Study in Perfect (7 page)

My mother too was gifted with an unusually keen social intelligence, or “shit detector,” as she called it. She distrusted Phil Donahue, and G. Gordon Liddy
before
the Watergate scandal broke. Though Lutheran by baptism, she had a Jewish impatience with niceties, euphemisms, whitewashing, and could see from a mile away whether someone was faking it.

This made my adolescence difficult. To honor my curfew, I went to my room at eleven, locked my door, climbed onto a chair under the window, cranked the handle, squeezed through, and dropped to the begonias below. Then I'd walk briskly to the bridge by Mohegan and Goldsboro, where my boyfriend stood smoking under haloed streetlights. Night after night after night, our relationship secretly flourished.

Weeding the side yard one hot afternoon, my mother spotted
the crushed flowers. I blurted out an explanation: “It must have been those dogs. A whole pack of them. Look what they've done!” We both knew the real story. To my mother, it wasn't worth the fight, so nothing surfaced, little changed, except perhaps my avoidance of her begonias when I leapt into the steamy dark.

In common use from the fourteenth all the way up to the seventeenth century was the adjective
gull
, of Germanic origin, which meant, “yellow or pale.” The noun
gull
referred to “an unfledged bird, especially a gosling.” A young, inexperienced bird, pale and yellow, might be easily deceived. From this comes the word
gullible
.

Though pale, Sister Paulette was no fledgling bird, sparrow nor goose. Neither was my mother.

Kindness should override truth.
—
SAMUEL BUTLER

I don't think my parents ever lied to me. The worst I remember is a kind of imprecision. When asked about the results of my IQ test, my mom responded, “Oh, somewhere between your father's and mine.” I could tell, in the name of tenderness, she allowed herself a white lie, a clean cloth over a knotty table. I was satisfied with her answer and sat like a sparrow, safe between my parents on the swaying intelligence wire.

The truth is often too hurtful, terrifying, unpleasant, mundane, or confusing to deal with. It begs embellishment. As a
consequence, in varying degrees, for multiple reasons lying is an essential element of social interaction. Here are four points on a possibly infinite list of examples:

• Joni Mitchell doesn't wear makeup: “Not really. A little blush, concealer, a dash of mascara, a little color on the lips. And that's it.” Joni wants us to think her beauty is effortless. The
Times
calls this “makeup denial.”

• Please do not call them McMansions. They are “luxury estates,” a phrase that conjures up Versailles, Fontainebleau, Kensington Gardens in the dappled, rolling hills of France or England. For a mere $5 or 6 million, you too can be a count, lord or lady, prince or princess from a long line of blue bloods.

• The director promises to get you started in the very next play, scheduled for spring. When you don't sleep with him, the part never materializes; you can't even get him on the phone.

• “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” said President Clinton. Note his avoidance of the contraction “didn't,” as well as his reference to “that woman,” formalizing, and distancing himself from Monica Lewinsky. Thousands of teenagers are now “abstaining from sex” by practicing fellatio. This benefits boys in particular, a happy new population of Little Bills.

A lie is a social tool. We lie to avoid consequences—hurting the feelings of a loved one, embarrassment, failure, impeachment,
jail, or sometimes just because it's easier than relaying the complicated truth. (I borrowed the sweater from my sister who borrowed it from her roommate who bought it at a thrift shop. Or: Thank you. I don't remember where I got it.) We also lie to get something we want, whether it is a fluffier version of our lackluster selves, a longer vacation, membership in some elite intellectual group, or a house in the Pacific Palisades.

Even animals will lie. Our hound dog Emma sleeps on the living room couch; it's her spot, her kingdom. When her sibling Monty hops up there before her, she rushes to the front door to let roll her mellifluous, hound-dog bellow. There is, of course, no intruder. We all know she's faking, except Monty, who jumps off the couch to join in the fray. Who can blame him? It's the wolf's cry, the irresistible bugle call of the hunt. He's bewitched and falls for it every time. As soon as he lands on all fours, Emma stops barking abruptly and leaps onto the couch before Monty knows what hit him.

There are some cases where lying is a virtue in the animal kingdom. Consider the nesting plover who spots a predator and immediately begins an elaborate charade of limping, squealing, dragging and dipping of one supposedly broken wing toward an adjacent sand dune and away from her brood. Animals dissemble for many of the same reasons we do. Monty's hair rises along his spine and he grows two inches taller. A magnificent frigate bird puffs up its scarlet feathers until its throat is bigger than a bear's heart. Plants too: The mountain laurel's pollen-coated, spring-loaded stamens are painted a bright, alluring pink. From scent and color, the lady-slipper creates a tantalizing canoe-shaped trap for bees and spiders.

