Silken Lies

To say the truest thing, one must first abandon beauty. And I am not ready. Not because I am dishonest, no. Dishonesty is gauche, too obvious. I am not ready because I have fallen in love, with language, with suggestion, with a sigh so artfully timed it becomes an argument. I have known truth, of course. I have dined with it. But I’ve never quite let it stay the night.

Truth is like one of those bawdy girls with chipped nail polish and haunting eyes, who enter your car on a rainy platform and sit too close. Not because she desires you, but because she has never been taught differently. Her proximity is not seduction. It is the absence of pretense. And it is unbearable. She smells like perfume and cold wind. She never learned to flatter. She looks at you, really looks, and in that moment, you realize. She will never learn to lie beautifully. So you glance away. You rearrange your scarf. You reach for a cigarette you no longer smoke. Truth, you see, does not sip from fine china. It drinks from the palm of its own hand.

To say the truest thing, I would have to strip the sentence of its silk, lace, its cunning little punctuation. I would have to write as though I did not know I was being read. I would have to murder the metaphor, dismember the simile, and stand naked in a house with only windows. There is a kind of pornography to that, a hideous exhibition of the unadorned. I cannot abide it. I like my sins to wear perfume and my revelations to undress slowly, preferably to music.

That is the very problem. I do not want to confess, I want to be admired while confessing.

Beauty, you see, is the alibi I use to avoid conviction.

I once saw a man leap to his death from a roof in Zurich. Or rather, I saw the crowd that formed afterward. He had landed poorly, almost theatrically, and someone had flung a coat over the worst of it. The onlookers stood at varying distances, as if their place in the circle could insulate them from knowing. A little girl asked her father what had happened, and he said, “He fell.” That was not the truth. That was a gentleman’s version of the truth. That was beauty’s version. Neat, palatable, portable.

I think about that fall often, how even the blood knew to bloom around the coat and not through it. How polite, I thought. How utterly civilized.

So no, I am not ready. Not ready to say that I did not love her in the way she deserved. That I studied her gestures the way one studies a foreign phrase one intends never to use. That I wrote her into characters more elegant than she ever was, because I could not endure the unembellished sound of her real voice. Not ready to say that I am terrified of ordinary grief, that slow, suburban grief that requires no metaphors, only time.

The truest thing I could say? I don’t miss her, I miss the way she made me sound in letters. And yes, I know. I know what that makes me.

But I will not say it. Instead, I will write around it. I will design exquisite cul-de-sacs of implication. I will embroider the wound until it looks like something beautiful. I will charm the truth into a kind of slumber.

But, my love, this is not cowardice. It is aesthetic diplomacy.

You see, truth without beauty is like a corpse without context. Indecent. Inconvenient. One cannot possibly leave it in the drawing room. One must arrange it, light it just so, and call it something else entirely. A study, a moment, an elegy.

And so I remain. Here, poised between the impulse to strip the sentence bare and the overwhelming desire to wrap it in mink and hand it champagne. I remain a lover of windows but not of the light they let in. I remain faithful only to my own evasions.

To say the truest thing, one must abandon beauty. And I am not ready. Because beauty has always come when truth has not. Because beauty stayed.

Because beauty lied with me, and let me lie.