The Liar's Wife (6 page)

She hadn't looked too closely at what her mother thought of Johnny. She hadn't asked. She hadn't, perhaps, wanted to know. She and her mother would be in the kitchen, making supper, doing dishes, whispering like girls, and they would hear Jocelyn's father laughing as they had never known him to laugh with them, and get almost sick with laughing at dinner over Johnny's stories. Story after story; they poured out of Johnny like grain from a sower's hand, or from a chute. But she couldn't now remember a single story. Not one. Oh, yes, she could bring one up now. Something about some IRA soldiers who were lying in ambush to kill a wealthy Anglo Irishman, only to find out he wasn't coming out; he'd been laid up with a cold. “The poor fellow,” the soldiers had said to one another. “Terrible thing, a summer cold. Please God he'll be all right tomorrow.” Tomorrow would be the day that they would shoot him. Yet for tonight, he would be in their prayers.

Later, when she'd tearfully asked her mother, “Why didn't you warn me?” her mother had said, “I hoped for the best.”

Certainly, her parents had been welcoming. Too welcoming? Had her father offered her up on the altar of his own desire for a lively son?
He took him to the country club; he taught him golf. Johnny seemed to learn the game instantly. “A natural,” her father said. “As if he'd been born to it.”

“Well I'd hardly say that,” Johnny had said.

And there was the music. When he came to New Canaan he always brought his guitar. And after dinner he would sing for them. It was summer; the evenings were long, the light stretching out, it seemed, forever. “I'll sing the darkness in,” he'd say, sitting on the back porch, and they were all at peace, and happy, but she was enormously aroused and couldn't wait for her parents to go to bed so she could be in his arms. Right there on the couch; was it this couch? She had remained a virgin. She can't imagine now how that could have been. She can't imagine that she thought it normal that she would wear a girdle when her stomach was perfectly flat.

The music. She was for that summer, for the whole next year, the singer's girl. Gigs they were called; it was a word she heard for the first time then. An endless series of Irish pubs that seemed to her indistinguishable from one another. The Shamrock, the Blarney Stone, Paddy's Galway Bay. Smelling of beer, the bartenders not knowing quite what to make of her nursing a single gin and tonic—she'd do better now, she thought. As she aged, she'd learned to like drinking more and more. But then, she was the girl at the table, sitting, holding her drink, smiling, but full of anxiety—would they like him, they had to like him, she would kill them if they didn't like him, how could they not like him, he was entirely lovable, entirely desirable, entirely gifted. Or if they didn't like him enough, enough for him to say, “It was all right, then,” he would be cast down, his lower lip thrust out, his upper lip tucked behind it, in need of endless reassurance. “You were great, Johnny, they loved you.”

It was hard, sitting at those tables, to keep her face in what she imagined was the right way. She'd tried to remember the faces of the girlfriends of singers in movies. But they had it easy: they were only required to keep their faces right for a minute or two. She felt the responsibility of it, sometimes for hours. Fifty years later, she can remember the strained muscles in her face. Trying to keep it right.

She remembers the music, not the people he gathered around him, droves of them, not the people, not the stories. Because even then she
didn't quite believe the stories. Sometimes she was embarrassed to see some of the people again, because he'd told them things about her that weren't true. At first she thought he'd misunderstood when he told people her ancestors had come over on the
Mayflower.
That her father had been one of the soldiers to land on D Day.

He'd ended each of his sets with the same song, which he dedicated to her each time.

“To my very special lass here, who puts up with me.” He'd strum a few chords and then warn the audience that this was the last song of the evening. Then he'd put down the guitar and step forward and begin Prospero's speech from
The Tempest
, “Our Revels now are ended,” pausing a moment after “We are such stuff / as dreams are made on, and our little life / is rounded with a sleep,” to say, “This is Shakespeare's way of saying, ‘Have ye no homes of your own to go to?' ” Then after the laughter, a few more chords and the song that brought tears to everyone's eyes, even hers, genuine tears, every single time.

