As I Die Lying (17 page)

"Sure," I said, flashing a smile that felt so
brittle I thought my face might break. I wondered who would wear my
boots into this new territory. More importantly, who would wear my
face?

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

We talked away the September afternoon,
drinking organic Sumatran at a round concrete table outside the
Student Union. The surrounding brick buildings housed enough
knowledge to ensure no second-guessing or doubts. Leaves skittered
and scratched across the concrete patio, whisked by the autumn wind
into piles that served as mass graves. The wind also carried
Styrofoam cups and half-finished homework assignments across the
university compound, where the worn grass had given way to mud. The
black bones of tree branches lay on the ground, broken by the
frosty nights.

Beth's cheeks were pinked by the wind. She
put her hat in her lap to keep it from flying away. Strands of her
golden-brown hair kept blowing across her face, and she brushed
them back with an impatient hand. She told me of her family back in
Philadelphia, how she had come to the mountains as an escape, to
get away from the crime and traffic and the press of skyscrapers
and the crush of crowds.

"But I'm worried that my career as a critic
will force me back to the city," she said.

"If you want to study fish, you have to go
underwater. If you want to study artists, you have to go
underground," I said. Of course, all my exposure to art came from
books or the occasional small show. But I was good at pretending,
and a little generosity never killed anyone.

"Where the wild things are. That's where it's
happening. But it's the critics who make the art, not vice versa.
We're like the remoras who hook themselves onto the shark and suck
until we're fatter than what we're feeding on."

A wisp of steam rose from her cup, curled in
on itself for a moment, then climbed the wind and disappeared.

"You don't have a very optimistic view of
your future career."

"I inflate illusions. I play the art game,
but I play to win."

I had to hold my nearly empty cup to keep it
from blowing away. Classes were changing, and students swarmed from
the brick buildings like disturbed ants from an overturned log,
except ants didn’t carry books. Beth stood up and took a final gulp
of her coffee.

"I have a class. Nice talking to you,
Richard. See you around, huh? For real."

"What if?"

"If I don't?"

She threw her backpack over her shoulder, her
body swimming with grace at the movement. I swallowed the stone in
my throat that must have been my heart. Not that I knew what a
heart felt like, but I’d eaten many stones.

"Say, have you read Tom
Wolfe's
The Painted
Word
?" I asked, trying to steal another
moment of her attention, one more gaze from those jeweled eyes. In
retrospect, maybe it was all Bookworm’s doing. All he had was
words.

"No, but I've heard of it."

"It's a must read for critics, even amateurs
like me. You can borrow my copy if you'd like."

She smiled, flashing the neat, white
fencerows of her teeth. "Does that mean I have to give you my phone
number?"

"I suppose so. Though, again, my intentions
are purely honorable."

"Boring. Remember, no 'what ifs.'"

“
Okay, how about this one?
You know how a preying mantis eats the head off the male after
mating?”

Her eyes narrowed. Cute. “Yeah?”

“
What happens when she
masturbates?”

“
Hmm. Wakes up to find she’s
slept with Franz Kafka?”

Good enough. She’d passed the audition.

She gave me her number and I watched her walk
away until I could only see the top of her hat, held down by one
slim hand, the brim flapping in the wind. Then she disappeared into
the crowd.

Mister Milktoast approved.

"She has a nice hat, for a female," he said,
from his fussily neat closet in the Bone House. "I don't think
she'll hurt you. Not like Sally and those others."

“
You never can tell,
though,” I thought, in answer. By then, I was usually smart enough
to keep my mouth shut when talking to the voices in my
head.

"Ah, but better to have loved and lost than
to lose without getting a game piece." Mister Milktoast was fond of
his distorted little aphorisms, but he would have failed miserably
as a romance columnist.

"It's not love, only a chance meeting."

"Don't give me that. I can
feel your heart pounding like a rain of frogs on a tin roof.
It's
my
heart,
too, remember?"

"I can fool myself, but I can never fool you,
can I?"

"To thine own selves be true."

