The Liar's Wife (10 page)

Johnny had not contained his life or been contained. He had loved women, left them and been left. He had a child whom he hardly knew. He hadn't even enough money for proper medical care. His musical dreams had ended up in what he had to know was an embarrassment: an opening act for a minor star at county fairs in parts of the country no one but the natives knew about. And ending up with Linnet, with her fried hair and her fake breasts and her tacky clothes and her murdering of the language. But that was not all Linnet was. Linnet was that and then there was the Linnet of the miraculous voice, clear and pure, light on water. All that that voice suggested and called up. So he had had that too. They had had it. The both of them.

He had loved life. He had lived it abundantly. “Brimful” was a word that came to her. No, not just brimful, she thought; overflowing.

And of herself, the words that came were “meager.” “Mere.”

She thought of the fable of the grasshopper and the ant. Maybe it was all wrong. Maybe the ant withered away alongside his store of dried-up grain. Sated but desiccated. Maybe the grasshopper got some other creature to take him in at the last minute, glad of the company, happy to provide.

She could not have made a life with Johnny. And yet he had made a life. A life he loved.

“I've always loved life.” She would never forget his saying that. And behind those words other words came to her, from where? The Bible? Some long-dead poet. Love casts out fear. If love casts out fear, does it follow that fear casts out love? More than loving life, she'd feared it, not what it was, but what it could bring. She had not been able, ever,
for long, to put out of her mind the things people had to endure. The things they lost.

Perhaps it was genetic; perhaps she was born the child who wept when the swings were taken down for the winter.

She had always somehow known that life was capable of striking blows that crippled, mauled, maimed, even killed. Always she had been prepared for the great blow.

But the great blow had not come. Rather there had been a series of diminishments. She couldn't say, if she were honest, that age brought anything but loss. The muscle's firmness, the keen tooth of desire blunted or ground down, the ardent flame of the first years of marriage banked, coals in a stove, the heat steady, dependable, the embers lively, but the flame, the flame, the thrilling dangerous climb and crackle nowhere to be seen. And the soaring love of children, the exhausting days when you wept for sleep that you couldn't have, days when you knew every act was meaningful—diluted now to a weekly call, a monthly visit. The belief that the work that you were good at was somehow important, mattered terribly to the fate of the world—you knew others would take up what you'd done, perhaps be better at it, or perhaps the work would become obsolete, and no one would remember what you'd done or how you did it. And the fate of the earth itself, degraded by the greed, the carelessness of people who would not see. Would her grandchildren kill or be killed for drinking water? Would New York be drowned? She often had these thoughts, and when she did, what she hoped was to die before these things happened, before she had to see the horrors that she knew might come.

She believed that the best possible course in the face of these things was to see clearly, to see what was there. Not to pretend that what was there was not. So that you wouldn't find yourself ambushed, struck down on a dark road. She had tried to see clearly. And because of this she couldn't say, “I love life.”

As Johnny could.

My life, she wanted to say, not even knowing what she meant, my life. “Sometimes I think I don't understand anything about life, Johnny,” she said. “Nothing at all.”

“Isn't that the great thing, then,” he said. “Isn't that the great thing
about it. Anything can happen, you never know what it's going to mean.”

She felt quite light-headed, and she very much wanted to be outside. “Come outside with me, Johnny,” she said. “Let's have a look at the moon.”

The moon was three quarters full. It fell on the blue-black grass, it lit the peach-colored geraniums so that they seemed newly daring; the yellow hibiscus blazed, remembering its jungle home. The white hydrangeas seemed larger than they had in daylight; someone's cat slunk into a bush; there seemed to be no stars.

They were standing in the moonlight; they would not see each other again. It ought to have been a solemn moment, but she felt not solemn at all, but giggly. She very much wanted to dance.

Through her mind went the words of the nonsense poem, turned into a song she'd sung for her children. “They danced by the light of the moon, / the moon, / the moon, they danced by the light of the moon.”

She heard herself beginning to sing.

“Would you dance with me, Johnny?” she said.

“Delighted, madam,” Johnny said. “I'd say Tony's Chianti did you no harm.”

“I never sing, Johnny. I have a terrible voice.”

“There's no such thing as a terrible voice if you have the love of singing.”

“Well, Johnny, that's just not true,” she said and began giggling, letting him twirl her across the dark lawn.

Suddenly she felt quite dizzy. “I must sit down,” she said.

“And I must say good night.” He kissed the top of her head.

“Joss, you're a great girl, a great girl. You always were. We had some great times, didn't we, lass? No regrets.”

“No, Johnny,” she said, “no regrets.”

And she knew she'd spoken truthfully. She would have been less had she never known him, without the glimpse of something offered, something she knew she couldn't hold on to. Didn't want. Without Johnny she wouldn't have known, really, who she was. Because he had taught her who she was not.

And by coming back, he'd done something else for her. Some lightness
had come about, as if heavy branches had been cut down, changing the whole look of the house.

He had changed something. Moved some rock that had sealed something over. The sealed-up understanding that she'd had, as if she knew what life was and would always be.

