Lies & Ugliness Read online

  The weird part is, this whole time, he’s never figured Evan for a dynamo of passion. And ever since catching him noshing strips of paper, Micah’s wondered if Evan might not actually prefer paper women, if maybe to him the act of eating a centerfold would be better than the idea of having sex with the actual model.

  Turns out Evan must know his business behind a closed bedroom door after all. Either that, or Lydia’s just uncommonly good at faking it, but does it make sense that she’d fake it so enthusiastically every night? Not to Micah it doesn’t. Because if she’s not into it to the degree that she sounds like, surely not even Lydia would want to give a man that much encouragement. The kind of encouragement that, if they were in an apartment building instead, with thin walls, concerned neighbors would be calling the police.

  Most nights it sounds like she’s dying in there for a minute or two before dissolving into her strange, satisfied little whimpers.

  More now than ever before, he’s glad he has at least a few recollections of his real mother, enough to realize that her memory and Lydia are nothing alike. He’s got that little bit of distance left intact, and maybe this, finally, is the reason Lydia has always insisted upon things staying that way, that even though she’s been just like a mom for the last decade, she still wanted to hang onto the privilege of turning into a wildwoman without him totally freaking over it.

  Which is only validated by Charisse when he tells her about it one night, to get her perspective on the situation.

  “Good for Lydia,” is all she says, like she doesn’t see anything one bit weird about it.

  “So you don’t think it’s perverted?” he has to know.

  “That they’re not afraid of having a good time? What’s perverted about that?”

  “Well,” Micah says, only tossing this out for consideration, not that he’s made any determinations on it yet, “their age, for one thing.”

  “Let me tell you a secret,” she says, under the stars and with the taste of berry wine on her lips. “I wish my mother still remembered how to cut loose and enjoy herself that much. She’d be a lot more fun to live with, I think. Mostly she just seems to look at my sisters and me like we stole it away from her.”

  And it’s comments like this that make him realize one thing above all: He will never come close to understanding the way women think. Even at the best of times, they seem to him as alien as anything that came out of that nest he nuked.

  “Where does she think you stashed it?” he asks.

  Charisse stares at the sky with her arms around her knees, like she has to really think about this one. “I guess we’re supposed to have kept it for ourselves. Just sucked it out of her and held onto it. Like it was our birthright or something.”

  More bug imagery — he can’t help it. Maybe it’s the sticky almost-summer air and the expectation of what it’ll soon be bringing. He pictures Charisse and her four sisters, most known only through photographs, as mosquitoes surrounding their mother and bleeding her of any ability to get it on with abandon. No matter which way she turns, she can’t escape the sharp hollow probes they jam into her for another extraction of joie de vivre. Her exhausted cry of heartbreak and defeat: How am I supposed to live like this, love like this, you ungrateful little whores? A word he can’t even imagine the woman saying … which may be part of the problem.

  “So, all that pent-up energy, it’s, like, inside you now,” Micah says, clarifying, with so much hope it could power a city.

  “Don’t let it give you ideas. That’s not what I was driving at.”

  Again. Shot down in flames so many times he could qualify for frequent flyer miles. His craving, his absolute need, to be inside her churns away like a turbine.

  “You’re beautiful,” she tells him then, cheerfully, as if that’s supposed to be enough to quench every urgent yearning.

  Maybe it’s even good for Lydia, he decides eventually — that much attention, that much desire, that much satisfaction.

  These noisy nocturnal bouts between her and Evan have been going on for three or so weeks by the time Micah concludes that it’s not just his imagination: She really is losing weight. And not just those extra pounds she put on starting the year after his dad left them. At first that’s all it was, as if she were flipping through the pages of the last few calendars in reverse, restoring herself into the person that he remembers first taking him in. But soon it goes beyond this, and he’s never known her to be so thin, Lydia throwing an ever-narrower shadow, until she’s as gangly as any of Charisse’s friends that he’s hardly ever seen eat more than two bites. Except Lydia still has that soft little pad of jowl beneath her chin.

  “Are you feeling okay?” he asks her one day. Has to. It’s what sons do, even if he’s no one’s son anymore. What, he’s supposed to ignore it when she seems to have a bit of trouble walking?

  “Never better!” she says, very chirpy about it.

  She tries to reassure him with that same confident smile she must use whenever house-hunters say we’ll take it, where do we sign. Except he finds it impossible to believe her. Secrets between them, at last. Secrets and lies. It’s what mothers do, even if they didn’t give birth: lie so the kids won’t worry. Where did they ever get the idea this worked, anyway?

  Until now, he and Lydia have always been so open, because they can afford it, not one single chromosome in common. What could finally be so awful that she won’t tell him? It’s Evan-related, obviously. He’s brought home some appalling disease, the way musicians are prone to doing. Or maybe she’s gone into the club one night to listen to him play and seen some other woman drape herself over him, a stick figure with nipples, and has decided she’s got to compete.

  No fair, Micah thinks. Lydia’s turning him into a detective right here in his own home, and her timing sucks. What kind of thing is that to force on him now, with the school year winding to a close and final exams to worry about?

