Lies She Told(41)

I accept my clothing and excuse myself to the bathroom. He calls through the door that I am welcome to shower. Of course I am. Better for him if all DNA evidence of our act is scrubbed from my body. Should I reveal his name and my lawyer husband decide to go after him, it will be my word against his. He can argue that I made the whole thing up. Delusions as an outgrowth of postpartum depression.

The bathroom light stays off as I dress. The sight of my ruffled hair and rumpled clothing against the backdrop of the unfamiliar wall tile will humiliate me more than any mug shot. It’s bad enough that I’ll have to pass the park on the way to my building, dodging the rotating sprinklers spraying the walkway in my party dress, looking like yesterday’s newspaper. I rub my eyes hard, forestalling the frustrated tears building beneath my lower lids. Crying will only make me hate myself more. And I do hate myself. I was half of a power couple with a healthy baby girl. I’ll never be that again, no matter what I do. If I stay with Jake, I will be the laughingstock wife of a philandering husband. If I leave him, I will be the poor single mother with the waiting newborn at home.

I cannot abide either role. The only option is to make Colleen go away.





LIZA


A golden glow rouses me from sleep. The sun peeks above the horizon, long arms stretching across the landscape and reaching through my uncovered bedroom window. I think about showering and food but can’t motivate myself to leave the body heat cocoon beneath the covers. Instead, I slide my laptop off of the bedside table and reread the scene penned the prior evening.

I edit for an hour. Around nine, I become offended by the human smell of the room and take a scalding, soapy shower. The hot water reddens my skin and purges my pores. I pack my bag and check out, thinking about David and his weekend of work (with Cameron), trying not to think about Trevor. I grab Starbucks across the street from the hotel. Given the free morning brew offered in all the breakfast panels, spending five dollars on a latte feels wasteful, but I don’t want to run into my editor right now. It was hard enough saying good night. I’m not ready for good morning.

I can’t concentrate during my panel, though no one appears to notice. My fellow authors are too busy squeezing mentions of their current books into responses to questions about their first novels. The moderator is a timid woman, ill-suited to the job of dividing speaking time between the five egos on this dais. She’s being talked over by an author who has seized every opportunity to rebut critics of her panned second book. If I were in charge, I’d make sure to call on individual authors in order to keep the panel from becoming an infomercial for the loudmouth’s latest. But I’m not, and to be honest, I’m too distracted to care. At the end of the day, maybe one person out of the few dozen gathered will buy a book. If that sale doesn’t go to me, so be it. I didn’t come here to fight with my compatriots.

I didn’t come here to indulge in sexual fantasies, either. Yet it’s difficult not to hear Beth’s running description of Trevor’s body, forged, she says, like Spartan armor.

“Liza?”

The moderator’s smile is strained. I’m that kid caught daydreaming in math class. She’s the teacher who has called me out. “I’m sorry. Got a little lost there thinking about the relation of my first book to my most recent, Accused Woman.” When in doubt, sell.

“The question concerned how authors identify with dark subject matter. You had to not only imagine a victim of child abuse in Drowned Secrets but also believably write about the response to that abuse from the perspective of a twelve-year-old girl . . .”

She trails off, hoping I’ll fill in the blanks. The crowd stares as though I’m the driver in a slow-motion accident. Pressure builds deep in my hippocampus. “Well, I don’t exactly know.”

The moderator blinks, waiting for me to continue.

My palms open in a guilty appeal to the crowd. “I think when the writing is going well, you are so immersed in the character that everything’s automatic. It’s a bit like having an Ouija board instead of a keyboard.”

The audience is silent. A person in the front of the crowd flashes a nervous smile as though I’ve just confessed to actually communing with spirits or something similarly insane. It’s an analogy, people. Get with it.

“Well, how did you come up with the idea?”

“Um . . .” The audience’s eyes speckle my body with dozens of laser sights. Sweat buds on my hairline. “I think I had this character in my head, and I really wanted to tell her story.”

An audience member raises her hand. She is a younger woman with a notebook in her lap—an MFA student, if I had to guess. The moderator acknowledges her with the enthusiasm of a teacher calling on a class pet. “But how do you get characters in your head in the first place?” she asks.

She might as well demand to know how images show up on a television screen. Clearly, there’s rhyme and reason behind it. But damned if I understand. “They’re just there.”

The student gears up for a follow-up. Thankfully, loudmouth starts before she can get it out. “What Liza says about this automatic writing, if you will, really resonated with me. When you’ve been immersed in the character for so long, you really do feel what they feel and write what they are thinking. You don’t have to imagine it anymore. It’s a bit like acting in that way. In my latest book, the main character, Jolene, is, of course, in a situation I would never find myself in, God willing. She’s living in a dystopia where the government can hear your thoughts. Yet I can imagine her pain of not having privacy. I don’t need to be nineteen, either. You know, as a person, you can identify. You can picture yourself, and it really is . . .”