Pretend I'm Dead

by Jen Beagin

  Without a word he handed the camera back to her, and she noticed her hands were shaking. She mumbled an apology, but he was already walking away. He paused in the doorway and motioned for her to follow him.

  “Should I bring my things?” she asked.

  “No,” he said.

  She put her camera down and followed him toward the front door, panic scratching the back of her throat. Fired, she thought. Fired and . . . sued, possibly. Or just blackballed. She’d have to close up shop and search for other work. What else was she qualified to do? Nothing.

  He led her past the front door and down the hallway. Where was he taking her? What the fuck did he want?

  To humiliate her, maybe. She kept her head down and stared at his hairy calves as she followed him into the office.

  “Have a seat,” he said.

  She sat in the comfortable chair by the window, he in the chair behind his desk. Here we are in the principal’s office, she thought. He pulled a checkbook out of a drawer. His bathrobe fell open and she could see one of his pink nipples. She’d never pictured him naked before. Why was that? More important, why was she here? She imagined him removing his bathrobe and touching himself.

  Dear God, I’m sorry for calling you Bob. Please don’t—

  “Well, you said you were an artist,” he said, and chuckled.

  She shrugged.

  “Are you a painter as well?”

  She considered saying yes—he seemed to want to hear that—but he might know she was lying. The only painting she’d ever made was of Spoon, and she’d never finished it.

  “I sculpt occasionally,” she said, then instantly regretted it.

  “I know a lot of sculptors,” he said. “What’s your medium?”

  Fuck. What’s my medium, what’s my medium? “Clay,” she said. “And . . . marble.”

  “Marble and clay,” he repeated, and smiled.

  “Actually, just clay,” she said, and shook her head. “No marble.”

  “Well, you’re a talented photographer,” he said. “Seriously.”

  “Thanks.” She tapped her crooked tooth with her finger and wondered if he was mocking her. Several minutes seemed to tick by. He bit his lip and began writing her a check. He was going to fire her, after all. She imagined herself cleaning the whirlpool jets in the guest bath with a toothbrush and then she saw herself putting her cleaning bucket in the bed of the truck while trying not to cry.

  “Am I fired?” she asked.

  “No, no,” he said, and shook his head. “I just haven’t paid you in a while. What you’re doing is okay with me. I totally get it.”

  “You do?”

  He nodded. “We’re all dying, aren’t we? We all want to stop time. To make a mark. And also to make meaning out of the work we do. I imagine your job feels trivial a lot of the time.”

  “I’m twenty-four,” she said, for no reason.

  He nodded thoughtfully and handed her a check. The numbers were legible—he’d overpaid her by forty dollars—but his handwriting was straight-up chicken scratch. She folded the check and placed it in her apron pocket. He’s loaded, she thought. High on Dilaudid.

  “I’m sorry I barged in on you like that,” he said. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I’d just woken up and I was . . . confused. I forgot you were coming today.” He coughed into his fist and then stared at his hand for several seconds. “I’m, uh, sick! I mean, that’s why I’m home.” He looked at her face and took a deep breath. “The truth is, I’m a very sick man. I think you know that already. I mean, you’ve probably seen . . . signs.” He waved his hand, as if the signs were everywhere.

  She nodded. A very sick man indeed. No question about that.

  “But, I want to ask a favor of you, Mona.” He placed his hands on the desk. “I realize it’s hard to keep this kind of thing to yourself, but please don’t tell anyone. Especially my friends. Or anyone at all—it’s a small town.” He shook his head. “Anyway, believe me, it’ll all come out soon enough. I’m about to undergo more aggressive . . . treatment. But for now I want to protect Zoe.”

  Oh man, she thought. Oh man.

  “What do you say?” he said. “Can we keep each other’s secrets for a while?”

