A Field Guide to Deception Read online

  Eight

  Doppelganger

  In the courtyard of the Mercury Café, a pudgy, inept fellow spun dance music, and groups of lawyers, drunk and argumentative, still in their court suits, lounged at tables. Amidst the myriad tables, sat two large contingents of lesbians, in their softball gear, emptying pitchers of beer. Back by the fire door, the gay boys stood with cigarettes. Claire wound through the tables, and along the wall where more girls leaned, and a kind of hiss had started, then finally inside the bar. Three lines for the bar, all of them long and surly, Claire chose the one that looked a little less teenybopper. A girl approached her almost instantly: “I was hoping you’d be here tonight.”

  Claire stared at the girl, trying to place her, “How have you been?”

  The girl looked like she might cry. “Oh. Right. Sorry.” She walked to a table by the jukebox and muttered something to the two girls sitting there. Claire ordered a gin and tonic, but the bartender wouldn’t let her pay for it.

  “Your drinks all night are covered,” he told her. “I’m not allowed to say who.”

  Claire had picked the Mercury to be left alone. With just three chapters left, she’d phoned Agnes, Simon’s favorite sitter, and asked if she were available Friday evening. Now, baffled, she moved through the tables, aware of being watched from every direction, and headed upstairs. She sat on a stool by the pool tables and sipped at her drink. It was stiff.

  “Hi,” the girl said.

  “Hi,” Claire answered.

  “We should go.”

  “I just got here.”

  “The bathroom locks, remember?”

  Claire sipped her drink. Despite her confusion, something fierce was stirring; she could feel its weight shift, almost like a fetus, inside her.

  “I don’t think so,” Claire said. The girl’s face pinched and reddened. “Right. Gotcha. Enjoy your drink.” And then she, too, was gone.

  There were two more of them before the blond sat down on the stool across from Claire. Claire braced herself.

  “I’ll bet this is all a little confusing,” the blond said. When Claire didn’t answer, the blond went on, “They think you’re someone else. You look a lot like her actually; it’s kind of marvelous.”

  Claire considered this as the blond smiled, drank her beer. The woman was slender, long-legged to spectacular effect in her black Capri pants, and artfully made up. More than anything, though, she was not like the girls before her, and this, Claire realized later, allowed Claire to relax, pick up the conversation politely, and hand it back to the blond.

  “I’m a little less confused now. I appreciate your telling me.”

  “Oh,” the woman said, and waved the sentiment away, “I should have done it earlier, but I was enjoying myself too much.”

  “Ah, glad to amuse.”

  “No, no. It’s not like that. Liv has been an ass—my friend, your twin, Liv—and this little parade is proof of it. I’ve been enjoying myself at her expense, not yours.”

  Claire felt the fetal shift again. She took another drink to avoid speaking.

  “Sorry,” the blond said. “I’m Bailey. I’ve been kind of an ass myself tonight. Let me buy you a drink.”

  “No bother,” Claire said. “Let’s forget the whole thing.”

  They ordered more drinks, and Bailey began to tell Claire a story about the first time that she’d met Liv in an Early American Literature class as undergraduates. “We had the most bizarre professor—beady little mole eyes, random lectures—but he could recite anything. It seemed like he had all of literature inside his head. We were afraid of him.

  “Anyway, he had us write a daily response, only a page, to our reading assignments and picked someone to read every class. The first time Liv read, I thought I’d been struck with something. She was talking about how a particular essay gave her a sense of yellow, about how the sentences felt like butter when she read them. I’d never heard anything like it. I thought, listening to her, that she was some kind of genius.”

  Bailey finished her drink. She looked at Claire, and blushed. “It’s funny. I’ve never said that to her. And I can only tell you because you aren’t her. Isn’t that strange?”

  “Let me buy you another drink,” Claire said. And Bailey agreed, smoothed her finger across her lower lip as though she were applying gloss.

  “I’ve been back in Spokane,” Bailey was saying, “for eighteen months and I can’t meet anyone. I’ve got a great job and I love my house and I just can’t seem to meet anyone.”

