If She Were Dead

by J. P. Smith

  She wanted to spend years with him so that, when the final days came in old age, she would feel she had come to know him completely, as though he were an epic novel that had taken her decades to finish writing.

  Reason: it was what she needed, it was different from her work, from the tasks at hand, the flow of a pretty sentence, the bite of dialogue, the bend and span of character she was so good at evoking. She and Ben had connected, that was certain. He never seemed in a rush to leave her, he never said I’m late, I have to run. He stayed, he lingered, and as their children sat in classes and learned Spanish or algebra, they stood by their cars in the school driveway, in the dust and heat of September, caught in the corridor between conversation and touch.

  This was not love, she told herself. Love required more than just words, it demanded the clutch and breath of another.

  But it hadn’t begun; not yet. It hadn’t begun because nothing had passed between them to make it so, as if love were based on a shared password, a line of code. She wanted to make time move, make it move fast, push the hands of the clock ahead, because she knew that when it happened everything would change, everything in the past would be bathed in a different light, and the time to come would be altered forever.

  She realized she had never seen his house, and although Nina and Rachel were in the same class, she had never had the occasion to drive to Rachel’s, that in fact the girls had never been close friends, and she looked in the school directory and made sure to remember the number 57, before driving off at speed until she was in his neighborhood, barely twenty minutes from her house.

  This was the house of its own architect, unlike any other on the street, sloped and eccentric, with wide windows and skylights and an array of solar panels on the roof. She saw that she would have to return at night, just to see what it looked like inside ablaze with lamps, filled with life, a silhouette of Ben moving darkly, breaking the beams of light.

  Time became something palpable, something she wished she could take in her hands as a potter works her clay, softens it, shapes it, watches it slither between her fingers. Then time could be sculpted and toyed with, she could stretch it, make it long, let it thread back into the past. Then things would have been different. The words childhood sweethearts came to mind and made her smile: it suggested something that happened far away, in the heartland, or in small towns where houses had front porches and fireflies sparked in the quiet night. In the distance and enchantment of an imagined life she would have known him early, she would have had him first, the seed would have been planted.

  She never would have let him go.

  15

  Not long after that she drove past Ben’s house as he was getting out of his car in the driveway. With a squealing of her brakes she stopped and offered a bright hello. “I didn’t know you and Janet lived here,” she lied. “It’s a wonderful house.” She heard herself sounding utterly inane.

  He didn’t bother approaching the car. He turned slightly, and in that turn indicated that people were inside, people who might misconstrue the meeting, who might spoil it for them in the future. Yet at that stage the future was something that remained only in outline, awaiting further plot development and character study. “How’ve you been?” he said brightly.

  “Good,” and she smiled and nodded her head.

  Now he stepped into the no-man’s-land that divided them. “Nice to see you,” he said. He put his laptop bag down and shoved his hands in his pockets and smiled at her, squinting against the sunlight. She didn’t know what to say.

  “Do you live very far from here?” he asked.

  She told him where, and he nodded. She said she was on her way to see a friend. She took off her sunglasses. “Where’s Rachel thinking about going to college?”

  “She’s still not sure. I don’t even know why she’s agonizing over it. She still has a whole year ahead of her. I mean, we’ve looked at a few schools, but she’s still not into it.”

  Amelie said, “I know, we’re going through the same thing.”

  “But you only have to go through it once. We still have Andrew,” and he laughed.

  “Not forever,” she said.

  “I see you everywhere,” he said.

  “Well,” and she blushed, she had begun to make a nuisance of herself. She felt she was becoming a stalker, the type you read about in the newspaper’s police reports and see in courtroom photos once they’d taken a step too far, manacled in prison scrubs and pleading insanity to a homicide charge. “Between school and my work at home there are a million things that keep dragging me away.” It was an imbecilic statement that she hoped he hadn’t noticed. “The school wants me to become more active now that Nina’s a junior. I just don’t know if I have the time.”

  “Now I remember. You’re the writer.”

  She laughed a little. “Only one of many around here.”

  “I’ll have to read your books.”

  “And you’re an architect. I’ll have to see your houses.”

  “We’re both in the same business then,” he said. “We both make things people can get lost in.”

  He leaned a little on her car and looked over his shoulder at the front of his house. He turned to her, and his breath was on her cheek. Everything grew quiet, as though a secret was about to be passed. “You know,” he began, and she waited.

  16

  It was clear in an instant that everything that had led up to that moment—the looks exchanged, the wisps of small talk—was but small steps leading to an inevitable conclusion. In one of her novels the next chapter would have them thrashing about, making mad love, but it didn’t happen that way; anticipation, they both implicitly knew, was half the game.

  That day, as he leaned into her car, he suggested that maybe the next morning, after they’d dropped their kids off at school, they could meet for coffee in town. There was a Starbucks, where other school parents sometimes got together to exchange cruel gossip about other parents and rumors about their children’s teachers, but he’d suggested a greasy spoon far from the main stretch of retail shops, in a strip mall with an auto parts store and a long-defunct Chinese restaurant. Far from the eyes of others, it was the kind of place, she thought, where the illicit might be given the opportunity to breathe.

