Why Men Lie by Linden MacIntyre Read Free Book Online

students liked to use. Her father would say “pissed to the gills,” and that too was apt. She was just about to offer coffee when, in the babble of words and laughter at the table, she heard a word that sounded like “fidelity.”
    “Fidelity,” she said. “Now there’s a topic I could write a book about.”
    There was a sudden silence, but she didn’t really care. Everyone was piss-gill-shit-faced. “I have one basic rule about fidelity,” she added merrily. “JC can sleep with anyone he wants to as long as she’s older than I am.”
    She was the only one who laughed. She turned toward the kitchen counter, lined up the coffee mugs, turned again. Saw four round, blank faces staring at her.
    “One rule only, that’s all,” she repeated. “Older than me … she has to be. That’s the bottom line.”
    “Well, that kind of narrows it down,” Sextus said.
    Susan giggled.
    The room was suddenly and overwhelmingly hot.
    “Excuse me,” Effie said.
    In the bathroom she studied her face in the mirror but saw a stranger looking back. Older woman, well turned out but plain. Face pale, hair needing care.
Maybe I should cut it
, she thought. Shesquinted and the image became sharper.
Maybe I need glasses
. Then she told herself,
Stop fretting about your looks. Think of aging as maturing, growing wiser. What did Daddy used to say? No point getting older if it doesn’t make you smarter
. But still she wondered. With an extended finger, she stretched the skin below an eye.
What else did Daddy say?
    Overwhelmed, she dove toward the toilet.
    She rinsed her face, restored her lipstick, then went to sit for a while on the edge of JC’s bed, head light but stomach feeling better. Loud laughter came from downstairs.
    She sighed and stood. Her head spun, then stabilized.
    In the darkened hallway near the top of the stairs, she saw Sextus standing, hands in pockets, a concerned look on his face. When she tried to brush by, he blocked her with a suddenly extended arm.
    “Please,” he said. Then placed his forehead on her shoulder. “I’m so, so sorry.”
    “About what, exactly?” she replied.
    “Everything,” he said. “Tonight. Last year. Nineteen seventy-seven. My screw-ups, one and all.”
    Then he was facing her, hands gripping her shoulders. She just stared at him. At that moment her entire life seemed to occupy one clear, sharp quadrant of her brain, like a Mozart composition, one of Einstein’s theories. Fully formed and ready for articulation.
    “I just wish I could explain,” he said. “There was nothing—”
    “Move, please,” she said.
    He dropped his arms and she brushed by him and walked downstairs steadily, suddenly dead sober.
    The next day being Boxing Day, she spent the night.
    The battering wind seemed to scream, flattening the high brown grass in the marsh of Tantramar—the tantric marshes, Sextus called them, laughing wickedly. The wind pushed their small car onward and away from yesterday and toward tomorrow, a force as reassuring as the grass they’d smoked in a service station toilet back in sober Amherst, dispelling fear and purging all misgivings. She was singing farewell to Nova Scotia, the sea-bound coast, with the brown marsh grass undulating all around them and the sky dipping and swirling and clouds racing headlong with them toward an unseen finish line, the future. Laughter throbbed in her veins, the fear and anger falling far behind; faster, faster, through the Isthmus of Chignecto. “Isthmus be love!” she screamed, and wrapped her arms around his head so he could hardly see to drive, and the Chignecto wind now hurried them on, now tried to turn them back, as if it knew the future
.

3
    I t was the eve of the beginning of the last year of a millennium, and Effie Gillis was alone. She hardly ever answered the telephone at home. “That’s why God invented answering machines,” she would tell her friends. But that night she was waiting for a special call, and she picked up