Would I Lie To You (2 page)

“Nate? Naaa-te? Where are you hiding, my little goose-berry?”

That muffled, far-off cry made the fine sun-bleached hairs on the back of Nate Archibald’s tanned neck stand straight up. He’d purposely chosen the dingy but deserted attic of Coach Michaels’s house for a quick escape from yet another day of indentured servitude in the not-so-fashionable part of Long Island.

Escape, of course, meaning escape to stoned land. Inhale THC, exhale CO2.

He took a long drag from the freshly rolled joint and blew a plume of warm, dry smoke out the small half-window, straining to hear where the voice was coming from. The voice in question belonged to Patricia, also known as “Babs,” Coach Michaels’s ever-present and usually sun-bathing-topless-by-the-pool wife. Nate had been working at the Michaelses’ Hampton Bays house since graduation—or in his case, semigraduation, since he hadn’t yet received his diploma, due to a now-infamous Viagra-stealing incident. And while Babs had always been friendly—bringing him tall glasses of lemon-infused ice tea as he guided the lawnmower over Coach’s beloved lawn, urging him to eat a slice of buttery cinnamon toast when he showed up in the morning, bleary-eyed and ready for work—for the past two days she’d been . . . well, extra friendly. He might have been stoned most of the time, but he was with it enough to notice that Babs Michaels definitely had a thing for him.

Doesn’t everyone?

Nate paused and focused all his energy on listening to the quiet house, but the only noise he heard was the pounding of his stoned, nervous heart. He brought the joint back up to his lips and paused—maybe the pot was making him paranoid, but he thought he heard something. It sounded like footsteps coming closer.

Shit! Nate hastily stubbed the joint out on the rough wooden windowsill, sending a shower of sparks onto the floor. Great—not only was he about to get caught smoking a joint on the job, he was going to burn the fucking house down in the process. He tucked the roach into his pocket— no sense wasting it—and frantically fanned the smoke out the open window.

“Are you up here, Nate?” Babs’s voice boomed from the bottom of the attic stairwell. “Do I smell something . . . illegal? You know, I was a teenager once, too—not so long ago!”

Nate was still waving his hands frantically when Babs emerged from the top of the stairs. A sly smile spread across her wrinkled, slightly sun-burnished face. Her dyedred hair was pulled back in a sloppy ponytail. A halo of auburn frizz puffed out around her forehead.

“There you are.” Babs sighed. “Didn’t you hear me calling for you?”

Nate shook his head, suddenly very concerned about how stoned he was.

“Well,” she continued, strolling toward him, past the piles of cardboard boxes and all the old toys and junk that she and the coach had stored up there. “You know what my husband said: while he’s out of town, you’re mine.”

“Y-y-yeah,” stammered Nate. Coach was away at some lacrosse conference in Maryland for the week, probably learning new techniques in torturing high school boys. Nate was suddenly panicked he hadn’t completely put out the joint. Were his pants going to catch fire?

Yikes.

“The thing is, Nate,” Babs went on, idly tracing the handle-bars of a rusted Schwinn bike that was hanging from the ceiling, “I need a hand. Do me a little favor, will you?”

“’Course.” he nodded. “That’s what I’m here for.”

“Well, this particular favor might be outside of your regular job description,” she admitted. “But if you’d be so kind as to help me out, maybe I won’t mention anything about the fact that my attic smells like a Grateful Dead concert. What do you say?”

What can you say to blackmail?

“I’m . . . I’m sorry,” Nate stumbled. “It won’t happen again.”

Babs laughed. “You can’t possibly expect me to believe that.” She smiled, pushing past the upside-down bike toward Nate, who was still hunched by the window. “But never mind. I need a hand, and you’ve got two.” She took his now-callused hands in hers, examining them. “Two very capable, strong hands.”

Nate wondered if he shouldn’t warn Coach that his kids might not look like him for a reason: Babs had probably bagged every grocery boy who’d bagged her groceries!

