If She Were Dead

by J. P. Smith

  She knew now there was no way she could ever see Ben again, not after that conversation with Janet. Were she to continue seeing him, Janet would always be the elusive third person, physically invisible but psychically there, watching, listening, waiting. It would take Amelie a little time to get over the breakup, but of course she had felt it coming for months, she had sensed it in her heart but not inscribed it on her brain. It had been there in his hesitancies and gestures, in his lame explanations and pathetic excuses, the sad charade of a weak man.

  Good, she thought. It was over, and to hell with the bastard. Now she and Janet had something in common, the contempt for a despicable man who loved neither of them. She stepped into her house just as her cell chimed and she answered it and said, “Ben?”

  53

  “Who’s Ben?” Nina said.

  “I didn’t say ‘Ben.’ I said ‘But.’”

  “It sounded like Ben.”

  “I was talking to someone.”

  “You’re not alone?”

  Amelie looked around. “Laura is here. My friend Laura. She’s asked me to talk to her book group.”

  “Don’t forget to pick me up two weeks from Saturday.”

  “For what?”

  “For the end of school,” Nina said. “We have to leave the dorms then.”

  Amelie had forgotten her daughter was not going to be living at college for the rest of her life. “Have you called your father?”

  “He said that maybe you’d come down together.”

  “I’d rather come alone. How much stuff do you have?”

  “Too much for the Volvo.”

  “Fine. I’ll rent a U-Haul.”

  “You don’t need to, Daddy’s got his Durango.”

  She shrugged. “Fine. I’ll borrow his Durango, then.”

  “Why don’t I just ask him to get me?”

  “Fine,” said Amelie.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Everything’s fine.”

  “You don’t sound fine,” Nina said.

  “I’m just tired.”

  “I finished your book. It was weird.”

  “You always say that.”

  “Especially the sexy bits.”

  Amelie said, “I’m glad you read it, though.”

  “I liked it a lot.”

  “Especially the sexy bits.”

  “No, Mom. I was embarrassed.”

  “Don’t be. They weren’t written to make you uncomfortable.” She glanced out the window and saw a red BMW drive slowly by. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. She said, “Can I call you back?” and ran out and looked up and down the road and then went back for her keys.

  She drove up to the junction with the main road and looked both ways. She turned right and followed the road into the village until she came to the town where he worked. There was the Federal mansion where he and his partner had their office, she turned the corner and saw that his car wasn’t there.

  “Well,” she said.

  She wondered if she should drive to his house, and if his car wasn’t at his office and not at home, perhaps she should race back to her house and find it parked in front of her door. He would be inside, his fingers tapping impatiently on his knee as he sat waiting for her. She turned the wheel and merged with light traffic. She smiled and shook her head a little. So they had had an argument. People did it all the time. She and Richard were always arguing, and once he had even threatened divorce over her having forgotten to call the exterminator to deal with the squirrels in the attic, and once she had packed a bag and simply walked out on him. After a few hours had passed she returned and life went on as it had before. Until, of course, Richard stood up and walked out on her for good.

  But that was inevitable. Had he not left her, she would certainly have left him. She would have met Ben and they would have begun their affair, and then the day would have come when she would have to confront Richard. He would be stunned, he would cry and drink too much and he would hire a therapist, he would go on Prozac and submit to electroshock, but she would speak of her love, her true love, of how absolutely authentic this love was, how in some cosmic New Age manner she and Ben had been made for each other, and Richard would go and live in a cheap motel up by the Hawg’s Breath Saloon out in the boondocks. He would gain weight and grow an unkempt beard and start to neglect his physical hygiene. He would begin to frequent adult movie theaters. He would hang out at tattoo parlors and biker shops, and make friends with guys named Al and Wes. He might join a militia with all the other lonely hearts. He would take to wearing fatigues and combat boots, he would become an aficionado of the backwoods, he would get a crossbow and go out and hunt young animals, and then skin and eat them with his bare hands, and while he waited for the North Koreans to invade New England she would be with Ben: traveling through Italy, or spending a dirty Manhattan weekend at the Pierre, or looking for a vacation home on the Vineyard.

  But Richard had married and was about to become a father for the second time. The woman he had married had one thing going for her: she believed in Richard. And Amelie had no one. And Ben’s car wasn’t there. She turned the corner and began to drive home, she pressed her foot to the accelerator, she gained speed, she made it in record time, she pulled into her driveway.

  There was no Ben; no Janet. Just her. And the person in the mirror everyone knew as the author Amelie Ferrar. Poised. Pretty. Utterly professional.

  Part of her knew precisely what would happen. Not the actual events, not the day-to-day progression of her life, but the general sweep of things. Eventually the heat and cry of the moment would pass. As the tide carries debris from a past calamity at sea to some distant shore, something residual might surface, and in the detachment and serenity of the future, a time when other opportunities and other people would have slotted into place, she would examine this remnant—this fragment of pain, this pearl that had formed in her heart, something hard and spherical that would reflect the sky-blue memory of her eyes—and set it aside as nothing more than a curiosity, of no interest to her whatsoever.

