Empire of Lies

by Andrew Klavan

  It was my mother's house she was talking about. My mother—my poor old crazy mother—had finally died about eight months before. Her will had just cleared probate, and now her house had to be sold so my brother and I could split the money. Someone had to go back east and clean the place out and arrange to put it on the market. Cathy's question: Was I going to go now, or wait for my brother to turn up so he could help me?

  We'll never know what I would've answered. Even I don't know. Just then, the phone rang inside the house.

  "I'll get it," I said.

  My children's voices, the sough and birdsong of the world outside, were muffled as the sliding glass patio door whisked and thudded shut behind me. I walked two steps across our back room, our family room, to where the phone sat beside the stereo. I picked up the handset before the third ring.

  "Hello?"

  "Is this Jason Harrow?" It was a woman, a voice I didn't recognize.

  "Yes?"

  I heard her give a quick breath, a sort of bitter laugh. "It's funny to hear you talk after all this time."

  "I'm sorry. Who is this?" I still didn't know. My mind was racing, trying to figure it out.

  "This is Lauren Wilmont," she said. "Formerly Lauren Goldberg. Formerly your girlfriend, if that's what I was."

  It was a strange feeling. Standing there with the phone in my hand, with the family room around me and that voice I barely remembered speaking in my ear. My eyes flitted over the sofa and the stuffed chair; over the rug that was a blended tweed so it would hide juice stains and pizza and soda stains. There was a 36-inch flat-screen Sony TV in one corner. Shelves with board games stacked on them; Monopoly, Pictionary, Clue. Some of Nathan's cars and a couple of Terry's dolls were lying around. Outside, through the glass doors, I could see the tops of the kids' heads moving at the bottom of the slope of the backyard. I saw Cathy, in the foreground, turning in her chair, pointing a finger at her chest and raising her eyebrows to ask: Is the call for me? I smiled thinly. I shook my head no.

  And all the while that voice on the phone was talking on:

  "You have to come back east, Jason. You have to help me. Please. Come back. I need you."

  I had been honest with my wife about Lauren. I hadn't told her all the details, but I'd told her as much as she wanted to hear. She knew about The Scene and That Night in Bedford. Sometimes in church she saw me make a fist, and she knew I was holding fast to Christ's hand, and she knew why. I had been honest with her about all that.

  I didn't really start lying to her until after I'd hung up the phone, until I'd settled back into the patio chair beside her.

  And she said, "Who was it?"

  And I said, "Just someone from the office with a question."

  "You'd think they could give you your weekend, at least."

  "It was nothing. What were we talking about?"

  "About your mother's house..."

  "About the house—right," I said. I gazed down the slope of grass to the children playing around the swings. They were laughing loudly, chasing each other around in circles. The Frisbee was lying in the grass, and as far as I could tell, the elaborate structure of their game had already collapsed into hilarious confusion.

  I sat and gazed at them as if I were considering my answer, but my mind was blank.

  And then I said, "I think I'll go back east. I might as well. I might as well just go and get the whole thing over with."

  SUNDAY

  Another Life

  The jet dropped out of low clouds and there was Manhattan, the dense skyline thrusting toward the mist. I gazed out the porthole, watching the spires sail past. I thought of Lauren down there somewhere. What could she want? I wondered—wondered for the umpteenth time. What could she want and why call me about it? She wouldn't tell me over the phone, and I couldn't stop trying to figure it out. Was it money? That was the only thing I could think of, the only thing that made sense. She must need money. She must've heard I'd done well and figured I could help her. It had to be that—or why call me?

  After all these years, why call me?

  My gaze focused on the Empire State Building—and then went beyond it over the undulating fall of stone to the island's southern tip, to the place where I had seen her last. My mind went back to that day and to all the days before it until, as the plane descended, I was lost in another life—a life that used to be my life.

  I said I would tell you everything, so here it is:

  When I was twenty-eight, I went a little mad. There were good enough reasons for it, I guess. My mother's illness, my father's suicide, my own guilt about both because of my discovery of the Spiral Notebooks. My brother's cruelty had twisted me. The company I kept had led me astray. There were plenty of reasons.

