If She Were Dead

by J. P. Smith

  She shook her head: amazing why she had stayed with him for so long.

  And then there was his body. Of course it was eminently clear now that in fact he really wasn’t very good-looking. His backside was a little shapeless, pear-like and soft. His chest was too furry. His feet sometimes smelled.

  As a lover he was unexceptional. His hands were always cool and moist, and they didn’t always feel very good against her skin. He was quick while she preferred the long languor of an afternoon, the gentle curve of foreplay that led to the roar of climax.

  God, she thought, what a fool I was.

  She sat up on the side of the bed and looked at her phone. He had walked out and had not even taken the trouble to call her, to attempt to come to an understanding, even to say that his years with her had been wonderful and that he would never forget her. He had simply left.

  Actually it was better this way, not having to wait for Ben, to anticipate Ben, to suffer from Ben withdrawal. Now she was Benless, Janet could keep him, and the feeling stood somewhere between a kind of barren emptiness and the sweet iciness of relief. Fridays could now be Amelie’s alone. She could have lunch with a friend or drive into the city; she could shop for clothes or make herself available for more readings and interviews.

  She could take three-day weekends and, when she was away, not have to think of him. Maybe she would simply move. She could put the house up for sale and go elsewhere, perhaps to a nice apartment in Manhattan, or even out of the country if she liked. She could live in London and go to the theater whenever she wished, she could go to the Tate Modern and look at the paintings, she could travel to the Continent on the Eurostar on a moment’s notice. She could move to Paris and exercise her ability to speak French, just like she’d learned at Mount Holyoke. She could move to Africa, for god’s sake, she could move to Siberia or Fiji or a miner’s shack in Death Valley, as long as she didn’t have to think of him or run into him or catch a glimpse of him. She could even drive for three hours and throw herself off a bridge.

  She wondered if he would look for her. He would drive past her house and see the For Sale sign and wonder where she was going. He would Google her and find nothing, because she would strip herself of social media. He would search obituary databases and the website that told you where people were buried, and come up short. She would have moved or died; she would have vanished. And then his eyes would turn inward: what had he done to make this happen? Why couldn’t he have made it work, for both of them?

  In a novel he’d hire a private detective to scour the world and look for her in sweatshops in Singapore and tiki bars in Polynesia; in Russian brothels and Italian convents; in fast-food restaurants in all the fifty states, in her little uniform and cap, Would you like me to supersize that, sir?

  But that wouldn’t happen. He would get on with his life, make eyes at other women, and, because someone would be there to replace Amelie, come home unfaithfully to Janet, who of course was seeing a fiction named Brad. Which meant that Amelie had just granted Janet a kind of subtle superpower.

  He thinks she’s having an affair, and so he’ll do everything he can to keep her. Without his wife having to do a thing to salvage her marriage.

  Which led her to one simple conclusion: Janet, as nice as she was, as professional and sincere and intelligent as Amelie now knew her to be—Janet was the problem. Sooner or later Janet would discover exactly who the mysterious woman was in her husband’s life.

  Or maybe she already knew. And then she would do something about it.

  There was only one thing Amelie could do, only one final and decisive way of getting back at him. She wondered how she would do it, what would be the best way, and how they would find her body, and now she would have to sit down and compose an email and put it through a few drafts until it was perfect. Maliciously she thought of cc’ing Janet. And why not Rachel? Even Andrew, while she was at it.

  Dear Ben, It has come to this because I

  Dear Ben, Now you and everyone else knows how much I loved you and

  Dear Ben, To say goodbye would have asked very little of you. So now it’s time for me to say it.

  She went to her office and picked up the phone and, keying in his office number, told the secretary that she wanted to speak to Ben.

  “Who’s calling, please?”

  She thought for a moment. “Amelie Ferrar.”

  “One moment, please.”

  There was a pause. She could feel it happening within her, she could feel the press of desire. “He’s not able to come to the phone right now,” the woman said, and Amelie could not believe her ears.

  “Would you ask him to call me back, please?” She gave the woman her number. She said, “Tell him it’s an emergency.”

  47

  Strangers on a train, they met by chance. She was on her usual commute into the city, and at the stop after hers he entered the car and took a seat across from her. He looked out the window as the suburban world slid by him in a monotonous blur.

  Normally, she worked during this time of travel, tapping out emails on her laptop, or reviewing financial documents and memos, but today she was reading a book, one by an author she had come to know a little. She found it thoughtful and perceptive and well written, with imagery that made her stop and read certain lines over again.

  Suddenly he said, “It’s good, isn’t it.”

  “Sorry?”

  “The book. It’s good.”

  “Oh, it’s very good. I’ve met her,” and she turned the book over to reveal the author’s photo, filling up the back in vibrant color. “She’s interesting.”

  “I’ve met her, too,” and he smiled. He extended a hand. “Brad.”

