The Truth and Other Lies Read Online Free PDF

started its dictation.
    Henry had never seen his wife writing. Quite possible that her loins turned to marble as she wrote and that snakes flickered their tongues in her hair. He’d never dared to look.
    “Henry, we’ve got a marten in the roof.”
    “A what?”
    “A marten. It’s making gray lines.”
    “Gray lines?”
    “Gray stripes that turn into long lines.”
    “Like squirrels?”
    “Longer and parallel.”
    That did indeed suggest a marten. If Martha saw short, gray stripes, it normally meant a small rodent; if the stripes were longer and parallel, it was bound to be a larger animal.
    Martha was a synesthete from birth. Every smell and every noise had her seeing colors and patterns. Even in school, when she was learning to form her first letters, she saw photisms coloring the words, usually the same shade as the initial letter. She thought it was normal. It wasn’t until she was nine that she realized that not everyone saw these wondrous emanations, which was really rather a shame. She told her mother, and was taken straight to the doctor. The doctor was old-school and color-blind. He prescribed drugs whose sole effect was to make her fat and sluggish. Martha retched up the tablets and never mentioned the colorful apparitions again. It remained her secret until she met Henry.
    “Can you come upstairs, please, and have a look?”
    Oh, darling, I’m afraid I ’m a worthless wretch, Henry wanted to say, not worthy of you at all. I deserve to die—why can’t you release me from my suffering? Take pity on me and see me for who I am at last.
    “What do you say to fish for supper tonight?”
    “Henry, this animal gives me the creeps.”
    “Come here, darling.” He hugged her, kissed her hair. Martha laid her head on his chest, drinking in the scent of his skin.
    “You smell a little bit orange today,” she said. “Is it anything serious?”
    “I have to tell you something.”
    “What?”
    He couldn’t bring himself to say it. He mumbled something, incomprehensible even to himself, and laughed nervously. When he laughed, Martha saw deep blue spirals leap out of his mouth. No other man in the world laughed pure ultramarine with dancing star-shaped splashes.
    Martha kissed Henry on the lips.
    “If it’s a woman, keep it to yourself. And now let’s go and look for the marten, shall we?”
    She took his hand and pulled him up the stairs behind her. Henry followed her, pleased. So she already knew and wasn’t cross. The way she understood his failings was something he particularly valued in her, and so whenever Henry saw other women he did it discreetly and tactfully. He was often ashamed of himself; he frequently made up his mind to reform. But every time he came home after an affair, he was wreathed in telltale patterns; Martha could read the X-ray images of his guilty conscience. Only in Betty did Martha see a serious threat, not entirely without reason, as we know. And yet the two women had only met once, at a cocktail party in Moreany’s garden.
    It had been a remarkably mild evening; the night-flowering plants had opened their calyxes, luring the moths to pollinate. Betty stood at the buffet, her low-cut, backless dress exposing her dimples of Venus; she was poking around with a fork in a bowl of strawberries. “Not her , Henry,” Martha had said quietly, as she caught the gaze of her husband swinging toward Betty’s magnetic dimples like a compass needle. Henry knew at once who Martha was talking about, and that he’d never give Betty up. He promised he’d never see her again. From then on he only ever saw Betty in out-of-the-way places. He bought himself a mobile phone with a prepaid card, and paid for motels and candlelit dinners in cash. All the same it remained a liaison of hasty fondlings, accompanied by a constant sense of sad foreboding.
    ———
    Martha’s room was not big, and was done out in creamy white. She didn’t like rooms with high ceilings; they reminded her of her time