by J. P. Smith
“I think so.” He lifted up the book to show the cover. It was her latest, and her heart shut down before it began to thump all over again.
“Well. I’m flattered.”
“I thought I recognized you,” and he checked the photo on the back cover, Amelie in full color, her arm stretched across the back of a sofa. “It’s really good so far. I’m enjoying it.”
“Thanks. Actually, my readers tend to be women. It’s kind of unusual seeing a man reading something of mine. Also kind of gratifying.”
“I saw a thing about you in the local paper,” he said. “I thought what you had to say was interesting, and I thought I’d check out your latest.”
It had been an interview that had taken all of fifteen minutes at the Starbucks in town. The journalist, who clearly hadn’t read a word Amelie had ever written, asked her the usual generalized questions, and then said she had to rush off to get her dog from the groomer, still leaving Amelie sounding intelligent and provocative.
She sipped her drink and toyed with the little stick that held her olives. “I hope you enjoy the rest of it.”
He smiled. “Now that I’ve seen you in person I’ll always think you’re the main character.”
Ah yes: dear old Caroline who sins impeccably, while Amelie, conversely, preferred to be immoral as messily as possible. And if her protagonist had been a psychopathic killer? Would he have said the same thing to her?
“I wish,” she said, and he returned to his reading, saying nothing more to her.
Once again she was forty, alone, and halfway to the bottom of her first martini of the evening.
27
After dinner Amelie drove from the restaurant to Ben’s house. She felt compelled to see it in its vacancy—an act of magic, a way of reaching him three thousand miles away. Before leaving for California he had set timers to mimic the patterns of this absent family, so that early in the evening, life was intimated downstairs, gradually making its way into the upper reaches of the house, ending with the switching off of bedside lamps in this house that was stripped of life. A porch light was on, around which a lone moth darted and danced in its final hour on earth.
She looked at the front of this house to which she had never been invited, not even for one of Ben and Janet’s many social occasions. If she thought about it long enough she would see that she was indeed something on the side, and the side she was on was some distant outpost, a backwater village Ben could visit whenever he was up-country. So she was expected to sit at home and wait.
She sat in her car a full five minutes before the flames began, little licks of light like a brushfire in the middle of nowhere, then growing larger until quickly they engulfed the entire house. The outside walls fell away, revealing its inner life: Ben’s and Janet’s bedroom, the floor collapsing under the weight of the California king and matching nightstands, the bureau and her dresser, the framed prints and paintings tumbling after; Andrew’s room with all its little-guy stuff, a lacrosse stick and helmet, some books, a desk, a bed made for one, a laptop melting in the heat; the dining room, into which the bedroom fell, crushing the table and the chairs around it; and finally Rachel’s room, left precisely as she had the day she left for college, becoming a heap of burning garbage.
The house was reduced to ashes and glowing embers and broken glass in a matter of minutes, but only Amelie seemed to notice. There were no sirens, no neighbors standing on their lawns in their nightclothes watching this extraordinary display; just Amelie. And while she took one last look at the house in the night, as the last of the timed lamps was extinguished, signifying sleep, she put the car in gear and headed home, catching a final glimpse of the house in her rearview, still standing, untouched by her imagination.
She pulled into her driveway and realized that she had forgotten to leave a light on for herself. The darkness of her home made her think of a death in the family, a prolonged bereavement. Her mother was long gone; her father had left home for another woman when she was twelve. She’d only seen him once since then, at an airport with his new family, children and grandchildren, when she was flying back to Boston from a book festival in Chicago where he apparently now lived. Her mother had never spoken of him again after he’d left, as though the man had only been someone she’d dreamed up one lonely day and promptly forgotten. Until she was old enough to realize that her mother was impossible for him to live with, and her father insufferably unreliable.
At the airport he’d glanced at her, taken a quick second look, then herded his family to their gate. He’d grown distinguished with age, the dark hair of his earlier days gone gray and perfectly coiffed. Unlike most of the other male travelers in the terminal, who seemed to be still in their pajamas, he was in a suit and tie, exactly as she remembered him when she was a child. She’d always felt it was her fault, his leaving, since her parents’ arguments always seemed to be centered on her, What will she think as she grows up? Do you have any idea what this will do to our daughter? Do you really want her to believe men are just like you, endlessly disloyal, always wandering off? And her father would say nothing. Spied by his daughter from the top of the stairs he would be seen sitting in his usual living room armchair, his arms folded, a glass brimming with scotch beside him.
For years Amelie felt she could have prevented it, could have been a better daughter, could have prodded her father to pay greater attention to his talented and beautiful wife, and such a thought had lodged in her brain like a bullet, only vanishing when she fell in love with Ben and saw, for a brief crowning moment, that she had passed over to the other side of the equation. The side that also happens to consider itself right and just.
