As Good as Dead (12 page)

There! From the Victorian’s dining room: A whoop of Esmé’s distinctive laughter rose above the sounds of the other partygoers. I opened the porch’s screened door and went back inside to look for her.

That night, Esmé had drawn her red hair into a French twist, something I’d never seen her do before. Indeed, it was by her beaded “citrine” cardigan that I first identified her. She made a kind of lit candle, swaying on her knees in front of someone seated in a slipcovered easy chair—

A glimpse of curly salt-and-pepper hair.

The prize-winning author. That evening’s guest.

As I walked up to the two of them, I could hear snippets of the story that Esmé was telling the guest. The story of the picnic at which Esmé—twelve or thirteen at the time—met Saul Bellow. “I was too young to know who he was,” Esmé said with a laugh, “but I could tell he was flirting, the way he wouldn’t let go of my hands!”

The author smiled up at me from the easy chair as I came to a stop alongside Esmé, and I smiled back. I removed the author’s books from my shoulder bag and waited for Esmé to look up, say hello—a plan that, fairly quickly, turned awkward:

Esmé gave no sign that she registered that I stood beside her. She went on talking, talking about Saul Bellow,
Oh, she really did need to read Bellow; he was ancient, but he’d had the most astonishing brown eyes, like melted chocolate,
until the writer finally held up her hand to Esmé and pointed at me.

When Esmé looked up, the smile on her face was stiff, almost as if she could not place me. Then her fingers closed around my wrist. “You don’t mind not interrupting right now, do you?” she asked. “Since Marie and I are talking?”

I don’t remember what I said—
Of course not?—
before I backed away. I do know that, when I turned, I faced the big dining room table, laden with open bottles of wine, mixers, a half-filled six-pack of Sam Adams Ale, a somehow as-yet-unopened pint of Cuervo Gold neatly tucked between a plastic bag of paper napkins and a potted begonia, and I asked myself—yes, I did—
Wouldn’t a shot of tequila put a comforting arm around your shoulder about now, dearie? Ease your hurt and mortification?

At one of the AA meetings I’d been encouraged to attend after my teenage encounter with the pickup truck, I had heard someone say,
Whenever I see a bottle of booze,
I picture a skull and crossbones painted right across the front.

I pictured a skull and crossbones on the pint of Cuervo Gold. Hummed to shut out the sound of Esmé’s voice behind me. Directed the attention of my sober self to a platter of crudités. Playing party guest, I briefly set myself the task of chewing up a cauliflower floret; then I headed to Will’s station wagon and drove to the Burlington Street apartment.

A few weeks later, Esmé and I would laugh as we calculated how much extra I owed on the telephone bill because of the supposedly “lovesick” call to Italy that I had made after I left the party at the Victorian.

Eighteen minutes of weepy, transatlantic invective. “Like I wouldn’t have invited Esmé to join me if the situation had been reversed!” I’d protested to Will. “Like I wouldn’t have introduced her!”

Awful to think of that long-ago telephone call to Milan.

I tossed the now-empty bag of blue corn tortilla chips into the trash can by my desk.

What a baby I’d been. What a dope. My face grew hot as I remembered complaining to Will about Esmé’s “sycophantic kneeling and swaying” at the visiting writer’s feet. As if integrity had kept me from such behavior! I’d been shy. Esmé hadn’t and I’d wanted to damn her for it. Or to be more like her. Really, twenty years on, it seemed to me that I’d been a grotesque—
the Grand Maw
—imagining myself so starved that surely I deserved some of what Esmé had gone out and got for herself.

And poor Will—it had been five in the morning when I woke him up, but he listened to me sympathetically. I was not satisfied, though—no, no, not I. In an effort to wrest some satisfaction from the evening, I had
returned
to the party.

