If She Were Dead

by J. P. Smith

  The waitress indicated a stairway leading downstairs. She walked to the end of the narrow hallway, past the two doors with their stick-figure gender labels, and speed-dialed his cell number on her iPhone. She knew he would be working late, as he always did on Thursdays, her mind traveling the length of the circuit, moving up the coast and then a few miles inland, and then he answered and he sounded tired, and she said only, “It’s me.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m in the city. I haven’t done the reading yet. I’m having dinner. Any chance you could drive down and spend time with me afterward?” and she could hear it in her own voice, the bend of desire for the impossible to happen.

  The man with the silver hair stepped out of the men’s room and, looking directly at her, smoothed his hair back over his scalp. Passing very close and leaving his scent on her, he ascended the stairs.

  “I’d really like to see you,” he said. “But I can’t.”

  “I know. I just thought I’d try.” She laughed a little. “Can you come over to the house later? I’ll be home by ten or ten thirty at the latest.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t think I can get out.”

  “That’s never really been a problem before.”

  “I just don’t think I can do it. I’m exhausted, I’ve been working all day.”

  “I’m tired too.”

  “You know I’m working against a deadline.”

  “But I’d get out for you.”

  “Look, Amelie.”

  “I’d get out for you. I’d get in my car without a second thought.”

  “Look.”

  She held the phone away from her ear and stared at it as if she had suddenly forgotten what it was. Then she clicked off, with a violent downward motion, as though plunging a dagger into his chest.

  Her pinot noir was waiting for her. She took a long drink and, when the waitress returned, ordered another glass and some sort of pasta dish, simply pointing to the name on the menu. She looked at the book she had bought. Now everything about it repelled her—the ugly cover, the photo of the author on the back, the simpering smile on the woman’s face, the idiotic way she held her hand by her face, almost certainly hiding the wattles of late middle age. Amelie didn’t want to read, she didn’t want to try out her new glasses, she didn’t want to eat or smile and meet her readers, she didn’t want to sign her name or answer questions, she wanted to drive home and find Ben and shake him so hard he would suddenly come to his senses and reduce his world to Amelie Ferrar.

  She got up and went downstairs and called his number again. “Yes,” he said, and it sounded like the hissing of a snake.

  “I’m sorry. I just wanted to apologize.”

  She could hear him sigh, a great, huge dramatic sound.

  “I know it’s frustrating,” he said.

  “It’s been two years, Ben. Haven’t we got this down to a science yet? Wait—are you alone? I thought I heard a door shut.”

  “It’s…nothing. Look, I know it’s been tough on you.”

  “I’m home tomorrow,” she said. “I’m visiting Nina on Saturday, and I’ll be home that evening and all night and all day on Sunday. On Monday I’m driving back down here to record an interview on a radio station. It’s a network thing for NPR, All Things whatever. Just so you know. Maybe you can get out for a little while and drop by? I’d love to see you.”

  He said nothing.

  “Ben?”

  After a moment he said, “Yes. I’m here.” The flinty tone of his voice, his whole delivery, made him sound like someone else, a stranger who might otherwise have tried to assault her. She wondered if he was even at his office; with a cell phone he could be at the local Hooters or lost in the woods or sitting across from his wife.

  She looked at her watch. “I’ve got to go. I’ve got to eat. I’ve got to give this reading,” and she ended the call and walked back to her table. Her food was no longer hot. Warm, but not hot, and she ate it without a break, one forkful after another, chew and swallow, chew and swallow, and she finished her second glass of wine and ordered an espresso. She sipped it slowly, so slowly that when she reached the muddy dregs at the bottom of the tiny cup they were cold. She felt more herself by then, calmer. She knew that she had made an idiot of herself over the phone, badgering her lover with pointless demands, she knew he knew she loved him, she wanted him, and she would make it up to him.

  She handed her credit card to the waitress and looked at her watch. Now she could face her audience, read her twenty pages, answer their questions. She would sign their books and accept their compliments and nod her head when they told her what her books meant to them, how they had been moved to tears or laughter, or that they had spoken up in book groups on her behalf. A few mistakes had been made: the pasta would stick in her throat and affect her voice; an extra glass of wine might have been one too many. Still. Still.

  When she opened the door to the restaurant and turned to go back to the bookstore, the last rays of sun were shining directly on her. For a moment she lifted her face and smiled as she absorbed the heat and the light. Now she could feel summer in the air. Soon it would be full upon her. She would swim; she would go on long walks, and she and Ben would find places where they could be together in the tall grass of August. It would be like starting all over again, just as it was on that hot September day they had first exchanged glances.

  They met at the end of summer.

  It was how her reading began.

  11

  After she was introduced there was some gentle applause. She looked at the faces. Most were smiling; most were women; all must have seen her photos on book jackets or in newspapers or magazines, and now they were seeing her in the flesh. Until then she had only been the author of a number of volumes, novels that had distracted or amused them or, as she’d learned from readers who had talked to her, had served as a reflection of their own lives. Now they could see her as a person with a voice and a body, they could take in her blue eyes, her blond hair, they could see for themselves the woman loved by the architect.

