From its very first pages, The Lie is a uniquely bizarre tale. It reveals the desolate feelings of Ramona Smollens through her mental stream-of-consciousness. Seen from the viewpoint of what is likely an emotionally disturbed mind, Ramona’s pitiable rambling begins when she starts a long but energetic conversation with a man she meets on a park bench.
At first, she does not notice the thin, dark haired, swarthy young man sitting next to her. What immediately possesses her is an obsession with his fingers: In her mind, they are thick, swollen fingers that seem to bulge at the end. They strike her as unnatural — out of place — like ten swollen penises. Because of these engorged fingers, Ramona desires this man, imagining him as some kind of sexual masterpiece.
“I murmured that my name was Ramona Smollens but deep within me on the very most inside place I said it was Rhonda Smollens, whom I sometimes called Rita Smollens in honor of Rita Hayworth.”
At the beginning of The Lie
, the two chit-chat continuously while they chain smoke any number of cigarettes. In her nervousness, Ramona blathers on about her troubled past hinting that she loathed her father because he regularly abused her. What’s more, she despises her mother because she was aware of her husband’s actions with Ramona, but did nothing to stop them.
Ramona and the phallic-fingered man continue their discourse even though heavy rain soaks them both. Her "gloomy" new-found friend on the park bench beside her reveals that he, too, has a skeleton hidden in his personal closet. At the age of 12, he remembers witnessing his father being gunned down by two bullets. The father died naked, face down on the floor.
A short time thereafter, the repressed Ramona and her thick-fingered friend marry. She quickly discovers that her husband’s enormous sexual appetite does nothing to satisfy her own need for love. To Ramona, their beastly sexual union occurs all too frequently and all too quickly. Likening herself to sex symbol Rita Hayworth, she feels obliged to fake overwhelming gratification which drives her husband’s wild sexual ego to even more frequent copulation.
Ramona’s feelings of loneliness, desolation, and meaninglessness grow accordingly. In her flow-of-consciousness, Smollens imagines what the sexual life of Rita Hayworth must have been like. Knowing that Hayworth had been married five times, Ramona imagines that she, like Hayworth, might just be an insatiable woman. But Ramona has no real desire for another man. Instead, her sense of isolation, emptiness, and lack of love deepens.
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