William Lashner - Bitter Truth

“So long as he helped Nat in the garden,” I said.

“Yes, well everything has its price, doesn’t it? It was a pretty good deal for Franklin, considering Grammy paid his way through Episcopal Academy and then Princeton.”

“He looks like a Princeton man.”

“He’s grown into the part.”

As a boy, she said, he was wild, hyperactive. He seemed to always be angry, charging here and there for no apparent reason, a handsome little towhead bursting with energy. He was the only real friend she had at the house. Her father was never there for her, hiding from the world and his family in his upstairs bedroom; her mother was so preoccupied with being a Reddman she had nothing left to give to her youngest daughter. Brother Edward was too busy looking for trouble to be interested in his little sister. Brother Bobby was shy and bookish and sister Jacqueline moped about melodramatically, wearing long flowing gowns, carrying her dog-eared copy of The Bell Jar everywhere. But Franklin was wild and full of some exciting anger that drew her to him. Whenever he wasn’t working they were running off together like wolves, the best of friends.

“How did Grammy feel about that?”

“You don’t understand my grandmother. She wasn’t a snob at all. If anything, she encouraged Franklin and me to play together, at least when we were young.”

They liked the same sports, hated the same people, read the same comic books. They watched The Love Boat on television every Saturday night, religiously. They both thought the Beatles were overrated, that Springsteen was the boss. They agreed that Annie Hall was the most important movie ever made. They were almost a perfect match, which is why it seemed so natural, so inevitable, when they first started having sex.

“Out there on the ancestral moors. How old were you the first time?”

“Fifteen.”

“Fifteen? That’s statutory.”

“He’s only two years older than me.”

“When I was fifteen I hadn’t even slow-danced with a girl.”

“It was absolutely innocent. We were absolutely in love. We decided we were going to be married, so why not, though we swore not to tell anyone.”

“Grammy wouldn’t have approved you messing with a servant, I guess.”

“She never knew, no one ever knew. It was Franklin who insisted it be an absolute secret, and I understood. He was never quite sure of his place among all us Reddmans.”

They’d hide out together in the old Poole house down by the Pond. They brought in a mattress, sheets and blankets, a radio. They turned that ruin of a house into a love nest and whenever they could get away that’s where they’d run. They read books, poetry, reciting the lines to each other. They listened to the newest songs on WMMR. They made love in cool summer evenings to a cricket serenade. They experimented with each other’s bodies.

“When I was fifteen,” I said in amazed envy, “I wasn’t even experimenting with my own body.”

“Cut it out,” she said. “It’s not a joke. I shouldn’t be telling you.”

We lay in the bed for a while, quietly. Our legs were no longer touching.

“So what happened to you two?” I asked finally.

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know?”

“I still don’t know,” she said.

Somehow their secret was discovered. They never knew by whom or how, but they had no doubt. Someone had sneaked into the old Poole house and rummaged through their things. They could feel a chill when they were together, as if they were being watched. And then one night, when he was eighteen, Franklin disappeared. No one knew what had happened or where he had gone, he had simply vanished. A letter came for him from Princeton. Caroline opened it anxiously, recklessly; he had been accepted, but there was no one to tell. She searched for him, called all their friends, checked out all their places, found not a trace. And when he reappeared, finally, after months and months, reappeared without explanation, he was somehow different. Whatever had been wild about him was gone. The anger in him that she had loved so much had disappeared. And when she finally got him back to the Poole house and demanded he tell her where he had been, he sat her down and told her it was over. Forever. That though he loved her with everything in his soul they would spend the rest of their lives apart. She clutched hold of him and cried and begged to know what she had done but he wouldn’t answer. He just stood and left and never went back into the house and never slept with her again.

“And there was no explanation?”

“None.”

“Any ideas?”

“None. At first I thought he might have a disease that he didn’t want to spread to me, or that he might be gay. I announced our engagement publicly, a childish attempt to force him to change his mind, and he didn’t disabuse anyone of the notion, so the expectation remains in the family that we will be married, but he hasn’t touched me since. He can barely stand to look at me now. Franklin has other women, I know that. What I don’t know is why he’d rather be with them than with me. But desertion seems to be the pattern, doesn’t it? My father hides from me in his room, my one true love flees from me.”

“Do you regret anything now?”

“I regret everything now, but not that. It was the finest, purest time of my life. The last innocent period where I still believed in the myth that life was a thrilling adventure and everything was possible and there was true happiness to be found in this world.”

“What do you believe in now?”

She inhaled from her cigarette and let it out slowly.

“Nothing,” she said finally. And I believed her. It was in the dead look in her eyes, in the body piercing, as if to gore a great emptiness, in the tattoos, as if to scrawl onto her body some evidence of faith. It was in the way she drank in her situations, intently, the way she smoked, with the incessant dedication of a suicide, the way she held herself, like an actress searching in the wings for a line because she had none of her own. And most of all, it was in the way she screwed.

After she had clicked off into passivity I didn’t give up trying to bring her back. I kissed the flesh behind her ear and rubbed her crotch with my thigh and took hold of her hair. Though at Veritas I had been expecting something more, I wasn’t surprised this time when she left me alone in her bed with her body. But despite how I tried to revive her, she was gone, to someplace calm and innocent, to someplace full of youth and love, to someplace I could never follow, leaving me with only her flesh and my heightened desire. So what else was there to do? I caressed her pale flanks, indelibly marked in the green ink of her tattoos, sucked at her neck, dragged my tongue across the rough skin beneath her arms. Her mouth, newly rinsed with Scope, tasted as minty and new as a newly minted hundred-dollar bill and I grew ever more excited despite myself. To have sex with Caroline Shaw, I realized whilst astride her, was to peer into Rockefeller’s soul.

She lay there quietly for me, eyes open, saying not a word as I did what I willed with her. Her very passivity spurred me, her eyes staring at me, rich and blue, challenging. I straddled her and turned her around so those rich eyes were away from me and I entered her, pumping hard, pumping furiously, filled with anger at her stark passivity. And in the moment that I came, my teeth clenched in release, it was as if Mammon itself opened up its secrets to me and I started to grasp its dark power. It is utter emptiness, a vessel formed of nothing, filled with nothing, believing in nothing, an emptiness into which we are urged to pour our most essential truths. And what spurted out of me was not love nor compassion nor charity nor even need, what spurted out was all my wanting and my coveting, all my deep yearning for anything that anyone else might ever have, all my darkest ambitions for prestige and power and glory and ultimately what? Godhood? God help me. That was the next-to-worst part of screwing Caroline Shaw, the part that brought to light the ugliest shadows of my crippled soul.