He was part of a liars’ club three hundred million members strong. The discovery occurred in haphazard increments, but proved as unstoppable as an oil tanker on a new course.

He had known himself to be a liar and a sinner; he ate too much, was envious of his more successful co-workers, and worst of all, went all too often to filthy web sites and did things to himself that would be held against him in the final tally.

It was hard to believe the Devil put so much effort into him, but He did. As a result, he didn’t trust himself, but there were people you could always trust: the President; the Church elders; the principled principal of Dingby Baptist High School where his two kids went. And first and foremost, your wife, because she held it all together and she was truer
than true.

Then there had been the Dixie Chicks, his wife’s favorite band; it was clearly music for women, but one night after he had tucked Tyler and Shayna in, he had listened to “Godspeed”: “Sweet dreams, little man, Oh my love will fly to you each night on angels’ wings, Godspeed.” To his complete astonishment, he had found tears rolling down his cheeks, and at first had felt betrayed by his emotions—but the love for his children that had swelled in his chest, that massive surge of joy and gratitude tinged with inexplicable sadness, that could not be the Deceiver’s work.

He had felt open after that, and … and dare he say it, saintly. He had been willing to actually listen and relate to Jane’s complaints about the household that night. He had felt less envious at work the next day. And so the Dixie Chicks had joined the very small Pantheon of artists you could trust your heart with.

Then there was that day of Revelation in May of 2003, a spring day so warm that Sheila Stiles had worn summer clothes, and the torture of not allowing his eyes to linger on her cleavage had begun earlier than usual.

They had all been sitting in the break room, all seven of them in the Logistics and Supply Chain team, even that smarmy Dick Weinthrop who took any opportunity to have lunch with the General Manager; they had been eating fast food, vaguely watching TV, and talking about the drought of Biblical proportions Texas would face if the early heat wave went on like that when Sheila had shushed them all.

“Did you hear that?” she had said, her bosom aquiver.

Everyone had lifted their head from their Styrofoam lunch boxes and muttered “what,” “what’s going on,” “what’s the deal,” and, he now remembered, it had sounded like cows mooing in unison.

“That’s Natalie Maines” Sheila had croaked. “She said she’s ashamed that the president is from the same state as her.”

Of course, that was Texas. That was their home state Maines had talked about.

There had been a long silence.

“The gall!” Sheila had said. “Look at that Jezabel” she’d added, her breasts seemingly ready to burst out of her blouse from the outrage. “I’m never buying a Dixie Chicks album again.”

Jan Sorenson, who always finished her meals methodically, had snapped her half-full Styrofoam box shut and stared at the ensuing Kellogg’s commercial with indignation.

There had been nods, frowns, cold anger, and a generally wonderful feeling of united hatred; but not for him. Instead, there had been an icy feeling descending from his throat all the way into his stomach, like those terrifying stalactites he had seen at Carlsbad Caverns.

What exactly had Natalie Maines meant? The others had gotten it, and he still hadn’t. What was she ashamed of? President Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq? Was that it?

He thought of the things that caused him shame: his secret admiration for Weinthrop; his lust for Sheila; his obsession with the porno sites. But war? A righteous war? How could that be shameful?

He had felt bewildered and let down, and had had trouble falling asleep. The following day he’d gone to the Food Court with Jan, who had huffed and puffed as she tried to keep up with him—as much as he slowed down she still had trouble waddling along. She had finally inserted herself into a plastic chair and picked at her Caesar’s salad, taking tiny bites. “I don’t know how you do it” she had said. “You eat so much more than I do, and you stay trim.”

She always made comments like that, and he invariably felt flattered; but that day, he couldn’t help but goggle at her. A scream had formed in his throat, a scream so powerful that it had threatened to take him over. “If you eat so little, then why are you so morbidly obese?” The thought had flooded his brain. He pushed it down frantically.

“Something wrong?” Jan had asked.

“Nothing” he had said. “I’m still upset over that Dixie Chicks thing.”

“Hurry, Jim.” Jan was standing next to the truck, panting. Jim reached his arm in to turn the ignition and preemptively blast the a/c. Humidity, Jim thought to himself, that’s what makes the heat so hard to take this time of year.

Jim kept his thoughts to himself but couldn’t stop from laughing lightly. Sometimes even laughter was a sin. Humidity was the nickname that Betsy Vidor had bestowed on Jan back in junior high. Jan sometimes still winced when she heard the word in passing.

She climbed into the truck as Jim commanded all the windows down. It would probably take the entire drive across the parking lot and around to the Home Depot side of the mall before any cold air would creep in from the vents.

The previous week, in this same lot, Jim had side swiped a parked car. He wasn’t used to the extra length that the double cabin added to his Ranger. He glanced down at the Lexus he had just hit with its passenger side mirror now dangling by the root. This shiny new car was the same color as the underside of an oak leaf. Its mirror, undoubtedly power heated, maybe even light sensitive, would cost a small fortune to replace. He kept driving. Couldn’t they keep car parts simple and modular, he wondered.

