Private Lies (3 page)

"...sautéed shrimp cakes with lime herb butter and
rocket salad," the waiter chanted. "Another appetizer is home-smoked
salmon with dill cream on toasted brioche."

Eliot and Maggie listened as if the young man's rendition
were a holy chant.

"And the pasta special is duck-filled herb raviolis
with zinfandel rosemary butter."

"Not doughy raviolis?" Eliot asked.

"I've had them," Maggie said. "Light as
feathers."

"For pizzas," the waiter continued, "the
chef suggests a pizza with artichokes, shiitake mushrooms, eggplant, and
caramelized garlic."

"As long as the chef is not too light-handed on the
garlic," Eliot said seriously.

"Eliot is a gourmet," Maggie said.

"Obviously," Ken offered, unable to control his
sarcasm. Then he said, "I'm more of a gourmand."

"There is a difference," Eliot said. His amused
tone struck Ken as nasal, as if the tip of his nose were angled slightly
upward.

"For a main dish," the waiter continued, "we
have farm-raised chicken with Italian parsley and double-blanched garlic. We
also have the sautéed sweetbreads with arugula salad and sherry wine vinegar
butter."

Ken felt a tickle of nausea and he washed it away with the
melted ice of his drink.

"How is that prepared?" Eliot asked. "Too
much oil would be fatal."

The waiter went into elaborate details, with both Maggie
and Eliot offering various comments. Odd, Ken mused, how the subject of food
reveals character. It struck Ken that Maggie's interest in it had an intensity
he hadn't quite noticed before.

"I'm inclined toward the sweetbreads," Eliot
announced. "And I'll start with the salmon."

"And I'll do the other, the chicken and begin with the
duck-filled raviolis."

"And your pleasure, darling?" Eliot said,
addressing Carol.

"A little green salad, dressing on the side, and angel
hair with garlic and basil."

"Boring but effective," Eliot sighed.

Carol ignored his comment. Still, she did not look toward
Ken.

"I'll have the same as this lady," Ken said,
pointing to Carol. He also pointed into his glass. "And another of
these."

He caught Eliot's sudden raised eyebrow and blink of
disapproval.

"Calls for white," Eliot said, with a barely
perceptible flutter of disdain.

The booze was giving Ken an edge, exaggerating his
sensitivity. Something was beginning to trouble him and he began to feel a
subtle shiver of irritation. Why was she deliberately not recognizing him? Soon
his mind was racing for reasons. Perhaps he had misread her. Maybe her success
"for a bit" was really an embarrassment to her. Maybe the injury that
apparently had cut short her career was merely an excuse for failure. Maybe she
genuinely had not recognized him. But if she did know who he was, well, then,
her failure to acknowledge him could only be interpreted as an insult. Now that
she was married to this super-tight-assed employer of his wife, why dredge up
the banal acquaintances of her lower-class origins? Booze could also induce a
mild paranoia, he decided, groping his way back to balance.

The waiter came with the white wine and Eliot tasted it,
making odd expressions as he sloshed the liquid around in his mouth.

"Too much acid," he said.

"Perhaps I should have recommended the Ggrich,"
the waiter said.

"I wish you would have earlier," Eliot replied
with flouncy superiority. They agreed on Ggrich and the waiter scurried off.
"Probably getting a commission on the other," Eliot sneered.

"The American way," Ken chuckled sarcastically,
wondering if his words were beginning to slur. He picked up his fresh drink and
sipped. Maggie's eyes flickered a sharp warning. With good reason. A snootful,
a rarity for him, could make him caustic, his words barbed and insulting.

I'll be fine, his eye reply to Maggie said as he aborted a
deeper sip on his drink, fishing with his fingers for the onions instead. He
had tried to catch Carol's expression from the corner of his eye, to see if she
had observed the caretaking exchange with his wife. No sign. He was relieved by
that. It wouldn't do at all for her to see how mother-smothered he had become,
not he, her manly deflowerer.

"So how long have you guys been married?" Maggie
asked as the waiter peppered her duck raviolis.

