Total pages in book: 26
Estimated words: 24637 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 123(@200wpm)___ 99(@250wpm)___ 82(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 24637 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 123(@200wpm)___ 99(@250wpm)___ 82(@300wpm)
And there it is, the trap, laid out neat as the dessert spoons.
The pudding in front of me is a small architectural feat, some pale set cream under a lacquer of burnt sugar, the kind of thing that takes a trained man an hour and costs what I pay a volunteer for a day, and I look at it rather than at her, needing a moment the pudding’s willing to give me.
Here’s what nobody tells you about lying for money. The lie itself is never the hard part. The hard part is that a clever liar asks for detail, detail being where amateurs drown, and Bettina Kraus is no amateur.
She’s spent the soup and the fish constructing this exact question and tending it like a crop she means to bring in, and now she’s harvesting, sweetly, in front of eight investors and one beaming oblivious husband, in the fond tone of a woman who’d love nothing better than to watch my story collide with whatever story Loukas has already told.
The difficulty is that Loukas and I have no story. We’ve a contract and a ring and a single bed and eighteen years of loathing, and at no point between his porch and this pudding did either of us think to invent a proposal, what with me pricing trains and him not telling me things.
I feel the ease go out of him beside me, the particular held quiet of a man who’s just run the same sum I have and come up equally short. His arm’s still along the back of my chair, his hand at my shoulder, and I feel the exact moment it goes careful against me, the way your whole touch changes near a spooked animal the instant it senses the snare.
The whole table waits with him. Bettina’s eyes glitter over her folded hands.
“He didn’t kneel,” I say at last.
It’s the only true thing I have, so I grab for it like the one rung I can see in the dark.
“He doesn’t kneel. Not for anyone, not for anything, it isn’t in him, you all know it isn’t.” A small ripple of agreement goes round the table, this the most plausible claim anyone’s offered all night. “So no. There was no knee. No restaurant, no violinist, no ring hidden in a pudding like this one. What there was,” I say, slower now, and I let myself turn and look at him, and the looking comes far easier than it has any right to, “was an argument. We were arguing, the way we always argue, the way we’ve argued since we were twenty-one and he informed a roomful of strangers I was a shrew nobody could love.”
The table laughs, delighted and scandalized at once. Artie slaps the cloth so the crystal jumps. Bettina doesn’t laugh.
“And right in the middle of it,” I go on, softer still, the lie laying its own floor under my feet as I walk it out, the trick all the good ones manage, “right when I was telling him in detail exactly what I thought of him, he stopped. He just stopped, and he looked at me like he’d never once seen me before, and he said, marry me, then, and we can argue forever.”
His fingers press once into the bare line of my shoulder at that, and I lose the thread of my own sentence for half a heartbeat, because I’m supposed to be inventing this and instead it’s coming up from somewhere underneath me, already built, already true.
“And the terrible part,” I manage, “the thing I’ll never forgive him for, is that I said yes before I’d thought it through. I said yes like my mouth already knew something the rest of me hadn’t caught up to yet.”
I’ve told the truth. I work it out a beat too late, that I dressed the truth up as a lie and handed over the entire truth of it, because that’s how it would happen with us, that’s the only shape it ever could take, and the table’s gone soft and sighing, and even Bettina has had to rearrange that lovely face, and I make the fatal mistake, the one I keep making with this man, of turning back to see how I did.
He isn’t performing.
Whatever’s on his face has nothing to do with the eight investors or the toast or the brand. He’s looking at me the way I just described him looking at me, like he’s never seen me before, like the lie I built reached into his chest and shifted something that was holding the rest up.
And the air between us pulls taut, the same as it did on the platform, the same as it did in the cabin with the country pouring past the glass, that held-breath question I keep declining to refuse.