Fires. Essays, Poems, Stories

window, remembering that life. They had laughed. They had leaned on each other and laughed until the tears had come, while everything else—the cold and where he'd go in it—was outside, for a while anyway.
    THE LIE
    It's a lie," my wife said. "How could you believe such a thing? She's jealous, that's all." She tossed her head and kept staring at me. She hadn't yet taken off her hat and coat. Her face was flushed from the accusation. "You believe me, don't you? Surely you don't believe that?"
    I shrugged. Then I said, "Why should she lie? Where would it get her? What would she have to gain by lying?" I was uncomfortable. I stood there in my slippers opening and closing my hands, feeling a little ridiculous and on display in spite of the circumstances. I'm not cut out to play the inquisitor. I wish now it had never reached my ears, that everything could have been as before. "She's supposed to be a friend," I said. "A friend to both of us."
    "She's a bitch, is what she is! You don't think a friend, however poor a friend, even a chance acquaintance, would tell a thing like that, such an outright lie, do you? You simply can't believe it." She shook her head at my folly. Then she unpinned her hat, pulled off her gloves, laid everything on the table. She removed her coat and dropped it over the back of a chair.
    "I don't know what to believe any more," I said. "I want to believe you."
    "Then do!" she said. "Believe me—that's all I'm asking. I'm telling you the truth. I wouldn't lie about something like that. There now. Say it isn't true, darling. Say you don't believe it."
    I love her. I wanted to take her in my arms, hold her, tell her I believed her. But the lie, if it was a lie, had come between us. I moved over to the window.
    "You must believe me," she said. "You know this is stupid. You know I'm telling you the truth."
    I stood at the window and looked down at the traffic moving slowly below. If I raised my eyes, I could see my wife's reflection in the window. I'm a broad-minded man, I told myself. I can work this
    through. I began to think about my wife, about our life together, about truth versus fiction, honesty opposed to falsehood, illusion and reality. I thought about that movie Blow-up we'd recently seen. I remembered the biography of Leo Tolstoy that lay on the coffee table, the things he says about truth, the splash he'd made in old Russia. Then I recalled a friend from long ago, a friend I'd had in my junior and senior years of high school. A friend who could never tell the truth, a chronic, unmitigated liar, yet a pleasant, well-meaning person and a true friend for two or three years during a difficult period in my life. I was overjoyed with my discovery of this habitual liar from out of my past, this precedent to draw upon for aid in the present crisis in our—up to now—happy marriage. This person, this spirited liar, could indeed bear out my wife's theory that there were such people in the world. I was happy again. I turned around to speak. I knew what I wanted to say: Yes, indeed, it could be true, it is true—people can and do lie, uncontrollably, perhaps unconsciously, pathologically at times, without thought to the consequences. Surely my informant was such a person. But just at that moment my wife sat down on the sofa, covered her face with her hands and said, "It's true, God forgive me. Everything she told you is true. It was a lie when I said I didn't know anything about it."
    'Is that true?' I said. I sat down in one of the chairs near the window.
    She nodded. She kept her hands over her face.
    I said, "Why did you deny it, then? We never lie to one another. Haven't we always told each other the truthr
    "I was sorry," she said. She looked at me and shook her head. "I was ashamed. You don't know how ashamed I was. I didn't want you to believe it."
    '1 think I understand," I said.
    She kicked off her shoes and leaned back on the sofa. Then she sat up and tugged her sweater over her head. She patted her hair into place. She took one of the cigarettes from the tray. I held the lighter for her and was momentarily astonished by the sight of her slim, pale fingers and her well-manicured nails. It was as if I were seeing them in a new and somehow revealing way.
    She drew on the cigarette and said, after a minute, "And how
    was your day today, sweet? Generally speaking, that is. You know what I mean." She held the cigarette between her lips and stood up for a minute to step out of her skirt.