Big Little Lies

  They went to a bar at a hotel in the city. Harbor views. It was a warm spring night. She had hay fever. Her eyes were itchy. Her throat was scratchy. Spring always brought hay fever, but also that sense of possibility, the possibility of an amazing summer.

  There were some older men, maybe in their early thirties, at the table next to them. Executive types. They bought them drinks. Big, expensive, creamy cocktails. They chugged them back like milk shakes.

  The men were from interstate, staying at the hotel. One of them took a shine to Jane.

  “Saxon Banks,” he said, taking her hand in his much larger one.

  “You’re Mr. Banks,” Jane said to him. “The dad in Mary Poppins.”

  “I’m more like the chimney sweep,” said Saxon. He held her eyes and sang softly, “A sweep is as lucky, as lucky can be.”

  It’s not very hard for an older man with a black AmEx and a chiseled chin to make a tipsy nineteen-year-old swoon. Bit of eye contact. Sing softly. Hold a tune. There you go. Done deal.

  “Go for it,” Gale said in her ear. “Why not?”

  She couldn’t come up with a reason why not.

  No wedding ring. There was probably a girlfriend back home, but it wasn’t up to Jane to do a background check (was it?) and she wasn’t about to begin a relationship with him. It was a one-night stand. She’d never had one before. She’d always hovered on the side of prudish. Now was the time to be young and free and a bit crazy. It was like being on holidays and deciding to give bungee jumping a go. And this would be such a classy one-night stand, in a five-star hotel, with a five-star man. There would be no regrets. Zach could go off on his tacky Contiki tour and grope the girls on the back of the bus.

  Saxon was funny and sexy. They laughed and laughed as the glass bubble elevator slid up through the center of the hotel. Then the sudden muffled carpeted silence of the corridor. His room key sliding in and the instant, tiny green light of approval.

  She wasn’t too drunk. Just nicely drunk. Exhilarated. Why not? she kept telling herself. Why not try bungee jumping? Why not leap off the edge into nothing? Why not be a bit naughty? It was fun. It was funny. It was living life, the way Zach wanted to live life by going on a bus tour around Europe and climbing the Eiffel Tower.

  He poured her a glass of champagne, and they drank together, looking at the view, and then he removed the champagne glass from her hand and placed it on the bedside table, and she felt like she was in a movie scene she’d seen a hundred times before, even while part of her laughed at his pretentious masterfulness.

  He put his hand on the back of her head and pulled her to him, like someone executing a perfect dance move. He kissed her, one hand pressed firmly on her lower back. His aftershave smelled like money.

  She was there to have sex with him. She did not change her mind. She did not say no. It was certainly not rape. She helped him take her clothes off. She giggled like an idiot. She lay in bed with him. There was just one point when their naked bodies were pressed together and she saw the strangeness of his hairy, unfamiliar chest and she felt a sudden desperate longing for the lovely familiarity of Zach’s body and smell, but it was OK, she was perfectly prepared to see it through.

  “Condom?” she murmured at the appropriate point, in the appropriate low throaty voice, and she thought he’d take care of that in the same smooth, discreet way he’d done everything else, with a better brand of condom than she’d ever used before, but that’s when he’d put his hands around her neck and said, “Ever tried this?”

  She could feel the hard clamp of his hands.

  “It’s fun. You’ll like it. It’s a rush. Like cocaine.”

  “No,” she said. She grabbed at his hands to try to stop him. She could never bear the thought of not being able to breathe. She didn’t even like swimming underwater.

  He squeezed. His eyes were on hers. He grinned, as if he were tickling, not choking her.

  He let go.

  “I don’t like that!” she gasped.

  “Sorry,” he said. “It can be an acquired taste. You just need to relax, Jane. Don’t be so uptight. Come on.”

  “No. Please.”

  But he did it again. She could hear herself making disgusting, shameful gagging sounds. She thought she would vomit. Her body was covered in cold sweat.

  “Still no?” He lifted his hands.

  His eyes turned hard. Except maybe they’d been hard all along.

  “Please don’t. Please don’t do that again.”

  “You’re a boring little bitch, aren’t you? Just want to be fucked. That’s what you came here for, hey?”

  He positioned her underneath him and shoved himself inside her as if he were operating some sort of basic machinery, and as he moved, he put his mouth close to her ear and he said things: an endless stream of casual cruelty that slid straight into her head and curled up, wormlike, in her brain.

  “You’re just a fat ugly little girl, aren’t you? With your cheap jewelry and your trashy dress. Your breath is disgusting, by the way. Need to learn some dental hygiene. Jesus. Never had an original thought in your life, have you? Want a tip? You’ve got to respect yourself a bit more. Lose that weight. Join a gym, for fuck’s sake. Stop the junk food. You’ll never be beautiful, but at least you won’t be fat.”

