Lying (15 page)

Some neurologists say that the memories are meaningless and not even accurate, random spurts from a hyperactive brain; others say the scenes that rush up are loaded with deep clues as to who and what we are.

I myself don’t know what to think. All I do know is that after that conversation with Christopher the nature of my auras changed forever. They were almost all, after that, involuntary recalls, and thus I became a memoirist, what else could I be? But here’s the rub. Later on that night, still writing in a frenzy, preparing my portfolio for my visit with Christopher, I had a memory of falling out of a cherry tree and cracking open my head, and I wrote a short memoir about that.

“It never happened,” my mother said when I asked her the next day on the phone. “You never fell out of a cherry tree.”

“I remember that I did,” I said.

“You didn’t,” she said. “We’ve never even owned a cherry tree.”

“Yes we did,” I said. “I remember we once had a cherry
tree and because it got something called Dutch worm disease you had the gardener take it down.”

“None of my trees,” my mother said, “have ever had something called Dutch worm disease.”

She was so full of denial, she’s not to be trusted. Then again, neither am I. And anyway, just because something has the feel of truth doesn’t mean it fits the facts. Sometimes, I don’t even know why the facts should matter. I often disregard them, and even when I mean to get them right, I don’t. I can’t. Still, I like to write about me. Me! That’s why I’m not a novelist.

That night, I wrote late. The moon came out complete, the lights in all the dorms went off, and my words shimmered. When he read my words, he would want to make love to me forever. I was a sorcerer, my spell a mix of clattering consonants, my language a series of links that could close any chasm. Complete.

•  •  •

Hours later, I turned out my light. The soldier was snoring away in the top bunk. Her hand dropped over the side of the bed, and before I climbed in beneath her, I paused to look. I wondered whether she’d ever done combat hand to hand, and, if so, what it would be like to palm the life right out of a person.

I pulled the covers up to my chin. Then a lonely feeling, lonely and spooky, with that disembodied hand hanging down. In the coming of dawn the room looked dusty, and my sleepless eyes stung.

I closed my left eye. Because of my corpus callostomy, whenever I close my left eye, I am unable to read or understand language. Language lives in the right side of the brain, for most people anyway. The left side of the brain knows space and shapes, but not words. If the two hemispheres in the brain are separated, like mine have been, any words you take in with your right eye only get stuck in the left side, and the left side is the silent side. Losing words is a common side effect of epilepsy surgery, and it’s no big deal because we usually look at the world bifocally.

But I had a game I sometimes played with myself, a game that spooked me, which made me want to play it all the more. With my left eye closed I would stare at a wordless world, and the feeling was weird and clotted beyond what you could believe. Now, I saw my roommate’s dangling hand, dangling all the more because I knew it was a hand, but I could not have named it for a trillion dollars. Silence snowed down.

I might be reading a book, and close my left eye, and see before me not words but a scrabble of black ants in a meaningless march. Or I would hold an apple in my right hand, a fine fruit to hold, a perfect palm object, utterly graspable, cool, slick and sensuous. With both eyes open I knew I held an apple, but with my left eye closed, again, I could not name the apple, or eat the apple, and so there was no apple.

And so there was no Lauren.

And so there was no Christopher.

And so there is no you.

•  •  •

I was only seventeen, and this was a heavy philosophical load to cart around. Sometimes I imagined the chasm Dr. Neu had cut into my brain, my severed hemispheres floating in fluid, ghostly, gray, and crying for their twin. Perhaps this is why I longed for Christopher, why, as I grew older, my longings intensified, spiraled up. What else might explain it? That my mother didn’t love me well enough? A lot of people’s mothers don’t love them well enough, and not a lot of people develop Munchausen’s, into which I still sometimes relapse when the going gets tough; not a lot of people develop bad depressions, or take psychiatric medications, or have crack-ups. I’ve had several crack-ups, which I’m omitting for the sake of this story’s structure. I have been driven crazy, I think, by the existential truth made manifest in my flesh. Sartre says we must learn to live in space, and the fact of our groundlessness so terrifies us we flee into brittle sanity. I cannot flee, because the space, literally, is engraved in my skull. I cannot cross over. Lauren A stands on one hemisphere, Lauren B on the other hemisphere, and they reach across, trying to touch; air.

