Love & Lies: Marisol's Story (24 page)

But by Friday night I couldn’t bear it any longer. I’d see her in class the next morning, of course, but I felt like I had to see her before that, to iron things out, to make it all right again.

She answered the phone on the fourth ring, sounding rushed.

“Marisol,” she said. “What a surprise.”

A surprise?
“You haven’t called me this week. Have you been busy?”

“I’m always busy—you know that. I’m not a college kid anymore.”

Why did I get the feeling she was
trying
to piss me off? Well, I wasn’t going to bite this time. “It’s Friday night. We should go out and do something. Dinner, or—”

“I’m low on cash at the moment. I’m throwing together a salad here.”

“Well, we could throw together a salad
together
, couldn’t we?”

No answer. I persevered.

“I mean, I don’t care what we do. We could just walk around the Square or something. I just want to see you—and talk to you.”

“We’ll see each other in class tomorrow morning.” Her voice was clipped.

I didn’t get brushed off that easily. “Are you still mad about me going to the Cape with Gio? Or is this about snooping in your computer?”

A heavy sigh rustled through the receiver. “Take your pick, Marisol. I don’t like being lied to—you know that.”

“But you lied too!”

She sighed. “Oh, Marisol, I really don’t have time for this now.”

The tears that had been barely contained all week sprang forth. I just couldn’t stand being called a liar, especially by Olivia. “I try very hard not to lie to anyone,” I said. “Telling the truth—and being told the truth—is the most important thing in the world to me. I never meant to lie to you, and if I did, it was the most benign kind of lie, the kind that protects
you
. I didn’t want you to feel bad.”

“Are you crying?”

I sniffed. “No.”

“You can’t even tell me the truth about that! Marisol, I just don’t have the time for your dramatics tonight.”

“Why not? I thought you were just ‘throwing together a salad.’ Are you going out again?”

“That’s none of your business! I’m sorry. Maybe this is our age difference rearing its head here, but, really, this is just too juvenile for me at the moment. I’ll see you in the morning, if you’ve dried up by then.” And the phone went dead.

The shock of her hang-up did indeed dry up my tears. What had just happened here? I was too stunned to move,
but my brain was whirling. I needed to talk to someone about this, about
all
of this, but the appropriate friend was not available. Oh, Birdie and Damon were right outside in the living room watching a Steve Martin movie marathon on TV, but I’d already gotten my words of wisdom from them. I felt sure that disturbing them with my tale of woe would only lead to the inevitable “I told you so.”

Gio, I thought, might actually be helpful. But it was Friday, the one night of the week he was forced to spend with his father, eating pizza and pretending to “work on their relationship.” It usually didn’t put him in a sympathetic mood.

This was the kind of thing I could once have talked about with my mother, but since I hadn’t let her in on the earlier part of the story, it was too difficult to tell her the whole thing now.

There was nobody I could talk to about any of the important things happening in my life. Nobody I wanted to talk to, really, except Lee, and Lee was gone.

I
WALKED INTO THE CLASSROOM
on the dot of ten so there wouldn’t be time to talk to Olivia; I wasn’t currently in the market for any more snubs from her. But I needn’t have worried—she barely gave me a glance when I did wander in. I could have been any old slob she barely knew.

I took a seat as far from Olivia as possible and looked around—Gio wasn’t there. Just as I was despairing that I’d never find a friend to talk through my problems with, he came running in. “Sorry,” he mumbled to Olivia, and grabbed a seat two away from mine.

While Olivia was busy reading some of her favorite first lines from books, I scribbled on a piece of notebook paper, folded it in quarters, and passed it down to him. The two women sitting between us glared at me as if this note-passing proved my immaturity.

The note, of course, asked him to have lunch with me. He read it and nodded his agreement. Thank God. At least someone wanted to talk to me.

