* * *
Ray pushes the starter button on the heater and clicks it repeatedly. He taps the hose again. The heater sparks and the flame flutters a bit, but it will not stay lit. He is not going to give up. He’ll keep trying until he is exhausted and even then, he’ll keep trying until eventually, the spark will ignite a blue-orange ring of flame and it will hold.
“But when a woman decides to sleep with a man,
there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy,
no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root:
there is no God worth worrying about.”
– Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
“But first there was life. Hidden beneath the blah, blah, blah.
It is all settled beneath the chitter chatter and the noise. Silence and sentiment.
Emotion and fear. The haggard, inconstant flashes of beauty.
And then the wretched squalor and miserable humanity.
All buried under the cover of the embarrassment of being in the world …
blah, blah, blah.”
– Jep Gambardella (from the film – The Great Beauty)
Prologue
the cranes confined to the nest
If this really was the prologue, it might begin like this; Tulah is alone in the kitchen, it’s raining, Mozart’s music is floating around the room, and Ray is still sleeping. But surely you know by now, you’re riding along the surface of the backwards skeleton of a novel. You’re moving forward in time while the chapter numbers and other undisputed conventions of novels have been counting down toward something. If that little voice in your head is saying that at the end of this countdown there might be a payoff, a climax, a “damn, I honestly did not see that coming” moment, well, forget about it. That’s not going to happen. This story is pretty much done. No loose ends here. Just a soft landing. There is enough hardness in the world.
* * *
On that morning, Tulah toasts a plain bagel and looks around the room. She’s the one who wanted an open-concept home and now it has lost its appeal. She wants smaller rooms now, not this hollowed-out openness. She wants the clarity of cozy compartments and passageways from room to room. She wants rooms of different colours, not this one-tone auditorium. She does not put margarine on her bagel. She used to, but now it’s a skiff of butter, or nothing. It was some story she read online that reminded her that margarine was coloured to make it look like real butter. In the same way, she does not drink Diet Coke anymore – in fact, she doesn’t drink diet-anything. Whatever the sweetener is, she has decided she does not want it in her body. Every now and then, she’ll have a real Coke, with real sugar. She flips open the laptop on the counter and picks some music – this morning, Mozart’s Vesperae solennes de confessore with Kiri Te Kanawa.
The day is grey. It’s drizzling and all the colours are vibrant and sharp. The grey-green junipers pop against the pewter sky. The tree trunks on the boulevard are high-contrast black, and the puddles on the street are bowls of silver. This music is a good match. She clicks on play and her hunch is confirmed. The strings caress the morning and then Kiri Te Kanawa’s voice floats in the room. And of course the genius of Mozart is always there in each breath, each note, each phrase. And there is the perfect grey light in the room and the constant drizzle outside.
The girls are at a sleepover and will have to be picked up at noon. It’s nice that they’re only a year apart and get invited to the same birthday parties and sleep-overs. Tulah suspects at some point in the future this will change. They’ll want separation, but for now, it’s a good thing.
Last night, she and Ray met in the middle of the bed and held each other for a long time. They said nothing. They touched without desire or need or any sexual wanting. As if there was another level of intimacy that was beyond all that. As if they were both tired of the bullshit and wanted something true. They’d pushed through a membrane into this new land of observance where, maybe, sexual anxieties could not exist – a land where there was only beholding and no judging. They observed each other with newborn curiosity and expected nothing. At 3 a.m., when Tulah got up to pee, they were still intermingled together in the middle of the bed, still touching. When she crawled out of bed, wide-awake at 5:05 a.m., Ray was on his side, still in the middle of the bed. As if this was an end-point of something, and it was okay to be dead weight, to be adrift inside your own unconscious breathing. She sat on the toilet and felt hopeful, and she had just begun to fight for them. She felt closer to Ray this morning than she had for the past year. Ray was in their bed, not that woman’s bed – and that’s all that mattered. Where you go to sleep, and where you wake up, these are the most important things. The little voice in her head is squeaking – What about love? What about respect? What about kindness? Tulah ignores the little voice.
She takes her coffee mug and lets the Mozart push her down the long hallway toward the girls’ rooms. She stands in the doorway of Sarah’s room. It’s tidy and everything has a place. Her bed is made and along the top, above the pillows, there is a line of a dozen teddy bears, placed carefully, all looking out. Patience’s room is a disaster zone – blankets strewn in a pile in the middle of the bed, the fitted sheet pulled up at the corner, exposing the mattress, and a pile of books against the wall, ready to tip. Tulah picks up two empty water glasses from the dresser and pads barefoot back toward the kitchen. She hesitates outside their bedroom door and listens – she can’t hear anything moving. Ray is still asleep.
