Perfect Lies (6 page)

“How dare you—”

“You’ve never found a real partner. Someone who would stand up to you. Who refused to be controlled. Each time I see you repeat one of these ridiculous cycles, I become more convinced of what the problem is. You don’t want to find the right person because, deep down, you know you already have.”

“Oh, please—what self-serving—”

“Listen, to me, baby.” His hand was at the back of her neck. He gathered a fistful of her hair. “This is about us. Not me.
Us.
It’s real. I know you can feel it. We’ve got to work this out.”

“Let go of me. Or I’ll scream. I mean it.” He released his grasp, and Meg moved away from him on the bench. “The only thing we have between us is you acting like a fool. And a bastard. Do you have any idea how deeply Lark would be hurt—she’d be just ripped apart—if she knew what you were saying to me right now.”

“Of course, I know.” Ethan looked up at her without remorse. “Why in the world do you think I’ve waited so long, why I’ve denied these feelings, tried to block them out? I know how badly Lark would feel—if she knew. But what about me, Meg? Do you have any idea what I’m going through this
minute?
The utter hell of it?”

“No, I don’t understand,” she replied, unable to feel anything but disgust. “And honestly, I don’t want to. Somehow you’ve confused my caring about you as a brother—a brother-in-law—with something very different. And—believe me, Ethan—you’re dead wrong. You’ve meant a great deal to me—as Lark’s husband, as a great father to my nieces. I’ve admired your marriage. I love your daughters, you know that. I’ve felt lucky just being a part of your family. This … this fixation of yours, Ethan, it puts all of that in jeopardy. Everything we’ve shared. Please … let’s not ever talk about it again.”

Ethan said nothing and Meg gradually became aware again of the world around them: the grinding roar of traffic up Sixth Avenue, the distant wail of a fire engine, the rustle of sycamore leaves as the wind gusted east. When Ethan lifted his head to look at her, she saw tears in his eyes.

“Whatever you say,” Ethan told her softly. “Whatever you think is right … But I’ve got to tell you that what you’re asking—I just can’t promise that I can do it. Don’t you see, Meg? You’ve become a part of me. Like blood. Like breathing—”

“Ethan, I’m going now. I can’t hear any more of this. You know what you have to do.”

Juggling her briefcase and shoulder bag, she started to walk away, even though he kept talking, almost as much to himself as to Meg. “You’ve been my inspiration. My secret fire. You’re asking me to put that out…”

T
he Taconic Parkway in autumn was, to Meg’s mind, one of the most beautiful highways in the country. Winding up through the Hudson Valley, with the blue-tinged Catskills to the west and the foothills of the Berkshires to the east, its graceful curves and long valleys retraced the path of glaciers. The Columbus Day weekend fell at the very peak of autumnal color, and the hills were a dazzling wash of oranges, reds, and golds ablaze against a thickening gray sky. It was unseasonably warm for that time of year, and the forecast promised a series of powerful thunderstorms. Meg had the passenger window halfway down, the wind whipping at her hair.

After the accident that killed her parents, Meg’s confidence in her driving abilities was severely shaken. She learned to manage well enough when the weather was clear, but even now hated to be behind the wheel when the roads turned wet or icy. On inclement weekends, Meg often accepted Abe Sabin’s standing invitation to ride upstate with him. A lawyer and longtime friend of Ethan’s and Lark’s, Abe commuted from the city every weekend to his sprawling contemporary home on a mountaintop overlooking Red River. It was there that Meg had first met Abe and his stunningly beautiful wife Becca, though it was back in New York that she had really gotten to know and respect him. When Meg was starting her business, Abe, who was going into practice on his own at about the same time, gave her free legal advice. Hardwick and Associates grew as Abe’s firm also flourished, and Abe eventually became Meg’s official legal counsel, guiding her with painstaking care and a well-honed cynicism over several rough business patches.

Over the course of the ten or so years that Meg had known Abe, they had made the trip together back and forth to Red River hundreds of times. Though Abe had long ago put an end to Meg’s attempts to pay for gas, he did let her help replenish and recycle his extensive supply of tapes and audio books. The great thing about Abe, Meg had discovered, was that he seemed perfectly content driving the full two-and-a half-hour commute without saying a word. If however, she needed to talk, Abe listened and—in his overassured, court-appointed manner—dispensed advice. After the usual chitchat, Abe rarely initiated conversation himself and Meg sensed that he liked to use this time to unwind and mentally sort through his problems. In the past year those had included the bitter breakup of his five-year marriage to a woman who appeared to be so absolutely perfect that Meg and Lark referred to her as “Becca the Beautiful.”