  As she did at all of her readings, she began quietly, with her eyes on her audience, as though she was simply telling them a story off the top of her head, something you might make up for a child at bedtime. She knew when to pause and when to lift her voice, and there were times when she would fix her attention on first one person in the audience, then another, as if speaking to each individually.

  “It was long past the time when the lilacs bloomed and the primroses grew vivid in the midday sun. Spring had come and gone, and peace had fallen upon her like a morning mist. She found the time to be alone, to be calm, to be what she’d always wanted to be…”

  Twenty-two minutes later she was done, nodding and smiling to acknowledge the applause. The man from the store stood and called for questions from the audience. Where do you get your ideas? Do you write every day, do you have certain hours set aside? Is Nicole Kidman really as pretty in person? She answered the questions, as always, as though it were the first time she had ever heard them, with freshness and vitality and humor.

  Now it was time to sit at the table and sign books, and she realized that she’d already grown dependent on her glasses. She thought of the two phone conversations she had had with Ben from the restaurant and regretted having spoken to him so abruptly. Perhaps he really couldn’t get out tonight, maybe Andrew was sick, and yet if that were the case, why couldn’t Janet look after the boy, why couldn’t he just make the excuse that he’d left something at the office he needed to look at immediately…? He had done it before, he had told his wife he just needed to pick something up, and at high speed made his way to Amelie’s house, to make quick half-dressed love to her on the dining room table, and he was back in his car ten minutes later. So why couldn’t he do it now? The thought of it darkened her mind, we
akened her smile, prodded at her attention. She’d pushed him, she’d urged and nagged, she’d left the conversation unresolved, and now he resented her.

  The line for signed copies was dwindling, and at this stage it had become a mechanical exercise. Smile and sign, smile and sign, a few words here and there.

  Without looking up, she said to the woman who had handed her a book, “I’m sorry, what was the name again?”

  “Janet,” she said.

  12

  It took her a moment to process the various implications presented to her.

  “Janet. Yes. Of course,” and almost getting to her feet, Amelie instead smiled a little and took off her glasses, hoping the moment might lose its focus. “How nice to see you.” The usual formulaic words, spoken under extreme duress.

  “I had a dinner meeting not far from here and was walking by just now to my car and saw you were giving a reading. Since our daughters are friends, I thought, why not, I’ll stop in, say hello, buy your latest novel. I really loved your last one,” she added. “I’m sorry I missed your reading tonight, though.”

  The woman seemed sincere and open about it, and Amelie was too flustered to say anything more. She signed the book with Warmest regards and, still suspecting the worst was yet to come, handed it back.

  “I wonder,” Janet said. “Would you like to get a drink with me, or coffee?”

  Without thinking, Amelie agreed that a drink would be nice, just to turn the event into a long and utterly unmemorable blur. As they walked Janet spoke a little about her work as CEO of a medical software company, a fact that Amelie had already learned from Ben. She knew that Janet had made a name for herself as someone who ran an ethical and socially conscious company in a crowded, competitive field full of grifters in lab coats.

  They ended up in the same restaurant Amelie had eaten in a few hours earlier, and were seated at a table in the bar section. Janet ordered a cabernet and Amelie settled for her usual vodka martini.

  “So,” Janet said. “All this time and so much in common and I’ve never had the opportunity to chat with you.”

  Amelie smiled uncomfortably and tried to guess where this was going. She wondered if before the evening was over, she might be thrown from a moving car or strangled with Janet’s expensive Hermès scarf, the victim of a properly vengeful wife. Until now she had thought Janet was totally ignorant of what her husband was doing; now she wasn’t so sure. So much in common… The phrase seemed a little loaded to her. What did they have in common apart from daughters who went to school together…? Oh, right.

  Now that Janet was barely a foot away from her, Amelie had a long, not-altogether objective look at her. My rival, as she thought of her. The other woman.

  His wife.

  Janet was pretty in an anodyne way, the kind of pretty you saw in magazine profiles of people like her, heads of corporations, movers and shakers, senators and congresswomen: impeccably dressed, a model of confidence and serenity, utterly unreadable. People for whom the dark side was locked inside a vault within a fortress.

  Over the course of their affair Amelie had always wondered what Ben saw in Janet, and now it was evident: she was an independent woman of poise and intelligence, leaving Amelie feeling diminished, like a knockoff thirty-dollar Prada bag at a street vendor’s stall. From a distance Amelie seemed the genuine article, but next to her lover’s wife you could see the shoddy construction, all the little faults in the details that would eventually lead to its structural collapse and eventual demise in a distant landfill.

  “You’ve met Ben, haven’t you?” Janet asked.

  Here it comes, Amelie thought. “Once or twice.”

  “I thought you knew each other better,” and there was the briefest of pauses. And the merest of smiles. “You know, from school. Our kids.”

  “We’ve met. Chatted a little. The girls, like you said. You know.” Funny how a person who made her living from using words in a way that drew plaudits from reviewers and readers alike could be reduced to sounding like a mindless teenager.

  “How’s Nina?”