  She did not resist in any way. She stared at the downlight in the ceiling, blinking at her like a hateful eye, observing everything, seeing it all, agreeing with everything that he said. When he rolled off her, she didn’t move. It was as though her body didn’t belong to her anymore, as though she’d been anesthetized.

  “Shall we watch TV?” he said, and he picked up the remote control and the television at the end of the bed came to life. It was one of the Die Hard movies. He flicked through channels while she put back on the dress that she’d loved. (She’d never spent that much money on a dress before.) She moved slowly and stiffly. It wouldn’t be until days later that she would find bruises on her arms, her legs, her stomach and her neck. As she dressed, she didn’t try to hide her body from him, because he was like a doctor who had operated on her and removed something appalling. Why try to hide her body when he already knew just how abhorrent it was?

  “You off, then?” he said when she was dressed.

  “Yes. Bye,” she said. She sounded like a thick-witted twelve-year-old.

  She could never understand why she felt the need to say “bye.” Sometimes she thought she hated herself mostly for that. For her dopey, bovine “bye.” Why? Why did she say that? It was a wonder she didn’t say “thanks.”

  “See you!” It was like he was trying not to laugh. He found her laughable. Disgusting and laughable. She was disgusting and laughable.

  She went back downstairs in the glass bubble elevator.

  “Would you like a taxi?” said the concierge, and she knew he could barely contain his disgust: disheveled, fat, drunk, slutty girl on her way home.

  After that, nothing ever seemed quite the same.

  32.

  Oh, Jane.”

  Madeline wanted to sweep Jane into her arms and onto her lap and rock her back and forth as if she were Chloe. She wanted to find that man and hit him, kick him, yell obscenities at him.

  “I guess I should have taken the morning-after pill,” said Jane. “But I never even thought about it. I had bad endometriosis when I was younger, and a doctor told me I’d have a lot of trouble getting pregnant. I can go for months without a period. When I finally realized I was pregnant, it was . . .”

  She’d told her story in a low voice that Madeline had had to strain to hear, but now she lowered it even further to almost a whisper, her eyes on the hallway leading to Ziggy’s bedroom. “Much too late for an abortion. And then my grandfather died, and that was a big shock to us all. And then I went a bit strange. Depressed, maybe. I don’t know. I left uni and moved back home, and I just slept. For hours and hours. It was like I was sedated or really jet-lagged. I couldn’t bear to be awake.”

  “You were
probably still in shock. Oh, Jane. I’m so sorry that happened to you.”

  Jane shook her head as if she’d been given something she didn’t deserve. “Well. It’s not like I got raped in an alleyway. I have to take responsibility. It wasn’t that big a deal.”

  “He assaulted you! He—”

  Jane lifted a hand. “Lots of women have bad sexual experiences. That was mine. The lesson is: Don’t go off with strange men you meet in bars.”

  “I can assure you I went off with my share of men I met in bars,” said Madeline. She’d done it once or twice. It had never been like that. She would have poked his eyes out. “Do not for a moment think that you’re in any way to blame, Jane.”

  Jane shook her head. “I know. But I do try to keep it in perspective. Some people do really like that erotic asphyxiation stuff.” Madeline saw her put a hand unconsciously to her neck. “You might be into it, for all I know.”

  “Ed and I think it’s erotic if we find ourselves in bed without a wriggling child in between us,” said Madeline. “Jane, my darling girl, that wasn’t sexual experimentation. What that man did to you was not—”

  “Well, don’t forget you heard the story from my perspective,” interrupted Jane. “He might remember it differently.” She shrugged. “He probably doesn’t even remember it.”

  “And that was verbal abuse. Those things he said to you.” Madeline felt the fury rise again. How could she fight this creep? How could she make him pay? “Those vile things.”

  When Jane had told her the story, she hadn’t needed to try to think back to remember the exact words. She’d recited his insults in a dull monotone, as if she were reciting a poem or a prayer.

  “Yes,” said Jane. “Fat ugly little girl.”

  Madeline winced. “You are not.”

  “I was overweight,” said Jane. “Some people would probably say I was fat. I was into food.”

  “A foodie,” said Madeline.

  “Nothing as sophisticated as that. I just loved all food, and I especially loved fattening food. Cakes. Chocolate. Butter. I just loved butter.”

  An expression of mild awe crossed her face, as if she couldn’t quite believe she was describing herself.

  “I’ll show you a photo,” she said to Madeline. She flicked through her phone. “My friend Em just posted this on Facebook for Throwback Thursday. It’s me at her nineteenth birthday. Just a few months before . . . before I got pregnant.”

  She held up the phone for Madeline to see. There was Jane wearing a red sheath dress with a low neckline. She was standing in between two other girls of the same age, all three of them beaming at the camera. Jane looked like a different person: softer, uninhibited, much, much younger.