Rocks and cement do not lie. The very idea is absurd. It appears the lie is a characteristic of living things, an extension of
Darwinian notions of natural selection. The liar, whether plant or animal, casts a spell for a handful of reasons: to jump-start the reproductive process, protect its young, defend its territory, escape predation, scare or intimidate rivals, or otherwise appear more fit in the world's eye.

The most enchanting things in nature
and art are based on deception
.
—
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Here is a poem that describes a deception gone wild, from Jeffrey Harrison's collection
Feeding the Fire
:

OUR OTHER SISTER

The cruelest thing I did to my younger sister
wasn't shooting a homemade blowdart into her knee,
where it dangled for a breathless second

before dropping off, but telling her we had
another, older sister who'd gone away.
What my motives were I can't recall: a whim,

or was it some need of mine to toy with loss,
to probe the ache of imaginary wounds?
But that first sentence was like a string of
DNA

that replicated itself in coiling lies
when my sister began asking her desperate questions.
I called our older sister Isabel

and gave her hazel eyes and long blonde hair.
I had her run away to California
where she took drugs and made hippie jewelry.

Before I knew it, she'd moved to Santa Fe
and opened a shop. She sent a postcard
every year or so, but she'd stopped calling.

I can still see my younger sister staring at me,
her eyes widening with desolation
then filling with tears. I can still remember

how thrilled and horrified I was
that something I'd just made up
had that kind of power, and I can just feel

the blowdart of remorse stabbing me in the heart
as I rushed to tell her none of it was true.
But it was too late. Our other sister

had already taken shape, and we could not
call her back from her life far away
or tell her how badly we missed her.

The first false sentence the speaker recalls in this poem—the pronouncement and vague shape of another sister—is the easiest. But a lie is seldom solitary; it begs another and another, until an imaginary skeleton is built, bone by bone, muscle and flesh, a sister-hologram with hobbies, home, hair. The greater the detail, the less likely she will crumble. The longer her history, the greater the strain, until he can't even make the truth believable and must suffer “the blowdart of remorse.”

Initially, the speaker lies to get what he wants. Perhaps it began with a whim. Or big-brother meanness, like the homemade blowdart. Perhaps indeed the speaker was “toying with loss,” or probing “the ache of imaginary wounds.” Whatever the motivation, the lie flatters the liar. Like Joni Mitchell's makeup denial or the frigate bird's magnificent feathers, the lie allows him “that kind of power.”

True consciousness, the recognition of self, separated from world, occurs at around age seven, the age at which a child also begins to lie. Teenagers are notorious liars. They lie about their whereabouts, drugs and alcohol, school attendance, grades, boyfriends, sex, mostly to avoid punishment from various authority figures. But they lie to their friends as well, boosting their intelligence, sexual experience, cool quotient. The high social pressure of adolescence makes them desperate for any and every kind of “spell.” It is often a way of
being
. Bonnie once told her teacher she had been abused and now her parents were divorcing. She noticed how victims were getting all the attention, their status clearly elevated to the point of celebrity. Again, we were pulled into the Sister's office as the first step in a kind of intervention. We could see the open training manual on her desk, as well as a Xeroxed list of professional counselors.

Perhaps lying follows the natural curve of a child's independence—my lie makes me NOT YOU. My lie makes me ME. Human beings are not ants who, lifelong, remain committed to their basic job description. We have the ability to depart from
communal dependence. The lie, whether to avoid or get something, is the primitive beginning of the effort to distinguish oneself.

Like most young people, I experimented with a variety of personas, from Amazonian firefighter to urban botanist to country schoolteacher. Only the poet stuck, but even then, in order to write poems, I faked masculinity. I dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt, sat at a table swept clean of comforting objects. Then I imagined how a guy would see the mule grazing in my front yard, the piles of rotten Osage oranges, dirt road winding out to our mailbox, and grackles decimating the few tomatoes left in our garden. I feigned confidence. My voice deepened and I began to write, using description as a way in.

Back then, this maleness was where most of the published works came from, where the good ideas lived, or so it seemed. My poems had almost nothing to do with my true life; they were chill, disembodied fabrications. But I believed in them, and they were successful, published in prestigious literary magazines.