"Ten years," Carol said, chewing daintily on a
lettuce leaf.

Ken calculated that that would have put her at thirty, a
chronological watershed for most dancers who weren't established by that age.

"Are you a New Yorker?" Maggie asked. Off and
running now, she had a passion for personal history. Another mark of their
social inferiority, Ken supposed. He had married a busybody. Once he had
thought this quality attractive, a characteristic of her open and giving nature.

"I was born in Frankfurt," Carol replied.
"My father was an American army officer stationed there."

"French ancestors. Titled. Le Roc was her maiden name.
Great-grandfather was a marquis," Eliot said.

Ken felt an odd rearing sensation. Le Roc. American army
officer. Great-grandfather a marquis. What elaborate, unmitigated bullshit.
Carol was from Forest Hills. Born and bred. When he suddenly looked at her full
face she did not stir, her gaze still hidden. What's going on here? Ken
thought, glancing at the others, who ignored him. Eliot was intently sampling
Maggie's raviolis, nodding approval.

"Where did you study?" Maggie asked sweetly
without looking up.

"Paris, actually," Carol said. "My mother
insisted. Then I studied in San Francisco. I didn't get to Sydney until I was
twenty-three."

"Twenty-three? You don't look much more than that
now," Maggie said with obvious sincerity.

"Fact is, I'm thirty-one."

Jesus, Ken thought. She's lopped off ten years. The alcohol
buzz receded. Perhaps his own powers of recognition had been faulty.

"Robbed the cradle," Eliot said. "She's a
few years older than my son."

Ken reached for his glass and observed her over the rim.
Was this really Carol Stein? Or an alcoholic fantasy? The old Carol, the one
engraved in his memory, was not a dissembler. If this was the real Carol, she
was lying through her teeth.

"Carol's father was killed in Vietnam," Eliot interjected casually.

The declaration caught Ken in mid-swallow, although he
prevented himself from coughing. Mr. Stein, Carol's father, was an accountant,
an older man with thick glasses and badly fitted false teeth, hardly a warrior
and very overage for Vietnam.

"Tough break," Ken heard himself say.

"You poor girl," Maggie said with her Earth
Mother sincerity.

Ken felt absolutely compelled to join the investigation, if
only to validate his own sanity. He studied Carol's face. She still kept her
eyes hidden, but her hands, which had been transparent with blue veins showing,
were still transparent with blue veins showing, without a hint of the spots of
age that were beginning to sprout on the backs of his own hands. And when she
talked he saw that one crooked eyetooth which she thought flawed her smile, but
didn't as far as he was concerned.

For further identification there was a circle of brown
frecklelike beauty marks just above the areola of her perfectly shaped right
breast. This was hardly the place to go searching for that. There was also a
tiny half-moon scar at the upper end of her inner thigh just at the spot where
her public hair began. How's that for details, he thought, taking another sip
of his drink in self-congratulation. And there was more. He felt his skin
temperature rise as his mind began to search for some clever question that
might explode this preposterous myth. Then it came.

"Been to the Washington wall, Carol?"

She showed no reaction, nor did she raise her eyes to
acknowledge the question, concentrating instead on the lettuce in her barely
touched salad. When she didn't answer after an appropriate interval, he pressed
the point.

"You know the one. The Vietnam Memorial wall. All
those engraved names."

"Too painful, I'm afraid," she whispered.

"I might be going next week. I could make a rubbing of
your father's name." An inspired idea, he decided. He took out a ballpoint
from an inner pocket. Gotcha, he told her silently.

"To Washington, Ken?" Maggie asked. "You
never mentioned it."

"Research," Ken shrugged, his mind turning over,
alert, shocked to sobriety. Not once had Carol's eyes met his. "New candy
product. Minty marzipan. They want to make it look like real silver dollars.
Get the mint angle."

"And they pay you for this," Eliot said
sardonically, sipping his wine.

"Really," Ken pressed, ignoring Eliot's comment,
addressing Carol. "What was your father's name? Le Roc, was it?"

