Empire of Lies (5 page)

"Is this the end of civilization as we know it?" she drawled ironically, a laugh stuck in her throat. "Three major Hollywood studios certainly hope so as they get ready for the premiere of the first film ever using Real 3-D Technology at the New Coliseum Theater just off Times Square—"

I pressed the remote, hunting through the channels. An ad for car insurance went by, then an ad for soda, then a game show with lightbulbs flashing around a babe in a short skirt. I settled on the news. Enormous images tumbled past of American soldiers curling around the doorways of bomb-gutted houses, young men charging into bullet-riddled darkness with brave and fearful eyes. There were bodies in an Arab marketplace around an exploded car. There was an old woman in a black burqa weeping on her knees. In St. Petersburg, some Islamo-fascists had set off a bomb near the Church of Saints Peter and Anne. In Paris, a lone jihadi had gone apeshit at the Louvre, stabbing two tourists before he slashed a priceless painting, Ingres's
Odalisque.

I stared at the images, but again, my mind drifted back to Lauren, wondering what she wanted, why she had called me. And suddenly, thinking of her, watching the images on the screen, a realization came to me. With all this business about confronting the past and so on, I realized I'd been imagining Lauren as if she would be the same, as if she would look the same as I remembered her. When she'd spoken to me on the phone, her voice was unchanged. It was still a low, throaty drawl, sardonic, mocking, secretly vulnerable. The image of her that came into my mind as I listened was the image of her as she once was: young, narrow, wired, with that braced, expectant air some women have as if they're waiting to be taken by storm. I remembered her mostly as
I saw her last, turning away from me, walking away, disappearing into the crowds by the harbor, Liberty in the distance to the left of her, the Twin Towers looming against the sky to her right.

But she will have changed, I reminded myself, as if talking to a simpleton. Of course she will have changed. I'd changed. Everyone had. The whole city was different, diminished, those towers themselves blown to rubble, the thousands in them dead. The whole world—that stunned, victorious West we lived in—our dumb, hilarious, in-the-money America with the slave colonies of the evil empire clacketing down like dominoes around our big clown feet: Seventeen years and it was all different, all gone. Look. Look at the TV: There was war after war in the Middle East now, war after war radiating like shock waves from the wound in the island where the towers had stood. Crazy jihadists taking over the failed kingdoms of Islam, fanatic hordes of fundamentalist warriors who seemed to have burst alive out of a mural of the Dark Ages, burst, complete with beards and turbans, frothing horses, scimitars upraised, to go galloping nutso through real life. They would brook no god but their god, their ferocious god, no law but their sharia law. They would kill anyone who might oppose or offend them, any Muslim who imagined a new future, any woman who wanted to be equal or free. And they dreamed of conquering all the infidel West, subjugating the whole mess of the modern world. They were murderers in Holland. Rioters in France. Bombers in England, Russia, Pakistan, and so on. They were armies fighting for entire nations in Africa. Here in America too, after the World Trade Center, they continued to pull off attacks now and then. Sometimes it was a terrorist cell, sometimes just a lone mad-for-Allah boy opening fire in a shopping mall or running down some nonbelievers with his SUV. But there were always bigger doings in the works, foiled plots and whispered conspiracies: to bring down
more buildings, to bring down anything that stands—hell, to bring down the whole third dimension and make the world flat again.

Look at the TV, I told myself. Look at the news. The past wasn't there to be confronted anymore. This was the state of things now, the state of things since Lauren walked away from me with the Twin Towers looming over her.

No, I thought. It was unlikely she would look the same.

Nothing could have prepared me for her, though. No act, I mean, of my imagination. She was changed almost entirely from what she'd been.

She lived in Astoria, in Queens, a working-class neighborhood just across Hell Gate from Manhattan. She had the bottom floor of a two-story row house, one of a set of red-brick boxes standing side by side in a block-long line a stoop away from the sidewalk. It was eight o'clock when I got there. A lot of moms were rushing by me, towing their kids behind, hurrying to drop them off at school, I guess, so they could get themselves to work on time. There were other kids slouching off to school alone. Guys in windbreakers twisting their cars out of tight parking spaces. Guys in cheap suits marching to the train.

