City of Truth Read Free Page A

birthday we'd given Toby a ten
    -speed bike, but four months went by before I put it together, and he hardly ever rode it, so the whole experience was rather null, a zero — two, in fact. 6 ... 1 ... 0 ... 4 ... 0 ... 0.
    My fingers parted, and the poems floated toward their fate, joining the Homer epics, the Shakespeare plays, the Dickens novels, and the mushy, gushy, pseudoscientific rantings of The Journal of Psychic Healing .
    * * *
    "It's absolutely incredible," I told Helen as we sat in No Great Shakes burrowing into the day's special: MURDERED COW SANDWICH, WILTED HEARTS OF
    LETTUCE, HIGH-CHOLESTEROL FRIES — A QUITE REASONABLE $5.99.
    "Four hours ago I was having breakfast with a dissembler. I could've reached out and touched her."
    "But you didn't," said Helen in a tone more apprehensive than certain. She slid her sunglasses upward into her frothy, graying hair, the better to scrutinize my face.
    "I didn't."
    "She's definitely one of them?"
    "I'm positive. More or less."
    My wife looked straight at me, a shred of lettuce drooping over her lips like a green tongue. "Let's not get carried away," she said. Let's not get carried away . That was Helen's motto; it belonged on her tombstone. She was a woman who'd devoted her life to not getting carried away —
    in her career, in our bed, anywhere. It was her job, I believe, that made her so sedate. As a stringer for the celebrated supermarket tabloid, Sweet Reason , Helen moved among the skeptics and logicians of the world, collecting scoops: CONTROLLED STUDY NEGATES NEW ARTHRITIS CURE, SLAIN
    BIGFOOT REVEALED AS SCHIZOPHRENIC IN SUIT, TOP PSYCHICS'
    PREDICTIONS FALL FLAT. Ten years of writing such stories, and you acquire a bit of a chill.
    I said, "You have a better interpretation, ostensible darling?"
    "Maybe she found the paper on the street, supposed sweetheart," Helen replied. A beautiful woman, I'd always thought: a kitten's pleading eyes, soft round cheeks you wanted to rub against your hands like balm. "Somebody else composed the poem."
    "It was in Martina's handwriting."
    Helen bit into her murdered cow. "Let me guess. She gave you her name and address, right?"
    "Yes. She wrote them on the page."
    "Did she say she wanted to have sex with you?"
    "Not in so many words."
    "Did you say you wanted to have sex with her?"
    "Yes."
    "You think you will?"
    "I don't know," I said. "I hope so, I hope not — you know how it is." I licked the grease from a French fry. "I'd hate to hurt you," I added. I would. Helen's eyes became as dark and narrow as slots in a gun turret. "I probably feel as conflicted as you. Part of me wants you to turn this Martina over to the Brutality Squad, the better to get her out of our lives forever. The other part, the woman who feels a certain undeniable affection for you, knows that would be a stupid thing to do, because if the lady senses the police are on her trail, well, she might also sense how they got there, right? These dissemblers, I've heard, are no nonliteral pussycats. They've got assassins in their ranks."
    "Assassins," I concurred. "Assassins, terrorists, lunatics. In other words, burn the paper?"
    "Burn it, critic."
    "I already did."
    My wife smiled. In Veritas, one never asked, Really? One never asked, Do you mean that? She finished her cow and said, "You're a somewhat better man than I thought."
    We filled the rest of the hour with the usual marital battles — such ironically allied words, marital , martial . Helen and I loved to fight. My erections were becoming increasingly less substantive, she asserted, truthfully. The noises she made when chewing her food were disgusting, I reported, honestly. She told me she had no intention of procuring the obligatory gift for my niece's brainburn party on Saturday — Connie wasn't her niece. I didn't want her to get the gift, I retorted, because she'd buy something cheap, obvious, and otherwise emblematic of the contempt in which she held my sister. And so we continued, straight