If She Were Dead

by J. P. Smith

  “Has it been going on? I don’t know. But I think it’s been a while. He seems like a really decent guy.”

  “You’ve met him?”

  She smiled a little. “Did I say that?”

  She was discovering that messing with reality was almost as much fun as writing.

  He shook his head. “It won’t last.”

  “Is that a wish or a prophecy?”

  “Let her have her little fling. It’ll be over soon.”

  “So tell me honestly,” she said. “Have you ever mentioned me to her?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Not let anything slip out…?”

  He shook his head. He turned away and looked back out the window. In the closeness of the car, with the windows tightly shut and covered in a thin film of condensation, she could smell him, he was inches away from her, and she turned so that she wouldn’t have to see him, that she wouldn’t be tempted to touch him, that only words could be exchanged. She felt herself beginning to tremble, not inwardly, as characters in her books tended to do, but literally, her hands jigging in the air.

  “Look,” he said. “I’m sorry about what happened. Between us.”

  She let him go on.

  “And about how that all came out.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “About the way we argued like that. You know.”

  “So now you’re sorry,” she said. “For what, exactly?”

  “I just think it could have been done better.”

  “You might begin by explaining what you meant at the time.”

  “About,” he said, and she nodded, she looked at the mute face of the radio, she said, “Marriage.”

  “Just what I said. I can’t marry you.”

  “Listen.”

  “I just—”

  “Let me talk, Ben. We’ve been together for two years. We’ve been intimate in ways other people couldn’t imagine. We’ve done everything but take out a license and buy the rings. Do you really think it’s fair to Janet for you not to ask for a divorce? Especially now that she knows? I mean, how much longer do you want her to suffer?”

  “But it’s my family.”

  “That’s just a word.”

  “And you’re a writer. You know how important words are.”

  She also knew how easily they could be juggled in the air and bandied about and tossed to the wind, where all of their edge would be worn away and mutate into just another overpriced Hallmark card with its artless mush and sad drawings of flowers and cats.

  “At least Richard did the honest thing. It was hard on me, but he ended it and stopped the deception, and I’m glad he respected me in that way.”

  Now his hand was on his knee and she crossed her arms. She would not touch him, she would not look at him, she would be pure voice, words and sentences, questions and answers.

  “And I can’t understand how you can just end it like that. As if you couldn’t even say a proper goodbye. It means that everything we’ve done has no resonance for you.”

  “It was hard for me to do that,” he said. “It’s been hard for me since then. I’m not sleeping, and the other night I drank too much and Janet and I fought about nothing important and—”

  “If it was all so hard for you, why didn’t you call me, or come over and see me? We’re perfectly capable of having a civilized conversation without anything getting in the way.”

  “It’s just—”

  She waited.

  “It’s just that I didn’t think I could resist you,” and then she felt it, his hand on her thigh, and she fell.

  55

  She let the front door slam behind her and began undoing her jeans as she ran up the stairs ahead of him. This was not going to be the long anticipated screw-of-the-week; this was going to be the quick and soon-to-be-forgotten one, and when they got into bed, they moved with speed, the air filling with growling, hungry noises that came from something deep within them as they wrestled each other into position, and in less than a minute it was over, the best she’d ever had, ever, ever.

  And, just as quickly, it began to fade.

  They lay sprawled against each other, drifting in and out of sleep. Something within her said that she shouldn’t have done it, it was like the Just One More Cigarette of the person determined to quit, and yet she couldn’t resist him. And this thing that lay within began to rouse her, and without looking at him, without moving her sweaty body, without reaching down to touch his shoulder or his face or any other part of him, she said, “Why did you do this to me?”

  He made an inarticulate sound, and it seemed to her that he was no better than an animal.

  “Why did you do it? Why did you get into my car, why did you touch me, how can you do this?” The word corruption passed through her mind.

  “I couldn’t help it,” he said.

  “Then how can we go on living this way if every time we see each other we can’t keep our hands to ourselves?”

  “You need to have a life,” he said. “You need to be able to live the way you want, not always waiting for me.”

  “Do you really think I’m always waiting for you, Ben? I was pestering you at your office because I thought I deserved better than I got the other day. Otherwise I have a very full life. I write, I promote my books, I’m a mother, I have a mind, I have my imagination. What makes you think my life is spent in the devoted following of a priapic architect?” she said.

  “It’s really over, Amelie. I mean, it’s been fun and all, I’ve really enjoyed this, but I have a career to protect. Especially now.”

  She understood exactly what he was trying to say. No loose ends. She was nothing more than an inconvenient thread dangling from the hem of his professional life.

  “And you think, what, that I’m somehow hindering your advancement in the world of architecture?” she said.

  “You know what I mean. Stability.” And he shrugged.

  “So you never saw this as anything but a lighthearted little diversion?”

  “You had fun, didn’t you? Anyway, it’s time both of us moved on.”

  “Wait a moment—I don’t have anything to protect? Are you serious?”

  “Come on, Amelie,” he said, barely disguising the weariness in his response.

