the dead fish,” he said, and when I went to do it with my right hand, my left hand got angry or grossed out and kept trying to force my right hand toward the Kiss. “That’s called two-handed antagonism,” Dr. Neu said. “Sometimes we see that in corpus callostomy patients.”

  This session, I told Dr. Neu about my involuntary recalls.

  “Given the prevalence of your auras, and their intensity, I suspect you are actually having very mild and frequent seizures, so mild you aren’t even aware of them. That’s okay,” he said. “The surgery has ninety percent eliminated the dramatic drop seizures, and you can take a low dose of Dilantin to clean up the auras.” He started to write a prescription.

  “No,” I said.

  “No?”

  “I like my auras,” I said. “They give me things.”

  • • •

  We fucked the whole time. I brought him my new stories, all ten of them. He read one, we fucked, he read another, we fucked again, until we’d fucked ten times over the course of the weekend. It was hard, therefore, not to make the Pavlovian association between words and love. With both eyes open, I saw language as a bridge across the chasm; we could cross. We did.

  Every three weeks we met in motels in Vermont. Our encounters were seedy, our sex on synthetic carpets, polyester bedspreads, a Gideons Bible in the nightstand drawer. Highway motels, the sounds of cars like ripping silk, he held me. Snow started. Clumps of wet snow fell to the ground, branches bowing on all the trees. Darkness came earlier then, the sad smoky dusks of December.

  I showed him a memory story I’d written. Eight years old, with my parents in Florida, in Delray Beach, where malls were bright with sunshine and cheap satin. One night, we went to an alligator fight, and a man with a red cape tranced the alligator by turning her on her back and stroking the smooth belly. I wrote a story about this, about the sweetness of submission and my own arousal seeing it. He read the pages, and then put them down.

  “This is fantastic, Lauren Jean,” he said. He had a strange, sweaty look to him. His eyes bugged out.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “Nothing’s wrong,” he said. He pulled me to him and turned me on my belly and I thought, Oh God, he wants to do it like a dog, my least favorite position. Like a dog, with my breasts drooping down and my butt in the air, I’d let him. He moved over me, but then I felt him pushing into my rear.

  “No,” I said sharply. I twisted away but he held me tight.

  “Please, Lauren Jean,” he said.

  “No, get away.”

  “I promise,” he said, “I won’t hurt you. You tell me if you want to stop,” and then he was pushing at my butt again; I felt a widening, he was inside.

  He pushed farther, there was a slight searing, a deep ache.

  “Stop,” I said. “Please.”

  He reached around front and began fingering me, and my body started to move even while my mind was stilled, frozen, disgusted, delighted, my body back and forth, and he said, “Ahh, that’s right, sweet girl, that’s good.”

  This was so twisted, so wrong, so florid, I couldn’t refuse. Dr. Neu had split my brain and now he, for sure, this Christopher was splitting my torso, ripping me into two wet shreds, but while I felt split I also felt full, held, bound by a touch irrevocable. He pushed deeper in. A sharpness, a dark red flame of pain running up my flank. “Stop!” I cried.

  He stopped, and his hand stopped too. I felt bereft, gave a little cry.

  “Well, which one?” he said, his voice hoarse, almost ugly. “Which do you want, Lauren Jean? Stop or start?”

  Now that his hand was gone, I felt the gap. I said nothing. The only pain was absence.

  “Say it,” he said. “Say, ‘Oh please.’ Say, ‘Do it.’ ”

  Asking me for words, language leading into life, velocity mine, “Do it,” I said, and I bit down hard on my wretched lip; blood.

  He began moving again, and his hand again, mythical we were, a single roar of sound, alive, while outside cars ripped up the roadway.

  • • •

  Something changed after that. I missed him more. Having known the completeness of connection, how horrid and bright we were, I wanted nothing less. Back in Boston, the next day, I called him at the university where he taught.

  “He’s not in right now,” the department secretary said, so I did what I’d never dared to do before. I called him at home.

  He sounded surprised to hear from me. “I just wanted to say hello,” I said.

  “Hello,” he said, a little stiffly.

  “I’m sorry to call you at home,” I said. “But I know your wife’s at work, and the girls in school and …”

  Silence on the other end of the line. I needed to get him back.

  “And, I wanted to tell you that I’ve won—”

  “My wife,” he interrupted, “does not always work the same hours. And my girls,” he said, “could have been home sick today.”

  I said nothing.

  “But,” he said, his voice softening, his interest turning toward me, “you’ve won what, Lauren Jean?”

  “A contest,” I whispered, “for fiction.”

  • • •

  I called him the next day too, and then the day after that. I had the right, given what we’d done. I had the need, because his absences were harder to bear.

  Something happened to me after the butt sex. I started, sometimes, to not like what I’d written, to look at the words and think they were clunky. I read Colette, whose sentences were flawless, and it was just too tempting, so I slipped some of her sentences in between my own, and then I did it again, and again, not only sentences but passages, paragraphs (pages, maybe? the pages in this book, maybe? I won’t say), so my work, at times, was a criminal mixture; I couldn’t stop stealing the words. “Plagiarist, plagiarist,” I whispered to myself, and it would not be too much to say I hated myself, but I couldn’t stop. I did it for Christopher, so I could send him perfect work, and when I did, he would send it back to me with exclamation points and check marks on places that were not mine, and also on places that were. I felt terrible, fraudulent, but I also believed I needed to do whatever I needed to do to keep him impressed.

