Empire of Lies

MONDAY
Lauren as She Had Become

Nothing could have prepared me for her, though. No act, I mean, of my imagination. She was changed almost entirely from what she'd been.

She lived in Astoria, in Queens, a working-class neighborhood just across Hell Gate from Manhattan. She had the bottom floor of a two-story row house, one of a set of red-brick boxes standing side by side in a block-long line a stoop away from the sidewalk. It was eight o'clock when I got there. A lot of moms were rushing by me, towing their kids behind, hurrying to drop them off at school, I guess, so they could get themselves to work on time. There were other kids slouching off to school alone. Guys in windbreakers twisting their cars out of tight parking spaces. Guys in cheap suits marching to the train.

The clouds were breaking up over the low roofs. The sun was out, rising over the Island. The air was cool and fresh.

I climbed the stoop and knocked on Lauren's door. I heard her shout out, "Just a minute!" from inside.

I waited, squinting off toward the sun, nervous with anticipation. I heard the door open and turned to see her. The sight rocked me. I had to force a smile. Startlingly, she came into my arms. Her hair smelled the same, anyway: baby shampoo and cigarettes. She took my hand and drew me into the house.

We moved together into a small living room. It was cramped and depressing and stank of divorce: the sudden loss of income, a life cobbled back together in a rush. The walls were a slapdash beige slung on by the landlord. The tan carpet also must have come with the place. There was an aging TV on a stand in one corner. There was an aging sofa facing a mantelpiece. The mantelpiece should have surrounded a fireplace, but there was no fireplace, just the beige wall below and a mirror above it. There were framed photographs on the mantel in front of the mirror: a little girl, then the little girl older, then the same girl as a teenager. My eye flashed over them and I thought: So she has a daughter now.

I faced Lauren again. She was standing back from me, appraising me as if I were a statue in a gallery.

"Wow!" she said. "I mean, you look… you look good, Jason. You look like… no, you look good. I mean it."

"So do you, Lauren. It's nice to see you."

"Yeah, you too, I mean-wow." She examined me from this angle and that. "You look like you're doing really well."

I knew she was right. I did. When I'd gotten dressed that morning, I'd gone out of my way to look prosperous. I mean, I was prosperous, sure, but I'd gone out of my way to look it. I put on the blue button-down shirt and the tan sports jacket Cathy'd gotten me for Christmas, and the khaki slacks I'd picked up at Brooks Brothers in Chicago. It was a kind of bragging, showing off for an old girlfriend. I wanted her to see how well I'd done since we'd broken up. Petty and stupid and vain of me, I know. I told myself not to do it, but I did it anyway.

"Thanks," I said. "You look pretty good yourself."

That, on the other hand, was a lie. She looked like crap. Complete crap. The long straight black hair I remembered was now cut short in unbecoming curls. The thin, harsh, sensual face had become bloated, the pale skin strangely dimpled and rough. She was dressed in a baggy black sweater and a cheap straight-cut cotton skirt, dark blue, too tight around her hips. The outfit made her body-that once-lean-and-ready body-seem as if it had gone doughy, sloppy, as if it had settled and bulged like clay.

She looked old. Not just old: old and hard and hard-worn. Her pale brown eyes had been clear and even a little soft when I knew her. They were rheumy and narrow and watchful now. Her smile was bitter, the anger fairly twitching at the corners of her mouth.

How did it make me feel to see her like that? Well, it made me feel sorry for one thing, sorry for whatever had happened to her to make her look this way and sorry that the attractive young Lauren I had known was gone forever. But there's no point in lying: I felt other things, too. I felt smug and triumphant-you know, glad that things had gone better for me than they had for her. I was rich and she wasn't. I lived on the Hill and she lived here. I looked okay and she looked blasted. I didn't want to feel good or smug about it. I really didn't. But I did feel like that a little, and I bet she knew I did.

There was a box of Kents on a lamp stand by an ashtray. She scooped it up, flipped back the top, and offered one to me. Oh, yeah, she knew what I was feeling, all right. I could see her watching me as she held out the cigarette, reading my thoughts, gauging my every expression. She knew exactly how shocked and sorry and self-satisfied I was at the sight of her. She knew, and it made her bitter smile more bitter still.

I waved off the Kent. "No, thanks. I don't do it anymore."

She jabbed one into her mouth, fired it with a plastic lighter. "What's the matter? A little cancer scare you?"