  “It’s easy to be isolated here. I think this is where people come to be left alone.”

  “Too alone. People here are too alone. It’s not good for people to be so alone.”

  Claire thought of her own loneliness, and agreed.

  “I’m almost thirty years old,” Bailey went on, “and I thought my life would mean something by now. No, don’t look at me like that; I’m talking about real meaning. Let me tell you something. My grandmother lived in a retirement home on the South Hill and I used to go up there in the afternoons to sit with her. We’d read or talk or whatever. And one day she tells me, ‘Love, Bailey, love is a collision.’”

  Bailey took another drink. “Wait, I’m telling this wrong. My grandmother was married for sixty years when my grandfather died of liver cancer. Fucking horrible. He lost half his body weight before he finally died, in constant pain. Horrible. And my grandmother, she was made of steel then. That whole time he was sick, she took care of him.

  “So this day in her apartment we’re talking about my grandfather, and how she met him and when she knew—you know—knew that he was the one. She tells me, ‘Love is a collision. It blows out the glass, and bends the fenders, and wrecks the engine, and it moves you. My god, it moves you. It shifts you from one spot to another. Simple. Easy. You’re there and then, in a moment, you’re here. Live here. Exist in this space. Be brave enough to stay.’

  “I wrote it down in my notebook in the car. The whole thing. It fucking shook me. The way she said it as much as anything. I memorized it and I say it to myself sometimes like I’m saying a prayer. It hurt me. Her saying that hurt me, it was so beautiful.

  “And it’s true, what she said. It’s true and I want my crash. I want to be moved like that: shifted from one spot to another.” Bailey smacked her palms together.

  Claire found herself trembling. She couldn’t articulate why, even in her own head, but she was shaking. She thought of the money in the broken cupboard; she had taken it without a moment’s hesitation. She had not considered even, had simply known that she would take as much as she could carry, and then return for the rest. Simple. Easy. You’re there and then, in a moment, you’re here.

  Love was like that, yes, but so was freedom.

  “I’m sorry,” Bailey said. “I’m talking too much. I just met you. You’re like Liv and not like her all at once. It’s intoxicating.” She laughed, shook her head like an apology, and drank again.

  “I’m interested,” Claire said. “I don’t mind.”

  “Would you have wanted any of the girls that came up to you tonight? I mean, on their own account, would you have approached any of them?”

  Claire thought of the girls: young, almost foolishly young, and more than a little helpless. “No.”

  “I keep thinking of Liv as that genius I met in school. The quiet one, the unassuming one, and now she’s going through girls like they’re heroin. How do you reconcile that?”

  “You’re in love with her.” Claire knew this was true, yet it startled her: the thought as well as the statement. Across the table, Bailey nodded.

  “Yes. I’m in love with her.”

  “What will you do?” Claire asked. She worried for Bailey’s love. For the weight of it on the table between them, and inside Bailey, for the despondency of this love, she worried.

  Bailey shook her head. “I’ve no idea. What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “Have you had your collision?”


  Claire’s mind brought Simon forward in answer to Bailey’s question. Surprising and true, she realized. Simon was her collision. “I have a three-year-old. He changed everything.”

  Bailey looked confused a moment, her hooded brown eyes suddenly wholly open. “But it’s not the same. I mean, parental love is more definite, isn’t it. Clearer.”

  “Yes, but no less moving.”

  Bailey shook her head. “No. Too easy. A child isn’t a collision. For one thing, you choose to have one, don’t you? Can’t choose love, though. Can’t choose a wreck. Just fucking happens, doesn’t it?”

  Claire agreed. She liked this woman across from her. She liked her vulnerability, her obstinate mind.

  “Have you never had a collision either?”

  “No,” Claire said. “I guess not.”

  “Fucking Spokane.” She pushed her hair back from her forehead. “But a kid, that’s something. Some meaning anyway. Did you have him on your own?”

  “His father was in a band. It was all stupid really, that part. And then Simon, and it didn’t seem stupid at all. It was supposed to happen, exactly like it did.”

