Genuine Lies

door. He let in a young boy.”
    Eve paused to drink. When she spoke again, her voice was cold and flat. “He couldn’t have been more than sixteen, seventeen. I remember swearing at Tony, threatening, even pleading while he undressed that child. While he touched him with those wickedly clever hands. I discovered that even after nearly four years of being married to a man like Tony, I was still innocent in some things, still capable of being appalled. Because I couldn’t stand to watch what they were doing to each other, I closed my eyes. Then Tony brought the boy to me and told him to do what he wanted, while he watched. I realized that the boy was far less innocent than I. He used me in every possible way a woman can be used. While the boy was still in me, Tony knelt behind him, and …” Her hand wasn’t steady as she lifted her cigarette, but her voice was curt. “And we had a three-way fuck. It went on for hours, with them endlessly switching positions. I stopped swearing, pleading, crying, and started planning. After the boy left and Tony let me go, I waited until he fell asleep. I went downstairs and got the biggest carving knife I could find. When Tony woke up, I was holding his cock in one hand, the knife in the other. I told him if he ever touched me again, I would castrate him, that we were going to get a quick, quiet divorce and that he was going to agree to give me the house all its contents as well as the Rolls, the Jag, and the little hideaway we’d bought in the mountains. If he didn’t agree, I was going to whack him off right then and there like he’d never been whacked off before.” Remembering the way he’d looked, the way he’d babbled made her smile. Until she glanced over at Julia.
    “There’s no need for tears,” she said quietly as they streamed down Julia’s cheeks. “I got my payment.”
    “There is no payment for that.” Her voice was husky with a rage she could only imagine. Her eyes shone with it. “There couldn’t be.”
    “Maybe not. But seeing it in print, at least there’ll be revenge. I’ve waited for it long enough.”
    “Why?” Julia brushed tears away with the back of her hand. “Why did you wait?”
    “The truth?” Eve sighed and finished off her drink. Herhead was beginning to throb, and she bitterly resented it. “Shame. I was ashamed that I had been used that way, humiliated that way.”
    “You’d been used. You had nothing to be ashamed of.”
    The long black lashes fluttered down. It was the first time she had spoken of that night—not the first time she’d relived it, but the only time she hadn’t relived it alone. It hurt still; she hadn’t known it could. Nor had she known how cooling, how healing unconditional compassion could be.
    “Julia.” The lashes lifted again, and beneath them her eyes were dry. “Do you really believe there’s no shame in being used?”
    Faced with that, Julia could only shake her head. She, too, had been used. Not so hideously, not so horribly, but she understood that shame could nip at the heels like a dog for years. And years. “I don’t know how you stopped yourself from using the knife, or using the story.”
    “Survival,” Eve said simply. “At that point of my life I didn’t want the story to come out any more than Tony did. Then there was Travers. I went to see her a few weeks after the divorce, after I’d discovered several reels of film Tony had hidden. Not only of him and me in various sexual stunts, but of him and other men, of him and two very young girls. It made me realize that my entire marriage had been a sickness. I think I went to her to prove to myself that someone else had been fooled, taken in, seduced. She was living alone in a little apartment downtown. The money Tony was ordered to pay her every month barely covered the rent after her other expenses. Those other expenses being the institutional care for her son.”
    “Her son?”
    “The child Tony insisted that the world believe was dead. His name is Tommy. He’s seriously retarded, an imperfection Tony refused to accept. He prefers to consider the child dead.”
    “All these years?” A new kind of rage worked in Julia now, had her pushing up out of the chair, striding to one of the windows where the air might be cleaner. “He turned his back on his son, kept it turned all these years?”
    “He isn’t the first or last to do that, is he?”
    Julia turned back. She recognized the sympathy, the understanding, and