The Liar's Wife (3 page)

He jumped up the three porch stairs—still, she thought, the master of the boyish gesture.

“Well, Jossie, if you're not a sight for sore eyes. You haven't changed a bit.”

And you're still a liar, she wanted to say, surprised at her own bitterness.

“Won't you sit down,” she said, indicating the couch to them, displeased at her own diction.

The woman sat down and patted the chintz fabric of the couch. “Johnny was as nervous as a cat that you wouldn't want to see him. I said, ‘Johnny if she don't want to see you we just start up the truck and just take off, like we never been here.' But he says to me, ‘Linnet my love,' he calls me that, I think it's the Irish way, ‘Linnet my love,' he says to me, ‘you go in first, to pave the way.' I said to him, ‘For Lord's sake, Johnny, after all this time there's bound to be no hard feelings.' ”

Hard feelings. Jocelyn thought. No hard feelings. What would be the opposite of hard feelings? Soft feelings. The truth is, Linnet my love, she wanted to say, I have no feelings at all.

She felt ashamed at her own nullity of heart. In place of sadness or regret there was simple curiosity. Johnny Shaughnessy was seventy-five. He'd been twenty-five when she'd last seen him. In her mind, he was still twenty-five, and Johnny had always been much more boy than man. And so, like some joke speeded-up film, the boy in her mind was the old man in her living room.

“It means the world to him,” Linnet said. “I can tell you that for sure.”

Johnny seemed to want to let Linnet talk. He was looking down at the carpet, as if the pattern were a code he might, with luck, break.

“Linnet,” she said. “That's a lovely name. Unusual.”

“My father was Canadian.”

She wondered what that had to do with anything. She tried to remember what a linnet looked like, but she was pretty sure it was a small bird, rather delicate. But there was nothing delicate about this woman, with her tortured hair, her oversized breasts, her Born to Be Wild T-shirt, her long red nails. The stench of cigarette smoke clung to her. Jocelyn wondered if her breasts were real. It seemed unlikely, given the smallness of the woman's frame. But what did it matter if she'd had—a phrase Jocelyn loathed—a boob job? She wouldn't be spending enough time with her for it to matter one way or another. A few minutes, half an hour perhaps. Then she'd be gone from Jocelyn's life, as quickly and easily as she'd entered it. Taking Johnny with her. Quickly and for good.

“You're probably surprised to see an old Frito-Lay's truck parked in front of your house, on your nice street. But it's our job. It's a pretty common job for senior citizens. Pretty common for retirees trying to supplement a pension. Cross-country hauling, I mean to say. Of course we're not exactly retirees. A musician never retires. For a musician, retirement and death are the same word. And the Lord knows neither of us have a pension.”

“You're still playing and singing, Johnny?” Jocelyn asked, glad to think of something to say.

“We both do, Jossie,” Johnny said. “We call ourselves Dixie and Dub.”

“On account of he's from Dublin and I'm from Tennessee.”

“Oh, yes I see,” she said, wanting to add, You were better than that when I knew you.

It was the fourteenth of July, 1962, the day she met him. She remembered it was Bastille Day.

He had come into their lives because her father had met him on the train. His usual train, the 5:38. Johnny had sat down next to him, out of breath, having only just made the all-aboard. She always imagined a conductor shouting “All aboard” and Johnny running down the track, jumping onto the train at the last minute. But she wasn't really sure if anyone shouted “All aboard” on suburban commuter trains.

Johnny had engaged her father in conversation. Had her father been reluctant, putting his face in his
New York Times
to seem discouraging? But no shield could withstand the thrusts of Johnny Shaughnessy when he was determined to make contact. Of course her father had been charmed. Perhaps it was his voice, the beautiful Irish cadences, making you feel you'd never heard English spoken properly before. Her father had been seduced. Johnny was a seducer. His seduction of her was in a way the least spectacular of the many she'd observed. He had seduced her, but it had been he who'd been abandoned. There was a category “seducer,” but none for the abandoner. That is who she had been.

Johnny had missed his station: New Rochelle. What had got into her father, that he'd invited Johnny home for supper? It was quite unlike him; he was a careful, a reserved, a predictable man. But he arrived at the door with Johnny, Johnny with his rucksack and guitar. Like the wanderer in an adventure story.

She had wondered later about her father's unusual impulse, inviting a stranger to dinner. Was it a vestigial longing for the wildness and camaraderie of the War? Lieutenant Pemberton. Stationed in France 1941–45, an orderly in a wartime hospital. He never spoke of it.

Or was it that in Johnny he saw the son he'd always wanted, lighthearted, free, so different from the careful women—wife and daughter—he'd come home to after the War?

Summer of 1962. It might have been one of the best summers in the history of the world to have been young and in love. If you were healthy, prosperous, American.

She had just graduated from Cornell, B.S. in animal physiology. She had wanted to be an entomologist, wanting to work in a laboratory, but not like her father: he was involved in cancer research, and she didn't
want to work at something where so much was at stake. She preferred the nineteenth-century model of scientist, naturalists they were called, whose métier was slow observation and precise recording. She took the job in the lab of Dr. Probst, her father's friend, just to give herself time to figure out her next move. “Rest, you need your rest, after the ordeal of senior year and all those exams,” her mother said, having no real idea of what Jocelyn's college life had been. She had worked hard, but certainly not to the point of exhaustion, like many of her friends. She never left things to the last minute, and she wasn't given much to late nights. She dated, but the men she met didn't interest her enough to become seriously involved. She was famous for refusing a fourth date, although if they were handsome she enjoyed the light kissing and fumblings in the backs of cars, the incomplete expressions of desire in the dormitory “parietal hours.” But no one interested her enough to give up her virginity, which was still, in 1962, something of a big deal for someone like her.

