“Thanks,” Robert said. “I owe it all to you, in a way.”
“How's that?”
“Astrid. I met her at your wedding.”
“You did? Astrid who?”
“Henglund.”
Brian frowned. “Must be a friend of Marcy's,” he said.
At home that night, when he asked Astrid about it, she said that she'd been there as someone's date, a guy she didn't know well and never saw again. “As soon as I saw you,” she said, “I knew.”
A week later his secretary told him a woman was there to see him, and for a moment his heart lifted. (This was another fantasy he had, about Astrid surprising him at work, wearing a trench-coat with nothing underneath it.) But it was Barbara Henglund, who stood for a minute examining his office — the picture of him and Astrid on the desk, the black-and-white photograph of Central Park she'd given him on the wall — and then sat down with her purse in her lap. “I got the invitation,” she said.
“Oh,” he said, smiling at her, but she didn't smile back. “I hope you'll be at the wedding,” he tried.
“Astrid hasn't had a lot of boyfriends,” she said.
He didn't know what to say to this. “And?”
“I don't think you know her very well,” she went on.
Robert sighed. He didn't know what was wrong with these people and didn't much care, except that he was glad Astrid had gotten away from them. “I know everything I need to know,” he said. “Astrid works in a clinic, she's from California, we've been together almost every day for a year, and we'll be together for the rest of our lives. I'm sorry if you find it hard to accept, but that's how it is.”
Barbara Henglund nodded several times, quickly, as if in agreement. “Astrid is troubled,” she said slowly. “She's been alone a great deal.”
“She isn't alone now.”
“She also isn't from California. She's from Babylon. She grew up in that house. We've lived here for thirty years. And she doesn't work in a clinic. She's a paralegal. Her office is only ten blocks from here.”
He stared at her for a long moment, and finally shook his head. “That makes no sense,” he said.
For the first time, Mrs. Henglund's expression seemed to soften. “She used to only lie about small things. Whether or not she'd cleaned her room. Where she was going with her friends. Then she went off to Barnard. We liked the idea that she was close by. Her transcript came after the first semester. All Fs. We found out she'd been going to NYU, lying about being enrolled there. In all those classes she had straight As.”
“That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard,” he said.
“She was in therapy for years,” Mrs. Henglund said. “I thought it was over.”
When she stopped talking the world was soundless. He looked over her shoulder at the clear glass wall of his office. In the corridor people were strolling past, papers in hand, chatting. None of it was possible.
“I thought you should know,” Barbara Henglund said, then stood up and turned to go.
“I don't believe you,” he said.
She looked at him, pity distending her lips into an expression that was almost, but not quite, a smile. “Dustin, Rawlings & Livermore,” she said. “Forty-seventh Street.”
At five o'clock that afternoon he was waiting outside the building. It really was only ten blocks away. He told himself this was crazy, that he'd go home and never tell her about the vicious lies told by her crazy mother, that they'd sever all contact with her family and never go to Babylon again. Crowds of office workers streamed past toward the subway. The day was rainy and gray.
Then he saw her unmistakable blond hair. As if in a dream he reached out and grabbed her arm. In movies, he thought, a guy searches for the girl he loves in a crowd, runs after her, and when she turns around it's never really her.
But Astrid turned around. “What are you doing here?” she said.
He looked at her. “What is this? What are you doing here? What are you?”
Her expression didn't change. “How funny to run into you,” she said. “I was just doing an errand.”
He dragged her to a nearby bench, people on the sidewalk frowning at them, wondering if they ought to intervene. “Love,” he said, “your mother came to see me. She says you work here as a paralegal, that you're from Babylon, not California. Just tell me she's crazy, okay? Tell me who the guy was that you went with to Brian and Marcy's wedding.”
Astrid was wearing gray trousers, and when she crossed her legs on the bench she looked, for a moment, as composed as ever. Then her eyes met his, and he saw the tears and knew his life was over. “I used to like to go to weddings,” she said. “I was … lonely. There are weddings every Saturday at that hall.”
He put his head in his hands, felt her arm wrap around his shoulder, then stood up and shook off her touch, feeling like he was choking. Her hair was in the corner of his sight as he walked away, not knowing where he was going.
It turned out everything was a lie. Her job, her background, even her name — which was Sophia, though she preferred to call herself Astrid after a favorite aunt. That evening in her apartment, relentlessly questioning her, he stripped away lie after lie, and Astrid, sitting on the couch where she'd first lied to him about the dinner she hadn't cooked, admitted to all of them, tears always trembling in her eyes without ever seeming to falclass="underline" yes, she'd lied about her job; no, she couldn't explain why. There were lies upon lies, lies without sense, lies without end. There was no reason why being a physician's assistant was better, worth lying about, than being a paralegal. There was no reason why California was preferable to Babylon. He kept asking her what the point was, and she kept shrugging. He grabbed the model of the breast from her bookcase and shook it at her, its rubbery flesh cold in his hand. “What about this?”
“I can't explain it,” she said.
For the first time in months he slept in his own apartment. In the morning — from work, where he was calmer — he called his parents. His mother made arrangements to fly in immediately from Chicago, and when she arrived she set about canceling all the plans that had been made for the wedding. He didn't call Astrid and didn't hear from her. He thought she must be too ashamed, and that she deserved it, for the magnitude of her be trayal.
It was over.
A week went by. His mother called everybody who'd been invited and explained that the wedding was off. He worked all day, and at night his mother gave him some Valium, which he took obediently, just as he'd taken antibiotics from her as a child, and he'd be asleep before eight.
Then one evening he came home and his mother told him she thought he needed help. She'd made an appointment with a therapist for the next morning, without asking, and he was too tired, or sedated, or will-less, to protest. In the office he explained what had happened mechanically, as if it were somebody else's story. The therapist, a scholarly looking man in a green cardigan, listened to him and nodded slowly. “Recovering from this shock will take you some time,” he said.
“Thanks for the tip,” Robert said sharply. The therapist nodded again, and Robert sighed and rubbed his forehead, where there seemed to be a permanent pain. “What gets me is why. Why would she make these things up? They were such useless lies.”
“Often this kind of behavior is related to a childhood trauma or abuse,” the therapist said. “Although of course I can't say for sure, not without seeing her myself.”