Look Closer

by David Ellis

As a wise woman once told me: The best lies are the ones closest to the truth.

I don’t know why oddness and contradiction calm me, but they always have, maybe because of their familiarity, because I see so much of those traits in myself.

“Now, I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, Simon.” In the history of mankind, nobody has followed I don’t want you to take this the wrong way with something that could be taken any other way.

Is that what love feels like? Feeling like when you’re with the one you love, you’re on top of the world? It’s been so long I’ve forgotten. I feel like I’ve just taken my hands off the wheel, closed my eyes, and floored the accelerator.

Simon has often joked that he has Irish Alzheimer’s—he only remembers the slights, the grudges.

“Can I ask you a question?” he says. “Shoot.” “Have you ever done this before?” I pull on my underwear, hook up my bra. “Do you want me to answer that?” “I do.” “Are you sure? You wouldn’t prefer to remain in your male-fantasy bubble, that you’re the only one who can unleash the tigress inside me?” “Wow,” he says, though he chuckles. I lean over him, face-to-face. “No, Christian, I have never done anything like this before. I’ve been a very good girl for the last ten years.”

I talked to all kinds of therapists, who explained to me that we look at suicide through this prism of control. We think we can control other things and other people. So when someone we love takes their own life, we think we could have stopped it. We think we had control, and we blew it. We are so unwilling to give up this notion that we control things and people around us that we’d rather feel guilt over the suicide than admit that we didn’t have that control in the first place.”

“Don’t speak unless you have something to say,” she used to say to me during our talks when she tucked me in. “But when you do choose to speak, say what you mean, mean what you say, and be ready to support your points. If you can’t support your point of view, then it wasn’t much of a point of view to begin with.”

They inspire me, the people fighting through poverty and crummy schools, getting the short end of every stick, but fighting no less. I have lived a blessed life. I know that. I’ve had a few low points, to be sure, but I’ve never wondered whether there would be food on the table, I’ve never wondered whether I’d go to college, I’ve never had to avoid windows in my own home for fear of stray gunfire, I’ve never been told that there was no hope for me. I’ve never been ignored.

But that’s what you do with the people you love. You trust them. You trust them until they prove you wrong. Until they betray you. And then, you react however you’re wired to react.

That’s how most people work, in my experience, and I have a lot of experience in breaking up marriages. If they feel guilty about how they’re treating you, they want to turn you into the bad guy. They start to treat you with cruelty.

It’s almost humorous. This guy’s a con artist himself, in cahoots with a fellow swindler. And yet the possibility that someone swindled them seems beyond his capacity at the moment. Here’s the problem. It’s a lot easier to fool someone than to convince someone they’ve been fooled.

The brilliance of the law is that it’s not concerned with one person but with a system applicable to all. It protects the guilty so it can protect the innocent. It protected me, the guilty, from prosecution twice now.