  “No. Please explain it, because all these words—these little prefab lines you’re coming out with—mean nothing to me. Because I always thought I meant something to you.”

  “You did. You do. I mean, we can still be friends, right?”

  She lay back and shook her head in exasperation. The ambiguous exit and a soft landing in the lush meadows of cheap cliché. As though she were expected to be grateful to him for the sentiment.

  She felt completely calm. “Did you also say all this to your first wife when you dumped her?”

  He looked stunned, as if someone had hit him hard in the back with one of Al’s two-for-one bullet specials. “What do you mean?”

  She sat up and held the sheet to her chest. “You got rid of wife number one when you met Janet. But you couldn’t leave Janet for me. Am I that second-rate? Or just too damned old and used-up for someone like you?”

  He shook his head. “Christ, she really is out of her mind.”

  “What, you’re saying there was no first wife? That she’s making this up?”

  He took a moment. “What else did she tell you?”

  “That’s between your wife and me, don’t you think?”

  He sat up on the side of the bed, his back to her. “All right, look—yes, I was married before I met Janet.”

  “And you were going to tell me this when—?”

  He shrugged. “At the right time, I suppose.”

  “At the altar?”

  Now he turned to look at her. “I’m not marrying you. You know, maybe if you
and I had met earlier things might’ve—”

  “But you still fell into bed with me. You knew exactly what you were doing, unless, of course, all these years your little one-eyed friend there has been taking you for a joyride down Happy Street. I always felt you were the perfect man for me. We fit together so well in so many ways, and now I’m seeing that all along I was just…an amusement for you. A trifle. You’ve been lying to me for two years. Two years when you earned my respect and love, and now this. So let’s get right down to it, Ben. Am I no longer good in bed—?”

  He said, “Of course not, you’re amazing.”

  “Have I grown ugly?”

  He sputtered and shook his head. “Don’t be ridiculous. You’re beautiful.”

  “Have you grown bored with me? Obviously not, because here we are. Do you honestly think this is just going to end because you want it to? We’re going to keep running into each other. At gas stations and supermarkets, and we’ll always end up back here. I know it, and you know it, and as much as I may want to resist it, I can’t. And neither can you.”

  Without a word he got off the bed and went into the bathroom. She heard him pee, and without washing his hands he came back, a naked detumescent man framed in the doorway. Now he was serious, he was dead calm.

  “That’s never going to happen, Amelie. We’re not going to see each other ever again. Because I’m not going to be here much longer.”

  She sat up and looked at him. “I don’t understand.” It was as though death had entered the room, shrouded and armed for slaughter.

  “This is how I wanted to do it. I wanted to be able to say it to your face. I wanted to walk away with a happy memory of you. Of us. Of…this,” and he gestured toward the bed, toward her.

  “Are you sick, is something wrong?”

  “We’re leaving, Janet and Andrew and I. We’re moving to California. I was offered a job there with a consortium of architects in San Francisco.”

  She could barely take it in. It was as though someone in authority had announced that the axis of the earth had shifted. The effects of it were inescapable: the ice age would be here in a matter of weeks.

  “We’re going to live in the city, or maybe in Berkeley. We’re putting the house on the market tomorrow morning. I start work the first week in September. We hope to be out there by June tenth to find a place to live and a school for Andrew. He just has to finish his school year here.”

  “That’s in three weeks. And you’re only telling me this now?”

  “Rachel’s spending the summer with us out there before she heads back to school.”

  Amelie looked around the room as though she had suddenly found herself in strange surroundings. “I don’t understand,” she said, and he must have been able to see it, the incomprehension in her eyes, her crooked, confused smile, her hands as they inarticulately played the air before her. She felt something disconnect inside her, as though everything she believed in and trusted had vanished.

  “But—when did this happen, Ben? Couldn’t you have warned me?”

  “I didn’t know about it until I was offered the position.”

  “But you must have applied for it, you must have brought yourself to their attention, people don’t just offer people jobs without meeting them.”

  “The person who arranged this for me was one of my professors at the university. He knows my work, he’d been following my career. I had lunch with him in LA. Things just…happened.” He smiled and she wanted to slap that smirk off the face of the earth.

  “And you couldn’t tell me that all this was in the works?”

  “It wasn’t easy,” he said.

  She sighed. There was no point in going on.

  “So you’re essentially leaving me for Janet.”

  “It’ll be best for everyone that way.”

  She watched as he began to dress, she saw his average-size penis flop behind the black cotton of his underpants, she watched him button his shirt. It would be the last time she would see him naked, the last time she would be with him.

  He was right: if only she had met him earlier. If only she had known him one day before he had first laid eyes on Janet. If only she had grown up next door to him, gone to school with him, attended college with him. If only she had been there at the beginning when they were both nine years old and holding hands on the porch swing. She could have shaped him into the man he should have become. Honorable. Decent. Loyal.

  She lay back in bed and pulled the covers up to her chin. She felt as she did when as a child she would become feverish and shaky, when only warmth and shut eyes and the ministrations of her mother could relieve her pain.