  And when I wasn’t writing for him, I called him. If he wasn’t in school, I called him at home. “You can’t do this,” he said one day over the phone, “you can’t jeopardize me like this,” he said, and I said I was sorry and promised him I would stop calling him at home. Unfortunately, however, the more he told me not to, the more I needed to. He had a wife, two girls, a life kept separate from me. I called then, not for him, but to hear the sound of his wife’s voice, a husky hello, I not saying a word. “Hello? Hello? Who’s there?” and I hanging on until she clicked off, and I was left in static, random electrical pulses—crash and hiss.

  One night, I woke up late and called. Three A.M. The phone rang and rang in their dark, distant house. A little girl picked up. “I know who you are,” she said.

  “Who?” I said. I couldn’t believe I had answered her. I should have hung right up.

  “My father’s slut,” she said, and then gently, just gently, replaced the receiver, and we both went back to sleep.

  • • •

  The next time I met him in Vermont he looked weary, the skin blue and crepey around his eyes. “This has gone too far,” he said, sitting on the edge of the motel
bed. “You are a talented girl, Lauren Jean, quite possibly a genius, but this has gone too far.”

  I looked down at the floor. I had so many thoughts and feelings going through me, primarily around the genius issue. Would he think I was a genius if I hadn’t stolen sentences? Yes, he would; long before I’d ever plagiarized, he told me I had talent; I kept saying this to myself, but inside me there was deep shame, a terrible feeling of fraudulence.

  “Look,” I said, my voice coming out as a croak. “Look.”

  “What, Lauren Jean?” he said. “Look at what?”

  Tears came to my eyes. “I need to see you more,” I said.

  “You knew,” he said, “you knew full well I am married. And it’s going to stay that way.”

  Then we fucked, not in the butt, thank God, we fucked the normal way and afterward he wouldn’t even spend two seconds lying around. “I have to go,” he said.

  “I came all the way up here for a two-hour visit? I thought we were spending the weekend. We usually spend the weekend.”

  “Not this weekend,” he said. He was up, throwing on his clothes, tossing my clothes toward me. “My daughter,” he said, and then he mumbled something about a play in school, I pictured it. A kid in costume, looking out to find the faces that belong to her, but just beams of light, floating auras, color that can’t be touched.

  • • •

  I wish I could report the whole sorry affair ended there, but no. He did write me less and less, his letters short, oftentimes on note cards, once or twice a coffee stain spilled across the back. But he always signed, “Love, Christopher,” and he often mentioned maybe meeting up again.

  I started to send my work out to literary magazines, half because I wanted to get published but half, or three quarters, because I wanted an acceptance or two when I saw him again. I sent work that was both all mine and somewhat mine to small prestigious journals, the kind Christopher often appeared in, high-minded magazines with reproduction Vermeers and Cézannes on their covers. My rejection notes, like Christopher’s letters, were full of double meanings. “Excellent,” wrote Hilda Raz from Prairie Schooner about a story that really was an LJS original. “This story is exceptional, truly beyond the pale. We can’t take it, but please try us again.”

  In February he invited me to meet him in New Hampshire, where he would read with Bernard Malamud. “Bernard Malamud,” he said. “Lauren Jean, Bernard Malamud has asked to read with me.”

  I left on a Saturday, the air woolly with fast-falling snow. The roads disappeared beneath blankets of white. Cars crawled slowly, and spun sideways into ditches, where their hazard lights blinked beacons in the thick storm. I had come to the point where I’d risk my life for him, and I saw how stupid, stupid I was. I wanted to tell the bus driver to turn around. I wanted my own bed back, that narrow dorm bed becoming mine if I would only let it.

  Hours later I entered the Holiday Inn. This is comic. I was spinning in through the revolving door and she was spinning out, the she being Liz, the Bread Loaf horse, her sturdy body bending into the blizzard wind, her footprints fat as Clydesdales’ in the snow. I recognized her immediately, and once inside I stood by the plate-glass window and watched her recede into winter’s lint.

  “Liz was here,” I said to him. I tossed my small suitcase onto the bed.

  “How are you, Lauren Jean?” he said.

  “What was she doing here?” I said.

  “I’ve been here since Thursday,” he said. “She asked if she could visit, and I said yes.”

  I punched him then. I had come through snow and sleet, wind and weather. I punched him hard on his shoulder and I heard the gunshot crack of a bone.

  “Jesus,” he said, grabbing my wrists, you guessed it. We wrestled, fucked, and then I punched him again.

  It was over.

  “I told you,” he said, pressing ice cubes to his clavicle, “I told you I’m compulsive in this area.”

  “But not Liz,” I said. I was shaking. “What is it about Liz?” he said.

