Andrew Klavan: Empire of Lies

I didn't really start lying to her until after I'd hung up the phone, until I'd settled back into the patio chair beside her.

And she said, "Who was it?"

And I said, "Just someone from the office with a question."

"You'd think they could give you your weekend, at least."

"It was nothing. What were we talking about?"

"About your mother's house…"

"About the house-right," I said. I gazed down the slope of grass to the children playing around the swings. They were laughing loudly, chasing each other around in circles. The Frisbee was lying in the grass, and as far as I could tell, the elaborate structure of their game had already collapsed into hilarious confusion.

I sat and gazed at them as if I were considering my answer, but my mind was blank.

And then I said, "I think I'll go back east. I might as well. I might as well just go and get the whole thing over with."

The jet dropped out of low clouds and there was Manhattan, the dense skyline thrusting toward the mist. I gazed out the porthole, watching the spires sail past. I thought of Lauren down there somewhere. What could she want? I wondered-wondered for the umpteenth time. What could she want and why call me about it? She wouldn't tell me over the phone, and I couldn't stop trying to figure it out. Was it money? That was the only thing I could think of, the only thing that made sense. She must need money. She must've heard I'd done well and figured I could help her. It had to be that-or why call me?

After all these years, why call me?

My gaze focused on the Empire State Building-and then went beyond it over the undulating fall of stone to the island's southern tip, to the place where I had seen her last. My mind went back to that day and to all the days before it until, as the plane descended, I was lost in another life-a life that used to be my life.

I said I would tell you everything, so here it is:

When I was twenty-eight, I went a little mad. There were good enough reasons for it, I guess. My mother's illness, my father's suicide, my own guilt about both because of my discovery of the Spiral Notebooks. My brother's cruelty had twisted me. The company I kept had led me astray. There were plenty of reasons.

Still, in the end, it was me, my thoughts, my actions, my choices that sent me down the road into darkness until I became sick-morally sick; lost and mad and desperately unhappy.

It was seventeen years before all this began, before that autumn afternoon on the patio and the End of Civilization as We Know It. Picture me handsome, edgy, dripping with urban sophistication. I smoked in a curt, defiant way. I was quick-witted and funny. I had a good line in irony and sneering left-wing cant.

All in all, I would say I was deceptively presentable back then, considering what a mess I was inwardly. I dressed conservatively, in a pressed, preppy style. I thought it made a piquant contrast with my opinions and my job. I was an investigative reporter for the Soho Star, a radical weekly with an office on lower Broadway. I spent my working hours hunting down obnoxious landlords, highlighting cultural offenses against blacks and homosexuals, and seeking out corruption in any official who did not believe in the state as a sort of Nanny Robin Hood, stealing from the rich to fund its infantilizing care for the poor. I liked to claim that my creased khakis and my button-down shirt, my navy blue jacket and school tie were a sort of clever disguise to help me mingle with the ruling class and get the goods on them. But I'm afraid the ugly truth was: I liked the way I looked in that outfit. And the upshot was I appeared in those days as every inch the solid pillar of society I would one day come to be.

But oh, my soul.

I was miserable. I was miserable and I was proud of it, the way intelligent young people often are. I wore my inner pain like a badge of honor. It showed I was too sensitive for the harsh world, too honest for its corruption, too independent for its iron chains of conformity. Oh, I had all sorts of ego-polishing notions about my unhappy self. And I had theories, too. What, after all, is a depressed intellectual without his theories? I can't reconstruct the details of them now. It would be too boring to try. But there was a lot of Nietzsche involved and Freud, too-oh, and Marx. That was it, my trinity: Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx. Which is to say I believed that power, sex, and money explained all human interactions, all history, and all the world. To pretend anything else, I thought, was rank hypocrisy, the worst of intellectual sins. Faith was a scam, Hope was a lie, Love was an illusion. Power, sex, and money-these three-were the real, the only stuff of life.

And the greatest of these, of course, was sex.

I don't remember how I worked all this out philosophically. But for some reason, the other two persons of my trinity-power and money-were things to be disdained. They were motive forces for them, you know, for society's evil masters, the greedy, the corrupt, the makers of orthodoxy.

Sex, though-sex was for us. It was the expressive medium of the liberated, the unconventional, the unbowed, the Natural Man. When it came to sex, there was nothing-nothing consensual-that could repel or alienate such enlightened folk as we. Anyone who questioned that doctrine or looked askance at some sexual practice, anyone who even wondered aloud if perhaps, like any other appetite-for food, say, or alcohol or material goods-our sexual desire might occasionally require discipline or restraint, was painfully irrelevant, grossly out of the loop, unhip in the extreme. No, no. A free man, a natural man, a new man-so my theories went-threw off hypocrisy and explored his sexuality to its depths.

My depths, unfortunately, had been forged in the fire of a very unhappy youth. Rage at my mother's fate, confusion at my father's, a wellspring of pent violence opened by my brother's bullying brutality all played a part. And when I really delved into the nature of my desires-and how, given my theories, could I do otherwise?-I discovered I had a simmering penchant for cruelty. This had to be developed-so I decreed in the name of liberation and integrity-not to mention the fact that it turned me on.

Which brings me to Lauren Goldberg.

Lauren was the child of a teacher-slash-filmmaker and the paralegal-slash-wannabe-artist whom he divorced. The years of their marriage, of course, were Lauren's golden era. Till the age of eight, she could trust and believe in family and love and the gentle guidance of the teachers at her private school. After that, her world was all recriminations and disillusionment and shifting sand-plus the cold chaos of public education when the parental breakup sent the family budget to hell. The contrast between these two periods was the source of-or at least the excuse for-all Lauren's bitterness and all her yearning.

She had long black hair, a small, thin, nicely proportioned body, a harshly attractive face with her father's aquiline Jewish features and her mother's white German-Irish skin. She was young, like me. Smoked, like me. Saw sneeringly, like me, into the grimy heart of the pseudo-immaculate American dream or whatever it was we were sneeringly seeing into the heart of. She worked as a photographer's assistant. Her ambition was to become a photographer herself.

We met at a poetry reading held in a church. We drank wine out of plastic cups and talked, standing close to each other in the corner under a station of the cross. She agreed with me-or at least nodded eagerly-when I expounded on what a con job, what a lie it all was. Society, I mean, Western culture: all just a disguise for the will to power and money and sex. She nodded and said in a scintillating tone of admiration, "That is incredibly true."