If She Were Dead

by J. P. Smith

  “It’s the logic of chaos,” Amelie said. “Inner turmoil has a way of creating its own perverse order. One face for ourselves, another for everyone else. When it works, no one can really read what you’re thinking.” Now she was letting the alcohol speak for her and, in a way, it was rather fun.

  Janet pointed a finger at her. “Exactly. And that’s what the book ends up being about, right? How we live in these wonderful little towns and do all the same things, and then we find out how radically different we all are. It kind of subverts the whole suburban novel thing, doesn’t it?”

  They sat in silence for a few moments while they sipped their drinks. The bar was busy for a weekday night. The people drinking earlier while Amelie was having dinner had been replaced with a younger crowd, seemingly always on the edge of rowdiness as they burst into inappropriately raucous laughter. When she was young, she and her mother would often go into Manhattan for a matinee and dinner, and all the people at the bar seemed so much more worldly and tasteful with their tailored suits and designer skirts, their subdued laughter and their hats and handbags and Dunhill lighters. She’d longed to be one of them, to outgrow her seemingly unending childhood and leave home and smoke and drink highballs and make amusing small talk, and now here she was, having an affair with the husband of the woman across from her, an arrangement very much of that time, in a story that in fiction could only end with angry words and gunshots on a rainy Los Angeles night.

  As though she had read Amelie’s mind, Janet’s mood suddenly darkened. “Things could be better between us, between Ben and me,” she abruptly said, watching as Amelie’s blue eyes grew larger and, if possible, bluer. “We argue more than we used to,” Janet went on, “and sometimes he just seems, I don’t know, distant…? Like he’s not really there…?” She shook her head, rattling the words around inside it. “Like I’m being locked out of his life. Sometimes I think he even resents me. That I’m, I don’t know, the odd one out? You know what I’m saying?”

  Three’s a crowd, Amelie thought, wondering if, as happened to her, Ben had inadvertently called his wife by a different name, one just as dangerously close to Amelie, such as Amy or Leigh. In which case she had to assume Janet suspected her as being the object of his distraction. Had she allowed herself to be hijacked by this woman?

  “But then again,” Janet said, “whose marriage is genuinely perfect? Is that even possible? And then we absorb all the guilt for an inattentive husband, as if he’d done nothing wrong. What did we do or say that drove him astray? How could we have made things better? It’s always on us, isn’t it?”

  Amelie said that, yes, she understood exactly what she meant.

  “And then,” Janet went on, “if we find out that our husband has taken up with someone else, what’s our recourse other than divorce?”

  Amelie cleared her throat. “Do you think your husband is…deceiving you?”

  Janet considered it. “Don’t we all end up with that conclusion at some point or another? Even if it’s not correct?” She took a few more moments. “I think if I had proof that was the case I’d take things into my own hands.”

  Amelie nodded a little and said I see, which was a bit of an understatement.

  Now Janet was on a roll. “I really do pray that Ben and I will actually stay together. For the sake of the children as much as for ourselves. And, of course, one day Andrew will be leaving for a whole new life.” She smiled a little, as though in anticipation of his departure. “College. You know.”

  The packed bags, the overstuffed SUV, the tears, the waves.

  “That’s a long way off, I imagine,” Amelie said.

  Janet set down her glass and leaned in, her eyes glistening in the light. “Enough of that. So tell me. Give me a hint as to what you’re plotting out now.”

  13

  This is the game of If She Were Dead.

  If Janet were dead, Amelie would allow Ben a period of mourning, three or four weeks, five at the most. She would go to the funeral and embrace him like just another mourner before the eyes of friends and relatives. “Amazing Grace” would be sung, tears would flow. She would be dressed in muted gray and sit across the aisle from him, two rows back.

  If she were dead.

  If she were dead, Rachel would leave Smith for a while, maybe two weeks. She would see a therapist, she would comfort her father, she would get edgy and miss her friends and worry about her work and then saying that she really wanted to stay, Just say the word, Daddy, she’d hop on the bus and go back to Northampton and her dorm and her friends and her music and her classes in Western Civ and creative writing.

  If she were dead.

  If she were dead, her things would have to be sorted out, given away, discarded. There were undoubtedly clothes in her closet, drawers full of pretty little undies and Wonderbras, shelves filled with expensive perfumes and things to keep her looking young. Ben would beg Amelie to do it, and she would do it alone, or at least when he was in another room, she would fill garbage bags with Janet’s things and then drop them in a dumpster behind the supermarket, along with the rotting vegetables and week-old chicken parts.

  If she were dead.

  If she were dead, little Andrew would miss his mother. Every night he would cry, Mommy, Mommy, and Ben would not be able to give him succor because he was not Mommy, he was incapable of being Mommy, in fact he was Daddy. But Amelie would help in this matter, she knew just the right words, just what little boys needed. She would hold him in her arms, say Shh, Shh, and rock him gently. She might even sing quietly to him. There were songs appropriate to every occasion, and she would find them. She would have them on the tip of her tongue, just as her mother would sing songs of broken hearts and longing from Broadway shows that had opened and closed long before her daughter was born.

  If she were dead.

