The Liar's Wife (7 page)

“How long have you two been driving trucks?”

“Well, not that long, it's just our latest way of surviving,” Linnet said. “We met when we were working a county fair in Wisconsin; we were an introductory act for Arlo Guthrie.”

“Oh, yes,” Jocelyn said, “Alice's Restaurant.”

“Fabulous guy, fabulous. He wasn't just a one-trick pony. He's really grown as an artist. Great stories, great stories. Great gas it was being on the road with Arlo.”

“Don't say ‘great gas,' I told you that, baby,” Linnet said. “It makes people think you've got a flatulence problem.”

Johnny laughed and kissed Linnet on the mouth. Jocelyn remembered she had thought the same thing fifty years ago in Dublin when people said “great gas,” when they meant they were having a good time.

Jocelyn felt herself laughing more than she knew the comment was worth. Why not enjoy the evening? she asked herself. There's nothing wrong with it. It's good to widen your horizons. Get out of your rut. God knows, Johnny was never in a rut.

“For a while, we had a really good gig, a good paying gig, not a musical gig but, you know, like a job. We had it for two years. We were a live-in couple for a terrific old lady. We really loved her. Out in New Mexico, near Taos. Beautiful country. I just love the desert,” Linnet said.

“I do too,” said Jocelyn, with an enthusiasm that suggested that the bond between them was profound.

“Adelaide Harrison, what a great lady. A really great lady. We lived in, you know. I was the handyman and Linnet did the cooking and cleaning and the errands—she had a gorgeous place near Taos, incredible views of the desert, unbelievable sunsets. We lived there for two
years, and we were like family. We couldn't do enough for her, she couldn't do enough for us,” Johnny said.

“It's because of her we have this nest egg,” Linnet said, reaching into the neck of her T-shirt. She pulled something out, a silver chain, and lifted it over her head, cupping it in her hand as if it were a literal, fragile bird's egg, robin, perhaps, or plover, Jocelyn thought. She brought her hand close to Jocelyn's face and then opened it slowly. “This is our nest egg,” she said. Attached to the chain was a diamond ring; the stone, Jocelyn could see, even in the darkness, was enormous.

“Adelaide gave this to me and Johnny. It was her engagement ring. She said she'd give it to us if we'd promise to make it legal someday. We said we would, although, as a matter of fact, that's not going to be happening anytime soon, because neither of us is exactly what you'd call divorced.”

“Ashley's mother?” Jocelyn asked. She was listening to what they said as if they were people with whom she had no connection, from another very distant country, with another set of customs, fascinating, but far from her concern.

“No, no, Ashley's mother was much too organized not to get properly divorced. You were organized in that department, Jocelyn, or I guess the family lawyer was. I was quite grateful at how easy it was.”

She'd had to sue him for desertion, and she'd disliked that very much, because he hadn't deserted her, she'd deserted him, although she found the word grotesque, as if they were infants left on some doorstep. She knew that he wouldn't mind, though, and it was much easier. Quite easy, in fact, she remembered now.

“No, it was a lady named Melody, but we did not make beautiful music together,” Johnny said.

Linnet raised her glass, and they clinked.

“And me,” she said, “well I got out by the skin of my teeth, let me just tell you that. I don't know what it was but for a while there, bipolar types just levitated towards me.”

“I think you mean ‘gravitated,' sweetheart,” Johnny said. “Although knowing you, you're such an angel, maybe they did levitate.”

“Whatever,” Linnet said. Jocelyn noticed she took no offense at
Johnny's correction of her diction. He had cared about words; she wondered if Linnet's carelessness with language was troubling to him.

“But you let your friend Adelaide think you would get married someday.”

“Well, we didn't want to worry her. It would have just worried her if she knew about all our legal complications. And she was worried about what to do with the ring. She knew her daughter didn't want it. She kept saying, ‘Rowena's just too sporty for this kind of ring.' ”

“What she meant,” Linnet said, “was that she was a lesbian.”

“Rowena was a great girl, her and her friend Beth. We had some marvelous evenings with them, watching the sun go down with a glass of wine. It was great crack, great crack.”

