This Is All a Lie

by Thomas Trofimuk

  * * *

  After The Lover leaves, Tulah is bombarded by a shockwave of emotions – she’s angry, disappointed, relieved and sad. Her emotions are so unsettled, halfway home, she wonders about the wisdom of driving. She pulls over to the side of the road and stops. She sits and stares out the windshield as the snow falls steadily through her view. Every couple minutes she flicks the windshield wiper to clear away the snow. There’s music playing, a vacuous female pop singer named after a Starbucks coffee who sounds like a dozen other vacuous female pop singers. It’s not loud, or soft enough to be annoying. She would not say she is listening to the music, but it’s nice that it’s there.

  By the time she gets to her mom’s house, Tulah has had enough of the snow. The roads are sluggish, and driving is slippery and slow. She’d like a couple years without snow. She wants nothing to do with it. She wants to hide from it.

  Someone is stuck near the corner to her mom’s street. As she drives by, she can see Mrs. Bowerman, who is well into her seventies and lives two doors down from her mother’s, standing beside the stuck car. She’s standing beside her car trying to wave someone down. She looks helpless and frail. Mrs. Bowerman used to call her mother to complain about Tulah crossing her lawn, instead of taking the long way – sticking to the sidewalk – when she was delivering fliers. Tulah’s flier route was a miserable, short-lived job made less pleasant by Mrs. Bowerman’s constant barrage of complaints. Tulah couldn’t understand what grass was for, if not to walk on. Mrs. Bowerman used to call her ‘girl.’ ‘Your girl walked across my grass again,’ she’d say. ‘That girl is going to make a path – she’ll kill my grass.’ So Tulah wouldn’t do it for a few weeks, then, she’d risk it – she’d skip quickly across the grass, and sure enough, Mrs. Bowerman would be banging on her living room window, shouting “Girl! Girl! I see you, Girl!”

  Tulah honks, twice. “Fuck you, Mrs. Bowerman,” she says, smiling and waving as she drives by. She drives slowly enough that the old woman can see who she is.

  Her mother is surprised. She thought she had her granddaughters for the whole day.

  “Plans changed,” Tulah says. She looks at the girls. “We’re going to do something fun.”

  “Will there be cookies? And milk?” Patience is pouting. She is not happy that she’s going to miss afternoon snacks with her grandma.

  Tulah’s mother stops her in the hallway. “Is everything all right?”

  “Yes, mom. Everything is peachy.”

  In the car, Tulah asks the girls what they want to do.

  “I want to go to the zoo,” Patience says.

  “I want to see Santa,” Sarah says. “Santa! Santa! Santa!”

  “The zoo is closed for the winter,” Tulah says. “We can see Santa some other time. Let’s do something really fun.”

  “Santa is fun,” Sarah says.

  “Yes, but let’s save him for another time, okay?”

  Traffic is slow. The snow is coming down harder now and Tulah drives aimlessly. She finds herself on 127th Street, heading north. She is not focused. She should be concentrating on her driving and the roads but she keeps drifting to The Lover and his wife. “What the fuck?” she whispers.

  She pulls into the parking lot for the Bronx Bowling Lanes and stops near the front door. There are two large women in tight clothing huddled close to the building, smoking.

  Bowling will be fun, Tulah thinks. She wants to throw the ball down the lane and knock things down. There’s a violence to bowling that matches her mood. She wants to smash the pins with the ball. She wants to pulverize the pins with her ball. She turns around, looks at the girls and sighs. Bowling is a bad idea. Her girls are too young. She’s not thinking straight. Bowling is not a game for a three- and four-year-old.

  Tulah starts the car. “Santa it is,” she says, and the girls cheer. Patience starts to sing Jingle Bells and her sister joins her.

  “You sing too, mommy,” Sarah says.

  Tulah points her car in the direction of South Point Shopping Mall, and sings along with her daughters, who are excited and happy in their car seats.

