I want to believe that it’s harmless, a coping mechanism that makes a pretty shitty reality seem bearable, but it always catches up with me, a black cloud that engulfs me with a sense of failure, of stupidity and worthlessness. In college I lied about why I hadn’t done assignments as a way of buying myself time and sympathy—a grandmother’s funeral here, a self-harming roommate there—and initially it had been fine. I even made the dean’s list in my first year, and I never pushed beyond simple lying into other moral or criminal areas, like plagiarism, which—though related—felt like theft. But getting away with a lie brings its own particular euphoria, a secret pleasure like an adrenaline high, and if you’re not careful it can become an end in itself. I said that my excuses, the assorted variations on the dog ate my homework, bought me time, but midway through my second year, it became clear I wasn’t actually using that time to finish the work I had dodged. I was using it to build more lies, more escape hatches. In my third year I took two incompletes that I never finished; and in my fourth, I ran headlong into Dr. James Bancroft and his developmental biology course. The class wasn’t especially hard, but I didn’t like it, didn’t like his pedantic, robotic teaching, and I resolved to find a way to skate through it with the minimum amount of actual work.
From time to time I ran into people who saw through me. Not completely, and usually not right away, but they were hardwired to sniff out bullshit and—and this was worse—to call you on it. Most people are too polite to see a lie for what it is. They sense something is off, but you seem so nice—or so upset, whatever—and they just assume they’ve miscalculated somehow. After all, they say, why would she lie?
Why indeed?
Anyway, Bancroft was one of the few who were just primed for untruth. I’m not sure why, though I suspected afterward that he knew me like an alcoholic recognizes other alcoholics, picking up the little tells in the way your eyes go to the bottle just before you sit as far away from it as possible. Or maybe he had seen the behavior in someone close to him and was just alert to it. In any case, my little elaborations, what I used to call my fibbing, didn’t wash with him. I tried to avoid a paper on morphogenesis not once, not twice, but three times, spending more labor on inventing reasons why I couldn’t do it than I would have done on the actual paper. The first time Bancroft shut me down so completely that I should have known I was on a losing tear, but some stupid part of me treated it as a challenge. The second time I was actually affronted by how unmoved he was by my tales of hardship, as if my inventiveness had actually deserved the pass.
I failed the class, a shock so unsettling that I lost control of my grades in every other course that semester, failing to show up for finals in two of them, including one in my beloved mythology class. By the time I graduated, the 4.0 I had maintained through my first year had dropped to a 2.7, and my future was in burnout. I applied for lab positions and internships, never lying in my applications but always in interviews, upping the ante as jobs came and went, and I was still getting up at three in the morning to oversee the stocking of shelves at Great Deal. The more desperate I became, the more reckless was the lying, so that I was soon telling stories of my past employment that were in direct contradiction to my own résumé. I got used to the ripple of confusion on the faces of my interviewers, the way their gaze would go back to the papers in front of them while I backpedaled and unraveled.
I told myself it was fine. I was moving on up. It would all be fine. I was fine. And I continued to do that, right up to this day at the beach in Crete.
They were all still in the sea, but I had splashed a little distance away to be alone with my humiliation. The lie I had told Marcus about the promotion not being right for me was nothing like as great as the one I had been telling myself: that I’d gotten it, been welcomed to the upper echelon of the company with open arms, that I could afford a solo apartment or, for that matter, this vacation. That was the greater lie, the one that said life was good. That I didn’t mind my spreading body, the increasing gap between me and the friends I had made on this beach five years ago, the longing for the rum I had missed while taking the nap I had pretended was from tiredness rather than retreat, rather than panic, dread, and rushing inadequacy. They were all paddling back to their deck chairs now, and there would be more rum, or whatever newfangled cocktails Melissa had discovered in the trendy London bars I would never visit. I wanted one of those drinks more than anything. No, I wanted six. But I couldn’t face the way Marcus would avoid my gaze, as you might avoid looking directly at a beggar.
I was an embarrassment.
So I swam farther out as the others went in.
I swim like I do everything else—badly, with neither grace nor power—but I felt my feet leave the bottom and labored on out to sea. The horizon sparkled through my speckled glasses and I fixed my eyes on it, pushing through my clumsy and inefficient breaststroke, glad I couldn’t see the others settling happily on the beach talking about . . . what? Old times? Recent triumphs? A new kitchen, even a new house? I doubted Simon could afford a private jet, but a boat was surely within his means. Maybe he already had one. Maybe Marcus was telling them all about the excavations at the palace of King Minos. Or Midas, who turned everything to gold just by touching it. Or maybe he was telling them about Jan and her lies, her dire financial straits and professional failures, Queen Jan whose touch turned everything to shit.
I kept swimming. Someone went buzzing round the headland on a Jet Ski. We’d used a Jet Ski or two when we were here last. I remember seeing Simon on a big blue one, looking like a latter-day Poseidon shooting across the waves, his face dark with focus, his chest and arms braced. He had been—as always—confident, impressive, even when he ran it aground on the pebbly shore on our last day and had to pay for the damage.
“Why you drive so fast, man?” the rental guy had yelled. “Why you not just shut it off? And why you come from over there? I told you, you only go round the rocks that way!”
It should have been funny, but I guess we were tired and stressed about leaving.
The jet skier wasn’t Simon this time, though. Not one of my group, I thought, marveling at the ironic inaccuracy of that my. I had thought Gretchen was the interloper, the hanger-on, but suddenly it seemed more likely that that was how they saw me. Jan the Pathetic, the charity case who had to have her way paid for her.
A horrible thought struck me, and my stroke faltered. What if I was the only one who wasn’t chipping in for the cost of the villa? What if the others had gotten together to help out poor Jan and they were all covering my expenses? What if Gretchen was auditioning to be the group’s new Jan, a better prospect for Marcus: cuter, less of a downer, someone who could be counted on not to lie about what fucking day it was . . .
The Jet Ski whipped past, a good twenty yards in front of me, but the wave from his wake caught me by surprise. It slapped me hard in the face before I could float over it. I came up sputtering and realized immediately that what had been crisp and clear was blurry, a smudge of light and color.
My glasses.
I had lost my glasses. I flailed in the water wildly, but I was out of my depth and couldn’t fix my position as the sea moved round me. I thrust my splayed fingers through the water, hoping to catch the drifting frames, staring down, my face almost under the surface, but I touched nothing, saw nothing.
“No,” I said aloud, hands raking the water desperately. “No!”
It was futile. And stupid. I had lost them. My only pair—of course they were—and I had lost them. I was more than angry. I was humiliated, ashamed even, because this was just so me.
I continued to tread water a little longer where I was, sobbing quietly, my piggy snuffling loud in my ears as the infuriating fucking jet skier zoomed away so that I had the Aegean to myself. At last I began my pathetic splashing back to the shore.
I remembered coming out of the optician’s shop when I was twelve in my first pair of glasses, astonished by the clarity of the bricks in the wall across the street.
People can see like this? I had wondered, amazed to the point of disbelief. It had always seemed to me quite logical that things got harder to see the farther away they were, and I had breezed through the first decade of my life sure in my own mind that there was nothing wrong with my eyes. No one else had figured it out either because I developed ways of hiding the truth, even from myself. I sat at the front of class; I kept clear of sport, professing that I would rather read books; and when other people pointed things out that I couldn’t see, I pretended I could.
More coping strategies. More lies.