The King of Lies Read Online Free PDF Page A

untouched beside her. Rarely had I seen her so still.
    “Anything in the paper?” I asked, my voice sounding small even to my own ears.
    I carried my beer into the well of her silence and sat in my favorite chair. Her head was bowed; her skin shone pale as Ezra’s bones and a still darkness filled the hollows of her cheeks. When she looked up, her eyes were red and getting redder. Her lips seemed to have thinned, and for a moment she looked scared, but then her eyes softened.
    “Oh, Work,” she said, tears leaking out to slide like oil down the high planes of her face. “I am so sorry.”
    I saw the headline then, and felt it odd that she could cry while I could not.
    That night, as I lay in bed waiting for Barbara to finish in the bathroom, I thought of the newspaper article and the things it had said and left unsaid. It portrayed my father as some kind of saint, a defender of the people and pillar of the community. This brought my mind again to truth as a concept, and the naked subjectivity of something that should be pure essence. My father would have found the article a fitting epitaph; it made me want to vomit.
    I stared through the window at a night made beautiful by a waxing moon, turning away only at the sound of Barbara’s self-conscious cough. She stood transfixed, pinned between the moon and a soft spill of light from the bathroom closet. She wore something filmy that I had never seen, and her body was a ghost beneath it. She shifted under my scrutiny and her breasts moved in unison. Her legs were as long as always, yet they seemed more so tonight, and the darkness of their joining pulled my eyes down.
    We’d not had sex for weeks, and I knew that she offered herself thus from a sense of duty. Strangely, that moved me, and I responded with a hard, almost painful need. I didn’t want a wife just then. No communication. No feeling. I wanted to wall myself in soft flesh and pound the reality of this day from my bones.
    She took my proffered hand and slid beneath the sheets, saying nothing, as if for her, too, this remained impersonal. I kissed her hard, tasting the salt of barely dried tears. My hands moved on her and in her, and somewhere along the way, her nightclothes vanished. She trailed her hair across my chest and offered her breasts to my mouth. I bit down, heard her stifled cry, and then was lost in the rush of blood and the slap slap of wet, happy flesh.

CHAPTER 4
    I ’d discovered in recent years that there was often a special silence in my wife’s absence. It was as if the house itself had finally exhaled. And when I woke the next morning, I knew before opening swollen eyes that I was alone. As I lay there, five seconds into the first day of the rest of my life, I came to know that my wife no longer loved me. I didn’t know why the realization struck, but I couldn’t dispute it. It was fact, like my bones are fact.
    I glanced at the bedside table, seeing nothing but the lamp and a water glass with smeared lipstick on its silvered edge. She used to leave little notes: “At the bookstore”; “Coffee with the girls”; “Love you.” But that was before the money got tight. I wondered where she’d gone, and guessed the gym, there to sweat out what remained of me from the night before. She’d study her figure in the mirror, carve a smile onto careworn cheeks, and pretend she hadn’t prostituted her life for a lukewarm marriage and a handful of shiny nickels.
    I swung my feet from beneath the covers and stood. A glance at the clock showed it was almost seven. I felt the day loom and knew it would be a big one. By now, word of Ezra’s death would have spread across the county and I expected to leave a wake in the day wherever I went. I carried this thought to the bathroom, where I showered, shaved, and brushed teeth in desperate need of it. A single clean suit remained in the closet and I pulled it on without pleasure, thinking of blue jeans and flip-flops. In the kitchen, I found a