Empire of Lies

SATURDAY

Out of the Past

The day it began was an autumn day, a Saturday afternoon in October.

I was sitting in a cushioned chair on the brick patio at the edge of my backyard. The air was clear and warm with a hint of chill in it. There was a wind off the lake across the way-thunderstorms coming, though they weren't yet visible over the water.

I was looking down half an acre of grassy slope to where my two boys, Chad, ten, and Nathan, seven, were organizing some kind of Frisbee game around the swing set with some of their friends from the neighborhood. The boys were letting their three-year-old sister, Terry, tag along with them. I found this very heartwarming.

I was forty-five years old. The reedy figure of my youth was growing thicker at the chest and waist, but I was still trim enough. My once-sandy hair was thinner and darker, with a sprinkling of gray. My once-boyish face was not so boyish anymore, though I think it was what they used to call an honest face, smooth, clean, and open, the blue eyes bright.

My wife was in the kitchen making us some lemonade. My wife was named Cathy and I can't say how much I loved her, not without sounding like a sentimental idiot, anyway. We had been together twelve years then, and I still sat up sometimes at night and watched her sleeping. Sometimes I woke her because I felt so grateful for her and so passionate I couldn't help but trace her features with my fingertips. If this bugged the hell out of her, she never let on. But then, she was a cheerful and generous creature who would melt into lovemaking at a look or a touch.

We had a deal between us, Cathy and I. Our deal was simple. It was agreed to at the start in no uncertain terms.

When I first came to this town from New York seventeen years ago, I edited the local paper. I started out as city editor and was promoted to managing editor pretty quickly. The city had an insanely left-wing government at the time, and so, of course, it was spiraling into bankruptcy and chaos. There were high taxes supporting lavish payoffs to the unions, high crime because of lenient judges and tight restrictions on the police, and strangulation by regulation for any businessman stupid enough to hang around. It was a government like a garrulous fat man moralizing over a dinner for which he would never pick up the bill. I helped run them out of town. My paper printed story after story showing why every one of their policies would fail and proving it by showing where they had failed in the past. Plus we exposed the corrupt political machine churning away as usual under all the welfare. Within three years, the voters threw the bums out. The unions were crushed in the next round of contract negotiations. Taxes and useless programs were cut. Bad guys started going to prison. New businesses started popping up, people started making money again, and-surprise, surprise!-the government's share of the profits brought it back from the brink despite the lower taxes. In short, the streets grew clean and the city grew rich, and my newspaper and I had a hand in it. For this, I can proudly say, I was roundly despised by some of the best-educated and wealthiest people in town. Something about my uncaring, insensitive editorial policy. Elites hate to be proved wrong by the common man.

My boss, however, liked me. The man who owned the paper was a billionaire land developer named Lawrence Tyner. He convinced me to leave the paper and come into his real-estate business. He taught me the ropes and helped me to invest in the city itself and the surrounding countryside. Ultimately, I made my fortune with him. And I met Cathy, who was one of his lawyers.

I didn't think much of Cathy at first. I didn't think she was all that pretty, for one thing. "Efficient-looking," I would've called her. She was short and full-figured, bordering on pudgy. She had medium-length brown hair and a sweet, friendly face. She always seemed harried, hurried, on the edge of panic, was always running off to some zoning-board hearing or other with her giant purse and a stack of folders under her arm. It made me nervous just to look at her.

Then one day around Christmas, her boyfriend broke up with her. I didn't know this at the time. He lived in another city halfway across the state. He'd been stringing her along for years. He was one of those horrible mild guys. You know? Really earnest and caring all the time. Narrowed his eyes a lot and nodded without lowering his chin, his lips all pursed and serious. For about five years, he used this New Man sensitivity to manipulate Cathy into hanging around. Then he met someone he liked more, and Cathy was out.

Anyway, our office Christmas party came along. Everyone was drinking and singing and getting up to mischief and so forth. I wasn't much of a drinker anymore, so after a while I took a stroll through the back offices to get some quiet. There was Cathy. She was sitting at her desk in the dark with a paper cup full of bourbon. She wasn't drunk or anything. She was just sitting there, staring into space. I peeked my head in her door.

"Everything all right?" I asked.

"I hate my life," she told me. This was a woman I'd said maybe twenty sentences to in the year since I'd been working for Tyner. "I did everything right, everything my mother said. She was a feminist, my mother, very fierce. She said I could have it all. She told me what to do, and I did it. I got good grades, the best grades. I went to law school. I got a big job. I never depended on anyone. I even played softball when I was in high school. I hate softball."

This sounded like the start of a long evening. I went into her office and sat down across the desk from her.