  In this role as detective, it’s not like he can get anyone to answer questions. He’s forced to rely on observation. Which only creates more questions, and he sort of wishes that he never noticed the way Lydia wears nothing but long sleeves now, no matter how hot the days are getting. It’s been weeks since he’s seen her elbows.

  Likewise her knees. She wears only slacks now. She was never that prone to wearing shorts, being sensitive about a couple patches of spidery blue veins on her thighs, but used to be, it wasn’t like she’d never wear them. Some days, comfort got the better of pride. Except it’s not only shorts he knows she won’t be wearing again anytime soon. Even her skirts and dresses seem to have become obsolete.

  One evening his watchful vigilance pays off when Lydia gets careless. He sees her reach for the day’s mail, or what’s left of it after Evan gets through with the junk, except her sleeve isn’t buttoned. It rides up past her wrist and he sees the lower inches of a gauze bandage wrapped around her forearm, and the edge of a yellowish stain that’s seeped up from below. Sees it for two seconds maybe, hardly enough time to know for sure that his eyes aren’t playing tricks, then her arm is close to her dwindling body again. He pretends not to have noticed anything as Lydia’s other hand scurries to secure her sleeve and she pretends she’s not eyeing him to see if she got away with it.

  They’ve become junkies, he imagines. Suburban junkies. Evan’s found a connection and is trying in his own demented way to bring back the great dangerous age of jazz that he was cheated out of by being born too late. Except they don’t know how to do it right yet, and already they’ve made an infected mess out of her limbs by wrecking vein after vein.

  So maybe that’s the cause of the Lydia-sounds he hears at night. She hates the needles but loves what they bring.

  No fair, Micah thinks. Lydia’s turning him into a pervert right here in his own home, because now he actively listens for her — the moans, the cries, the whimpers, the sighs. He’s becoming something that his friends used to razz him about, back when all these guys started showing a freedom to admire Ly
dia that they wouldn’t have if she’d really been his mother. Telling him how they wished they were in his position, because since she’d only raised him for the last few years, she would probably be the one to fuck him the first time, too.

  So Micah listens for her sounds and excuses it by reimagining them as the soundtrack to his own life. Same sounds, different source, and he’s the one who inspires them. It’s a unique form of ventriloquism, throwing these anguished and delicious cries across town so they’re emerging from Charisse instead.

  Except…

  If all that about them being junkies is really true, how come Evan hasn’t started to diminish?

  Micah’s been turning that one over in his mind awhile, watching the creeping dawn brighten his window after a night without sleep. It’s Saturday, though, so maybe he can do some catching up. Saturday morning — garbage day for their part of town, he remembers after hearing the grind of the truck and the clang and thud of emptying cans coming from the end of the block.

  A whole week’s worth of their trash is sitting out beside the alley behind the house, waiting to be hauled away and made anonymous. If he’s going to get to the bottom of any mysteries, there may not be a better time.

  Micah grabs a pair of jeans, wrestles them up to his self-tenderized groin and fastens them on the run while, behind their closed and inviolable door, Lydia and Evan soundlessly guard their secrets. He doesn’t waste time with shoes and barely makes a sound himself as he rushes through the house and out the back door. He crosses the dew-slick back lawn with wet whisking footslaps.

  The truck and crew are four houses away, which doesn’t leave much time if he has to do any real digging to find anything. In the sticky-cool dawn, with a scab of pebbles and dirt forming on the soles of his feet, he stands over the pair of big round green plastic cans and waves away the flies that find them so appealing. Not both cans so much as just one.

  At first it seems reasonable that it’s only kitchen scraps they’re after, but two seconds’ thought and this theory doesn’t hold up. They eat a lot of carry-in in this household. How are you going to have kitchen scraps when hardly anyone ever cooks?

  He clutches the handle of the lid and yanks it from the can.

  More flies — they flurry upward into a dense cloud. Their buzzing is so thick it has legs of its own, so loud it nearly drowns out the rumble and hydraulic crush of the approaching truck. He swats at them with the lid like it’s a shield, feels the hailstone pop of their hard little bodies against the plastic and his stomach does slow rolls at the thought of something so many, so mindless, so greedy.

  When he’s cleared away the worst of them, Micah thrusts his free hand down into the can, not knowing the first thing about what he’s looking for. If it’s used-up needles, then he figures he’s doing a really stupid thing because he’ll be sure to get one through the palm.

  The stink hits him only after he remembers he should be breathing. He’s smelled worse — it’s not quite like something spoiled, or fast-food dumpsters on a hot day. It’s a stink with some mystery to it, a pliable odor that hasn’t yet tipped into full rot, but still has a richness of suppuration and decay. It’s like no smell he’s ever encountered rising out of a garbage can.

  He finds the source in a big white plastic bag forced into the can and subjected to a half-ass job of trying to conceal it, with a few other bits of trash scattered on top. It’s filled as tight as a sausage with soiled bandages, just like the one he saw bound around Lydia’s arm, except here there are wads and wads of them — so many that he might as well have ripped open a trash bag behind a hospital.

