Andrew Klavan - Empire of Lies

Oh, wait, look now. There was a new wrinkle to the plot of the movie. The woman had climbed down off the man and was positioning herself on the bed on all fours. The man knelt behind her and began pumping his hips while she cried out, throwing her head around so that her hair whipped about her face. Stirring stuff. I straightened a little on the couch. When the man ran his hands along her flanks to cup her breasts, I could almost feel the yielding flesh against my own palms. I could almost feel what Anne's flesh would be like.

Anne, I thought, yearningly. Anne…

I kept thinking about her. I kept thinking about that ring she wore around her neck. I knew that sort of ring. It was called an O-ring, after The Story of O. At least, that's what I'd always heard it called. Back when I was with Lauren. Back when we were in The Scene. A ring like that around a woman's neck-or on her wrist, or dangling from her ear-was meant to signal that she enjoyed being submissive during rough sex. It meant she liked to be dominated. She liked to be hurt.

How do they know? I almost whispered aloud. How do they pick you out like that? How do they always know?

Uh-oh, hold on, what was this? The bedroom door had come open-in the movie, I mean; on the television. The wife, the man's wife, barged into the room and caught her husband doing the naked bang-bang with this other woman. Now here was drama for you. Look how shocked and hurt she was. Well, sure. The faithful love that had sustained her life, repaired the injuries of her childhood, become the medium of her joy and self-esteem was now revealed to be a lie-a lie, I tell you! How could she ever trust the naked man again? How could she ever trust anyone or anything? And the children-what of the children? Their parents' marriage was their universe. Divorce would bring the very stars down around their heads!

Quickly, the husband unplugged himself from the naked woman's backside. As well he should! He went to his wife. He stroked her shoulders in a conciliatory fashion.

"We wanted you to join us, but we were afraid to ask," he said.

Ah, never be afraid to ask. That was the underlying theme of the movie. Never, never, never be afraid to ask. Because now see: The wife was taking her clothes off, too. She was kneeling naked on the bed while the husband and his girlfriend climbed up her flanks like ivy. What relief. What joy. What tits.

Oh God, oh God, how I wanted Anne just then, how I wanted her naked in my arms!

I snagged my glass of wine off the table. I knocked back another swallow. Husband and girlfriend now had the wife on her back, the girlfriend's mouth on her breasts, the husband's face buried between her legs.

And shouldn't life be like that? I asked the empty room silently. Instead of all this fuss about adultery and morality and whatnot. Shouldn't life be just like that?

Take my father, for instance. My father could serve as an object lesson here. My father killed himself while I was away at college. He sat in his Lexus in the garage just outside this television room, just on the other side of the door. He turned on the engine and let it run. My brother Alan had already graduated by then and had more or less moved back home to begin his career as a leech and wastrel. He was the one who found Dad's body slumped behind the wheel.

And why? Why did the old man do it? Well, there was no suicide note-Dad died as he lived, in pale and thin-lipped silence- but let's face facts: It was because of Margaret-of course it was-little mousy Margaret who adored him and whom he loved.

She was a client of his, bankrupt after her husband left her. My father restructured her finances, helped her get a bookkeeping job. She relied on him and came to look up to him and finally idolized him in her careful, mousy way. I saw them together once, in his office. Quite a comical pair, really, the two of them. He dry as a stick and colorless as a tax code, and she with her limp brown hair and the face of a painfully serious squirrel, sniffing and nibbling around his every word as if it were the meat she lived on.

I only learned the whole story later, from her, from Margaret herself. She came to Dad's funeral. I was sitting in the front pew of the mortuary, sitting with my arm around my mother. Poor Mom barely understood what had happened. She was looking at the floor, shaking her head, whispering to herself, trying to fit Dad's suicide into the grand historical scheme of things. At some point, I glanced over my shoulder and spotted Margaret sitting modestly in the back, alone, a stranger to everyone else, unobtrusive but clearly grief-stricken. I remembered seeing her in Dad's office that one time and somehow now, I guessed the truth. As the service ended, I saw her slip out the back door quietly. On instinct, I went after her, caught her elbow as she crossed the parking lot to her car. I thanked her for coming. She seemed grateful that anyone spoke to her at all. We arranged to have coffee together in the city.

What a funny little creature she was. Small and slump-shouldered and flat-chested and with that plain, humorless, squirrelly face: You never would've thought there could be so much passion in her. We met at a Starbucks near NYU, a big glass box of a cafe filled with round wooden tables and straight-backed wooden chairs. She sat in her colorless skirt and jacket suit, nearly quivering with formality amidst the crowd of students slouched all around her in hoodies and jeans. She spoke carefully, primly, with the superserious air of a little girl laying out a tea set, trying to get everything exactly right. I listened, in my own student hoodie and jeans, slouched across the table from her. This is what she told me:

My father's life with my mother could hardly be called a marriage, not for the last few years, anyway. Mom had finally gone too crazy to relate or even speak sense to him. Sometimes she even seemed to believe he was an impostor, a stranger only pretending to be her husband. At times like that, she refused to have sex with him. Even in her clearer moments, she'd submit to it only as a wifely duty. She obviously found it an irritating distraction from the realizations and inspirations constantly flashing in her brain. At best, Dad felt he was an annoyance to her. At worst, he felt like a rapist. Finally he gave up. They continued living in the same house-even sleeping in the same bed-but each was living alone.

Now Dad and Margaret, meanwhile-they were a different story. A veritable riptide of erotic longing was dragging their scrawny bodies and their bloodless lips together. They fought it with all their honor, all their might, trying like mad to do what they thought was the right thing. But once Mom and Dad stopped having sex altogether-well, then, Dad and Margaret, pursuant to what I imagine was a rather dry, legalistic discussion of the finer moral points, decided they were justified in giving in to the flow. Occasionally, furtively, they began meeting at her apartment where, not to put too fine a point on it, they went about the serious business of fucking each other like a pair of rabid wildcats.

Of course, it only made matters worse. The sex was like sea-water, quenching their thirst only to leave them thirstier still. Once they had a taste of each other, they wanted to be with each other every night. They wanted to sleep with each other and wake in each other's arms. Their conversations returned to the problem again and again until they rarely talked of anything else. Their joy in being together from time to time quickly soured into painful longing to have each other always.

But my father wouldn't leave my mother. He and Margaret both agreed it wouldn't be right. She was his wife of twenty-five years. They had loved each other when she was well. She had cheerfully kept his home, cooked his meals, raised his children. Now she was ill beyond recovery. What was he going to do? Put her in an institution somewhere? Abandon her to sit gaping beneath the television set in some sterile dayroom, drugged and drooling, confused and alone? Oh, you could rationalize it all you wanted, but abandonment was what it would be.