The Liar's Wife by Mary Gordon Page B

Italian ghetto, we’ve got two real special people for you, singers on their way to Ireland from sunny California. Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce Dixie and Dub.”
    Linnet ran to the stool and hopped on it like a girl. Johnny said, “Good evening, folks. We’d like to start out telling you a little bit about ourselves.” He struck a few chords, and then they began, “We got married in a fever / hotter than a pepper sprout …”
    They begin with a lie, Jocelyn thought, but she realized she didn’t care. They weren’t married. They would never marry. What did it matter? What had it ever mattered? The song made everybody happy; Johnny made everybody happy. And he was dying now.
    The next song was Linnet’s. The tough girl singing “We got married in a fever” had disappeared; the purity of her voice was shocking, piercing, disturbing coming from someone with that ruined hair, those disproportionate breasts, the Born to Be Wild T-shirt. “I am a maid of constant sorrow. I’ve seen trouble all my days.”
    Jocelyn believed that she had seen trouble, that they had both seen trouble. She felt suddenly smaller than the two of them with her safe life, her safe home, her safe marriage. The light fell on them, and she noticed that their hair was exactly the same color, and she wondered if that was why Johnny’s hair hadn’t greyed; because he dyed it. She saw them buying Clairol in a drugstore and grooming each other in the tiny bathroom of a cheap motel. She touched her own hair, disliking it now, disliking everything about herself.
    The next song was Linnet’s too, and she was a different person yet again. “Stand by your man,” she sang or belted, defiant, proud. And then Johnny took the mike. “This is for a very special lady, and some very special memories.”
    She knew what it was from the first chords. “Oh, the summertime is coming / and the trees are sweetly blooming.”
    She was glad that the restaurant was in the dark, because she could feel free to weep without constraint, invisible.
    He invited people to sing along, and they did, a surprising number of them knowing the words. And then he put down his guitar and stood by the mike. “Our revels now are ended,” he said, and went into the speech from
The Tempest
, ending the way he always had, “Which is Shakespeare’s way of saying, ‘Have ye no homes of your own to go to?’ ”
    She let the tears flow, and looking around, she could see others were weeping, though none of them would know what she was weeping for, and she didn’t know why they wept. She looked at Johnny and Linnet. What did it matter that their hair was dyed, that their teeth were false, that her breasts were silicone, that they’d abandoned wives and husbands or been abandoned by them, that the “nest egg” that settled itself between Linnet’s false breasts might have made its way there by less than entirely honest means? They had made something happen in this ugly room, with its turquoise faux leather benches and its plastic gondolas. They had given people something; whatever else was false, the tears were real, real tears. What was it they had given? Hope? Belief? A sense that we are not alone, that we will not be left, finally, unaccompanied.
    Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
    As I foretold you, were all spirits and
    Are melted into air, into thin air:
    And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
    The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
    The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
    Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
    And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
    Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
    As dreams are made on, and our little life
    Is rounded with a sleep.
    Johnny was dying.
    And he had come back to her. To say goodbye.
    The place went wild. Tony came up to the mike. “You’ve got to let them go.