If She Were Dead

by J. P. Smith

  Two weeks of memory and speculation.

  She ran through the rain to the house and took in her mail. There was a water-and-sewer bill; there was a magazine and there were four catalogues; there was junk, the endless junk that spoke of auto detailing, of muffler repairs and tanning salons and photofinishers and new pizza parlors and the latest in Chinese cuisine, the junk that seemed to think you were anticipating it, the junk that slipped from your fingers onto the floor, and she felt the anger rising again within her. Ben would be away from her, he would be gone, she would be here in a world of litter.

  And the real fear became articulate in her mind, the fear that when he came back he would sit down with her in her living room and like some disgraced politician tell her that he needed to spend more time with his family, that he could only lead one life and not two. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror as she walked out of the room, and it occurred to her that she was no longer the self-assured woman who enchanted her readers, who signed books and gave interviews. Her hair was in disarray, her clothes wet from the rain, her stomach uneasy from the speed at which she had eaten her lunch. Their one day of the week together had been shot to hell.

  “Ben,” she said in a small voice. “Ben, where are you?” She walked up the stairs. He was lying on her bed completely dressed, staring at the ceiling. She knelt on the floor beside him. She said, “I don’t want to make love to you today. I’m not very happy and I don’t feel I’d enjoy myself. I don’t think I could give you any pleasure. Do you understand?”

  He looked at her. Very calmly he said, “Take off your clothes.”

  “Ben, please listen to me. I’m sorry I acted like that. I just. It’s just,” and she tried to shake the words out of her. “I just don’t think it’s right today. I’m sorry.”

  “We’re leaving on Saturday.”

  She looked at him.

  “Janet and Andrew and I are flying out on Saturday. I won’t see you again for two weeks. I’m going to miss you. I may be going away with my family but I’m going to be thinking about you all the time. Please let me take something of you with me. Please let’s make love.”

  She looked at him, at his eyes, his serious expression, the way his throat moved when he swallowed. No, she thought, look away, look away now, walk out, find something to do. She said, “I,” and he gently pulled her toward him, as though this were her choice and not his. Kicking off her shoes, she mounted and straddled him. He began to unbutton her blouse. She placed her palms on his chest and looked into his eyes. Her breathing grew heavier, she felt herself swell and open to him. She said, “I can’t live without you, Ben.”

  And he said, “And you can’t live with me.”

  But he didn’t say that. She only imagined the line two hours later. One day, when it was too late, she would remember to use it.

  24

  Amelie slept.

  She wore nothing but a white bathrobe and black panties, the garments having been hastily put on just before Ben left the house in the last hours of the afternoon. The belt of her bathrobe had come undone and the panels of the robe were parted. Beads of sweat formed on her upper lip. Her skin had turned pale in the depths of her sleep. She slept heavily, her breathing deep and regular. In her dream someone said that the worm was without merit. Without waking she rolled onto her back, her legs separating in an easy, lascivious gesture. The rain dwindled to a light mist; the sun emerged briefly and the temperature rose until it touched eighty-three. She made a little noise, ehmmm, like the sizzle of gravel, a memory of the pleasure of her afternoon. What had taken place in the restaurant was no longer in the forefront of her recollections. She and Ben never mentioned it again that day.

  When he left he took her in his arms and held her, he pressed his lips to her head and then her mouth. He told her he would miss her. He said he would try to call and would definitely text and email. She held onto him a moment more and then released him, as though he were a bird she had rescued, nourished, strengthened, and then set free. One day, she sensed, he would not be there for her. Two years of a passionate affair would turn out to have been nothing but a charade, an amusing little trifle that made him feel worthy of this life he led.

  But that wouldn’t happen. You don’t buy a woman’s love by going through the motions and mouthing all the scripted words. No: this investment ran deep. He may have thought he owned her, but, in fact, she owned him. This wasn’t just his story. Her story, with all its little subplots and thrills, would one day grow all the richer in the telling.

  Her eyelids began to flutter as she reentered the playground of her dreams. While she slept things were happening, worlds were in collision, doors were shutting, people were speaking on telephones, packing their bags. In hospitals all over the land people gave up their last breath and expired. Babies were born, people were plotting, fuses were lit, bodies were lowered into the earth. The air was heavy with moisture, the trees glistened in the light, birds sang. She dreamed she was about to go to bed with someone, and she was gripped by the anticipation of it, for the person had never seen her undressed, had never made love to her. She took off her clothes and showed herself to him and then the dream changed utterly because the person waiting on the bed for her was a little boy holding a gun in his hands, and in her sleep she turned over and now she was at a meeting, perhaps with her agent or editor. Now things were fine. Once again thunder was imminent. The sun began to set. Things grew quiet.

  Outside, people drove by, a girl delivered the local newspaper to her door, some man with the hands of a bricklayer inserted a flyer into her mailbox advertising his services as a roofer. Her neighbors returned from work, kissed their spouses and their children. They opened their mail, changed their clothes, checked their email, some took to the roads for a quick jog. Amelie slept. One evening her mother went to sleep and never woke up, and Amelie had been the one to find her in the morning, discolored and swollen and silent.

