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  “Remarkable,” raved the Los Angeles Times. “His talent shines,” declared The New York Times Book Review. “A tenebrous marvel,” wrote the Cleveland Plain Dealer of Daniel Vilmure’s debut. Life in the Land of the Living. Now in his much anticipated second novel, Vilmure brings us the tragicomic story of a young man’s perilous waltz into a world where nothing—not even the truth— is what it seems.

  toby Sligh is a senior at a Catholic high school who wants only to dance with his boyfriend at the prom. This is the very least of his worries—as he finds himself tangled in a web of illusions. Toby’s mother has just moved out of the house and made him promise not to tell his father where she is. Leonard “Juice” Compton, Toby’s best friend, is an all-state running back and a spectacular crack dealer, dragging Toby into trouble with both sides of the law. And Ian Lamb, Toby’s boyfriend—whose enigmatic glass eye reflects a dark history of mystery and deceit—leads Toby to the bedside of father Eli Scarcross. a gaunt and AIDS-ravaged Jesuit priest, who embodies what happens when love and lies collide. Ian offers Toby a deal: If Toby will befriend Scarcross, Ian will get to the bottom of Mrs. Sligh’s flight.

  In a fantastic journey through the playgrounds and hospitals, bedrooms and classrooms, backseats and back alleys that make up our shadow nation, Toby Sligh learns the truth and the truth about himself in a world where everybody has a secret to hide, a trust to betray, and a story to tell.

  also by Daniel Vilmure

  Life in the Land of the Living

  SIMON & SCHUSTER

  Rockefeller Center

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  This book is a work ol fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents

  either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead,

  is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1995 by Daniel Vilmure

  All rights reserved,

  including the right of reproduction

  in whole or in part in any form whatsoever.

  SlMON & SCHUSTER and Colophon are registered

  trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

  Designed by Levavi & Levavi

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 3 9 10

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Vilmure, Daniel

  Toby’s lie : a novel / Daniel Vilmure.

  p. cm. I. Title.

  PS372.l.39T63 1995

  813’ 54—dc20 94-45602

  CIP

  I.SBN 0-684-80204-X

  I.SBN (0-634-80204-X

  “Crosstown Traffic” (written by Jimi Hendrix) copyright Bella Godiva Music, Inc.; all rights reserved; used by permission. “The Last Waltz,” lyrics by John Klenner. music by Frederic Chopin, adapted and arranged by Lucy Ann Bryant; copyright© 1963 Shapiro Bernstein & Co. Inc. New York; copyright renewed; international copyright secured; all rights reserved; used by permission “Free Your Mind.” by Denzil Foster and Thomas McElroy © 1993 EMI Blackwood Music Inc. and Two Tuff-E-Nuff Publishing (EMI all rights controlled and administered by EMI Blackwood .Music Inc.; all rights reserved; used by permission. Selection from The Double, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. translated by Jessie Coulson 1972, (Penguin Classics 1972). copyright © Jessie Coulson. 1972. reproduced by permission of Penguin Book» Ltd. “Redemption Song” written by Bob Marley; copyright © 1980 Bob Marley Music Ltd., used by permission; all rights reserved.

  .

  Acknowledgments

  To Marie-Joele Ingalls, my accomplice in sangría;

  To Mary, my sister, five-snowballs-to-one;

  To Marcus and Jean, two angels in New Orleans;

  To Moshe and Bruce, roommates deluxe;

  To Venkatalakshmi Bakshi. for the palmreading;

  To Eric Steel, editor, overdue in Mexico;

  To Mary Evans, midwife, who likes a good plot;

  And finally to someone who doesn’t have a name.

  Thanks from my heart for your love and support.

  To my mother and father, with love

  There is a Smile of Love,

  And there is a Smile of Deceit,

  And there is a Smile of Smiles

  In which these two Smiles meet.

  WILLIAM BLAKE

  I have never lied—except for maybe once. That lie is my own. And this is its story… .

  My mother was moving out of the house, and she took me out of school that afternoon to help her.

  “Family emergency,” she told the principal’s receptionist.