"I have a sister," she said, gazing not at me but into the shadows. "She dropped out of college and got married. My parents went nuts, screamed and yelled. It was awful. My sister went to work as a secretary until she got pregnant. A secretary! Pregnant at twenty-two! And then she quit and stayed home and kept house! My mother nearly died. Now she has four children. Her husband owns a small construction company. He's a great guy. Treats her well. Loves the kids. And my sister is the single happiest person I've ever met." She was silent a moment. Her eyes seemed to grope for something in the darkness. Then she said, "I want her life. My sister has the life I want. I know I'm supposed to want my life, but I don't. I hate my life. I want hers."

It was a funny thing. Sitting still like that, staring into space like that, talking so quietly, she didn't seem as frantic and efficient as usual. She seemed softer, more vulnerable and much prettier than I thought she was at first.

We dated for three months after that, but I think I knew I loved her that night. We started talking about getting married. I was living in a quaint old two-story shingle on River Street back then. We were downstairs in the kitchen there, sitting over sandwiches. I said to her, "Listen, this thing, this modern thing where, you know, marriage is a partnership and we're equals, and we share housework and child care and all that-I'm not that guy. I'm, like, the because-I-said-so guy, the head-of-the-household guy, that's me. Marry me and I call the shots. I'll break my butt to make you happy, and I'll try to give you the life you said you wanted. I don't cheat, I don't leave, and I am what I say I am. In return, I expect-I don't know-sex, dinner, some peace and quiet now and then; maybe some affection, if you've got any. That's the best I can do. What do you think?"

Without cracking a smile, she stuck her hand out to me across the table. "Deal," she said.

We shook on it. Then I chased her around the table, tossed her over my shoulder, and carried her upstairs.

So that was our deal. And I was thinking about our deal that very day-the day it all began. I was sitting on the patio, watching my children play and thinking about our deal and also thinking about a girl named Tanya. Now, Tanya was a college girl who worked in my office over the summer, an energetic, cheerful blonde with a bright, pretty face and a tight, electrifying figure. And I was thinking about her because I had spent a certain amount of late July and part of August fighting the urge to fuck her senseless.

She had given me a number of indications that fucked senseless was exactly what she wanted to be. She was an expert flirt. Her gaze was admiring whenever I spoke. Her smile was warm, her perfume intoxicating. She encouraged me to play the mentor with her. I often found myself lecturing her on local zoning policy or whatever, just to get a taste of that gaze, that smile. At first, she flattered me a little. After a while, she flattered me a lot, calibrating her praise to my increasing credulity. And then there was her touch… As the weeks wore on, she would sometimes lay a hand on my forearm when we spoke, or straighten my collar or brush an imaginary piece of lint from my chest. Once she even came up behind me and massaged my shoulders briefly as I was working at my keyboard. And yet… yet she never took that last step. She never propositioned me. She never tried to kiss me, never so much as stood on tiptoe. That last step, with all its risk of rejection and with all its moral responsibility-that she left up to me.

So it gave me a lot to think about. On the one hand, I thought about breaking the heart and losing the trust of the woman I loved; about shattering the idol of my two sons who looked to me for their image of manly strength and integrity; and about disintegrating the emotional universe of my daughter which rested primly, like a ruby on a turtle's shell, atop her parents' affection for each other. On the other hand, I thought about twenty golden minutes with Tanya, with the youth and heat of her flesh against my flesh. Twenty yahoo-screaming minutes with those glossed lips parting to gasp at the force of my urgent entry, until our mutual climax which, who knows, might never end, might never dump me from its height into the black tar pit of shame and remorse. My family or Tanya. It was a tough choice to make.

Maybe women will call me shallow for saying that, but that's women for you. Men wrestle with these matters at a deeper level than women know. In the end, though, a deal is a deal. Cathy had lived up to her part of it. She'd been a full-time mother, a dedicated homemaker, a wife of endless tenderness and surrender. I adored her. And-yes-a deal's a deal.

So bye-bye, what's-your-name-Tanya-bye-bye. I avoided her for the rest of the summer. No more of her quick, gentle touches. No more imaginary lint on my chest, no more massages. And hold the flattery, thanks, just go type up the application forms and get me a cup of coffee while you're at it.

She ended up sleeping with Stan Halsey instead. He was one of our environmental-impact experts, a thirty-five-year-old idealist with a social-worker wife and a brand-new baby girl. By the time Tanya went back to college, Stan was living in a motel, trying to grovel his way out of a separation. All the same, he was a lucky schmuck for those twenty minutes, I had to admit.

Well, it's a world of choices, that's the thing. I'd always have my fantasies. Plus I still had my wife.

And that's what I was musing about when the whole thing started. Sitting on the cushioned chair, on the brick patio, watching my kids play in the backyard.

At some point then, the wife in question brought me a glass of lemonade and kissed me.

"What the hell is this game anyway?" I asked her, tilting the glass toward the kids on the lawn. "I mean, they never actually seem to play it. They've just been making up the rules for the past half hour."