And the second verse, even more beautiful:

It was only later that she discovered the third verse, the one that made a mockery of eternal love. “If my true love will not come / I will surely find another.”

He never sang that verse. She didn't know about it till years later, after she'd left him. She heard a record of the Clancy Brothers on the radio. That was when she discovered that he'd stolen the “Revels now are ended” bit … and have ye no homes of your own to go to … from
the Clancy Brothers, a straight-out theft. How could he have done it, riding as he did on the coattails of the Clancy Brothers, riding the wave of the craze for folk music? But in 1962, she'd never heard the songs before. She thought they were original with him because she thought everything about him was miraculous. And so it seemed a miracle to her when he told her he loved her and when, that September, he asked her to marry him. Who would refuse a miracle? Would she, he asked (he was literally on bended knee), go back with him to Ireland?

Was she disappointed that her parents seemed so delighted? Or was it just her father? Her mother busied herself with plans for the wedding, only a few people, a judge who was her parents' friend, right in the living room. Right here, she thought, I married him right here. She wondered if he remembered.

“We have a favor to ask you, Linnet and myself, but we'd like to think we'd be able to do something in return.”

Here it comes, she thought. How much money would he ask for? How much would she give him?

“Could we park the truck here and spend the night in your home? We'll be out of your hair in the morning. It's nice for us to rest our old bones in a bed from time to time instead of dossing down in the back of the truck. And we'd be pleased to take you to dinner. We've just made great friends with Tony, who owns a fabulous restaurant right here in town. Of course you know it. The Tower of Pizza. Fabulous Italian food.”

“No,” she said, feeling as if she'd missed something right under her nose, something wonderful he'd seen the first minute he laid eyes on it. “Richard and I rarely go out to eat when we're here.”

“Well then you've a treat in store,” he said, rubbing his hands. She understood that he understood that she'd already agreed to their spending the night. She couldn't say no now without making a much larger point than she wanted to. And really, her impulse was to agree.

“I wonder if I could bother you to use the powder room,” Linnet said.

“The powder room.” The words made Jocelyn sad, making clear
the woman's unease, her desire not to appear unrefined, and the use of the words was the very thing that revealed their class differences, as if a spotlight had been shone on them.

“Of course,” Jocelyn said, “I'll just get you a hand towel.”

“She's a great girl, Linnet, a great soul, really,” Johnny said when the bathroom door closed. “The soul of loyalty. The most loyal woman I ever knew.”

Did he mean that as an accusation against her? She knew very well that with Johnny anything that was hurtful was not meant. Unconscious malice, it might be called by a certain type. Passive-aggressive by another. But Jocelyn believed that neither of these terms applied to Johnny. No, it was simply a certain absence of mind. A certain lightness, a tendency to shift attention.

But meant or not, the word “loyal” could not have been applied to her. She had left him. After only a little more than a year of marriage.

“We'd better get a wiggle on,” Linnet said. “It's after seven and they don't serve all night. And we need to get an early start in the morning.”

“I'm thinking you'd prefer to take your car than ride in the cab of the truck,” Johnny said.

“Yes, certainly,” said Jocelyn.

“So if you'll move your car out of the driveway, I'll just pull the truck in. We don't want to leave it parked on the street. The last thing we need is a whopping great parking ticket.”

“Of course,” Jocelyn said. She realized that, since they'd arrived, she'd done nothing but do what they asked. And why not? Everything they suggested made the best possible sense. But what sense did it make that she was driving her ex-husband and a woman who either was or was not his wife, fifty years since she'd last seen him? It made no sense at all.

She realized she hadn't called Richard to tell him where she was. She hoped he wouldn't worry. Of course he wouldn't worry. There was no reason to, no reason whatever.