She sits at the kitchen island and sips her coffee. She is too old for the myth of perfect love that lasts forever and ever, amen – the myth that is so embedded in the idea of marriage. There is no Cinderella, no Sleeping Beauty, no happily ever after. Human beings get distracted. They grow tired of their own patterns. They tire of what they have and they look around. Or they forget how to kiss. Or they forget how to start to make love. Married couples get distracted by the lives they devise – by jobs, and children, and desires. And if a husband or a wife strays, it is never a mistake. They like to say that straying is a mistake, but it never is. It is always on purpose. Tulah knows in her heart it is always a choice. She also knows that infidelity is never simple. Are you meeting in a hotel at the airport, are you looking at pornography, or are you practically leering at that executive assistant in your office? Are you flirting? Are you open to the advances of a man who accidentally drops a book beside you at the airport? How far are you willing to go? How many lies are you willing to tell? How many lies are you willing to live? How many lines are you willing to cross?
She decides she is not jealous. She must rise up and move beyond jealousy because she can’t go there. She is only a little hurt, and it is a small thing to forgive a little hurt.
“We are happy,” she whispers into the room. “I am happy. We are happy.”
Tulah takes a big breath and when she exhales she is angry again. She thought her anger was at bay, but it was a pissed-off elephant in the room – an elephant that was confused and enraged and desperate. She grips her coffee mug – her impulse is to throw it across the room, through the window and into the grey day. She looks at the mug. Patience made this mug – it was a gift from her daughter and Tulah feels awful.
She takes a sip of her coffee, which is lukewarm. She wonders if she needs forgiveness, or if she should offer it. What about the idea of absolution? Is absolution only a Catholic thing? Because she wants to be absolved, and she wants Ray to ask for it, and neither of them is Catholic. She knows forgiveness has a power that exists beyond any concept of God, but she is unsure about absolution. She does not know anybody in her life who would be qualified to grant absolution for her sins. Maybe the Dalai Lama. She can imagine the Dalai Lama listening to her long list of sins. He will listen, his eyes brimming with compassion and then he’ll lean forward and touch his forehead to hers. Maybe she will feel some sort of deep jolt of awakeni
ng – she will have touched an old, fully awakened soul. He will look at her, quizzically tilting his head. “Stop being bad,” he will say. “Stop it. Practise kindness. Practise compassion.” Then he will smile and step back, and Tulah will know she is absolved.
* * *
Ray is dreaming he is a Viking. In this dream, Nancy is wearing his ring. It is not the simple silver ring from the newspaper article – not the one that was found in the Viking grave fields near Stockholm. This ring is white gold, or platinum, and it’s set with a massive diamond.
It is raining in his dream, and everything is wet. He and Nancy are on a ship at sea. The water is a murky green-grey and the sky is a study of the colour of zinc. They are sheltered below deck in a small cabin. The smell of wet wood. And chickens. And damp wool. Nancy is in bed beside him. She is scratching him with her ring – the diamond has turned under on her finger and she does not rotate it. She’s trying to be gentle and loving with her touches, but Ray’s body is covered in scratches, some deeper than others. The scratches turn immediately into scars. Regardless of the pain, Ray wants her to touch him – he lifts toward her touch.
She planes her hand with its jagged ring along his lower back and across his right buttock. There is an immediate welt – a striation. “Can you feel that?” she asks.
Ray looks at her. Her lips are so red. They are full and pouty and shockingly red. “Yes,” he says, “I can feel that.”
“Good,” she says. “It’s important to feel things.”
She lifts her hand and begins again in a different spot.
* * *
Tulah picks up the phone before it rings twice. She does not check the call display – she just scoops it up and says hello on an exhalation. It’s the police. The woman killed herself – a handful of sleeping pills – perhaps some vodka. They’re doing an autopsy. They found Ray’s number on her phone – a long conversation four days ago. There were a couple other calls after that but nothing as substantial as a four-hour-and-thirty-nine-minute conversation.
Tulah sits down. A shiver of tears. An exhausting, consuming sorrow. A jolt of breathless pain stabs through her core. She swallows hard, and then again. “Four hours and thirty-nine minutes,” she says. The length of this call was almost more shocking than the fact the woman was dead. What did they talk about for almost five hours? There is an assumed intimacy in a phone call that length. She tells the police officer on the phone that she will let Ray know. She will get Ray to call back. “Yes,” she says. “It’s sad news.”
“Did you know Ms. Petya well?”
“She was an acquaintance,” Tulah says. “My husband knew her better than I did.”
“Your husband is Ray Daniels?”
“Yes. I know we have different last names. I’m Roberts. Tulah Roberts.” She spells her first name for the policeman. “We don’t believe in hyphens,” she adds. She can hear her own voice explaining their names to this policeman, and at the same time she is appalled that she is doing it.
The officer is silent, as he is trying to understand what she’s talking about. As if it’s beyond him somehow. What is she saying about hyphens? Finally, he clears his throat. He tells her everything. It comes out in one long stream. There was no note but there is no doubt this was a suicide. She cleaned the entire apartment, did all the laundry, folded it and put it away. She took the garbage out and dusted, everything. She vacuumed and scrubbed every surface – even the glass railing on the balcony was cleaned. Every pair of shoes in her apartment was polished. There were sixty-seven pairs of shoes, organized by colour and heel. All the dishes were done and placed in the cupboards. She was wearing a red dress and a string of white pearls. Her hand was locked on the pearls when they found her. “…Her hair was done. I mean, it looked pretty,” he adds. “Her ankles were crossed and she was – I don’t know if this sounds weird – but I thought she looked peaceful…”
Tulah is confused. Why is he sharing all these details about this dead woman? She does not want to know anything about this goddamned woman, and this policeman is spitting out details she will not be able to forget. Why would he notice her ankles were crossed? Why doesn’t he tell his wife these things? Or a co-worker? Or his mom? Anyone but her.