“What can I do for you?” he asked, trying to sound cheerfully polite, although he heard his voice warble in pure stoned terror.

Babs dropped his hands and undid the top button on her pink cotton shirt. “I decided to get a little surprise for the coach.” She undid another button.

“I see,” Nate replied evenly. And he did see: some very impressive cleavage, and nary a tan line, thanks to her after-noon regimen of topless sunbathing.

Nice.

“I decided to get a little tattoo.” She giggled, undoing the last button on her shirt and letting it slide off her shoulders and onto the floor. “Just a little something for the coach to discover when he gets home.”

“Great.” He nodded. Eye contact, eye contact, eye contact.

“But I’ve got to take special care of it,” she whispered huskily, turning her back to Nate to reveal a tiny tattoo of a butterfly, its green wings spread across the burnished leather of her lower back. “But I just can’t seem to reach it,” she continued. “My tattoo artist, Matty? He said I have to rub this ointment on it every couple of hours.”

Nate studied the tattoo, trying desperately to clear his head. What was he supposed to do in this situation? Babs was okay, but up close her skin looked kind of like a beat-up old baseball glove, and her perfume smelled like the soap in a gas station bathroom.

No wonder Coach Michaels needed that Viagra.

Speaking of him: he’d kick Nate’s ass, and not just figuratively, if he knew that his wife had taken her top off in Nate’s presence. On the other hand, if he didn’t rub Babs with ointment she’d tell Coach Michaels he’d been smoking pot on the job. The coach probably wouldn’t give Nate his diploma at the end of the summer, which would mean no more Yale, and basically his whole entire life would be fucked up.

His choices were slightly limited.

“Where’s the ointment?” he asked Babs, closing his eyes as he dabbed it on. He searched his stoned brain for something nonsexual to talk about. “Um, after this I gotta get that mower out of the sun, otherwise she might blow. I don’t want to start any fires.”

Too late, honey.Too late.

“Ouch, shit,” muttered Dan Humphrey, burning his tongue on his tap-water-and-Folgers-crystals excuse for a cup of coffee.

Ever heard of Starbucks, dude?

Dan stuck a slightly bent Camel in his mouth and tried to simultaneously take a drag from it while blowing to cool his coffee, which was totally impossible. Coffee splashed out of the lumpy, eggplant-colored ceramic mug his mother had made years ago, before she’d moved to Hungary or the Czech Republic or wherever the hell she lived, and onto the dusty yellow linoleum floor. He was definitely not a morning person.

Dan deposited the sad cup on a semicluttered part of the old Formica kitchen counter and padded over to the beige ’70s refrigerator, hoping against hope that he could scrounge up something edible to eat on his way downtown in the sub-way. He only had twenty minutes to get to his job—a dream gig at the Strand, the storied, sprawling used bookstore in Greenwich Village—and if he didn’t eat now, by the time his lunch break rolled around, he’d be half-dead from malnourishment.

Holding his breath to avoid exposure to any unfortunate smells, he wedged his head inside the large, rumbling appliance and surveyed the scene: an ancient CorningWare coffee pot filled with some concoction covered with fuzzy green mold, a white ceramic bowl overflowing with unidentifiable vegetable remains, a clear plastic case containing hard-boiled eggs that his sister, Jenny, had drawn little faces on before she left for Europe more than a month ago. It wasn’t pretty.

“Don’t bother,” muttered a voice behind him. “I looked last night. There’s nothing even remotely close to edible in there.”

He closed the refrigerator and smiled weakly at Vanessa Abrams, whose status had evolved from best friend to girl-friend to roommate. After many ups and downs—all of which involved Dan’s horny, wandering eye—they’d decided they were better off as friends who slept in separate beds, in separate rooms. It just so happened that those rooms were in the same apartment, because Vanessa had been rendered homeless by her newly Czechoslovak-boyfriended totally selfish bitchface of a sister.

“Yeah, this sucks.” Dan dropped his cigarette into the sink, where it went out with a hiss. “I’m so hungry.”