•  •  •

The day before my weekend with Christopher in Brattleboro, I had an appointment with Dr. Neu. True to his word, he continued to follow me, although I think he’d lost some interest in me. Or maybe, after Christopher, I had lost interest in him. Our sessions were always the same. He always had the same beard, and he was short. He was cute, actually, a cute little Dutch doctor.

We did tests. I would close my left eye and he would flash a picture to my right visual field. Never could I name what I saw.

Occasionally, my symptoms were spectacular. Once Dr. Neu put in front of me a dead fish and a chocolate Kiss. “Pick up the dead fish,” he said, and when I went to do it with my right hand, my left hand got angry or grossed out and kept trying to force my right hand toward the Kiss. “That’s called two-handed antagonism,” Dr. Neu said. “Sometimes we see that in corpus callostomy patients.”

This session, I told Dr. Neu about my involuntary recalls.

“Given the prevalence of your auras, and their intensity, I suspect you are actually having very mild and frequent seizures, so mild you aren’t even aware of them. That’s okay,” he said. “The surgery has ninety percent eliminated the dramatic drop seizures, and you can take a low dose of Dilantin to clean up the auras.” He started to write a prescription.

“No,” I said.

“No?”

“I like my auras,” I said. “They give me things.”

•  •  •

We fucked the whole time. I brought him my new stories, all ten of them. He read one, we fucked, he read another, we fucked again, until we’d fucked ten times over the course of the weekend. It was hard, therefore, not to make the Pavlovian association between words and love. With both eyes
open, I saw language as a bridge across the chasm; we could cross. We did.

Every three weeks we met in motels in Vermont. Our encounters were seedy, our sex on synthetic carpets, polyester bedspreads, a Gideons Bible in the nightstand drawer. Highway motels, the sounds of cars like ripping silk, he held me. Snow started. Clumps of wet snow fell to the ground, branches bowing on all the trees. Darkness came earlier then, the sad smoky dusks of December.

I showed him a memory story I’d written. Eight years old, with my parents in Florida, in Delray Beach, where malls were bright with sunshine and cheap satin. One night, we went to an alligator fight, and a man with a red cape tranced the alligator by turning her on her back and stroking the smooth belly. I wrote a story about this, about the sweetness of submission and my own arousal seeing it. He read the pages, and then put them down.

“This is fantastic, Lauren Jean,” he said. He had a strange, sweaty look to him. His eyes bugged out.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

“Nothing’s wrong,” he said. He pulled me to him and turned me on my belly and I thought,
Oh God, he wants to do it like a dog
, my least favorite position. Like a dog, with my breasts drooping down and my butt in the air, I’d let him. He moved over me, but then I felt him pushing into my rear.

“No,” I said sharply. I twisted away but he held me tight.

“Please, Lauren Jean,” he said.

“No, get away.”

“I promise,” he said, “I won’t hurt you. You tell me if
you want to stop,” and then he was pushing at my butt again; I felt a widening, he was inside.

He pushed farther, there was a slight searing, a deep ache.

“Stop,” I said. “Please.”

He reached around front and began fingering me, and my body started to move even while my mind was stilled, frozen, disgusted, delighted, my body back and forth, and he said, “Ahh, that’s right, sweet girl, that’s good.”

This was so twisted, so wrong, so florid, I couldn’t refuse. Dr. Neu had split my brain and now he, for sure, this Christopher was splitting my torso, ripping me into two wet shreds, but while I felt split I also felt full, held, bound by a touch irrevocable. He pushed deeper in. A sharpness, a dark red flame of pain running up my flank. “Stop!” I cried.

He stopped, and his hand stopped too. I felt bereft, gave a little cry.

“Well, which one?” he said, his voice hoarse, almost ugly. “Which do you want, Lauren Jean? Stop or start?”

Now that his hand was gone, I felt the gap. I said nothing. The only pain was absence.

“Say it,” he said. “Say, ‘Oh please.’ Say, ‘Do it.’ ”

Asking me for words, language leading into life, velocity mine, “Do it,” I said, and I bit down hard on my wretched lip; blood.

He began moving again, and his hand again, mythical we were, a single roar of sound, alive, while outside cars ripped up the roadway.