  She had written about these things before. Her first novel was about the end of an affair and the vicissitudes of memory, and now that she was living it, now that she was inhabiting a plot she’d already imagined, she knew that she would never write about it again. She wasn’t even sure she would be able to love again, as though everything in her heart had been spent, leaving nothing within her but this vast, uninhabitable desert where nothing could flourish.

  This is what it would be like for her: servant to a dream, plaything of the insubstantial, a chaser of illusions. She took her bag, the gun lying heavily within it, and walked with resignation into her house.

  Part Five

  54

  When Amelie woke on Friday the sky was dark and rain fell from it, rain without end. She rose and showered and had breakfast and sat down to work. With Ben’s absence, with her hopes and wishes having withered, she felt as if someone had spilled ink over her imagination: now she could write about the darker impulses in people: the homicidal shift in the most unassuming character; the scheming, leveling place in the heart that might explode at any time.

  A woman sits on an examining table at her doctor’s office. He listens to her heart and lungs, and the regularity and depth of his breathing indicates he is evaluating things, moving toward a conclusion. She can smell the soap on his body and the shampoo in his hair; she can see the thought behind his eyes.

  It was as if she were examining him while he was assessing her state of being. She watched his pupils dilate as his hand nestled into the fold beneath her breast, gently pressing the cold disk of the stethoscope against her skin. With each step, she knew, the news would only get darker.

  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 chan
ge this day, the night to come, and all the days thereafter.

  And then life, Amelie added, can truly begin.

  When noon came she had completed a total of three satisfactory pages in a novel that would, she now knew, be about a woman who has little time to live, but who needs to even up the scores in her life. Coloring outside the lines, as her agent once cautioned her against doing. But the time had come for her to do exactly that.

  “Good,” she said quietly, as she closed her laptop. Good, she thought.

  She got into her car and drove into town to buy soup, because right now it was what she needed, some liquid comfort that wasn’t called vodka. Three blocks from her house on one of the country roads there were flashing lights ahead, and her wipers doing their intermittent sweep revealed at least three police cruisers, a fire engine, and an ambulance. A cop in the road, the same one who had stopped her when she was driving past Ben’s house, put up his hand. She came to a slow halt and slid down the window.

  “What’s happened?”

  He said, “Accident.” He tilted his head a little and looked at her. “I know you, don’t I?” It felt like a pickup line at a bar.

  I see you everywhere, she remembered Richard saying. And Ben. And now a stranger in a uniform.

  “I don’t think so,” Amelie said.

  “You look familiar.”

  “I’ve been told that before.”

  “We’re trying to reach next of kin to the deceased.”

  “Deceased.”

  He leaned back and scratched his head. His radio squawked. He said, “Driver didn’t make it.” Another cop, farther down, waved her on. “Okay, you can proceed.”

  She passed slowly by the wreck and a line of traffic flares. A silver Mercedes had veered off the road, apparently at a high rate of speed, because its front end was completely crushed against a large oak tree. Officers were pointing at the skid marks on the road, while others worked on extracting the body as EMTs stood by.

  Shaken by what she’d seen, Amelie drove even more cautiously than usual, especially as the rain had grown harder. Her phone chimed. Laura said, “So we thought we’d meet next Thursday at Jane Baron’s. That’ll give everyone a chance to read the book. Actually, everyone’s bought a copy. Books ’N Stuff in town ordered copies for all of us.”

  “Sorry, I’m just… I just saw a terrible accident. Someone was killed.”

  “Oh my god—you actually saw it happen?”

  “No, just…after. I’m a bit shaken by it. Anyway, go ahead.”

  “So I’m hoping you’ll definitely be able to join us.”

  “Yes. All right. I’ll do it.”

  “You don’t sound enthusiastic, Amelie.”

  “It’s just that I’ve done this sort of thing before.” Still disturbed by the scene she’d witnessed, she tried to put a smile on her words. “I’m not complaining, but you end up trapped in someone’s living room having to explain every little detail in your novel.”

  Is the fact that you named a character Oswald anything to do with the Kennedy assassination, is there any symbolism in the river overflowing its banks, how did you manage to write the sex scene without using the you-know-what word, do you have any inside Hollywood gossip, how much does your publisher pay you, is your agent willing to read a little something I’ve jotted down?

  “Oh no no,” Laura protested. “We don’t do that sort of thing. It’s just a discussion group. You know. Book chat and chardonnay.”

  Amelie considered it. It would be nice to get out with other women, it would be nice, now that she thought of it, to get out with anyone but men, and, more particularly, Ben. If she ever took the time to think of it, she’d realize that she’d made few friends since moving there twenty years ago. Her work kept her in isolation, and the little socializing she did was with other families from Nina’s old school. She didn’t have one close friend, no one to confide in or trust. She’d invested all in Ben. And now she had nothing. Except for Janet, of course. Her brand-new friend with a heart as dark as hers had become.