“Mmmm,” Vanessa grunted, microwaving some water in a Pyrex measuring cup, the only clean vessel she could find. She spilled Folgers on the floor while trying to spoon it into the cup. She wasn’t much of a morning person either.

A match made in heaven.

She hoisted herself onto the cluttered kitchen counter, her pale, prickly legs sticking out from a pair of Dan’s tattered navy blue boxer shorts. It was bizarre to see her still wearing something of his, something so intimately his, when they weren’t together anymore. It made him . . . sad.

Every night for the last week, Dan had lain awake in bed, wondering what Vanessa was doing in the next room. He’d hear her get up to go to the bathroom, and think about accidentally bumping into her in the dark, familiar hall of the apartment. They’d fall into each other’s arms, furiously kissing all the way back to Dan’s bed. He’d rub her shaven head, loving the feel of the familiar soft stubble on his chest, the way her ears were always so hot when she got excited—

Dan suddenly started shaking his head as if his fantasy was water stuck in his ears.

“You okay?” Vanessa asked, eyeing him suspiciously. She shifted from side to side on the countertop, settling beside the microwave.

“Um, yeah,” Dan practically yelled, his pinkies now lodged in his ears. “I guess I better hit the road. Gotta get to work. Make the donuts.You know how it is!”

“Why are you screaming?” she asked quietly, her eye-brows knitted in question.

“Oh, sorry.” Dan laughed. He downed his coffee in one quick gulp, ignoring the burning sensation in his throat, and reached past Vanessa to grab his folded-up copy of the New York Review of Books to read on the subway. “So. ’Bye. Have a good day,” he added, resisting the urge to kiss her.

“’Bye,” she called after him.

But hello, awkward?!

The rolled-up Review tucked safely in his damp armpit, Dan bounded down the musty granite stairs toward the legendarily filthy employee lounge at the Strand. The dark stairwell smelled like moldy books, which should have been nasty but was actually one of Dan’s favorite smells.

He had thirty seconds to stash his paper, grab his name tag out of his locker, and report to the floor for duty. None of the bookstore’s managers had any sense of humor about things like tardiness. They were crusty, liberal pseudoacade-mics who resented young summer job kids like Dan, who they all just called “the new kid” or “hey, you,” despite the fact that he’d been working there full time for almost a month and wore a name tag everyday, just like they did.

How glamorous.

Dan burst into the tiny lounge, accidentally banging the door against the wall, startling a skinny kid with short, mussed-up blond hair and horn-rimmed glasses too big for his square, wide-eyed face.

“Sorry,” Dan muttered, dashing over to his designated locker—a tiny, one-foot-square cubby just inches above the dust-bunny-and-decades-old-cigarette-butt-littered concrete floor. He entered his nerdy combination—8/28/49, the birth-day of Goethe, the author of his all-time favorite book, The Sorrows of Young Werther—tossed his paper inside, and grabbed his plastic name tag.

“New York Review of Books, huh?” asked the blond guy.

“What? Yeah.” Dan pinned the cheap red tag to his faded black T-shirt, eyeing the stranger suspiciously. Dan hadn’t noticed him around before. Was it his first day? Was it possible that Dan was no longer technically “the new kid”?

“I’m Greg.” The stranger smiled. “It’s my first day.”

Fresh meat in moldy-book land. Sounds like a freaking party.

“Cool. Welcome to hell,” Dan barked, secretly thrilled that he now had seniority over someone.

“Actually, I can’t believe I’m here,” Greg continued eagerly, glancing around the room as if it were the Sistine Chapel instead of a dirty, windowless room in a rat-infested basement. He was wearing a short-sleeved cowboyish but-ton-down shirt and cutoff khaki pants that reminded Dan of Vanessa. The other afternoon when the A/C had blown out in the living room, she’d spontaneously cut the legs off her favorite black cargos to make shorts. God, he missed her.

“I’ve always wanted to work here, you know?” Greg went on.