Only then did she look up at him, her eyes flashing a
brief, unmistakable warning to cease and desist. Whatever her reasons, this
particular subterfuge had been a mistake. Now he was dead certain. She hadn't
forgotten him at all. No way. She was hiding, all right. For reasons known only
to her, she had reinvented herself. A wry chuckle escaped his throat.

"I really would prefer you didn't," she said.

"Sure," he shrugged, retreating quickly, putting
the ball-point point back in his inside pocket. It was over. He had gotten what
he needed.

The waiter came with their main dishes.

"Marvelous," Maggie said, looking at the
concoction on her plate.

"You must try some," Eliot said, spearing a
sweetbread and popping it into Maggie's mouth. She did the same with her
chicken. They offered a chorus of appreciative oohs and ahs over the food.

Both Ken and Carol picked at their pasta, growing silent,
leaving the conversational field to Maggie and Eliot, who started on computers,
then turned to wildlife. Carol listened with rapt attention as Eliot's
intensity grew. No question about it, Ken could tell. The man was a fanatic
about his causes.

"Greed is endemic. Whole herds of elephants are being
massacred for their ivory. The rhinoceros is almost beyond saving. The leopard
is having lots of trouble coming back." He had adopted a slightly pompous,
pedagogic tone, lecturing in his superior, nasal voice. Maggie, Ken could tell,
was enthralled and Eliot was encouraged by her interest.

"Africa," Eliot continued, "is the standard
by which we must be judged. It's our most vulnerable continent. If our greed
destroys Africa, then we are all doomed. Not only is African wildlife
threatened, Africa itself is an endangered species."

"Africa is Eliot's particular interest," Maggie
said, turning to Ken, as if this lecture were for his benefit alone, which was
apparently true. He was the only real outsider in this group. "They've
been three times."

"Carol loves it as well," Eliot said, glancing
toward his wife. Then he launched into a long diatribe against man's methodical
destruction of Africa, "the planet's most important asset."

Maggie listened with rapt attention.

"He is inspiring when he gets going," she said to
Ken.

Not like me, Ken supposed she meant. By comparison, he felt
bested by Eliot's cool eloquence, his touted wisdom, his sense of purpose and
personal fulfillment. He was certain that Carol thought that as well. It was
obvious that Maggie did. On a scratch sheet Ken Kramer would show a lot longer
odds than Eliot Butterfield.

But on reflection, Ken decided that Eliot couldn't be all
that smart to fall prey to Carol's reconstituted history. Too much into
yourself to see the truth, eh tight-ass, Ken thought, feeling the bile of his
nastiness building again.

He was, in fact, puzzled by Carol's lies. They were public
lies, checkable lies. The business of the birth date alone. And the elaborate
convoluted personal history. Never mind the Le Roc on the wall memorial. Where
and how had Carol journeyed for two decades to bring her to this?

"We're off to Kenya again in a few months," Eliot
said. "Another safari. I try to go every two years. Draws me like a
magnet. Makes me sad, too, watching it go downhill." He turned to Maggie.
"Ever been?"

"No. But I'd love to," Maggie said, looking
toward Ken.

"We tent," Eliot said. "Not exactly the
Ritz, but remarkably comfortable. And I've got this fabulous guide. Former
white hunter until they banned it in 1977. Nobody like Jack Meade. Right,
Carol?"

"The best there is. It's a bit Spartan, very
nineteenth-century, but that's part of the charm."

"Ken's not much of a rough rider," Maggie
laughed. "He likes his creature comforts."

Must you. Now she was making him out to be a self-indulgent
weakling.

"Did the primitiveness bother you, Carol?" Maggie
asked.

"It took some getting used to," Carol said.
There, for a fleeting moment, was the old Carol, the one that didn't dissemble.

"Going downhill in a hand basket," Eliot said.
"Unless we do something drastic."

"We'd better hurry over, then," Ken said, unable
to hide the pique that had been building inside him. Don't, he warned himself,
rolling the pasta on his fork, stuffing his mouth to shut it up.

