The Lie (37 page)
And so on my graduation day,
instead of having a conversation with my father about my need to be free to pursue my own path in life, I took my first step down the one he had walked before me.
After spending a few hours at Heather’s sorority house, I was forced by her to attend a celebratory dinner with her mother, her sister, my father, and my father’s wife. My nausea during the entire event was extreme. The smiles on the faces of each person present, mine included, betrayed the actuality of the circumstance. I wondered who my next wife would be.
At some point in the evening my father took me aside and told me that he was extremely proud of me and that he hadn’t even known that Heather and I had been serious for long enough to think about marriage. He told me that he couldn’t wait for his first grandchild, and he hoped it would be a boy who would run the company when I got too old to do it—which brought him to what he considered to be further cause for celebration. He told me that one of the positions of junior vice president of regional sales had just opened up and I was to begin work at the company headquarters in Las Colinas as soon as I wanted to. He impressed upon me that there was no real rush and hoped that I would spend some time with Heather in order to relax and enjoy life a little bit, maybe go to Europe, but when I was ready in a month or so the position was mine. He claimed to be excited to work side by side with me.
I told myself there would always be time to change my life, to have the conversation with my father that I should have been having with him on that day, to find my own path in the world. But I knew that was a lie.
I worked at the movie theater full time until I got enough money to move out of my parents’ house and into my own apartment. I remain one semester’s worth of credits short of graduating and I haven’t really given much thought to trying to finish undergrad. I’m going to reapply to some different out-of-state med schools next year. I think my MCAT scores and my grades in the pre-req classes should be good enough to get me in. But any school I apply to is going to ask why I got expelled from SMU as an undergrad, and they’ll probably have access to my records, so if I just make something up, they’ll know I’m lying. I don’t hang out with Brett too much, as I’m sure you can imagine. It’d be a little weird.
In the end things didn’t work out as well as I would have hoped, I guess. But like they turned out pretty good. Kyle got seriously fucked over. I heard he was working at a video store or a movie theater or something. I mean that’s pathetic. I got married to Brett, which could be better, but I’m still Mrs. Brett Keller and we got to have like an incredible wedding with like two hundred people and everything and Kyle didn’t get invited. He and Brett don’t really talk all that much anymore. Brett had an invitation for him, but I threw it in the trash when I mailed them all. Brett doesn’t really want to, but I think his dad really wants us to like have a baby so we’re going to start trying. I think he fucks other girls, but he has sex with me pretty regularly actually, so whatever. He works all day and I just mainly like decorate our house, which is so amazing. It’s not like as big as his dad’s or anything, but it’s really nice in Plano and we have a pool and everything. I have pretty much everything that matters and I really like my life.
In the beginning each day was akin to passing a kidney stone. The circumstances of my existence were so difficult for me to accept that I experienced headaches, had trouble sleeping, eating, et cetera. I hated my job. I despised my wife. I missed my best friend. As time wore on, these things became easier to accept, or more accurately the pain they caused me became easier to dismiss. The tedious and meaningless functions of my job became comfortable routine. The sharp hatred I maintained for my wife and all women like her drifted into general apathy that made me able to tolerate her. The memories I clung to of time spent with Kyle in our youth faded into emotionless mental abstraction. I found pleasure in the repetitive pattern that my life had become. My father has made his desire for a grandchild clear. Heather wants a child. I will more than likely oblige them both within a year’s time and try to find somewhere in me that hope for my child that I once had for myself, that he will find some way to escape this all.
Chad Kultgen
is the author of
The Average American Male
. He graduated from the USC School of Cinematic Arts, and lives in California.
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Cover design by Milan Bozic
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE LIE
. Copyright © 2009 by Chad Kultgen. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Mobipocket Reader February 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-177555-0
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