Olivia had moved on to having the class read their favorite first lines and then the ones we’d written ourselves. She liked many of them; in fact she was much less critical of
this week’s work than usual. When Hamilton Hairdo leaned back confidently in his chair and explained that his ridiculous first line was a metaphor, all Olivia said was, “That’s interesting. It could work.” No, it could
not
work! What
was
the metaphor, anyway? Why was Olivia being so nonjudgmental today? If she thought “The sun reflecting hotly off Albert’s cantaloupe-colored head foretold many days of bad weather for the sailors” was a good first sentence, her praise of the rest of us didn’t mean much either.

My turn. Olivia nodded, frowning, as I read my first few sentence choices, but when I came to number four, the
Bell Jar
quote, she practically exploded.

“Sylvia Plath! You read Sylvia Plath? That overhyped old suicide? Goodness, I thought you had better taste than that!”

I felt the blood leaving my face and pooling in my stomach. Olivia had once
quoted
Sylvia Plath to me, without crediting her, of course. Now, suddenly, when I quoted her, Sylvia was a cliché? But all I said was, “I like the book, yes. I think it’s very good. And the first line . . .”

“Overwritten. Plath never knew when to stop. And so many of the young writers who emulate her are just as bad. Let’s hear the sentence you wrote, Marisol.” I could practically see her licking her lips over the prospect of chewing my words into pieces.

Was this anger all about me finding the writing quotations on her computer? She obviously wanted to humiliate me in front of the entire class—so much more fun than simply letting me have it when the two of us were alone. There was a part of me longing to stand up and yell at her:
I love you! I let you in! Don’t you get that?

But I didn’t. I stood up, my voice shaking as I read my first sentence. “‘Christina had always believed she was born lucky—smart, funny, and just good-looking enough to get pretty much everything she wanted, except, of course, the thing she longed for most: love.’”

Sure enough, Olivia smiled, then pounced. “Well, that’s a mouthful, isn’t it? I’m wondering if your book is going to be autobiographical. Because you know, Marisol, the whole world is not interested in the juvenilia of a lovesick teenager. Besides, it doesn’t work, does it? It feels manipulative, don’t you think, class? Am I right?”

She appealed to her minions, and many heads nodded agreeably, eager to pull me off the pedestal.

“I don’t think it’s manipulative at all,” Gio said. “And what difference does it make who the story is about? Lots of people write coming-of-age stories. J. D. Salinger made a career of it.”

“Oh, Marisol’s brave defender,” Olivia said, waving her hand dismissively at Gio. “I certainly hope no one in here is planning to emulate J. D. Salinger! His time has come and, thankfully, gone! What I want to know is, can’t you just write a plain, clear sentence, Marisol?”

What? Like the one about the sailor with the hot cantaloupe head?

The look she sent in my direction was full of rage. It was pretty obvious, at least to me, that this rant had nothing to do with my writing ability. I slapped my notebook closed and stared back at her.

She seemed happy to move on from my juvenilia to the rest of the class’s lyrical claptrap. Gio’s stuff was good, of course—though Olivia didn’t think much of it—and one or two other people could write their way out of a bag, but most of it was pure junk. Which did not stop Olivia from praising its “potential.” Talk about lies!

My own anger pulsing in my ears made it just about impossible to listen to anything else Olivia had to say. Obviously, I could never come back to this class again. It was over—the class, my relationship with Olivia, maybe even the whole idea of writing a novel. It had all been ruined by one thing or another.

The minute the class was over, I grabbed my bag and ran for the door, not even looking back to see if Olivia noticed. I was out on Brattle Street, fighting tears, before Gio caught up with me.

“Wait up!”

I slowed down. “I had to get out of there, Gio. She hates me now. My life has turned into a big stinking pile of shit.” I wiped away a loose tear, furious at myself for caring so much about someone who didn’t give a damn about me, someone who was happy to make a fool of me in front of a roomful of people.

He took my arm and led me down the street. “Let’s go somewhere. We’ll get coffee and talk.”

I was puffing steam like a moose in winter. “Let’s go to the Mug. That’s one place I’m sure Olivia will never set foot.”

“Good. I have something to tell you, and I want you caffeinated before you hear it.”