"We share our planet with lots of competing forms of
life," Eliot said. "We need a plan to balance it all, but first we
need to decide that we must have a plan. You see..." He was plunging into
it now, offering all that his thinking had wrought on this subject.

While Eliot spoke, barely pausing between bites and sips,
Ken's thoughts raced along another path.

Down memory lane.

THIS LOCAL GIRL had won a prize, coming in first in a
ballet competition sponsored by the New York Ballet Company. The prize was five
hundred dollars toward tuition at the ballet school run by the company. There
had been a brief piece in the
New York Times
announcing the prizes, and
Jack Holmes, the editor of the
Mid-Queens Post
, had sent Ken to
interview her. Local Forest Hills girl wins ballet prize. Two cents a word and
a byline.

Holmes liked Ken's stuff. It was a beginning, after all. He
was a senior at City College then, full of himself, borderline arrogant,
cocksure of his talent. Hadn't he mesmerized his fellow student writers when he
read his short story "The Other People" before the creative-writing
class just two days prior to that fateful interview?

Funny how that juxtaposition of detail had hung on,
appended itself to the recollection as if it were essential to his state of
mind at the time. Stunning, the teacher had said about his story. It had the
rhythm of a clear stream rolling down a mountain in springtime. Even that
hyperbolic image had stuck in his mind. He had his own private analysis,
redolent of Hemingway. It was about a man in crisis alone, not up in Hem's Michigan, but here in the wilderness of New York. He had sent it off to a prestigious
literary magazine and was certain of its acceptance.

He had been extremely lucky to get these assignments. Hell,
journalism was writing, albeit a notch down on the literary scale, but it had
an element of craft and he was good at it. And the bylines gave him a sense of
authorship and would look impressive in a portfolio.

Despite literary pretensions, Ken could not escape his
failed father's admonition that one was compelled to scheme toward one's
practical economic future. Of course, he was absolutely certain that he was
programmed for early literary discovery, which didn't mean that he couldn't
hedge his bets.

"Won't do to get left behind," his father had
warned. "Like me."

His mother of blessed memory, his most avid reader, had
never faltered in her belief that he could be anything he wished. An amateur
genealogist, she had tracked a literary bent back four generations to a
great-uncle from Kozin, a shtetl not far from Kiev where amusing stories had
appeared in the local paper, scrupulously preserved in cellophane and carried
across in steerage on the U.S.S.
St. Louis
by Ken's great-grandmother.
He had read them in translation from the Yiddish. They had struck him as
extremely clever, and his mother had impressed upon him that such tendencies
and talent could come down through the blood.

He took that as one more clue to a growing conviction that
he was being urged on by some inner force, some mysterious and compelling need
to become a writer, a teller of stories.

"He always loved to make up stories," his mother
had told anyone within earshot, as if, for her, his writing career had always
been a foregone conclusion. From earliest childhood the use of words had
fascinated him. He had also been an early talker, reader, and compulsive
frequenter of the public library.

As early as elementary school he had shown signs of
literary talent, winning a poetry prize in the seventh grade. Later he became
editor of the high school paper and literary magazine. And it was always Ken
Kramer who was called upon to write the class satire or a speech for his
favored candidate running for the student council. Weren't these activities the
foreshadowing of his future?

"This is a very talented boy," his mother had
been told again and again when she appeared on open-school days.

The writing gift also had a profoundly positive effect on
his popularity with his classmates and friends, especially when puberty arrived
and he could write good rhyming love poetry to the girls. His friends had
concluded that this was the true reason why he was the first of their crowd to
go all the way sexually with a female. He had just turned fifteen.

Such early successes had made the idea of a brilliant
literary career a natural progression and, therefore, prophetic. From that conviction
flowed the decision to major in English at City College, much to the chagrin of
his unemployed and expendable bookkeeper father, who, by then, was plagued by a
certain fear that his son would emulate his own failure.

On the other hand, although she had never gone to college,
his mother had always read voraciously and encouraged him in his pursuit. His
father, true to his fears, would have preferred that his son, at the minimum,
become a CPA like his sister's husband.

