If She Were Dead

by J. P. Smith

  “Anyone I know?”

  “I only met her last week, and school’s almost over, so we talked a little about rooming together next year. Her name’s Abbie Kinsman.”

  “I’ve met her mother a few times. The daughter went to your school, right?”

  “Then left for Andover our junior year. So I only knew her a little.”

  “Let me look at you. What is that?”

  “I got my nose pierced.”

  Amelie resisted the temptation to touch the tiny jewel that lay nestled in the shallow valley above her daughter’s left nostril. “Did it hurt?”

  Nina laughed. “You can’t imagine.”

  “You didn’t get anything else done, did you?”

  “No, Mom.”

  “Is Peter full of holes?”

  “Stop it,” she said, though she also laughed.

  “Do you want to eat?” Amelie walked inside. On the sofa was Nina’s laundry, at least three weeks’ worth spilling out of plastic garbage bags.

  “Peter has a pierced ear,” Nina said.

  “Is he a student?”

  “He’s at Harvard.”

  Amelie went in the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. “And what is he doing there?”

  “He’s a student.”

  “I meant what is he studying?”

  “Prelaw.”

  The phone played a few notes from some pop song, and Nina picked it up and smiled, “Hi. Yeah. No. Yeah. Okay.”

  Nina wandered off with her phone. Amelie opened a tin of tuna and, dividing it in two, emptied each side onto a bed of lettuce leaves. She made a dressing with balsamic vinegar. She poured herself a glass of white wine. Nina came in and finished her phone call, “Love ya, bye.”

  “Peter again?”

  “Sorry.”

  “I don’t mind you talking to him. Why don’t you invite him over for lunch tomorrow?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Amelie looked at her. “So…do you want to talk about it? About him, about your relationship…? I mean, it’s not my business, but if you want to sound me out about anything, I’m always here for you, no matter what. You know that, don’t you?”

  Nina came to her, arms outspread, and hugged her mother, holding her close. “Sometimes I guess I just need to hear that.”

  “Even though you don’t want to talk about it,” Amelie said, and they both laughed.

  Amelie went back to preparing lunch. After a few moments she said, “Sometimes being a writer… It’s not just sitting down and working. Your mind is always on it, it’s always distracted, you know? So if sometimes I don’t sound interested or engaged, it’s not you, okay?”

  Nina nodded.

  “It was always hard for me, having to balance it off, raising you and getting to work. Sometimes, after you finally could sleep through the night, I’d be exhausted, but I’d drag myself to my desk and work until two or three in the morning.”

  Nina came up beside her and touched her arm. “I’m sorry, Mom.”

  “No. Never be sorry. I’m the one who should apologize. But, you know, I’m so glad we had you. My life would be so much poorer without little Nina.” She tousled her daughter’s hair and they both laughed. Amelie handed her a salad.

  Nina was the only real constant in her life, the one undivided loyalty she could depend upon. And she smiled at the thought of it.

  Nina found a can of Diet Coke in the fridge and popped it open. They went out to the deck. Amelie told Nina about her latest book, how it was being received, how the interviews were going.

  “I’ve been reading it,” said Nina.

  Amelie looked at her. “And?”

  “I haven’t finished it.”

  “Any thoughts?”

  “Not until I’ve finished it.”

  “Nothing?”

  Nina shook her head.

  They ate for a few moments. Nina said, “It’s about an affair.”

  “It’s about love.”

  “It’s about a love affair.”

  Amelie looked at her. “Is that a problem?”

  Nina shrugged.

  “Is it a moral issue?”

  “No, Mom.”

  “It seems to annoy you.”

  “No, Mom.”

  For a few minutes they said nothing. Birds sang in the trees, a squirrel hung upside down on the feeder, struggling to extract sunflower seeds. It swung there every morning, its little limbs wrapped around the cylinder, as if there was no food to be found elsewhere, no buried acorns, no nuts, no garbage to rummage through, no slugs to eviscerate. She clapped her hands, and the squirrel swiveled its merry mocking eye to take her in as it continued to gorge and sway.

  “Then what is it?” Amelie said. “What bothers you about my book?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It does matter, it matters a great deal to me. It’s my book and you’re my daughter and you’re both important to me.”

  “It’s…” Nina began and then she shook her head and fell silent. Had Rachel’s friend seen more the day she was supposed to have spied them at the restaurant, were things going on under the table that could be construed as elements of foreplay?

  “I bet Tolstoy’s daughters never took Anna Karenina out on him,” Amelie said, and Nina got up and went back into the house. She returned with a banana and began peeling it.

  “Can we have Indian tonight?” she asked, and Amelie smiled.

  “Of course.”

  “I never get it at school.”

  “Do you ever go out with your friends?”

  “Well, yeah, of course.”

  “I mean for a meal.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “And with Peter?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Have you spoken to your father?”

  Nina nodded. “He’s going to have a baby. His wife is, anyway.”

