Choke on Your Lies

by Anthony Neil Smith

  We sat quietly for several minutes until she looked down, eased her hand free of mine, and cupped her fingers against each other.

  She said, “So…when will you be able to leave?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “How long will it take you to find a place to stay?”

  I couldn’t answer. I was thoroughly confused. She was the one who left. She was the one moving. “I don’t understand, sweetie.”

  Met my eyes again. “Are you joking? I thought we’d…Mick, I’m keeping the house.”

  After swallowing hard and pressing down the ache rising in my stomach, I said, “Like hell you are.”

  *

  A half hour later, I was pacing in front of the fireplace, Frances on the couch. She sat on the edge with her knees together, one hand on each, like she was just waiting me out.

  “You left. What…what was I supposed to think? You wanted out. I wanted to stay right here.”

  “You’re right, I left. To give you time. Don’t say you believed I was going to move in with him. Divorce is hard, Mick. Very difficult on both of us, I know. I never intended to jump right into another co-domestic situation.”

  “You can fuck him over there, can’t you? That’s not enough? You want to bring him here, too? Fuck on our bed?”

  She was too calm for this. “It’s just a bed. Don’t be so crude. What happened to you being okay with this?”

  I was tempted to bring up the photos Octavia had shown me. The threesome, the student, the abortion. I mean…our possible child. A voice in the back of my mind whispered Save it for court.

  Goddamn it, now Octavia was in my head.

  There was something to be said for putting it all on the table at that moment. A lot to be said for the power of shame.

  Or you just show her your ammo, and then give her time to go find the right armor.

  I shook my head. Frances looked bored.

  “Frannie, that’s entirely different. I mean, this is our house. To be fair, I never left. I don’t know why I should be the one to leave now. At the very least, and it’s not my favorite option, but you’re the one who’s created this mess—”

  “I’m not selling it.”

  “Yes, yes, I don’t want to either, but if we can’t reasonably come to a resolution that satisfies both our needs—”

  “We already have. I’m not selling the house.”

  I stopped pacing. I knelt in front of her. My hand covering her hand. “What do you mean we already have? I don’t understand.”

  Frances sighed. “Mick, please. You know what I’m talking about. I’m surprised you’re even making such a fuss. I’m sorry if you’ve changed your mind, but I’ve always thought you were honest.”

  I pulled my hand away. I realized at that moment that I would never touch her again affectionately. Bukowski:

  I was wrong and graceless and

  sick. all the things I had learned had been wasted.

  there was no creature living as foul as I

  and all my poems were

  false.

  “You think I’ve lied to you?”

  “No, no, Mick. Maybe you forgot. I’m sorry. Besides, lying about it would be kind of silly, wouldn’t it?”

  I was speechless.

  She said, “Excuse me a moment.” And got up.

  I listened to her steps on the hardwood floor as she creaked up the stairs. I stayed behind, pushed myself off the floor and walked over to the window, a very confused man staring at summer grass, the breeze through the leaves, wondering what I had done. Drunk with love, had I promised Frances she could have our house? Why would I? The romantic in me would brush aside even the idea of ever parting. I would have painted her an oath of devotion in the rawest of words rather than consider life without her.

  We married near the end of graduate school after a couple of years of dating spotted with dramatic break-ups and painful interludes, trying our best to hurt each other in the off-times by wrapping our attentions around other students, critics, visiting writers, professors, as we climbed the rocky face back to our senses, and each other. Frances was willing to give up a return to New England in order to follow me home to Minneapolis. It took some convincing and a long weekend visiting the Cities, but she fell for them as much as I had in my youth.

  And, both of us being of mostly upper-middle class backgrounds, grinding our way through grad school with assistantships and student loans, we chose to forgo a prenuptial agreement and toss the dice on forever, agreeing that in the very unlikely event of a split, we would have the maturity and decency to make sure we each got our fair and equal share.