  Still, in the end, it was me, my thoughts, my actions, my choices that sent me down the road into darkness until I became sick—morally sick; lost and mad and desperately unhappy.

  It was seventeen years before all this began, before that autumn afternoon on the patio and the End of Civilization as We Know It. Picture me handsome, edgy, dripping with urban sophistication. I smoked in a curt, defiant way. I was quick-witted and funny. I had a good line in irony and sneering left-wing cant.

  All in all, I would say I was deceptively presentable back then, considering what a mess I was inwardly. I dressed conservatively, in a pressed, preppy style. I thought it made a piquant contrast with my opinions and my job. I was an investigative reporter for the Soho Star, a radical weekly with an office on lower Broadway. I spent my working hours hunting down obnoxious landlords, highlighting cultural offenses against blacks and homosexuals, and seeking out corruption in any official who did not believe in the state as a sort of Nanny Robin Hood, stealing from the rich to fund its infantilizing care for the poor. I liked to claim that my creased khakis and my button-down shirt, my navy blue jacket and school tie were a sort of clever disguise to help me mingle with the ruling class and get the goods on them. But I'm afraid the ugly truth was: I liked the way I looked in that outfit. And the upshot was I appeared in those days as every inch the solid pillar of society I would one day come to be.

  But oh, my soul.

  I was miserable. I was miserable and I was proud of it, the way intelligent young people often are. I wore my inner pain like a badge of honor. It showed I was too sensitive for the harsh world, too honest for its corruption, too independent for its iron chains of conformity. Oh, I had all sorts of ego-polishing notions about my unhappy self. And I had theories, too. What, after all, is a depressed intellectual without his theories? I can't reconstruct the details of them now. It would be too boring to try. But there was a lot of Nietzsche involved and Freud, too—oh, and Marx. That was it, my trinity: Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx. Which is to say I believed that power, sex, and money explained all human interactions, all history, and all the world. To pretend anything else, I thought, was rank hypocrisy, the worst of intellectual sins. Faith was a scam, Hope was a lie, Love was an illusion. Power, sex, and money—these three—were the real, the only stuff of life.

  And the greatest of these, of course, was sex.

  I don't remember how I worked all this out philosophically. But for some reason, the other two persons of my trinity—power and money—were things to be disdained. They were motive forces for them, you know, for society's evil masters, the greedy, the corrupt, the makers of orthodoxy.

  Sex, though—sex was for us. It was the expressive medium of the liberated, the unconventional, the unbowed, the Natural Man. When it came to sex, there was nothing—nothing consensual—that could repel or alienate such enlightened folk as we. Anyone who questioned that doctrine or looked askance at some sexual practice, anyone who even wondered aloud if perhaps, like any other appetite—for food, say, or alcohol or material goods—our sexual desire might occasionally require discipline or restraint, was painfully irrelevant, grossly out of the loop, unhip in the extreme. No, no. A free man, a natural man, a new man—so my theories went—threw off hypocrisy and e
xplored his sexuality to its depths.

  My depths, unfortunately, had been forged in the fire of a very unhappy youth. Rage at my mother's fate, confusion at my father's, a wellspring of pent violence opened by my brother's bullying brutality all played a part. And when I really delved into the nature of my desires—and how, given my theories, could I do otherwise?—I discovered I had a simmering penchant for cruelty. This had to be developed—so I decreed in the name of liberation and integrity—not to mention the fact that it turned me on.

  Which brings me to Lauren Goldberg.

  Lauren was the child of a teacher-slash-filmmaker and the paralegal-slash-wannabe-artist whom he divorced. The years of their marriage, of course, were Lauren's golden era. Till the age of eight, she could trust and believe in family and love and the gentle guidance of the teachers at her private school. After that, her world was all recriminations and disillusionment and shifting sand—plus the cold chaos of public education when the parental breakup sent the family budget to hell. The contrast between these two periods was the source of—or at least the excuse for—all Lauren's bitterness and all her yearning.