Meg knew that Becca weighed heavily on Abe’s mind, even though he hardly ever talked about her these days, but she never pried. Lark, however, had confided to Meg that Becca had taken Abe “for everything he was worth” and that, though he had fought her each step of the way, she had recently received a very lucrative divorce settlement. Today, with Abe in a particularly quiet mood and Meg mired in her own concerns, they’d exchanged about a dozen words. Meg had bought a new Joshua Redman recording for the trip, and for the last half-hour she’d sat with her eyes closed listening to music that seemed to tap directly into the turmoil that had taken over her life.

Ethan. He hadn’t followed through on his promise to forget her—not for a single day. In fact, Meg decided, he was now thoroughly out of control. For the past three weeks he had been calling her every night, late at night. Meg could tell from the sounds in the background that he often placed these calls from a noisy restaurant or bar. After the first two or three rambling conversations, Meg wouldn’t pick up the phone. He just talked into her machine instead.

“I can’t take this anymore,” he would begin. “I have to see you. Today was utter hell. I could hardly work, thinking about you. Do you have any idea how beautiful you look when you’re angry? That afternoon in Bryant Park your eyes were such an amazing green—I’ve been trying to reproduce that exact hue with my glass. Oh, God, Meg, it’s the only thing keeping me sane. Am I sane? Perhaps, you’re right, I am out of my mind. But it’s you, baby, who’ve driven me there.”

He stopped by the office three times, unannounced, bringing her ridiculously huge bouquets of flowers. At Meg’s obviously perturbed request, Oliver steered him back to the elevator banks each time, apologizing about how busy Meg was at that moment, but how he’d be sure to give his boss the lovely gift.

“What’s up with your brother-in-law?” Oliver had asked her after running interference during Ethan’s second unexpected visit.

“Believe me, you don’t want to know,” Meg had responded, though she was longing to confide in someone. She was losing sleep worrying. And, as the ordeal continued, Meg came to believe that Ethan was deluding himself—living out a fantasy that he seemed convinced Meg shared with him.

Ethan had always been somewhat histrionic and prone to mood swings. He was an artist, after all, and Meg had assumed that his volatile nature was part and parcel of his creativity. But when he didn’t ease off, when he refused to accept Meg’s rejections, she began to think he was experiencing some kind of nervous breakdown. Perhaps the whole awful affair could be written off as a male midlife crisis, a chemical imbalance in the brain, a sudden overproduction of testosterone. Whatever the case, some explanation was needed. Because someone had to let Lark know what was going on.

The week before, Meg had decided to face Ethan head-on with the problem. She agreed to have lunch with him at a very busy, very public restaurant in midtown. From the beginning, he’d been impossible. He kissed her on the cheek as he arrived and sat down next to her on the banquette.

“Sit opposite me, please,” she’d said. “In the chair. And keep your hands to yourself.”

“It’s just so great to see you.” Ethan slipped around the side of the table and settled down across from her. Meg had noticed several heads turn as Ethan, tall and magnetic, strode through the restaurant. He was now gazing at her with a look of such unabashed admiration that the woman at the next table smiled at her and shook her head with good-humored envy. If she only knew, Meg reflected ruefully.

By the end of the lunch, as she might very well have predicted, they were going over the same well-worn ground in an increasingly heated manner.

“If you don’t stop with all this—the calls, the flowers—” Meg said, “I’m going to be forced to tell Lark.”

“Don’t do that, Meg, please.”

“So, you’ll stop. Today, this lunch, is the last time we discuss this madness?”

“It’s the gold I can’t get,” he told her, with a wide grin that would have seemed disarming to anyone except Meg at that moment.

“What are you talking about?”

“In your eyes. You have these beautiful golden flecks, kind of embedded in the green.”

“Ethan, please stop.” But it just started all over again.