  “You were curvy,” said Madeline, handing back the phone. “Not fat. You look gorgeous in this photo.”

  “It’s sort of interesting when you think about it,” said Jane, glancing at the photo once before she flicked it off with her thumb. “Why did I feel so weirdly violated by those two words? More than anything else that he did to me, it was those two words that hurt. ‘Fat.’ ‘Ugly.’”

  She spat out the two words. Madeline wished she would stop saying them.

  “I mean a fat, ugly man can still be funny and lovable and successful,” continued Jane. “But it’s like it’s the most shameful thing for a woman to be.”

  “But you weren’t, you’re not—” began Madeline.

  “Yes, OK, but so what if I was!” interrupted Jane. “What if I was! That’s my point. What if I was a bit overweight and not especially pretty? Why is that so terrible? So disgusting? Why is that the end of the world?”

  Madeline found herself without words. To be fat and ugly actually would be the end of the world for her.

  “It’s because a woman’s entire self-worth rests on her looks,” said Jane. “That’s why. It’s because we live in a beauty-obsessed society where the most important thing a woman can do is make herself attractive to men.”

  Madeline had never heard Jane speak this way before, so aggressively and fluently. Normally she was so diffident and self-deprecating, so ready to let someone else have the opinions.

  “Is that really true?” said Madeline. For some reason she wanted to disagree. “Because you know I often feel secretly inferior to women like Renata and Jonathan’s bloody hotshot wife. There they are, earning squillions and going to board meetings or whatever, and there’s me, with my cute little part-time marketing job.”

  “Yes, but deep down you know that you win because you’re prettier,” said Jane.

  “Well,” said Madeline, “I don’t know about that.” She caught herself caressing her hair and dropped her hand.

  “So that’s why, if you’re in bed with a man, and you’re naked and vulnerable, and you’re assuming that he finds you at least mildly attractive, and then he says something like that, well it’s . . .” She gave Madeline a wry look. “It’s kind of devastating.” She paused. “And, Madeline, it infuriates me that I found it so devastating. It infuriates me that he had that power over me. I look in the mirror each day, and I think, ‘I’m not overweight anymore,’ but he’s right, I’m still ugly. Intellectually I know I’m not ugly, I’m perfectly acceptable. But I feel ugly, because one man said it was so, and that made it so. It’s pathetic.”

  “He was a prick,” said Madeline helplessly. “He was just a stupid prick.” It occurred to her that the more Jane expounded on ugliness, the more beautiful she looked, with her hair coming loose, her cheeks flushed and eyes shining. “You’re beautiful,” she began.

  “No!” said Jane angrily. “I’m not! And that’s OK that I’m not. We’re not all beautiful, just like we’re not all musical, and that’s fine. And don’t give me that inner beauty shining through crap either.”

  Madeline, who had been about to give her that inner beauty shining through crap, closed her mouth.

  “I didn’t mean to lose so much weight,” said Jane. “It makes me angry that I lost weight, as if I were doing it for him, but I got all weird about food after that. Every time I went to eat it was like I could see myself eating. I could see myself the way he’d seen me: slovenly fat girl eating. And my throat would just . . .” She tapped a hand to her throat and swallowed. “Anyway! So it was quite effective! Like a gastric bypass. I should market it. The Saxon Banks Diet. One quick, only slightly painful session in a hotel room and there you go: lifelong eating disorder. Cost-effective!”

  “Oh, Jane,” said Madeline.

  She thought of Jane’s mother and her comment on the beach about “no one wants to see this in a bikini.” It seemed to her that Jane’s mother had probably helped lay the groundwork for Jane’s mixed-up feelings about food. The media had done its bit, and women in general, with their willingness to feel bad about themselves, and then Saxon Banks had finished the job.

  “Anyway,” said Jane. “Sorry for that little tirade.”

  “Don’t be sorry.”

  “Also, I don’t have bad breath,” said Jane. “I’ve checked with my dentist. Many times. But we’d been out for pizza beforehand. I had garlic breath.”

  So that was the reason for the gum obsession.

  “Your breath smells like daisies,” said Madeline. “I have an acute sense of smell.”

  “I think it was the shock of it more than anything,” said Jane. “The way he changed. He seemed so nice, and I’d always thought I was a pretty good judge of character. After that, I felt like I couldn’t really trust my own instincts.”

  “I’m not surprised,” said Madeline. Could she have picked him? Would she have fallen for his Mary Poppins song?

  “I don’t regret it,” said Jane. “Because I got Ziggy. My miracle baby. It was like I woke up when he was born. It was like he had nothing to do with that night. This beautiful tiny baby. It’s only as he’s started to turn into a little person with his own personality that it even occurred to me, that he might, that he might have, you know, inherited something from his . . . his father.”r />
  For the first time, her voice broke.