  “How do you feel about that? You’ll have a half sister or half brother.” She had to stop herself from saying how much she hated the idea, as if Sharon’s pregnancy were the result of some intrigue worked out by Richard and his wife to make Amelie appear barren, alone, unloved.

  The landline rang and Nina ran inside to answer it. Amelie finished her wine. Nina came out and handed the cordless to her. “It’s Rachel’s father,” she said, and walked back into the house.

  32

  “I’m outside a restaurant in Malibu. I can see the ocean.”

  “Why didn’t you call my cell?”

  “I hit the wrong speed-dial number. Is it a problem?”

  She could hear the traffic behind him, a siren, someone’s car stereo blasting, I’m a motherfucker, you’re a motherfucker.

  “That was Nina,” she told him. “Great timing.”

  “I thought you’d be alone.”

  She could see Nina beyond the kitchen, in the living room, her bare feet up on the coffee table. Amelie knew precisely what her daughter was doing; she was working out the higher mathematics of her mother’s private life.

  “She says Rachel has a friend who saw us in a restaurant,” and then Nina slid open the screen door and joined her, taking a chair and leafing through a magazine. “So how have you been?” Amelie said with bright interest. “And Janet? And Andrew?”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “That sounds nice,” Amelie said flatly, and Nina glanced up at her. She wondered if Nina had been endowed with the power to read her mother’s mind or the shift of light in her eyes. Amelie put her feet up on the edge of her chair and then changed her mind, because there was something coquettish in the pose. She sat up and crossed her legs. “And how’s the weather been out there?” she said with perky brightness.

  “I miss you,” Ben said.

  “Oh, I agree,” she s
aid.

  “It’s been shitty.”

  “The weather?”

  “That too.”

  “Is that right?” Amelie said, as if Ben had told her of some extraordinary phenomenon he had witnessed, the splitting of California from the continent, the collapse of the movie industry.

  “I’ll be back in a week. Exactly one week.”

  “Yes, I know that.” She sounded as if she were talking not to her lover, the man who every Friday brought her to the most exquisite orgasms, but to the repairman at the appliance store in town.

  “I want to fuck you,” he said, and she felt her breath rush out.

  “Good,” she said. The washer will be fixed before tomorrow, good, send me a bill, that was how she made it sound, and Nina pretended to read Vanity Fair while all along she was keeping an eye on her mother.

  “I want you so badly,” he said.

  “Hmm,” she said.

  “They’re in a restaurant. I stepped out to get something from the car. That’s why I’m calling you while the valet keeps staring at me. You just have to show your face, and they expect a tip.”

  “Oh I see.”

  “I’m not going to be able to talk much longer. I’ll tell them I called to check messages at my office.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said. “And Disneyland was fun?”

  “Are you really interested?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Is Nina still there with you?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “We’re flying up to San Francisco tomorrow. We decided not to go to Mexico.”

  For some reason that pleased her. “How fascinating,” she said.

  “Talk dirty to me.”

  She laughed. He always liked how she sometimes spoke to him, how she referred to her own body, how she would talk while they were in bed, how she would tell him what to do, where to put things, how to touch her. “And there’s the problem with the windows,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Because if we extend the side too far there’ll have to be more windows installed. Isn’t that what you suggested?”

  He laughed. “I’ve got to get back to the restaurant. I miss you.”

  “Well, then that’s how it’ll have to be done. Let me see what solutions you come up with when you’re back in town.”

  “You’re good at this, you know. I want to see you naked,” he said. “I want your mouth on me.”

  “And I could always add some sort of, I don’t know, little greenhouse at the end, I suppose. You know, lots of glass and…” She shrugged.

  “I’ll be back late next Friday night. I’ll try to get away for an hour or two on Sunday. If not, I’ll take Monday off.”

  “Excellent,” she said.

  “We’ll just stay there all day. We’ll screw our brains out.”

  “It sounds like a great idea. Some sort of walk-in conservatory might be just the answer.”

  He said goodbye and hung up. Amelie set the phone on the table and looked out over the garden. She could hardly keep from smiling. She felt aroused by her conversation. It was as if the wall had been breached and whatever was inside was seeping out for all to see. It was like an omen, the phone call. He missed her desperately, and now, perhaps, he’d come to realize that she was the woman he should spend the rest of his life with.

  Amelie said, “That was Rachel’s father.”

  “I know that, Mom. Remember I answered the phone?”

  “He just wanted to discuss something about the addition I told you about.”

  “While he was on vacation?”

  “I guess he brought his work with him.”

  Nina turned the page of her magazine and said nothing. “Why are you having an addition put on this house?” she suddenly asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, you live alone here, why do you need an addition?”

  “I don’t know, I just thought it would be nice.”

  “But you live alone, Mom.”

  “I’m thinking about moving my office downstairs. I don’t like the room I’m in. I don’t know, it’s too bleak in the winter.”

