If She Were Dead

by J. P. Smith

A neighbor’s cat wandered into the yard and stopped to stare at her before squatting to drop its daily business. Into her second drink of the evening, Amelie drifted into a light sleep, and when the phone rang it was dark. She cleared her throat and said Mother? Had she become Holly all of a sudden?

  “It’s me,” he said.

  She blinked her eyes a few times. In her dream the woman had turned and said to her, I think I’ll lie down for a few minutes, and it was exactly what her mother had said fifteen minutes before she got into bed to die.

  “Good morning,” Amelie said, trying to sound alert and cheerful. She couldn’t understand why she’d woken up so early, why she was sitting on her deck before sunrise. She felt completely rested, if not a bit stiff from sleeping in a chair.

  “It’s nine o’ clock,” he said. “I’ve been sleeping for most of the day.”

  “It’s night?”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Darling?”

  He laughed.

  “I must have dozed off,” Amelie said.

  “Janet’s gone to the supermarket. Andrew’s in his room playing a video game. I’ve been on the phone for the last fifteen minutes with Rachel.”

  Rachel: Amelie remembered. “Did she say anything?”

  “About what?”

  “About us in the restaurant.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it. Janet doesn’t know a thing.”

  But she hadn’t asked that. She was asking about Rachel, not Janet. And now Ben himself had become a question instead of the answer he always had reliably been for her.

  She took the phone into the house and sat in the living room. Three hours had disappeared from her life. She wondered how she must have seemed, sitting on her deck with a drink by her side, her head slumped, unconscious. Amelie Ferrar the writer; Amelie Ferrar, profiled in Vogue in all her perfectly coiffed blue-eyed prettiness; Amelie Ferrar the old drunk. The taste in her mouth was of a foul stickiness. She felt she knew what it was like being one of the old men who convened outside the local saloon each midday, stinking of piss and Camels, their lives fouled beyond repair. “I missed you,” she said. She decided she would say nothing at all about Janet’s call to her. That belonged to her world, not theirs.

  “I missed you, too.”

  “Did you think about me?”

  There was the briefest of pauses. “Of course,” he said. “Have you been working?”

  “I did a few more interviews. But writing’s been slow. Come over and see me, Ben. Try to get out tonight.”

  “I’m still kind of beat. I don’t think I can.”

  “Just for five minutes.”

  “I really can’t,” he said.

  Now a silence lay between them.

  “Then when?” she said.

  “Monday. Like we planned. I’ll drop Andrew off at school and come straight to your place,” and he hung up, click.

  “Goodbye,” she said. Goodbye?

  36

  Afterward they rested. Her head lay in the bend of his arm, her left hand played lightly with the hairs on his chest, back and forth, this way and that. For some reason she hadn’t pleased him, and she didn’t know if she imagined it, but he seemed distant, unfocused, somehow separate from her. The dissonance of their failed lovemaking now filled the air. “Should we try again?”

  He shook his head a little. “Not right now. I don’t think it’s going to happen today. I’m glad it was good for you, though.”

  “But I wish it had been nice for you, too.”

  He shrugged. The expression on his face was unreadable.

  “Tell me what I can do for you.”

  “Nothing. I don’t think it’s going to work.”

  “Do you feel all right?”

  “I feel fine.”

  She placed her palm flat against his chest. “Something on your mind?”

  “Besides work?” He looked at her. He smiled.

  “Whatever.”

  “No. Not really.”

  “Did something happen on the trip?”

  He smiled. “Nothing happened on the trip.”

  “Is there anything you want to tell me?”

  He shook his head. She thought about how it would be living with this man, having to shed a long-established routine marked by solitude and work and the small pleasures she had learned to accept since her divorce in favor of carving out an evening or even a whole day with Ben.

  Apart from the sex, how would it be? Apart from the sex, was there really anything else to look forward to? And what was he like outside of bed? Although they had eaten in restaurants and driven in cars together, she had no concept of how things would be on a day-to-day basis. Eating breakfast, having dinner, going to bed together simply to sleep. But she would come to learn his habits just as he would learn hers, and sometimes the little things he did or forgot to do would cause some tension. But at least he would be there, even when he wasn’t, because eventually he would be there.

  And she remembered what Janet had told her that night over drinks: that sometimes it seemed as if he wasn’t there. Now Amelie was seeing it for herself. He extricated his arm and sat up on the side of her bed. She saw his back, bowed with exhaustion and failure, and when she reached out to draw her fingers across it, he stood and began to dress.

  She said, “We’ll try again at the end of the week.” Already she had begun making excuses for him, because it was what she always ended up doing.

  She saw that his body had begun to lose its firmness, that the gravity of age was drawing him down.

  “I won’t be here,” he said, still not looking at her.

  “What?”

  “I have to travel. On business. I’m flying out Friday morning and won’t be back till Sunday night.” He was speaking to the air, to the absolute nothing that lay between him and the wall.

  She couldn’t believe her ears. “But you just got back from LA.”

