Love & Lies: Marisol's Story (22 page)

Once we hit Wellfleet, Olivia softened considerably. All the tension seemed to leave her, and she became the charming person who’d enchanted me the first time I met her. She fed me bites of her omelet to go with my French toast, and she scooped a drip of syrup off my chin with her finger, then put the finger in my mouth. She ordered us cocoa with marshmallows and licked the foam off my lips. And I was sad about trading this for an afternoon at the beach? Was I nuts?

On the drive home she started to tell me about trips she wanted to take sometime, not just to Cape Cod, but to San Francisco, Europe, Brazil. She didn’t seem to have traveled much, but she’d read about lots of places, and she described them to me in detail.

“Maybe you’d like to come with me?” she said.

“That would be great,” I said. I could imagine it—the two of us discovering the world together.

“We’ll see, won’t we?” she said, teasing. “If I can trust you.”

My stomach clenched. I hated that I’d lied to Olivia rather than explain my friendship with Lee. I hadn’t wanted her to get mad at me; her anger was so transforming. But what now? If Olivia and I kept dating, there would surely come a time when we’d bump into Lee, or maybe Gio and Diana. I couldn’t ask everyone I knew to keep on lying for me. Gio had once called me a “truth zealot,” but lately I’d
proved him wrong about that. Lying so you didn’t hurt someone’s feelings was one thing, but lying out of fear was another, and it made me very uncomfortable. I’d never tolerated lying in other people; how could I accept it in myself?

The farther away from Provincetown we got, the better Olivia’s mood became. Once we were on Route 3 headed for Boston, she stepped on the gas and sang along with a Bonnie Raitt song on the radio.

“So, do you want to know what your class assignment is for next week?” she asked.

“Sure.”

“Not hard. I want you to find five outstanding first lines from novels and tell me why they make you want to read the whole book. And then I want you to write the first line of your own novel.” She smiled at me. “Since you already have a first line, you’re ahead of the game.”

“Oh, that’ll be fun!”

“I thought so.”

“What’s the first line of your novel?” I asked.

“What?” She looked startled.

“Your novel. The one you’re finishing up.”

“Marisol, you know I don’t like anyone to know anything about my work until it’s completely finished.”

“Not even the first line? You can’t even tell me
that
?” I said, laughing.

“No, I can’t!” Her bite was back, and it was just as bad as her bark. I turned away from her and looked out the side window. Once again I felt we weren’t on equal footing. I was the kid, and she was the grown-up who could put me
in my place at any moment. Which totally sucked.

Olivia reached over and patted my knee. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be secretive. You know,
anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity.”

God, she had a saying for every occasion. “What are you anxious about?”

“I’m very near to finishing the book, Marisol. As a matter of fact, I may be able to finish it this week.”

“Really? And then can I read it?”

She sighed. “You are so persistent!
Eventually
, you can read it, yes.”

I had another idea. “Maybe I could read some of your stories! The ones you had published in those magazines!”

“Oh, I don’t have those in my apartment. I sent them to my parents for safekeeping.”

“You don’t have the files on your computer anymore?”

She shook her head. “Deleted them. You don’t need them if you have the magazines.”

“Well, what are the names of the magazines?”

Olivia threw her head back in apparent frustration. “Marisol, just let it go, would you?”

I was beginning to think she didn’t want me to read any of her stuff, which hurt my feelings. Did she think I was too young to understand it, or what?

Olivia had started talking about herself and didn’t notice my annoyance.

“I love being so close to the end of the story. Endings are so magical,” she said.
“If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I’d just type a little faster.
When I stop working, the
rest of the day is posthumous. I’m only really alive when I’m writing.”

“Not when you’re having sex?” I said it in a snotty tone of voice, but Olivia just laughed.

“Well, that wakes me up too,” she said. “Are you hinting that you want to come over to my apartment when we get back?”

I shrugged. “If you want me to,” I said, as if I hadn’t started getting excited immediately.

