by J. P. Smith
“Really.”
“Yes.”
“Well.”
“I’ll send her your love.”
“I was thinking of calling her myself,” he said.
“Then I won’t bother,” she said.
5
It was strange how disturbed she was when she called the second time that evening and Ben hadn’t answered, as though the rules of their universe had somehow been broken. Although it wasn’t the first time it had happened, it didn’t often occur. She pictured his wife at that precise moment: getting ready for bed, undressing in the bedroom, unbuttoning her blouse, making small talk while he slipped off his shoes, looked at his watch, conveniently forgot Amelie Ferrar. His wife, Janet, remained an enigma to her, like a suspect in a mystery story. Yet they had one thing in common: each, in her own way, was the Other Woman.
Now it was time for another drink. She got up and threw some ice cubes into her glass and poured vodka onto them. The blue of the day had given up to darkness, the air filling with sounds she had known for most of her life, yet which remained unidentifiable in origin: the strange minimalism of peepers, the odd chipping of some insect. The natural world played little role in her books: when people touched the bark of a tree it remained unnamed; when a bird sang prettily in the early morning it was just another winged creature. Once she had spent two months traveling in England, where she’d made an effort to learn the names of things, the blooms and grasses of Kew Gardens, the great antique trees that lay toppled in the ancient West Country woods, the wildflowers that twisted their insidious way into the hedgerows of Dorset and Devon. They had names like wolfsbane and woundwort, bird’s-foot trefoil, petty whin, and Carthusian pink, and it was just like her to forget the plants but remember the words.
She put her hand on the phone and considered trying again. How many times could she do it before his wife would grow suspicious? Technology had overtaken the lover’s ruse: buttons could be pushed, numbers identified, calls blindly returned.
She slid open the door and stepped from the kitchen onto the deck. It was too early in the season for mosquitoes, though moths had begun to appear with their pale nocturnal bodies, their powdery wings. She put her hands on the wooden rail and looked out into the darkness of her garden, and beyond it the brook, the fields, and farther on the woods and the sky, eventually the sea. She sometimes wished there’d be something to look at, something to see into, other lives, just as when she was young she would watch the wordless little dramas unfold through the windows of other houses on her street: marital spats marked by the baring of teeth and the shedding of tears; scenes of amorous abandon, the pressed faces, clasping arms, the curve of a woman’s back, the gestures and poses of people losing their balance at the edge of a cliff. The world of adults, as she thought then, and how dead right she’d been.
She turned her head slightly, her eyes went out of focus, now she could hear it, now it was closing in. The car came to a stop, a door opened. Now everything was better.
6
She woke early, had fruit and coffee, and walked for half an hour at the edge of the road, stepping onto the grass whenever a car or truck passed. The morning air was cold and the breeze bit into the skin of her face, and yet the sun was warm and she could feel herself breaking into a sweat. Although most of her friends belonged to a local fitness center with its treadmills and weights and spinning classes, she preferred a quiet, solitary amble, a time when she could gather her thoughts, prepare for the day’s work.
Idling and kicking next to their backpacks, children waited in front of their driveways for school buses. An appliance-repair van drove slowly by, and the driver caught her eye, turning his head to look at her as he passed. A month earlier a car had pulled up alongside her, and the driver, a heavyset man in dark glasses, asked if she needed a lift. She said, “No thanks,” and then he said, “Hop in.”
“I’m taking a walk,” she said, as if it weren’t obvious.
“I’d like you to get in.”
“No.”
She remembered the sudden pain in her stomach, the loss of breath, the immediate realization that things were moving into another dimension, a fun-house room of distorting mirrors and uncertain footing. She thought of Nina before she left for college, considering a three-thousand-mile hitchhiking trip into the unknown, and here was her mother, fifteen minutes from her house with a creepy man in a rusty car.
“I want you to see something interesting,” he said, reaching to open the passenger door.
But by then she had glanced at his license plate and begun to back away, knowing he would have to reverse or turn around, and she started to run. But he didn’t reverse or turn around; he drove on at speed. She had left her phone at home, and reminded herself never to do that again.
When she got back she called Ben at his office. “There was this man,” she began, and then she lost control, she was in tears, and her stomach continued to churn.
“But nothing happened,” he said after she told him about it.
“Nothing had to happen. I was frightened anyway.”
“Come on.”
“You don’t understand.”
“But—”
“Go to hell,” she said, hanging up.
By the time she called the police she had forgotten even a single digit or letter of the man’s plate number. She described the car, she described the man, and the officer asked how tall he was.
“He never stood up.”
“Can you estimate it at least? I need to put something down.”
“I told you, he was sitting in his car.”
“Six feet?”
“I don’t know.”
“Five nine?”
“He was in his car.”
“He never touched you?”
“He was going to rape me.”
The officer cleared his throat. “You said he asked if you wanted a lift.”
“He was a complete stranger to me.”
