Liars, page 1
By Sarah Manguso
Fiction
Liars
Very Cold People
Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape
Nonfiction
300 Arguments
Ongoingness
The Guardians
The Two Kinds of Decay
Poetry
Siste Viator
The Captain Lands in Paradise
Liars is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2024 by Sarah Manguso
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Hogarth, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Hogarth is a trademark of the Random House Group Limited, and the H colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
Portions of this work were originally published in “Love” by Sarah Manguso in Pets: An Anthology, edited by Jordan Castro (New York: Tyrant Books, 2020).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Manguso, Sarah, author.
Title: Liars: a novel / by Sarah Manguso.
Description: First edition. | New York: Hogarth, 2024.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023033510 (print) | LCCN 2023033511 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593241257 (Hardback) | ISBN 9780593241264 (Ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.
Classification: LCC PS3613.A54 L53 2024 (print) | LCC PS3613.A54 (ebook) | DDC 811/.6—dc23/eng/20230724
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023033510
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023033511
Ebook ISBN 9780593241264
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Susan Turner, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Cassie Vu
ep_prh_7.0_147548048_c0_r0
Contents
Liars
Afterward
Acknowledgments
About the Author
_147548048_
In the beginning I was only myself. Everything that happened to me, I thought, was mine alone.
Then I married a man, as women do. My life became archetypal, a drag show of nuclear familyhood. I got enmeshed in a story that had already been told ten billion times.
But before all that, back at the beginning, I remember looking out the door of my apartment, watching John’s head appear as he climbed the stairs, and then, step by step, more and more of him.
Which is when I said, You’re real!
Which was my first mistake.
* * *
—
Upstate for the summer, I was house-sitting and making vigorous use of the fireplace. I walked by the Hudson and sometimes swam. The locals said that you could pick through the river bottom and find pure garnets, but I never found any, so I tried to write poems about not finding them.
I pretended that the house was mine, and that I’d paid it off and lived alone. I pretended I was fifty years old and had published many books translated into many languages. I imagined seducing the beautiful young men who installed satellite dishes and fixed cars and lived in my neighbors’ converted stables.
The house didn’t have a satellite dish, and the only theater in town screened Hollywood fluff that had played in the city months earlier, but in late June a film festival came to town.
The reception after opening night was the first party I’d attended in a long time, and I introduced myself to the Canadian filmmaker whose film had been my favorite. The action took place at the foot of a mountain over hundreds of years. The last shot was just the landscape. It was calm and forthright. It resembled him. His name was John.
He and I drank two drinks together, and then I followed him to his room in the inn, where I saw all the things he’d collected over his three days in town. Mugs with dried red wine at the bottom, or half an inch of milky old coffee. Overdue books from the New York Public Library, river stones, castoffs from a local flea market, and all the birch bark he’d found on the ground all week, apparently—it was everywhere. I hadn’t picked up any of it. Because it was everywhere.
It was dark, and I was afraid of the dark—the real dark, the country dark. It isn’t dark in the city even though we refer to dark alleys and dark nightclubs. Those are only city dark. In the country, under the right circumstances of moon and weather, the dark can be depthless. I had never seen this dark before, but John was from Alberta and didn’t mind it. In fact he seemed to love it. I didn’t hold his hand in the dark, that first night, but I took his arm, and he led me back to my little house in the night.
Over the next week he hand-delivered a birch-bark note to me in my mailbox every day, and halfway through that week we started fucking and didn’t stop for almost fifteen years.
I tried to understand that first ferocious hunger and couldn’t. It came from somewhere beyond reason.
He had the calm, unguarded eyes of someone who had already seen everything. Those eyes, his heavy limbs, the raucous black bloom of pubic hair. He smelled like cedar. I asked him whether this happened to him often, because it hadn’t ever happened to me. Not like this, he said.
He said that in the next two years he wanted to make a name for himself, put his finances in order, and find gallery representation for his photographs. I wanted to publish a book-length poem and get a tenure-track teaching job.
He wanted to win the Akadimía Prize, which would take him to Athens, Greece, for a year, to live in a beautiful villa and work in an airy studio and eat food prepared by chefs. He said that I should apply, too—every year the fellowships were given to two artists, two writers, two architects, two medievalists, and so on.
I felt dull when I remembered that John could write, draw, and make photographs and films, while I could only write. I wondered if I’d feel like a failure next to him. But then I remembered that he thought clearly, felt deeply, worked hard, made art, was dark and handsome, and wanted to marry me. I’d ordered à la carte and gotten everything I’d wanted.
He said he’d dated two women at once, one year, and that they’d found out about each other.
He said that his last relationship had died a slow death and ended in guarded friendship, but I knew it might yet be there, steering him.
