The Lie by T. C. Boyle

Author:T. C. Boyle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2010-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

. . . . .

The next day—Friday—I didn’t even bother to call in, but I was feeling marginally better. I had a mild hangover, my head still clanging dully and my stomach shriveled up around a little nugget of nothing so that after I dropped the baby off I wasn’t able to take anything more than dry toast and black coffee at the diner that was fast becoming my second home, and yet the force of the lie, the enormity of it, was behind me, and here, outside the windows, the sun was shining for the first time in days. I’d been listening to the surf report in the car on the way over—we were getting six-foot swells as a result of the storm—and after breakfast I dug out my wetsuit and my board and let the Pacific roll on under me until I forgot everything in the world but the taste of salt and the smell of the breeze and the weird, strangled cries of the gulls. I was home by three and I vacuumed, washed the dishes, scrubbed the counters. I was twenty minutes early to pick up Xana and while dinner was cooking—meat loaf with boiled potatoes in their skins and asparagus vinaigrette—I took her to the park and listened to her screech with baby joy as I held her in my lap and rocked higher and higher on the swings.

When Clover came home she was too tired to fight and she accepted the meat loaf and the wine I’d picked out as the peace offerings they were and after the baby was asleep we listened to music, smoked a joint and made love in a slow deep plunge that was like paddling out on a wave of flesh for what seemed like hours. We took a drive up the coast on Saturday and on Sunday afternoon we went over to Tank’s for lunch and saw how sad his apartment was with its brick-and-board bookcases, the faded band posters curling away from the walls and the deep-pile rug that was once off-white and was now just plain dirty. In the car on the way home, Clover said she never could understand people who treated their dog as if they’d given birth to it and I shook my head—tolling it, but easily now, thankfully—and said I couldn’t agree more.

I woke on Monday before the alarm went off and I was showered and shaved and in the car before my wife left for work, and when I pulled up in front of the long windowless gray stucco edifice that housed Iron House Productions, I was so early Radko himself hadn’t showed up yet. I took off my watch and stuffed it deep in my pocket, letting the monotony of work drag me down till I was conscious of nothing, not my fingers at the keyboard or the image on the screen or the dialogue I was capturing frame by frozen frame. Log and capture, that was what I was

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