  The phone didn’t ring. No one came to the door. Now it was time for a new dream, he was once again beside her, just as in the beginning, he was beside her and touching her, and although her eyes were shut she could hear him breathing, she could sense him watching her as she bit her lip in the throes of her pleasure, for he knew precisely how to please her, like this like this like that, and then Amelie woke and blinked her eyes and gasped a little, for the dream had had nothing to do with Ben. She had forgotten about the boy with the gun. All she could remember was that she had just dreamed of Richard.

  25

  Now with Ben off on his family vacation Amelie couldn’t write, she could hardly even read, as though her career solely depended on the presence of this man. It was ridiculous. Before Ben, even after Richard, she’d slowly blazed a path to the bestseller lists. Now, having reviewed through a haze of dissatisfaction the patches and sketches she had worked on for two weeks, she decided to start something else, something fresh, a novel not about people to whom very little remarkable happened, who passed their days having perfectly edited conversations, who sat on school boards and worked as travel agents and chatted with friends and consulted their therapists, and who, in the simmering afternoons of their summer, quietly schemed and slept with each others’ spouses, but those who take life-changing risks, who break the fabric of what passes for civilized society.

  She was sick of dealing with characters who made sheepish transactions with themselves and their lovers, who trusted and then slipped into mild distrust, whose troubling pasts occasionally rose up out of their distant obscure memories to wreak mild chaos. In short, she had grown sick and not a little tired of herself.

  Yet, her agent always told her to color within the lines. Go edgy, just not too much. This is your brand. Your readers see themselves in your characters, it’s why they stay loyal. Tease them if you like, take them to the frontiers of your imagination, but if your crayon strays too far beyond the lines, if you start to smudge or smear, you may begi
n to lose your audience.

  And maybe, she thought, even gain a whole new one.

  She wished, then, that she could write about a murderer, someone bright and charming who wielded a knife and slashed the throats of people who opened their eyes and looked the wrong way. She wished she could write about the darker areas of sex, the things that were done in basement rooms in Nevada and in woodsheds in the hill country of Tennessee. She wished she could write about strippers and prostitutes, soldiers of fortune and psychos. She wished she could write anything but what she had made her reputation writing: something new, something startling, something frightening and transgressive and unexpected. Something that would change her image, that would shake up her world.

  She looked at the calendar hanging over her desk. She’d put a red dot on the day Ben flew to LA, and a green one on the day he was due to return. Twelve more days. She knew what she was in for, as though she were a madwoman, some tragic figure in a Greek tragedy, day after day cursed to go through the same motions, trapped by the same circular thoughts, thirsting for relief. Even Saturday, a day when calls were primarily from telemarketers, had been totally squandered. She spoke to three of her friends, all of whom had read her new book and called with the intent of praising it. Adulation grew thin, turned to questions: Is the guy in the book based on Richard, were you thinking of Susan Gartner when you created Leslie Bennett, is the house in the book supposed to be Linda Kinsman’s, why did you call the son Cal, is there any symbolism in it? And she replied to her friends who long ago had taken English Lit 101 by saying that everyone in the book was a product of her imagination, that she would never dream of acting maliciously toward Richard, that Cal was just Cal and not Caliban or Robert Lowell or anyone else they might be thinking of.

  Of course the guy was based on Richard, and it was just like Richard not to have noticed the little mannerisms they shared. And as for Susie Gartner, well, if she wanted to see herself in the shrewish character Leslie Bennett, she could just go ahead and please herself.

  Amelie went into the kitchen and made herself a salad. Afterward she would take a little walk and then come home and work until four, pecking out words and hoping for a story to emerge. Then she would make herself a drink and dinner and later snooze in front of a streamed movie until bedtime.

  On the radio a writer she vaguely knew and intensely disliked was being interviewed. It was obvious the writer was pretending to be shy and retiring, and yet he was spilling the details of his life like a child toting a brimming bowl of milky cereal across a room. He had told these stories so often that they had grown burnished and mannered over time, to the point where they sounded more like tawdry fiction than the grueling life events he so enjoyed recounting. Now Amelie remembered where she’d met him, at a book festival just north of there. The author had strutted onto the stage in his work boots and jeans, and in a halo of preening self-satisfaction read page after page of the most sexually graphic scene from his new novel, looking up with a wry smile to see if he’d either offended or titillated, not realizing that he’d aroused no one but himself.

  As she ate she wondered what might happen were she to let it drop through some obscure channel that she had been having an affair with Ben, not just having an affair, something light and airy and occasional, but something unknown to others that had lasted for over two years, something that involved sweat and spit and sperm, an act of moral sabotage with all its promising overtones. Ben would have to admit to it, he would say it was nothing, it’s all over, don’t worry, but to her it wasn’t all over, it wasn’t nothing, it was something very large indeed, something that cast a shadow over Janet and her marriage to this man she thought she knew so well.

