Liars

In the beginning I was only myself. Everything that happened to me, I thought, was mine alone.

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Then I married a man, as women do. My life became archetypal, a drag show of nuclear familyhood. I got enmeshed in a story that had already been told ten billion times.

But before all that, back at the beginning, I remember looking out the door of my apartment, watching John’s head appear as he climbed the stairs, and then, step by step, more and more of him.

Which is when I said, You’re real!

Which was my first mistake.

Upstate for the summer, I was house-sitting and making vigorous use of the fireplace. I walked by the Hudson and sometimes swam. The locals said that you could pick through the river bottom and find pure garnets, but I never found any, so I tried to write poems about not finding them.

I pretended that the house was mine, and that I’d paid it off and lived alone. I pretended I was fifty years old and had published many books translated into many languages. I imagined seducing the beautiful young men who installed satellite dishes and fixed cars and lived in my neighbors’ converted stables.

The house didn’t have a satellite dish, and the only theater in town screened Hollywood fluff that had played in the city months earlier, but in late June a film festival came to town.

The reception after opening night was the first party I’d attended in a long time, and I introduced myself to the Canadian filmmaker whose film had been my favorite. The action took place at the foot of a mountain over hundreds of years. The last shot was just the landscape. It was calm and forthright. It resembled him. His name was John.

He and I drank two drinks together, and then I followed him to his room in the inn, where I saw all the things he’d collected over his three days in town. Mugs with dried red wine at the bottom, or half an inch of milky old coffee. Overdue books from the New York Public Library, river stones, castoffs from a local flea market, and all the birch bark he’d found on the ground all week, apparently—it was everywhere. I hadn’t picked up any of it. Because it was everywhere.

It was dark, and I was afraid of the dark—the real dark, the country dark. It isn’t dark in the city even though we refer to dark alleys and dark nightclubs. Those are only city dark. In the country, under the right circumstances of moon and weather, the dark can be depthless. I had never seen this dark before, but John was from Alberta and didn’t mind it. In fact he seemed to love it. I didn’t hold his hand in the dark, that first night, but I took his arm, and he led me back to my little house in the night.

Over the next week he hand-delivered a birch-bark note to me in my mailbox every day, and halfway through that week we started fucking and didn’t stop for almost fifteen years.

I tried to understand that first ferocious hunger and couldn’t. It came from somewhere beyond reason.

He had the calm, unguarded eyes of someone who had already seen everything. Those eyes, his heavy limbs, the raucous black bloom of pubic hair. He smelled like cedar. I asked him whether this happened to him often, because it hadn’t ever happened to me. Not like this, he said.

He said that in the next two years he wanted to make a name for himself, put his finances in order, and find gallery representation for his photographs. I wanted to publish a book-length poem and get a tenure-track teaching job.

He wanted to win the Akadimía Prize, which would take him to Athens, Greece, for a year, to live in a beautiful villa and work in an airy studio and eat food prepared by chefs.

He said that I should apply, too—every year the fellowships were given to two artists, two writers, two architects, two medievalists, and so on.

I felt dull when I remembered that John could write, draw, and make photographs and films, while I could only write. I wondered if I’d feel like a failure next to him. But then I remembered that he thought clearly, felt deeply, worked hard, made art, was dark and handsome, and wanted to marry me. I’d ordered à la carte and gotten everything I’d wanted.

He said he’d dated two women at once, one year, and that they’d found out about each other.

He said that his last relationship had died a slow death and ended in guarded friendship, but I knew it might yet be there, steering him.

He said he’d known right away that he’d spend the rest of his life with me. Then he said, That’s what’s called showing one’s hand, or putting all one’s cards on the table, and then I said, I’ll totally marry you.

Back in the city, where we both lived, providentially on the same subway line, we visited each other’s apartments. His was in a cruddy row house in a neighborhood that hadn’t been gentrified yet; all his neighbors were in their eighties. His apartment, a top floor walk-through, was dotted with glass vases from rummage sales, stones and seashells, an old edition of Poe nibbled beautifully by bookworms. He crouched next to some bookshelves he’d made and plugged something into the wall outlet and then looked up at me. In a translucent orange vase the size of a pineapple, a ball of wadded-up Christmas lights was suddenly aglow.

John said that we had to be discreet while walking in his neighborhood. He hadn’t told his ex-girlfriend about me, and I said that that wasn’t good enough, and he listened to me and then rescinded the rule.

But Naomi still called him every night. He claimed she was suicidal and that it was his responsibility to save her.

She’s . . . unstable, he said, the little pause making the second word even darker, more dangerous.

I said that he was valuing her feelings above mine. I said that she couldn’t control our relationship with her phone calls and suicide threats, and I asked John to limit his communication with her.

I couldn’t sleep unless no one was touching me, but John couldn’t sleep unless he was holding on to me. Tight.

I wish I were more like you, he said.

Then I found his Friendster profile, which he’d logged into within twenty-four hours, and which listed him as thirty-four and single.

My mother said that John wasn’t ready to settle down right away because he hadn’t expected to meet me.

Then John emailed me and said that Naomi had found out about me, that she would come over that weekend for the final breakup, after which he’d change his profile.

I wrote back, I’m not going to have a meltdown and break up with you. You’re going to have to work consistently and effortfully to sabotage this. It’s not impossible, but I don’t think you have the heart to do it. At least I really, really hope you don’t.

I signed it, I love you, Mumbun. Mumbun, our pet name for each other, derived very early on from Bunny. John, my tender arctic hare.

That night he visited, heartbroken over something else—a friend had lost his dead father’s jigsaw and bought him a used one to replace it, even though he’d requested that she buy a new one, and then she’d lied and said he’d never said it. I petted him and massaged his back and listened to his sadness, and I sensed that he was learning.

The next morning he sexily disassembled my old inkjet printer, looking for parts he could use to make a robot for a photography project. I was revising a book review. It was late morning when the mail came. Mostly junk. Two magazines. A letter.

I put the magazines on the desk, put the junk mail in the bin under the kitchen sink, and opened the letter from the Akadimía. When I read that I’d won the Akadimía Prize I went cold, knowing I’d have to conceal my pride when I told John. Affectless, he said, I want to be as successful in my field as you are in yours. Then he put down his little tools and took me out for brunch. We waited forty minutes for a table while we both stewed, him about not having won the photography fellowship, me about wishing we’d eaten oatmeal at home for free.

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From Liars by Sarah Manguso. Copyright © 2024 by Sarah Manguso. Published by Hogarth, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.