The Liar's Wife Read Online Free Page A

lifelong friends. What pleased her most was walking the streets of New York, and having a paycheck. And it was pleasant to meet her father for a drink at Grand Central as they got on the commuter train together, workers on their way home for a good meal. She hadn’t been on the train with her father the day he had met Johnny. If she had, things would have been very different. She would have been sitting next to her father. There would have been no free seat beside him for Johnny to fall into, at the last moment, in the nick of time. Her life would have been different. Although she wasn’t sure how very different it would be. If her marriage to Johnny had changed her very much. She was not sure it had changed her at all.

    She thought it was important to set the right tone. She didn’t want to sound unfriendly. But how did she want to sound? She didn’t want to spend much time with him, but to turn him away would be to suggest something that was not true: that what had happened had been powerful enough to cause her to recoil. He had once been part of her life. No, she told herself, tell the truth: he had once been her whole life. Was it possible that he was nothing to her; was it possible that memory, which was meant to be so powerful a force, growing stronger in its pull with every year … was nothing to her? She had to understand that, in fact, she didn’t remember him very well.
    It had been nearly fifty years ago. Their time together had been only seventeen months.
    Three months in New York City and New Canaan, Connecticut. July, August, September 1962. And fourteen months in Dublin, October 1962 to December 1963. What fraction of her life was that? Less than one seventieth. Still, she had loved him. They had been married. She ought to be feeling more than this.
    When he smiled, she saw that, like Linnet, he had a very bad set of dentures. For the first time, she felt sadness. She remembered she had loved his mouth; the slight upper lip, the very full lower, which expressed his moods much more clearly than his eyes: sad or delighted, she could tell in a moment by his mouth. When he was troubled, he jutted his lip out, and tucked his upper lip behind it. And when he was happy, the lip seemed to grow even fuller, as if his joy in whatever was pleasing him had spilled over and filled that lovely lower lip.
    But now his mouth was just the mouth of an old man with a bad set of dentures. She remembered he had always complained about his teeth, envied hers. American dentistry, she’d said, apologizing for her lack of dental troubles. Our greatest achievement. Sure, we gave the world the atom bomb, but we’re second to none in orthodontia. But then she’d come to understand, he brushed his teeth only rarely. She’d worried about this, urged regular toothbrushing on him. With horror, she remembered herself testing his toothbrush for wetness in the morning. Well, he’d paid for it now.
    She didn’t want to be thinking this way, thinking about toothbrushes and dentures when she ought to be feeling something great.But she couldn’t get thoughts of teeth out of her mind. She remembered a conversation she’d once tried to have with her dental hygienist, whom she very much liked. She’d said, “So much comes down to dentistry. I mean, if you have good teeth, you are sexually viable, young, employable, socially acceptable, and if not, well, not. What we’re doing, you and I, Suzanne, is in some way unnatural. At my age you’re supposed to be dead or wearing dentures.”
    The hygienist, who was very young, looked at her strangely and began blinking hard. “But you don’t want to die and you don’t want to have dentures. So it’s all good, right?”
    Jocelyn had regretted the conversation, because she liked the girl, and she thought she had made her uncomfortable, feared that perhaps Suzanne would now find Jocelyn strange and they would lose