If She Were Dead

by J. P. Smith

  She remembered how the year before, he had stood on the lip of his father’s grave, tears dripping from his eyes, and how much she had pitied him, how small and pathetic and childlike he had seemed, and then afterward how he had come home and gotten so drunk he’d begun doing imitations of celebrities, Robert De Niro and Jerry Lewis, before a roomful of other mourners. “You’re a ridiculous man,” she said to him that night he’d broken the news to her.

  “I am truly sorry, Amelie.”

  “God, you make me sick with your piety.”

  “But I mean it.”

  “Just go.”

  He opened his hands. “It just happened.”

  “Oh. Like an accident?”

  He beamed. “Yes. That’s it. That’s right.”

  “You had absolutely no control over yourself.”

  “Well, that’s my whole point, Amelie, it’s—”

  “When Nina was a baby she had no control over herself. She peed in her diapers, she spat up her food, she drooled on my shoulder. Is this what we’re talking about, Richard, did you get a little sloppy?”

  “Of course not, I—”

  “Nothing just happens,” she said.

  “This did,” and he moved his hands up and down before him as though he were in ten feet of water and suddenly noticed he couldn’t swim.

  “And what happens to me, Richard? I’ve lived with you for twenty years, what happens to me?”

  “What do you mean? You want money?”

  “Jesus. Jesus.” She got up and went to the window. She felt like thrusting her hand through it, so dim was this man she had loved for so long. “It’s not the money,” she said.

  “I know I’ve hurt you,” he said, idiotic in his glasses and mustache.

  “You’re a piece of shit.”

  He said nothing.

  “Why did you tell me, why didn’t you just carry on screwing this slut in secret?” And of course the answer was right there, it was more than her body he wanted, more than the pleasure of her arms, the taste of her kisses. He simply no longer wanted to live with Amelie Ferrar. It was this that hurt the most. All of a sudden she was completely without allure for him.

  “She’s not a slut,” he said, and she laughed dramatically and said this woman was indeed a slut. “I know who she is now, I’ve seen her before at your office. She’s that freelance tramp you hired.”

  “She’s a freelance graphic artist, Amelie,” he said calmly, as though speaking to a mad person.

  For a few minutes he said nothing. She could barely bring herself to look at him. She went into the kitchen and poured herself a large glass of vodka and drank it so fast it burned her throat and then she hurled the glass into the sink where it shattered. “I hate you,” she screamed, and the sound of her voice rang in her ears.

  “Where is Nina?” he suddenly asked.

  “Nina? You mean my daughter? My daughter is sleeping over at a friend’s house. It’s Friday, there’s no school tomorrow, my daughter’s not here, she has no idea what’s taking place at this moment, no idea that her father is walking out on his family for a syphilitic little tramp, no concept that at this moment her family is no more. Why don’t you run to your woman, why don’t you go and let her have the pleasure of your middle-aged body. One of these days, and this is a guarantee, Richard, one of these days you’ll rise from her bed and she’ll crack open her big vacant eyes and she’ll look at you and say ‘Oh my god what have I done, why am I living with this saggy lump of human waste?’ and then you’ll try to come back and I won’t be alone.”

  “Look,” and he lifted his hands a little in the remarkable calmness of his evening, “I don’t know if it means anything to you, but she feels as bad about this as I do. She’s even read your books, she really likes your work.”

  Amelie turned and stared at him.

  “I just think for the sake of Nina that we should always remain friends,” he said. And then he smiled.

  18

  At the Founder’s Day event Amelie heard Richard saying something and she turned and she saw them shaking hands, ex-husband and current lover. She almost said Oh there you are, darling, and instead she smiled and continued to look around as if there was nothing unusual in this encounter. “Do you know each other?” Richard said.

  “We’ve met once or twice before, I think,” Ben said, not quite looking at her.

  “Of course. Here at school,” she said. She held out her hand and looked a little away from him. “Amelie Ferrar.”

  He took it and released it at once. “Right, right, Nina’s mother. Good to see you again.”

  There was nothing untoward or suggestive about the scene. She could be friends with a man without being perceived as going to bed with him on a weekly basis. She was friends with many men—her agent, other parents she’d come to know at Nina’s school, husbands of friends. Richard was always friends with women and he never went to bed with them, except he did, and that was with Sharon.

  “Is your wife here?” she said to Ben.

  “Janet’s…” He looked around. “She’s somewhere.”

  Amelie stood back and watched the two men talk. One day Richard would learn about her and Ben, the moment would come when she’d tell him she was going to marry the architect, and then he would put two and two together, he would look back and realize that this had been going on for some time, that while he thought she was alone and missing her ex-husband, she was in fact deeply in love with another man. The irony of it didn’t escape her; as a novelist she savored it as much as a connoisseur of wines takes pleasure in a four-thousand-dollar bottle of Château Petrus Pomerol.