  “Really good, thanks. Wellesley was a good choice for her.”

  “Same with Rachel with Smith. It took her a few months and an additional fifteen pounds before she settled down,” and both of them laughed.

  That had never been Amelie’s problem. When she went off to college, she’d subsisted on cigarettes and black coffee, and while her roommate quickly outgrew all the new clothes she’d brought, Amelie had lost ten pounds in the first month.

  The waitress brought a little bowl of nuts to the table. Amelie watched as Janet took exactly one cashew and introduced it to her lips. Her husband, on the other hand, was a voracious eater. He ate the same way he made love, as though the food on his plate, like Amelie on the bed, was going to be snatched away from him at any moment.

  “Where did you go to college, Janet?”

  “Stanford.”

  Amelie said she’d gone to Mount Holyoke, and Janet laughed. “I applied there and was rejected. Same with Smith and Bryn Mawr and Harvard. I was fortunate that Stanford wait-listed me.” She shrugged. “Guess I just got lucky in the end,” and they both laughed.

  Summa fucking cum laude, Amelie guessed, while she was only magna and was now being paid a pittance compared to Janet. Maybe that’s why Ben was sticking around with her. Like Amelie, he was paid for his commissions, and as with Amelie, especially in the early years of her career, there must still be periods of drought. But Janet was his insurance policy, and once again the film noir was back in play, Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray facing each other across the shadows in Phyllis Dietrichson’s Beachwood Canyon home. But who exactly was in charge here?

  Were it in a movie, the conversation would snake around all the niceties and end up in a barrage of accusations, productions of evidence, photos, and recordings, leading to a bitter divorce, and then, of course, murder, because that’s how a noir always ends. In this case it could only lead to her marriage to Ben. So maybe this was all for the best. Two women chatting and getting a little plastered.

  “I hear you live alone now,” Janet said. “I’m sorry, but—what is his name…? Robert?”

  “Richard. We’ve been divorced for two years now.”

  “So how has it been for you?”

  It was a question no one had ever bothered to ask Amelie, and since she felt she had no need of professional counseling, queries of that order simply never came her way.

  “Richard and I get along perfectly well. Pretty well, anyway. Anyway, better than we did in our last years of marriage.”

  “Isn’t it always that way?” Janet said, and again they shared a moment’s merry laugh.

  Amelie looked at her. Now it was her turn. “I know so little about you, Janet. Is this your first marriage?”

  Janet smiled. “First and only. He’s the love of my life.”

  Mine, too, Amelie thought. “Actually, Richard’s remarried.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “To a younger woman.” A much younger woman. “Did you ever meet him?” Amelie asked.

  “I think Ben once introduced us at some school thing.”

  Something her lover had never divulged to her. What else had he kept hidden in the folds and valleys of the mysterious gray blob in his skull?

  “And life is okay?” Janet said. “Being alone, I mean?”

  Amelie’s martini was down to its sad final olive, and she knew better than to order another drink. Driving home would be a carnival of swerves and an eventual hit-and-run, the body of some kid coming home from soccer practice left foaming at the mouth in his knee socks and cleats in the middle of the road. There’d be no witnesses, of course. Except for one, the old woman walking her shih tzu in its tartan jacket. I seem to remember, she’d tell the police, that her license plate began with—And then they’d come pounding on
her door at three in the morning.

  Another tricky but interesting plot point to consider.

  “Another?” the waiter said, and Amelie paused and looked at Janet, who was just finishing up.

  “Why not?” said Ben’s wife with a big, expensive bleach-toothed smile, and Amelie cautiously ordered a glass of prosecco. “No—change that. I’ll have another martini, please.” After all, the highway to hell always led to her door.

  “I can’t imagine living alone,” Janet said when their drinks were delivered. “Ben and I have been together for so long that it’s… Well, it becomes something of a habit, doesn’t it,” and she laughed.

  Funny how addicts always ended up bonding over the same drug.

  “I understand Ben’s an architect,” Amelie said, pulling the olive off her little bamboo phallus with her teeth.

  “He is,” and Janet smiled openly and happily. “He’s very successful, too. He has a number of potential projects lined up for this year and next. I guess he’s a little like you, though.”

  Amelie gazed at her. Yes? And so? said her expression.

  “I mean, you both create things out of thin air. You must have an amazing imagination. Unless, of course, you’re writing from life. In which case I have a whole bunch of questions to ask about your novel before this one,” and with a smile she tapped her copy of Amelie’s book that lay bagless on the table.

  This is how a detective questions you. Makes you comfortable, gives you refreshment, Big Macs and Big Gulps before the lamp goes on for the third degree.

  Amelie offered a nervous laugh and chewed on a few nuts. “Were you shocked by it?”

  “That your main character walked out on her husband after twenty years of marriage? It came as a complete surprise to me, but then the more I thought about it, the more it seemed, well, inevitable, if you know what I mean. You tell us all about her outer life, which seems so perfect, but inside her it’s all different.” She thought for a moment. “And then, when you close the book you realize that all along you sensed exactly what her heart and soul were really like.”