The clouds were breaking up over the low roofs. The sun was out, rising over the Island. The air was cool and fresh.

I climbed the stoop and knocked on Lauren's door. I heard her shout out, "Just a minute!" from inside.

I waited, squinting off toward the sun, nervous with anticipation. I heard the door open and turned to see her. The sight rocked me. I had to force a smile. Startlingly, she came into my arms. Her hair smelled the same, anyway: baby shampoo and cigarettes. She took my hand and drew me into the house.

We moved together into a small living room. It was cramped and depressing and stank of divorce: the sudden loss of income,
a life cobbled back together in a rush. The walls were a slapdash beige slung on by the landlord. The tan carpet also must have come with the place. There was an aging TV on a stand in one corner. There was an aging sofa facing a mantelpiece. The mantelpiece should have surrounded a fireplace, but there was no fireplace, just the beige wall below and a mirror above it. There were framed photographs on the mantel in front of the mirror: a little girl, then the little girl older, then the same girl as a teenager. My eye flashed over them and I thought:
So she has a daughter now.

I faced Lauren again. She was standing back from me, appraising me as if I were a statue in a gallery.

"Wow!" she said. "I mean, you look ... you look good, Jason. You look like ... no, you look good. I mean it."

"So do you, Lauren. It's nice to see you."

"Yeah, you too, I mean—wow." She examined me from this angle and that. "You look like you're doing really well."

I knew she was right. I did. When I'd gotten dressed that morning, I'd gone out of my way to look prosperous. I mean, I was prosperous, sure, but I'd gone out of my way to look it. I put on the blue button-down shirt and the tan sports jacket Cathy'd gotten me for Christmas, and the khaki slacks I'd picked up at Brooks Brothers in Chicago. It was a kind of bragging, showing off for an old girlfriend. I wanted her to see how well I'd done since we'd broken up. Petty and stupid and vain of me, I know. I told myself not to do it, but I did it anyway.

"Thanks," I said. "You look pretty good yourself."

That, on the other hand, was a lie. She looked like crap. Complete crap. The long straight black hair I remembered was now cut short in unbecoming curls. The thin, harsh, sensual face had become bloated, the pale skin strangely dimpled and rough. She was dressed in a baggy black sweater and a cheap straight-cut cotton skirt, dark blue, too tight around her hips. The outfit made
her body—that once-lean-and-ready body—seem as if it had gone doughy, sloppy, as if it had settled and bulged like clay.

She looked old. Not just old: old and hard and hard-worn. Her pale brown eyes had been clear and even a little soft when I knew her. They were rheumy and narrow and watchful now. Her smile was bitter, the anger fairly twitching at the corners of her mouth.

How did it make me feel to see her like that? Well, it made me feel sorry for one thing, sorry for whatever had happened to her to make her look this way and sorry that the attractive young Lauren I had known was gone forever. But there's no point in lying: I felt other things, too. I felt smug and triumphant—you know, glad that things had gone better for me than they had for her. I was rich and she wasn't. I lived on the Hill and she lived here. I looked okay and she looked blasted. I didn't want to feel good or smug about it. I really didn't. But I did feel like that a little, and I bet she knew I did.

There was a box of Kents on a lamp stand by an ashtray. She scooped it up, flipped back the top, and offered one to me. Oh, yeah, she knew what I was feeling, all right. I could see her watching me as she held out the cigarette, reading my thoughts, gauging my every expression. She knew exactly how shocked and sorry and self-satisfied I was at the sight of her. She knew, and it made her bitter smile more bitter still.

I waved off the Kent. "No, thanks. I don't do it anymore."

She jabbed one into her mouth, fired it with a plastic lighter. "What's the matter? A little cancer scare you?"

"I got kids now. I'm not allowed to die."

She tossed the cigarette box down on the lampstand again. I noticed a couple of business cards lying near the ashtray: lauren wilmont, watson & mantle, paralegal. She hadn't become a photographer, the way she'd wanted. She was a divorced paralegal-slash-wannabe-artist, just like her mother before her.