"Now just who the hell would
that be, Mister M? Me? You? Or
them
?"

I sat on the cold concrete bench under the
deep blue sky, looking at the feathery fibers of clouds
inch-worming toward the east. The smell of dried leaves, soil that
would stay damp until spring, and smoke coiling from a distant
chimney assaulted my nose. The sharp sound of heels on the sidewalk
surrounded me, accompanied by scraps of conversation that melded
into hubbub. A cross-town bus honked its horn. My fingers rubbed
the pebbled surface of the Styrofoam cup, my face felt the kiss of
wind, my mouth held the rich oily taste of coffee. In a world of
sense, I was nonsense.

I was thinking about never being alone with
my thoughts.

"No man is an I-land, but maybe a me-land,"
Mister Milktoast chimed in.

"No, but do I have to be a
whole fucking
archipelago
?"

"Yo, Roachtit, what are you bitching about
now?" Loverboy had risen from his lusty dreams and walked down the
Bone House stairs. He must have smelled meat, gotten a whiff of
clean female skin, or maybe he dug the hat, too. "You finally
bringing home some bacon? About time. My nuts are the size of onion
rolls."

Mister Milktoast answered for me. "Now,
Loverboy, there's more to a woman than her physical gifts."

"Oh, yeah, Fuckwheat? You
can diddle yourself till the cows come home, talk about that
emotional crap until you vomit, and that's fine for you. But, me, I
got
needs
. And let
me tell you something."

"Yes, my lascivious brother?"

"When I'm doing the synchronized snakedance,
you can bet your sweet-boy ass you'll be watching."

Mister Milktoast made no answer. Loverboy
retreated into the dark, triumphant.

"Love is a bed of roses, my friend, and
you'll always suffer the pricks," Mister Milktoast said, then he,
too, slipped off into the dark rooms of my mind, leaving me on the
concrete bench, the cold flowing into me and filling me until I was
as hard and fragile as an ice sculpture.

I awoke each morning during those next few
weeks with Beth's name on my lips, trying to follow her back into
my dissolving dreams, sure she had been in them. When I eventually
mustered enough nerve to call her, she seemed pleased to hear from
me. I was afraid she had been humoring me, tossing scraps of her
attention to me the way a grudging retiree tosses breadcrumbs to a
starving pigeon or a girl does when she thinks you might have a
hunky friend she can meet later.

We talked daily after that, of art and its
pretensions, of the weather, of bad novels, of the concrete
ant-farm of Manhattan, and, when all else failed, of feminine
politics. Bookworm came in handy then, popping up to talk about the
latest browse in the Paper Paradise. I didn’t know him enough to
trust his motives, but he sure knew how to pontificate. And he
wasn’t even that boring.

Beth and I started going out together,
sharing lunch or a walk or sometimes only time. She was easygoing
and open, eager to share her work and her life and her dreams. I
was a good listener. With all those voices in my head, I’d had lots
of practice. I knew when to nod and when to shut up, which I’d
learned was about all you needed to know in order to satisfy a
woman’s desire for constant attention. Life imitates imitation.

For the first time since Virginia's death, I
was goofy with attraction. I had been afraid that we each got only
one shot at love in our lives, and I had destroyed mine through
Loverboy's callousness. But now my heart was reawakening, my chest
expanding with the helium of desire, blood puffing with St.
Valentine’s poison.

On our fifth real date, after watching
Hitchcock's “Strangers On a Train” at the campus theater, Beth
wanted to come to my house for drinks. She was impressed that I
owned a house. I suppose she was used to having a romantic
rendezvous interrupted by the proverbial unwashed roommate, and I
knew how that felt, though I lived alone. Since she didn't have a
car, I drove her to my house, pulling into the driveway under the
smoky skein of stars that made up the Milky Way.

As I opened the door, the Bone House door
also opened, and I was afraid.