Home Depot was even more crowded than usual.

Jan didn’t say a word about the car he had hit, nor about the long caterpillar of a scratch on his own car. She was afraid to; he knew it. He could smell the Hostess HoHo she had just eaten for dessert. He could also smell her sweet uneasiness whenever they were together.

They walked across the parking lot; flashing car mirrors glinted in their eyes like fish scales. Just then, Jim had the sensation of a dark, spreading energy working its fingers over his skull, to his forehead. He knew he was one of God’s liars, and he knew what this familiar gloom made him want to do.

Jan left a trail of light sweat wherever she walked now, a Rubenesque snail leaving its obligatory stream. He turned to her and grabbed both her wet hands with his own. He thought he knew what W must feel like, about to make a speech to bitter mothers of drowned children.

They were halfway down the interior paint aisle. The sample strips of mushroom-colored bathroom enamels made chessboards in the air.

She jerked her hands away. He grasped at them again; her sweat made him slip. After a long moment, she looked him in the face.

“What?”

He mustered the lie:

“Jan I have to tell you something. I talked to my wife last night. I told her something I’ve been meaning to tell her for a very long time. I hope you can forgive me, Jan. I hope my wife can forgive me.”

He felt himself flush, and this time it was Jim who looked at the floor. He bet 10-to-1 he was doing just as good a job—if not better—than our president. He felt that familiar swell of love in his chest again—or was it pride?—just like the other night when he had looked in on his sleeping kids.

“Jan, I told her that you were the one I really wanted to be with. That you and I had something special, but we had never talked about it.” A beat of silence. “I told her that.”

Jan started to wipe the sweat from her hands onto the front of her dress. She had no idea what to say to this man, this man she had dourly wanted since the day he had nearly fallen on her desk after slipping on a wet spot in Supply Chain.

She had not been with another human being in six years. She could not let this possibiity glide past her. No. She would not. It was time for her to put it on the line. Maybe for the last time.

“Are you being serious with me?”

An Office Depot worker deftly carries a ladder down the aisle between them, then was gone.

“No.” He laughs and looks directly at her. “I’m just kidding.”

Jan stumbled a few steps back. She felt her face flush and her head grow dizzy. The sensation of being struck in anger, an invisible backhand suddenly rocking her off balance. All her life Jan had endured men mistreating her, mocking her, and now a train wreck of memories, one slamming quickly into the next, rose up before her in painful, Technicolor detail. She blinked several times. Had she heard him right?

Jim stood in front of her, expectant, smiling. A flash of white rage, and then Jan’s fist connecting with Jim’s front teeth. They both screamed—Jan, because she had never ever hit another person before in her life and now her fist was on fire with the pain, and Jim because he had never ever in his life been struck by a women and now his front tooth was swimming in blood inside his left cheek.

“You….you…bitch!” Jim yelled from behind his cupped hand. “That was my tooth!”

Jan felt that same flash of rage again and this time saw, almost as if it were happening on the big screen at the mall movieplex, her foot connect with Jim’s crotch.

“Arrrrggghhh!”  Now Jim clutched his crotch with one hand, his bleeding mouth with the other.

Jan, shaking, began to walk back across the parking lot but then turned and ran-walked back to Jim, and kneed him in the rear-end. Jim lurched to the ground.

“Shame on you,” was all Jan could muster as she turned and marched back toward the food court entrance. She needed a cupcake.

Jim hid behind his privacy-tinted windows and dripped blood on his leather-trimmed bucket seats.

He cursed at the thought of spending an extra $75 on detailing with no guarantee they’d be able to remove the bloodstains. He breathed deep and escaped into the dripping of blood. Pit. Pit. Pit. The steady rhythm reminded him that the crimson puddle came straight from his own heart. Spontaneous meditation slowly blossomed into ill-advised euphoria and he convinced himself that he’d never felt more blessedly alive.

The taste of blood, the painful throbbing, the sweaty smell of his own fear, the spaciousness of his 4-door SuperCab—it all made him feel larger than life, like a wounded hero on the big screen. A sweet and sorrowful benevolence swept through him. Pity those who would never experience emotion so deeply, so completely.

He laid his head on the steering wheel—the leading man in a Hollywood film, sensitive but hard—gathering himself before he stuck it to the world.

The horn shrieked in protest, and Jim bolted upright, a nervous shock blowing heroic notions to smithereens.

Two kids walking past the front of the truck retaliated for the undeserved blast. The girl gave him the blowjob signal with the bobbing fist and tongue inside the cheek. The boy blew him a kiss and smacked his ass.

Jim started crying.

His wife was going to find out. His boss was going to find out. He was screwed. Jan would tell everyone in the office.

What was he going to do?

Wrong question, he told himself. I need to think big. What would Doubleya do?

Doubleya’d stick to his guns. He always sticks to his guns. He shapes his own reality.