"Writing is not a career that you pick," his
mother had repeatedly explained to his father. "It picks you." The
explanation invariably confused the poor, beaten man, whose experience had
convinced him that becoming a professional man was the ultimate ticket to
financial security. Logic, after all, was on his side.

But Ken reveled in his mother's explanation and agreed with
it. How else to explain the thrill of being transported beyond himself when he
read the stories of Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, F.
Scott Fitzgerald, and others? It was as if these writers were pulling him into
their circle.

Yet even then, he recognized a dark side to his mother's
militant support of his grandiose ambitions. His father, although a sweet,
gentle man, had no obvious creative impulses, no compelling drives. It showed,
of course, in the modesty of his income and in the simple adequacy of creature
comforts in the household.

The background music of Ken's early life was his mother's
perpetual drumbeat of disappointment over the man's failure. There was no other
word for it.

"How can you be satisfied with being nobody, taking
crumbs," his mother would rant. "Where is your pride? Is this kind of
failure a good example for your children?"

"I do my best," his father would say, or some
variation of the same theme. "I didn't have the opportunities."

"You didn't take them," his mother would counter.

"He gets a free education," his father would
reason. "He could be a professional man. Look at me. I'm an example of
what happens when you're not a professional man."

"A writer is a professional man," his mother
would point out.

"No. A writer is a gambler. He could do it on the
side. First he should be a breadwinner."

"Like you, I suppose."

"That's the whole point."

"You don't understand. You're born an artist. You have
no choice. He's not like you. You have to be dedicated. You can't do it on the
side. It takes every ounce of his being."

Every ounce of his being. Of course. She had it right as
far as it went. But experience would teach him that even dedication and
obsession were not enough. And yet, not once did he ever inject himself into
his parents' psychological Ping-Pong, which seemed to permeate their lives when
he was in his late teens. He told himself that he had too much love for them
and too much delicacy to be involved in their marriage wars. Yet, in a profound
way, their words seemed to define himself to himself.

To have this fierce maternal support that brooked no doubt
was an enormous motivating factor. Her early death from cancer had robbed him
of her supportive presence, but spared her from the ultimate realization of his
failure, although she might not have defined it that way. It could be argued
that he had made it as a writer. Couldn't it?

There was guilt in it, of course. But it was always
mitigated in his own mind by the way he had said his farewells, hoping to
fulfill her most fervent wish by reading the entire seven volumes of
Remembrance
of Things Past
by Marcel Proust to her as she lay dying.

"Thank God my Ken doesn't do anything halfway,"
she told him, drifting away with a smile, her hand in his. He had barely
finished
Swann's Way
, the first volume in the series.

It was that kind of emotional baggage that Ken Kramer
carried into Carol Stein's home on that fateful day in early July.

He had entered her family's modest red-brick row house on 108th Street in Forest Hills. Carol's mother ushered him into the living room where Carol
sat, her legs tucked under her, in the center of an overstuffed couch.

Her mother had pointed him to an upholstered chair, one of
two beside the cocktail table in front of the couch where Carol sat. Carol's
mother took the other chair.

Observing the room, Ken was struck by one central fact.
This family's life and fortunes were totally tied to Carol Stein's aspirations.
There were pictures in silver frames almost exclusively of Carol. Carol on a
pony. Carol in a tutu as a tot. A spindly Carol, all legs, dancing on her toes.
The exception was a wedding picture of two people who obviously were her
parents. Her father, with his thick glasses and doughy features, her mother,
all smiles and dimply in the picture. In real life the woman seemed far more
intense, extremely earnest. There was no doubt about it, his insight told him.
Her daughter's career was the only real spark in an otherwise colorless life.

"We're very proud that she won," Mrs. Stein had
said, looking at Carol.

There were lots of plants in the house, and spears of
sunlight coming through the window made Carol's eyes glow green. There was not
a spare ripple of flesh on her delicate kittenlike face, framed by black hair
parted in the middle. She was wearing a gray skirt that fringed perfect, smooth
kneecaps, and a white silk shirtwaist with a bow that flowed down to her chest.

