Beautiful Lies

“Yeah. Ridley Jones, writer by day, PI by night,” I said without levity. I wasn’t in the mood for jokes. “Okay. So who is she?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t been able to come up with any information on her.”

I sighed, stood up to walk the length of the room and back again. I looked at Jake and noticed again those hands, big and square, how the bulk of his muscles strained the cuffs of his shirt. Something else was bothering me, too.

“Jake,” I said. “I don’t understand how you got all this information. How you seem to know so much about this.”

“I told you,” he said.

“Yeah, but you just seem really comfortable with it, like you’ve done it before.”

He smiled. “I always secretly wanted to be a detective. And I know a lot of cops. You hang around those guys enough, it starts to rub off.” He gave a shrug and pointed toward his notes. “Besides, this isn’t me. My buddy got all the info for you.”

Distantly something was jangling, something I didn’t want to acknowledge. I’d felt his tenderness, his kindness, I’d trusted him with this secret part of myself, felt safe enough to share my body with him. But there was something about him, even about his apartment, that made him seem transient, as though he could walk away from everything in the room, including me, and never look back. I looked around the apartment for something that grounded him, something that made him seem more real, more permanent. A photograph, an address book, anything that made him attached to the space. But it was bare, void of the detritus that makes a place home.

I remembered him saying, There are things you need to know about me. He’d said it last night and I’d quieted him and then we’d fucked each other into oblivion. We fucked away each of our pasts, the present. My body, fully electrified by lust and whatever else, was unconcerned about a future. Today again, I’d let desire wrestle all my questions to the floor.

“Ridley,” he said, walking toward me, snapping me back to the moment.

He put his hands on my shoulders and looked into my eyes. I saw it there, the thing about him that made me trust him. He put those arms around me and placed a kiss on the top of my head. And then the scent of him unleashed a chemical reaction in my brain. The Japanese believe in a fifth taste sense called Umami. When it is ignited by certain foods, it unleashes intense cravings, causing you to eat long after hunger has been sated. I was experiencing the emotional equivalent of that phenomenon. I didn’t ask him what he had meant last night.

“So…what now?” I said, moving away from him. I sank into his couch, which was about as comfortable as granite.

“Well, the way I see it, you’ve got two choices. Call the number and see who answers, see how they play it and decide how to proceed based on that. Or maybe I go up to the Bronx and hang out around this address. See what I can turn up. You give away a lot of power if you call. You let them know that they got to you, that you’re scared, curious, whatever. They have the upper hand.”

Here a kind of mental paralysis set in. To me it felt like choosing how you wanted to commit suicide. Jump off the Brooklyn Bridge or shoot yourself in the head? Slit your wrists in the tub or take a bottle of sleeping pills? Each method had its pros and cons, but in the end you still wound up dead.

“Why you?” I said after a minute. I was suddenly so exhausted it was an effort to voice the question.

He shrugged. “Why not me?”

“Do you have any experience with this kind of thing?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Do you?”

I lay down on my back and looked at him briefly, then covered my eyes with my forearm. It was my “woe is me” position.

“Just forget it,” I said, standing up suddenly. “Just forget the whole thing.” I left him sitting there and slammed the door as I left.

fourteen

I know what you’re thinking: What a baby! Here’s this beautiful man who went out of his way to help me, though we barely knew each other, who was willing to go up to the Bronx (the Bronx!) to try to figure out what was happening to me. He cared about me; I could feel that he cared about me in a very real and rare way. So, naturally, I acted like a brat and stormed out of his apartment. My behavior wouldn’t have surprised anyone who knew me—just ask Zack. All I can say is that I was scared and confused and suffered some kind of core meltdown, some kind of flight response. “Get away! Get away!” my brain (or was it my heart?) commanded and I obeyed.

How many people can you claim truly care about you? I mean, not just the people in your life who are fun to hang out with, not just the people who you love and trust. But people who feel good when you are happy and successful, feel bad when you are hurt or going through a hard time, people who would walk away from their lives for a little while to help you with yours. Not many. I felt that from Jake and I wasn’t sure how to handle it. Because there’s another side to it, you know. When someone is invested in your well-being, like your parents, for example, you become responsible for them in a way. Anything you do to hurt yourself hurts them. I already felt responsible for too many people that way. You’re not really free when people care about you; not if you care about them.

I fumbled at the lock on my door and heard Jake come down the stairs. He sat on one and looked at me through the slats of the banister.

“Hey,” he said. There was a smile in his voice that told me he found me amusing. “Take it easy.”

I leaned my head against the door and smiled to myself.

“You want to go somewhere with me?” I asked him.

“Sure.”

Long before I married New York City, I had a passionate love affair with the place. I don’t remember ever wanting to live anywhere else. The gleaming buildings, the traffic music, the glamorous Manhattanites—everything about it said grown-up to me. I always imagined myself walking its streets, wildly successful and impossibly cool. My uncle Max’s apartment was the embodiment of everything I loved about New York, every dream I ever had of the city. The penthouse at the top of the Fifty- seventh Street high-rise that he’d developed. Sleek lines, crisply dressed doormen, marble floors, mirrored elevators, plush carpeted hallways. Naturally, at the time I had no concept of what such a place might cost. I figured everyone in Manhattan had a sprawling penthouse with panoramic views of the city.

I pushed through the doorway and was greeted with a solemn nod from Dutch, the doorman. He moved as if to get up to push the elevator button for me, but I lifted a friendly hand, tossed him a smile. He looked over a pair of bifocal lenses, the flat gray eyes of the retired police officer. Cool. Level. Missing nothing.

“Good evening, Miss Jones. You have your key?” He gave a long glance at Jake.

“Yes, Dutch. Thanks,” I said, my voice bouncing off the black marble floors, the cavernous ceiling.

“Your father was here earlier,” he said, looking back down at a paper laid out before him on the tall desk.

“Was he?”

I wasn’t surprised, really. We all came here at different times for our different reasons. We visited Max’s apartment like some people visit a grave, just to feel close. He’d asked that his ashes be scattered from the Brooklyn Bridge and we’d done that, all of us feeling that a terrible mistake had been made once all that was left of him floated on the air and then into the water below. It was as if we’d given him back, without keeping anything for ourselves. But it was just a moment. We can’t hold on to anyone or anything, you know. We lose everything except that which we carry within us.

Max’s lawyer kept reminding my father how much Max’s apartment was worth, how much the maintenance alone was costing him. But nearly two years after Max’s death, it sat just as he’d left it.

“Sweet digs,” said Jake as we entered the door and I punched in the alarm code: 5-6-8-3. It spelled love on a