  She gazed at her hands folded in her lap. She had no real proof that he’d ever touched Zoe. If she went to the police it would be his word against hers, and her word meant nothing. He was a successful restaurateur and she was a cleaning lady, a nobody, a ghost. She didn’t even have a real business license. She wasn’t bonded or insured. And then there were the pictures. Jesus. People would be upset about that. She could be convicted of fraud, sent to jail—

  Assuming they were talking about the same thing. Could he be referring to his addiction? Could she come out and ask? Excuse me, but are you talking about drugs or incest—

  “Are you okay?” he asked, raising his eyebrows.

  “Sure, yeah,” she heard herself say. “I’m fine. I guess I’m just wondering—” She shook her head. “Never mind.”

  “Go ahead, Mona,” he said. “Please. Don’t be shy.”

  She was about to ask, Which secret am I keeping? But then he said, “Are you wondering what kind of cancer I have?”

  “Wait—what?”

  “Oh,” he said. “Shit.”

  Her clothes felt strangely heavy and she realized she was sweating. She touched the back of her neck—cold, damp—and then wiped her hand on her apron.

  “I assumed you knew. I mean—I thought—because you’re so thorough—” He shrugged. “I don’t know what I’m saying.”

  Cancer. Of course. It explained pretty much everything: the Dilaudid, the weed, the vomit she sometimes found near the toilet, the bloody Kleenex she often saw in the trash. Maybe even the weird-ass erotica. If you’re dying, you may as well jerk off to whatever the hell you want.

  I thought you were a pervert, she wanted to confide. A pill-popping pervert. Isn’t that funny? Ha ha.

  “Anyway, it’s stomach cancer,” he said. “In case you’re wondering. They caught it early, so I actually have a pretty good chance. Of beating it, I mean.”

  “Okay,” she said. “That’s good.”

  “So do we have a deal? Can we be quiet about this for a little while?”

  She nodded and tried to smile, and then they actually shook hands across the desk and she felt like she might throw up. He looked pretty nauseated, too.

  * * *

  SHE HAD YET TO LAY eyes on Zoe in person, but she was able to piece together her weekends with Henry. She knew what movies they watched, what they read, what they ate. In Zoe’s wastebasket she found drafts of a book report on Of Mice and Men, a geography report on the state of Louisiana, and a history report on the Pueblo Indians. In Henry’s trash, empty bottles of Maalox and cigarette butts. She hadn’t seen Henry since that day, six weeks ago now, but judging from the amount of hair loss—she found loose strands on his pillow, in the shower, all over the sinks—he’d started chemotherapy.

  He also seemed to be engaging in retail therapy. Like most rich people she’d worked for, he was careless with receipts. He left them in shopping bags strewn all over the house. She collected the receipts each week and placed them in a neat pile on his office desk. A week later she’d find them in the garbage.

  One day she saw a few shopping bags she didn’t recognize. After examining the receipts, she discovered they’d spent the weekend in San Francisco. He’d bought himself and Zoe leather jackets, an assortment of hats, and designer jeans. Then she found a receipt from a lingerie store totaling $352. So he had a girlfriend, she thought. A girlfriend he showered with expensive lingerie. And here she thought she’d been overcharging him.

  She wondered what Zoe’s leather jacket looked like. It was black, no doubt. She wandered into Zoe’s room and took a look in her closet. Typical train wreck, but nothing new. She must have carted all the booty to her mother’s. In fact, she was probably at school right now, showing it off to her friends. Well, good for
her.

  On her way out of the room she noticed a pair of panties—midnight-blue silk with black lace trim—crumpled up on top of the bureau, and the scales fell from her eyes. This guy didn’t have a girlfriend. Zoe was his fucking girlfriend. She opened the top drawer of the bureau. There, on top of Zoe’s cotton briefs and socks, lay a neat pile of undergarments with the tags still on: several pairs of black French knickers, $50 each; three baby doll nightgowns, $75 each; two $60 black lace bras; several pairs of crepe briefs, $30 each.

  She stared at the tags, dumbfounded. The poor girl’s boobs were still growing, for chrissakes. She’d probably just sprouted pubic hair two weeks ago. Picking up the underwear on top of the bureau, she took a tentative sniff, then chastised herself: you’ve masturbated in a client’s house—on his bed, no less, to his incest erotica—and now you’re sniffing his daughter’s panties. You got problems.