She thought of the word “unsealed,” and the thrill of it made her feel even more dizzy. But the dizziness pleased her now.

She was awakened at 4:30 the next morning by a sound she couldn't place: it was loud, unaccustomed, misplaced in the grey air which ought to have been still. She was unwilling to unloose the grip of sleep; she couldn't yet commit to wakefulness. Alongside the loud noise, which she gradually understood to be the sound of an engine, or rather, underneath it, two words thrummed or drummed in her sluggish brain. Blood meal, someone was saying. A woman's voice, no one she knew. Blood meal, the voice repeated. And then, hovering above it, the sound of Johnny's voice singing, “We'll all go together” and then Linnet's, “I wonder if I could bother you to use the powder room.” And then Johnny's voice, speaking this time, “Our Revels now are ended.”

She forced herself awake, and then walked quickly to the window. The yellow truck was driving down the street.

She felt a chill in the air. The sun hadn't come up yet and the air was damp.

He'd gone now. She remembered that he never liked goodbyes.

She wouldn't see him in her life again.

She would have to explain to the neighbors why a Frito-Lay truck had been parked in her driveway.

Of course she could never go back to the Tower of Pizza again. Or maybe she would, with Richard, and if anyone said anything about Mick, she'd just put her finger to her lips and then wink.

But how could she tell anyone about what had happened last night? The visit of these two. Quite out of nowhere.

People might say she'd dreamed it.

But no one would suggest she'd made it up.

No one would think she had it in her.

OCTOBER 7, 1942

She looks ridiculous.

Only a ridiculous person would be dressed like that.

The black cape, overwhelming her in the high wind.

The flapping trousers.

The white hand, holding down the black beret.

The wind has overwhelmed her.

She is standing in the middle of the sidewalk, overwhelmed.

Waiting for someone to tell her what to do.

Her cape, that looks like it is good for nothing, certainly no good for protection from the cold. Or good only to carry her off.

Away somewhere.

Aloft.

And then smashed down.

And her trousers, as if they, too, were in the business, the enterprise of forcing her to take flight.

Forced into flight when what she wanted was just: gravity.

The wind is strong but her clothing makes the wind a much greater problem.

Overwhelmed.

Unfit.

Unsuited.

Genevieve doesn't know: Does Mlle Weil see me? Or does she not see?

Genevieve cannot order her impressions. Which was first?

“This figure, man or woman, I can't tell, is ridiculous.”

“I will not grant this ridiculous figure the expenditure of my attention. Even for a second glance.”

Or was it: “That is Mlle Weil, whom I refuse to see.”

Or was the first impression not in fact a sight, but a cry, audible despite, or perhaps because, of the high wind.

“Geneviève. Geneviève.”

Her name pronounced as she had known it until two years ago. “Jahn, uh, vee, evv.”

Her American friends call her “Jenn uh veev.”

Her American in-laws, strangers to the French, but not the Yiddish tongue, prefer to call her Jenny.

There is nothing to be done. She can't run; she is pushing a perambulator.

If she hadn't had the baby with her, would she have run?

Probably not. She is not that sort of person. To run. To run away from someone she had known, who calls her name. And she would not have run, because of that woman's force.

A force from whose field she had believed she had long ago freed herself. Mlle Weil, her teacher. Her revered teacher in the
lycée
of Le Puy, in the south of France, thousands of miles away. The year was 1933. Nine years ago. Now she is twenty-four, no longer Genevieve Le Clos, now Genevieve Levy. The wife of Dr. Howard Levy, fighting in the army of the South Pacific. The mother of a thirteen-month-old baby. Aaron. Her son. No longer the girl she was.

And Mlle Weil? Is she the person she was in 1933?

It is impossible to believe that Mlle Weil would not be the same.

Genevieve waits for the light to change. Mlle does not wait; she is running. Even across the width of Riverside Drive, Genevieve can see the plain happiness on her face.
Can she be smiling like that when I am feeling nothing but the urge to flee?

She had known that Mlle Weil was in New York. Friends of friends had told her, colleagues of her brother, Laurent, professor at the university. Columbia, Department of Psychology. Mlle Weil is here because of her brother. The great mathematician André Weil. Older brother of the younger, in some ways more famous, sister.

Mlle Weil is here with her parents. Saved from the fate of French Jews, sequestered on account of her brother's gift for mathematics. In the safe bosom of the American academy. Teaching in a college in Pennsylvania, Genevieve had heard. But the Weils, Mlle Weil and her family, are living, she knows, quite near where she lives. On the same street, though perhaps a quarter mile away. Riverside Drive. To herself, though she never says it aloud, Genevieve thinks of it as Riverside Boulevard.

Genevieve had been afraid of just this moment. This moment of encounter, not only with this woman whom she does not wish to see, but with the whole of what has been lost.

Of course her losses are not singular. The War. The War has stolen whole lives. Whole cities. Ways of living.

But the sight of Mlle Weil reminds Genevieve that the loss had come before the War. And
was
in some ways singular. A loss unlike others brought about by the War. Perhaps not a loss, rather a relinquishment. A gift freely given. A relinquishment, yes, but drawn up from a well of love.