"I got kids now. I'm not allowed to die."

She tossed the cigarette box down on the lampstand again. I noticed a couple of business cards lying near the ashtray: lauren wilmont, watson amp; mantle, paralegal. She hadn't become a photographer, the way she'd wanted. She was a divorced paralegal-slash-wannabe-artist, just like her mother before her.

She blew out a cloud of smoke. There was something nasty about the way she did it. Even though she blew it off to the side and up over my head, it felt as if she were blowing it right at me. She crossed an arm under her breasts and propped the other elbow on it, holding the cigarette high, pinning me with a knowing and ironic look.

"I Googled you, y'know," she said. "When I was trying to find out where you lived. Actually, that's bullshit. I'm always Googling people from my past. I've Googled you a lot."

"Yeah, I tried to Google you a couple of times, too, but I didn't know about the name change. So you're married."

"Was. And you're, like-what?" She gave me a great big man-eating smile. "You're some kind of right-wing Christian asshole now, huh."

I laughed. "That's me."

"Kind of cuts down on your S amp;M action, doesn't it?"

"You kidding me? That's all we do."

She grabbed a drag and laughed out more smoke. It was an angry, unpleasant laugh. "Whipping the sin out of naked schoolgirls. Repent! Swish!"

"Exactly."

"And you got the wife."

"Got the wife," I said.

"She hot?"

"The mother of my children, you mean?"

"Oh, well, sorry."

"As the hinges of hell, yeah."

She'd already managed to set up a hovering cloud in front of herself with that Kent of hers. She nodded and smiled at me through the haze but, boy oh boy, I could feel the bubblings and eruptions of nastiness going off just beneath the thin surface of her, her temper threatening every moment to explode right through. I wasn't sure if it was just the sight of me that had her so pissed off, or if she resented having to ask me for help or-who knows?-maybe she was always like this, percolating with wrath.

"And two kids?" she asked.

"Three. Two boys and a girl."

"And what do you-all, like, go to church together?"

"Whenever we can rustle up a Jew for the human sacrifice, sure."

"Well, jeez, don't get all defensive, Jason. I'm just asking."

"Yes, we go to church together. Every Sunday."

I got more of that appraising look from her. Her lips quirked, her eyes mocking and furious. More smoke. She shook her head. "I'm sorry. It's just when I think back…"

I shrugged.

"I can't believe anyone I used to fuck is a Republican. Oh, but maybe I can't say 'fuck' to you now."

"You can say anything you want."

"You mean because I'm going to hell anyway."

"Right, Lauren. That's what I mean." Hoping to deflect the onslaught, I pointed to the mantelpiece, to the framed photos. "What about you? You take these? You still doing photography?"

"Shit, no. I don't have time. One day…"

"That's your daughter, though."

"Serena, yeah."

"She's beautiful. Serena. Very pretty name. She go to school?"

"High school. She's a sophomore." Her answers were curt and grudging like that. She didn't want to be distracted from the business of attacking me. She stuck her tongue in her cheek, looked me up and down again, shook her head again. "Man, look at you. I can't get over it." There was a drooping tube of ash on her cigarette now. She flicked it violently into the tray. "If they only knew, right? Your wife and kids. The sort of evil shit you used to get up to. Does your priest know? Your reverend or whatever he's called. What the hell? You should tell him, Jason. Might put a little excitement in his day." She made a sound like a laugh. Not a laugh, really, but a sound like a laugh. "The Scene. Right? Don't you ever miss it?"

"No."

"Liar."

"Why? Do you?"

"Not really. But it didn't come as naturally to me."

I shrugged again and waved her off. I didn't want her to think she was getting under my skin.

There was a dining alcove off one end of the room. A little space by the kitchen with an oval table and four wooden chairs-the kind of furniture that comes in boxes and you slap it together. I wandered in there as if to take a look around. I was really just trying to put some distance between us, maybe slow her down. Behind the table, there was a glass door. You could see through it into a postage stamp of backyard and on through a diamond-link fence into the backyard of the house on the next street over. There was a woman in the far yard, a woman in her forties but too soon old. She was slumped in a flannel nightgown. Holding a plastic bag full of trash. I watched her carry it to a can standing against the side of the house. What a depressing place this was.

"You know, I've been trying and trying to figure out why you called me," I said. "I mean, why you need help so urgently and why I would be the one you'd call for it after all these years."

