Two Lies and a Truth
“I served coffee to Matt Damon yesterday,” she says. “He had a nonfat, decaf, no-whip white chocolate mocha.”
“And?” I ask.
“I had my tattoo removed with lasers.”
“And?”
“My mom won two thousand dollars in the lottery.”
It’s our ritual. Whenever we meet, we each offer three anecdotes, two of which are lies, one of which is true. Then we guess which one is the truth. We learned the game at a party back in college.
“Let me think,” I say, taking a sip of wine.
Claire works part-time at a Starbucks in Harvard Square; it’s plausible that Matt Damon could have shown up there. She also has a tattoo of a calla lily on her ass, which she got our freshman year but whose green stem, she told me recently, was turning brown. And her mom is an avid lottery player. This is what makes her so good at the game. She knows how to lie.
“Your mom won the lottery,” I say.
“Nope. Bye-bye, calla lily. Want to see?” She shifts on the barstool as if she’s about to pull down her jeans.
“No, no—I trust you.”
“Your turn,” she says.
“Okay. I ate goat stomach at a Taiwanese restaurant.”
She grins.
“I got a five-hundred-dollar raise.”
“Go on.”
“The guy from the liquor store near Fenway asked me out.”
She thinks a moment, then says, “Congrats on your raise.”
She is always certain when she makes her guesses. In fact, with Claire it never is a guess; she just knows. In the half decade we’ve been playing the game, she’s never been wrong.
It’s happy hour, and the bar is crowded. Before we can finish our first drinks, we’ve blown off four men, three interested in her, one in me.
“What’s up with that?” I ask. “Do I look married or what?”
“You do have a look,” she says thoughtfully, gazing at me over the top of her glass. “A back off, I’m taken sort of look.”
“Damn.”
“Yeah, I’m sure you miss getting hit on by losers. Poor baby.”
“They’re not all losers. You don’t give anyone a chance.”
“I don’t see anyone worth giving a chance.” Claire waves her empty glass at the bartender and looks around. “You’re so lucky to have Bruce,” she says. “I think you found the last eligible man in greater Boston.”
“He’s always offering to set you up.”
“It’s too forced.”
“Bruce and I met on a blind date, remember?”
The bartender replenishes our drinks, and I watch Claire poke at the lime in her glass. It’s a familiar movement, but I can’t gauge her expression. Lately when I think about Claire, about the years since graduation, what comes to mind is the makeshift chart my mother created to track my growth when I was young. The scratches in the wall inched up and up and up until they stopped at five feet five. I grew another two inches after that, but we never marked it.
These days, I imagine a similar chart, one on which I can see patterns of recent growth: first job, second job, third; breaking up with one boyfriend, meeting the next, deciding to move in with another; watching friends marry, leave the country, get pregnant. In all of this, I no longer know where to place my friendship with Claire. We’d been inseparable as roommates, when school was the social center of our lives—the late nights, the feasts and pranks, the pre-date rituals and the mornings after—it all dissolved into more weighty responsibilities: bills, deadlines, taxes. I think I expected our relationship to deepen as we got older. Yet somehow we’ve grown neither closer nor apart over the years. Our growth is stunted, the marks on the wall untouched.
“Hey,” I say, touching her arm. “Why don’t we have a party? At my place, with all the single guys we know.”
She brightens. “We can dress it up to look like Rick’s bar in Casablanca.”
I hold up my glass. “To the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
“At this point,” she says, “we’re more in the middle.”
We clink glasses.
* * *
I don’t remember exactly when I began to notice things or what exactly I noticed. It was more like a feeling, until I started to put the moments together.
First there was the party. She came over early with a beaded lamp and a fern. She covered every surface with tablecloth and loaded black-and-white film in my camera. Yet, once people started to arrive, she retreated to the kitchen where she blended drinks and refilled snack bowls. She didn’t talk to any of the single men we invited unless they wandered into the kitchen for drinks or food. Toward the end of the evening, I saw her standing at the sink rinsing the blender. She was talking to Bruce, and at one point, she leaned against him and rested her head on his shoulder.