“Job’s a job,” replied Dan, disinterestedly. Of course he knew exactly what Greg was talking about, but he was kind of enjoying mimicking the attitude copped by the rest of the senior Strand employees. It made him feel tough, like he might put out his next cigarette on the back of Greg’s hand. “I saw a whole cart of old literary journals upstairs by the elevator. Guess that’s what you’ll be dealing with till lunchtime.”

“Sounds great to me!” gushed Greg. “Am I supposed to just wait down here, though? This guy Clark told me to come down here and that he’d be with me soon, but that was, like, fifteen minutes—”

“Well, Clark knows what he’s doing,” Dan interrupted. “I’ve got to get upstairs, but I’m sure I’ll see you around, Jeff.”

“It’s Greg,” the guy corrected him. “Did anyone ever tell you that you look exactly like that guy from the Raves, Dan Something?”

Dan froze in midstep. “Humphrey. His name’s Dan Humphrey,” Dan informed him. “Well, actually my name’s Dan Humphrey.” Dan’s career with downtown rockers the Raves had lasted for exactly one gig at Funktion on the Lower East Side. He couldn’t believe anyone remembered that night. He certainly didn’t.

An entire bottle of Stoli can do that to you.

“Oh man, are you serious?” Greg crossed the small room and extended his hand. “You’re Dan Humphrey? You’re the Dan Humphrey, the poet? I can’t believe I’m meeting you! Of course, it makes total sense—you would work at the Strand.” He pushed his geeky horn-rims up on his nose. “It’s perfect. I can’t believe it. I loved your poetry, man. Got any new stuff I can read?”

Dan felt himself blushing. Before his unlikely stint as a rock star, he’d published a poem called “Sluts” in The New Yorker. He’d been the buzz of the literary world for exactly five minutes, and though his memories of that time were warm and fuzzy, he couldn’t believe there was someone besides his dad who remembered his brush with poetic fame.

“Well, poets have to keep working,” Dan lied energetically. “I’m putting together some ideas for a novella. That’s why I’ve been laying kind of low lately.”

“Dude, this is such an honor, I almost can’t believe it. I’m meeting a New Yorker poet. This is incredible.”

“It’s really not such a big deal.” Dan waved his hand like he was batting away the praise.

Mister Modesty.

“This is perfect,” Greg continued, shoving his hands in the pockets of his just-below-the-knee cutoffs. “Look, I can’t believe I’m going to ask you this, but I’ve been trying to get a salon going, you know, kind of an informal thing, lots of people who care about books, getting together every so often to just shoot the shit, talk about literature and poetry and films and music. And blogs. But only sometimes. I’m sure you’re probably really busy, but maybe you’d like to join up? Or I mean, if you’re too busy it’s cool, but—”

“A salon,” Dan interrupted Greg’s rambling. It actually sounded kind of . . . awesome. He’d come to work at the Strand expecting lots of stimulating break-room discussions about the classics and foreign films, but so far the most in-depth conversation he’d participated in had involved two coworkers asking to bum cigarettes. “That sounds cool.”

“Oh man, that’s great!” Greg cried excitedly, his voice cracking. “I’m still working on all the details, you know, drafting a mission statement, thinking about how to recruit members.”

“A mission statement.” Dan nodded thoughtfully. “Maybe I could help you out with that.”

“Really?” Greg asked. “Fucking fantastic.” He pulled a rainbow swirly pen out of his breast pocket and grabbed Dan’s hand. “I’ll give you my e-mail.” He scrawled his address across Dan’s palm. “Just send me any random ideas and I’ll plug them in. Also, we need a name. I was thinking we could mix up the names of some dead poets, like Wadsworth Whitman or Emerson Thoreau. They wouldn’t mind.”

No, but they’ll be rolling in their graves.

“Cool.” Dan pulled his hand out of Greg’s grasp and glanced at the address he’d written there. “I’ll be in touch,” he added, trying not to sound too eager, even though he definitely was. He needed some new friends now that Vanessa was rightfully tired of him.

One word: sad. But also . . . slightly cute. In a seriously sad way.