  “We usually open a few bottles of wine, and everyone brings a little something yummy to snack on,” Laura went on. “As you’re the guest of honor, you bring nothing but yourself. This time it’ll be something of an event as Janey’s husband was offered a position at Berkeley beginning in September and I guess after that someone else will have to provide the house.” She laughed and Amelie ignored her; she knew nothing about this Baron woman except what Andrew had told her, that she had a daughter who sucked.

  “Sounds great.”

  “And you can sign our books for us.”

  “I’d be happy to.”

  There was a pause. Laura said, “Everything else okay?”

  “Everything’s fine,” Amelie said, and then ten minutes later, after she parked in front of the shop where she always bought soup, she called Laura back. “I was just wondering what time you wanted me next Thursday.”

  “Sevenish, if that’s convenient.”

  “And one other thing. Why did you ask if everything was okay?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Because everything’s fine.”

  “That’s what you said.”

  “I mean, you sounded like you’d heard that something wasn’t fine.”

  “No, no,” said Laura, and Amelie very clearly heard the laughter in her voice. Now that it was all over, had Ben gone out and told the world about what had happened, did he describe Amelie as a woman unhinged? Was love really akin to insanity? But he wouldn’t do that, just as she would never speak of him. They had been joined in love, they had split in silence, and now he had not a moment in his life to spare for her. She was like a doll that wets or cries “Mama”: the Disposable Amelie. You can brush her hair, take off her little outfits, twist her limbs this way and that, and then, if you like, you can just toss her away. Bye-bye, Disposable Amelie.

  Because there’s always a bright new toy waiting on the shelf.

  She clicked off. The rain had gone from drizzle to downpour. Once inside the place, she ordered her soup and looked at who else was there, the odd familiar face without a name. Everyone looked solemn. She wondered if news had reached them about the accident, the victim someone they knew.

  She paid for her lunch and ran back to her car. Now everything in it smelled of wet dog, of wet dead dog, and she switched on the heat and turned on the radio and pulled onto the road. It was the time of day when everything falls quiet, when people are at work and children at school, when the solitary and homeless huddle for warmth beneath bridges, the time when Amelie felt most redundant. Now she lived like a vagrant, moving from errand to errand to sofa to books to four o’clock and eighty-proof vodka on the rocks. Now the hours lay before her not in terms of seven or eight of them, but the subdivisional hell of minutes and seconds, computable in the millionths, one after another.

  Everything fell still; time seemed to come to a halt. Her tires whispered on the wet roadway. She turned the corner, pulled into the gas station, and found herself behind the red BMW. On the rear window was a sticker for Andrew’s school and above it one for Rachel’s college. Ben waited while the attendant filled his tank. He looked in his rearview, looked away, then looked back.

  “Well,” she said quietly to herself as their eyes met, and something moved in her chest, something grew hard in her throat, she could feel her heart blasting against her rib cage, and for a moment she feared she might be having a stroke. She watched him get out and walk slowly toward her car. He opened the door and climbed in beside her.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi.”

  He laughed a little. “You look as wet as I am. How’ve you been?”

  She wondered whether she should tell him that she had been miserable and lonely and suicidal and unhappy and angry, or say that she’d been great, fabulous, happy, and satisfied thank
s to a long line of suitors who had been waiting for Ben to get the hell out of her world. She said, “I’ve been all right.” She thought of the gun in her bag. These days it went everywhere with her. The itch of a handy weapon: like the urge to self-gratification, it never failed to creep up on a person at the oddest of times.

  The attendant came to the passenger-side window, and Ben handed him his credit card before the guy stuck his nozzle into Amelie’s tank.

  Now she wanted to watch Ben squirm. “I might as well tell you that Janet is aware of us. Or at least of you. She knows you’re having an affair.”

  He just stared at her. “Are you serious?”

  “It’s why she wanted to have dinner with me. To see if I might have any ideas on how she could handle this.”

  He took a deep breath and said, “Did she say she knew who it was?”

  “Well, I assume she was talking about me.”

  He looked around and obviously saw nothing but rain. “But she’s having an affair, right?”

  Brad. Like a character who suddenly makes an entrance in one of her books and grows in importance once he’s allotted an identity, throwing the plot in a wholly unexpected direction. But Brad was still just a convenient placeholder in the life of Janet. And the life of Amelie.

  And, of course, Ben.

  “You haven’t asked her yet, have you? I didn’t think so. Too afraid to learn the truth that you’ve been betrayed as much as she has? I don’t know who to feel more sorry for, you or Janet, but right now the odds are really slithering away from you.”

  He took a moment as he stared through the windshield. “Who is this guy?”

  “Brad? He’s with MIT. Runs one of the big labs there. The kind of man someone like Janet would go for.”

  He seemed in shock. “How long—”