“I don’t know why…”
“…I am sorry. I don’t mean to weigh you down with this, especially when the deceased was just an acquaintance. Please accept my apologies.” He’s having a hard time reconciling the discontinuities in the woman’s apartment. The way everything was perfect – obsessively so – and then that one desperate act of utter chaos. A handful of pills. Well, that and the fact her nylon was ripped – the left leg. With all she did to make sure everything was in its place, why didn’t she take the time to put on a pair of nylons that wasn’t ripped? The policeman thinks about the empty pill containers placed neatly on the bedside table – Percocet and Ambien.
“Her nylons had a rip in them,” he says, more to himself than to the woman on the phone.
“…maybe it was her only pair,” Tulah says, hoping this offering will end things.
“Ah, yes, of course, that could be. I’ll look into that.” He can’t imagine why this ripped nylon would be important. He tells himself to just let it go but little things like this nag at him. The police officer does not tell her about the white silk scarf tied to the balcony rail, or caught there somehow. This was another strange detail of this death but he was beginning to sense the deceased woman was less than an acquaintance to Tulah Roberts. He decides not to tell her about the test on the bedside table next to the pill bottles. The dead woman was probably pregnant. They won’t be sure until after the autopsy but the pregnancy kit was left there on purpose – it was not hidden or discarded. It was placed just so. It seemed everything in the apartment was arranged with purpose. The dead woman looked peaceful in her bed, clutching her pearls in one hand, but the whole picture was disconcertingly familiar to him, as if he’d seen her like this before, or he’d seen this pose somewhere.
He clears his throat. “Anyway, again, I apologize for dropping this news on you so early in the morning. We just have some questions for your husband. You understand – it was a lengthy phone call. As a follow-up, we’d like to know what that call was about. You understand, Ms. Roberts. It’s just routine.”
“I won’t forget to tell him,” she says. “This is sad news. So awful...” Her voice trails away.
“You have my number? It’s extension 346.”
“Yes. I have it.”
“I am sorry, Ms. Roberts.”
“What? What did you say?”
“I’m sorry for the loss of your...of your acquaintance.”
“Yes, of course. Thank you,” she says.
He disconnects.
“Fuck,” Tulah says, a soft whisper into the morning. She sits on the sprawling leather couch and lets her gaze be in the direction of the windows and the back yard and the snow clouds. She is not one for drinking in the morning but a shot of vodka seems like the right thing. She pulls the bottle from the freezer and slow-flows it into a water glass. She shoots it back – it’s icy cold and harsh and it burns down her throat – and then she pours another.
Part of her is fine with the death of this woman – the jealous, petty part of her – the part that can so clearly imagine this woman and Ray making love. The part of her that was hurt by a year or more of secrecy and lies could care less about this woman’s death. Mostly, Tulah is sad. Ray’s mistress was a human being who wanted to be loved, who wanted to love and in this basic respect, she was no different than Tulah. And really, what does it matter? He’s a good husband, and father, and friend. She would not want anyone else to witness her life. Oh God, this is bullshit. She knows this is bullshit. All these things are just lofty, high-road goals – they are the Buddhist way, they are the way of forgiveness. Right now, all she can think is that he is a selfish bastard, an asshole, and her husband. She was a
horrible person too, but she’d stopped being like that. She was not so horrid now. She was well beyond being vile and now he has reminded her of her own sins. She does not know what to feel. Everything is swirling.
It’s too soon, but she can see herself shouldering part of the blame for this woman’s death. She can draw the line from an unhappy Ray being open to the idea of an affair, to him breaking the affair off, and then this woman killing herself. At the bottom of it all, was Tulah, because she played a role in Ray’s unhappiness. Tulah shouldered part of the blame for not having a sex life with her husband. Her desire faded and she did nothing about it. She is baffled by her diminished sexual wanting. Perhaps she just stopped caring. And Ray went to this poor woman for sex. Tulah may as well have killed her with her own hands. She killed her. And a few days ago, she told her she was nothing more than an amusement ride. She may as well have force-fed her those pills. The police will want to question her next. The police will figure this out. They’ll know it was her. Tulah can feel panic rising in her body – she can’t get a full breath. She has to calm down but she can’t focus on calming down. She starts to feel dizzy. She leans forward and hangs her head between her legs – and eventually she is able to get an almost-full breath. Then another. The police don’t know anything. Another breath. They just have routine questions for Ray. Not her. They’re not interested in her. They don’t care about her and Ray’s sex life. And anyway, there was the craziness in the bathroom at the restaurant a couple of days back. That was something. But the police won’t care about that either.
This Is All a Lie Page 34