Doug was sitting on a stool at the counter with a stack of
bills in front of him, but he raised his hand and said, “Hey, kiddo,” when we walked in. We crawled into a corner booth away from the window. Sue came over to wait on us, her clogs clopping across the floor like horseshoes. “God, I can’t believe you come here even when you aren’t working,” she said.

“Where should I go?
Starbucks
?” I said nastily.

Sue looked to Gio. “
She’s
in a mood.”

“That’s true.” He glanced down the page-long menu. “I’d like a tuna fish sandwich and a cup of Earl Grey tea.”

“Fries with that?”

“Sure.”

“That is so predictable,” I griped. “Give me a grilled cheese and a cup of coffee.”

“Because
that’s
unusual,” Sue said dryly, nodding at Gio. “You got your hands full.”

Once she left, Gio pulled some papers out of his backpack and spread them on the table.

“Do I really want to know whatever it is you’re going to tell me?” I said.

“Probably not, but you have to. Last night, after I finished writing down my first sentences for class, I was goofing around online and decided to look for some quotes. I found these sites last year that list all kinds of famous quotes—I use them in papers for school sometimes, and it impresses the crap out of the teachers. And I thought it would be interesting to search for quotes about writing to put in my next zine issue. So, I’m reading through the quotes—”

“I know,” I said, glancing at his sheets of paper.

“You
know
? Since when?”

“Since last Sunday night. I was at Olivia’s place, and I went onto her computer while she was in the shower. I know, it was a crappy, sneaky thing to do, but she wouldn’t show me anything she’d written, not even a short story. She wouldn’t even tell me the first line of her novel, and I was just trying to find
something
. . . and instead I found pages of writing quotations, lots of which she’s already used in class.”

“Without telling us that somebody else actually said them first!”

“Yeah.”

“Is that why she’s so mad at you?”

“I guess so. I didn’t plan on ratting her out or anything.”

“She’s really got the art of public humiliation down pat. She must have been embarrassed that you found the list.”

I shrugged. “She just acted mad. It was all about my invading her privacy, which I guess I did.”

Sue plunked our plates and cups on the table. “You’re invading people’s privacy now? I’d shoot you.”

“Go away,” I said. She wrinkled her nose and stalked off.

I stared at the table, where crumbs from somebody else’s croissant were still scattered. “The weird thing is, I didn’t find much else. There were a few notes for her novel and some ideas for short stories, but no actual writing. Not saved on her computer. And I looked around for discs, too. I can’t believe she’d go to so much trouble to hide her novel from me. It’s crazy.”

We chewed our sandwiches for a few minutes in silence. Gio swirled a French fry in a pool of ketchup and had it halfway to his mouth when the thought struck him. I think the idea was creeping more slowly into my own head, probably because I
had more reason to want to keep it out. But there it was.

Gio dropped his fry. “Wait a minute! What if there
is
no novel? No short stories, either. What if she made up her whole career?”

I held my head motionless, hoping the truth would rise to the top. “But wouldn’t they have checked her credentials before she started teaching?” Surely there was some excuse not to believe what was becoming clear.

“She was a last-minute replacement, remember? They were probably just glad to get a warm body to show up on Saturday mornings.”

“But she teaches at Harvard, too!
They
would check her credentials.”

Gio sipped his tea, looking at me sadly. “Do you
know
she teaches at Harvard?” he asked quietly.

I let my head fall into my hands.

“Marisol, I don’t think you can trust anything she’s told you. Look at the crap she pulled in class this morning. I’ll bet she thought you’d figured out her whole nest of lies already, and that was what made her extra crazy.”

I held my coffee cup up under my nose so the steam and aroma might twist up my nostrils and soothe my mind a little, so the heat of the cup might penetrate into my ice-cold fingers. I looked across the table at Gio, who could never lie to anyone the way Olivia had lied to me.

I nodded. “You’re right. She’s lied about everything. Probably including the effusive praise she gave me the first few weeks. Which I was more than happy to believe. God, I’m such an idiot!”

“You aren’t an idiot. You may not be quite the genius she portrayed you as, but you’re the best writer in the class, and she knows it. That’s probably why she liked you to begin with.”