  “In a band?” Bailey seemed affronted by this. “So you slept with some drummer or something?”

  “Bassist, yeah.”

  “So you’re not a lesbian?”

  Claire laughed.

  “Let me guess,” Bailey said. “It’s complicated.”

  They agreed to walk to a diner for coffee and breakfast. It was nearly two in the morning, and neither able to drive. On the dark streets, the stoplights flashed, and rain drizzled. Bailey walked with great concentration.

  “I love summer nights,” she said.

  July was a balm for these two women and the night itself, determined to comfort them. Claire felt that too, their need—hers and Bailey’s—for comforting. That day in the garage with Liv, sawdust in their mouths, hard metal surfaces behind and beneath them, even that day, Claire remembered with disquiet.

  “Where’s your son now?” Bailey asked, after stabbing her eggs so that the yolk spread over her entire plate.

  “He’s in the car, sleeping, I hope. I left his baby monitor.”

  Bailey, startled, and quite instantly terrifying, had just begun her tirade when Claire held up her hands, apologized, explained about Simon sleeping over at the sitter’s house. “He loves it. He gets to sleep in a bunk bed with her little grandson.”

  “Sure, I had a bunk bed. Loved it. Like being on a ship.”

  Tears along the purple vinyl of the booth scratched at Claire’s legs. Below the photographs of men racing cars, paint bubbled on the walls. Bailey used her toast as a spoon for her eggs and hash browns, asked, “What do you do, for work, I mean?”

  “Well, I write field guides, actually.”

  “Nature guides?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s interesting.” Bailey poured two little plastic thimbles of milk into her coffee, stirred, and smiled at Claire.

  Nine

  Just like paper

  Simon sat on the steps, crying. He’d spilled his milk in the office and his mother was furious. Scolded him and sent him away. He threw Murdoch in the grass, scowled at him a moment, and then quickly retrieved the engine. Bees flitted about everywhere and he walked along the field, keeping back from the high grass, until he came to the fence line. He ran his train along the fence as though it were a rail.

  He had not said her name once. He had not asked his mother where she was, or when she was coming back. Liv had told him that she would be quick. With a present, she had said. “I’ll be back with a present.” Simon stared down the gravel road and said her name once like a magic word. He looked for a long time, but no yellow truck.

  At dinner, they had spaghetti. Simon twirling the strands in his fingers, sucking them hard so they squirmed as he ate them. Claire gave him extra cheese, rubbed his head for a moment before she handed him a second toasted roll.

  “Is there another plate for me?” Liv asked behind them.

  Simon sprang from his chair and was at her. Liv scooped him up and kissed him repeatedly on his face. His hands were fists at her shoulders, holding fast to her shirt. Liv walked forward, and then he was pressed between them.

  She’d bought him a small plane with a motor and a remote control. It flew and Simon could direct it. Mostly he ran beneath it while Liv controlled its flight. Claire, sipping at her lemonade, sat on the rail of the deck and watched them. She’d forgotten, in seven days, how young Liv looked. Lithe in the field with Simon, both of them bright with laughter: immortal. That word came to her as she looked on, immortal.

  At bedtime, they both read to him. He gave books to each of them and sat between them, on his knees, turning the pages. Liv brought him Edward and Emily and kissed him goodnight. His mother knelt by the bed and then they closed the door, and stood a moment in the hallway, savoring.

  Liv kissed her, finally, there outside Simon’s door. A tender kiss, new and hopeful, and Claire’s eyes closed heavily as she leaned into Liv. Their bodies entangled, afflicted, soft as vellum.

  They sat on the recliner, wrapped in a blanket, and Liv told the story. Her mother’s surgery, how they’d removed a breast, but thought they’d found it all. Her mother’s anger volcanic, destroying in all directions. Her father at the sink, frightened, baffled, washing the same plate over again. Liv administered pills, took any assault, returned with soup and water and another dose. Ugly. Mean and ugly and frail.

  “My mother,” Liv said. “My mother’s in tremendous pain and I’m bringing her soup. Everything she ever wanted.”