  Apparently I had softened in my view along the way. Plus, we’d have to clarify “fair”. As in, “You get to fuck whoever you want, and you can have the house, too. While we’re at it, take a nice chunk of my pay for no particular reason.”

  The creaking stairs signaled her descent, and I turned to face her, hands in my pockets. Otherwise I would have wrung them like a wet paper towel. She carried an accordion folder, bright yellow. She was flipping through papers as she walked.

  “I’m sorry, Mick.” Still flipping, not looking at me. She found what she was looking for, shuffled it out and handed it over. “Really, I hope you’re not just being difficult here. Don’t you remember?”

  What was I holding? Legalese, some form of contract, notary stamped and dated last fall. “What is this?”

  “Goddamn it.” A break in her voice. “We’d talked all weekend, that cabin on Lake Superior. Things weren’t going so well, and we came up with a list of what ifs, don’t you remember? You’re trying to make me look stupid.”

  No, I didn’t remember. I remembered the Lake, I remembered the talk. It was brutal, listening to my wife tell me she’d been feeling bored, a little smothered, and so then I laid my own cards on the table—my growing anxiety, the need for more affection, and, embarrassing to say now, bringing in a third for sex, or experimenting with various scenarios to liven things up. A thunderstorm on the Lake, October chill, old quilts and a gas fireplace. The crying, the emotional bleeding. The making up, the longest kisses, and some of the most honest, raw, and vulnerable sex we’d ever shared.

  “I don’t remember this,” I said. “I remember us.”

  “No, this was when we got back. It took a lot of maturity to do this, to ensure that I’d be able to stay if the worst case scenario happened.”

  “I thought the worst case scenario was if one of us died.”

  “This feels like that, only worse. I mean, we have to work together. We’ll be in meetings together. Where will all of this emotion go? I don’t know. I just know you and I can’t live with each other anymore, but this is far from a clean cut. God, can you imagine if we’d had a child? Can you?”

  Maybe blood runs cold is a bit cliché, but that’s exactly how I felt right then.

  “I was hoping…” I couldn’t finish the sentence.

  She stepped closer, curled her fingers around the back of my arm, gave it a rub. Warmth. Thawing. She spoke in rich tones, said, “I know, I know. It just wasn’t meant to be. I don’t know how or why, but Mother Nature wasn’t on our side. You’ll meet someone else. You’ll have that chance. It’s a good thing, Mick. I really mean it. For both of us.”

  At last I focused on the words on the page. A quitclaim deed signing over full ownership of the house to Frances. My signature, loud as thunder, right there. I rubbed my hand over it, the faint imprint of the notary seal. “It’s not real.”

  “No, it’s just a copy. We filed the original.”

  “I mean, no, I mean it’s not real. I never signed this.”

  She pointed to my signature. “You did. It’s right there. I watched you sign it.”

  I brought the paper closer. It was undeniably my signature. The tiny oddities only I knew about. But it was impossible. Not one memory. How? Why would I?

  I shook my head. “I swear, I didn’t sign this. Never, under any circumstances…” My fingers dug i
nto the paper, crumpling the edges. Then I let it go, dropped it to the floor. Looking to Frances. Waiting for something, anything, to save me.

  She crossed her arms. “No, Mick, please. Here I thought you would keep your word and be an adult about this.”

  “Keep my word? But I am. I have. You left. Where am I supposed to live?”

  “You said you’d find a place. Maybe a loft downtown.”

  “A loft? Are you joking?”

  “I don’t know.” She stepped back. “Don’t yell at me.”

  I hadn’t yelled. I hadn’t signed the paper. I’d never said anything about a fucking loft or a new house. I couldn’t afford anything like that. What the hell? And Frances, acting as if she was all afraid of me? It was like I’d stepped into some alternate reality.

  “Frannie, this is…I don’t know what to say. Something’s gone very wrong.”

  Her face was stone. A placid, assured expression. Like she’d just won a staring contest. She sank to her knees and picked up the document. Then she rose to full height, held the deed flat against her stomach with one hand, smoothed it as best she could with the other. She handed it back to me. “I hope you’ll do the right thing. But just in case.”