  But this was worth investigating, she reminded herself. Perhaps he was in the process of seducing her and hadn’t touched her yet. I’ll save you years of self-mutilation, Zoe, and psychotherapy, and antidepressants, and bad sex with strangers.

  Starting in Henry’s closet, she frisked his coat pockets. Nothing but Blistex, a bottle of Visine, a few nickels. She picked up each of his shoes and shook them. Nothing there, either. She was surprised and disappointed—as a kid she’d ransacked her parents’ closet on a regular basis, hunting for quarters to buy candy with, and had found all manner of disturbing items. She remembered the photograph she’d come across in one of Mickey’s jackets, a blurry close-up of two people fucking. Her parents, presumably, but who could tell. Well, they could, obviously, but she wasn’t about to ask them. On second thought, it may have been her father and Heather, their cleaning lady. She didn’t remember much about Heather, only that she was thin and blonde and nervous looking, but her father’s alleged affair with her had been one of the final straws for her mother. That and the broken nose he’d given her when she confronted him about it. In any case, the irony wasn’t lost on Mona. Her father boned the cleaning lady and now, thirteen years later, she was cleaning houses and sticking her nose where it didn’t belong. She had yet to have sex with a client, but at the rate she was going—ah, what was this, hidden behind a sleeping bag on the top shelf? A small leather toiletry bag. She wrestled it out and placed it on the bed. Inside were ten or so empty prescription bottles. She examined the labels. More Dilaudid, more Percs, all prescribed to Henry.

  She replaced the toiletry bag and moved to his office—nothing incriminating in his desk drawers, just a bunch of papers and office supplies along with a big bag of weed and a hand-blown pipe. Then, hidden under a stack of phone bills in his filing cabinet, she found a handwritten letter on bone-colored paper.

  Dear Zoe,

  By the time you read this you’ll understand why I cherished our time together so much. You’ll also understand how special our bond is. What we have is very unique—I think you know that. It’s so hard to be away from you, especially with the likelihood that in a few years we won’t have this time together. I love you so much. You are, and always will be, the greatest thing that ever happened to me. It’s been difficult for me to see you only on weekends and holidays. I hope I’m well enough to take you to Wyoming again this summer. The time we spent there last year was the happiest of my life. I taught you how to ride a horse, shoot a rifle, and make pie crust. You became a woman on that trip and although I was unprepared, I like to think I rose to the occasion. I know you’re probably still embarrassed about the whole thing, but I think it was very special and I’m glad I was there. When I’m gone you might miss what we

  * * *

  THE LETTER ENDED THERE. SHE pictured herself confronting him at his restaurant, in front of his employees. “I found your little love letter, kid fucker!”

  If only she had the balls. If anything, she’d consider leaving it in plain view on the kitchen counter—no, on his pillow.

  Maybe she’d simply write a letter of her own: Dear Henry, I regret to inform you that I can no longer clean your house. I think you know why. Good luck with your cancer.

  In the end, however, she did none of these things. She replaced the letter and finished cleaning the house as if nothing had happened.

  At home that night she watched television for a solid three hours. At ten o’clock, flipping through the free-movie channels, she came across the opening credits of Raging Bull. She watched De Niro, alone in the ring and wearing a hooded leopard-print robe, box in slow motion to weepy Italian opera music. Mickey would have been in tears already. Maybe he wasn’t such a bad guy. So he was a drunk—so what. So he’d spent most of her childhood in a blackout—well, who could blame him, really, after losing an arm. So he’d taken a few pictures of her naked and showed them to his friends—big whup. It wasn’t like they were beaver shots, for chrissakes. They were black and white and, as far as she remembered, fairly tasteful.

  At any rate, she’d certainly had it better than Zoe, hadn’t she? He’d done the best he could, given the circumstances. She pictured him trying to play tennis—there had been a brief phase where he’d tried to become a jock—and felt a sudden wave of affection for him. She picked up the phone.

  “I was just thinking about you,” he said, as if they’d just spoken yesterday.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  There was a long silence.