When I arrived, I saw a fleshy, older, first-year student—Jeremy Fletcher, his ever-present gray fedora tipped far back on his head—standing on the Victorian’s brick front steps, talking with two second-years (a tall woman with bobbed hair a pearly shimmer in the moonlight; her petite, brainy friend from Calcutta). Flannery O’Connor was their topic, and when Jeremy Fletcher stopped me to ask if he might bum a cigarette, I braved telling the group that I’d taught “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” to my undergraduates that week and discovered, to my amazement, that over half of them hated the grandmother:

“It was crazy!” I said. “One student was, like, ‘What a bitch! I was
glad
when the Misfit shot her!’”

“Wow,” said the woman from Calcutta. Her tall friend closed her eyes, which I knew from better-lit places were a crackling blue. “Un-fucking-believable,” she said.

Jeremy Fletcher, however, drawled, “But y’all, the grandmother
is
a bitch! The Misfit did her a favor by shooting her!”

“Well, that’s absurd,” I said.

I already was weary of Jeremy Fletcher, who hailed from a part of Alabama he had told me was “so Deep South the muck’d suck off your boots.” He regularly plopped down in the spare chair in my TA cubicle so that he might share with me some piece of self-promotion—say, the program director’s belief that Jeremy Fletcher’s fiction “tapped a new American vein.” It bewildered me that the director and other Workshop people found Jeremy Fletcher impressive. They seemed
tickled
by his Confederate flag tattoo, his pickup truck with the gun rack and bumper stickers promoting Ronald Reagan and the NRA. They grinned when the man defended the patently offensive in his work:
I’m jist a good old Chrustian boy from ’Bama who don’t know no better!

“But, Iowa Girl”—he loved to call me that, his voice rippling with amusement—“don’t you know that Flannery herself believed the Misfit had the makings of a prophet?”

The tall woman inclined her pearly head toward the front door of the Victorian, and she and her friend went inside. Maybe they agreed with Jeremy Fletcher. Maybe it wasn’t important to them to change his mind. I, however, got all riled up. I took offense at his calling O’Connor by her first name. Would he have referred to Herman Melville as
Herman
? No way, José. So I said, “If you read the talk O’Connor gave on the story—I’ve got a copy—you’ll see she calls the grandmother a
heroine
. She says the grandmother had a good heart. It shocked O’Connor to find out that there were teachers telling their students otherwise.” I shook my head in frustration (I’d had arguments along these same lines with Will). “As for O’Connor saying the Misfit might become a prophet! O’Connor says it’s
because
the grandmother reached out to him—the pain of his memory of the grandmother’s gesture—
that’s
the thing that might make him a prophet.”

Drops of beer hanging from the tips of his overlong mustache, Jeremy Fletcher smiled and blew a
tooty-toot-toot
of dismissal at me across the lip of his bottle of beer. His breath was rank—after Esmé and he wound up a couple, I’d understand that she lacked any sense of smell—but I was too worked up to be driven off, and I rattled on. “Remember how the Misfit says he couldn’t know about Jesus because he wasn’t present when Jesus was alive?” To my embarrassment, a sudden overflow of emotion made my next words come out a choked mess: “Well, the Misfit
was
present when the grandmother reached out to him!”

Such a relief to hear, at my back, the front door creak open! I’d had my useless say. I was ready to escape, though I had my doubts about returning to the party.

“If it isn’t the lovely Miss Esmé Cole!” Jeremy Fletcher gave a throaty chuckle. “Do y’all know Iowa Girl, here, Miss Esmé Cole?”

From behind me, Esmé stepped forward and looped her arm through mine. “Charlotte’s my pal! I was looking for Charlotte!”

“Well, she’s one fucking earnest pal!” Jeremy Fletcher said. “Crazy earnest!”

“It suits her!” Esmé said and squeezed my arm.

“We’re roommates,” I told Jeremy Fletcher.
Better not to expect so much from your friends
,
Will had said to me on the telephone, but he was in Italy and Esmé stood beside me, close enough that I could detect both her L’Air du Temps and the alcohol on her breath.