  Now he stood and turned to her. “I have to go to Carbondale. Illinois. I’m being interviewed by some people at the university there for an arts center they’re hoping to build. This could be a big deal for the firm.”

  She sat up on the bed and for some reason pulled the sheet up to cover her nakedness. “No,” she said, staring at him.

  “It’s business, Amelie. I’m obligated to do this. I really want this contract.”

  “No.”

  “I need to do this.”

  “You could have told them to schedule it for a different day of the week.”

  “It’s not a day, it’s the weekend to tour the site and take photos. And I can’t tell them to change their schedule. I mean, I’m the one who wants the damn job. Look, I wouldn’t expect you to cancel if your publisher wanted to see you, or if you had to do a signing or an interview.”

  “But that wouldn’t happen. Publishers deal with authors all the time, they allow us to change our minds.”

  “Look. Amelie. I can’t just tell them to alter their schedule. I’m trying to land an important commission. I wouldn’t want you to miss something important in your work just for this.”

  She stared at him, a flaccid man with his hands in the air. “Just for this. Thanks, Ben.” She turned away from him. “Just for this.” She shook her head.

  “You know I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “But you said it. You said the words. Just for this. So this is what it’s all about. You’ve had me for two years, and now you’ve decided you’ve had enough. Is that what you’re saying?”

  He pulled on his trousers and zipped them up. He said, “Look. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it to sound that way. You know how I feel.” He stepped over and touched the side of her face with his hand. And then he was gone. Just like the last phone call.

  Goodbye?

  37

  In words it went l
ike this: he was slipping away. Interpreted visually it was the view of him lifting himself from the bed, stepping out of her reach. There was something emblematic in the way he presented his back to her. Once, early on in their affair, Amelie had dreamed that she had reached out to touch Ben and her hand went right through him, and when she woke, it was with a laugh, for the dream was like something out of a textbook, something to make the Freudians put down their cigars and rub their hands in glee. Amelie sensed that if things didn’t change, the affair would inevitably move into entropy: they would begin to sicken of each other, their words turning to ominous silence. It was a rootless thing, devoid of commitment, forever teetering on the edge.

  And where would that leave her?

  On Sunday she had been invited to an early dinner party in the city, hosted by a couple she had known since Nina was a baby. She knew there would be a few single men there, successful men, perhaps attractive and intelligent men, men who featured in magazine articles about “The Hundred Most Eligible Bachelors with Ivy League Degrees,” and she wondered for the first time in two years whether what she should be doing was dating. Men with whom she could enjoy an evening, without sex, with whom conversation would be stimulation enough. Who knows? She might learn to get a little distance between herself and Ben, and maybe this is what he needed, even what she required.

  Because if she looked at him objectively, Ben was rather ordinary in his appearance. He was pleasing, not striking. He was certainly not eligible. And he was intelligent but not particularly droll. Often she would say something to amuse him and he would stare blankly at her. She stopped this line of thinking immediately, for by the end of the hour she would have come to despise the ugly witless gnome that her lover had become in her estimation.

  She had only dated three or four times since the divorce, and Ben hadn’t protested. She once said to him, “I think I need to do this,” and he agreed, unhelpfully saying she had to do whatever she felt comfortable doing. “At least for the sake of appearances. Otherwise…” and she let him figure it out.

  “Do you like these men?”

  “They’re not you.”

  And he smiled and put his arms around her.

  “The difference is that I love you.”

  “Do you go to bed with them?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “I go to bed with you.”

  There had been Stuart, who took her to a restaurant where the waiters were dressed like football referees and where mounted televisions on every wall broadcast nonstop sporting events, and who, when she tried to talk to him, continued to speak to a point just above her head. Over his sixteen-ounce sirloin he suddenly threw his hands in the air and shouted Score!

  There was Larry, who took her to a comedy nightclub in the city, where the star of the show was a loud woman who told jokes about fat men suffering from impotence. Amelie remembered the allegedly funny lady saying “Did you ever have a man fart in bed?” and she turned to Larry and whispered “I can’t stand this any longer, I want to go home,” and she stared at this man with whom she had spent the evening, for he was in tearful convulsions of hilarity.

  Early on there was Eric, who took her to dinner at the most expensive restaurant in the city and afterward to a play starring Frank Langella, and she realized that she rather liked Eric, that although he wasn’t stunningly gorgeous, he was intelligent and graced with a sense of humor, as well as breath that reeked of an open sewer.

  There was Gerry, who was a friend of Patrick and Susie Gartner, and who was in advertising and drove a red Porsche, and with whom she had civilized and amusing conversation over the phone, but of course he had simply never bothered to pick her up at the agreed time. Neither did he call. Nor apologize. Nor anything.

  38

  Amelie was at her computer. Remembering sitting in the optometrist’s chair in the darkness, she had begun to type:

  Tell me something that you can’t take back, she thought as she tried to read her doctor’s expression. Tell me something that will change this day, the night to come, and all the days thereafter.

  And then, as though something about that passage had frightened her, she deleted it, one reluctant letter at a time.

  And then restored it.