"I think that is the game," Cathy said. She sat down in the chair next to me, one leg tucked up under her.

I sipped my lemonade. "Strange creatures."

"Our children?"

"You think if we put them in cages out front, people'd pay a dollar a pop to see them?"

"If we include the Cavanaughs' kids, they'd probably pay us a dollar just for putting them in cages."

I laughed. "The get-rich-quick scheme we've been looking for."

"Has anyone ever told you that you have the nicest laugh in the world?" Cathy said. "I love that about you. The way you laugh all the time."

"Ah, you're just saying that to get me to have sex with you."

"Speaking of which, the kids are all going over to the Matthews house later for pizza and a video. We should have a couple of hours to ourselves."

"I'm going to run you to ground like a cheetah running down a deer."

"Ooh," she said.

"Like a panther. I may even wear my panther costume."

"You know your panther costume drives me wild."

We held hands and drank lemonade and watched our children for a while in companionable silence.

That, in brief, was my life before the End of Civilization as We Know It. And I loved it. I loved her, Cathy, and to hell with all the Tanyas of the world, let them go. I loved our children. I loved our neighborhood, Horizon Hill, the Hill for short. Big yards, Craftsman houses, lake views. Friendly, mostly like-minded people, hardworking dads, housewife moms, not too many divorces, lots of kids. Most of us were white and Christian, I guess, but we had a good number of Jews mixed in and a few blacks as well. In fact, I think we were a little overfond of them-our Jews and blacks-a little overfriendly to them sometimes because we wanted them to know they were part of the gang, that it was our values that made us what we were, not the other stuff. It was a place of goodwill-that's what I'm saying. I was very happy on the Hill.

Now, after a few moments, Cathy spoke again. It was the last thing she said to me before the phone rang, before the lies and the violence and all the craziness started.

She said, "Have you decided yet what you're going to do about the house?"

It was my mother's house she was talking about. My mother-my poor old crazy mother-had finally died about eight months before. Her will had just cleared probate, and now her house had to be sold so my brother and I could split the money. Someone had to go back east and clean the place out and arrange to put it on the market. Cathy's question: Was I going to go now, or wait for my brother to turn up so he could help me?

We'll never know what I would've answered. Even I don't know. Just then, the phone rang inside the house.

"I'll get it," I said.

My children's voices, the sough and birdsong of the world outside, were muffled as the sliding glass patio door whisked and thudded shut behind me. I walked two steps across our back room, our family room, to where the phone sat beside the stereo. I picked up the handset before the third ring.

"Hello?"

"Is this Jason Harrow?" It was a woman, a voice I didn't recognize.

"Yes?"

I heard her give a quick breath, a sort of bitter laugh. "It's funny to hear you talk after all this time."

"I'm sorry. Who is this?" I still didn't know. My mind was racing, trying to figure it out.

"This is Lauren Wilmont," she said. "Formerly Lauren Goldberg. Formerly your girlfriend, if that's what I was."

It was a strange feeling. Standing there with the phone in my hand, with the family room around me and that voice I barely remembered speaking in my ear. My eyes flitted over the sofa and the stuffed chair; over the rug that was a blended tweed so it would hide juice stains and pizza and soda stains. There was a 36-inch flat-screen Sony TV in one corner. Shelves with board games stacked on them; Monopoly, Pictionary, Clue. Some of Nathan's cars and a couple of Terry's dolls were lying around. Outside, through the glass doors, I could see the tops of the kids' heads moving at the bottom of the slope of the backyard. I saw Cathy, in the foreground, turning in her chair, pointing a finger at her chest and raising her eyebrows to ask: Is the call for me? I smiled thinly. I shook my head no.

And all the while that voice on the phone was talking on:

"You have to come back east, Jason. You have to help me. Please. Come back. I need you."

I had been honest with my wife about Lauren. I hadn't told her all the details, but I'd told her as much as she wanted to hear. She knew about The Scene and That Night in Bedford. Sometimes in church she saw me make a fist, and she knew I was holding fast to Christ's hand, and she knew why. I had been honest with her about all that.

I didn't really start lying to her until after I'd hung up the phone, until I'd settled back into the patio chair beside her.

And she said, "Who was it?"

And I said, "Just someone from the office with a question."

"You'd think they could give you your weekend, at least."

"It was nothing. What were we talking about?"

"About your mother's house…"

"About the house-right," I said. I gazed down the slope of grass to the children playing around the swings. They were laughing loudly, chasing each other around in circles. The Frisbee was lying in the grass, and as far as I could tell, the elaborate structure of their game had already collapsed into hilarious confusion.

I sat and gazed at them as if I were considering my answer, but my mind was blank.

And then I said, "I think I'll go back east. I might as well. I might as well just go and get the whole thing over with."