  Family emergency …

  It was no exaggeration.

  Mom had decided—for reasons unknown to everybody but her—to take an efficiency apartment across town. It consisted of a little bed, in a little bedroom, with a little kitchenette and a black-and-white TV. It was the sort of thing Lucy and Ricky Ricardo would have hidden out in if Ricky had gotten in trouble with the mob. Out back was a yard with an old junked car. On top of it were lizards doing push-ups in the sun. Inside there were roaches, and a faucet keeping time. There was drummer boy wallpaper. My mother loved it.

  “Bet you’ll never guess how much I’m paying for this place.”

  “You re paying? I thought maybe they were paying you.”

  They referred to students at the local university. My mother used to make pin money allowing them to perform strange experiments on her. One month, for the med school, she walked around with a plastic tube inserted down her throat. Mom lost twenty pounds, made $1,200 (“That’s a lot of fucking pins,” my father observed), and wore a special T-shirt that read: I’m with the alien.

  “It’s a steal,” Mom said. “I got it for a song.”

  “But you can’t sing.”

  Mom touched her nose: “Exactly.”

  Everything Mom owned, and then some, had been packed with anal-compulsive care into six cardboard boxes in the backseat of her car. Only the unruly hem of her wedding gown managed to announce itself in a yellow swell of silk. When Mom tried to tamp it down, it only bulged more—until at last she wrestled it out and slung it round her shoulders like a predator’s kill.

  “Ridiculous things, wedding dresses,” she proclaimed. The gown responded in hisses of lace. “Awkward as a parachute, ugly as a circus tent, impossible to move in—”

  “Isn’t that the idea?”

  Mom snorted once and plumped the dress down on the porch. It stood, then it sank like a swooning girl at mass. I plucked the veil up and draped it round my forehead.

  “The neighbors’ll think you’re gay,” my mother scolded, and brushed the brown hair from my straw-colored eyes.

  I didn’t say a word. There were other veils around me. For one: I was gay. Not that it really mattered. And what neighbors there were were nowhere to be seen. The apartment was concealed behind a tangle of palmettos at the end of a dirt road bordered by a fence. It was creepy. There were used car parts everywhere. And bits of broken mirror. And mosquitoes. Great big ones.

  “Mom, are you a drug dealer?”

  “No, I’m not a drug dealer.”

  “This is the sort of place that a dealer would live in.”

  “How would you know?”

  “I’ve seen a lot of movies.”

  “You’ve seen too many movies. Come help me with this box.”

  If my mother was a dealer, she was dealing heavy drugs. Her boxes bore the weight of seventeen years of marriage. There were books, and eight-tracks, and clothes, and tarnished silver. There were seventeen years of canceled checks and tax receipts. There were old sewing patterns, and shoes, and journal entries. There was crystal wrapped in bubble-pack and chintzy jewelry.

&nb
sp; “What’s in this one?” I asked.

  It was light as I lifted.

  “Open it and see,” she told me. “Open it and see.”

  I set the box down on a bruise-colored stain that spread like a Rorschach across my mother’s carpet. From the silence that sanctified the air as I knelt, I expected something more than what the box contained. I felt like a kid promised something at Christmas, a kid denied a promise: I felt ripped off. Still, I tried, but couldn’t stifle a laugh when the box opened up on my father’s dirty laundry.

  “He’s helpless, he is,” my mother explained, squatting down beside me and rifling through the pile. She fondled a pair of skidmarked underwear like a buyer for a Saks Fifth Ave. for fetishists.

  “Mom, that’s disgusting!”

  “These are your father’s!”

  “I don’t care if they belong to Mother Teresa! They’re filthy, Ma! Jesus! Put ’em down, will ya?”

  She strolled about the kitchenette, twirling them around her finger.

  “Can’t imagine what your poor dad’ll ever do without me. Can’t cook. Can’t sew. Can’t even tie a tie. Every morning, you know, I tie his tie for him.”

  “He ties my tie for me, Ma.”

  “Ha! That’s what you think!”