“That's another thing you can't say, Johnny, like I've told you maybe like, what, a million times. You can't say ‘great crack.' People will think you're a drug addict.”

Jocelyn laughed out loud, a laugh she thought would have embarrassed almost everyone she knew. It would definitely have embarrassed Richard.

She was feeling dizzier now, and her sense of well-being had suddenly disappeared, replaced by a disturbing notion that if she got up and tried to walk she would fall down. She remembered feeling that way all the time in the last days of her marriage to Johnny. It was navigating the choppy seas of what they would call stories and what she could only call lies. Not knowing what was firm, dependable ground, the ground of fact, the ground on which words and facts met—it had made her woozy; some days she felt she could do nothing but take to her bed. It was why she'd needed to leave him; she needed to be on firm ground again. And she had been, living her life, one foot before the other on the sweet firm earth. Until tonight. Once again she had to navigate the sea of untruths. Johnny telling the restaurant owner she had been Mick Jagger's girlfriend. Pretending that she wasn't more than slightly queasy about the way in which they'd got their “nest egg,” this extraordinarily valuable ring. He had pulled her back, back into those treacherous waters.

They never called anything a lie, but they lied all the time, even to each other, even to their best friends. Lying to each other didn't seem to tarnish their sense of friendship. But she had believed that if you were really friends with someone, you didn't lie to them, and so if you lied to someone, that person could not be a real friend. She thought she had made real friendships until the end, when she couldn't believe anything, when she thought nothing was real, and she had been terrified and fled for home.

She had thought Claire and Moira were her friends. She was fascinated by them, by a way she'd never known of being a woman. They talked as she had never heard women talking before. In the fog of talk, the tempest of talk, the tornado of talk, the furniture shop of talk, the flood of talk, the firestorm of talk—men talking, talking, these two women would send up a flare, and there would be a clearing because always they were surprised that it was a woman talking. And the talk of these women was deliberately not kind.

She and Johnny had lived first with Claire and her husband, Diarmid, when they arrived in Dublin. The ease, the kindness of Claire and Diarmid … “You're very welcome,” they had said, and she did feel welcome, nothing begrudged, everything offered—laughter, talk, cigarettes, whiskey, wonderful brown bread and butter-boiled eggs for breakfast; tea, which she had to learn to like, and did. They had actual jobs; they left the flat early … Claire to work at
The Irish Times
, Diarmid at his architectural firm. He was taking a courageous position, a position against the time of the tide: trying to preserve the beautiful old Georgian buildings against the rush of new development, buildings of a shocking ugliness, an ugliness, he said, that gave him a physical pain, made him want to take to his bed. He was quieter than Claire, and Claire talked even more than Johnny. But she, Jocelyn, was the quietest of them all. She thinks now that with her, Claire took on the male part: the talking part, and she became the woman, the wife, the little sister, listening. Listening to the real story. What was really there behind the ornate, colorful, so decorative screen.

Claire and Moira: best friends since childhood. Jocelyn came to see they didn't really take men seriously. For them men were always boys to be put up with or put off or teased or indulged. A luxury item. They
never asked men for advice; they never asked men their opinion. And they had important work, Claire at the paper, and Moira a doctor. How surprised Jocelyn had been that someone her age, twenty-three, would already be a doctor. The training was different, she learned soon; you trained as a doctor the minute you entered college. Tropical medicine was her specialty. And Rory, so in love with her, getting his Ph.D. in French, but film was his passion. What was most important to him was writing film criticism for small journals. They were all mad about film … Sometimes they forgot themselves and pronounced the word “film” with two syllables—“fillum,” they would say. There were enormous queues around the cinemas that showed the latest films from Europe. The whole town seemed movie mad. But no one was more mad about films than Rory. Serious, always the butt of their jokes, perfectly accepting, even relishing in his role as the one to be teased.

So much is coming back to her now. She remembers Moira making fun of an article he had written. “Marian Imagery in the Work of Ingmar Bergman.” He had asked if they would listen to it, give him “constructive criticism.” Jocelyn had no idea what the words “Marian imagery” might mean. It became clear to her (she had learned by then not to ask, to wait until she got the code) that it meant something about the Virgin Mary.