She enjoyed working in the lab; everyone was young and enthusiastic. Often they went out for drinks after work. She couldn't remember what they talked about. Nothing very serious. Five years later, it would have been impossible not to talk about politics. But in June 1962 it was certainly possible. It was, in fact, the norm. John Kennedy was in the White House. Everything would be all right.

Her work was interesting but not taxing; her colleagues were pleasant, but she knew that none of them would be lifelong friends. What pleased her most was walking the streets of New York, and having a paycheck. And it was pleasant to meet her father for a drink at Grand Central as they got on the commuter train together, workers on their way home for a good meal. She hadn't been on the train with her father the day he had met Johnny. If she had, things would have been very different. She would have been sitting next to her father. There would have been no free seat beside him for Johnny to fall into, at the last moment, in the nick of time. Her life would have been different. Although she wasn't sure how very different it would be. If her marriage to Johnny had changed her very much. She was not sure it had changed her at all.

She thought it was important to set the right tone. She didn't want to sound unfriendly. But how did she want to sound? She didn't want to spend much time with him, but to turn him away would be to suggest something that was not true: that what had happened had been powerful enough to cause her to recoil. He had once been part of her life. No, she told herself, tell the truth: he had once been her whole life. Was it possible that he was nothing to her; was it possible that memory, which was meant to be so powerful a force, growing stronger in its pull with every year … was nothing to her? She had to understand that, in fact, she didn't remember him very well.

It had been nearly fifty years ago. Their time together had been only seventeen months.

Three months in New York City and New Canaan, Connecticut. July, August, September 1962. And fourteen months in Dublin, October 1962 to December 1963. What fraction of her life was that? Less than one seventieth. Still, she had loved him. They had been married. She ought to be feeling more than this.

When he smiled, she saw that, like Linnet, he had a very bad set of dentures. For the first time, she felt sadness. She remembered she had loved his mouth; the slight upper lip, the very full lower, which expressed his moods much more clearly than his eyes: sad or delighted, she could tell in a moment by his mouth. When he was troubled, he jutted his lip out, and tucked his upper lip behind it. And when he was happy, the lip seemed to grow even fuller, as if his joy in whatever was pleasing him had spilled over and filled that lovely lower lip.

But now his mouth was just the mouth of an old man with a bad set of dentures. She remembered he had always complained about his teeth, envied hers. American dentistry, she'd said, apologizing for her lack of dental troubles. Our greatest achievement. Sure, we gave the world the atom bomb, but we're second to none in orthodontia. But then she'd come to understand, he brushed his teeth only rarely. She'd worried about this, urged regular toothbrushing on him. With horror, she remembered herself testing his toothbrush for wetness in the morning. Well, he'd paid for it now.

She didn't want to be thinking this way, thinking about toothbrushes and dentures when she ought to be feeling something great.
But she couldn't get thoughts of teeth out of her mind. She remembered a conversation she'd once tried to have with her dental hygienist, whom she very much liked. She'd said, “So much comes down to dentistry. I mean, if you have good teeth, you are sexually viable, young, employable, socially acceptable, and if not, well, not. What we're doing, you and I, Suzanne, is in some way unnatural. At my age you're supposed to be dead or wearing dentures.”

The hygienist, who was very young, looked at her strangely and began blinking hard. “But you don't want to die and you don't want to have dentures. So it's all good, right?”

Jocelyn had regretted the conversation, because she liked the girl, and she thought she had made her uncomfortable, feared that perhaps Suzanne would now find Jocelyn strange and they would lose the easy bond she had enjoyed. And so she said, “Right, Suzanne. All good.”

She felt she'd been standing silently, looking at Johnny for much too long. Finally she thought of something it would be all right to say. If she had been a religious woman, she would have offered up a prayer of thanks. But she was not a religious woman, so she put it down to luck.

“What brings you to this part of the world?” she said, in a tone that she believed was light but not dismissive.

“Well that's a story in itself, Jossie, and like all my stories, as I'm sure you've not forgotten, not a short one.”

She turned on the living room light. She would have to offer them something to drink.

“A beer would just hit the spot,” he said, settling back into the couch.

She put her hand to her throat, feeling his request as an accusation.

“I'm afraid I don't have beer,” she said. “We're not beer drinkers, my husband and I. Wine, though, we've got lots of wine. Or scotch, vodka, or bourbon, any of those. Only we just don't have beer. My husband has to worry about his weight. Or not really, he's not heavy, but, you know how men of a certain age put weight on in the gut, and that's a danger, increases the risk of heart disease.”

She felt her words had a slightly hysterical edge, and she sat in what had been her mother's chair to calm herself.

“What are you having, then? Let's just be easy. But I'd say you don't have to worry about weight, you're as slim as a girl.”

She knew that wasn't true. She'd put weight on in the thighs, in the midriff, in the upper arms, but she could dress to conceal it. She wondered what he thought of her, in one of her fifty identical Eileen Fisher outfits, neutral colors, linen or cotton, loose pants, flowing tops. There was nothing loose or flowing about Linnet and Johnny in their jeans and T-shirts. She admired them for it; she was sick of those ads for Viagra showing older couples in matching white outfits, heading, hand in hand, for twin bathtubs with a beautiful view of the sea.

“Neither of us seems to gain an ounce,” Linnet said. “It's all that good living, I guess.”

“We're very happy to drink whatever you're drinking, Jossie,” Johnny said. “Whatever's easy.”