Free The Liar's Wife by Mary Gordon

their heads back and laughed at a joke whose meaning Jocelyn had no access to.
    So the friends she thought she had made had all been lying to her. And lying to each other.
    But she should have known, because almost from the beginning her friendship with Moira had been marked by lies. The first had turned into a joke. Jocelyn had invited Moira for dinner one night when Johnny was meant to be working late. She had bought what she would have called lamb chops, what were in Dublin called mutton chops. They had just moved into their own apartment and she was excited about cooking for another woman, a woman whom she liked, whom she admired.
    But before she could serve Moira, Moira grabbed her stomach and said, “Oh, dearie, I’m afraid my girlfriend has just arrived.”
    And Jocelyn didn’t know what she meant, so Moira had to explain, her “time of the month,” and she ran out of the house saying she’d come by tomorrow, and they’d have a great time then.
    When Johnny came home, and she heated over the lamb chop forhim, and told him what had happened with Moira, he bent over laughing. “Oh, God, Jossie, you were going to serve her meat on a Friday and she just couldn’t do it, under pain of mortal sin; she lives by that kind of thing, even though she thinks it’s tosh, she says she still has to live by it. She didn’t want to embarrass you so she pretended to be ill.”
    â€œShe lied to me?”
    â€œOh, why would you put it that way? Think of it as a sign of her regard.”
    â€œBut she wasn’t telling me something I needed to know. I could have gone on making the same mistake over and over again.”
    â€œThe thing is, Joss, we believe people will twig sooner or later. But in their own time. We’re not great believers in rushing things here.”
    â€œYou can say that again,” Jocelyn said, because the inability of all her Irish friends to get anywhere on time, to do things when they said they would be done had been a source of great vexation to her, and her vexation was a great source of amusement to her friends. And so, when she said, “You can say that again,” Johnny picked her up in his arms, threw her on the bed, and said, “We’re not great believers in rushing things here,” and made love to her slowly, quoting from Beckett, “ ‘With a slowness that would arouse an elephant.’ Not that you’re an elephant, you’re my lovely kitty cat, my sweet, fastidious pet.”
    He was so generous in his praising of her body. What he loved, he said, was the contained whiteness of her body. “Like a lovely, peeled almond,” he said, kissing every inch of her, and that, she could remember fifty years later, was a pleasure so complete that she thought she might be carried away somewhere. Love unto death, she remembered thinking. But it hadn’t been unto death. It had, rather soon, been over.
    She believed that he loved her body. But after a while, she didn’t know what she could believe.
    She looks over at Johnny, an old man now, perhaps still handsome, but all his freshness leached. She had not been able to bear being married to a liar. She could no longer avoid the truth of it, after the big lie had been unmasked. Is a fifty-year-old lie still a lie? Or has it become just a story?
    â€œI’ll need to be packing a bag, Jossie. I’ll be needing to go to a funeral.”
    She was rather excited; she’d been told that funerals, rather than weddings, were the great social events for the Irish.
    â€œOh, no, my love, it’s a long tedious journey. To Longford City. Changing buses, all of them uncomfortable, and then there’d be nothing for you to do … it would just be family telling stories and drinking too much and I don’t know where we’d stay. No, you’re much better off staying here in our cozy nest that you’ve made so wonderful. But I’d