  I knew. I felt utterly defeated. She was not a woman so much as she was a writer. My thinking went as follows: If he loved me for my words then he probably loved her for her words, which meant my words were not the only words or even the top words, they were just words, words among many. And then I felt my words drop into the chasm, I could almost hear them hitting the rocky bottom of my brain like Coke cans tossed into a gorge.

  What, I wondered, would fill the silence, the space in me? What would make me real? I had tried stealing, sickness, the lovely links of language, none of it had worked. I needed something more direct, like life support. Hook me up, please. Put me on a breathing machine, pump me full of fresh oxygen, fresh bags of blood, dialysis, cardiac cuffs, my heart has stopped, I need resuscitation.

  The blue line on the blank screen, flat, and then a tiny, struggling spike.

  Revitalize me.

  Raise me from the things that die.

  Christopher was staring at me, staring and staring, his eyes sharp green, his lashes thick and black.

  I had spent more than half my life now seizing at this, seizing at that, my body clenched around air. In the old days, when witches boiled herbs and princes stood in towers, people said epilepsy was a sign of the devil, the soul and skin possessed by evil, thrashing spirits. But no. Epilepsy does not mean to be possessed, passively; it means to need to possess, actively. You are born with a hole in you, genetic or otherwise, and so you seize at this, you seize at that, your mouth so hungry you’ll take your own tongue if you have to.

  I sat in the motel room with a man who did not love me and I heard the sound of Coke cans thrown into the gorge. And I was seventeen. And outside the snow was coming down like angels shaking dust from their voluminous robes, a sight beautiful and beyond my reach. And I had the feeling, then, I had the knowledge. I was seventeen and no longer a concrete thinker. I saw I was spiritually bankrupt, a liar, a thief, a plagiarist. I saw my illness as more than a physical thing; it was also a metaphor, and that helped me make some sense. Seizure. Seizure.

  “What is it?” Christopher said. He whispered.

  And then I had a real seizure, my first big one in many months. When I woke up, I was on the floor, and there was some blood.

  “What the hell,” Christopher said, and then he shouted, “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “I have epilepsy,” I said. I said it flatly, without drama or flourish or mystery. We had come to the end, I knew, a place beyond manipulation, beyond what I could handle.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” he said. “This is too much.”

  “Yes it is,” I said.

  The rest I don’t remember. Somehow I got back to the bus, and we said good-bye I knew for good, and I got home and I could not stop crying. My soldier roommate made me tea and, to distract me, told me things about the Israeli secret service that few people know. She showed me how to fire a gun, cocking broomsticks on our shoulders and pressing phantom triggers, kaboom. I got to like her a little, and when I felt lonely I decided I should love her like a sister, but love never came. What did come, however, weeks after the affair had ended, was a letter in the mail, a special letter about a memoir I had done that was not plagiarized but that my mother had told me was not accurate. “Dear Ms. Slater,” the editor wrote, “I am pleased to inform you that the nonfiction work entitled ‘The Cherry Tree’ has been accepted …”

  In my backyard, in the house where I grew up, I think I remember that there once was a cherry tree. Every spring it bore tiny green leaves, and in the summer red fruit that gave way to rot very slowly. In the morning I could smell the sweetness of the tree, and in the evening I could hear the bees, hundreds of them, nosing at the sun-spoiled pulp and turning it all to honey. One day I climbed this cherry tree, and when the wind blew I fell from it, diving with what must have been God’s grace toward the ground. This is my tale, and I have written it over and over again, and, depending on my mood or my auras, the story always seems to change, an
d yet it always seems true. Perhaps that means it is all false, except that, every time, the words bear witness, and every time I feel love, and then, with a simple snap of an eye, the click of a closing shutter, the tree is gone, the love is gone, the man is gone, the words are gone, Christopher is gone, and I am standing in space, my brain split, my hands held out. If only I could learn to live here, in the chasm he cut, in the void out of which our world was born, if only I could.

  I can.

  CHAPTER 7

  HOW TO MARKET THIS BOOK

  MEMO

  To: The Random House Marketing Department and my editor, Kate Medina

  From: Lauren Slater

  Date: December 10, 1998

  Re: How to Market This Book

  1. This is a difficult book, I know. There was or was not a cherry tree. The seizures are real or something else. I am an epileptic or I have Munchausen’s. For marketing purposes, we have to decide. We have to call it fiction or we have to call it fact, because there’s no bookstore term for something in between, gray matter. If you called it faction you would confuse the bookstore people, they wouldn’t know where to put the product, and it would wind up in the back alley or a tin trash can with ants and other vermin.

  You would lose a lot of money.

  2. So, I suppose you want to know how much is true, how much untrue, and then we can do some sort of statistical analysis and come up with a precise percentage and figure out where the weight is. That, however, would go against my purpose, which is, among a lot of other things, to ponder the blurry line between novels and memoirs. Everyone knows that a lot of memoirs have made-up scenes; it’s obvious. And everyone knows that half the time at least fictions contain literal autobiographical truths. So how do we decide what’s what, and does it even matter? That’s question number one.