  With a flick of the wrist she pitched the undies in the sink and ran water on them, and stared out the window. I came up behind her and put my arms around her. Everything felt like an Afterschool Special.

  “Mom, why are you leaving?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. Her voice was in splinters. She was trying not to cry.

  “Are you having an affair?”

  “I should be so lucky!”

  “Is Dad?”

  “Who knows? Who cares!”

  She was bawling.

  “What’s going on, Ma? This is weird. I can’t handle it.”

  “You’ll just have to handle it,” she said, and stiffened up.

  “Are you getting a divorce?”

  She sniffed. “We’re too Catholic.”

  “I know.”

  “Little heathen.”

  “Would you like to?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you love Dad?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he hurt you?”

  “To-by!”

  “You can tell me! I’m here! I’m right here!”

  “My pre-cious boy !”

  Mom hugged me then. Her tits squished against me. It was sort of incestuous, but kinda nice, too. I held her for a while, and she clenched her arms around me, and then we started waltzing, very slowly, on the tile. Mom had taught me to waltz the week before, in the garage, for the prom, which I had to take a fat girl to. I wanted to take my boyfriend, a swimmer. We even talked about it. We would make the evening news. As I danced with my mother I shut my eyes tight and pretended I was dancing with my boyfriend, the swimmer. I imagined it was his body I was holding, not hers. Mom didn’t notice. It was all very sexy. I didn’t even register the roaches on the walls. At some point our waltzing unwound into a boxstep and I started humming “Red River Valley.” I pretended I was Henry Fonda in The Grapes of Wrath, and I cupped my mother’s chin in my hands, like Ma Joad’s, and I crooned like Tommy does toward the end of the movie:

  Come and sit by my side if you love me,

  Do not has-ten to bid me adieu,

  Just re-mem-ber the Red Ri-ver Valley,

  And the cowboy that loves you so true… .

  Then we started laughing. Everything would be all right.

  “Promise me you won’t tell your father where I am?” Mom said as she abandoned me at our abandoned home.

  “Uh-huh, I promise.”

  She touched her nose: “Our secret!”

  “Where’s your mother, Toby?”

  I was playing dumb. I was sitting on the frontporch, on the porchswing, swinging. I was reading The Idiot. Dad had finished work.

  “Don’t know, Pop. Didn’t pick me up from school. Had to catch a ride with—”

  “That’s damned funny.” Dad scratched his head and did Freudian things with his tie. He made a jingling noise with his shiny metal car keys. “Probably at the store. Whatcha reading?”

  “Dostoev—”

  “Don’t forget to cut the grass.”

  The door shut behind him.

  That night, at four in the morning, Dad woke me. “Toby?’” he said, slugging my shoulder. “Toby? Tobias? Are you awake?” Pop kept slugging me, harder and harder. My shoulder was swelling. “You up, boy? You up?”

  At last I sat up in my bed and looked at him.

  “Yes, I am up.” I rubbed my shoulder. “What is it?”

  “Can’t sleep,” Dad said, and wiped his nose with his forearm. The hall light was on. It made a halo around him. “Your mother’s not home.”

  “She isn’t?”

  “She isn’t. And hell if I know where my baby girl could be.” Dad ran his fingers through his hair like a model. He sneezed and he hiccuped. “Excuse us,” he said.

  “Why don’t you have another Bud Light or something?”

  “We’re out.”

  “But we had two sixes in the box!”

  “Uh-huh.” Dad’s eyes, in the darkness, went glassy. “I drank them,” he said. “I blew chunks, Tobe.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Dad sat on the edge of my bed in his misery. He was staring at his hands. He was shivering a little.

  “I think that she left us.”

  “What makes you say that, Dad?”

  “I got these antennae.”

  Dad pointed at his head.

  “What antennae?” I asked.

  His hands grabbed for my hands. He pressed my fingers to his skull. I was Phrank the Phrenologist.

  “Don’t feel any antennae.”

  “A husband’s got antennae. Like radar. Like bats.”

  I flapped the sheets and started squeaking.

  “Toby, this is serious. Should we call the police?

