This Is All a Lie

by Thomas Trofimuk

  Ray tried to sing Itsy Bitsy Spider to Sarah. He thought it would be a nice tradition, a common thread between sisters, but it just woke her up. He walked with Sarah. He took her on a walk through the hospital corridors at 2 a.m., and this movement calmed her.

  The next day, they were home and their family was one more.

  Chapter 11

  Yellow Flowers

  “Onion treats seven ailments”

  – Zhanna Petya

  Two months into their affair, Ray brings Nancy flowers. He thinks the gift of flowers is a simple thing. He finds a bouquet of yellow freesia at a sidewalk vendor and Nancy seems pleased, at first, but then she unwraps them. Her initial delight turns to anger.

  She drops the bouquet on the counter as if it is a rotten fish and steps back. “You bought yellow flowers,” she says.

  “Yes. Freesia. They smell amazing.”

  “These are yellow flowers,” she says. “Yellow is for funerals.”

  “What?”

  “In Russia, yellow flowers are only for funerals.” Then she is bent over and counting the stems and when she stands up straight, she is shaking with anger. “Ten,” she says. “There’s an even number, Ray. Even numbers of flowers are for the dead. You must never give flowers in even numbers, unless someone has died.”

  “I am so sorry. I didn’t know.”

  “Go home, Ray. It’s ruined. No one is dead here but you have behaved as if someone is dead.” Nancy bursts into Russian and Ray has no idea what she’s saying. He can’t quite figure out if she’s serious. It would be an amazing prank, but there’s something shaky and crazy in her voice. Her voice is all edge and danger.

  “I am so sorry…”

  “…You could not know, unless you went to a Russian florist. But it does not matter. The insult is done and this is all ruined.” She steps open the garbage pail, dumps the flowers, and lets the lid slam down. “It is insulting to give flowers like this. You must leave now.” She’s thinking that if she were truly important to him, he would have known about the yellow flowers. He could have asked questions, or looked it up. Only an imbecile would give an even number of yellow flowers to a Russian woman as a romantic gesture. To buy flowers without thinking beyond the fact they smell good is uncaring and stupid.

  Ray steps backwards into the hallway and Nancy shuts the door. He stands in the hallway, looking at the door. He looks at the brass plate with the number 3903 on it. He wonders if perhaps she is looking through the peephole at him.

  He’s confused. What’s ruined? This moment? Everything? She said it was all ruined. Does that mean they’re done with each other? Because of yellow flowers? The bile of anger rises in his chest. This is irrational and illogical. The flowers were a gift and she’d rejected this gift based on a cultural transgression he could not be expected to know. In the elevator, he’s pissed off.

  Nancy is sitting on the floor, her back against the door, sobbing. She is back in time, at her father’s funeral. The soldiers in their drab, green uniforms and Russian military fur ushanka hats. The funeral march was plodding and dark and minor keyed. And there were yellow flowers everywhere. Nancy was standing beside herself, watching her body be still. This means her papa is not going to catch her anymore. He will not be there to catch her at the back entrance. This means they will no longer skip stones by the river. She is holding two flowers. One of the soldiers gave her these flowers and they were both yellow.

  * * *

  “Tell me how you ended up like this, Ray. How are you able to do this? The lies. The hundreds of dishonesties. The stolen time. All of it.”

  “You mean, how can I do this to myself?”

  “Is that what I meant? I thought I meant lying to your wife, sneaking around and being despicable, living this falsity. Is falsity a word?”

  “I feel like you were asking about me, about what I was doing to myself.”

  “So you think the promises you made in your wedding ceremony were meaningless? Do you even remember what it’s like to be truthful?”

  Ray thinks about Lime Kiln Valley and the Mexican pickers. He can see Pastor Bob’s face, Jesús playing his guitar and that woman – Jesús’s fiancée – who wouldn’t stop crying. He remembers the dry purity of the air and he remembers Tulah’s body in her little black dress. He remembers that night as she wriggled out of her dress – and let it slip to a puddle of black fabric at her feet. Kissing Tulah wiped away the world. When they kissed it was as if the world pulled back and let their kissing fill new space. His world was just Tulah’s needy mouth. Just her skin. Just her quickened breath.

  He waits for Nancy to say something and then there is an explosion on the road beside his car. The sound of glass breaking and shards of glass hitting the metal car door like frozen rain on a tin roof. Ray stops breathing. It’s not her, he thinks. Please, please, please let that not be her.

  All his mind will allow is that she has jumped and hit a car and the spray of glass is from the impact. Ray takes a breath, and places his hand on the door handle. He looks back and around through the windows and can’t see anything out of place. People are walking on the sidewalk. There’s a woman with five dogs on leashes yanking her down the sidewalk. A bike courier wearing shorts – his satchel across his back. A mom with a baby strapped to her chest. Everything is as it should be.

  If that was not the sound of a body, what was it? He brings the phone back to his ear.

  “Nancy?”

  Silence.

  “Nancy?”

  “Did you get that?” she says.

  “What the hell!? What did you do?”