  * * *

  There have been many times in her life when Tulah wished she could have a conversation with her sister, or to meet for a glass of wine, or a cup of coffee, or a meal. But Alesha has been living in northern India, in Dharamsala, for the past fifteen years. She went there to study yoga for a couple months and found the people, and the mountains, and the yoga suited her. She got a job in a hotel. She picked up enough Hindi and Tibetan to make her a valuable employee.

  “This life suits me,” she said after five years. “There are mountains in my eyes every morning.”

  “Have you become a Buddhist?”

  “Not yet. One of the men I work with talks non-stop about it. But I have not been swayed. I am no religion, but if I had to choose, it would be Buddhism.”

  Tulah gets lengthy letters from Alesha three times a year, and occasionally, a phone call when Alesha is on duty at the hotel. The twelve-hour time difference was a problem, as one of them would always be tired. Each letter begins the same, with a description of the mountains, the cedar tree outside her window, the weather, and the way the clouds look. The last ten years she has been teaching yoga in one of the hotel spas, and she does massages for a steady list of clients in her house. Tulah had seen pictures of this house and it would be a stretch to call it a cabin. It was at best a lovely hut. Tulah has long ago come to a kind of peace about the way her sister started her letters. After all, she lives at the edge of the Himalayas in the same vicinity as the Dalai Lama. Of course it’s beautiful, and it ought to be in every letter.

  Now is one of the times Tulah wished Alesha had her own phone, or that she was just down the block, or across town; anything but in a lovely hut on the side of a mountain in some distant time zone. She thinks she could share this irrational heartache with her sister. She could share the story of The Lover with her sister and her sister would listen without judgement. None of Tulah’s friends would understand. They all adored Ray. Alesha would get it, but she had effectively removed herself from this life, from her nieces, and their mother, and all the details of Tulah. There were mornings when Tulah woke up angry about this removal and moved through her day feeling resentful toward her sister. She loved and missed Alesha but her love was a constant mix of hard-fought understanding and bitterness.

  People used to ask about Alesha and Tulah’s stock answer was – She’s in India. She studies yoga and she’s peaceful; she’s peaceful and nimble.

  5½

  Mortal sin

  There were no cafés in Paris in the 1500s. If you were to travel back in time to 1502 Paris, you would not be able to find a café, or a cup of coffee. Coffee was coming but it would be a few years. Can you imagine a world without coffee? Someone at a dinner party once asked you when you would like to live, if you could pick any time in human history. You said you’d like it to be a year that is after the invention of soap and antibiotics, which was a clever answer, verging on wise. But it was not really in the spirit of the question. Your real answer would likely be 1500, in the middle of the Renaissance. It’s just, there was so much going on. Columbus was accidentally finding land between Europe and China. The Protestant Reformation was happening. The printing press. Michelangelo. Galileo. Shakespeare was coming. On the Revolution of Heavenly Bodies by Nicolaus Copernicus was published – purporting his theory that the earth revolves around the sun. And coffee. The idea of coffee comes into the English language in the 1580s by way of the Dutch koffie, which came from the Turkish kahve, which came from the Arabic qahwah.

  If you look up the word qahwah, you might find a description of a particular type of Arabic coffee drink that contains coffee, crushed cardamom, cloves, saffron, and rose water. You might even stumble upon directions for preparing this coffee.

  * * *

  Claude Garamond and his lovely wife, Marie
Isabelle, knew nothing about coffee. And Vikings knew nothing about coffee. You probably feel sorry for Claude Garamond and Marie Isabelle, and for those imagined Vikings too. You love coffee and they have no idea – no clue what they’re missing.

  Look, don’t worry too much about the fine people of France in the sixteenth century. They may not have had coffee yet, but they had wine and they drank a lot of it. Most of Europe staggered into the Renaissance in a drunken stupor. Wine was a cure for almost everything, in many regions it was considered a food group, and it was the preferred beverage over water. People didn’t trust water. They trusted wine.