When I asked Bruce about it, he said he didn’t remember. Claire told me later she hadn’t met anyone she found attractive or interesting.
Then there was a dinner with friends. We gathered around a table in the front of the restaurant, which opened up onto Newbury Street, letting in the midsummer air and the voices of passersby. Arriving late, Claire pulled up a chair, squeezing between Bruce and me, forcing everyone else to scoot over. She drew nasty looks from other tables as chair legs scraped against the hardwood floors and someone’s martini crashed to the floor in a spray of gin, glass, and olives. She zoomed in on Bruce, and I faded into the background, fuzzy and inconsequential.
Given my suspicions, it seems an odd time to be packing up to move in with Bruce—and odder still that Claire is in my living room helping. But what can I possibly say? I’ve begun to think that nervousness about living with Bruce has triggered some sort of paranoid dementia. And when Claire arrived earlier, the familiar sight of her with a pizza in one hand and a six-pack in the other, sent my thoughts back to better times, and I welcomed her in.
We’re nearly finished. Claire is pulling the last books from the bookcase and stacking them in boxes. She finds a photo album on the top shelf and sits down to leaf through it. I stand over her shoulder as she turns the pages, watching the faces of my friends flip past. I packed my other albums earlier that week, and now I find myself comparing them with the recent one Claire is holding. Formerly pictured in large chaotic groups—all limbs, plastic beer cups, drunken smiling faces—we’re now alone or paired off, at wedding parties instead of fraternity parties.
Claire holds up the album, open to a page of baby shower photos. In one, my friend Gina sits in a recliner, looking weary and bloated.
“This will be you in a few more years.”
“Want to bet?” I open another beer. “What will you be then?”
She tosses the album into a box. “Who knows? The manager at Starbucks?”
“No—you’ll have sold a script by then. You’ll move to L.A. and give yourself the leading role.”
“I think that tampon commercial I did is the closest I’ll ever get to big-screen fame.”
“Hey, you were great in that,” I say. “I switched brands because of you.”
“Such loyalty,” she says.
Claire stands and returns to the bookshelf. We finish packing. The only items left are necessities in the bathroom, plus my bedding and her sleeping bag.
“I’m going to take a shower,” she says, shaking out her arms as if to cast off unwanted dust. “When was the last time you cleaned this place?”
“Sorry. There’s a towel on the back of the door.”
She shuts the door behind her, then comes out again. “Forgot my beer.” She picks up her bottle.
As Claire turns and trots back to the bathroom, the short, thin towel flutters, flashing the brown stem of her calla lily tattoo.
* * *
“I gave whole milk to everyone who ordered nonfat coffees today,” she begins.
“And?”
“I found a bullet in the street in Central Square.”
“And?”
“I joined an escort service.”
Normally I would laugh, but I’m not in the mood. Instead, I watch her warily. For weeks I have avoided her, citing work or illness when she called to get together. Yet, at the same time, I miss her. Since that day in my apartment, I’ve tried to tell myself that perhaps her laser removal hadn’t worked, that she hadn’t actually lied. I’ve tried to change my own mind so I can go on believing her.
I guess the bullet, and she tells me it’s the milk.
“Your turn.”
I hesitate, then say, “I broke up with Bruce.”
Her glass pauses just below her lips, then finishes its journey. She sets it on the table and nods, ready for the next one.
“One of our staff writers got fired for plagiarism.”
“And?”
“I’m pregnant.”
“Are you trying to make this easy for me?” she says, forcing a laugh.
I don’t say anything. She looks at me for a long moment, then throws up her hands. “It’s got to be the plagiarism,” she says.
I shake my head.
“What is it then?”
“Bruce and I broke up.”
We’re sitting in a restaurant, and she jumps up and kneels next to my chair. “What happened?”
“I’m staying at my sister’s tonight. I’m going to move out as soon as I can find a studio near work.”
