As Good as Dead (10 page)

He read off the gallons used and the total fee. The amount was bad enough that I had to say, “I’ll be more careful.” Then, brightening my voice—feeling queasy over the wasted water and the bill and the tension and the playacting required for what I needed to say next—I added, “But, hey, something kind of amazing happened today. Esmé Cole—my roommate back on Burlington Street?—she just found out we live in Tucson. She came by to invite us to dinner. Not that you have to go—since I didn’t ask you if you’d want to—but I felt like I had to say yes.”

Slowly, Will took off his glasses and set them on the table. He began to rub his eyelids—always surprisingly pale because of his heavy brow—with the tips of his long, fine fingers.

“And why’s that, Charlotte?” he asked.

I had planned an answer of sorts, something about my feeling pity for Esmé.
She didn’t even look like the same person, Will.
Pity was an honorable emotion in Will’s eyes. But I knew that answer would stink on at least two counts. Number one, it would be a lie. I
wanted
to spend time with Esmé. Number two: Once, back in Iowa City, Will had stepped into Esmé’s and my apartment kitchen and seen Esmé standing naked at the stove, and I suspected that ancient anger over that moment still made me eager to slap an image of the changed Esmé over whatever lovely image might reside in Will’s brain. This being the case, I said only, “She and I were close once, Will. It was nice of her to ask.”

He opened his eyes, now pink from his rubbing, and he gave me a weary look. “Didn’t you let her know when we moved here, though? And she never responded?”

“Oh”—I made an airy, butterfly movement with my hands, suggesting how things might come and go—“I sent a postcard to her office, but she never got it. She was shocked, I guess, when she found out we lived here . . . very recently.”

A long and skeptical
hmm
from Will.

Humiliating, I thought. I wanted him to accept, as I had, that what mattered was my old friend’s wanting to see me
now.
Still, I had no desire to chat with him about Esmé, and I said that it was not a problem, not at all, if he did not want to go to the dinner.

“No.” He put his glasses on again. Sighed. “You’d go for me—and, besides, I figure it’s a one-shot deal.”

I sighed, too, but in a noisier way; in imitation. “Please, just stay home if you’re going to act like it kills you.”

“Don’t be silly, Charlotte. Of course it won’t kill me. What night is it?”

I had shrunken down inside myself during that exchange. I did not feel like saying one more word, but I had to answer or risk looking sulky. “Wednesday.”

“As in the day after tomorrow?”

“That’s the one, Will.”

He got up from the table and came into the kitchen. Opened the oven. Poked at the potatoes with a fork. “So, how’s your reading for Gregor’s contest going?” he asked.

Very glad of this change in topic, I stuck out my tongue to indicate how fagged I felt at the thought of all the pages ahead of me. “Two done. Eight to go.”

“I guess, then”—he shut the oven door—“after this dinner with your friend, you’ll be keeping your calendar clear.”

“Will!”
I would not have dreamed of saying a thing to him about his “calendar.”

“Hey.” He raised his hands, then let them fall. “You were saying the other day that you hadn’t had a chance to write all week. I know that can get you down. Last night—you got up, didn’t you? I thought maybe you couldn’t sleep.”

I shrugged. Such was the reality of marital bliss that, in case he might use the information later—say, he fell for the governess and decided to have me locked away as a madwoman—I had not told Will about the weird, jarring awakenings that I’d been experiencing that autumn, moments in which I sat bolt upright in bed, gripped by an icy fist of not knowing who I was; and not merely in some garden-variety anxious way, like
What’s my role in life?
Character, personal history—all were wiped clean. Those moments reminded me of the many disorienting nights when I’d woken up in the hospital after my drunken collision with that pickup truck. I seemed to be reduced to something elemental in the elemental universe. Unlike my nights in the hospital, though, I could move, and, sometimes, after I came fully awake, I would step out into Will’s and my backyard, beyond the overhang of the ramada, and—feet icy—look up at the sky and try to open myself to a correspondence in the distance between the atoms inside me and the distance between myself and the stars and all that whirling infinitude of which I understood myself to be a part—though I barely could believe it.

Wasn’t that magic? That was magic. But hard to enter in the pagan way that I wished that I could—right along with Wordsworth, though not Blake, Blake was cracked—and eventually I would grow too lonely and cold to keep up my investigation of the night and so go inside and back to the bedroom, where Will would lift the covers, inviting me to spoon into that space against his thighs and chest that was, if not Heaven, a fine earthly refuge.

After we finished eating our potatoes and salad and Stilton, I started the water running in the sink, getting it hot for the dishes. I liked to be in charge of the washing—to have my hands in warm, soapy water, and to do the rinsing, too. I’d learned to shepherd the cleanup along because Will, who was so good at keeping us supplied with bread and apples and filling up my car with gasoline and remembering to get cash from the ATM, had a tendency to get distracted in the kitchen, leave things half done—

Or disappear.

“Will?” Where had he gone? I turned off the water—had he gone off, as he so often did, to make a telephone call? “Will?” No answer. “Will?”

Then I heard the sweet bleats of the horns that made such a tantalizing opening for the old ballad by Al Green called “Let’s Stay Together.”

I smiled as Will came back into the kitchen. His face was serious, though, when he crossed the room and took me in his arms. Always a surprise: Just like that, from the practical and day-to-day, he could become a figure of romance.

We slow-danced, there, by the kitchen sink. My cheek fitted against the V where his ribs met. His hands warm on the skin under the back of my shirt. I was awash in delicious, helpless feelings of love—feelings a part of me distrusted:

Did I give away too much of myself in exchange for moments of romance with this sexy, handsome man?