We stepped into my living room. Beth looked
at the walls that were lined with bookshelves, and books were also
stacked on the coffee table and on the floor beside the sofa and
chairs. The lamp threw its cobwebbed light across the tan carpet.
The room was made brown by the weight of its dull shadows. Beth
didn't mention the absence of a television, something my infrequent
visitors usually noticed instantly. I had all the channels I needed
right inside my head.

"Nice place," she said. Pleasant. Goddamned
pleasant and nothing more.

"Make yourself at home. There's the stereo,
if you can get there through the mess."

I started a pot of tea and Beth put on an
R.E.M. CD. She sat on the couch and sang along in a pure, pleasant
voice. I brought her a glass of the Red Zinfandel that I had bought
and stored in a closet in hopes of one day sharing with someone. Or
maybe some genetic disposition had planted the bottle there,
knowing all Coldirons eventually sought some form of escape, liquid
or otherwise.

"Aren't you having any?" she asked.

"I don't drink much. But don't worry, I'm not
holier-than-thou."

She has more holes than
you
, Mister Milktoast quipped.

"Shut up," I whispered back.

"What?"

"Tea makes me sneeze." I sniffed. It sounded
enough like "Shut up" to get me off the hook.

"You’re quite a bookworm," she said,
surveying the shelves.

Did she know?
The truth was sometimes the best possible cover
story. "Yes, among other things."

"So, Richard, tell me about those
things."

"What you see is what you get." Except for my
Little People, the Bone House, memories, my favorite candy, and the
fact that everything she said would one day end up in a book.

"You told me you came from Iowa, but nothing
about your parents or anything. You didn't walk full-grown out of
the cornfields, did you? A sort of ‘Field of Nightmares’ or
something?"

Guitars chimed from the stereo speakers in
repetitious riffs. Michael Stipe was mumbling enigmatic vocals over
the college-rock backbeat. My past was like Stipe's lyrics, best
left murky and unknown, unless I could sell the book, in which case
it all was on the table. Except that thing with my mother. "Well,
my past is no big deal. I try to live for the moment."

"Don't get surly. I was just asking. Can't
you at least tell me the good parts?"

The good parts?

"Parts is parts," said Loverboy, before I
could stub him out like a cigarette.

"Huh? Where did that come from? Don't tell me
you're an amateur actor, too?"

"Nope."

"But the way your voice just changed...and
your expression..."

"My run-of-the-mill evil twin. But back to my
past...the best part was moving up here and meeting you," I said,
feeling Loverboy twitch in my brain like a frantic fetus kicking
its mother's uterine walls.

"Flattery will get you everywhere. But I'm
not that easily put off the trail. There's a secret to you,
Richard. I'm not a babe in the woods. And I'm not easily scared
off."

Babe
, Loverboy said.
See? They all know
it. So, Booksquirt and Milk Dud, stop with all that 'respect'
shit
.

"My biggest secret is that I get a strange
feeling every time I'm around you," I said, a little uneasy at
Loverboy's stirrings. Was he going to crash the party, complete
with lampshade hat, clown shoes, and a toilet seat around his neck,
ready for a gloveless stranglehold?

"What sort of feeling? And don't say 'love,'
because love is like God and UFOs, I'll believe it when I see
it."

"The feeling you get when you eat your
favorite candy."

Beth finished her wine. I reached out to take
the glass, but she said, "I'll get it. Where's the bottle?"

"On the counter. Help yourself."

She stopped to look at my aquarium on her way
to the kitchen. The yellow angelfish cut their mindless patterns
through the water. "Peaceful in there," she said. "No worries."

“
None at all,” I said, voice
trailing as I was dragged into the Bone House. My roommates were
coming to life. The Little People were awakened by the storm of
emotions rattling the eaves and they appeared to be rearranging the
furniture.

They sensed my helplessness. They all came
out at once, tripping each other as they rushed for the door and
fought for dominance of my face.

"I like your woodwork," Beth called from the
kitchen. It sounded as if she were across the universe.

Please stay in
there
, I thought at her, before I was free
of thought. Then I became an observer, an innocent bystander who
wasn't truly innocent, helpless witness to the actions of my own
flesh. A blameless victim. I sort of liked that.