  If she were dead, Ben would find himself helpless in the kitchen. Every night would be Tuna Helper or ground chuck with things added to it, macaroni and green peppers, and more and more he would come to rely on frozen dinners, Here, Andrew, here’s your Salisbury steak, eat up, buddy. Amelie wasn’t much of a cook, lately she’d been much better on the phone, poring over a Chinese menu or a leaflet from Cluck Plaza, the chicken palace, even ordering a pizza that would be delivered in under twenty-five minutes by the boy with tattoos of defunct heavy metal groups up and down his arms. But she could handle an omelet, she could broil a steak, she could make twenty different kinds of pasta, in a pinch she could even poach a fish. She would be there to serve them; she would be there to wash the dishes. She would sit with them. She would begin to fit in.

  If she were dead.

  If she were dead, Ben would have to attend functions by himself. He would sit beside a vacant chair, in time being placed next to someone totally inappropriate, someone who didn’t suit him, some elegant divorcée with long fingernails and cheap jewelry or an ecstatic widow who would speak to him of her husband’s coronary as he ate whatever sat on a plate before him. He would suddenly be invited to hundreds of parties where his stature as widower would increase his popularity a hundredfold.

  If she were dead.

  If she were dead, it would take him about three weeks before he began even to consider having sex. Naturally he would be thinking only of her, his late wife, of how beautiful she was, how good she was, how tender, how sweet. He would lie alone in his bed, as he never lay alone now that she was alive, he would lie there and watch the movie that was his marriage play in the screening room of his mind.

  If she were dead.

  If she were dead, he would have to reexamine his life. No: he would have to examine his life. He would have to examine his life because he’d never done it before. He would catch glimpses of himself in the gazes of others and see that he was attractive. He would look at the walls and ceilings of the house he’d designed, at the artistic corners and fantastic details, and know that he was talente
d. He would consider his age; he would weigh his circumstances. He had a daughter and a son. The girl was pretty; the boy handsome, the very image of his father. He would have to be there for Andrew, for Rachel was at Smith and could very well take care of herself, or be taken care of; such a high tuition must cover such needs. He would have to be there for Andrew’s Little League practice, for his lacrosse games, for his piano recitals and school plays.

  If she were dead.

  If she were dead, they could attend the theater in a city near them. They could buy plane tickets and sit next to each other and see the world through each other’s eyes. They could go to concerts, and he could finally see Paul Simon and James Taylor in stadiums the size of Rhode Island. They would go to Springsteen concerts, wildly overpriced events with audiences filled with people half their age zonked out of their minds.

  If she were dead.

  If she were dead, Amelie could dedicate a book to him. For Ben with love. Once she’d thought about simply writing For B., and then realized it would take people she knew not more than two seconds to put letter to name to face to person to truth. Amelie? Oh yes, she’s sleeping with Ben, Janet’s husband. But it wouldn’t matter, would it?

  Not if she were dead.

  If she were dead, Amelie could accept awards and thank her husband, Ben, for his love and patience. Magazine articles would no longer show a woman sitting alone in a room but a woman sitting with her husband in the house he had designed. In fact architectural magazines could show them also. This too had to be taken into consideration.

  If she were dead.

  If she were dead, Janet would eventually fade into the dusty back room of memory. Andrew would grow up knowing mostly Amelie. Rachel would resent her, it was only natural, but in time she would come to love this woman who had grown to love her. Amelie would take Rachel out shopping, just as she did with Nina. Sometimes she could take them both out together, they could spend the day in the city, they could go to nice stores and have lunch in good restaurants and stop for a quick cappuccino before she drove them back to their respective colleges. Perhaps it would be easier for Nina simply to transfer out of Wellesley and also go to Smith or even Mount Holyoke, where Amelie herself had gone; or, conversely, Rachel could leave Smith and attend Wellesley or Harvard. Amelie would spend time with them both on parents’ visiting days, she would be introduced by Rachel as her stepmother, and Rachel would be affectionate with her as they walked through the ochre paradise of autumn.

  If she were dead.

  If she were dead, she would not be wholly forgotten. Occasionally photographs would surface from the backs of drawers, from shoeboxes that once housed Top-Siders and Nike sneakers, and she wouldn’t mind at all if the children looked at them, they needed to remember, it was only right. And naturally it would take Ben a little while before he found his bearings. He would embrace Amelie and for a moment think it was Janet, and he might even call her by the wrong name, but it didn’t matter, such things could be forgiven.

  If she were dead.

  If she were dead, she would be in a box under the surface of the earth. If she were dead, she would be silent. If she were dead, she wouldn’t unexpectedly appear at Amelie’s readings, sitting in the front row in her jeans and blond hair and nice shoes, or show up to buy a book and ply Amelie with cocktails. If she were dead, they would be able to go to restaurants two blocks away instead of forty miles distant. They could check into hotels not as Mr. and Mrs. White, not as Mr. and Mrs. Ruddigore, not as Mr. and Mrs. Armstrong, like the guy from the moon and his wife. They could simply be themselves.

  If only she were dead.