  Claire thought of herself in the car on the roadside. Her aunt’s body in the snow. Impotent. A scared child left behind, incapable of climbing from the car. You cannot be broken. You cannot be broken while I am still alive and needing you.

  “Can we get drunk?” Liv asked.

  “Sure. Come and see the pantry. Any poison you like.”

  Claire does not mention Bailey, or their night out. She does not mention the Mercury Café or Liv’s disappointed disciples. After that night, she found herself a reluctant stone thrower—unwilling to cast judgment.

  “Are you close with your parents?” Claire asked.

  “Before I moved back to Spokane, I lived with them for a while. That’s not something I would recommend.” Liv picked Tanqueray, and tailed Claire to the kitchen for tonic and limes.

  “I rarely last a conversation with my parents,” Claire said, worrying for her mother’s breasts. For the illness that must be inevitable. “Get a kid. Simon deflects a lot of their energy, and doesn’t seem to notice that they’re insane.”

  “My mother’s usually got four million questions she wants answered the first half hour. She didn’t talk much this trip. I kind of missed the endless cataloguing of minutiae. Anything’s better than your mom on the couch, sobbing for two days straight. I spent most of my time there trying not to call you.” Liv held up her glass. “Anyway, here’s to tumblers.” She lit another cigarette, then grinned at Claire: “At some point, we’re probably going to have to discuss what all this means.”

  “You mean how I’m paying you for sex?”

  “Yeah, you totally lowballed me.” Liv flicked ash off the deck. “We don’t have to talk about it now, I’m just saying that I know it’s coming.”

  “You make it sound so dire, like you’re preparing for a siege.” Claire tried to laugh, to sound as though Liv’s tone hadn’t troubled her, as though she hadn’t wondered each night if Liv would return at all. “We’re dating, aren’t we? It’s intense because you live here and we’re isolated and Simon loves you. But it’s just dating.”

  Distracted by the rail of the deck, Liv had looked away from Claire. “You’re right.” She stood and took her glass to the kitchen before coming back out to finish her cigarette. “It’s late,” she said. “And I’m tired. Sleep well.” She kissed the top of Claire’s head and left through the field.

  Sensiti
ve, Claire thought, and was immediately ashamed of herself. What did it mean—all this? She could see the girls in the bar, an endless line of them in bathrooms, and alleyways. A city of girls with their arms wide, and their faces eager. Cold now, even with the blanket, she went inside to bed.

  Ten

  Hives

  Bailey ordered for both of them. “You’re going to love these crepes,” she said. “They’re marvelous.”

  Bittersweet Bakery, high-ceilinged and classical, had the most welcoming atmosphere. Claire thought of Hansel and Gretel and the gingerbread house while she drank her latte. Bailey split the croissant between them, her fingernails plum-colored, hair swept back elegantly from her face.

  “I love this place,” she said. “Eventually, I want to open a little bakery like this.”

  “I can see it.”

  “Can you?” Bailey, pleased, devoured her croissant.

  Claire wasn’t sure why she’d come. She’d had to ask Liv to watch Simon. Bailey’s enthusiasm on the phone, her chattering, the delighted delivery of the invite; Claire had agreed, she thought, to have a respite from silence.

  “I have a confession,” Bailey said. “I know who you are.”

  Claire, sanguine, looked across at her. “Who am I?”

  “You’re the woman employing Liv.”

  Claire nodded. “Yes.”

  “It was one thing that first night, but not saying now would just seem, I don’t know, less somehow.”

  “Less?” Claire asked.

  “Devalued or something.”

  “Yes.” Half of Claire’s coffee was gone. She was hungry and wished for her crepe.

  “Do you mind if I tell you? Do you mind talking about it?”

  “No,” Claire said, rocking her flip flop rhythmically with her toes. “I don’t mind.”

  “Liv came back three months ago. She’d been living back east with family, a cousin, I think, and then Portland for a while. She came back to town, and was harder or something, more aggressive anyway. We’d go out and just stare. It was so strange. I’d known her for ages and then I didn’t know her at all.