Would this have been any easier if she and Lark weren’t so close? There was no one in the world Meg loved as much as her younger sister. There was nothing she wouldn’t do to keep her from being hurt. And yet, telling her about Ethan would cause Lark such anguish, Meg could hardly imagine it. Lark was still so glowingly, unashamedly in love with her husband. She was such a devoted, doting mother. And, ultimately, she was so proud of the beautiful family she and Ethan had created. She’d even managed to integrate the difficult, demanding Lucinda into the household. Lark had been able to accomplish what she and Meg had always longed for as children: she’d built a real home. And now it looked as though Meg was about to destroy it.

Because she usually confided every detail of her life to her younger sister, Meg stopped phoning Lark once Ethan started his campaign. Lark, who sometimes knew Meg better than she knew herself, quickly would have been able to detect that something was wrong. But not calling her proved to be a mistake after all.

“Hey there—what the
hell
is going on with you?” Lark had left a message on Meg’s machine the night before, an hour or two before Ethan called. “I know when you go into hiding like this that something’s wrong. Is that snake Paul Stokes back in the picture and you’re afraid to tell me? I asked Ethan how you seemed at your lunch with him the other day and you know what he said? ‘She seemed fine.’ Period. Men. Listen, believe me, I’m going to get it all out of you this weekend, so be forewarned. Also, it turns out that Fran and Matt are coming to dinner after all and I just don’t have the time to do any more baking. Could you pick up two of those great little Dutch apple pies from Cupcake Cafe for me? Love you. See you Friday.”

And Meg knew that Lark
would
come after her, probing, cajoling, unrelenting. Even as a small girl Lark had demanded intimate and direct access to Meg’s feelings, a result, Meg believed, of having an older sister as quasi-parent. When Lark became a mother herself, she honed her skills of observation and emotional control to a fine art. In the past, this intense concern had been a comfort to Meg. It was Lark’s way of expressing love and, Lord knew, Meg could use all she could get. But now, with the prospect of three long days under siege, she dreaded the thought of what Lark’s persistent questions would force into the open.

“So? Who is it?” Abe asked. They were crossing the short bridge just below the Columbia County border; the lower Berkshire hills rolled away to the east, like so many misty, gray-green breakers.

“Pardon?”

“Who’s the guy? You’ve had this little frown on your forehead all afternoon. In my experience that can mean only one thing.” Abe himself was smiling as he asked the question—the slightly down-turning, self-deprecating grin that Meg had seen him use to his sly advantage on many occasions. Abe seemed so easygoing and harmless at times that one could easily forget the razor-sharp, unforgivingly logical mind that was constantly at work. His dark, unruly hair had started to recede at the temples and his compact frame had grown lean from years of tennis, but he could still pass at a glance for the brilliant Harvard Law graduate who had clerked for Justice Rehnquist. Until one met his gaze. Abe had the weary, slightly hooded eyes of a man twenty years his senior.

“You’ve been talking to Lark?”

“No, I’ve been talking to Paul Stokes.” Abe had introduced Paul to Meg, and he had followed their burgeoning affair with a proprietary interest. “Paul said he saw you at lunch the other day with some man he didn’t recognize. He said the guy looked like he really had a thing for you.”

“You lawyers sure have a fine way with the English language.”

“I’m sorry. Have I offended your feminine sensibilities?”

Meg considered Abe’s tone of voice. “Why are you so upset, Abe? I’m a bona fide SWF.”

“Me? Upset? Not at all. I was just curious. From the way you were talking post-Paul, I thought you were giving up on the male of the species for a while.”

“Actually, I am,” Meg said, pressing the button to roll up the window. The sun had fallen behind the larger mountains and with its departure the temperature had plummeted. Meg felt the chill on a deeper level. If other people were noticing Ethan’s attraction to her, then she had no choice. She would have to tell Lark what was going on.

“Whatever you say.”

“What’s with you, Abe? You know, it feels like you’re actually sniping at me.”

“Not so.”

“If you’re pissed at me about Paul, just come right out and say so.”

“You’re accusing
me
of holding back?” Abe said, laughing. He glanced at her quickly and then turning his eyes back to the darkening road. “You know me better than that. No, this isn’t about Paul. I told you before that I was a little stunned when you two seemed to take. Opposites attracting and all that. I guess I’m just puzzled these days by the whole subject of couples, and of love. You usually tell me when you’ve got something hot going on.”