To learn the truth of a narrative, you have to examine the narrator carefully. That’s what I tell my students when I introduce them to Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour. Iris Aroon St. Charles is a protagonist so ridden with repression and denial that we perceive as much from her silence as from her words.
You’d think such a skill would be second nature to teenagers, with their whispered intents and coded language, but it still surprises me how much they take at face value. Reading between the lines is also a strategy for life, but it’s all the more important when words are tight and motives are hidden behind them.
I love teaching, the focus it requires. For an hour or two, I am lost in a literary world with my students while we investigate the stories and minds of my favorite writers. When I was an undergraduate, I studied Joyce, Beckett, Yeats, men celebrated by surname alone. It took me several years to ask where are all the women? and several more to put them on the curriculum.
Now, as female voices soar into our collective consciousness, I struggle even more with my own. I’ve published widely in the academic field, but I’ve never dared share any of my own creative writing. I have dabbled periodically but I’ve never been able to let go enough to make it real. Maybe I just don’t have what it takes, but it doesn’t stop me wanting it, wondering what would happen if I could break the seal on what I know.
“Can you name me any other unreliable narrators in literature?” I ask the new first-years in the tiered seating before me.
A tentative hand goes up in the front row, a girl with a pink fringe and pierced eyebrows.
“Amy Dunne in Gone Girl.”
“Yes, she’s a classic,” I say.
“Atonement,” shouts a girl several rows up.
“That’s a good one,” I say. “Briony Tallis changes the truth to try and atone for what she’s done. Anyone else?”
“Humbert Humbert.”
It’s a quiet voice to my right, a boy with pockmarks and earnest eyes.
“Have you read Lolita?” I ask.
“Em, no,” he says. “I mean, I always thought it was … problematic?”
“Well, if you read it as a love story between a middle-aged man and a twelve-year-old girl, then, yes, it certainly is. But you already know that. So you’ll come to it with a cold eye, ready to discern the truth by dissecting Humbert’s account. Because Lolita doesn’t have a voice, only the lie given to her by him.”
My phone vibrates on the desk in front of me and my eyes shoot to the alert. It’s an email from a Liam Kelly, the subject line below his name:
I know what you did.
“Did you read Lolita when you were younger?” asks the girl with the pink fringe while my pulse surges to double time.
I stare at her as I try to engage the trademark Lou Manson cool. It’s a survival skill that’s never left me and I show no emotion as I struggle to separate her words from the ones I’ve just read.
“I, eh … sorry, what’s your name?”
“Maisie Taylor.”
“And what was your question, Maisie?”
My tongue sticks in my mouth and I put my hands on the desk to steady myself.
“Did you read Lolita when you were our age?”
Maisie is eighteen, nineteen. Old enough to get it, young enough to think she’d never fall for it.
“Yes, I did.”
I glance at my phone to see if it’s time to wind up the lecture, but there are still ten minutes to go. I see the words again and my stomach clenches. I don’t know a Liam Kelly; it might be spam, but I won’t be able to breathe until I find out.
“Did people understand it back then?” asks Maisie. “I mean, did they know how bad it was?”
They didn’t want to know. I close my eyes, but it does nothing to dull the ringing in my ears nor the glare of the overhead lights.
“Everyone knows child abuse is bad,” I say.
“But it wasn’t as taboo, was it, in the seventies and eighties? Like, pop stars went out with fourteen-year-old girls and nobody said anything.”
“Well, I don’t really remember the seventies, thank you very much, Maisie,” I say with a smile as I pick up my phone with a shaking hand.
I hear the start of a “but” as I snap my laptop closed and I speak over her with the first words that come to mind.
“I want you all to read Good Behaviour with an eye on what Iris does that conflicts with what she says, and we’ll discuss next week.”
And then I take the stairs two at a time and keep putting one foot in front of the other until I’m safely behind my office door. I don’t even make it to my desk before my phone is out and I skim the email, looking for the right words, seeing only the wrong ones. I throw the phone on my desk and fall into the chair, trying to catch my breath as my chest tightens and my shoulders heave. I open the laptop, as if the words might make more sense on a bigger screen. My heart hammers in my ears as I read.
If you testify, I’ll tell them everything.
I look away, the unreliable narrator caught in the lie of omission. I suck the breath into me as I try to think about what this means. If it’s really out there, the secret that has haunted me all these years. There were times I almost let it out, to Alex, to Katie’s dad, but I was never brave enough to take that risk. Only Shauna ever knew the truth about that night, and I have no way of knowing what she might have done with it.