  Ben and Janet would find themselves a therapist, where they would sit in their separate chairs while the good doctor asked questions, offered suggestions, tried to help them patch this torn quilt that had been their marriage. They would begin to drift apart, each to his or her own hour and corner, following the separate times of their divided lives.

  Andrew would become difficult, a brooding child blasting hollow men in the twilight world of his Xbox, or idly lighting matches in his bedroom, one after another, flip onto the floor, flip onto the floor. His appetite would change, he would make himself throw up, he would engage in tantrums, he would tell his parents he hated them. He would retire into the dark world of his young mind, a place of vines and caves and tubes of glue, of dead ends and strange dwarfish obsessions, of endless hours of hard-core porn.

  Time would pass. Amelie would visit Ben in the cheap motel where he lived out of his suitcase, where the maid came in promptly at ten to vacuum—Good morning, sir, Good morning, Conchita—and where the management of the place offered free HBO and at least one blue channel, and where if he weren’t inclined to drive out to the Dunkin’ Donuts up the road he could make instant coffee in the machine on the desk. Lawyers would be retained, and a counselor for Andrew engaged, someone to soothe his pain, to help him come to grips with this thing that had destroyed his home.

  Of course, Ben would never identify the Other Woman, leaving Janet to speculate at her leisure as to whom it might be. Every woman in their proximity would be a candidate, and every one of them would be considered her enemy. The Other Woman would be unknown to anyone but Ben, leaving Janet only to refer to this woman as Her. Why don’t you go to Her, she would shout at her husband whenever he visited. Why are you here, why don’t you go and sleep with Her? And Andrew would watch television and place his hands over his ears or turn up the volume on his music, and life would become something you lived inside your head to the sound of three amplified chords.

  The divorce would be described as acrimonious, though blessedly brief and uncomplicated. The name Amelie Ferrar would be mentioned, and Ben would naturally move in with his lover. Janet would get over it, but not until she’d picked up the phone, waited for Amelie to answer, and then called her Fucking Bitch Whore at the top of her lungs. Rachel would barely notice what was happening. Andrew would manage, somehow. There might be a spot of trouble with him down the road, of course, difficulties in school, a little weekend vandalism, the occasional binge with friends, Bud Lights and Marlboros on a Saturday night. But he’d manage. He’d manage because Amelie and Ben needed to be together and Andrew would just have to learn to live with it.

  But it wouldn’t happen that way. Janet would never know what had happened, who had caused it, who was to blame. Of course Amelie would run into her now and again, at the supermarket or dry cleaner, and she would be just as friendly as she had always been. They might even go out for lunch or a drink now and then, and she could imagine Janet spilling all the details of her divorce. I think there was someone else, another woman. Sometimes I feel that if I ever found out who it was, I’d kill her for the sake of my children, and the idea—rapidly jotted down on a shopping-list pad she kept in the kitchen—thrilled Amelie to her core.

  Part Three

  26

  The main restaurant in town, the Coach & Four, situated between the Knit One, Kibitz Too yarn shop, and the Second Life yoga studio, was an easy ten-minute drive from the house. Before Nina was born—and because the only other option, near the railroad tracks, was Zeke’s Bar & Grill where, after closing time, the odd drunk could be found sprawled outside it on the sidewalk—she and Richard had sometimes gone there for drinks and dinner, though he always spent his meal hunched in silence, a heart full of grievance toward the overstuffed gentry surrounding them.

  During the colder months a fire blazed in the hearth in this 1753 house that had now become the most expensive restaurant in town, and the music on the sound system was always quiet enough to be ignored, especially when the place was busy. She hadn’t been there since her divorce, and now, desperate to see other people and hear the easy intercourse of conversation, she decided to go for a drink. She would sit with her cocktail at the bar and eat the tasty little snacks provided, and then go home and see if sh
e could get at least one coherent sentence written.

  There were only a few tables occupied at this early hour, and as it was spring the fireplace was barren, the air naturally warm on this balmy evening. She took a seat at the bar and looked over at the others sitting along it, a couple she vaguely recognized from someplace, and a younger man opposite her reading a book while he sipped his beer.

  Bing! She checked her phone, a text from Nina, a selfie she’d taken the night before at a concert in Boston. Beside her was a guy her age, presumably Peter. He looked like every other twentysomething these days, with the same haircut, the same Heineken grin. Amelie sent back a smiley with two hearts for its eyes, and heard nothing more.

  The bartender delivered her usual martini, and when she looked up, the man with the book was staring at her, his eyes quickly returning to his reading.

  Well, she thought, flattered by the momentary attention. She was at least ten years older than the guy, something he surely must have recognized, and yet something about her had caught his attention. For that brief moment she felt closer to twenty-nine. He seemed well groomed and decently put together. Because the restaurant and bar weren’t busy, she lifted her chin and said, “Any good?” She immediately regretted it. It sounded like a cheap and easy pickup line, not much cleverer than Do you come here often? and now she would add to her reputation that of being a tarnished divorcée on the hunt for young flesh.