  Frances retrieved her bag from the couch, a big one I had bought for her in Prague. She reached inside, pulled out another packet of documents. Stood there, her back to me, sighing loudly before turning and offering them.

  I knew what they were. It was inevitable that I would take them from her. But I left her hanging, arm outstretched, an awkward moment. I looked directly into her eyes, ignored the papers.

  One minute? Maybe not quite?

  “Mick.”

  I didn’t respond.

  “Mick, it hurts enough already. Please don’t make it worse.”

  She’d said it with real emotion, as bitter as that might be. I tucked my tongue into my cheek and took the divorce papers.

  “Thank you,” she said. “We can do this and get on with our lives. I promise, I’m not trying to hurt you. It’s because I don’t want to hurt you that—”

  “Shut up.” Sliced the air with my hand. “Please…leave me alone.”

  She shouldered her bag, hugged it close. “I’ll give you another week here to make arrangements. But don’t do anything crazy. I know you love this place, and it would be a shame to see it damaged.”

  “A week?”

  “I need to come home. Please.”

  I don’t know why I cried. One moment I was shaking with anger, and then my jaw tightened, so sore, and I let loose. I swallowed hard. “You’re killing me.”

  She came to me, hugged me tightly, my arms still at my sides. I couldn’t make myself lift them, wrap them around her. I couldn’t. I would want her too much if I did that. No. I sniffed and sniffed again and reached down deep to hold it all together. But then she turned her head just so, and her breath warmed my neck. My hands jumped, enveloped her, under her shirt, the skin on her back.

  I said, “Don’t go.”

  Frances lifted her head, retreated. “I have to, I’m sorry.” She headed towards the front door. “Just call me when you’re ready.”

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t move. Listened to the door open, close, her footsteps on the steps outside. Goddamn it, Mick, why did you have to cry? Beg? I took a seat on the couch and studied the deed again. Was I drunk? On painkillers? Why couldn’t I remember signing this?

  There was no way to deny it, though.

  The date. Something about that date last year.

  I walked into the study on the second floor, a small room with a gorgeous view of the backyard. It was my sanctuary, where I’d written so many failed poems, but also the three handfuls that I’d published before drying up. Minimalist bookcases full of classic finds, chapbooks and collection from friends, colleagues, and visiting writers. Near the wide windows, a small 19th century writing table served as a desk. I composed with ink and paper first—very fine quality parchment and a fountain pen, just a habit to make the whole process feel more natural, tied in to the earth rather than blips on a computer—before transferring them to my MacBook. Landscape prints from Minnesota artists. A giant framed black-and-white photo of Frances and me on our wedding day, in the woods beside the stone Episcopal church back in Massachusetts, where Frances’ parents had lived since she was sixteen.

  On my workbench, cluttered with ungraded student poems from last semester, handouts to be sorted, bills to be paid, was also my Moleskin planner. But that was the current year. Another “elitist” tendency, I guess, but I used them every year. They were simple, classic, like my poetry, my aesthetic for so many things in life. Like my literary heroes. I kept the older ones in a filing cabinet in the basement.

  Downstairs to the basement, unfinished except for the carpet we’d laid when we hoped to transform it into a family room, but we then had to admit to ourselves that neither of us watched enough TV to justify it. We would rather spend that time listening to soft music while watching the sun rise and set outside our windows. Watch the seasons change, as they did so magically here.

  Instead, the basement had become extra storage space for our papers, our books, our seasonal clothes, our discarded antiques once replaced by newer antiques, our unfinished home improvement projects—a ceiling fan, tile for the downstairs half-bath, cans of Arctic White paint for the kitchen.

  Two filing cabinets, one for taxes, expenses, bills. The other for writing or research related archives. In the bottom drawer, a stack of seven Moleskins. The one I was looking for was on top. I flipped through. November. November. She’d had me signing that deed on a Monday in November.