  She had long black hair, a small, thin, nicely proportioned body, a harshly attractive face with her father's aquiline Jewish features and her mother's white German-Irish skin. She was young, like me. Smoked, like me. Saw sneeringly, like me, into the grimy heart of the pseudo-immaculate American dream or whatever it was we were sneeringly seeing into the heart of. She worked as a photographer's assistant. Her ambition was to become a photographer herself.

  We met at a poetry reading held in a church. We drank wine out of plastic cups and talked, standing close to each other in the corner under a station of the cross. She agreed with me—or at least nodded eagerly—when I expounded on what a con job, what a lie it all was. Society, I mean, Western culture: all just a disguise for the will to power and money and sex. She nodded and said in a scintillating tone of admiration, "That is incredibly true."

  And so to bed.

  Now, the media have portrayed me as such a withered puritanical moralist that I suppose I ought to say right up front: I have no qualms whatsoever about the games lovers play, and may God bless you all in your variety. But this is my story, so I can only tell you about the things I did and how they affected me.

  Anyway, Lauren and I didn't get up to anything too grotesque or dangerous, not at first. We just tied each other up with belts and bathrobe ties and slapped each other's butts and pretended to choke each other, snarling nasty words and so on. All in good fun, you know. And I mean, I liked Lauren well enough. I liked the fragility and the longing I sensed under her sullen, cynical hide. We had, I guess, a relationship of sorts. Pasta and philosophy in the wine cellars of Alphabet City. Wrist-bound, red-bottomed nights in her apartment—because her apartment was nicer than mine, a sparkly brick-walled wood-floored studio in Chelsea her father helped her rent.

  Then, of course, after a while, I grew bored with her. Nothing surprising there. The urge to sexual variety in men is just as strong as the urge to bear young in women. And since our relationship was based mostly on sex, I saw no reason to draw things out. No hypocrisy, remember. I simply broke the news to her: I wanted to see other people. To my surprise, she eagerly agreed: Yes, yes, we should. In fact, through her photography contacts, she knew some other couples who were into what she called The Scene. Maybe we should get together with them. Well, yeah! I said.

  I didn't understand, you see, that Lauren likely would've done anything to stop me from going, to win my love, to be the girl she thought I wanted her to be. To my idiot mind, we were just a couple of free spirits exploring the dangerous boundaries of our desires. It never occurred to me until it was too late that I was the natural leader of us, that I was in charge of her and therefore responsible for her welfare.

  So we entered The Scene, becoming part of a loose company of people who enjoyed rough sex and other shenanigans. We would get together, two or sometimes three couples at a time, play out roles and scenarios, expose our most secret, most violent hungers and proceed to satisfy them on each other.

  If you are wondering what that feels like—what it feels like to hurt other people for your sexual pleasure—I mean, to really bind them hard and hurt them cruelly—I will tell you: It feels good. At least it did to me. There was a dull-minded, feverish heat to having sex that way. No, it was not like lovemaking exactly. There were no deep draughts of pleasure from someone else's pleasure, no long, slow immersion in another's face, another's body, beautiful because they were her face and body, exciting because they were hers. Acting out the universal male fantasies of rape and conquest and domination had instead a childishly gluttonous quality. It was like sitting cross-legged on the floor and stuffing chocolate cake into your mouth until the whole cake was gone. It was just like that, in fact: delicious—then compulsive—and finally sickening.

  Sickening, yes. Because when it was over—never mind the morning after, I mean the second it was over—I felt my spirit—that spirit I did not believe existed—flooded with moral revulsion as if a bubbling tarlike substance was rising into my throat and choking me. But here was the funny thing—the strange thing. I somehow managed to hide this feeling from myself. It's odd, I know. I meant to be so honest about everything, to expose my deepest nature, to act upon my most primal instincts without restraint—no hypocrisy. And yet about this—this most basic fact of the experience—I lied shamelessly. I told myself I felt deliciously wicked. I told myself I felt a free man who had broken the bonds of moral conformity. Oh God—my God, my God—the things I told myself. Anything to hide the truth of my moral revulsion.