The quarrelsome questions of husbands and wives:
Is what I’ve given up worth what I’m getting in exchange?
And:
How did I get so lucky to marry a person as great as
X
?
And:
But if
X
is so great, why did s/he marry me?

Sometimes, even though Will himself had put on a song, he would get impatient with it, stop dancing. That night, I yearned for him to want to dance the whole song through.

Happily, we danced the whole song through.

When the next song on the CD started—something up-tempo—we stepped back from each other. Smiled. “I’m glad for you, Charlotte,” he said, “that your old friend came by.”

I lifted his hand and kissed it. I said what was true but not the whole truth, “It was good to see her.”

Chapter 10

That night, while Will worked at his computer on the dining room table, I went to my desk and read a couple of graduate students’ stories; later, optimistically, I climbed into bed with the third of the Poulos Prize novels. I liked the pages that I read, but I was tired and drifted off several times until, around midnight, I called, “I’m turning out the lights.”

Will climbed into bed shortly after that. “Love you,” he said in the dark, and I said, “Love you, too,” and raised my head enough to drop a kiss on his shoulder. Those bedtime rituals were important to me. Because of Will’s height, we had a queen-size mattress, but we still kept close throughout the night.

At around two, something woke me. I felt disoriented, and the disorientation persisted even after I was up and out of a bed that should have informed me where I was (all I would have needed to do, after all, was reach out my hand and touch Will, there beside me).

By what felt like instinct, I made my way through dark territory toward a murky, moonstruck place, home to a gray creature who increased my dread. I forced myself to meet its fog of eyes.

Oh.

You.

Reflected in the mirror over the bathroom sink. Recognition without satisfaction.

Then I was wide-awake. And, just like that, thinking about Esmé.

Will always said, “If you can’t sleep, wake me up, and we’ll talk,” but I didn’t see how I possibly could talk to him about what was on my mind. And I didn’t want Esmé on my mind. Very quietly, I went to my bedside table for the Poulos Prize entry that I’d started reading before I turned out the lights, and I carried it with me into my office.

After I finished the first thirty pages, I felt reassured. I hadn’t loved anything about the first two entries that I’d read, but this one seemed promising. It opened with a twelve-year-old girl having her new best friend at the house for a “sleepover.” The hostess’s parents were out for the night, and the girls were having a fine time in her bedroom, watching a movie, talking. Then the hostess’s seventeen-year-old brother and one of his friends began banging on the bedroom door, making the absurd demand that the sleepover guest—the daughter of a hairstylist, a girl whose breasts already had developed—“do” the boys’ hair. The guest was excited by the boys’ noisy attention and pleaded with the hostess:
Couldn’t we pause the movie for just a little bit?

Reluctantly, the hostess gave in. She felt certain that her brother and his friend wanted only to be close to her friend’s breasts (which swayed under the girl’s flimsy pajama top as she and the hostess went out into the kitchen with the boys). No one paid any attention to the hostess once things got rolling. The girlfriend—pink-cheeked and silly as she worked styling mousse into the hair of the hostess’s brother—the hostess started to hate her! The girlfriend couldn’t have missed the boys’ happy leers! The smart and handsome brother—previously so admired—the hostess began to hate him, too! He looked like a clown, allowing her guest to draw his hair up into a soft-serve swirl on top of his head! “She’s not even that cute!” the hostess hissed into his ear before she ran into their parents’ bedroom and slammed the door behind her and telephoned another girl to sob, “Becka is such a slut!”

Maybe I felt especially moved by this particular novel’s opening pages because of Esmé’s visit—I would need to keep that in mind as I read on—but the writer did seem to me to have nailed down an essential female dilemma: A girl learns it is imperative to win the attention of boys. The attention, while gratifying, exacts a price. It makes her the object of envy. It comes between her and other girls, and striving to win it and keep it renders a girl, simultaneously, vain and insecure.

At forty-one, I had several dear, longtime female friends (some in Tucson, some far away), and a few newer friends who seemed likely to become just as precious. These women were smart and charming—three of them were also very funny—and they enriched my life. They had faults. Knowing myself to be full of faults, I put up with theirs. Knowing myself to be full of holes, I worked hard not to expect my friends to make me feel whole.

But when I was twenty-one—

Christ, the fury that I’d come to feel toward Esmé—a person I also adored, whose friendship I craved—during the months that we lived together!

Maybe I stunk with it, maybe I just blended in. The Workshop was famous not only for its big-name author-teachers, its reading series, and the literary successes of its graduates but also for its cutthroat atmosphere (
backstabbing
,
ass-kissing
,
brownnosing
were just a few of the adjectives regularly lofted in hallways, at parties, over after-workshop pitchers of beer). In short, the place was glorious
and
it reeked. Socially, I was in way over my head. Besides being from a small town in Iowa, at twenty-one, I was the youngest person in the graduate program. And working class. I’d met a few people at my little undergraduate school who had wealthy parents, but quite a number of my Workshop classmates came from a world I’d never encountered except in books. In the four years since she had graduated from college, it seemed that Esmé had spent more time traveling in foreign countries than she had working. Some of my classmates already knew famous writers (Esmé herself had met Saul Bellow at a picnic thrown by the grandparents of her friend Sarah). One student was the daughter of diplomats and had gone to private school in Switzerland and spoke of a second home in the Caribbean. In the first weeks of the semester, waiting for a reading to begin, I’d overheard a first-year poet seated in the row ahead of me say to the person beside her, “Admit it: You’d die if you had kids and they didn’t get into an ivy!”

His response: a grin and a nod.

Mine: an
ivy
?

I had the use of Will’s old station wagon, and, after that reading, as I unlocked the car, it came to me: Ivy with a capital
I
. An Ivy League school.
You’d die if you had kids and they didn’t get into an Ivy!