She walked past her father and his family and turned abruptly back. She needed to do this, she needed to speak to him, to show that she at least deserved an apology.
She caught up with him at his gate. He’d settled into a seat, while his wife, who looked remarkably like Amelie’s mother, walked off to a ladies’ room.
When he looked up from his phone he saw her standing there. He said, “Yes?”
“Daddy.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Jack Ferrar?”
“Yes…”
“Don’t you know me?”
“No,” he said after a moment, looking back down at his phone.
“It’s Amelie. Your daughter.”
“You must be mistaken,” he said.
He gazed at her with his rheumy, boozy eyes, while she waited, a moment longer, before walking away. She hated him. She would hate him forever, the cheating, lying, abandoning son of a bitch. There was nothing more to be shared, not now, not ever.
She stepped into her darkened house and thought that something was wrong, something was out of joint: time or topography. She stood still for a long moment and tried to gather her thoughts.
After turning on the lights downstairs, she took a knife from the kitchen, the expensive one she used to demolish garlic cloves and dismember chicken. She pictured someone sitting on the edge of her bed, waiting for her. She would walk into her bedroom and see the guy from the restaurant with the book, and before she could cry out, he would have her on the floor, his hand over her mouth.
She thought of Ben, who would be back in another week and who, not having heard from her after his return, would let himself in to be greeted by the stink of decaying flesh and to find what remained of her bonded to the wide pine boards of her floor she’d had refinished only a few years before, her desiccated unraveled intestines surrounding her naked body like a nest of snakes. But that wouldn’t happen. Her bedroom was empty. Nina’s room was empty. There was no killer in the house, no one hiding, waiting. There was no bereavement.
What she had lost was any sense of hope, though she sensed once again it had been there all along: Ben wouldn’t be in her life forever. That the end of the affair was contained within its first moments: a big bang that w
ould eventually burn out and leave her world a black cinder. She thought of the young man in the bar reading her book. How many more of these would she encounter before she was too old even to be noticed?
She turned on the bathroom light and saw only a crazy woman staring back at her from the mirror, her hair in disarray. She switched off the light and returned to her bedroom. She put the knife on her nightstand and sat on the bed and felt her body begin to shudder, and then the tears came, copiously down her cheeks, and her nose ran and she began to perspire, and when she was done, when everything had begun to cohere, body and soul and heart, she took her bottle of Advil from the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, gave it a shake, assessed the stash. She would take two, not fifty, not ninety-three; she would swallow two and take off her clothes and get into bed.
Take two, she reminded herself, and she opened the bottle and took five and then went to bed.
28
It was Nina who roused her from her sleep, and when Amelie woke it was instantly into the throes of panic. She reached for her phone and dropped it and then picked it up and even before putting it up by her face said What?
“Mom?”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I always call on Sunday morning.”
Amelie rubbed the side of her face. “I was asleep.”
“No kidding.”
“Sorry, baby. Sorry.”
“Late night?”
Amelie ignored the question. “School okay?” she said.
“I have so much work.”
“But you’re able to handle it.”
“I’m just studying all the time. Can I come home next weekend?”
“Of course.” With Ben away, anything was possible. No excuses would have to be made, no one would be put off, no lies were in the offing. “Do you want me to pick you up?”
“I’ll take the bus. Or the train. I’ll call when I know which one I’m taking.”
“Everything else all right?”
“I saw Peter once or twice.”
“How’s it going?”
“I don’t know,” Nina said, retreating into vagueness. “You know, I heard from Rachel again.”
Rachel Rachel Rachel. Oh yes: that Rachel. “Really.”
“We’re going to get together one of these days.”
“That’s a great idea.” Amelie looked at the clock: it was nearly eleven, as late as she used to sleep when she was her daughter’s age.
“Mom…?”
“I’m here, I’m all right.”
“Her parents are in California.”
“Really,” she said. It was three hours earlier there; Ben was asleep, his arm around his wife. This is what came so vividly to mind.
“What’s going on?”
“What do you mean?”
“Rachel said something about you and her father. Some friend of hers saw you and her dad at a restaurant. About a month ago, I guess.”
One of Rachel’s friends. Some malevolent private school grad with malice in her heart, probably a budding writer with a head full of wanton speculation.
Amelie didn’t know what to say. “Go on,” she said, and she knew at once it sounded sinister, it rang with guilt. A month ago: she remembered she and Ben had gone to Boston, visited a museum, and afterward ate in a crowded Newbury Street restaurant. It had been foolish of them, a risky thing to do, and now the word was out. It was ridiculous: forty minutes over shrimp scampi and a glass of wine or two were about to become the outward signs of a torrid affair.
“That’s all. She was just curious. I was just curious.”
“I don’t understand what the problem is. We had lunch, that’s all. I’m thinking about having some work done on the house.”
“You’re joking.”
“I thought he might have some ideas about it. I mean, he’s an architect, right?” She listened as this nonsense issued from her mouth.
