She’d anticipated Matija’s unpredictability and even expected his creative attitude about the truth. At first she romanticized it. She never asked him about the story he’d mentioned when they first met, the one about the swan and the swan boat. She filled the gaps in her understanding with assumptions about herself and her lack of familiarity with the world. At first. But by now her colorful imagining of Matija’s creative world had grown dark and cold. She’d catch an odd gesture at the end of a grueling day, a whisper to someone invisible, when he’d come to the end of his rope, when something raw peered out from beneath his playful exterior. He’d be suddenly skittish, shifty, edgy, and silently pained. She knew he was hiding something from her when she came home one evening and saw him kneeling on the floor, one hand punching a pillow, the other over his mouth and nose as if holding back something that was burning in his throat. He made a sound, a howling from deep down inside him. They weren’t words she’d ever heard; later she remembered hhhhsuh, dellllik, and znalllk or znarrrrk. Terrified, she tiptoed out of the apartment and called him from the street a half hour later. She didn’t have the courage to face what was happening, but the outcome was inevitable. Matija was becoming more a part of the material world, the world of things she so often collided with. She became aware of the possibility that even Matija might seriously harm another person without meaning to, simply by living as he always had.
He called her at work first thing the morning after they argued in front of her friends.
“Hey.”
“Hi,” then silence. After a moment, Dina said coldly, “So, what’s up?”
“Not much. I just wanted to check and see if we’re good.”
“Can’t talk now, I have a meeting in five. I don’t know if we’re good.”
“I’d like us to be. I reached for you last night.”
“I don’t know what to say. Since you never call me at work, I assume you know where I am?”
“Sort of, yes. I know something’s been bothering you, but I don’t get why. People always embellish a little now and then, spice things up. I don’t know why you went crazy over it.”
“First of all, don’t talk to me about crazy. You lose it, like, every few days. Last week, when you screamed at those kids playing around in front of the building? So who the fuck are you to talk about crazy?”
“Whoa, don’t go—”
“And second: It’s one thing to spice up a story a little. But you tell a story one day, and the next it’s totally different. And then you try to convince me you didn’t say what you said, and… I don’t know… And all the damned off-limits subjects. Fuck, it’s like you don’t remember anything before high school. What’s that about? If I hadn’t already caught you making up stuff about your childhood, it wouldn’t matter, I’d believe your memories started when we met. See? I wouldn’t care. But now, damn it, now I have to know, because… I need to understand.”
“I don’t know what to say. I know who I am, but every day it strikes me a little differently, and I, like, come to it a different way each time. And that thing yesterday—so what? People exaggerate, y’know, everyone does that. Tell me your dad doesn’t embellish his war stories a little. As if they actually hung grenades instead of ornaments on the Christmas tree—please. But the story’s good, so we laugh and nod and don’t give it another thought… I’m no different.”
“Seems to me you are. Or maybe I care more. You’re making it sound like I’m this Gestapo bitch overanalyzing what you said and how you said it, like I’m nitpicking, but no way. Fuck, got to go.”
“Wait, are we seeing each other today?”
“Don’t know. Not exactly in the mood.”
“No need to be in the mood—I’ll perk you up. I have a bottle of rosé with your name on it. And some good jazz. What do you say?”
After a pause, Dina spoke clearly and firmly. “Okay. I’ll come to your place. But without the rosé or the jazz. I’ll come around eight, and then please, tell me about yourself. Seriously. As if you’re talking about someone you don’t like. Cut the bullshit. Whatever happened, happened. You’re not an addict, you’re not in debt to loan sharks, you don’t beat women, so far as I know you were never in jail, and you probably don’t have the plague. Everything else I can handle, I know I can. But I have to know. See? From now on… You tell me everything, the way it happened. If you’re up for that, we’re good.”
If Matija had said, “I am,” he knew it would have sounded fake.
“See you tonight,” he said and felt his balls swell.
Matija did what he had to at work, he was unusually cheery and flippant, and on the way home he bought the rosé. He spent no time at all thinking about his lies and how he sometimes overreacted. Most of the time he believed he was no different from anyone else. Sometimes he’d say something happened that didn’t, sometimes he’d say something happened to him when it happened to someone else, sometimes he’d do a little of both. But tweaking his history was like covering a song, he thought, and everyone did that. He knew Dina was sick of it, though, and that he’d better stick to one story. Piece of cake, he thought. Most of all, he thought about how he’d fuck her.
She arrived around eight thirty in a hurry, no time for a kiss hello. They sat at the kitchen table without even taking off their shoes. Who cares? I’ll fuck you in your heels on the table, he thought. He went first.
“Okay, here goes. I can’t tell you my whole life story, that’d be impossible. Most of it’s forgotten, but that’s true for other people, too. So ask me whatever. I think you’re taking this a little too seriously, but so be it.”
“Okay. Tell me your life backward, starting from today and going back to the first memories you know are really yours.”
“What? You mean day by day, hour by hour?”
“Whatever works.”
“Wait, what do you actually want to hear?”
“All of it.”
“All of what? You want to know when I came home, what I was wearing, how I crossed the street, what the cars looked like?”
“All of it.”
“Fuck off. Why not just say you came to fight and dump me?”
“I didn’t. I came because I’d like—”
“Oh, I get it. You want me to list all the women I’ve slept with. You want to hear whether I’m in touch with my exes and if I meet them every now and then for coffee. Look, I don’t go around asking you who you’ve fucked.”
“No, that’s not it, because those aren’t things you’d lie about,” said Dina, and added, as if speaking to an invisible third person, “I can’t believe what a weirdo I’ve fallen for.” Addressing Matija again, she said, “You know, you have three different stories for everything that ever happened to you.”
Maybe because she’d said she’d fallen for him, or because there was so much tenderness leaking through her vehemence, he began to yearn for an end to the torture. Matija planted both hands on the table, leaned forward, and began to talk, looking her straight in the eye. He talked for what felt like an eternity. He confessed a series of unpleasant things: the way he and Miljac used to be beaten up when they were in high school, that his family was impoverished after his father died, and how he’d started pretending to have a better life by, among other things, saying he’d had such a fabulous time sailing his family’s yacht. He said he had no friends until his family moved to Zagreb, and that’s why he made up the secret club. He told his new friends these stories so they wouldn’t think he was a weird loner. After the move, a good lie was a lifesaver. He talked about his father’s death. He said he found it easier to see how pain impacted his mother and sister than face his own fears. In high school he said that his father had probably been killed in Germany by Serbian secret agents because he’d helped to prepare Croatia for the war, so not much was known about his death. His father, in fact, had died of leukemia. Matija’s voice spontaneously quavered in a few places, he was so moved by his own story. Even Dina, he thought, teared up a time or two. At university he’d lied and said that his book was coming out for a year before he even submitted the manuscript. He was relieved when it was accepted for publication, because he’d used it to seduce a woman who was, like, way out of his league. He admitted trying to come off as more clever and more important than he really was at work. His title had enough cachet to flatter his intellectual snobbery, but it was boring enough that people didn’t ask him much about it. An ideal position for training and promoting frauds, imposters, and fakes. There you have it.