  “Well? What were you thinking?”

  “Two things I remember about you as a baby,” he said. “You hated to walk on grass, and you always had to be sucking on something—you used to suck on my stump.”

  “Gross,” she said.

  “Oh stop,” he said, and laughed. “It was adorable. Remember that game we used to play in the pool?”

  “No,” she lied.

  He seemed excited that she didn’t remember. “Your grandparents’ pool.”

  “Okay.”

  “You were such a funny kid,” he said, clearing his throat. “You made up this game where you’d pretend to be drowning. Remember?”

  “Vaguely,” she said. Part of her was curious to hear what new details he’d make up and which ones he’d leave out. But the other, larger part of her wanted to hear the story because she liked hearing about herself in the past. It was like hearing about some other person.

  “You’d splash around and make a big scene, then you’d float facedown and wait for me to jump in and save you. So I would, of course. But you were so dramatic! And you could hold your breath forever.” He paused and she waited for him to continue. “I think you liked all that attention,” he said finally.

  She bristled at the word “attention.” She remembered the game, but she’d never thought of it that way before. She’d called it Pretend I’m Dead, and had always played it more for his benefit than her own, as it had given him a chance to outdo himself. He’d only agreed to play when they had an audience. She’d float facedown, he’d dive into the pool, swim noisily over to her, then drag her by the arm to the pool’s stairs. Sometimes he lifted her out of the pool altogether and carried her to the lawn. She thought they were both exceptional—he at pretending to be frantic, she at pretending to be dead.

  But she was surprised he remembered it at all. His memory had always been faulty, to say the least. One of her duties as a child, in addition to cutting his steak, ironing his shirts, and tying his shoes, was to fetch his nose spray, which he always seemed to misplace. The nose spray he used in conjunction with the “Chinese brain powder” he snorted on a regular basis, which he claimed “helped with his memory.” After he was sufficiently coked up, he’d regale her with stories from his childhood for several hours. As she got older, the stories turned into painfully long lectures on the dangers of drug and alcohol abuse.

  Maybe he was back on the blow. In any case, it was infuriating that he’d been misremembering the game all these years.

  “Well, just for the record, that’s not why I played that game with you,” she said. �
��I did it so you’d feel like a good dad for a few minutes. And it’s you who likes attention, not me.”

  “You should have been an actress,” he said, ignoring her.

  “What—you think that’s going to work on me? I’m not a kid anymore.”

  He sniffed. “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-four.”

  “Still a baby,” he said, and sniffed again. He was either wired, or else on the verge of tears. She decided on the former.

  “You’re the baby,” she said.

  “Hang on a sec.” He put down the phone and blew his nose. “God, you have a mean bone,” he said afterward. “That’s why I never call, you know. You seem to think I was a lousy father or something. Your mother put all these crazy ideas in your head, and you’ve been carrying them around for years. You should see a therapist or something.”

  She laughed. “This is me after therapy. Five years. It’s you who needs therapy.”

  “Well, five years wasn’t enough,” he said. She could tell by his voice that he really believed what he was saying.

  “You’re in denial, ” she said. “It’s really common among addicts. I learned that in therapy.”

  “Turn down your TV. You’re shouting.”

  “Listen, this isn’t why I called,” she said. Why did she call?

  “I need a wife,” he said. “Not therapy.”

  “Where’s Tom?”

  “Tommy’s living like a king in Mexico.”

  “New Mexico?”

  “Old Mexico,” he said. “He moved down there a few years ago. Has a maid, a cook, lots of girlfriends. But I haven’t heard from him in over a year. I think he might be dead.”

  “Maybe he’s just avoiding you,” she said.

  “Nah,” he said. “We’re like brothers. We share everything, even women. You know, he and your mother had a—”

  “Wait!” Mona shouted.

  “What?”

  “I don’t want to hear about it,” she said quietly. “I just wanted to tell you that your favorite movie’s on ENCORE right now.” She hung up, resolved to never call him again, and returned to Raging Bull. She stared at the screen and let her eyes go out of focus. Cry, she ordered herself. Let it out.