“Most of the afternoon,” I said. The first lie was complete now. I sat up in bed and looked around the room. I had committed myself to a mean and dicey strategy and I felt that lie as if it were a weight tied to my leg and dropped into a bottomless pit: you wait at the edge and watch the rope uncurl.
“Good,” said Ann. “I rested too. We can make it a late night if we want to.”
“I’ll come over in about an hour,” I said. I didn’t want her to suggest we meet somewhere else. I wanted Ann at home so someone could call and tell her about Hugh. The police? Ingrid?
But by the time I reached Ann’s, she still didn’t know. It was seven in the evening and the darkness’s only presence was in the lengthening shadows. Ann was dressed in striped seersucker pants and a boyish shirt. Her hair was wet and combed straight back and her face was paler than before and her lipstick darker. She’d been writing all day and that’s what we talked about.
“I can feel myself getting better,” Ann said. “I can hear my own voice now. I mean, I sound like myself when I write, and later on I recognize myself in a way that pleases me and surprises me, too.”
“Would you show me something you’ve written?” I asked. I was sitting on the sofa, rocking back and forth.
“You seem so nervous,” Ann said. “It’s about last night?”
“No.”
“Maybe we should talk about it, though. I’d like to let it rest, but you seem…”
“No,” I said, but it didn’t matter because now, finally, the phone was ringing.
“Ah!” said Ann, rising. “Opportunity. Fame. Romance.”
Ingrid. She was calling from a phonebooth. There was something she needed to discuss with Ann and she didn’t want to do it over the telephone. Could she come over? Right away? Yes, right away.
“What a peculiar mystery,” Ann said. “My guess is she wants to look me over, which is, if I recall, a common symptom of the matrimonial virus. Listen to me! I feel so cocktail-in-hand ex- wifey. But I feel such an advantage over Hugh’s new girl. With her hushed little voice and the bogus drama: she so wants to make an impression.”
I made a move to get up and Ann started in her chair as if she’d just remembered I was there. I wondered if she had any idea how nervous she was.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“I’ll come back later. I’ll call in an hour or so.”
“No. Stay right where you are. We’ll make up a name for you, if that’s what you’re worried about. I like my little illusion of superiority and I don’t intend to cancel it out by letting Hugh’s girl find me all alone on a Saturday night. My generation places great mystical emphasis on Saturday nights and I know that’s the first thing Hugh will ask her, if I was alone. Let him think I was with some young hip man. It’ll do us all a lot of good.”
And so I waited with Ann, in a position so profoundly false that the highest pitch of madness could not have felt more strange. Of course, it was not the first lie I’d told in my short, evasive life, but it was by far the most enormous. This was no social lie, no defense of my privacy, and this was in no way on a par with the careful deletions I made in my monologues with Dr. Ecrest, or my upbeat progress reports to Eddie Watanabe. The lie I’d told to Ann loomed over, darkened, and then devoured all the truth that was in me. The popular expression is “living a lie” but you don’t live it, you live in it, the way you might live in a cave.
I thought suddenly, sickeningly, with that sense of relief that slows the racing heart by stepping on it, that there was a good chance no one would ever guess my part in Hugh’s death. Only Ingrid could connect me to that moment, and with a gambler’s feverish keening prayer—it moaned through me in a fretful, spacy tone, chanting like a man at the top of a mosque—I begged the future to make Ingrid innocent of all knowledge of me. Of all she’d seen that afternoon—Hugh’s race into the path of that cab, the black man with his dimes, the driver of the florist’s van dabbing at his forehead, the refraction of the sun off the policeman’s spiral notebook—I hoped that my face existed in her memory only as so much kindly vapor. My lie, my need to remain near the wounded core of the Butterfields’ life, my slow way back to Jade—everything finally depended on Ingrid’s not recognizing me, the way a smuggler’s run, months in the planning, depends finally on a heavy fog for its success.
Ann seemed so adamant that I meet Ingrid and so oblivious to my terror in waiting with her that thirty times in as many minutes the thought came revolving into my consciousness that Ann knew everything I was trying to hide, that her talkativeness and her coyness were only bizarre and costly strategies, like those deadpan psychological gambits private eyes run in movies to force a suspect’s hidden hand. She drank a glass of white wine and placed one on the table in front of me.
“What shall we call you?” she asked.
“My name?”
“We’ll make one up.” She reached behind her and switched on a delicate wooden floor lamp with a small flowered shade. “I know I’m bullying you, David, and believe me I know this is sick, but I do want to handle it this way. I have this terrible feeling Hugh’s led his new girl to believe I’m some frosty old celibate, and even if I’m correcting the image under false pretenses—” she overemphasized the word false, or so it seemed—“I think I have that right.” Her glass was already empty; the wine seemed to have disappeared without her having once raised the glass to her lips. “We’ll call you Tony. That’s a good one. It sounds well bred and frightfully proletarian. Hugh will turn it over in his mind, I think. And really, David, you don’t have to say anything. I’ll just introduce you and you can leave. But say you’ll be back. I mean, don’t make it appear that you’re off somewhere. I’ll owe you a favor, if you want. Will you do it?”
Ann got the jug of white wine from the kitchen and began to pour it into my glass before she noticed I hadn’t drunk any yet. A little oily puddle formed around the stem of my glass as the wine overflowed.
“Oh, I am nervous,” she said. “Ingrid coming to see me. Our little charade. I always get caught in my lies, too. I admire successful liars—I mean right up and over the edge of envy. My stories would be so much better if I could lie more easily. But I drag the actual facts of my life around like that poor man in Madame Bovary with the metal foot.”
The living room was dense with dead heat; the open casement windows brought in the noise of traffic and a faint gassy breeze. The down above Ann’s lips was shiny from the heat; her skin looked moist, stimulated; her hair refused to dry. I felt coated in sweat from my scalp to my legs; when I touched my throat, my hand came away wet.
And then, finally, the buzzer was rung from the downstairs lobby and it fired off in the long hallway of Ann’s apartment. The bulk of my fear had passed. My nerves seemed to have collapsed from exhaustion. When I heard the buzzer I sat forward and took hold of my wineglass. I had an impulse to ask Ann not to answer the door. But that was alclass="underline" my decisions were made; my life was going on without me.
“Horrible thought,” Ann said, getting up. She put her hand over her mouth and looked at me. “What if she’s brought Hugh along? Or if he’s bullied his way in.” She shook her head. “That’s all we need. Right?”
She picked up the old-fashioned black intercom and said, “Who is it?” I took a small sip of the wine. “It’s her,” Ann said to me. “Sit where you are. When I come back, I’ll sit next to you.” She shook her head and said, “I’m positive I’m going to regret this.”