“But why?”
“He’s cheating on me.”
She straightens. “How do you know that?”
“I just know.”
“Do you know who?”
I shake my head.
She moves back to her own seat, facing me. “But how can you be sure?”
“Look, he’s not committed, I know that much. And the more I think about it, we’re just not a very good match.”
“I don’t get it,” she says. “This is coming out of nowhere.”
“It wasn’t meant to be, that’s all.”
She pulls a chunk of bread from the basket on the table. She shreds it with her fingers but doesn’t eat.
At home later, I wait by the telephone. The phone rings, as I feared it would, and I let the machine pick it up. “Bruce, it’s Claire. I just heard. I want you to know that you can call me, anytime. I’m your friend, too. There’s no reason for us not to see each other.” She leaves her number and hangs up.
I replay the message six times. I hear Bruce’s keys in the door and press delete.
A couple weeks later, I pack up again. Alone this time, I finish quickly. The photo albums never left their boxes.
* * *
“You go first,” she says.
“How come? You always go first.”
“Change is good—isn’t it?”
“Okay.” I take a moment to think, watching Claire pick through the bowl of nuts on the table. It’s early autumn, and her cheeks are flushed from the chill in the air. Her hair, newly dyed a fiery red, falls across her forehead. She is more unrecognizable to me than ever.
I begin. “I have an online stalker.”
“And?”
“My editor ran away with the UPS man.”
“And?”
“I was nominated for a Pulitzer.”
“The UPS man,” she says.
“You can’t guess the Pulitzer, just to humor me?” I say.
She only looks at me.
“All right, it’s the UPS man,” I say. “Your turn.”
“I have a new gynecologist named Dr. Finger.”
I can’t help but laugh. “And?”
“I bought a joint from the homeless guy on Harvard Avenue.”
“And?”
She hesitates, then continues. “I have a date with Bruce this weekend.”
It is the only time I haven’t had to guess. She knows I know the answer, and she leans across the table. “We’ve been seeing each other for a couple of weeks,” she says. “I thought we should ask you first, but it just sort of happened. It surprised us both.”
* * *
I arrive early and shake the snow from my coat before folding it over the next barstool. I order a glass of wine and turn around, leaning against the bar.
I scrutinize everyone who enters, meeting friends, coworkers, dates. I try to guess their relationships based on how they act together. The women at the table in the corner, I imagine, are colleagues. They greeted each other warmly but without affection. Now, as they talk, I notice that their gazes wander across the room more often than across the table.
Another pair of women are sisters, I decide. They laugh a lot, and while they look nothing alike, their gestures are similar. At one point they raise their voices, bickering. I see a couple I believe to be on an early date, each feigning interest in what the other is saying while surreptitiously taking in each other’s hair, eyes, hands.
A man sits alone at the other end of the bar, and I wonder whether he is studying people the way I am. I wonder what he might think when Claire arrives—would he take us for sisters, or distant colleagues? Or perhaps it’s impossible to tell.
She and Bruce have been together for five months. I don’t think she suspects that I’m sleeping with him again. He seems to find me more desirable now that he’s with Claire, but I’ve no illusions about getting back together with him. By now, I’ve stopped believing in fantasies, in loyalty, in happily ever after. What I believe now changes and morphs, the truth fluid and malleable, ebbing and flowing the way friendships bend and stretch but rarely break.
I see Claire walk in the door and glance around the room. I hold up my hand and wave. She notices me and smiles.
She sits next to me at the bar and orders what I’m having. We’re still playing our game. I wait for her to begin.
– Midge Raymond's short-story collection, Forgetting English (Eastern Washington University Press, 2009), received the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction. Her work has appeared in TriQuarterly, American Literary Review, Ontario Review, Bellevue Literary Review, the Los Angeles Times, and other publications. Her current projects are supported by an Artist Trust/Washington State Arts Commission Fellowship. Visit her online at www.MidgeRaymond.com.