  He scatters the more benign rubbish back over them, like more than anything it’s still important to maintain household secrets, and slams the lid back into place.

  He needn’t have bothered. By now the truck has pulled up to carry it all away. The ground trembles underfoot and until this moment he never thought he could be so glad to smell diesel exhaust.

  “That ready to go?” asks one of the garbage men. Barely six in the morning and already he looks like he’s made of grime. He points at the can and its halo of flies. “Or are you looking for something you lost?”

  Micah doesn’t know how to even begin to answer that.

  In hindsight, it seems inevitable that she would stop going to work. That one morning he would get up and the bedroom door at the end of the hall would still be closed. That there would be no coffee smell wafting from the kitchen, no Lydia rushing around with her day planner and trying to remember where she last laid her cell phone. That Charisse would drop him off after school and Lydia’s car would appear not to have moved an inch.

  Maybe she took a sick day, is all. If anybody’s entitled, Lydia is, judging by what he found in the garbage. And then a second sick day after that? Well, okay fine, but he can’t keep from wondering if she shouldn’t actually be in the hospital, instead of just replicating the trash from one.

  And shouldn’t he see her?

  “Maybe she’s depressed,” Charisse tries. “It happened to my mom once, a few years ago. She shut herself up in her room and drew the blinds and we hardly saw her for three weeks.”

  They’re on lunch break, except it turns out that the last thing he’s interested in is that greasy burger in his hand. Just like there are two days of school left and the last thing he wants is more time to spend at home.

  “But you did see her some, right?” he asks.

  “Sure. But we had to force our way into the room.”

  That’s the difference between them. He could never do that. Another side-effect of not being related to the woman. Since he’s not bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh, he doesn’t have the full Bill of Rights. He can stand out in the hallway and look at the door like any pet thwarted by the knob.

  “The only thing is,” he says, “she doesn’t sound depressed.”

  “Then she’s probably pretending it’s not even happening. My mom, if you mention that time to her now, she just looks at you like ‘What are you talking about?’” Charisse makes a big flourish with her hands, introducing something that isn’t there. “Ladies and gentlemen … our role models!” She laughs, and it’s the first time Micah can remember her laughter sounding like he’s not supposed to join in. Like maybe this time she’s worried she might not be able to overcome every bad example set for her. “What does Evan say?”

  “Evan doesn’t say anything.” Micah stares at the liquefying shake in his hand. He’s been downing them since before time began but this one suddenly seems unnatural and nauseating. They can’t call these things milkshakes because no milk ever gets anywhere near them. He’s heard they’re made of aerated chemical foam. “When he’s not in there with her, Evan just smiles and plays his new piano.”

  Like now he’s got everything he wanted, Micah thinks but doesn’t say out loud, because it too would be an admission of failure, since to get it Evan at least had to know what that was.

  It’s the third day and he’s decided enough’s enough. He’s going to get some answers. Which is only fitting, since he can’t shake the nagging suspicion that he’s given a lot of wrong ones during this past week of test questions.

  Today’s the right day for it, too, since this is one of those rare afternoons when Evan’s car is gone. He’s run down to the jazz club, maybe, to pick up his paycheck while it’s still banking hours.

  Weird, how long a hallway can feel when you’re not that eager to get to the other end. If Charisse had known he was going to do this, she could’ve wished him good luck, told him he could handle it, that he was beautiful.

  He knocks on the closed bedroom door. Lightly, in case she’s sleeping.

  “Lydia?” he calls. “Can I come in for a minute and talk to you?”

  “Micah?” she calls back. Like who else would it be? “No … no, I’d really rather you didn’t. Not right now.”

  He listens carefully, trying to hear if there’s a rustle of sheets, or any other movement of a depressed, sluggish
body, and decides there isn’t. Just this strange, distant quality to her voice, as if it were coming through an extra door or two.

  “Well, when, then?”

  “I don’t know, Micah. Whenever I’m feeling better, I guess.”

  She’s starting to sound irritated and defensive, then softens when he tells her all he wants to do is talk the way they used to when it was just the two of them, when they used to need each other to make it through some of those earliest days. That gets her; he’s speaking Lydia’s native language now. She knows exactly the days he means: both of them hating the same man and for a long time too chicken to come right out and admit it.

  “We can talk this way,” she says. “Nothing has to change.”

  “But I can’t even see you.”

  She makes a noise that sounds a little like her most carefree laugh. “You don’t know what I look like by now?”

  Taking great care to do it silently, Micah grips the knob and gives it a slow twist. It turns only millimeters before it stops. Locked. He leans against the door frame, stalling for time while he schemes. Telling her that today was the last day of school for the year — did she know that?

  “You’re kidding.” She sounds legitimately surprised. “It seems like only a week or two ago it was spring break.”

  Yeah, he thinks, losing all track of time is always what happens when you start to lose yourself in the wrong guy. He has to wonder if for Lydia there even exists such a thing as the right one.