I glanced back over my shoulder at her. She was still standing there the same as before. In her little cloud, her cigarette upraised. Still appraising me with that combination of mockery and rage.

"Maybe I just decided I need Jesus," she said. "I mean, when the spirit hits you… Right? There's no time to lose."

"I figured it was money," I said, keeping my voice even. "That was the only thing I could come up with that made sense."

There was a long silence. Then finally, I sensed the assault was over. She chewed on her lip and I could see in her eyes that she'd grudgingly called cease-fire. "You want some coffee?" she said.

We sat at the table in the alcove. She gave me coffee in a mug with a slogan printed on it: "I'm having my coffee, so fuck off!" She brought one of the pictures to the table too, one of the framed photos from the mantelpiece. It looked like it was taken for a high-school yearbook. It was posed and glossy, gauzy and sentimental.

The girl-Serena-didn't look like Lauren much. She had lighter hair and softer, rounder features, sweeter features than Lauren had ever had. A small, pouting, uncertain mouth. Serious brown eyes-even in the photo, I could look into them and see that she was hurting and lost.

"Men suck," said Lauren. She had a mug of her own with a slogan of her own: "Party Girl." She had a fresh cigarette going. "They really do. I mean, when I got pregnant, Carl was all, like, 'Oh, you're so beautiful, you're having my baby, I'll never stop loving you.' It was like we were in some commercial-free hour of crap music on AM radio. Then he hangs around long enough for Serena to love him. You know, girls-they just love their daddies. And he's, like, a Wall Street guy, so we had money, and I got to stay home and take care of her, so she got used to that, too. And I got used to it."

"You married a Wall Street guy?" I said.

"I met him on his day off. He was cooler then."

"Ah."

"Anyway, it was right after you and I broke up, so I was on the rebound, I guess. But he was nice to me, too. I gotta say that for him, to be fair. Men suck, but at least Carl was nice for a while before he sucked."

I hid my corkscrew smile in my coffee. It was pretty easy to guess where this story was going. A successful young guy like Carl with a sharp-tongued harpy like Lauren. It was only a question of what he'd leave her for: young tail, freedom, peace and quiet, the right to hang on to his own money. Or maybe just some girl who knew how to string together ten minutes of tenderness and respect and admiration to take his mind off his itching dick.

As it happened, it was a little of everything. The young tail came first. A girl at the office. Then, another girl someplace else. And so on until Lauren caught him one too many times, and it ended with him slamming the door in her screaming face as he stormed out. After that, he had a few party years on his own, so that took care of the freedom. And now he had the peace and quiet off in Arizona somewhere, living with a Life Partner type, the two of them running a homegrown investment firm together: lots of money and no kids.

"Fucking son of a bitch!" Lauren tore smoke out of her cigarette with her teeth. "He set this mad-dog lawyer on me. They threatened to have me declared an unfit mother, take Serena away from me. I ended up, I hardly even got child support-which he hardly ever pays, anyway. Never comes to see her. Sends her fucking birthday cards. When she was little, she used to sleep with them under her pillow. How pitiful is that?" I had set the picture of the girl down on the table. Lauren picked it up now, looked into her daughter's face. "I thought she'd gotten over it," she said plaintively. "I thought she was doing great."

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I thought. Single moms. Divorce dads. They always think the kids are doing great. Cathy and I hear it all the time, in church, in our children's schools. How're the kids doing? They're doing great! They're always doing great. Until they're not doing great, until suddenly they're in rehab or on medication or off at some special camp for suicidal teens or whatever. Divorce fucks kids up.

"What happened?" I asked her.

She laid the photo down again. "She's gone."

"Serena is gone? You mean she ran away?"

She waved the cigarette in circles. "Moved out."

"Moved out? She's a sophomore, you said. She's-what?-sixteen? Call the cops; make her come back."

"I did that. She just leaves again. What am I gonna do? Chain her to the radiator? After a while, you know, you keep calling the cops, they set Child Protective Services on you. I'm not gonna let them put her in some foster home…"

I sighed, rubbed the back of my neck. "Well, where is she?"

"I don't know. She stays with friends, one friend, then another. I don't even know most of them."

"Friends like other kids? Kids with parents? Is she staying with other families?"