  Nina looked at her. “How can a room be bleak?”

  “Look, I want something a bit sunnier, that’s all.” It was astonishing how her affair had put her at the mercy of everyone. She had become wary of Janet, she had to tiptoe around Nina, she had to live in a world of code and signal, of distrust and deceit. Now she would have to deal with Nina. She would have to convince her that nothing was going on, nothing illicit was taking place. She went into the bathroom and slid her jeans and panties down to her ankles and sat on the toilet, and then the phone rang and she shouted, “I’ll get it,” and only half-buttoned, she ran out to hear her lover’s voice again.

  She stood at the screen door and listened as Nina said, “I’m fine.”

  Who is it? Amelie mouthed, and Nina looked at her and said, “It’s Daddy.”

  “Oh,” Amelie said, and went back to the bathroom.

  33

  “Are you writing now?” the unseen interviewer in Santa Monica asked, and Amelie said she was working on a new book. “At least I’m trying.”

  “Do you find it difficult, especially as your latest book has only just landed?”

  Amelie said that it wasn’t always easy when you’re in the middle of publicizing another book. “Sometimes I get a little lost,” she said, and she laughed. “I’m still in the world of the last book.”

  “Will the next novel be anything like the one that just came out? Your reviews have been uniformly excellent.”

  “I can promise it’ll be completely different.”

  “Then will the setting be pretty much the same?” He went on to say that over her last three novels she had begun to map out a universe of suburban angst, where below a veneer of respectability and conformity was a universe falling into disarray.

  She felt a tickle in her pocket, indicating that a call was coming in over her iPhone. She could do nothing about it. She was being interviewed by a man she had never met who was sitting in Southern California asking her the same questions everyone else asked her, except he sounded a thousand times more intelligent.

  “Well, I’m not sure actually. I mean, I think all writers try to create a consistent fictional world. The challenge is in always making it new. Exploring different layers of it.” In other words, stepping over the line. She didn’t know what else to say. Her phone kept vibrating, and she knew instantly it was Ben, that he had managed to extricate himself from the demands of his family. The vibrations stopped; the call had come to nothing.

  “Of course a lot of writers don’t like to discuss their work in progress, at least not in any detail.”

  “I suppose I’m like that, too,” Amelie said brightly, addressing her invisible audience: people in cars, people in rest homes, actors in their studio trailers. Eight minutes had passed since the interview had begun. She looked at the digital clock on the studio wall, and her pocket began vibrating again. She wanted to say, Could you please let me take this call from my lover? Instead she said, “I still have no idea of even the names of the characters.”

  “So you’ve just begun work.”

  “I started it quite recently.”

  “And I know a lot of our listeners are interested in a writer’s working habits.”

  That again.

  “Could you tell us a little about some of yours?”

  She wished she could be outrageous as some writers were. She wished she could say that she smoked a joint, or needed to cut her own flesh before sitting down to her laptop, comments that boosted sales and earned their authors spots on late-night talk shows and photos in the pages of glossy magazines devoted to troubled celebrities.

  “I like to take a long walk in the morning,” she said. “And
then I just write.”

  “So you clear your head in the fresh air.”

  She was sorry she had mentioned it. Soon the interviewer would be asking her about her religious duties.

  “And afterward? How do you wind down for the day?”

  Before I go to yoga, I kill small animals and feed them, properly field-dressed, to my cellar full of kidnapped children. She laughed a little. “A glass of wine, some music, sometimes a movie. Then I always read before bed.” Then her dear old friend, Mr. Pink, the magic pleasure machine.

  After a few more questions the interviewer thanked her for her time, mentioning the title of the book and its publisher, and said it was undoubtedly available in your local library, which wasn’t quite what Amelie wanted him to say. She imagined thousands of people putting their names on a reserve list while hundreds of unsold copies in bookstores were being packed and shipped back to warehouses in New Jersey.

  “And from our studios in Santa Monica we want to say thank you to bestselling author Amelie Ferrar.” She was about to take off the headphones when the interviewer said, “I think that went very well.”

  “Thank you.” She’d forgotten his name.

  “You were very, I don’t know, unrevealing? In my experience most writers are exhibitionists.”

  She laughed a little. She knew lots of those. “I think a bit of mystery never hurts.”

  “I really like your latest jacket photo,” he said.

  “Oh, thanks.” Where was this going?

  “Do you ever get out to the West Coast?”

  “I have, in the past.” With Richard, then with Richard and Nina, then alone when she was touring her last book but one.

  “But not with this book.”

  “Soon, though.” The California leg of her current publicity tour would come in another month.

  “Well, if you do, I’d love to meet you in person. Maybe for a—”

  Again her phone began vibrating, and she took off the headphones and walked out of the studio, still hearing the small voice within them saying Hello…? Hello…?

  “Hello?” she said into her phone as she walked through the station lobby and out to Commonwealth Avenue.