“Because if you’re having an affair with him, Rachel will go crazy, she will go absolutely insane. Are you having an affair with him?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Amelie said.
They said goodbye and the call was ended. Amelie went directly into the shower. She shut her eyes and stayed there for ten minutes in the heat and noise and the rush of water. It was as if she were drowning, all the breath taken from her as she went under. Fuck, she said aloud. Oh god, fuck. And she rested her forehead against the wall of the shower and cried real tears.
29
Finally something lifted from her, leaving her with a stillness she associated with the last days of her mother; the quiet memory of a woman climbing the stairs, stopping to catch her breath and gather her strength for her impending death. Sometimes she tried to imagine how her mother saw the world in those last days, how the Persian carpet in the living room became something rich and allusive, the pictures on the walls panoramas of a lost paradise. It was the calmness of appreciation, the quiet intensity of self-control, the sense of something rounding to an end. It was the serenity that knew only moments, as if time were made up of a million tiny bubbles, each of them brilliantly reflective, lighter than air. If you stop, you will see, she used to say to Amelie when she was a child, and in their walks she would come to a halt and point out a caterpillar on a leaf, or a hummingbird seeking nectar, vanishing in a blur of wings.
The routine of Amelie’s days became an ordered thing, where hour succeeded hour not feverishly but quietly, each moment carrying weight and significance in preparation for the next. The days stretched out before her without event or interruption. Ben was in California; Friday was hers alone. And the idea of this solitude left her with an unexpected feeling of muted joy, as if she had suddenly cupped her hands around the hours of her life to make them all her own.
She began to rise with the sun. She walked and showered and had a light breakfast, and after checking her emails leafed through the newspaper that arrived daily on her doorstep. Through her glasses she read about what was happening in the world and in the country and in the state. She glanced at the obituaries and read the arts reviews and looked at her horoscope and saw that challenging aspects would compel her to make a life-changing decision. She closed the paper and walked up to her office.
Without realizing it she had worked all morning; her engagement with prose had replaced her obsession with love. For one whole day she’d owned her own life, and the only word that came to her lips was Finally.
Each day she sat at her desk and steadily tapped out the words until the passing of time became invisible, until the world had been reduced to the sentences she was composing. She thought of Janet sitting across from her in the restaurant: the beginning of a novel, the mistress meeting the wife, and neither knows what is in the heart of the other. Over a few drinks motives become blurred, intentions grow raw, outcomes blossom, inevitably, into fatal uncertainty.
She typed the sentences, one after another, and even before finishing the third page she knew how it was going to play out. All she needed was the one character who would make it work.
30
The next morning Amelie worked until noon and then rose from her desk and prepared a light lunch. She answered a few emails, she made some calls. She was going to be recording an interview the next day for a books program based in Los Angeles, which entailed her driving to a studio in Boston while she listened to the questions through headphones. The illusion would be that she was sitting with the host in his Santa Monica studio, and that afterward she would step out and take a walk along the beach. It would be funny if by chance while Ben sat in traffic on the freeway he switched on the radio only to hear his lover’s voice speaking of her work, or reading aloud from it: They met at the end of summer…
Perhaps she should say something special in the interview, something meant for him alone. She tried to think of some word or phrase that was familiar to them f
rom their times together. He never called her anything but Amelie, save for that time he had called her Janey. Or Jane, or whatever it was. And to her he was Ben or Darling. She had never nicknamed his penis, as she had Richard’s, though she did point out to her ex-husband in the miserable final days of their marriage that in fact he was not, after all, a Richard but a dick.
But Ben wouldn’t hear it. He would be out on the beach with Janet, or in Disneyland or at Universal Studios, or driving through the streets on the lookout for wandering movie stars. And she consoled herself with the idea that eventually she would be able to take a vacation with him, that they could go off to someplace wonderful, Capri, perhaps, or Portofino, their names forming deliciously in her mind.
That was it.
She looked up.
Here it was.
She smiled.
She would ask him to divorce Janet. She would ask him to marry her. It would be an ultimatum, the logical outcome of their two-year relationship, something he could not possibly dismiss. Because she had it all before her: the narrative she needed to shape the reality. It was so simple, so perfectly logical. The one undeniable element in the story.
The other man.
31
When Amelie returned from getting her hair cut and colored on Friday, Nina was sitting on the deck with her iPhone. Nina held up a finger and said, “Love ya, too, bye-bye,” and ended the call. She stood and hugged and kissed her mother.
“How did you get here? Bus?”
“I got a ride.”
“Peter?”
“He doesn’t have a car.”
“I meant on the phone just now. Was that Peter?”
Nina smiled and nodded.
“I’d like to meet this boy.”
“This man.”
“This young man,” Amelie said.
“A girl in my dorm lives, like, ten minutes from here. That’s how I got a ride from school.”