“Maybe he was trying to be friendly,” the cop said. “A lift is not sexual assault.”
“He insisted on my getting in. Do you call that being friendly?”
“Maybe it’s a matter of interpretation, Ms. Ferrar.”
“He said he wanted to show me something interesting. Do you think he was going to whip out a Blue Period Picasso?”
“What he said doesn’t in itself indicate anything of a criminal nature.”
“So you’re not going to look for him, is that what you’re saying?”
“I just need to know how tall he is,” he said, and she clicked off and called Ben’s office again.
“My secretary is wondering who keeps phoning me, I can see her face through the glass.”
“I don’t give a damn, Ben. I just need a little sympathy,” she said.
“Now?”
“Forget it,” and she hung up again.
For a few weeks she kept off the roads in her area, walking instead in a state park twenty minutes away. Now she was back to her routine and she felt safer and more secure, only because time had softened the fear.
When she returned from her walk the morning after the interview she saw a message had been left for her on her cell. She brightened when she saw who it was, and then his voice came on. Janet just left to take Andrew to school, so I’m going to the office. Last night was amazing. I’m sorry you were upset that I didn’t call you first, but I just wanted to surprise you. So. But. It was really nice being able to get out. Um. To see you.
She smiled to herself, not because of the call or the sound of his voice or his choice of words or the little hesitancies she had always found charming, but because she remembered how it had felt twelve hours earlier, how even though it was just a quick one it pleased her more than he could imagine. She took off her sneakers and socks and yoga pants and sweatshirt and T-shirt and underwear and s
tepped into the shower. She lifted her face to the water and shut her eyes as it streamed into her hair and ran down her body. She began working the shampoo into her hair. She lathered up the soap and, with a mitt, rubbed it on her skin. She shaved her legs and rinsed off and then she was done.
The drive to the bookstore would take nearly an hour. Though her reading was scheduled for seven thirty, she left a few hours early. She would pick up her glasses and then continue on to the city. She would have a light supper at a nearby restaurant and then meet with the people at the store at seven. She sat in traffic on the highway and listened to NPR and watched the haze of the afternoon thicken over the unspectacular skyline. Things came to mind: the possibility of taking up smoking again, a habit she had ended because a few years before the divorce Richard had stopped and she felt it would be unfair to light up in the house. She wondered if she’d visit Nina on Saturday or Sunday, and on the little pad she kept in the car wrote Call Nina, and added an exclamation point. Perhaps she’d bring her something, food or something to wear, just as she used to at camp. Or she would take Nina shopping and then out to lunch, and would this entail inviting her roommate as well? She remembered the young woman’s parents, the brass-buttoned blue blazer the father wore, his tasseled loafers and his striped necktie. While other parents tramped casually about the campus in jeans and sweaters, the roommate’s mother for some reason wore a yachting outfit, white slacks and a little jacket with piping, and Amelie wondered if there was also a cap involved, something naval she’d left in the car or on her boat or at the marina. The woman had asked Amelie what sort of books she wrote.
“I write about… Well, they’re kind of hard to describe. They’re about people like you and me,” and she waved her hand in the air to indicate every other well-off adult wandering the campus. “I’m mainly interested in how our inner lives are so different from how we act in life. The contrast. I mean, we’re all so preoccupied with how people look, how they dress, if they’re famous or not, but it’s what’s inside that interests me. What they’re hiding.”
It seemed amazing to her how such a literate person could sound so inarticulate. She wondered why people were so interested in what writers thought, or even in describing what they wrote, while in fact authors’ lives were usually rounds of self-destructive behavior alternating with baroque fantasies about themselves and others; it was what they put on the page that mattered most. That was the face they wanted others to see, not the thing that startled them every morning in the blaze and glare of the unforgiving bathroom mirror.
The woman sniffed and said she only read cozy mysteries.
Amelie remembered that Nina was not overly fond of her roommate, and that was just as well, for she was a large girl with an unmistakably hungry look in her eye, and lunch might have become something more than a salad or a sandwich; it might have turned into an expensive, three-course feast. No: she would take Nina on her own, they would shop, they would eat, they would walk and talk, and Richard could go to hell if he couldn’t find the time to leave his new wife even for two hours.
The woman on the car radio asked her to call in and pledge fifty dollars, in return for which she’d receive a coffee mug with a picture of some other announcer on it. If you pledged seventy-five dollars you received a voucher for dinner at some exotic bistro, and if you pledged five hundred dollars you got to eat with the man whose picture was on the mug. Next week Amelie was due to tape an interview for broadcast on this very station, and stations like it all across the country would be syndicating it. The whole thing would take less than half an hour, to be edited down to something like eight minutes.
She liked to be interviewed, she liked to be photographed, she liked to be talked about. It went along with the job, and yet there were areas in her life that could not suffer the light of day, places of whisper and code that, if discovered, would cause misery and grief to others. She thought of Ben’s two children and his wife. How long would it go on, this subterfuge? Twice she’d seriously asked him to leave his family and live with her, and twice he said Not now, it’s not the right time, and she asked when the right time would be, and all he could do was shrug and say that he didn’t know.