I can do that. I’ve gotta shape my own reality. It’s not a lie if you believe it.

“And I want, I need, Somehow to believe, In the choice I made…” The angelic voice of Natalie Maines came to him from nowhere, like a sign from above.

Jim caught up with Jan outside the Cinnabon. He held her hands as if he couldn’t let go. He looked deep into her eyes and tried to see her soul.

“Please listen,” he said. “I panicked … I can’t say I love you. I’m married. But believe me when I say that I can’t bear the way you look at me with those hungry eyes. It drives me crazy to see the way you fill the space around you and devour all that life offers. Sometimes, when you’re in the room with me, it takes all my strength not to scream.”

Jim pleaded from his heart, “Please forgive me. My life is hard enough just being near you. Please forget today ever happened and let us both move on.”

Jan looked at Jim with a mixture of hurt and anger. She crinkled her eyes a bit, and the rest of her face went blank as she processed it all in. He gulped and tried to take a deep breath but his heart was pounding too fast to take in the air.

Finally, after what felt like minutes, Jan wiped a tear from her eye and weakly smiled. “Why, Jim, I didn’t know you felt that way.” Like clouds lifting after a rainstorm, her face lit up. “I mean, I always kind of suspected, but….”

The blood returned to Jim’s face and he felt like he had just escaped something, like when he ditched Bible Studies to drink beer at Bobby Joe’s house to watch football and managed to convince his parents that he was there to have a private study session. Lady Luck was once again wrapping him in her arms and covering him like a blanket. “So, you forgive me?

Jan’s eyes widened further. “Well, Jesus commands that we must forgive others and as I accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, I am commanded to forgive you.” As she said it, her face turned from happiness to what Jim could only discern as lust, or as lustful as somebody with a double (triple?) chin and a wide, fleshy, moon-shaped face could look. Jim hoped it wasn’t him that brought out that look but the Waffle House in the distance.

“You know, Jim,” she said with a tone of mischievousness this time, “I always felt the same way about you. Sometimes, late at night, I’d picture us together, and, may the Good Lord forgive me for the thoughts that passed through my mind and for what I did while thinking about it.”

Jim turned bright red. Like beet red. Like the kind of red you get when you choke on a corn dog and somebody has to do a Heimlich maneuver. He had to quickly figure out a way around this, something made even more difficult by the images just placed in his head and the ensuing nausea building from the pit of his stomach. Why does he always have to lie like this? In fact, why did he do any of those things he knew he wasn’t supposed to do. It was like the more he tried to not do it, the more determined he was in doing it. Like all those times he vowed he wasn’t going to visit those kind of porn sites on the web and then ten minutes later, he’d plunk down some more money on his credit card for “HotLesbianSchoolGirlsInWhippingCream.com” or that special online video of Penthouse Pets playing naked touch football. Well, W. says we must stay the course and not cut-and-run and if it’s good enough for Dubya, it’s good enough for Jim. He ain’t no cut-and-runner.

“Oh Jan, you know I’m crazy about you. And like you, at night, while in bed with my wife, I…” and here he trailed off as he couldn’t go any further and his thoughts frantically ran through what little Bible versus he could think of in his brain for just the right passage to say (praying every night was another thing he lied about, except the night before an LSU football game). “Doesn’t it say in Corinithians 5:32 that we must honor the family above all? In fact, doesn’t the Bible tell us that that even lusting after someone in your heart is adultery?”

Jim made yet another silent prayer to the God he had once again forsaken that he came even a little bit close to the correct passage. Or a passage whatsoever.

“Oh, Jim, I couldn’t do that….” said Jan as tears once again started streaming down her face. Damn, Jim thought, that woman sure does cry a lot. She even cries on Doughnut Friday’s. He quickly looked around to see if anybody he knew could possibly be watching and gave her a quick hug in sympathy, trying as hard as possible not to give her any chance of wrapping her huge body around him in return.

“But…you know…” he started meekly “we have to keep this secret. Nobody can know of our love. Not our coworkers. And not my family. Why, it would ruin me. It would ruin us. This will always have to be our thing, a love that will never be. Like that song “I Love You In Your Cowboy Boots But I Ain’t No Cowboy.”

A pause. For Jim, the world stopped at that moment, like in all of those TV shows where the background froze and the only thing that moved were the main characters. Jan looked down at the ground for a second as she started crying again. Finally, she looked at him, straight in the eye. “Why, of course, Jim. I promise. I swear to Jesus Christ himself that I will never tell a soul. For the sake of your children and our souls.”

And with that, she gave him a quick hug. Jim let out a breath of air and vowed yet again to never do something like this again.

As she was leaving, Jan turned around. “One more thing, Jim.”

“Yes…”

“When I get home, the first thing I’m going to do is call your wife.”

Jim’s jaw dropped and he couldn’t take a breath. “But why?” he croaked.

“‘Cause I’m a member of the Liars Club too”

And with that, she went into the Cinnabon, laughing as she went.