•  •  •

Something changed after that. I missed him more. Having known the completeness of connection, how horrid and bright we were, I wanted nothing less. Back in Boston, the next day, I called him at the university where he taught.

“He’s not in right now,” the department secretary said, so I did what I’d never dared to do before. I called him at home.

He sounded surprised to hear from me. “I just wanted to say hello,” I said.

“Hello,” he said, a little stiffly.

“I’m sorry to call you at home,” I said. “But I know your wife’s at work, and the girls in school and …”

Silence on the other end of the line. I needed to get him back.

“And, I wanted to tell you that I’ve won—”

“My wife,” he interrupted, “does not always work the same hours. And my girls,” he said, “could have been home sick today.”

I said nothing.

“But,” he said, his voice softening, his interest turning toward me, “you’ve won what, Lauren Jean?”

“A contest,” I whispered, “for fiction.”

•  •  •

I called him the next day too, and then the day after that. I had the right, given what we’d done. I had the need, because his absences were harder to bear.

Something happened to me after the butt sex. I started, sometimes, to not like what I’d written, to look at the words
and think they were clunky. I read Colette, whose sentences were flawless, and it was just too tempting, so I slipped some of her sentences in between my own, and then I did it again, and again, not only sentences but passages, paragraphs (pages, maybe? the pages in this book, maybe? I won’t say), so my work, at times, was a criminal mixture; I couldn’t stop stealing the words. “Plagiarist, plagiarist,” I whispered to myself, and it would not be too much to say I hated myself, but I couldn’t stop. I did it for Christopher, so I could send him perfect work, and when I did, he would send it back to me with exclamation points and check marks on places that were not mine, and also on places that were. I felt terrible, fraudulent, but I also believed I needed to do whatever I needed to do to keep him impressed.

And when I wasn’t writing for him, I called him. If he wasn’t in school, I called him at home. “You can’t do this,” he said one day over the phone, “you can’t jeopardize me like this,” he said, and I said I was sorry and promised him I would stop calling him at home. Unfortunately, however, the more he told me not to, the more I needed to. He had a wife, two girls, a life kept separate from me. I called then, not for him, but to hear the sound of his wife’s voice, a husky hello, I not saying a word. “Hello? Hello? Who’s there?” and I hanging on until she clicked off, and I was left in static, random electrical pulses—crash and hiss.

One night, I woke up late and called. Three
A.M
. The phone rang and rang in their dark, distant house. A little girl picked up. “I know who you are,” she said.

“Who?” I said. I couldn’t believe I had answered her. I should have hung right up.

“My father’s slut,” she said, and then gently, just gently, replaced the receiver, and we both went back to sleep.

•  •  •

The next time I met him in Vermont he looked weary, the skin blue and crepey around his eyes. “This has gone too far,” he said, sitting on the edge of the motel bed. “You are a talented girl, Lauren Jean, quite possibly a genius, but this has gone too far.”

I looked down at the floor. I had so many thoughts and feelings going through me, primarily around the genius issue. Would he think I was a genius if I hadn’t stolen sentences? Yes, he would; long before I’d ever plagiarized, he told me I had talent; I kept saying this to myself, but inside me there was deep shame, a terrible feeling of fraudulence.

“Look,” I said, my voice coming out as a croak. “Look.”

“What, Lauren Jean?” he said. “Look at what?”

Tears came to my eyes. “I need to see you more,” I said.

“You knew,” he said, “you knew full well I am married. And it’s going to stay that way.”

Then we fucked, not in the butt, thank God, we fucked the normal way and afterward he wouldn’t even spend two seconds lying around. “I have to go,” he said.

“I came all the way up here for a two-hour visit? I thought we were spending the weekend. We usually spend the weekend.”

“Not this weekend,” he said. He was up, throwing on his clothes, tossing my clothes toward me. “My daughter,” he said, and then he mumbled something about a play in school, I pictured it. A kid in costume, looking out to find the faces that belong to her, but just beams of light, floating auras, color that can’t be touched.

•  •  •

I wish I could report the whole sorry affair ended there, but no. He did write me less and less, his letters short, oftentimes on note cards, once or twice a coffee stain spilled across the back. But he always signed, “Love, Christopher,” and he often mentioned maybe meeting up again.