Private Lies
Authors: Warren Adler
Tags: #Fiction, Short Stories, Romance, Contemporary, Fantasy
BOOKS BY WARREN ADLER
Banquet Before Dawn
Blood Ties
Cult
Death of a Washington Madame
Empty Treasures
Flanagan's Dolls
Funny Boys
Madeline's Miracles
Mourning Glory
Natural Enemies
Private Lies
Random Hearts
Residue
The Casanova Embrace
The Children of the Roses
The David Embrace
The Henderson Equation
The Housewife Blues
The War of the Roses
The Womanizer
Trans-Siberian Express
Twilight Child
Undertow
We Are Holding the President
Hostage
SHORT STORIES
Jackson Hole, Uneasy Eden
Never Too Late For Love
New York Echoes
New York Echoes 2
The Sunset Gang
MYSTERIES
American Sextet
American Quartet
Immaculate Deception
Senator Love
The Ties That Bind
The Witch of Watergate
Copyright ©
1991
by Warren Adler.
ISBN 978-1-59006-092-6
All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced
in any form without permission. This novel is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, places, incidents are either the product
of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
Inquiries: WarrenAdler.com
STONEHOUSE PRESS
Epigraph from
The Snows of Kilimanjaro
by Ernest
Hemingway. Reprinted with permission of the Hemingway Foreign Rights Trust and
Charles Scribner's Sons, an imprint of Macmillan Publishing Company. Copyright
© 1936 by Ernest Hemingway, renewed 1964 by Mary Hemingway.
"Kilimanjaro is a snow covered
mountain 19,710 feet high and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its
western summit is called the Masai 'Ngaje Ngbi', the House of God. Close to its
summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained
what the leopard was seeking at that altitude."
--ERNEST HEMINGWAY,
The Snows of Kilimanjaro
IT ALL BEGAN, as Ken perceived it, with a sudden fit of
precognition, and he knew instantly that the mooring lines that stabilized his
life were about to show the first signs of major slippage.
He had been observing this couple just coming out of the
slanting April rain all aflutter and out of breath as they shook off drops from
their raincoats before handing them over to the hatcheck girl at Pumpkins, the
pricey restaurant on Second Avenue, Maggie's choice, where the cooking was West
Coast eclectic and the atmosphere luxury-liner Art Deco.
Ken, who was sitting facing the restaurant's entrance, saw
her first in profile as she patted her cheeks dry with a tissue. Couldn't be,
he decided at first, realizing suddenly that he had actually searched for her
face in crowds for more than two decades.
Of course, he tried denying it, knowing it was the trigger
to this precognition. No Way. This could not be Carol Stein. The process of
aging cannot stand still. Yet he could not tear his gaze away. There was that
same easy grace of the floating swan, the same question-mark dancer's posture,
the same high-cheekboned cat's face, the same angled head, emphasizing the
sharp line of tilted chin overhanging the long, thin, white neck.
Aside from the emotional power of this hard punch to the
solar plexus of his psyche, his physical reactions, too, took him by surprise.
His heart seemed to skip a beat, many beats. His back broke out into a cold
sweat and his throat ran dry.
Then his wife, Maggie, waved and the tall man in the blue
double-breasted wide pinstripe and elegant gold-and-blue-striped tie beside
this replica of Carol Stein acknowledged the gesture with a movement of his
own, tapping the shoulder of the woman who could not be Carol Stein.
He watched her move toward him with a ballerina's dainty
precision, her body gliding in step with some inner rhythm that made her long
challis skirt seem driven by a gentle breeze over soft kid boots. The movement
seemed to have a remembered signature, vibrating an old erotic chord within
him.
Was this Carol Stein walking into his life after
twenty-three years? He felt a blast of heat from that old furnace, firing up
the passion and possession that had inflamed his youthful soul.
As she came closer, denial faltered and he felt trapped
with all exits closed off. He would be an exhibit for her to observe and gloat
over. Another tide of anxiety washed over him as he imagined the bloated
remains of his former being lying on a cold slab awaiting Carol Stein's
coroner's knife. Who could hide one's failure from that kind of scrutiny? He
felt ashamed, the bitter bile of his lost dreams on the verge of exposure.
Suddenly there was no place to hide.
Ironically, Ken had resisted this dinner. Earlier, he had
been overflowing with self-satisfaction and self-esteem. A top client of the
agency had approved his campaign. His butt was bruised with kisses. He had been
showered with praise, accolades, the usual exaggeration that was the idiom of
the advertising business. They had, in fact, used the familiar buzzwords:
creative
genius, a gargantuan talent, awesome brilliance
.
Of course, he understood the hyperbole. It was all part of
the self-congratulatory culture of the advertising game. And the truth of it
was that he had actually exhausted himself by feigning humility. An advertising
copywriter could feign that often. It was expected. It telescoped to others
that he knew he was good.