“I think it’s a great idea.” Olivia arched her lovely neck and smiled at me. Then she said, “That girl Diana—I thought I’d met her once before, at the Arts Festival. But she looked different this morning.”

My brain was momentarily paralyzed, and I could feel the lie cracking my heart in half. “She did? You only saw her for a minute.”

“Yes, but I have a very good memory for faces.”

I sat there frozen, unable to continue the lie or admit to it.

Finally she spoke again. “Well, I guess we all make mistakes, don’t we?” she said.

I stared at her, my stomach churning, but nothing about her face, or her posture, or the way she clutched the wheel answered my question. Could she possibly
know
?

T
HAT AFTERNOON, IN HER BEDROOM,
Olivia was definitely in charge. Which was fine. I mean, it was certainly exciting; Olivia knew what she was doing, and she had me completely in her control. The thing was, I didn’t really like being controlled, being the passive one to whom things were done, no matter how pleasant those things were. Maybe I was being oversensitive because of the way the rest of the weekend had gone, but it seemed like another example of the ways in which we were not on even ground. Just because she was older, did that mean she would always be the commander in chief of our relationship? Taking a backseat wasn’t really a facet of my personality.

Around four o’clock she rolled over and peered at the clock. “Time to jump in the shower. I’m meeting someone for drinks before dinner.”

“You’re going out
again
?”

“Yes. Do you have a problem with that?” She climbed out of bed and stood there, hands on her hips, perfectly naked, nakedly perfect.

“No, but, well, I thought maybe we could, I don’t know . . .”

“You thought we could roll around in bed all day and all night? I have other things to do, Marisol!”

“That’s not what I meant! I thought maybe the two of us could go out somewhere.”

“Not tonight,” she said curtly, throwing on a robe and heading into the bathroom. “I’m meeting someone important.”

You didn’t need to hit me in the head with a brick—clearly,
I
was not “someone important” to Olivia. And it was obvious that all but a very small portion of her life was being kept secret from me. Though she had no qualms about interfering with
my
plans, I wasn’t supposed to know about hers. I wasn’t invited to meet her friends or even know who they were. I couldn’t read her novel or even hear the first sentence of it! What kind of a relationship was that?

I got up and dressed quickly, then went to her computer, this time with a purpose. As I’d hoped, it was turned on. The screensaver gave way to the same menu page as before. This time I scanned the short list of folders carefully.

Ideas for Stories


Lillian


Adult Ed Class Notes


Writing Quotes


Books I’ve Read


Books to Read


Miscellaneous


And that was all. An oddly brief list, I thought, for a writer. Did she delete everything the minute she finished it? And where
was the actual manuscript for
Lillian, Who Says She Loves You
?

I went to the Lillian folder first, but there was no more in it than there had been the week before. Only notes, not an “almost finished” novel. I opened Ideas for Stories, which was exactly that. Half a dozen pages of ideas. Character sketches, a few chunks of dialogue, a description of an interesting setting. But no chapters.

Since some of the folders were clearly not relevant, I skipped down to Miscellaneous, but there wasn’t much of interest there either: a bunch of saved articles from the
New York Times
and the
Boston Globe
, mostly about writers or books; an old itinerary from a trip to Bermuda in 2005; some information about how to exchange tickets at the American Repertory Theatre.

I went back to the menu page and clicked around from there, trying to find some file on this computer where Olivia’s book might be saved. But there was nothing. I wondered if she knew I’d been looking at her computer, so she’d downloaded the novel onto a disc and hidden it somewhere. Would she really do that, just to keep me from reading a few pages? I opened desk drawers, looking for discs, but the only ones I found were still in their packaging and looked new. I was stumped. How far would she go to keep me from seeing her novel? Or was I being ridiculously paranoid?

Back to the menu page again. I clicked on Writing Quotes, just in case
Lillian
was buried under a heading meant to confuse me. A long document came up, one quotation after another, alphabetized by author. I gave up—the novel was not there either—and began to half-heartedly peruse the
list. As I scanned, lines began to jump out at me. At first I didn’t remember where I’d heard them before.