He said he’d known right away that he’d spend the rest of his life with me. Then he said, That’s what’s called showing one’s hand, or putting all one’s cards on the table, and then I said, I’ll totally marry you.
* * *
—
Back in the city, where we both lived, providentially on the same subway line, we visited each other’s apartments. His was in a cruddy row house in a neighborhood that hadn’t been gentrified yet; all his neighbors were in their eighties. His apartment, a top floor walk-through, was dotted with glass vases from rummage sales, stones and seashells, an old edition of Poe nibbled beautifully by bookworms. He crouched next to some bookshelves he’d made and plugged something into the wall outlet and then looked up at me. In a translucent orange vase the size of a pineapple, a ball of wadded-up Christmas lights was suddenly aglow.
John said that we had to be discreet while walking in his neighborhood. He hadn’t told his ex-girlfriend about me, and I said that that wasn’t good enough, and he listened to me and then rescinded the rule.
But Naomi still called him every night. He claimed she was suicidal and that it was his responsibility to save her.
She’s…unstable, he said, the little pause making the second word even darker, more dangerous.
I said that he was valuing her feelings above mine. I said that she couldn’t control our relationship with her phone calls and suicide threats, and I asked John to limit his communication with her.
I couldn’t sleep unless no one was touching me, but John couldn’t sleep unless he was holding on to me. Tight.
I wish I were more like you, he said.
Then I found his Friendster profile, which he’d logged into within twenty-four hours, and which listed him as thirty-four and single.
My mother said that John wasn’t ready to settle down right away because he hadn’t expected to meet me.
Then John emailed me and said that Naomi had found out about me, that she would come over that weekend for the final breakup, after which he’d change his profile.
I wrote back, I’m not going to have a meltdown and break up with you. You’re going to have to work consistently and effortfully to sabotage this. It’s not impossible, but I don’t think you have the heart to do it. At least I really, really hope you don’t.
I signed it, I love you, Mumbun. Mumbun, our pet name for each other, derived very early on from Bunny. John, my tender arctic hare.
That night he visited, heartbroken over something else—a friend had lost his dead father’s jigsaw and bought him a used one to replace it, even though he’d requested that she buy a new one, and then she’d lied and said he’d never said it. I petted him and massaged his back and listened to his sadness, and I sensed that he was learning.
The next morning he sexily disassembled my old inkjet printer, looking for parts he could use to make a robot for a photography project. I was revising a book review. It was late morning when the mail came. Mostly junk. Two magazines. A letter.
I put the magazines on the desk, put the junk mail in the bin under the kitchen sink, and opened the letter from the Akadimía. When I read that I’d won the Akadimía Prize I went cold, knowing I’d have to conceal my pride when I told John. Affectless, he said, I want to be as successful in my field as you are in yours. Then he put down his little tools and took me out for brunch. We waited forty minutes for a table while we both stewed, him about not having won the photography fellowship, me about wishing we’d eaten oatmeal at home for free.
* * *
—
Fifteen years earlier, when I’d gone away to college, I wore a fur coat I’d bought for ten dollars at a thrift store. It was Persian lamb, the fur rotting off the skin. I used reeking permanent black markers to color in the skin as the fur fell off. My mother had showed me how to do it.
I sang in the choir; that was six hundred dollars a semester. I was a research assistant for a doctoral student; that was eleven dollars an hour. I shelved books at the music library in the afternoons; that was minimum wage, four twenty-five.
One night in the dining hall I’d bumped into a classmate who worked in the kitchen. I spilled my plastic cup of grape juice all over his white chef’s jacket. I wanted to pay for the cleaning, but the jacket would just go into the institutional wash. I’d needed to pay for something, though. I’d felt guilty for having any money at all.
When one day someone casually referred to my tony Manhattan girls’ school, I proudly told him I’d gone to public school in Massachusetts. He seemed impressed that I could play rich so convincingly. He was from Ohio. I was a liar, but I didn’t know it yet.
* * *
—
John and I went together to the first meeting of that year’s class of Akadimía Fellows. All around the big table stood chairs at equal intervals, with stacks of paper in front of each one. John sat down next to me. The other spouses and partners all sat in the chairs against the wall.
Mortified, I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to insult John. A seat at the table is too much to ask? he would have said. But none of the other fellows’ partners are at the table, I would have said. Then he would have said it wasn’t worth discussing, a man sitting in one chair when he could have been sitting in a different one, why was I making it an issue, what was wrong with me. John would do what he wanted, I was crazy, he was the partner of a crazy person. Whom he loved anyway, dearly.
That night he went out and didn’t call and came home late. In the morning he said he’d gone out drinking, a phrase that repelled me. I hated the person John became when he drank, tormented by the idea that he wasn’t smart enough, able only to regale everyone about how bright a student he’d once been.