For this present exercise in painful knife-in-the-flesh
truth, he had had to turn down his colleagues' celebration dinner in which he
would be the trophy guest, able to bask all evening in the warm syrup of their
admiration. This getting-to-know-you appointment with Maggie's client, the
formidable Eliot Butterfield, would be strictly Maggie's show.
And here was the sight of this facsimile of Carol Stein,
steering his thoughts into these dark cobwebbed corners, and forcing a
confrontation with the dead past. Except that it wasn't dead, could never be
dead. It flushed out reminders of the glory days of possibility and promise,
and directed his attention to the reality of his defeat.
It had been the moment he had feared for more than two
decades.
How old had he been in the season of Carol Stein?
Twenty-one, was it? It was still a time when he had been dead certain of his
talent and his future. Hadn't his teachers, his friends, his mother especially,
through elementary school, high school, and college, assured him that he had
the literary right stuff?
He had thought of himself as Hemingway incarnate. Hemingway
in those years was his literary god, and the imitative rhythms of his prose
reflected it. Ken had a way with words, they all said, stretching his
confidence, feeding his ambition and all those secret fantasies of fame and
celebrity.
If encouragement was judgment, he was destined, according
to them, to walk in his master's footsteps. Of course, he believed it. Doubt is
not a serious issue at sixteen. Even at twenty-one, in the season of Carol
Stein, the dream was reasonably intact, although hard reality, the so-called
real world, had already begun to rattle the foundations of certainty.
Had she made it, scaled the heights, become the prima
ballerina of her young obsession? Had the sacrifice of their love been worth
the candle? For her? For him? Actually, he could not remember a time when he
was so acutely embarrassed by his failure. Especially since, in the narrow
world of advertising, most people considered him a success. It had been a
comfortable illusion.
God, he hadn't felt such obvious regret for what might have
been for years. Perhaps this was not
the
Carol Stein, he thought
hopefully, but an apparition. Go away, he begged it. Only it still kept coming,
challenging his vanity, his sense of himself, his essence.
He dared not face her, dared not allow himself even to
consider jogging her recollection. He could not bear the idea of showing her
his failed self, especially if she had been successful, was successful. Worse
for him, on the arm of this solid-looking, confident fellow, she looked
successful.
Twenty-three years ago, still at least five years too late
to be trendy, he wore the Jesus look, a beard, long hair, and little round
glasses. Now he was slightly balding in front, the jet black was flecked with
peppery gray, and he had shaved the beard. Now he wore contacts, the
extended-wear kind. He wished he were wearing sunglasses to further hide his
eyes from her. The eyes, he asked himself, the good old windows on the soul,
would they be the dead giveaway?
She was coming closer now, moving in tandem with this tall,
elegant man who had acknowledged Maggie. He felt himself flush, the heat
dampening the thinning wisps on his forehead.
Would she recognize him? Him? At twenty-one, America's greatest unknown writer. First would come the novels, the prose sharp and clean.
True sentences marching like determined battalions across the page as true as
"Up in Michigan," as true as "The Snows of Kilimanjaro,"
truer maybe than "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." He had
pretensions then. True, indeed.
As for Carol Stein, she was to be a prima ballerina, the
heiress to the mantle of Margot Fonteyn, Moira Shearer, Maria Tallchief. It was
she, Carol Stein, who would be the half-bird, half-woman of Stravinsky's
Firebird
,
the equal of Markova's Giselle, the Sugar Plum Fairy of
The Nutcracker
.
Not maybe. Assuredly. Talk about dreams that burn, Carol Stein's was as hot and
focused as nuclear fusion. Like his.
Put on this the added burden of addictive love, consuming
passion, red-hot lust, Kismet, or however one describes unquenchable hormonic
eruption, and you get a flame too greedy to compete with other obsessions. Like
ballet. Like literary achievement. Discipline demanded they end it. Didn't it?
He tried his best to ridicule the idea in the light of later events. What,
after all, had all that burning ambition achieved?
But then, twenty-three years ago, to part seemed the only
logical alternative, the only cure, which resulted in a necessary, cruel,
wrenching but brave and courageous act. Cold-turkey amputation. How else to
describe it? Try as he might to drive the memory away with ridicule and
sarcasm, it was just too powerful to fully obliterate.
The parting was bad enough. Worse, he recalled the promise.
In keeping with the passion of their relationship, they took solemn oaths to
pick up the reins when they had "become," made it. In two, three
years, maybe five, bemedaled and enshrined, they swore reunion, fealty, and
faithfulness. Even in the recollection, the melodrama of it was beyond excess.
From the beginning it was all excess, magnified and
multiplied. Everything was ritual and ceremony. Sex was holy. Their lovemaking
had the fury of exorcism.