“Literature is the question minus the answer.”

—Roland Barthes

“Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

—E. L. Doctorow

“Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity.”

—T. S. Eliot

That was the one that stopped me; I’d heard it only a few hours before, but I’d assumed it was just another one of Olivia’s ingenious observations. And then it all fell into place. I looked at the list again.

“The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

—Sylvia Plath

“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”

—Mark Twain

For God’s sake, Olivia went around spouting these quotations as if she’d thought them all up herself! One after another! Weren’t teachers supposed to be extra careful about stuff like that? Maybe it wasn’t exactly plagiarism, but it sure smelled a
lot like it. It was cheating, that I was sure of, to make your students think you could come up with smart, pithy sayings like these hour after hour. I was so stunned by this revelation that I didn’t hear the shower go off. When I looked up, Olivia was standing a few feet away from me, smirking.

“Snooping, are we?” she said.

“Yeah, I guess I am,” I said.

“Find what you were looking for?”

“No,” I said. “But I found this.” I turned the screen so she could see it.

Her face drew closed, and I could see she was furious. “Well, I hope you’re satisfied. When you invade someone’s privacy, you shouldn’t be surprised to find something you don’t really want to see.”

As always, she’d confused me. Shouldn’t I be angry with her? Shouldn’t she be apologizing to me? Instead
she
was mad. Okay, I was snooping, but look what I’d found!

She walked to her closet and began yanking clothes off hangers and throwing them on. “You were trying to find my novel, weren’t you? That’s what you were looking for, isn’t it?”

“I was,” I admitted. “I don’t understand why you won’t let me see just a little of it. You read
my
writing.”

“I’m your teacher!” she spat out. “It’s my job.”

“Is it also your job to make us think you came up with all these clever insights that are really the exact words of a bunch of famous writers?”

“What difference does it make?” she said, pulling a pair of hose up over a sculpted knee. “Those bozos wouldn’t remember who said it even if I told them.”

Bozos?
“It makes a difference to me! You took the credit and I trusted you!”

She was quiet while she slipped her delicate feet into a pair of black heels; then she looked up at me and said, “And now you don’t?”

“I—I don’t know. I’m just shocked. I thought you hated lying as much as I did.”

Olivia’s voice got quiet. “And yet you lied to me, too, didn’t you?” She disappeared back into the bathroom, leaving the arrow lodged in my heart. If I wasn’t truthful with her, what right did I have to expect her to be truthful with me? When she came out again, she had on makeup and long, dangly earrings. She looked fantastic, and I wondered who would have the benefit of her dazzling company tonight.

“I told you I was sorry. I didn’t think my lie was a big deal,” I said. “It’s not like Gio was going with me as my boyfriend. I was afraid you’d misunderstand.”

“So you said. But if you’ve told me one lie, how do I know there aren’t more?” She took a red leather jacket from her closet and slipped it on. “Anyway, we’ve each disappointed the other today, haven’t we? Shall we just call it a draw and put the whole thing behind us?” Her mouth smiled, but I could tell her heart wasn’t in it.

Having Olivia mad at me made me feel sick to my stomach, so I was relieved at whatever ragged reconciliation we could patch together. When I looked into her eyes, I still adored her. I still wanted to be with her. Even if she lied, even if I didn’t understand her, I still wanted her to love me.

We didn’t say much in the car, but Olivia kissed me before I got out, and I tried to convince myself everything was still okay between us. It had to be okay.

Birdie and Damon weren’t home yet—they’d obviously made a day of it on the Cape—and I was pretty jumpy after the showdown with Olivia. I made myself coffee and a sandwich and took them into my room, thinking that doing the assignment for next week—such an easy, fun task—would get my mind off the day’s events. I pulled a chair up to my bookshelf and read the beginnings of some of my favorite books. I hit gold on my first try.