  She took it, held it for a second, then released it. “Janet.”

  He went back to scrolling through messages on his phone, as she returned to her reading. Once or twice she glanced up at him, and each time he was looking at her with the same smile as before. As though embarrassed to be caught, he would quickly turn away. At first it disturbed her a little, being looked at in that way; but she was nonetheless flattered. Her husband hadn’t been all that attentive lately, and to have a man actually show interest in her, now that she was nearly forty, was both a novelty and extremely pleasing.

  She said, “Do you work in Boston?” and he said he did, he was head of a research lab at MIT. She asked which one, and when he told her, she dug out one of her cards and handed it to him.

  “I know this company,” he said, his eyebrows lifting. “It’s a good place. You do your due diligence there.”

  They discovered they lived one town away from each other. He said, “I’d love to talk to you more at length, but…” His eyes went to her left hand and the ring finger, appropriately encircled in gold, nestled beside a diamond engagement ring.

  “Actually, I’m in the process of planning to kill my husband’s mistress before she kills me,” she said. “Would you like to help?”

  48

  She had heard from more than one source that when you cut your wrists you should immerse yourself in a tub full of very hot water. That way you felt no pain, and an hour later, in the glow of all the candles you’d carefully placed around the room, it would be over. The heat of the water would make you drowsy, especially if you’d downed three vodkas and most of a bottle of a nine-dollar pinot noir. You would drift in and out of unconsciousness, floating through layers of dream, and death would come as it had to the ancients, slowly and voluptuously, as though it were a long journey into a pleasant land of Lethe and lotus. She stood by the sink and looked at the razor she used on her legs, at the little cartridge with its slender edge of death. She dried her hair and went into her bedroom and dressed in jeans and a Wellesley T-shirt she’d bought when Nina first started college. Now an hour had passed.

  Amelie picked up the phone and tried his office once again. The woman said, “As I said
earlier, he’s in a conference.”

  She hadn’t said anything of the sort; a conference had never reared its ugly lying head.

  “I’ll try again later,” and Amelie quietly replaced the receiver. She looked at her watch. What was later, what defined that moment, what was a reasonable amount of time that was required to pass? Eventually his secretary would come to recognize her voice; there would be the raised eyebrow, the hooded whispers behind his back, the glances out the window as he drove off to get his perfectly innocent smoked turkey sandwich at the local deli.

  She looked at her watch again: now another minute had passed. She imagined how he must have looked when his secretary once again came in to tell him that the madwoman Ferrar had called for a second time. She reached for the phone and suddenly it chimed, Yes? she said, a little too loudly.

  “I got your message.”

  It took her a moment to catch her breath. “I think we need to talk.”

  “What emergency?”

  “I thought I might have to go to the hospital.”

  “And did you?”

  “Why don’t you ask what happened?”

  “Okay. So what happened?”

  “I think I’m hemorrhaging.”

  He said nothing.

  “There’s blood everywhere.”

  She detected a sigh.

  “Call an ambulance, Amelie.”

  “It’s fine. I’ll live.”

  “I need to go.”

  “We need to talk.”

  “I thought we already had talked.”

  “Look, Ben, couldn’t you at least have called me back from a place where your partner isn’t listening?”

  “I’m calling you from the car.”

  “Then kindly stop talking to me as if I were a damned roofing contractor. I think I need to have a few points cleared up.”

  “You kicked me out of your house.”

  “I asked you to leave, Ben.”

  “You told me to get out.”

  “I never used those words.”

  “And that…thing about you and Janet. I don’t know if I can really believe you.”

  “Like I said, Janet and I have talked and we get along quite well. I’ve sort of become her confidant.”

  She heard the silence of a man considering things.

  “I think it’s important that you understand how I feel,” she said. “At least try, Ben, try to see it from my point of view.”

  “I never once said I’d marry you.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Look,” and she could hear the anger now, she could sense the edge, “what do you want from me, Amelie, what do you want me to say, what do you want me to do? I’m not going to leave Janet, I’m not going to destroy my family.”

  She said, “Even if it would make you happy?”

  “I’m happy enough as it is,” he said.

  For a moment she was distracted; idling on the road at the end of her driveway, almost blocking it, was a black Audi.

  “What?”

  “I said, I’m happy enough, thanks.”

  “And without me on Fridays?”

  “I’ll manage.”

  “You’ll manage.” She waited. “You’ll manage, then, right?” She waited. “Ben? Ben…?”

  He had clicked off ten seconds earlier.

  49

  Amelie thought the driver had just stopped to check a cell phone or send a text, and waited until the car left before getting into her Volvo and pulling onto the road. She wasn’t going anywhere in particular; she just needed to get out of the house, to get away from what was starting to feel like a suffocating hall of memories. The painful ones were hard to bear; the pleasant ones even harder.