  “Whenever Ziggy behaves in a way that seems out of character, I worry. Like on orientation day, when Amabella said he choked her. Of all the things to happen. Choking. I couldn’t believe it. And sometimes I feel like I can see something in his eyes that reminds me of, of him, and I think, ‘What if my beautiful Ziggy has a secret cruel streak? What if my son does that to a girl one day?’”

  “Ziggy does not have a cruel streak,” said Madeline. Her desperate need to comfort Jane cemented her belief in Ziggy’s goodness. “He’s a lovely, sweet boy. I’m sure your mother is right, he’s your grandfather reincarnated.”

  Jane laughed. She picked up her mobile phone and looked at the time on the screen. “It’s so late! You should go home to your family. I’ve kept you here this long, blathering on about myself.”

  “You weren’t blathering.”

  Jane stood up. She stretched her arms high above her head so that her T-shirt rose and Madeline could see her skinny, white, vulnerable stomach. “Thank you so much for helping me get this damned project done.”

  “My pleasure.” Madeline stood as well. She looked at where Ziggy had written “Ziggy’s dad.” “Will you ever tell him his name?”

  “Oh, God, I don’t know,” said Jane. “Maybe when he’s twenty-one, when he’s old enough for me to tell him the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

  “He might be dead,” said Madeline hopefully. “Karma might have gotten him in the end. Have you ever Googled him?”

  “No,” said Jane. There was a complicated expression on her face. Madeline couldn’t tell if it meant that she was lying or that even the thought of Googling him was too painful.

  “I’ll Google the awful creep,” said Madeline. “What was his name again? Saxon Banks, right? I’ll find him and then I’ll put out a hit on him. There must be some kind of online murder-a-bastard service these days.”

  Jane didn’t laugh. “Please don’t Google him, Madeline. Please don’t. I don’t know why I hate the thought of your looking him up, but I just do.”

  “Of course I won’t if you don’t want me to, I was being flippant. Stupid. I shouldn’t make light of it. Ignore me.”

  She held her arms out and gave Jane a hug.

  To her surprise, Jane, who always presented a stiff cheek for a kiss, stepped forward and held her tightly.

  “Thank you for bringing over the cardboard,” she said.

  Madeline patted Jane’s clean-smelling hair. She’d nearly said, You’re welcome, my beautiful girl, like she did to Chloe, but the word “beautiful” seemed so complicated and fraught right now. Instead she said, “You’re welcome, my lovely girl.”

  33.

  Are there any weapons in your house?” asked the counselor.

  “Pardon?” said Celeste. “Did you say weapons?”

  Her heart was still pounding from the fact that she was actually here, in this small yellow-walled room, with a row of cactus plants on the windowsill and colorful government-issued posters with hotline numbers on the walls, cheap office furniture on beautiful old floorboards. The counseling offices were in a federation cottage on the Pacific Highway on the Lower North Shore. The room she was in probably used to be a bedroom. Someone had once slept here, never dreaming that in the next century people would be sharing shameful secrets in this room.

  When she’d gotten up this morning Celeste had been sure she wouldn’t come. She intended to ring up and cancel as soon as she got the children to school, but then she’d found herself in the car, putting the address into the GPS, driving up the winding peninsula road, thinking the whole way that she would pull over in the next five minutes and call them up and say so sorry, but her car had broken down, she would reschedule another day. But she kept driving, as if she were in a dream or a trance, thinking of other things like what she’d cook for dinner, and then, before she knew it, she was pulling into the parking area behind the house and watching a woman coming out, puffing furiously on a cigarette as she opened the door of a banged-up old white car. A woman wearing jeans and a crop top, with tattoos like awful injuries all the way down her thin white arms.

  She’d envisaged Perry’s face. His amused, superior face. “You’re not serious, are you? This is just so . . .”

  So lowbrow. Yes, Perry. It was. A suburban counseling practice that specialized in domestic violence. It was listed on their website, along with depression and anxiety and eating disorders. There were two typos on the home page. She’d chosen it because it was far enough away from Pirriwee that she could be sure of not running into anyone she knew. Also, she hadn’t really had any intention of turning up. She’d just wanted to make an appointment, to prove she wasn’t a victim, to prove to some unseen presence that she was doing something about this.

  “Our behavior is lowbrow, Perry,” she’d said out loud in the silence of the car, and then she’d turned the key in the ignition and gone inside.

  “Celeste?” prompted the counselor now.

  The counselor knew her name. The counselor knew more about the truth of her life than anyone in the world besides Perry. She was in one of those naked nightmares, where you just had to keep walking through the crowded shopping center while everyone stared at your shameful, shocking nudity. She couldn’t go back now. She had to see it through. She’d told her. She’d said it, very quickly,