He had a hangover and didn’t remember what he’d said to his graduate students, but he’d probably gossiped about his colleagues again while the students tittered. When I told him he had to stop doing that, he laughed at me.
* * *
—
In September, I packed three suitcases and moved to Greece and became an Akadimía Fellow at the Amerikanikí Akadimía in Athens. John stayed in New York for a couple of months, working and saving money and, I hated myself for thinking it, brooding about not having won the prize. One night my neck and shoulders were so tense, I needed a massage so desperately, that several other fellows came to visit me in my apartment in the villa. They rubbed my neck and spoke kindly to me.
Each morning, after I showered and dressed and colored in my patchy eyebrows with a pencil, I went downstairs to the coffee bar. The barman was capable of communicating entire sentences using just his eyes. His mouth never moved. He knew I wanted a makiáto before I was capable of waking sufficiently to speak Greek or any other language.
He called out the names of those who dared to keep their coffee on the bar for more than ten seconds, after which the particulate begins to drift toward the bottom of the cup and the shot is ruined. I always jumped up to seize mine, hurried to it like a wife. After drinking it I gave the barman a two-euro coin and he snapped my change onto the marble bar—usually something between thirty and forty cents even though I always bought the same coffee and bougatsa. When I got fifty cents back one morning I thought he must approve of me.
When John arrived it was almost winter. I led him through the entrance and past the fountain and up the marble steps. Then I dragged open the massive iron gate and we walked into the courtyard. John looked around and I watched him take it all in. Thousand-year-old stones were mounted in the ochre walls. It was a second layer, a higher level, of knowing the place. Whoa, he said. It fed me. We’d been together a year.
* * *
—
John sulked, fixated on his unsuccessful fellowship applications. Maybe I can’t be a mellow, easygoing guy and also an art star, he said.
In the beginning, everything about him had shone, but as time passed, I noticed that he used the word phenomena as a singular noun, couldn’t spell the word necessary, couldn’t write a coherent paragraph. Next to him, I was brilliant. Next to me, he was beautiful, charming, and initially capable of hiding all the things that, in my wrinkly little heart, made me consider him inferior.
I lay in bed naked, and John sketched me all day long, with encounters every now and then. I came in his mouth, rode him, and let him pull my hair, then came again in his hand just as he came in my mouth. At the end of the day he asked, Do you think we could get into that marriage column in The New York Times?
At dinner, the painter said, You seem like a completely different person now that John’s here. It makes me think that you have a good relationship.
Without meaning to, I began to restrict the material in my diary. I had become unable to articulate certain feelings. And so my body became their cultivation dish.
—
After we took care of the painter’s baby for the afternoon, the painter’s wife said to me, I don’t know how many points you give for good-with-kids, but John gets them all.
That night John said, Is it a comfort to you that I’ve always assumed we’d get married? but a moment later he said he didn’t want to be the unsuccessful partner of the successful person. Then he apologized and said that he’d just wanted to be honest. I said, It was brave and considerate to tell me.
I signed up for extra Greek conversation lessons with a couple of the other fellows. John had been skipping the regular classes. When I told him I’d signed up for another round of lessons without him, he sat and cried silently without moving his face. Tears dripped from his jaw. I was surprised.
That night there was a dance party. I left at one in the morning. John said he’d stay another fifteen minutes, but he stayed three more hours. In the morning he seemed contrite and frightened.
A week later, the photography fellow showed photos from the party, including two of John and a classicist posing as if they were about to make out. In shock, I asked John how he would feel if he were me. Sad, hurt, angry, he said.
God, but he was funny. The painter’s wife was pregnant again, and we all signed a card. John wrote, Good luck! The last time I had a baby they still let you drink and gamble in the delivery room. I was so doped up I bet on the Cleveland Browns to win the Kentucky Derby.
Every now and then one of the fellows was invited to give a talk or mount a show in Spain or Germany or Slovenia. The painter and his wife were trying to decide whether to leave the Akadimía for a research trip to Morocco. The wife wasn’t sure she wanted to go. We’re a team, the painter said to her. She and the baby went with him.
* * *
—
My best friend Hannah was married to her first husband for thirteen years. We met after I sent her a fan letter through a magazine editor, and we became best friends immediately.
One night we went to a party, Hannah and her husband and I, and she left before we did. While her husband and I waited for a bus home, he lit a cigarette. He smoked half of it, dropped it, sprayed his mouth with mint spray, unwrapped and chewed a piece of gum, took a little bottle of hand sanitizer out of his coat, and rubbed it all over his hands and forearms in front of me so that we’d have a secret. Testing me to see if I’d lie for him.