And Moira had said, “Oh, for God's sake, Rory, will you give over that pious shite. Bergman has no more interest in the Virgin Mary than my arse.”

“I've heard your arse is quite interested in the Virgin,” Claire said.

“So it's well ahead of Bergman.”

Claire, with her girlish, breastless body, her cap of tight curls, wearing only the lightest shade of pink lipstick, cutting her nails like a boy's. And Moira with her thick black hair, in a single plait, and the black eyes and the un-Irish olive skin. “My tinker blood,” she'd said, proudly.

Jocelyn had thought they were her friends. But in the time when she felt she was going mad, because she didn't know what anything really was, what was really happening, when she couldn't believe anything anybody said … she felt that even Claire and Moira, if they hadn't exactly lied, had presented her with some version of untruth.

One day, she'd run into them coming out of a store that had always puzzled her. The mannequins were nuns, deliberately unsexy, block-shaped rather than curvaceous. She had found the window display sad: garments meant for concealment rather than allure; serviceable, unadorned, unlovely.

She couldn't understand what Clare and Moira were doing coming out of that store, their arms full of packages. Her puzzlement must have showed on her face because Moira had said, “Shopping for my trousseau, don't you know.”

And Claire had said, “We'll have a drink to celebrate the dear about to be departed. Only keep it under your hat.”

Moira was going to be a nun. She was leaving for something called the novitiate in six weeks.

Jocelyn was appalled. It seemed appalling to her; beautiful, brilliant Moira throwing her life away, hiding herself behind stone walls. She had suggested gently, she hoped, that perhaps it hadn't been quite fair to Rory, to let him go on thinking there'd be a chance they'd spend their lives together. Moira's lips had thinned almost to invisibility and she'd said, “There are some things too deep for words, too complicated for words. It wouldn't have been telling the truth to talk about it, because I didn't know yet what I felt and I could only decide in the privacy of my own heart. Privacy is not concealment. It is not untruth.”

But they had never been quite comfortable with each other again. Because what Moira was doing seemed just too strange to her, too difficult for her to understand in someone whom she had believed to be a friend. Now she wondered: was there a kind of jealousy of it? A jealousy that her friend had a secret life, deeper, richer, more glamorous than any life she had access to? It made her friend unknowable to her; as if she were someone who had been born in another century, and the person Jocelyn thought she had been speaking to was only a phantom, a chimera, the product of a dream.

“We'd better drink up, because this one won't be getting the water of life too much from now on. We won't be able even to see her in the first year, while she's in postulancy. But I'd say in the novitiate they'll ease up on you.”

They were using these strange words, “postulancy,” “novitiate,” as if they were ordinary, as if they were saying “knife,” “fork,” “glass,” “spoon.”

“God knows what you'll be up to without me to keep an eye on you. I suppose the sky will be the limit with you and the French fella.”

“Well, Jesus, what would you have me do? Join you in the sisterhood of perpetual Irish virginity?”

Jocelyn was completely confused. They had had a lot to drink. They saw that she was lost, and she could see them sharing a look that meant, “Shall we let her in on it?” And then they decided that they would.

“You see, my wild American rose, my husband isn't so much for the below the waist business. It seems I haven't the right equipment. Not like your Johnny.”

How long did it take her to understand that she was saying that Diarmid was homosexual?

“I love him with all my heart, you see. My best friend. We're the greatest of pals.”

“More than you can say for the President of the Holy Name Society and his lovely wife, Prefect of Sodality.”

They threw their heads back and laughed at a joke whose meaning Jocelyn had no access to.

So the friends she thought she had made had all been lying to her. And lying to each other.

But she should have known, because almost from the beginning her friendship with Moira had been marked by lies. The first had turned into a joke. Jocelyn had invited Moira for dinner one night when Johnny was meant to be working late. She had bought what she would have called lamb chops, what were in Dublin called mutton chops. They had just moved into their own apartment and she was excited about cooking for another woman, a woman whom she liked, whom she admired.