The restaurant was near the railroad station, the part of town, in all the years she'd lived in New Canaan, that Jocelyn had approached most
rarely. The town had a dirty little secret, perhaps not well kept. Everyone thought of New Canaan as the home of upper-class WASPs, but there was a part of it that was not WASP at all, that had been, for many years, primarily Italian. None of her parents' friends lived in this part of town. “They” had their own church, their own schools; as a child she'd seen other girls her own age in plaid jumpers and brown oxfords, the boys in blue jackets and grey trousers. In high school, some of her good friends had been Italian: Barbara Valone, who'd been her partner in the science project—she remembered it was something about bats—that had won them third place in the state finals, and Arthur Calonna, who sat next to her in Chemistry and taught her how to use a pipette. But when it came time for college, Jocelyn and her friends went to Ivy League schools and Barbara went to Manhattanville, Arthur to Fordham. It was understood that they would go to Catholic colleges. Jocelyn had never seen them after high school graduation. Not once. If they came home to visit their parents, it would have been to quite another part of town.

“Right here,” Linnet said, indicating a neon sign that flashed
TOWER OF PIZZA
. How had she never noticed it? She noticed once again that Johnny had, if not actually lied, then exaggerated. He'd certainly got the name wrong. It wasn't an Italian restaurant. It was a pizzeria. But when they approached she saw that the menu on the door indicated that lasagna, manicotti, and baked ziti were also served. So perhaps she was being unfair.

Johnny and Linnet walked into the restaurant ahead of her. She saw how he did it, making an entrance, certain that everyone would be glad to see him. And the owner came out and put his arms around first Johnny and then Linnet. “I was so afraid you wouldn't show up,” he said. “We've got everything all set up for you.”

He pointed to two chairs and a microphone, a small table, a pitcher of water, a vase with two daisies in it, and an overlarge chrysanthemum.

“This is the friend I told you about,” Johnny said. “Do you believe she's lived in New Canaan all these years and never been here?”

“It's just that we're only here on weekends and, well, we like to stay at home.”

“No problem, honey,” the owner said. “Anything you do is fine by
me, after what Johnny told me about you. By the way, say hi to Mick next time you see him.”

Jocelyn nodded, not knowing what she'd agreed to.

“What did he mean by that, ‘Say hi to Mick'?” Jocelyn asked.

“Well, I just told him a little story, just to pass the time. I told him you and I had been friends when you were traveling in Europe in the sixties, boyfriend and girlfriend I said, but I told him you left me to go off with Mick Jagger. Before he joined the Stones.”

“Why would you do that, Johnny?” Jocelyn said. “What can I possibly say to him if he asks me?”

“Just say everything was great, that Mick was great, a very sensitive fellow,” Johnny said.

“Isn't he just a hoot?” Linnet said, putting her arm around Johnny's waist.

“You see, now, Tony has a story to tell his family and you'll always be welcome.”

“Except, Johnny, that it just isn't true,” Jocelyn said.

Johnny shrugged, and a waitress came up with two menus.

“Katerina, love,” he said, kissing her on the top of her head, “great to see you. I was hoping you'd be on. Katerina's from Romania.”

“I understand the song ‘Ruby Tuesday' was written for you,” she said.

“I guess so,” said Jocelyn. It was a set of muscles she hadn't used for fifty years, the muscles that allowed her to pick up the thread of Johnny's stories so that no one would be embarrassed, disappointed, shamed. Linnet started singing “Goodbye, Ruby Tuesday” and Johnny joined in, and then Katerina, and then Tony, the owner. Jocelyn looked down at the floor, hoping to suggest that the memory was bittersweet.

When she sat down, she realized she was trembling. She was slightly shocked at how glad she was to see Tony approaching with a bottle of wine and three glasses.

She drank rather faster than she was used to. Johnny and Linnet were holding hands. She found this vaguely embarrassing, and she disliked herself for the feeling. She felt that the silence made their handholding more portentous than it might have been. She noted that neither of them had asked her anything about herself. And then she remembered;
the Irish didn't ask you about yourself, they considered it rude. But of course Linnet wasn't Irish, but maybe she wanted to let Johnny take the lead. Well, Jocelyn told herself, I'm not Irish, and there's no one but me to take the lead. And there were things she wanted to know. She felt she had a right to know certain things; they had imposed upon her privacy, her hospitality. She should get something in return. She should be given information about the last half century of her ex-husband's life.