  Yes, yes, November. I ran my finger down the events, some checked, some crossed through, some postponed. But there it was—a writing conference in Colorado, where I’d been invited by a friend of mine who worked in Boulder to appear on a panel about the resurgence of interest in the poetry of Richard Brautigan, a neglected beat writer better known for his novel Trout Fishing in America. As an admirer of Brautigan’s poetry I’d been glad to appear, although my influences since those days of youth had taken me in a vastly different and more serious direction.

  Mainly I wanted to have fun, drink with my friend, and flirt with the women graduate students, all impressed by nearly any published poet, their smart-girl glasses and pretty legs. Not to actually do anything with them, god forbid, but to help forget about the troubles I’d been having with Frances. The catharsis at the Lake led to another freeze as soon as we got home, although it gradually melted so that by deep winter, we were enjoying each others’ warmth more than ever. Of course, she’d already strayed by then, and I was only enjoying the excess desire stoked up from her infidelities. Had I never realized that, I might have said that we had reconnected as intimately as any two lovers in the history of time. But no, I was getting “sloppy seconds”.

  Anyway, back in November, though, I was enjoying a weekend of somewhat adoring crowds and amorous young ladies blending sexuality with intellectualism in such a rich broth that I fell asleep every evening in my hotel room satisfied after bouts of imagining three of those aspiring academics, all so very different from each other and from Frannie, doing things to me I couldn’t talk to my wife about, so I thought. She seemed to prefer the familiar…at least with me.

  Yes, a great weekend, one that helped relieve so many tensions with relative innocence and allowed me to return to my wife a much settled soul.

  However, it wasn’t that cut-and-dry. While I was supposed to arrive home on Sunday evening, some bad weather delayed my flight and sent me to a couple of different layovers. I spent Sunday night in an airport hotel in Cincinnati. I didn’t arrive back in the Cities until nearly four in the afternoon on Monday, and Frances didn’t pick me up until four-thirty.

  However, I’d never made note of the delay in my planner. It was still listed as a three day trip.

  Upstairs, planner in hand, I picked up the phone and dialed Octavia’s number, hard logic silencing my so
ft heart. Jennings answered and asked me to wait. Not thirty seconds later, Octavia came on the line.

  “Change your mind?”

  I said, “Let’s punish the bitch.”

  THREE

  I should paint a clearer picture of Octavia here. Yes, I’d known her since high school, when we became friends in chem lab. She chose me as her partner because she knew I was better in English than Chemistry—wrote for the school newspaper, sometimes published poems in it, and she’d heard me talk about literature in class—and therefore wouldn’t get in her way.

  “Just do what I say when I say it, and write down what I tell you to, and we’ll be fine.”

  Which led to more talking in class, learning about each other, and a couple of make-out sessions in her car in the mall parking lot. It didn’t get further than getting my hands on her breasts, her hands in my pants, and a lot of wet kissing. She was big back then, not like now, though. Maybe one-eighty when she was sixteen. But she had a pretty face, dark eye make-up, and her signature jet-black hair. Plus, she played up the goth with flowing dresses and tall leather boots. Very striking, if not my type.

  Still, I was a little nerdy—or, in Octavia’s words, “faggy” because I liked poems— and shy. Octavia was aggressive, funny, and a lusty beast. Any girls made fun of her style or insulted her weight, she’d find a way to get sweet revenge—catch their boyfriends cheating, start vicious rumors linking them to the football team/vice principal/a secret baby/AIDS/that retard on the bicycle who shouted at us every morning/anal sex, and usually had some trumped up evidence that looked convincing to high schoolers. And if rumors or revelations didn’t feel severe enough, Octavia would just wait a few days, find the offending bitch in the girls’ room, and blindside her. Kidney punch with a textbook spine, fingernails across the eyes, and once a head shoved into an unflushed toilet.

  Which is why I thought she’d be the best person to talk to about Frannie’s shady deed.