She struck him as a kind of living Dresden doll with creamy
skin and a shy smile and eyes that were alert and curious, not at all shy. He
remembered being drawn to them. From that first moment she had stirred
something in him.

"Isn't she just a perfect Cinderella. That's the piece
she used from the second act when they're at the ball and..."

"I'm sure Mr. Kramer knows the story of Cinderella,
Mama."

"Well, it was hard work, you know," Mrs. Stein
said. "This is an art that requires absolute discipline and focus."

"No artist can succeed without that," Ken said,
still locked into Carol's gaze. She seemed to offer her silent consent. He
wondered what impression he was making on her, knowing such a thought was a
distinctly unjournalistic response. He was, after all, the observer. What should
it matter how he was observed by his subject?

"And how do you feel about winning first prize, Miss
Stein?" Ken asked, an open pad resting on his thigh, his ballpoint at the
ready.

Carol hesitated, losing eye contact, observing her fingers,
looking uncomfortable as she groped for the right words.

"She's still quite excited," Mrs. Stein said,
coming to her rescue as she nervously fingered a string of pearls.

"I never thought I'd win," Carol said modestly in
a soft voice.

"She's very determined, Mr. Kramer," Mrs. Stein
said.

"That's what it takes," Ken said knowingly.
"Nothing less."

"Night and day she worked," Mrs. Stein said.
"She barely eats. She's at the bar first thing in the morning."

"Just a bar fly," Carol said, offering a smile.
"Mother, shouldn't we offer Mr. Kramer some tea?"

"Of course."

Mrs. Stein struggled out of the deep chair and went off
into the kitchen, leaving Ken alone with Carol.

"My family's very supportive," Carol sighed.
"Maybe overly so. Considering what I have to go through, it's practically
a requirement."

"It means a great deal to you, doesn't it? A career in
ballet?" Ken asked.

"Everything, I'm afraid. It's my life."

Her eyes had again locked into his and he felt her
commitment and sincerity. Her intensity filled the room, although he seemed
even then to detect something beyond that in her eyes, something indecipherable
but compelling. Suddenly she uncurled her legs and stood up, walking about the
room.

He was surprised at her height, which was much greater than
had appeared when she'd been sitting on the couch, and when she walked she
reminded him of a reed being swayed by a gentle breeze. He noted that her legs,
displayed under her short skirt, were perfectly proportioned and lightly
muscled. Her walk seemed like a glide, her buttocks' movement rhythmical.
Without warning, the sight stirred an erotic thrill in Ken.

"This scholarship will at least take the financial
pressure off my parents," Carol said, as if to herself. She might have
said more, but he hadn't caught it.

At that moment, Mrs. Stein came in with a tray that held
tea, cups, and chocolate chip cookies.

"No sacrifice is too much," Mrs. Stein said.
"Ours is nothing compared to hers. A career in ballet requires a hundred
percent. Right, Carol? No. A hundred and ten percent. Believe me, if she was
not giving that, we would have to think twice."

"I wish there was a shortcut," Carol said, moving
back to the couch. She sat down and again tucked her legs under her. He caught
a brief glimpse of white panty, which embarrassed him, as if he had been
watching for it, which he was. He felt his face flush and he turned away.

"I started her at three," Mrs. Stein said.
"This scholarship could put her in the New York City Ballet Corps de
Ballet before she's eighteen." Mrs. Stein looked at her daughter
pointedly. "I know she will do it."

"It's no big deal, Mama. Baronova, Riabouchinska, and
Toumanova were all under fifteen when they became famous."

"She gets paranoid sometimes about time. Remember,
Pavlova never retired, danced right up until she died at fifty."

Mrs. Stein poured the tea, handed Ken a cup, and offered
him a chocolate chip cookie, which he took. She poured out a cup for Carol,
then herself. Then she settled back into the chair and put the cookie dish on
her lap.

"This is my very first interview," Carol said,
her voice modulated and mellow. She sipped the tea, but did not reach for a
cookie.