“I came out to have a smoke,” she said. “Can you believe those fools won’t let you smoke in there?” She extracted a cigarette from her pack and bent to light it. Fumbled. Dropped both her lighter and the cigarette. I bent to pick up the lighter while she retrieved the cigarette, and I noticed that her hands—poetic, long of fingers, the moon of each nail perfectly exposed—were shaking. An effect of the presence of Jeremy Fletcher? After we’d read the stapled pages that he pressed on every person who would take them, she had said, clearly impressed, “He told me big editors are already interested in his work, Charlotte!” I, never guessing that my beautiful and clever friend would regard such an unappealing person as a love interest, had protested, “It reads like something Faulkner and Harry Crews would have concocted if you’d locked them up with a stash of crystal meth, porn, and copies of
Soldier of Fortune
!”

But here she was, turning a beseeching look my way as she lowered herself to the Victorian’s front steps.
Help!
her eyes implored me, just before, making her voice very lively, she said, “Sit, sit, you two!” and patted the bricks on either side of her. “Two of my favorite people in the world! And I got some hash from my little brother today! It’s supposed to be primo stuff! You two can help me take it for a test drive!”

I sat. Jeremy Fletcher sat. We smoked some of Esmé’s little brother’s hash, which I knew perfectly well would be, for me and my sobriety, no different from having a shot of alcohol. What was I up to? Who knows, who knows. Making one more of my misguided attempts to be part of the gang, I guess. Esmé asked Jeremy Fletcher questions about the newspaper reporting that he’d done “down South.” While he talked, he pulled out a silver flask that I’d seen him drink from on other occasions—once in the English-Philosophy Building—and Esmé drank from the flask, and then, what the hell, I did, too.

I hadn’t noticed the effects of the hash until I had a drink of the whiskey. Then, oh, boy, oh, boy, something pretty great started to happen in my head. Those always jammed spots in my temples started to glide open.

As an undergraduate, after taking up celibacy—in an effort to honor my writing and from fear that I might otherwise find my romantic soul married—I almost always had downed my Bloody Marys alone in my dormitory room. The door locked. A chair wedged under the doorknob as a reminder that I was not to be trusted in public with alcohol circulating in my veins (example: drunk and riding in the backseat of a car filled with possible college friends, I’d been so overcome by frisky affection for a girl in the front seat that I’d leaned forward and bit her shoulder; quite hard, to judge by her shriek, so no doubt it was understandable—though it left me crushed—that she spun around and slapped me across the face). Now, in public and drinking, once Jeremy Fletcher and Esmé and I finished off the contents of the silver flask, I mentioned—my words sprawling out just so comfortably!—that, earlier, I had spied a pint of tequila inside.

“Let’s see if it’s still there!” I said.

With a lot of laughter, the three of us stood up from the Victorian’s front steps and dusted off our rear ends, and, then, like I was some sort of very talented hound, I led the way through the noisy crowd in the hall and on toward the dining room, where I stopped in front of the big, heavy-laden table. Pointed a finger toward the cleft between the bag of paper napkins and the potted begonia. Let Esmé do the honors.

Chapter 11

I did not change into anything special the Wednesday evening that Will and I were to go to the Fletchers’ house for dinner. I wore my Chinese work jacket, my black clogs. I did not freshen my makeup or put on perfume. I did not want there to be any suggestion whatsoever that I still thought I was cute.

While Will took a shower, I looked over the Google Maps directions that he had printed out and left on the dining room table. The house sat farther north than I would have guessed. Google Maps said we would need half an hour to get there. To give myself something to do while I waited for Will to dress, I went out front and poked my finger into the dirt in the potted plants there. The asparagus fern felt dry. While I filled the watering can from the spigot, the black cat came out from the oleanders. It definitely was limping, but it came right toward me, and it didn’t run off when I stooped to pet it, even though, when I ran my hand over its back—the fur felt singed, its spine sharp—I touched a spot that made it cry out in pain.

“Hold on,” I told it. “Hold on, sweetie, while I get you something to eat.”

I couldn’t hear the shower running when I stepped inside the house, but the door to the bathroom still stood closed, and I hurried on to the kitchen and grabbed a can of tuna and a can opener.

When I got outside again, the cat—I was sure it was Bad Cat—still sat in the spot where I’d left it, and I said, “Good, good,” and crouched down and began working on the can. “I’ve got something for you.”