  The next morning he walked in a minute or two after she did and sat across from her. Before either of them could say anything, the waitress was there, pad in hand. She looked barely old enough to be out of high school, but the ring on her finger spoke of marriage, the hickey on her neck of lust.

  “Coffee?” Ben said, and Amelie said that would be great. “Just coffee,” he said. He raised an eyebrow. “Unless you’re hungry?”

  She smiled and shook her head.

  When they were alone he leaned in a little. “So.”

  “Well.”

  “Funny seeing you here,” he said, and at that moment she was already a little in love with him.

  “I was about to say the same,” she said, and now it was his turn to laugh. “I mean, I see you at school, and our daughters are in the same class, and it’s strange, because we’ve never really connected. Talked. You know.”

  “You’ve already made a mess,” he said, again laughing, and his eyes dropped to the napkin she’d just nervously shredded, turning it into a debris field on her paper placemat.

  “I’ll get you another,” the waitress said as she delivered their coffees.

  “Hot,” he said, sipping and setting it back down.

  “Yes. It is.”

  “I mean the coffee.”

  “Your house is wonderful,” she said after a moment.

  He wrapped his fingers around the chipped mug. Again he leaned closer.

  “Did you design it?”

  He nodded.

  “It’s nice.”

  “You just said it was wonderful.”

  She
laughed. “It’s wonderfully nice.”

  He sat back and looked at her with what appeared to be admiration. “It’s good to see you. Meet you, finally. Like this,” he said, and he unclasped his hands and they were near hers on the table. She sipped her coffee, which was already losing its heat to the air-conditioned room.

  “So you’re a writer,” he said, and she nodded and said she’d already told him that when she saw him outside his house the day before. “Right, right,” he said.

  “Ben.” It was the first time she’d said his name out loud. It was like when she came around to naming a character in her books, how it was as if this accretion of sentences and bits of dialogue had suddenly been given the breath of life. Like a plane taking off from a runway, gathering altitude, and the sigh of relief from the passengers as they knew they were on their way.

  At the mention of his name he lifted an eyebrow.

  “And there’s…your wife—”

  “Janet, yes—”

  “And Rachel and…the boy—”

  “The boy would be Andrew,” he said, and they both laughed again.

  “More coffee?” the waitress said, and she looked at them as though she knew exactly what they were up to. Amelie wondered for a paranoid instant if the young woman also knew who they were, that he was married and she was not, and that sometime soon, that day or the next, they would be naked and sweaty and completely satisfied with life.

  “I’m good,” Ben said, and she agreed. They were both good.

  He looked around. At another table was clustered a group of elderly men who probably met there each morning to discuss their aches and pains and their prostate issues and friends who might have recently died. At the counter was a young guy eating eggs and bacon and reading the screen on his phone. Occasionally the waitress would chat with him and laugh.

  “What are we doing?” she asked.

  Ben smiled, and his smile made her smile, because it was the smile of someone who had been caught off guard. “You tell me,” he said.

  “Say my name,” she said.

  He paused for a moment. “Amelie.” He said it correctly.

  “You knew.”

  He nodded. “I looked it up in the directory.”

  She placed her coffee aside, barely touched, while his mug was nearly empty.

  “You know what we’re doing,” he said quietly, intimately. “We’re dancing without being on our feet,” and she thought it the loveliest thing any man had ever said to her. Even better than a line in one of her books. And she smiled in gratitude.

  An hour later, on the bed she shared with Richard, Ben rolled off of her and, lying beside her, took her in with his smile. She rubbed the back of her fingers along his jaw and felt the stubble that grew there, barely a day’s worth.

  “Dancing,” she said.

  17

  At the school’s Founder’s Day picnic six weeks after Amelie and Ben started their affair, she and Richard suffered an hour or two of harmony for the sake of their daughter. Parents, students, faculty, and trustees assembled on the soccer field while the woman who had founded the school forty years earlier sat oblivious in a nursing home in an advanced state of dementia, convinced it was 1971 and Nixon was president. Her son, the manager of a local inn, delivered a brief tipsy speech before climbing into his Range Rover and driving away.

  Younger children from the lower school ran after one another and fell down and cried, while the older ones stood in pairs or threes, brooding and staring at their peers when they weren’t transfixed by their phones. When Nina walked by she pretended they weren’t there. So oblivious she seemed to her parents’ lives that Amelie never worried her daughter might catch on to what she was doing with this married architect. Now Nina was in her last year of high school. In another twelve months she’d be off to college, and though Amelie knew she’d miss her daughter terribly, the house would finally be her own. Her house, her time. And Ben.

