She walked behind the sofa and patted the top of my head, then delivered her next speech standing there, with both hands on the back of the sofa, leaning over me, facing the audience.
“First, I think the tone is particularly good: I make myself sound as if I’ve barely changed, as if I’m still the simple girl I portray myself as having been when Greg recruited me. On the surface, I seem scarcely to have progressed beyond my simpleminded girlhood at all, though here and there an insight glints, and under all there’s a hint of weary self-awareness that foreshadows the future me.”
A mock curtsy.
“I like the way I pretend not to know, even at this late date, what attracted me to the idea of being on display, the cute way I dance around that bit of self-knowledge, wondering what seduced me—‘Was it Greg? Was it his proposal? Or was it Christmas cheer?’ I think the truth peeks out from behind the camouflage, though—that it was the idea itself that seduced me—and I think that most people catch the hints that it was actually my idea.”
She came back around the sofa, sat at the far end, crossed those legs, and shrugged again.
“I mean, otherwise why would it have suited my needs so well at that moment, hmm?”
Another shrug. I thought she was overdoing the shrugging and winking and thought I ought to tell her so. But how? How could I communicate with her without everyone’s noticing? With luck, some excuse would come along that would make it appropriate for me to take her in my arms, so that I could whisper in her ear and no one would be able to hear what I was saying. I made a mental note to watch for such an opportunity.
“All of that is pretty subtle stuff,” she said, in my direction, with mock seriousness. “That’s why I’m pointing it out. I’ve noticed over the years that the subtle stuff can go unnoticed if I don’t find a way to announce it.”
Holding up the thumb of her right hand as if she were ticking off the first in a number of points she intended to make, she said, “So, I like the tone in my story. What else?” She added her index finger to the tally and said, “I like the note of disagreement between Greg and me over the precise details of our meeting, the question of whether I was standing or sitting at the bar. This kind of fakery, displaying uncertainty about the tiniest detail in a big lie, is a master stroke, I think. Anyone who has tried to conceal something knows what I mean. In the middle of the alibi you’ve worked so hard to perfect, you pause, you stumble, you stammer, you fumble in the dark catacombs of your dead and dying brain cells as if trying to recall whether the car you were riding in was black or blue, whether it had two doors or four. That little imperfection makes the story believable. That apparently tiny failure of the memory is actually a great triumph of the imagination, since the truth is that there was no car at all. The best fakers have a bit of the artist in them, and the best artists a bit of the faker. That nitwit Guy would never have understood this. Agreed?”
There was quite a lot of applause. The hall was full. Ariane had become skilled at promotion over the years, and she had succeeded in establishing the impression that her last night on stage was an event not to be missed. Many of the people in the audience had been with us for our entire conversation. I sat there, grinning, playing second fiddle and happy in the role.
[to be continued]
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