  She drove past houses without really seeing them, groves of trees and open fields, a firehouse, a day-care center, a church. Familiar landmarks, and no matter where she looked, everything seemed to carry a memory, as though these inanimate objects and structures and geographical features contained something of her, and him, and of them. Two years of her life scattered across a few square miles like jacks thrown by a child.

  Reaching the end of the road, she headed into town. Which is when the Audi reappeared, four or five car lengths behind her, intermittently glimpsed in her rearview mirror. She turned right and increased her speed, hoping that cop wasn’t anywhere near, the Audi following at a distance. Now it was just the two of them, until Amelie made an abrupt left turn toward the road leading to Nina’s old school, and the other car disappeared. It was nothing, she knew. The day had been difficult enough without her turning an innocent traffic situation into the beginning of a horror movie.

  She turned on the radio, found a station that wasn’t broadcasting the hourly misery, and listened to some music. It wasn’t the kind of music she particularly liked, but it was something new and different, and right now new and different was exactly what she needed. A fresh start: Yes, she thought, though she knew she sounded like a character from that novel with that annoying Holly in it. A fresh start: she was well aware that was all an illusion, the product of wishful thinking, the sad optimistic fictions we all invent to make us feel momentarily better.

  And yet, oddly, she did feel better. Somehow more transparent, though that wasn’t quite the word she wanted, yet even as she drove under the slate-gray sky and listened to the music she sensed everything was about to change. Ben was out of her life, and in a perverse way it seemed to set her free. No more waiting for his calls, his texts or emails; no more thinking about him. The gaps in her life, small and big, would be filled with other things, new people, fresh experiences.

  She pulled into the parking lot of the local overpriced liquor mart, a reasonable place to start her new life, and picked up a giant-size Ketel One vodka and a few bottles of wine, put them in the back and drove home. That would do for now. She would go home and return to the woman in the doctor’s office. She would give her a name, a story, an age, all her hopes dashed by a simple declarative sentence uttered by this physician sitting before her.

  She crested the little rise as she drove up her driveway. Parked in front of her house was the black Audi. Leaning against it was the driver, her arms folded before her.

  50

  “Janet,” Amelie said, and she was so out of breath, so shocked by this turn of events, that Janet must have felt she was thrilled beyond words to be seeing her.

  Amelie waited for the smile, and there it was, the same honest, open smile she remembered from their dinner out.

  “Hello, Amelie.” Janet was calm and in control, looking like she wasn’t about to go anywhere. Amelie’s mind went in so many different directions that she sensed she wouldn’t be able to find a way out.

  “How did you get my address?”

  “Remember? Our kids went to the same school?” And she laughed.

  Right: the parents’ directory book, full of addresses and phone numbers and email addresses, too much information for the information age.

  “Is everything okay?” Amelie decided to leave the liquor in the car. Otherwise the grapevine would be working overtime tonight.

  “No. Everything is not okay. Hop in. We’re going for a drive.”

  “A drive,” Amelie said, as though the notion were wholly unknown to her.

  Janet opened the driver’s side door. “Come on. Let’s take some time to talk.”

  Amelie buckled her seat belt. Janet drove slowly down the driveway and turned right, driving just under the speed limit. She made a left and within half a mile they were in the country, on the road that led to the town dump, formally known as the James Winslow Memorial Recycling Center, though normally it stank of rotting overpriced vegetable matter and myriad bags of dog shit that had burst open.

  Janet began to increase her speed until she was barreling along the road leading to the great open vist
as of the treeless subdivisions and culs-de-sac that blandly defined the end of the town. Another mile, and you would end up in a whole other economic zone: old money, venerable names, acre upon acre of land held for three centuries by the same families in their more cash-starved generations.

  Until then Janet had said nothing, while Amelie felt herself shift into the same space in her mind when she would begin to get an idea for a novel; a place that, seemingly empty, apparently barren, was instead filled with a million invisible possibilities of what might happen to her before the hour was up.

  This is not happening, she tried to tell herself, and yet when she opened her eyes she saw that in fact it was taking place, a sequence unfurling before her eyes, the kind of narrative string that could only lead to something horrific. One sunny autumn morning, long after she’d been declared a missing person, someone would find her remains, hastily buried under bramble and scrub, a scarf tightly knotted around what remained of her throat, her fingernails thick with dirt, her nails chipped, her chest torn open by packs of coyotes, her eyes replaced by bundles of maggots burrowing their way into her brain. Just another episode of Unsolved Mysteries brought to its usual grisly conclusion.

  Quietly she said, “Where are we going, Janet?”

  “The long way around,” Janet said, turning to her with a smile. “I just wanted to talk to you, because I consider you a friend now, someone—really the only one—I’ve confided in about this, and I sense that you could be very helpful to me. Remember,” and easing to a stop at a crossroads, she turned to Amelie, “how I told you that Ben was so distant lately? Well, I’m now one hundred percent sure that he’s having an affair.”