Lies She Told(5)
A shudder crawls from one shoulder to the other as the bittersweet memory is replaced with the bilious image of me back at the meat market, flaunting my depression weight gain before men my age who are too busy salivating at twenty-year-olds to notice. Meanwhile, David—the man upon whom I’d bestowed my own twenties—would be busy making beautiful babies with his surely fertile husband-stealing bimbo.
I shake the sickening thought from my head and breathe deeply. David is not cheating on me. He’s stressed about his missing friend. That’s all.
I drum my fingers on the black keys, not hard enough to type anything. What will be my opening line this time? For a suspense writer, even one who fills her pages with licentious liaisons, the first sentence of every chapter is like an AA meeting. It demands the immediate confession of a problem by a specific someone. My name is Liza, and I’m a . . . I obviously know Beth’s issue, though I don’t yet know how to solve it. We’ll figure it out together, two friends fumbling toward a solution. My main characters are more extensions of my social circle than figments of my imagination. Each is fleshed out with characteristics of myself or my loved ones, endowed with unwritten pasts stitched together from my own experiences and the secrets of those closest to me. These embezzled backstories dictate my characters’ actions as much as my own personal history decides my emotional responses. I don’t invent my characters. I steal them from my surroundings. To be a writer is to be a life thief. Every day, I rob myself blind.
A door slams. I look behind me into the short hallway leading past the bathroom, trying to discern whether the bang was in my apartment or the neighboring unit. Footsteps answer my question. I check the time as I log off. Ten o’clock. Dinner has been staling on the stove for the past forty minutes.
I exit the bedroom and peer around the wall into the living/dining room, spying on my spouse. I do this often now, watching him from a distance, trying to ascertain his mood before engaging. Since Nick’s disappearance, he’s toggled between stages one through three of grief: tearful shock, frantic denial, and raging anger. I never know whether I should settle down for a silent night of him staring into space or brace myself for an endless rant against the inept police who still can’t figure out how his friend and law partner “fell off the motherfucking map.”
David stands in the dining area. His suit jacket hangs from one of four chairs surrounding a round glass table. It looks slept in. My husband came of age in the midnineties, when men were waxing philosophical about shampoo. He prides himself on his bespoke suits, and his vanity is filled with retinoid creams. The state of his blazer is a very bad sign.
He gazes out the French doors leading onto our Juliet balcony, hands shoved in the pockets of his pinstriped pants. The traffic noise is louder in the living area. One of the doors must be cracked. Though the apartment lacks central air, we never open them wide. A squat, seventy-five-year-old railing is the only thing preventing our potted Ficus from falling eight stories to the street below.
“Hey, you.” I drape my arms over his shoulders and punctuate my statement with a peck below his ear. He pats my hand against his chest before pulling away. There are no words.
As much as I’d like to fault Nick’s disappearance for his silence, our conversations have been dwindling for the past six months. It started, I think, with a case: a ten-million-dollar wrongful death suit against the state of New York, filed on behalf of the heartbroken mother of a high school senior who committed suicide after four years of merciless bullying. Nick had always been a strict constructionist with regard to attorney/client privilege, but the publicity surrounding the case had made David follow suit for the first time. Overnight, every question about David’s day became a threatened violation of his professional ethics. Now I don’t ask.
A dozen years together has eliminated any pressure to cough up a few sentences for politeness’ sake. Our relationship has discarded formalities like my spouse’s scalp has shed hair. All that’s left of David’s once Richard Gere–worthy mane are buzzed salt-and-pepper sides and a receding widow’s peak. He overcompensates with a permanent five-o’clock shadow, which I find sexy, albeit sandpapery.
His shoulders rise with each breath. I monitor their tempo, wait for the rhythm to pause. “You hungry?”
He grunts something affirmative. I walk through to the kitchen and turn on the gas burner beneath my room temperature pasta dish. “How are you?”
He responds, though not loud enough for me to make out the words. I think he’s said, “Oh, you know.”
I grab two plates from the cupboard and a pronged spoon, which I use to dish out some of my reheated concoction. While David keeps mulling over the view, I shut off the range, grab utensils, and balance the plates on my forearm like a diner waitress. I slide his dinner in front of the seat draped with his wrinkled suit jacket and set my place beside him. His briefcase claims my chair. As I move it to the floor, I spy a stack of papers slipped into the back pocket. They’re stuffed vertically into the flap so that half of an enlarged photo sticks out.
Have You Seen This Man?
David has used Nick’s headshot from the firm’s website. The image doesn’t do justice to the dead. Nick was handsome, though not in a generic, Hollywood way. He had wavy black hair that he wore to the nape of his neck and a Roman nose made more prominent by his narrow face. Deep-set eyes. Thin lips. Static images emphasize the angularity of his features. To appreciate Nick’s beauty, one had to see him in action: smiling, frowning, posing. He had a roguish quality, a swaggering confidence that he possessed despite, or maybe because of, his small stature. Nick couldn’t have been taller than five foot six; I towered over him at five foot nine. But like an actor, he commanded a room with his presence and orator’s voice, delivered with a Mississippi twang and a side of biting wit. Friends of mine who didn’t find him attractive on first sight would be falling all over him by the end of a night.