  * * *

  Claude Garamond is watching his wife. She is standing naked in the open doorway looking out at the rain and the forest beyond. Eloise, the maidservant from Allemond, comes only every other day and today is not one of those days. They feel this is their sacred space and they can be naked wherever they wish, and whenever they please – though, the maidservant does complicate this freedom.

  Garamond brings his full attention to his wife. He likes the way the colour of her skin contrasts the dark green of the forest that rises up behind her. He likes it that he can only see what the doorframe allows – what is beyond these limits is a mystery. The light in the sky is a translucent grey – it glows grey. She stands there for a long time, just looking and breathing. Her body is shaped like a violin, or a cello. Her curves are luxurious and long. He wonders if she has stopped in the doorway for him, or for herself. She could not know how lovely she looks because she is not watching herself from the bed, so perhaps she is pausing for herself. Maybe she thought she would give him the gift of her behind. Garamond decides it does not matter why she is beautiful in the doorway, it only matters that she is.

  She takes a couple steps beyond the overhang of the roof, into the yard, and squats. She lets her water mix with the rain. It has been raining all day and all of the previous night. There was a respite around sunrise, but then it began again. Even though it is August, the humidity of the rain causes it to feel chilly. It is after noon and they have a fire going to take the damp away. Marie Isabelle crawls back into bed and snuggles closer to Garamond. She has come to a place in herself where she no longer craves the commotion of Paris. She is fine and happy here in this dwelling near the village of Allemond. They have become friends with the vintner and his wife, Natalii, and the two couples sit down for a meal each Friday – they drink wine and talk and there is always laughter.

  Marie Isabelle wiggles herself closer to Garamond. This is not the life she imagined but it has become a life she loves. This is a sanctuary she has come to cherish – the nuances of light along the forest bottom, the patterns of bird song, the vagaries of light on the river. They have many books – both published and yet-to-be published – and good wine, and friends. Garamond works on his type designs each day. New manuscripts arrive weekly for consideration and it is Marie Isabelle who reads these books first. She gives her opinion and Garamond listens. She suspects her husband could be a publisher soon. When she is not reading, Marie Isabelle wanders through the woods and talks with Eloise who is a fine cook and does most of the cleaning.

  * * *

  Marie Isabelle and Eloise have just crossed the river and they are sitting down to dry their feet and legs before stepping back into their shoes and stockings. It is a warm spring day. The snow has retreated to the high places in the mountains and there is new green in the forests.

  “There is a boy in the village,” Eloise says. “He is the son of the butcher.” She stops and regards the flow of the water in the river.

  “You like this boy?”

  “Yes,” the maidservant says. “I like him.” She blushes and will not lift her gaze from the river.

  Marie Isabelle watches the girl as she dries her feet. She projects innocence. She looks at the world as if she is a newborn chick just hatched from the egg. Everything is wonderful and nothing is dangerous. She knows nothing of the world. She knows nothing about beauty, even though she has it. The girl has long black hair, loosely braided and pulled to the side and she dresses plainly except for a silver ring on her right forefinger.

  “We are both women, are we not?” She recognizes this is a stretch as Eloise has just turned fifteen.

  “Oui, Madame.”

  “Then it is safe to assume a certain familiarity about the nuances of the female spirit.”

  “Oui, Madame.”

  “And we understand each other, as women do, about the interplay of the flesh? We can talk freely and openly about the fleshy affairs between men and women?”

  “I think so, Madame.”

  They begin to walk toward the forest along the path that will take them to the Durand residence. The air becomes cooler immediately as they move under the trees and out of the sun.

  “Perhaps, even between women this is imprudent, but have you been in union with this butcher’s son?”

  “You mean fornication and such? Yes, we did,” Eloise says, grinning. But she is quickly embarrassed and there is fear in her eyes. “Last month. It was only one time, Madame. With God as my witness, it was only one time.”