  Part Two

  14

  The day it began two years earlier would always remain in Amelie’s memory, as though it were a permanent exhibit in a museum, a gallery in which she could browse at her leisure, letting her eyes roam over the works of art displayed there, each burnished with the pleasure and value and freshness of those collected hours.

  Something had happened that morning, and she knew that something would happen, that it was only the start of things, and that from then on her life would no longer be a simple round of routine, of waking and washing, eating and drinking, working and resting. Now it would grow in complexity, it would take on dimension and shade, nuance and hue. It was the life of the spy, where she would have two faces, two vocabularies, two loyalties, two lives.

  Certain irrelevant things remained with her from those days. She remembered the TV weatherman drawing his hand dramatically across his brow and speaking of what seemed to be an endless heat wave. She remembered looking out the window into the murky stillness of early evening where nothing stirred and the air bore the faint odor of things that had run their course and begun to decay. She remembered hearing a piece of music that made her lift her eyes from the book she was reading and erase her mind of everything but the voice of the soprano and the accompanying piano, and though the words sung were in incomprehensible Italian, the intent was crystal clear: it spoke of longing and the end of hunger, the light that awaited in the great distance, as though at the heart of love was the desire for oblivion. And every time she heard it, every time she came across it on the radio, she remembered the afternoon she’d realized she was going to fall in love with Ben.

  It wasn’t the end of summer, not technically. It was the beginning of fall, though it had been as hot as the last days of August. The leaves had started to curl and wither, the green of them having begun the fade into what would become the crisp reds and yellows of autumn. Her kitchen had been invaded by ants, large black creatures, obscenely segmented, moving from poses of watchful stillness to the frenzy of food, their little antennae twitching in anticipation. Moths flattened themselves against her windows, unmoving in their thirst for light, vanishing into the mouths of birds at dawn. Pale spiders found comfort in the highest corners of her rooms, and sometimes she would come upon them hanging from thin strands, swaying in the invisible currents that moved through her house. In the evenings the air grew cooler, the breezes of the day shifting, bearing with them the nocturnal smell of the sea and the fog.

  It was the beginning of the school year. She had caught glimpses of Ben before, when Nina and Rachel were younger, at school events, on carpool lines. Only now was she able to read his face, the way his eyes took her in, and she returned his look, she let him know it by the way she raised her lids and pursed her mouth a little. It was a game of mutual regard, as if they were two beasts astir in adjoining cages, turning, watching, narrowing their eyes, waiting. They began exchanging a few words, innocuous things: Hello, how are you, how are the kids, god it’s hot. They remained the only people left on the morning carpool line, caught in the warm wind of early September and the hollow phrases of small talk. Because it begins not on a certain day in a certain hour at a specific minute. It happens because you suddenly become aware it was there all along, as in a moment of distraction one hears the familiar song of birds beyond the din of city traffic.

  There were things she immediately liked about him: his eyes, the curve of his mouth when he smiled. She liked the way he made her laugh. She liked the way he used his hands when he spoke, for they carried with them a gentle elegance she had only ever associated with her mother. She liked the way it felt, this warm sense of intuition, of being sure that, even without knowing anything about him beyond his smile and his hands as they defined figures in the air, he would become a part of her life, woven into her waking hours, there beside her in her dreams. Could she dissect it, piece it apart, as one analyzes a poem? Or was it something that could not be so clearly explained, just as she felt when a scene she was writing crafted its own pace, the words and images clicking off her fingers without a second thought. How she did it, why she did it, was beyond her. It just was. It just had to be.

  On the days when she picked up Nina she looked for his car, the red BMW, and when she saw him she would offer a casual wave. Once or twice t
hey passed and stopped, and slid down their windows to exchange brief greetings, always a little awkward, as though they were two children overcome with shyness.

  Her writing began to suffer. Sitting down each morning at her desk she found herself at a loss for words, discovering that characters meandered about a house, touched things, gazed distractedly out of windows. Dialogue became spare, the texture of her prose growing dry and stalky, like a plant starved of nutrients, exposed to the relentless heat of a dry sun. She would sit for five minutes, then stand and find something else to do. She made cups of tea, she tried to read, she lay down with her eyes shut. Sometimes when it became too much for her she got into her car and drove away, making sure she had passed certain places where she knew he went. A few weeks earlier she had run into him at the pharmacy, and although she knew she was being completely absurd, like a character in one of her books, she wanted to touch the things he had touched, to walk the aisles where she had encountered him. The magic of longing, the voodoo of adultery.

  She shopped. She went to the mall and bought clothes for herself, and she bought them only in the thought that he might see her in them, that he might think of her dressed in these particular ways. She went to cosmetic counters where garishly painted saleswomen offered her tips and hints, touching her face with Q-tips and complimenting her on her complexion and her wonderful eyes, and then suggesting a little something just there, their fingers gently agitating the rise of her cheekbone.

  Did he think of her as she thought of him? She had often written novels in which male characters brooded over the women they loved, or wanted to love, and yet she knew that for her it was all supposition, a leap of the imagination. She wanted to be able to tap into Ben’s mind whenever she wished, to explore the images that passed there, the taste of his desire, the music he conjured. She wanted to find herself reflected in his hall of mirrors.