  “You’ve come home lots of times this late before.

  “That’s different.”

  “Why’s it different?”

  “I’m a guy.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Guys, you know,” Dad began, and then spluttered. “It’s a guy thing.”

  “Oh.”

  “Like Monday Night Football.”

  I turned on the bedside lamp and he shouted. His hand shot out and he slapped the lamp over.

  “Too bright,” he told me.

  “‘That’s coming out of your allowance.’ ”

  “Don’t be a smartass.”

  We sat there in the darkness.

  “Are you drunk, Dad?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you very drunk?”

  He nodded.

  “If I ask you something, Dad, will you tell me the truth?”

  “Turn the lamp on.”

  “But—but you just knocked it over!”

  “I hate being honest in the dark. Turn it on.”

  I picked up the lamp and switched it on on the table. Dad’s face swam into focus like a scruffy sea monster’s.

  “Are you having an affair?”

  “Am I having a what?”

  “An affair. Are you boinking some gorgeous young woman?”

  “May God strike me dead if I so much as ever breathed at any woman other than your lovely blessed mother.”

  “Can I take that as a no?”

  “You can take that as a no.”

  I let the silence settle, then I focused on him harder.

  “Is Mom having an affair?”

  “She wouldn’t do that to me.”

  “Does she love you?”

  “She’s a liar if she says that she don’t. Have you talked to her?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know where she is?”

  I said that I didn’t.

  “Are you lying to me, Tobe?”

  “Would I lie to you?”
>
  “Tobe, we dads … have antennae.”

  “Like bats?”

  Dad squeaked. “I wanna show you something.”

  We stumbled from my bedroom across the hall into their bedroom, which was lit up and gaudy as a Las Vegas lounge.

  “Got school in the morning.”

  “Fuck school,” Dad grumbled. “Your mother’s gone AWOL. This is fam’ly. It’s important.”

  Strewn about the white disheveled sheet atop their mattress were a thousand different Kodak Instamatic shots of them. Mom and Dad at the beach at Daytona. Mom and Dad at Disney World. Mom and Dad smooching. Mom and Dad hiding in a Kmart photo booth.

  “Where’d you get these pictures, Dad?”

  “In the closet. They’re the only things your mother didn’t steal.”

  Dad grabbed my shoulders and wheeled me around until I was facing two gutted closets. There, in the space where Mom’s things used to be, hung hangers and dusty, denuded wooden shelves.

  “She’s gone all right,” I said, turning to him.

  Dad was looking at the Kodak Instamatics on the bed.

  “See this one?” he asked, bending wretchedly over. It was Mom in a little red choo-choo, at a fairground. Dad sat behind her, leering like a letch. They were young and horny. They were beautiful and handsome. It was the sort of picture that made you wonder what their hands were doing. “That was at the Florida State Fair,” Dad confided. “An hour after we took that picture, we made love in somebody’s Chevrolet. I remember the way the upholstery smelled. And Jimi Hendrix was on—‘Crosstown Traffic,’ I think. You were conceived then. I knew it when we came. It was like we’d won the lotto. You’d better go to bed now.”

  I squeezed Dad’s arm and left him staring at the pictures. I went back to my room, and I put some Hendrix on, and stared up at the ceiling. But I couldn’t sleep. I lay there listening to Dad shift about, thinking of him and Mom fucking in a Chevy. Who was better in bed, Mom or Dad? I wondered. I was sure Mom was. She had the bigger soul. But Dad loved her more, and she was all he had, so probably he was better: he was more appreciative. I knew they still fucked. Sometimes I could hear them. They were into each other. They were constantly flirting. And I believed Dad when he swore that he hadn’t been cheating, and I knew he wasn’t lying when he said Mom hadn’t either. So what was it? Should I tell him where she was? All I had to do was march into his bedroom. I’d tell him, he’d hug me, he’d fetch the car keys, we’d drive rakishly and recklessly to Mom’s drug dealer pad, he’d plead with her a little, and then we’d bring her home. It was easy. It was cinchy. It was cake on a plate. So what was I waiting for? Why’d I hesitate?