  Once Ben was dressed he stood over her bed. He said, “Well. I guess it’s time, Amelie.”

  He actually had the nerve to hold out his hand for a shake, and after staring at said appendage for ten seconds she closed her eyes. And he walked down the stairs and let himself out.

  Two years, she thought, and it was like a fast montage from a feature film, all the meals, the laughter, the flirting, the sex… And now the movie was over. There would be no sequel. The theater was dark. The audience was gone; the popcorn was going stale.

  Amelie in love slept alone.

  56

  According to the TV news at six, the accident was now being treated as suspicious. As there was evidence of two different sets of tire tracks, police had concluded that another vehicle had been involved. Sideswiped? Maybe. Deliberately forced off the road? Possibly. Witnesses were being asked to step forward. So far there was no one. “The vehicle,” the reporter said as she stood in front of the wreck as it was being hoisted and towed away, its roof peeled back like a tin can, “was registered to a local woman, Jane Baron.”

  Amelie’s hand went to her mouth. A week from now she was supposed to be meeting with a book group at the Baron woman’s home. Amelie hardly knew her: a face and wave from behind the wheel of a Mercedes in the school driveway.

  The air was heavy, laden with moisture and threat. She felt off-balance, as if in some deeply obscure way this death had caused a rent in the fabric of her own world. Her cell rang, she said, “Hello?” and there was a pause. She was about to end the call when—

  “Amelie?”

  She had no idea who this was.

  “It’s…Janet.”

  “Oh. Yes. Hi. Sorry.” She switched off the TV.

  “I just wanted to let you know… That thing we talked about—? Well, it’s been taken care of. Everything’s been solved. My husband and I are moving to San Francisco before the end of the summer.” The words came out as a simple fact, with no nuance or stress. The woman sounded distant, even dazed, as though she were communicating from the Siberian outpost of a dormant marriage.

  “Oh, that’s a surprise,” Amelie said brightly, hoping she gave the impression that this was news to her.

  “I know it’s kind of sudden, but Ben’s been offered a very attractive position I’ve encouraged him to take, and I’ll be running my business from our West Coast office in San Francisco.”

  “Well, congratulations, Janet. It all sounds very promising.”

  “I feel like our move will change everything. Both for him and for me. I know it sounds like a cliché, but it’ll give us both a fresh start. Something I think we really need right now, and it’ll put us on a new footing in our relationship. Especially as there won’t be any…distractions,” she added.

  Amelie was surprised to feel her eyes well with tears. Something about the call—about hearing it not from Ben but from his wife—struck her with even greater force. This was not some speculative planning on Ben’s part, not a bout of wishful thinking. Now it was real. Now it was final.

  “Amelie…? Everything okay?”

  “Yes, I’m just…” and she sat. “There’s one other thing. I just want to say that I’m sorry, Janet.”

&n
bsp; “But for what, Amelie?”

  “I mean, he’s probably told you everything, and I’m…just glad you’ve worked things out. I am. Really.” And a single tear fell from her left eye. “You deserve to be happy.”

  “You have nothing to apologize for, Amelie. Nothing at all.”

  Now it was Amelie’s turn to fall silent as she wiped the tear away. She had no idea why she’d said it. Maybe it was a matter of clearing the air of any bad feelings. But Janet wasn’t even considering Amelie’s apology for what it was. She was proving to be a far more decent person than her husband. Without even asking for forgiveness, Janet had just granted her exactly that.

  “I…I’m also sorry that you’re leaving. I’ve enjoyed getting to know you.”

  “And I feel likewise, Amelie. But you’ll still have a faithful reader three thousand miles away.” And she laughed a little. “I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to your next book. I have a feeling it’s going to be amazing.”

  Amelie wiped away a tear from her cheek. “Well, I hope that you’ll at least find it edifying.”

  “So I’m just tying up loose ends,” Janet went on. “Saying my goodbyes, dealing with unfinished business,” and she laughed a little. “And also just to say thank you for being a good listener. It’s helped me come to a number of decisions that I think will make things better in my life. And Ben’s.”

  Later, Amelie knew, she would have to parse what Janet said, seeking the subtext, possibly even finding herself in the spaces between the words.

  “Did you hear about the accident?” she asked Janet.

  There was another pause. The sky swelled with distant thunder. “Oh yes. It was very sad. I mean, what a horrible thing. Funny how things can change in the blink of an eye.”

  Amelie said, “Did you know the woman—the one who died in the accident?”

  “Janey Baron…? Well, yes,” and there was the hint of a smile in Janet’s voice. “I knew exactly who she was.”

  57

  Now it was morning. In the hours to come Ben would meet with a broker, and a sign would be mounted on a stake and driven into the heart of his front yard, For Sale Exclusive. There would be an open house on some future Sunday, and balloons would be tied to the sign and anyone who desired could traipse around Ben the architect’s house: a place of absence, of life abandoned, where something of him might linger, a breath taken, one last thought for Amelie Ferrar.