  “Oh,” Marie Isabelle says. She was not expecting the conversation to veer so abruptly toward the bawdy. It is not that she is prudish. She is surprised by the candour of this girl.

  “I know it is a sin. I know God will punish me but it felt so good, Madame. How is it that something that feels so good can be a sin? I know the sin of fornication is a grave one but fornication should not feel so heavenly. If it is not heavenly then why does it feel that way? Oh, Madame, I fear even this conversation is a sin…”

  “Stop,” Marie Isabelle says. “Everybody sins.”

  “Surely not his Holiness the Pope.”

  “Yes, even the Pope. Even his Holiness Paul the Third. All human beings.”

  “You and Monsieur Garamond?”

  “Yes. Of course, we carry our sins.”

  “I doubt this very much, Madame.”

  “Look, forget about the sinning for a moment. What about you? Do you love this butcher’s son?”

  “Love?”

  “Yes, you know? When breathing becomes difficult because he is in the room. When you think about him, always. When you feel as if you are home any time you are with him?”

  “But I live on the edge of the village and he lives in the centre of the village. Our homes are far apart.”

  “No. I was speaking about a spiritual home – you know, when you feel safe and protected and at ease.”

  “Oh, Madame, the church is very small and the priest is only there two days a week.”

  Marie Isabelle sighs. It is hopeless with this girl.

  Eloise pouts. “It is unforgiveable to fornicate outside of wedlock.”

  Marie Isabelle stops walking. “Unforgiveable? I doubt God cares,” she says.

  “But fornication is a mortal sin, is it not?”

  “And the two shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two but one flesh.”

  “What is that?”

  “That’s the Bible. Jesus said that, actually.”

  “Jesus Christ?” The girl crosses herself with great enthusiasm.

  “Yes. Jesus Christ.”

  “Did Jesus really say this? He encouraged the two to become one? How do you know Jesus said this?”

  “Because I’ve read the Bible.”

  Eloise looks at Marie Isabelle as if she is a miracle. “You read?”

  “Yes. I read. I can teach you, if you want. Then you can read the Bible for yourself and you will not have to rely on the priest to tell you what’s in it.”

  They walk for perhaps 100 feet in silence. Eloise, with tears in her eyes, looks at Marie Isabelle. “I should like that very much, Madame.”

  “Good,” Marie Isabelle says. “We will begin next week.”

  * * *

 
Four days later Marie Isabelle finds the girl curled into a ball in the corner of the pantry, sobbing. “The priest says I will surely go to hell for this mortal sin. I have committed a mortal sin! I must never have sex again or I will go to hell for eternity. I do not want to go to hell, Madame. Not even for one day.”

  “Have you performed the acts of the penitent?”

  “Yes, Madame.”

  “You made your confession, you have embraced your contrition, and you have performed some sort of penance?”

  “Yes, Madame.”

  “And I trust you will find some way to make amends?”

  “Yes, Madame, but I am worried about my contrition.”

  “What are you worried about?”

  “I am worried that I am not sorry. Part of me is not sorry at all. Only the god-fearing part of me is sorry. I do not know how to change this, Madame.”

  Marie Isabelle is frustrated by this aspect of the church. She has often wondered if human beings could be moral without God’s direction. If people were left alone, what would happen? If we were ignorant of the presence of God, what would happen? It is as if the Church, with all its parental rules and laws, treats people like children, and there is never any growing up. She does not dare speak these thoughts out loud, but surely she can’t be the only one having them.

  She looks at Eloise, who is tortured with fears of going to hell because she did something natural that felt good. She would like to offer absolution to this poor girl, but for some reason, only men can do this. Men invested with the power of God. Marie Isabelle would like to tell the priest in Allemond to go to hell.

  “Say the words of contrition,” Marie Isabelle says. “Even if these words are not entirely true. Keep saying these words until they are true.”