"Sometimes. I don't know. No. No, I don't think so." She averted her eyes the way people do when you press them for details and they don't want to talk about the details because then they'll have to face them straight on themselves. Holding her cigarette between two fingers, she massaged her forehead with her pinkie and thumb. "She gets involved with these characters. They get their claws into her…"

Oh, wonderful, I thought. These characters… with their claws in her… I had to fight down a flash of irritation. People make such messes for themselves-for themselves and for their children, too. And yes, I knew I shouldn't've passed judgment on her. And yes, I did feel bad for her, too. Poor woman, the way she looked, her face all swollen and pocked as if every day since I'd seen her last had been a punch in the jaw. For all her smart mouth and her bravado, Lauren had always needed someone to take charge of her, someone to lead her to a better place. Guys took advantage of that-guys like Carl-guys like me, like I was back then. She wanted leading? We led her, all right. We led her where we wanted to go, and then dumped her when we wanted to go somewhere else. Him off in Arizona, me on the Hill. And her left behind, looking like this. So, aside from all the petty stuff-you know, my smugness at having a good life, my satisfaction at doing better than an old girlfriend-I really did feel bad for her and guilty, to some degree. All the same, she'd sure made a mess of things, a mess for herself and a mess for her daughter. And it irritated me, I have to confess.

"Have you told her father about this?" I asked her. "Have you told Carl?"

She answered with an exasperated Pah!

"Well, what do you want me to do?"

"Talk to her," she said. "Just go talk to her. Get her to come home."

"That's ridiculous, Lauren, I don't even know her."

"I know but… she needs someone like you, Jason. She needs a man, a father figure, someone who's not an asshole. That's always been the big thing about you. I always remembered that. I mean, with all the fucked-up stuff we did and everything, you were never an asshole, not like Carl. I mean, this Jesus shit you're into-I don't know what all that's about. I guess everyone has their drug of choice, so fine, whatever, but… You're the only guy I know who hasn't turned out to be a piece of shit. Serena's gonna hurt herself or get hurt or get pregnant or I don't know what and… I can't be Daddy for her. I can't reach her. Please. Go and talk to her. She might listen to you."

I had no idea what to say to that. Baffled, I shook my head. My eyes were turned down to Serena's photograph. That child-woman face, the pouting Little Girl Lost, was gazing up at me. It seemed to me now that she did have her mother's eyes, after all, those same hurt, defiant eyes, begging for someone to take charge of her.

"Look," I said. "I'm sorry. I mean, I want to help you, Lauren. I do. I'd like to help Serena, too, but… This doesn't make any sense to me. I don't even know what I'm doing here. You and me-it's a long time ago now. You don't just call a guy up after all these years. Not for something like this. She must have a teacher or guidance counselor or something…"

She made that exasperated noise again, the same noise: Pah!

"What would I even say to her? How would I even find her?"

"I don't know… They go to this club all the time, her friends and her. The Den…" Her cigarette had burned to the nub. She let it burn, holding it up beside her head. With her other hand, she pinched the bridge of her nose. She shut her eyes. A crystal tear shone on her lashes.

"Lauren…" I said. "Really…"

"Shit. Just do this, will you, Jason. For old times' sake. I'm scared, okay? Every day, I'm so scared… I can't sleep at night… Will you just do this? Please."

I'm not sure what I was about to tell her. Something, some excuse, to get me out of there. It all just seemed wrong to me somehow. Wrong, suspect, illogical, bizarre, maybe even dangerous. I was an idiot to have come. I had let myself be tempted by-whatever had tempted me-the promise of schadenfreude or the sexual charge of an old flame or the vague, imaginary prospect of an emotional adventure. And I was tempted now, too-by her ridiculous faith in me and by the chance to play her knight in shining armor and the chance to play Big Daddy to some pretty teenaged girl.

But no. I was finished here. I was sorry I'd come. I was sorry I'd left my sweet house on the Hill for this shabby rental with its secondhand couch and its furniture that came in boxes. I wanted to get out of here and get the hell home as fast as I could.

I started to push back from the table. I started to say, "I'm sorry, Lauren-"

But she dropped her hand-the hand that was pinching the bridge of her nose. She dropped it to the photograph lying between us. She lifted the photograph by its frame. She waggled it in front of me, grimacing in her anger.

"Shit, Jason," she said. "Look at her, would you? You have to do this. I mean, come on. Look at her! Why do you think I called you? She's not Carl's kid. She's yours."