She blew out a cloud of smoke. There was something nasty about the way she did it. Even though she blew it off to the side and up over my head, it felt as if she were blowing it right at me. She crossed an arm under her breasts and propped the other elbow on it, holding the cigarette high, pinning me with a knowing and ironic look.

"I Googled you, y'know," she said. "When I was trying to find out where you lived. Actually, that's bullshit. I'm always Googling people from my past. I've Googled you a lot."

"Yeah, I tried to Google you a couple of times, too, but I didn't know about the name change. So you're married."

"Was. And you're, like—what?" She gave me a great big man-eating smile. "You're some kind of right-wing Christian asshole now, huh."

I laughed. "That's me."

"Kind of cuts down on your S&M action, doesn't it?"

"You kidding me? That's all we do."

She grabbed a drag and laughed out more smoke. It was an angry, unpleasant laugh. "Whipping the sin out of naked schoolgirls. Repent! Swish!"

"Exactly."

"And you got the wife."

"Got the wife," I said.

"She hot?"

"The mother of my children, you mean?"

"Oh, well, sorry."

"As the hinges of hell, yeah."

She'd already managed to set up a hovering cloud in front of herself with that Kent of hers. She nodded and smiled at me through the haze but, boy oh boy, I could feel the bubblings and eruptions of nastiness going off just beneath the thin surface of her, her temper threatening every moment to explode right through. I
wasn't sure if it was just the sight of me that had her so pissed off, or if she resented having to ask me for help or—who knows?—maybe she was always like this, percolating with wrath.

"And two kids?" she asked.

"Three. Two boys and a girl."

"And what do you—all, like, go to church together?"

"Whenever we can rustle up a Jew for the human sacrifice, sure."

"Well, jeez, don't get all defensive, Jason. I'm just asking."

"Yes, we go to church together. Every Sunday."

I got more of that appraising look from her. Her lips quirked, her eyes mocking and furious. More smoke. She shook her head. "I'm sorry. It's just when I think back..."

I shrugged.

"I can't believe anyone I used to fuck is a Republican. Oh, but maybe I can't say 'fuck' to you now."

"You can say anything you want."

"You mean because I'm going to hell anyway."

"Right, Lauren. That's what I mean." Hoping to deflect the onslaught, I pointed to the mantelpiece, to the framed photos. "What about you? You take these? You still doing photography?"

"Shit, no. I don't have time. One day..."

"That's your daughter, though."

"Serena, yeah."

"She's beautiful. Serena. Very pretty name. She go to school?"

"High school. She's a sophomore." Her answers were curt and grudging like that. She didn't want to be distracted from the business of attacking me. She stuck her tongue in her cheek, looked me up and down again, shook her head again. "Man, look at you. I can't get over it." There was a drooping tube of ash on her cigarette now. She flicked it violently into the tray. "If they only knew,
right? Your wife and kids. The sort of evil shit you used to get up to. Does your priest know? Your reverend or whatever he's called. What the hell? You should tell him, Jason. Might put a little excitement in his day." She made a sound like a laugh. Not a laugh, really, but a sound like a laugh. "The Scene. Right? Don't you ever miss it?"

"No."

"Liar."

"Why? Do you?"

"Not really. But it didn't come as naturally to me."

I shrugged again and waved her off. I didn't want her to think she was getting under my skin.

There was a dining alcove off one end of the room. A little space by the kitchen with an oval table and four wooden chairs—the kind of furniture that comes in boxes and you slap it together. I wandered in there as if to take a look around. I was really just trying to put some distance between us, maybe slow her down. Behind the table, there was a glass door. You could see through it into a postage stamp of backyard and on through a diamond-link fence into the backyard of the house on the next street over. There was a woman in the far yard, a woman in her forties but too soon old. She was slumped in a flannel nightgown. Holding a plastic bag full of trash. I watched her carry it to a can standing against the side of the house. What a depressing place this was.

"You know, I've been trying and trying to figure out why you called me," I said. "I mean, why you need help so urgently and why I would be the one you'd call for it after all these years."

I glanced back over my shoulder at her. She was still standing there the same as before. In her little cloud, her cigarette upraised. Still appraising me with that combination of mockery and rage.