  Nina passed by with a friend, again ignoring her mother. A woman Amelie knew came up to her and it took Amelie a moment or two before she registered the fact that her friend Peggy was standing directly before her, ten sentences deep into a conversation. “So I was hoping you’d be able to be a committee chair for the auction this year,” she was saying. “Or you could co-chair with Matt Baron’s mom on the artistic end of things. I think you two would be a good team.”

  Amelie looked at her. “I don’t know her.”

  “I thought you did.”

  “Maybe I’ve heard her name before, I don’t know.”

  “I thought I saw her a little while ago,” and Peggy looked around, trying to find her in the crowd, and when she pointed her out to Amelie, the woman was talking to Janet and both of them were looking at Ben.

  “I’ll call you after I’ve spoken to Janey,” Peggy said.

  “To be honest,” Amelie said, “I don’t think I can help out this year,” and what she didn’t tell Peggy was that she couldn’t find the time because her hours and minutes were being spent elsewhere, on other things, on the obligations of fiction and the demands of love.

  Ben suddenly turned from Richard and said to Amelie, “Do you know Andrew?”

  “Your son, isn’t he?” she said, though she knew very well he was. Yet until then he had only been someone glimpsed from afar, a name mentioned in passing.

  When the boy ran up to his father she saw the resemblance at once, and she saw that had she and Ben grown up together this was the person she would have known over the years, a small boy with a big grown-up smile and huge dark eyes. He was not just some kid who only incidentally was the child of this man who meant the world to her, he was something more, a young version of Ben, and the likeness took her breath away. In the distance Janet was coming up to meet them by the food tables. She wore designer jeans and a chambray shirt. Loosely tied around her shoulders was a cotton sweater. This was Amelie’s rival. This was the woman who was as woven into the puzzle of deception as she was.

  In a way she would have liked to know more about Janet, she would have loved to have the freedom of Ben’s house even for just an hour, to go through his wife’s drawers, to sift amongst the garments in her cl
oset and the spices in her cabinet, to examine her prescription bottles and sniff her perfumes and glimpse her secrets. She had never been in Ben’s house, never seen the pictures on the wall or the furniture he sat on, and yet, as though she were gathering material for a new book, she wanted to start with the most intimate details, to have under her eyes lives that could unravel over the course of a few hundred pages.

  She walked over to the food tables and took a plate. Now she was behind him, she could see his back, and she couldn’t help smiling because she remembered scrubbing that same back in the shower, she remembered with pleasure pressing up against him in the stream of water and feeling his skin under her soapy fingers, and then inching around to his front and—

  “Hi.”

  She looked at the woman across from her, the one with the overgenerous smile, and had no idea who it was.

  “How are you?” she said anyway.

  “Not too bad, really. Jeff’s gotten into Yale.”

  “Wonderful news.”

  The woman’s smile dipped. “I think I have you mixed up with someone else. Linda Kinsman?”

  “I think I’ve met her once or twice.”

  “You look so much alike.”

  Having now wasted a few lines of pointless dialogue, Amelie took some salad and a roll and a bottle of water from a cooler. She found herself following Ben and then he stopped and she realized he was talking to his wife. “I don’t want to stay much longer,” he said, and as if she had witnessed a fatal car crash or a hit-and-run, Amelie turned and walked away, dropping her uneaten plate of food in the trash bin.

  19

  In the end, Amelie decided she would not tell Ben about her encounter with Janet after the reading, though she did wonder if his wife had instead told him about it. Wouldn’t he be desperate to know exactly what they talked about? And if she in fact had told him, why hadn’t he said anything? Who exactly was playing what game here, anyway?

  She sat at her desk, fingers on the keys of her laptop, and wrote gibberish, as though she was simply exercising her digits in anticipation of doing some actual work. And, in fact, nothing she wrote had the potential to go anywhere but in the magical discard machine, attainable with a quick tap of the finger.

  She stared through her office window, seeing nothing but the same blankness that lived between sentences.

  What if she did tell Ben about her meeting with Janet and lied about it, say that Janet confessed to having an affair with—and she came up with a list of names, none of them from the school or from the community, something exotic—Vladimir or Serge or Jean-Pierre or Gunther, the kind of people spies might consort with, meeting them in public parks or in disguise? She could create an entire scenario out of it, describe the look of bliss on Janet’s face as she spoke of wild afternoons with Marcello or Zorba, and then what would happen, would he divorce her on the grounds of someone’s else fiction? Or would he simply drive home, put his hands around his wife’s throat and strangle her in the kitchen, leaving her to writhe and die beside the marinating steak tips?

  Murder by proxy, she thought, and tapped the keys, saw the words, and deleted them, at least on screen. As though they might one day be used as evidence against her.

  But she liked it. She liked it a lot.

  Yet she had come away from her drinks with Janet actually rather liking the woman, understanding what Ben had seen in her in the first place. She was pretty in an Amelie sort of way, and she was also smart, driven, and successful. After two years of being Ben’s lover, Amelie realized that hers was a minimalist relationship; she knew very little about him: he was flesh in her arms, warmth on her neck, a mouth engaged with hers. And then he was a cluster of incidental details, he was a red BMW, he was a postmodern house, he was a man with blueprints, with an office in an old Federal mansion. He was six-two, he was fit because he went to the gym three times a week and ran nearly every morning, and had already begun to go a little soft around the middle, something she used to tease him about until, of course, gravity had begun to work its malign magic on her own midsection.