  She moved her eyes slowly across the crowd, rising occasionally on her toes, looking for Ben. Once or twice Richard made some comment, “Oh look, there’s Frank,” or “The headmaster is about to make a speech,” and she ignored him completely, as though his words were as commonplace as the setting of the sun or the fall of rain. She smiled and nodded and continued to seek out the face of her lover, the back of his neck, the rise of his hand, features she would have recognized at once in a crowd of a million.

  For Amelie, life with Ben was divided into two separate time zones: there was their time working, and their time together, and each seemed to move at a different pace, obeying different temporal laws and requiring coordination, like the intricate workings of a fine Swiss watch. They shared each other’s schedules, knew where the other would be, where he or she could be reached. She knew when to call him on his cell at home and when he’d be in the car alone and available to talk, and where they would drive for lunch once a week, thirty-five miles away in a town where they knew they wouldn’t be seen. She relied on texts and emails, and once he’d read them he’d wipe them from his phone or laptop, because everything was evidence. Their affair already had something deliciously criminal about it.

  In the beginning there was no future: everything happened now. It was for her, it was for him, it was for them. She felt herself moving into moods beyond her control. She burst into laughter at inappropriate moments, in doctors’ waiting rooms and on checkout lines at the supermarket, she found herself dancing around her living room to music that for anyone else would be unworthy of movement, the violin concerto by Alban Berg or Verdi’s Requiem. She began to tune in stations on her car radio that played the music of her adolescence, old songs that, though essentially idiotic, evoked a time when she had been through this before with a succession of boys through high school and college, Paul, Johnny, Greg, Jason, Brian, Dylan, the blur of twenty-five years of dating and loving, abandoning and being dumped.

  Even if she had parted from Ben only minutes before, she began to hunger for him, as though love were something you could devour, that you pick up and wrap your lips around, whose rind could be chewed and savored, whose juices could be sucked. He was with her always, as if he had somehow burrowed his way under her skin and was incessantly tickling the ends of her nerves. Everything changed: always hungry, she still lost weight; her periods became irregular, and sometimes she would wake in the night unable to catch her breath. She had to remind herself to grow calm, to shut her eyes and stay quiet.

  She sat at her desk. She stared at her computer screen. She picked up the phone and called her agent in New York. “I’m in love,” she said, and her agent said, “Is this going to be a problem? Is it getting in the way?”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because otherwise you wouldn’t have told me. Look, I have authors who’ve had heart attacks and gone through divorce and had surgery and sometimes I think even suffered brain death, but the books keep coming, Amelie, we all have to make a living.”

  “I know. I just wanted to tell you.”

  “You’re an adult, Amelie, you’re divorced and you can make your own decisions. You write the books, I negotiate your contracts. Everything else is your business.” There was a pause. It began to sink in. “What you’re telling me is that you can’t write.”

  She nodded, and he said, “Am I correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Take a deep breath. Close your eyes. Open them. Start writing.”

  “Do we have a deadline?”

  “By the end of the year, certainly,” he said. “I mean, it’s been a year since your last book came out. It did well. It did very well, in fact, and people want to see more from you. Just a reminder that you owe your publisher two more titles as per the contract.”

  Her life filled with distraction. She loaded her washing machine and turned it on without thinking of adding the detergent. She ran out of gas on the highway and sat the
re laughing because she had just spent two hours with Ben in a motel room equipped with a love tub, cable porn, and a bed that vibrated at the drop of a quarter. Once, walking down the stairs in her own house, Amelie in love missed a step and fell four feet, bruising her thigh.

  Even Richard noticed and had commented on it at the Founders’ Day picnic. “Is this menopause?” he said, and she stared at him. “I mean, even Nina says that you’re not yourself.”

  “Are you seriously asking me that?”

  “She only meant that you weren’t very attentive, that’s all.”

  “I’m attentive. And menopause isn’t going to come for a long time, Richard. Go ask your concubine about it.”

  “Don’t start,” he hissed, smiling at someone who greeted him with a wave.

  “I’m glad you didn’t bring Sharon,” Amelie said. “It was ridiculous of you even to think of it.”

  “She’s very fond of Nina.”

  “But I’m Nina’s mother.”

  “Let’s not do this here, okay?”

  And she looked at him and realized once again that everything about her former husband was hateful to her—his gold-rimmed glasses, the shape of his ears, the ironic twitch of his mouth. She hated his Dockers and his boat shoes and his flannel shirt and his tweed jacket, and she hated the way his hair lay on his head, she hated the color of his eyes and the hue of his soul, she despised him, period.

  He had been sleeping with Sharon for almost a year when he asked Amelie for a divorce. They had been married for almost twenty years, having met at graduate school, in fact in the same class, a Henry James seminar. They had gone to rock concerts and movies together and made friends with graduate assistants on the make. They moved to Vermont to take up teaching positions at the same private school. Now she couldn’t bear to look at him. Their marriage came to an end when he had stood in their living room and said to her, “I don’t know how it happened, I just don’t understand it.”