Genuine Lies

you helped her, again.”
    “I stood by her, as a friend, as a woman. She’d already decided on an abortion. They were illegal in those days, and often dangerous.”
    Julia closed her eyes. The shudder came quickly, and from deep within. “It must have been horrible for her.”
    “It was. I found out about a clinic in France, and we went there. It was painful for her, Julia, not just physically. That choice is never easy for a woman.”
    “She was lucky to have you. If she’d been alone …” She opened her eyes again, and they were damp. Like wet gray velvet. “Whatever choice a woman makes, it’s so hard to make it alone.”
    “It was a very sterile, very quiet place. I sat in a little waiting room with white walls and glossy magazines, and all I could see was the way Gloria had thrown her arms over her eyes, weeping, as they wheeled her away. It was very quick, and after they let me sit with her in her room. She didn’t speak for a long time, hours really. Then she turned her head and looked at me.
    “‘Eve,’ she said, ‘I know it was the right thing, the only thing, just as I know that nothing I ever do will hurt as much as this.’”
    Julia brushed a tear from her cheek. “Are you sure it’s necessary to publish this?”
    “I believe it is, but I’m going to leave that decision in your hands, your heart, after you hear the rest.”
    Julia rose. She wasn’t sure where the nerves had sprung from, but they were rippling just under her skin, like an itch she couldn’t reach. “The decision shouldn’t be mine, Eve. The judgment belongs to someone who was affected by the story, not an observer.”
    “You’ve never been just an observer, Julia, not from the moment you came here. I know you tried to be, that you would have preferred it that way, but it’s impossible.”
    “Maybe I’ve lost my objectivity, and maybe I hope I’ll write a better book that way. But it isn’t my place to decide to include or delete something this intimate.”
    “Who better?” Eve murmured, then gestured to the chair. “Please, sit, let me tell you the rest.”
    She hesitated, but she wasn’t sure why. Night had fallen quickly, leaving only the scatter of tiny lights and candleglow.Eve was haloed by the light, and an owl hooted from the shadows. Julia took her seat, and waited. “Go on.”
    “Gloria went home. She picked up her life. Within a year she met Marcus and began a new one. That same year I met Victor. We didn’t have our affair at discreet hotels or dingy motels. It wasn’t a flash of passion, but a slow, steady flame that held us together. On other points, I suppose our relationship had many similarities with Michael and Gloria. He was married, and though his marriage was unhappy, we didn’t make what we had public. I knew, though it’s taken me years to accept, that we would never be a couple outside our own walls.”
    She looked around her now, while Julia remained silent. The backsplash of light from the kitchen window sprinkled over the geraniums. Moonlight slashed over the fuming water of the fountain and turned it to liquid silver. Around it all was a wall, closing her in, and others out.
    “We loved here, in this house, and only a handful of people we both knew and trusted were ever included in our secret. I won’t pretend I don’t resent it, that I don’t resent his wife, and at times resent Victor, for all that’s been stolen from me. All the lies I’ve lived with. And one lie, one thing stolen most of all.”
    It was she who rose now, to walk toward the flowers, drinking in their fragrance deeply, as if she could find sustenance there that she hadn’t found in the food on the table. This was the point, she knew. The point of it all, the point, once passed, she could never retreat from. Slowly, she walked back, but didn’t sit.
    “Gloria married Marcus one year after our trip to France. Within two months she was pregnant again, and deliriously happy. Weeks after that, I, too, was pregnant, and miserably unhappy.”
    “You?” Julia absorbed the jolt, then got to her feet to take Eve’s hand. “I’m so sorry.”
    “Don’t be.” Eve tightened the grip. “Sit down with me. Let me finish.”
    Hands still linked, they sat together. The flame of the candle was between them, tossing light and shadow over Eve’s face. Julia couldn’t be sure what she was seeing. Grief, pain, hope.
    “I was almost forty, and had long since given up on the notion of having children. The