  He was raised in Philadelphia, he’d gone to UCLA. He liked Paul Simon and James Taylor and Amy Winehouse, and had more than a passing fondness for Bruce Springsteen, but when he drove he listened to NPR’s tasteful delivery of the daily horrors. She knew other things about him, such as that he wore colored underpants, or at least he had several in blue, others in black, and at least two in different shades of gray, charcoal, and what the designer referred to as Twilight Mist. Beyond the shape of his body and the look of it, the taste of his skin, the sound of his voice, there were no other landmarks of which she was aware.

  Which now led her to think that perhaps he was withholding facts about himself, in which case what could they be? An arrest record, a grim prognosis, some sort of weird kink he might one day spring on his unsuspecting lover?

  It was the beginning of a horror novel, the story of a charming serial killer who also designs buildings, one of these mild-mannered professional men, pillars of their community, who sins lightly with his novelist lover, then at night brings his victims to a storage unit in the hinterlands and slowly tortures them, returning daily to inflict further outrages before burying them like dogs in the smoky wastelands of another state.

  It came down to this: she had no idea who Ben really was, and now she placed her hands on the keyboard once again.

  She realized she had fallen in love with an idea, not a man, and though a person might die, an idea, like a ghost, could live forever.

  Now that was something to think about.

  20

  Amelie watched from her office window as Ben pulled up her driveway. She had been on the phone with her publicist for nearly twenty minutes, and they still hadn’t finished the conversation. She had six more appearances over the next few months, both in bookstores and festivals from Maine to Northern California, as well as a remote interview with a man who hosted a book show on NPR out of Los Angeles.

  Her publicist told her that the interviewer considered her books to be wry commentaries on contemporary life, as opposed to how some reviewers saw them, as bits of fluff, made to be read on the beach or over daquiris. Of course they were more than that. Her novels, ostensibly about people like her, also brought with them a sense of things impending, future crises and tragedies that lay just over the edge of the horizon, events the reader was meant to feel with each turn of the page. What the reviewers most liked was what she most loved writing: scenes of domesticity that seemed to veer into something darker, the velvety blue of a world of transgression, leaving her readers the freedom to imprint their own secret urgings onto the page.

  “Uh-huh,” she said into the phone, just as his car pulled into her driveway. “Uh-huh. Okay. Sure. Great. Great.”

  The moment she saw Ben she lost all interest in what she was hearing. The day would move from the public to the private, from the polite to the passionate, and she felt the anticipation of it as a pleasurable ache. She stood at the window and tried to read his expression as he got out of the car and looked up to meet her gaze. As always, he let himself in.

  When he walked into her office she held up a finger indicating a moment more as she finished her call. She felt his hands on her shoulders, and she touched one of them and let it slither away into her blouse. She felt his breath on her neck, and when he nibbled her flesh a little she laughed and said a cheerful goodbye to her publicist. “You smell nice,” he said, and she shut her eyes and felt the stubble on his cheek rub up against her face.

  When, later, they were on their way to the restaurant far from the eyes of anyone they might know, she was about to mention how she’d had a drink with Janet after her reading, and immediately changed her mind, as though it were something to be held in reserve, just as a plot point born in an odd moment of distraction would be noted down and inserted in a later chapter for greater effect.

  But it
was absurd, of course, worrying over her lover’s wife. Janet had only stopped by, bought a book, suggested they have a drink together. And yet something about it disturbed Amelie, darkened her mood. Knowledge was being withheld; cues remained hidden; plans were gathering like clouds before a storm.

  Ben and Amelie had mastered the science of infidelity in the first two months of their affair. She had a private life, while he had a name and a face, occasionally featured in magazines that no one apart from other architects or the wealthy who savored construction porn ever read, and thus, were people ever to see them together, they had to find a perfect balance by creating an entire set of alibis and excuses, something she had already mastered, having spent all of her professional life making things up.

  I’m thinking of having some work done on my house and needed to consult an architect.

  Ben’s car broke down and I happened to be in the neighborhood and offered him a lift.

  We’re running the school’s big fundraising gala, which is why we’re having drinks and lunch together. And afterward a quick roll in the hay.

  “Do you know that I love you?” she said to Ben.

  He turned to her and smiled. Until then neither had said anything of the sort. They had met and climbed into bed for an hour, and words had never come into it, words were things she wrote in her books. Words built sentences and dialogue and character. They were things you thought about carefully and used with cautious flamboyance. Affairs had nothing to do with words; they had everything to do with filling the eye with things imagined and desired, with the dark secret annex to one’s marriage. She felt lost in the notion of this man, as if he were some gelatinous, edible substance, sweet and glutinous, forever stuck to the surface of her skin.