  “I really wanted that to land on your car.”

  “What was it?”

  “That was the last of the good scotch glasses – the chunky expensive ones. Do I have your attention now?”

  A wave of relief moves through him. “Jesus Christ, Nancy. You could have killed someone.” He takes a full breath and he notices his breathing is shaky. Darkness looms up in the back of his mind – a chorus is chanting the mantra – This is not going to end well, this is not going to end well. As if the outcome of this conversation is a given. As if there’s nothing he can do. It will all come back to that hockey game where they met and flirted. It will come back to the first time he kissed Nancy, and the first time he made love with her. He will fixate on all those tipping-point decisions. These flash-points of memory will be terrible and they will reverberate in him.

  She speaks slowly. “Do I have your attention?”

  “For Christ’s sake, Nancy. Yes. Stop being so dramatic.”

  “So, tell me, how are you able to do this?” She really does wonder how he manages to push his life aside, for her.

  “She doesn’t know,” he says. “That’s how I can do it. It’s between you and me. Tulah doesn’t know.”

  Nancy cringes at the sound of Ray’s wife’s name. It’s an involuntary twinge in the middle of her back.

  “I’m sorry, Nancy.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Just leave your wife and be with me. That will solve everything.” She has never been so blunt, but what does she have to lose?

  “I have kids. I have daughters. If you had kids you would understand...”

  Nancy could have had a daughter, or a son. She was pregnant once, with the investment banker’s baby, and she had a miscarriage. It was a year after they were married and she still did not know about the papers he was having her sign every month. She was lost after the miscarriage. She did not know if she wanted to try again to have a baby. She felt betrayed by her own body and devastated by the loss. She sunk into a darkness that was so deep, she didn’t recognize herself. She lived at the edge of taking her own life. She thought about it every day, first thing in the morning, and last thing at night. She wrote lists of all the different ways she could imagine to kill herself. She thought about it at noon, and mid-morning and mid-af
ternoon. Her doctor prescribed Lexapro, which seemed to help her mood. And then Ambien, because she started to not be able to sleep.

  If her child had been born, and she had stayed with her husband, she likely would not have had this affair with Ray. Of course, this is a ridiculous speculation. Her life would have been different and she and Ray likely would not have met. She was surprised at her own behaviour when she kept pursuing Ray even after he told her he was married. She completely disregarded the wife. She negated his children. She just didn’t care. It shocked her, at first, but after a few months, she became accustomed to it. She acclimatized. It was a cold, delicate game of denial and artifice.

  Not for the first time in this conversation, Ray is astounded, shocked that he has landed here, in a car on 4th Avenue talking with a woman thirty-nine stories above him who has threatened to jump. He somehow moved so far away from Tulah. Did they stop talking? Did they stop being husband and wife? To say it’s because sex with his wife was a mine field of disappointment and frustration was only part of the picture. There was a growing contempt that seemed to be accepted – the swept-under comments that were mean but were also unacknowledged. They both did it. It was the unspoken territory under their civility. Inside this unspoken territory there was the ongoing question of marriage and sex. If the sex dries up, is the marriage invalid? Or do things change and you have to learn to deal with it? Surely, love is more than fleshy union. He tells himself to stop being so shallow. But then, he hasn’t given up on sex. He’s had Nancy for the past year.

  “I won’t make any trouble, Ray,” Nancy says. “I’ll go away like a good mistress. You don’t have to worry. But you changed the rules of your marriage, Ray. And then you weren’t honest about it.”

  “What?”

  “You broke the rules. Of your marriage. Marriages have rules.”

  “You’d be surprised the things a marriage can withstand.”

  “You mean secrets piled on top of secrets piled on top of lies?”

  “Yes.” He thinks about the word mendacity. He thinks about the speech Big Daddy delivers in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, in which he uses the word “mendacity.” Ray had looked it up.

  * * *

  “Ray?”

  “I’m here. Yes. I’m here.” His back hurts from sitting in the car for so long.

  “I’m sorry your marriage is flawed.”

  “It’s not that simple,” Ray says. “And anyway, all marriages are flawed. And besides, why do I have to have a reason?”

  “I’m curious, that’s all. I want to understand this. I want to know why you fool around on your wife. Is it just the sex?”

  “No. It’s more complicated than I can say, but I think I’m okay with no sex.”

  “You think you’re okay? You’re okay masturbating your way toward death?”

  “Yes. That’s what I tell myself. I’m okay not having sex. And the more I tell myself this, the more it becomes true. It’s like how when you tell a really good lie, and if you keep telling it, it starts to become true.”

  “So you’re not okay with a sexless marriage.”

  “Would you be okay?”

  “I’m just sleeping with a married guy. Why are you sleeping with a Russian woman?”

  Ray thinks about curiosity. He wants to believe it’s because he is curious about women – he is curious about all women. He wants to know their smells and sounds and the smoothness of their skin. He loves to discover what they look like at dusk, or in the middle of night by candlelight. He wants to experience the scents, the moans and the smallest intimacies. He wants to lean back against the headboard with a glass of wine and watch them get dressed, or undressed. He wants to discover their scars, and creases.