She was off the highway now, moving from stop sign to red light, pulling off the road and parking in the little strip mall. The man working at the optician’s recognized her from a few days before. He said her glasses were just about ready, that he was giving them one last cleaning, and he held them up to the light and examined the lenses. He stepped around the counter and asked Amelie to sit, and then he slid them over her ears and let them rest on the bridge of her nose. Amelie glanced at herself in the mirror. Now that they had been mounted with glass they seemed less becoming. The man asked her how they felt, and Amelie said they were a little tight over her ears. He took them off and made an adjustment. This went on for ten minutes, off and on, off and on, and then they were done. She was handed a laminated card with printing on it. She looked through the lenses and read the lines to herself, You can change your life simply by changing the color of your eyes. Ask your optometrist about, and she looked up and smiled. “That’s so much better.” It was like magic.
The man took some cases out of a drawer. Amelie chose a soft blue one, and he slid the glasses inside it.
“If there’s any problem just bring them in,” he said.
In the car she took the glasses out of the case and slipped them on. She looked at her watch and the numbers were distinct and black, and then she took the glasses off and the numbers sizzled into a smoky blur. She looked at herself in the mirror attached to her visor, settling the glasses on her face, moving her head this way and that. She wondered how they would look when her hair was loose instead of being pulled back and clipped, and she reached behind and released her hair and then everything fell into place, glasses, hair, face, and attitude.
She drove away and pulled back onto the highway. She wondered if she would have to wear the glasses for her reading. Still a novelty, they would make her feel uncomfortable, stared at, awkward. She wouldn’t wear them, then. She would manage without them, she would stand at the lectern and read the first twenty pages of the book and then answer questions from the audience. She wondered if anyone would actually show up. She remembered when she’d first started doing these events years ago, how sometimes a few people would come and introduce themselves, only to reveal they had never heard of her but they wished her the best of luck anyway, leaving with someone else’s latest book in their mitts.
Once, after her last novel had broken onto the bestseller lists, Ben had come to a reading at a bookshop two towns away from hers. It had been scheduled for a Sunday afternoon, and something like forty people were there to hear her, the majority of them elderly women who sat with their arms crossed, their mouths firmly shut, their eyes flashing as she read her tale of suburban lust. She remembered looking up and seeing Ben and his wife, Janet, arriving and sitting on folding chairs in the first row. Janet smiled at her. Ben looked away. She had seen Janet before, because their daughter had been in the same class as Nina, and at school functions they would occasionally politely greet each other.
Amelie stood at a lectern in the back room of the bookshop and for the first time was able to look all she wished at her lover’s wife. It was odd. It was odd not so much because she was in the same room as this woman, but because it suddenly dawned on her that she and Janet looked so much alike. Janet was blond, Janet was slim; blue-eyed Janet was sitting next to Ben in her jeans and turtleneck. Amelie took her eyes off Janet and stared briefly and coldly at Ben, and then later when he called her, the first thing she said was, “Whose idea was that?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I’m talking about. How could you do such a thing?”
“You mean Janet.”
“That’s right.”
“She’d read your last book. She’d taken it out of the library and wanted to hear
you read. What was I supposed to do, refuse to let her go?”
Now her anger shifted its focus. “She didn’t even buy it?” she said.
“Oh, come on.”
“Okay,” she said. “Forget it.”
Now when she thought about it she even laughed a little, because time had passed and they were still together, Amelie and Ben. And Janet.
One of them would have to go.
7
When Amelie arrived in Wellesley on Saturday morning, Nina was waiting for her at the gate. It was astonishing how much her daughter had changed since starting college. Amelie couldn’t quite say how, but little things—the way Nina stood, the way she smiled, how the elements in her face had shifted—were subtly coming together to define what was now a woman. She smiled and gave a little girlish wave when she saw the car, and Amelie was pleased that a trace of childhood still remained. She slid down the window. “I’m not late, am I?”
Nina shook her head. Now she was not smiling.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” She got in beside her mother. Her eyes were red, and she looked wan and unwell.
Amelie put her hand on Nina’s. “What’s wrong, baby?”
Nina smiled a little. “Nothing.”
“What would you like to do?”
“Nothing.”
“Do you want to shop, do you need anything?”
“No. Nothing.”
“Do you want to eat?”
Nina shook her head.
“Are you in trouble?”
“No.”
“You’re not—”
“No,” and she shook her head with exasperation.
“Let’s get out of here,” Amelie said, and she followed the narrow road out through another gate. Other students, books in hand, walked toward the library. A few others jogged or rode bicycles. One or two saw Nina and waved at her. Nina seemed beyond tired and looked more like Richard than ever before. “Have you heard from your dad?”