The Great Pretenders

In Edge of Evil, one of author J.A. Jance’s protagonists, Ali, learns that her husband is both a liar and a cheat, something she has not considered, but which is well-known to everyone who knows him. However, as is often the case, she is left to discover and deal with Paul’s deception on her own. As Ali tells it, she “assumed that she and Paul had both been working hard on their careers, building something together. With that erroneous assumption now laid to rest, Ali wondered how much else in her life was little more than a mirage—smoke and mirrors and special effects.”

There’s a lot of that going around as the new year kicks off, people whose lives are clouded in smoke, standing behind the one-way mirrors from which they all too often watch themselves act out a life that is little more than a part in a play. What makes their actions so insidious is that they don’t share with the other cast members that there is a play in progress: the others sharing the space with the great pretender believe that it is a life they are living. When the lead actor finally reveals that the play has finished its run and (s)he’s closing it down, the other characters don’t know what to do, what to say, what to think, what to feel—kind of the Truman effect, if you ever saw that movie, leaving nothing but an empty stage where once we thought we lived our lives.

The pretenders move on, but we can’t because everything we thought, everything we did, everything we were was an illusion, and it takes time to catch up to that reality.

Character is how well we handle ourselves when life turns to shit, and there are a lot of people building character this month. Facing up to the fact that life is a charade, a façade of image with no substance, is tough to do when it comes suddenly, without warning, without redress, without options. Ali lets it slide for a bit, until she gets her bearings, and then she takes care of business. Once Ali knows who Paul is and what Paul has done, she doesn’t really care what Paul wants. Since she has to move on without him, she’ll move on her way, not his.

This same theme is present in the movie Juno, a story about a pregnant 16-year-old who decides to give the baby to a couple picked from a classified ad. Juno meets them, likes them, strikes a bargain with them, involves them in the pregnancy, and is as shocked as the man’s wife when he says fatherhood isn’t for him, that he’s moving out and moving on. He plays guitar and wants the career as a rock star that he set aside when he married and pretended to become a responsible adult. The mother-to-be is devastated as she thought they were in it together. To her credit, Juno’s note to the woman is “I’m still in if you are,” so although the husband shatters the wife’s dream of a happily-ever-after marriage, she becomes a parent to Juno’s child. The audience is left to assume that her life will be better without the husband than it was with him.

If nothing else, it will be more honest.

I don’t know if that’s reality or just another plotline in a work of fiction, but it makes sense. Because they know it’s all illusion, the "great pretenders" have planned for the end, and they are ready to move on well before they let anyone else in on their little deception. They leave physically long after they’ve left mentally and emotionally, long after they have changed the course of other people’s lives without having to change themselves. Perhaps the “after play” for these people is laughing at the trust of the people they deceive.

The best revenge is not getting even, not stooping low enough to reach the deceiver’s level, but in getting better by moving on with your life, with reaching your goals, with fulfilling your purpose. It takes time to work through the debris left from the first experience, but once the trash is taken out, the whole house feels cleaner and fresher. Ali learns this lesson and is a better person for her life experience, but it’s not an easy journey for her—or for a real-life person. There are times when she questions her part in the failure of her marriage, in her husband’s need to share intimacy with other women, but she finally comes to understand that the failure is theirs, not hers. He was able to deceive her because she didn’t pay attention to their marriage. She assumed, and we all know what assumptions do to “u” and “me.”

In a relationship, it takes two people working together to create and sustain a healthy relationship. If one person is less vested in the relationship than the other, it’s simply a matter of time before the relationship fades and fails. There is no going back, there is no undoing or redoing the shoulda/ woulda/ coulda’s of the marriage. It’s just getting out of bed, putting the feet to the floor, and making it one day at a time. Some days, that will be tougher than others, but one day, it’ll be the most natural act in the world, the start of another new day.