"You must," she had cried that first time, urging
him to thrust forward past the pain of what they then called that tight,
unopened palace of her womanhood. Oh, God. To suffer that purple image now was
a mortification.
But still she came forward and he remained frozen and
fearful, unable to take his eyes off that smooth, chiseled, almost ageless
alabaster face, probing his memory for clues. Is she or isn't she? Since he was
not going to melt or disappear, he girded himself for this surreal reunion.
"The cab service was a half hour late," Eliot
said, offering a smooth apology in an accent that resonated with upper-crust
schooling, making it clear by implication that he was not one to chase cabs on
rain-swept New York streets. Certainly not like Ken had done.
Eliot took Maggie's hand, Maggie looking up at Eliot's
craggy features, all ruddy with charm and good cheer. He was extraordinarily
tall, with steel-blue eyes and a sweeping ski-run nose. His forehead was high
and shiny, crowned by a full head of dark wavy hair with distinguished gray
side-burns. Thin lips tightened over large teeth in what passed for a smile but
seemed suspiciously insincere. Ken, perhaps in order to avoid facing the real
or ersatz Carol, was actually studying him comparatively, which embarrassed
him. He was older than Ken, perhaps by a decade, big-boned, his hands large and
hard, not fleshy.
"My husband, Ken," Maggie said as the men's hands
joined. Eliot's glance lingered for a proper moment until his hand disengaged
and touched Carol's shoulder.
"And this is Carol," Eliot said with a lilting
air of pride and possession, as if he were showing off a prized grey-hound. Not
the
Carol. Surely not.
"So nice to meet you at last," Carol said to
Maggie.
She was never a broad smiler with her mouth. It was her
eyes that always danced a greeting, hazel eyes that often picked up any green
within sight. As they did now. She wore an emerald pin on a cream-colored
jewel-necked cash-mere sweater. Her black hair, parted in the center,
ballerina-style, was, slicked back severely, emphasizing her sculpted features.
After acknowledging Maggie, the woman's eyes shifted toward
him and he braced himself. There was no question in his mind now. Here she was.
Carol Stein, reborn. His stomach lurched as his eyes, after the briefest
flicker, evaded hers. In that split second he knew that he had not the courage
to make the first move of recognition. Perhaps he would escape, he told
himself, vowing to let her make the first move.
"My husband, Ken," Maggie said. Ken forced
himself to lock into her gaze. Here's your chance, he told himself. She offered
not the barest hint, not an iota of recognition.
"Pleased to meet you," Carol said.
He had taken her hand, feeling for signals. None came,
although for him the touch had had the impact of a lightning bolt.
Despite his desire not to be recognized, he was crushed by
the lack of it. How was it possible? Perhaps it merely mirrored his self-image,
made even more self-critical by this eventâthat of the failed man whose only
attainment had been anonymity.
Then, suddenly, as quickly as it had come, the idea of his
failure slithered like a snake back to its dry and rocky den. He was reclaiming
his courage. His coping mechanism was activated. He assured himself that in his
universe, the advertising world, he was looked up to, considered enormously
creative, an appellation of great prestige value. There were times when he had
loved it, believed it, had gamboled in the swill of its cachet and status. All
right, against the old dream, the dream of becoming the great writer, the
"creative" label was, in a sense, a debasement of the term, not to be
confused with the real thing. He had always known it was bullshit. But in the
increasingly junky American culture it had its place. Who could tell a great
writer from a hack these days? And in terms of labels such as
"creative," a "best" seller was rarely really best and half
of them were skewered to pander to fantasies of suburban females. Weren't they?
"A Stoly Gibson on the rocks with three onions,"
Ken told the waiter, feeling the salutary effects of his venting. Eliot ordered
a bottle of French red, fussing over the wine list with half-glasses, showing
serious interest, as he probed the waiter for explanations about the year and
the vineyard.
Maggie listened raptly, her long blonde hair rustling as
her head moved between Eliot and the waiter. Ken was suddenly aware of the
contrast between the women. The one delicate, black-haired, swanlike; the other
large-boned, yellow blonde, blue-eyed, sculpted out of northern-clime Norwegian
stock.
"Suit everyone?" Eliot asked, choosing the wine
finally. Carol nodded.
"Sounds great," Maggie said. "But Ken isn't
much for wine."
"Make mine a double," Ken called to the waiter as
he moved away. Maggie cut him a glance of disapproval, then turned back to
Eliot.
Maggie, no question about it, was impressed with Eliot
Butterfield. She was a software consultant, installing and creating computer
programs for various clients on a freelance basis. Eliot Butterfield was a
client. Maggie, wearing her midwestern openness on her sleeve, was often an
enthusiast about people, and when she was impressed with one or another of her
clients, the invariable game plan was to drag Ken out to dinner as a first step
to greater intimacy.