  “I’m curious about women,” he says. “It’s a bit of an unquenchable curiosity…”

  “…and I am a woman so I qualify for your curiosity? I have a vagina so you were curious about me.”

  “Yes,” he says. “You also have a mind, and an imagination, and a personality…”

  “…Okay, okay, that’s honest,” she says. “A little bit appalling, but honest.”

  “You came after me,” Ray says. “You called me the day after the hockey game. You reminded me that my marriage was only fine.”

  “Guilty,” she says. “Guilty as charged.” She raises her glass in a small toast to Ray’s truth.

  * * *

  Ray looks at the hazy reflected image of himself in his car window. He’s not sure about the question of why he wound up with a mistress but he is certain that he really enjoys making love. He wonders if this desire to give pleasure, this need for touch, and tenderness, is such a bad thing, or if it’s wrong. Because it doesn’t feel wrong. It feels horribly off course but it does not feel wrong.

  10½

  Milaya

  What? Did you think there would be anything resembling a straight line in this book? Don’t you want to know what really happened to Anatoly? You remember the Kapitán, don’t you? The soldier who delivered the news of Nancy’s father’s death? The one who gave her that watch? As if the watch was some sort of compensation for her father.

  * * *

  After three months of reading, drinking, and barely eating, the Kapitán sits at the wooden table and starts to write a letter to the girl. He knows she will likely not get it, but perhaps with what he remembers, and what he writes, someone will find the letter and figure out how to deliver it to the right girl. He remembers the name of her father, barely. And Kursk is not a big city. Perhaps the letter will find its way to the child.

  It is snowing, hard, and it is bitterly cold. Twice he has tried to walk to the village for food but turned back because the snow was too deep and he did not have the proper boots or a winter coat to make such a journey. Not even a kilometre from the dacha, he could feel the cold burrowing into his bones and he did not have the energy to fight it, so he turned around.

  Anatoly is warm, as fire wood is abundant and stacked along the sheltered wall of the dacha, but this is a small consolation against his hunger.

  He looks at the paper on the table and wonders if perhaps he could eat it. But he is not so desperate. Not yet. He has plenty of water, and he is using it to dilute the vodka, which goes straight to his head anyway.

  Milaya, he writes, because he does not know her name. He stops. He does not know if she was a ‘sweet girl.’ She could have been a shit of a horrid little girl. She only looked like a sweet girl. He shakes his head. He leaves ‘Milaya’ and carries on.

  Milaya. Hello. My name is Anatoly. You will probably not remember me, as there was a lot to process when I met you, but I am the one who gave you the wrist watch you are (hopefully) wearing. It does not matter if you don’t remember me. I am not offended by this. I have a forgettable face. I am also the one who brought the news about your father. I am so sorry, milaya. I know it makes no sense that your father would go away to Afghanistan to fight in a war about nothing and for nothing but the hazy sense of an insecure ideology. A senseless war in which so many men, women and children died. I know, milaya, this does not make you feel any better about your father’s death. All war is senseless. All war is barbaric. No one ever wins a war. Once a country goes to war, even if they win the war, they’ve lost the war. But you do not need lectures about the futility of war. You know this first-hand.

  I am writing you because I know some things about your father that you should also know. I had the opportunity to read his entire record before arriving on your doorstep. I have to tell you, your father was not a good soldier. He did not follow orders. You were not told that your father was reprimanded two times. In the short time he was in Afghanistan, he was written up two times for disobeying orders and going out of his way to rescue civilians. The first time, he saved two boys and their mother. They were too terrified to move, despite loud warnings in many languages that the building in which they were hiding was about to be de
stroyed. The second time, he went into a house where he found a small girl, and her grandmother who could not walk by herself. The house had not been cleared. The commanders thought the sound of a crying girl could have been a trap. Nobody wanted to go inside and find out if it was a trap, or not. His commander wanted to throw grenades first and ask questions later. But your father stood up and walked toward the sound of the crying girl. He went in and his comrades held. They waited to throw their grenades. They waited for him to come out, or to be killed. The commander was not pleased about this.

  The third time, well, you know what happened the third time.

  Here is my theory on the matter. I think your father was saving you, little one. He was at war but he kept saving you. I think he kept asking himself what he would want to happen if this was his little girl, or boy, or mother, or wife and then he acted accordingly. He acted without fear and with a single purpose. He did not think, ‘this is the enemy.’ He thought, ‘this is my family.’ Some part of him recognized these people as his human family and in the middle of a bloody war, he acted out of love.

  Anatoly’s stomach growls. He looks out the window at the falling snow and the cool grey light. Tomorrow, he will have to get to the village despite his inadequate footwear, and lack of a winter coat, and despite his waning energy for such a trip. If he does not eat soon, he will not have the strength to try to get to the village.

  He places the pen on the page. He can’t finish the letter today. He is too distracted by his empty stomach.

  Chapter 10