“I have to tell you something, Max. It’s bad and I’m very scared, but I know I have to tell you.” She turned and slid closer to me. I think she was facing me but it was so dark in the room that I had no idea what she was doing. It felt like she was having a long close moment of me either to give her strength or to burn something into her memory in case what she was about to say destroyed us. Saying nothing, she remained like that. I kept silent and didn’t move. Finally groaning deep and sad, she mumbled, “God,” and slid away. She took my arm with her, pulling it across her flattened breasts. Kissing my hand, she pressed it to the side of her face and kissed it again. “I love you more than any man I’ve ever known. I love you so much that I have to tell you these things even though—” She undid my hand from hers and pressed it to her lips. She kissed the palm, the fingers. She curled it into a fist and pushed it against her face. There was a strong and frighteningly fast pulse beating in her throat beneath one of my fingers. “I’ve done terrible things. If you were anyone else in the world I would never, ever tell. You have to know that. It’s very important to me because I believe there has to be truth between people who want to spend the rest of their lives together. Even when it’s something as bad as this. It’s such a contradiction—I love you so much that now I have to tell you the thing that can kill me.”
I didn’t turn to her and show her an expressionless calm face which, if she could have seen it in the dark, would have told her I knew already. Instead, her confessor, I spoke quietly toward the ceiling. “What would kill you?”
She sat up suddenly. The movement made a small breeze that swept the smell of sexy funk and her cologne past me. “A crime. I committed one of the worst crimes on earth. Me, Lily Aaron. I cannot believe I’m telling you this. You have to have the history right from the beginning. Maybe that’ll make it easier to understand. Probably not. There’s no way to understand this.
“When you were a kid, was there one thing you wanted more than anything in the world? I mean, so much that your hunger for it tore you apart?”
“I guess being a cartoonist came closest. I wanted that pretty bad.”
“I wanted a baby. I wanted to be a mother. My earliest memories are of playing with dolls. But I never saw them as adults, as other girls do. I never had tea parties for them or talked to them like I was a woman and we were all grownups. The only kind of dolls I wanted were babies. If someone gave me an adult doll or even a Barbie, I’d throw it in the back of the closet. I could never understand why someone would want Barbie. A teenager? Who would want to play with a teenage doll? I wanted babies. I wanted my own.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It was always in my blood from the beginning. When I’d see a baby carriage on the street I’d race up and look into it like I was looking at God. Didn’t matter if the kid was black or yellow or white. It was a baby and that was enough. If I was lucky, the woman would see my love and let me hold it a few moments. I remember being so terrified. What if I dropped it, or it didn’t like me and cried, or I did something else wrong? But holding it made me so happy, Max. It was the greatest feeling I knew on earth.
“When I was twelve, my mother allowed me to babysit in our neighborhood. I used the mimeograph machine in my father’s office, printed up an advertisement for myself and stuck it up on every telephone pole on our block. The younger the child, the better. You know how most sitters watch TV or talk on the telephone to their friends once the parents have gone out? I never did. I’d play with the kid till it was dead tired, give it a bath whether it needed one or not, then put it in bed and watch till it fell asleep. Lots of times I’d bring my homework into their bedroom and do it by the crib while they slept. I was your ultimate dream babysitter; totally trustworthy and in love with every kid I sat for.
“This is boring, isn’t it? I’m boring you, but believe me, it’s all important. Anyway, it’s time to undo my first lies. My family name isn’t Margolin, it’s Vincent. And I come from Glenside, Pennsylvania, not Cleveland.”
“Why did you tell me those other things?”
“Because I’ve been Lily Aaron from Cleveland for almost ten years. I became her so well that now I have to remind myself of the name Vincent. It’s not me anymore, I’m the Lily you know.”
“Sounds like I don’t know Lily.”
“Yes, you do! You know me better than anyone. You just don’t know this part because no one has ever known it. No one ever could. Please let me go on and don’t interrupt. I’m afraid if I don’t tell it all to you now, I’ll start lying again and I don’t want that. It’s taken me this long to get up the courage to do it, and the more I’ve grown to love you, the more difficult it’s become. I guess it’s like having a baby—once it starts coming, you just want to get it out.” As she spoke the last part of the sentence, she began crying again and this time it went on and on. I asked if there was anything I could do but she said no, just stay here, don’t go away.
I was so calm I was… interested. Interested to hear the details of her story and how she would phrase saying she had stolen her son. Weeks before, I would have been sweating and shaking too at this point in her tale, waiting for her to admit her secret sin. Then I probably would’ve grabbed and shaken her, screamed I know it! I know you did that! Not now.
The weeping ended and she tried to speak through those gasping hitches of breath that come after you’ve cried hard and your body is trying to bring itself back from the brink.
“But wh-wh-when I got to be a teenager it all changed. I-I-I didn’t ca-care about kids anymore. I lost all interest i-in them. There were boys now, and being popular in school was so important. All my interests changed. I hung around with girls who thought if you died and went to heaven, you got to be a cheerleader and had your own Princess telephone.
“And sex. Before, that wasn’t really connected to babies: it was like one day you’ll have a husband and somehow the two of you together will make children appear. But in eighth and ninth grade, the hormones began singing and boys you once hated started looking wonderful. Remember that? Everything’s suddenly about sex and being noticed. Not actually having sex, but all the things buzzing around it. Brassieres, flirting, who’s going with who, who’s rumored to be doing what…
“I wasn’t noticed at first because I wasn’t beautiful like Alexa Harrison or Kim Marcus, but I was adventurous and willing to try things other girls wouldn’t. I was the first in our crowd to French-kiss and word got around fast about that. I liked it from the very beginning. I liked kissing and being touched, although I’d never let anybody touch me in the places because that just wasn’t done. But I rolled around a lot! By tenth grade, a few friends of mine were making love pretty regularly, but I wasn’t. Funny thing was, I had the reputation for being fast and loose, while these ‘bad’ girls were seen as Little Bopeeps. They could have done the whole football team but no one would’ve described them as being naughty. Only me.”
“Did that bother you?”
“Not as much as you might think. It wasn’t true and I knew it. If someone believed I was a slut, they weren’t my friends anyway. The people who mattered knew the truth; they knew who I was.
“So I did as I pleased and didn’t lose my virginity till I was eighteen. A senior in high school, which was pretty old in those days.
“The tricky part began in college. I didn’t go to Kenyon, as I told you. I went to NYU. I’d always wanted to live in New York, and at the time, I wanted to be an actress. But it didn’t work out that way. My sophomore year, I met a guy named Bryce who hung around with the most interesting bunch of people I had ever met. Students mostly, but there were some writers and musicians, and actors sprinkled in there too. One of them had even been in an Andy Warhol film. You can imagine how I fell for them. Miss Glenside, Pennsylvania, meets the Lower East Side. Everybody did drugs and slept with everybody else. After a couple of months I did too. It was no big deal. Besides, these people considered you liberated if you slept around, not a slut like they had at home. And dope made it nicer, smoother, or sometimes if you did have worries, it made them go away, so it got to be my all-purpose cure-all. Little Lily Vincent makes the scene. The problem was, none of us was very talented, although we talked a good game. We knew all the correct words to use to make it sound like we were up to big things.