  She seemed to come out of nowhere, this woman on the verge of tragedy. As though with these words Amelie were clearing a path into unknown territory, and even that small step, a paragraph begging for context, a character demanding a name, made her uneasy. This wasn’t her usual fare; this was dark, ominous even, and to develop it meant she would break out of her shell; she would write herself into a whole new life, that of this unknown character. She just needed to find her way into it. And then find her way to the ending.

  The phone rang just as she shut her laptop. .

  “I’ve got a problem,” Ben said. It was the day before he was due to fly to Illinois.

  Amelie felt the blood drain from her face. “What’s wrong, what’s happened?” Her imagination began to blossom, and all the words of catastrophe—disease, death, deception—started to pass through her mind, because not once had he ever started a conversation with her that way.

  “I really hate to bother you like this.”

  “Just tell me.”

  “Janet’s meeting is running late, and I need someone to pick up Andrew from school and bring him to his piano lesson. I’m at the office going a little nuts preparing for the trip tomorrow.”

  Oh. That was it, then, fetch the boy at school. She let the silence sink in.

  “When are we getting together?” she said with as little enthusiasm as she could manage.

  “Next Friday, probably.”

  Probably: one of the great loaded words of the English vocabulary. Yes, I’ll marry you. Probably. Yes, I’ll call you. Probably. Yes, I want to see you again. Probably.

  “You’ve done it for me before,” he said. “Remember how you’d sometimes give Rachel a lift home?”

  “But this is Andrew,” and she didn’t know why she said it, why there was something problematic in taking Ben’s son from point A to point B, why he was any different from his sister. Somewhere in the crevices of the equation, in the esoteric angles of its logic, lay some further problem, something unclear that might get in the way, throw off the calculation, skew the result.

  She opened her laptop and looked again at what she had written. Tell me something that will change this day, the night to come, and all the days thereafter.

  “Forget it,” he said, not sounding the least bit disappointed. “You’re working. I shouldn’t have bothered you.”

  “I just need to get into this book.”

  “You’re right. Let me try someone else.”

  She thought of Andrew, how he seemed like an early draft of his father, a short story that one day would become a novel. Just giving him a lift would make her part of his life, and of course she really did need to get away from her work for a little while, she needed to get some perspective, she needed to take a ride, she continued to make excuses and talk herself into helping Ben. “Actually, I think I might be able to do it,” she said.

  “I’ll give Lindsey Baron’s mother a call. Lindsey’s in Andrew’s class, and they’re both out at the same time.”

  “But I’d like to do it. I’d be happy to do it for you. I want to do it, Ben.”

  “But your work.”

  “I don’t want you to call anyone else. I’m glad you thought of me.”

  “Just drop Andrew off at his piano lesson,” and he gave her the address. “I’ll call the school and have the message passed on that you’ll be picking him up. He’ll know to look for your car.”

  She considered it. She said, “And we’re definitely seeing each other next Friday?”

  “Absolutely,” he said.

  “If I don’t speak to you before then, have a good flight tomorrow.”

 
; On her way to pick up Andrew she listened to a news report on the radio about a plane crash in Ohio. All 172 passengers and crew had died in it. Investigators were picking over the wreckage, looking for the black box, finding body parts. She was sorry she had heard it, she was sorry for the people who died and for those who would be told the news, she was sorry she was in her car and finding her thoughts moving in all the wrong directions. In another day Ben would fly off to Illinois. He would board the plane and smile at the flight attendant, eat snacks and drink beer, and then she saw the engine burst into flames over Columbus and the plane tilt and then Ben would grip the armrests on his seat and people would be praying and screaming for god, and children would be crying Mommy, Mommy, and then it would hit and there would be a long moment of high-pitched pain and then Ben would become nothing more than a bloody mass of pulp and shattered bone, and alone in her car she let out a little cry and rubbed her brow with her hand.

  Because if his plane crashed there would be no Friday.

  39

  Through the winding back roads of New England, past the low stone walls of centuries-old farms, past the horses grazing in the luxury of their afternoon: it had been almost twelve months since she’d taken this drive, and it reminded her of all the years she had done this twice each day, how Nina had moved from car seat to back seat to front seat, and now Nina was capable of driving herself wherever she liked. It meant that Nina had grown up and Amelie was only growing older.

  It had begun with the glasses. Until then she had never really noticed much change. Certainly her skin had lost some of its firmness, and her body was no longer the trim, shapely figure she had lived with for so long, but with her eyes weakening she sensed that she had moved into some new phase of deterioration. Now she understood why Richard had married a younger woman and why he’d wanted another baby. Anything to stave it off, anything to take the mind off the process. What would happen next? Would it be menopause, deafness, arthritis, dementia? And aloud she said, “Enough,” and turned up the radio and hummed along with it a little, hmm-hm-hm-hmm. The moment she turned into the school’s driveway, people began waving at her. Here was where she’d see Ben each morning, here they had talked, they had exchanged looks, they had smiled and waved to each other. It was like wandering into a gallery in the museum of her life.