  Finally, when the lies were not enough, I used drugs. Well, we all used drugs, all of us in The Scene. They were to heighten the sensation, we said—without considering that the sensation needed heightening only so that the urges of our desire would continue to outstrip the commandments of our self-disgust. We started with cocaine and later added Ecstasy, which was just beginning to make the rounds in a big way. Before long, I was using something almost daily.

  And yet I still had my theories—and according to my theories, everything was going great! I had the joys of honest sensuality to set against the lies that mask society's emptiness and corruption. I had the bulwark of philosophical truth to protect me against the oppressive meaninglessness of existence. I had the satisfaction of answering ever-present Death with Physical Pleasure, the only thing that was both good and real.

  That was how it was, according to my theories.

  In practice, my personality was disintegrating and I was plunging into a dull fog of depression, illuminated by sharp flashes of suicidal despair. Go figure.

  It happened slowly at first, then it happened fast, like a child going down a playground slide, push, push, then picking up speed, then falling finally plump into the sandpit below. That was how I fell—plump—into That Night in Bedford.

  That's what we always called it, Lauren and I: That Night in Bedford. As in "I can't stop thinking about That Night in Bedford." Or: "After That Night in Bedford, nothing was the same."

  That Night in Bedford, we rented a car and drove up to Westchester to meet a new couple involved in The Scene. He was some kind of Wall Street guy, maybe forty, hopped-up, snappy. She was his wife, a Realtor, a little younger but not much. She was brimming with forced sophistication, broad, limp-wristed gestures, loud laughter. She actually said, That's just delightful, darling. She said it several times, in fact, during the course of the evening.

  They had a spectacular sprawling farmhouse off a wooded lane. She called it that when she gave us the directions: "It's a sprawling farmhouse off a wooded lane." They invited Lauren and me to stay with them for the weekend.

  I won't pretend I don't remember what happened. That would be nice, but I remember only too well, in spite of the chemical fog that was curling through the twisted byways of my brain at the time. The blow-by-blow of it doesn't matter much anymore. The point is: It ended with th
e woman sobbing. The wife, the Realtor. All her pretense at sophistication gone. Curled naked on the floor in a corner of the master bedroom, weirdly small-looking under the ceiling's enormous, exposed wooden beams. Her hand was wedged between her legs, and she was sobbing so convulsively, I thought she might rupture something. Lauren was in the master bathroom puking up pills. And me, I was holding my head in one hand and trying to find my clothes with the other.

  The husband, the Wall Street guy—he was worse even than the rest of us. If there were some sort of award for this kind of thing he would've won it: Most Disgraceful Behavior in a Disgraceful Situation or something like that. The clown was actually screaming at his wife. Standing over her in his ridiculous bikini briefs, his bland face scarlet, his pearly hands flying every which way. Screaming at her: "You always do this! You always goddamn find a way to pull this fucking shit on me!" With the poor woman curled up at his feet, convulsing, sobbing so that a stone would've pitied her: "I didn't want to. I told you I didn't want to."

  After that, after That Night in Bedford—that's when I cracked. It was the disgust, you know, the moral disgust. And yet, I had worked so hard at hiding it from myself that it could only reveal itself to me in other forms and symptoms.

  So I would wake up in the predawn dark or just go still, staring at my desk in daylight. My skin would suddenly turn clammy, my heart suddenly flutter and race. I would think about the sobbing Bedford woman. And outlandish fears would swim into my mind: What if she accuses me of rape? Or: What if she dies of internal injuries and I'm arrested for murder? I laughed these worries off at first. They were nonsense. She'd agreed to everything and I knew she hadn't been hurt in any serious way. And yet the fears kept coming back. And then other fears came, too, small emberlike worries that had been smoldering in me a long time but now suddenly burst into larger flame. What if I got sick? Having sex with so many strangers, careless because of the drugs. What if I had syphilis and didn't know it? What if I had AIDS? What if I got cancer of some kind? Cancer of the penis? Cancer of the balls?