As Good as Dead (2 page)

Esmé herself, stepping over the threshold and into Will’s and my front hall, appeared to be in a mood more jolly than nostalgic. Imitating Billy Crystal’s fulsome eighties parodies of Fernando Lamas, she said, “Charlotte, dah-ling, you look
mah-
velous!
Ab-so-lute-ly
mah-
velous”
—
actually, I’d carried out only basic hygiene, wore a pair of sprung yoga pants and one of Will’s flannel shirts—“while
I, it must be said
immediately
,
am a whale!” She raised an index finger to stop me from contradicting her. “But let us not tarry! Eliza, repeat after me: ‘In Hartford, Hereford, and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly happen!’”

The perfect handling of that awkward moment. It was Esmé who had introduced me to the old Broadway musicals adored by her favorite aunt, one of them being
My Fair Lady
,
and I was more than glad to take up the role of the
h
-dropping Eliza Doolittle:

“‘In ’artford, ’ereford, and ’ampshire, ’urricanes ’ardly ’appen!’”

Chapter 2

Some history:

Eleven years before Esmé’s arrival at our front door, the same semester that Will had finished a postdoc at the University of Minnesota, the two of us had the amazing good fortune to win tenure-track jobs at the University of Arizona (Will in art history, myself in creative writing). The week we packed for our move to Tucson, we took a break one night to attend a fund-raiser at Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center. Will stepped off to get a glass of wine at the bar set up for the event and I—wisely, if gloomily abstaining—went to say my good-byes to Chuck Close’s giant
Big Self-Portrait.

Good-bye, bespectacled, drooping eyes, each as large as a head. Shockingly gorgeous black-and-white bits of ash on a colossal cigarette hanging so tipsily from pillow-size lips, good-bye.

While I stood there, so full of admiration for Close, and rubbing my arms to stay warm in the museum’s air-conditioned tower of brick and glass, I sensed a body detaching itself from the cluster of attendees near the bar and sidling my way. A moment later, from behind me, abrupt and loud as a honk, a voice said, “Charlotte Price!”

A poet I’d known slightly during my Iowa Writers’ Workshop days. Her height threw me initially (she had on six-inch heels) and I couldn’t think of her real name, only the one that Esmé had given her—Queen Turd
—
in honor of her supercilious airs and the slippery-looking tawny braid that, back then, she’d worn coiled on top of her head.

“I’m a
reformed
poet now!” she declared with a great
haw-haw.
The woman always had impressed me as someone who viewed herself as a kind of celebrity, and I sensed that, like an interviewer, I was supposed to ask her to explain the “reformed poet” business. Of necessity, had she given up poetry the way that I’d given up alcohol? Or was Reformed Poetry perhaps a movement? From the retro hippie look that she’d favored in the eighties (Birkenstocks and Third World cottons), the poet had moved along to those towering high heels, sleek charcoal knits, tony earrings made up of alternating strips of gold and anchovy cans. Gone the turdish coil, replaced by a jet-black bowl cut above a swath of skull shaved to a high-maintenance smoke. She swigged the amber drink in her plastic cup, then squeezed my forearm and said, “I hear you’ve published, Charlotte!” Her squeeze—I admit, it stirred me. I was a sucker for a warm gesture—but before I could reply, up went her eyebrows like window shades set flying, and she added with another
haw-haw
, “Anything I should read?”

I was almost thirty years old by then, but my party skills remained on par with those of a cuckoo clock; I could count on coming up with a little something only once an hour or so. Defending another person—I’d lost a triangle of my two front teeth after jumping between two unmatched boys in my high school’s cafeteria—I was good at that, but could be rendered perfectly dumb by a personal remark. With an arch smile, the poet swiftly shifted the conversation to gossip about Workshop people, some of whom I remembered, some of whom I didn’t. Who’d won prizes, who hadn’t. I am half deaf (nineteen, riding a bike with my blood alcohol at three times the legal limit, I went flying over the pickup truck of an unfortunate hog farmer and did serious damage to several parts of my body), and, in the hubbub raised by the art patrons, I missed a lot of what the poet said, but after I mentioned that I was about to start a job in Tucson, I
did
hear her exclaim:

“But that’s where my Workshop friend Esmé Fletcher lives!”

Esmé lived in Tucson? Old guilt, grief, and fear swamped me—what would happen if we ran into each other?—and, then, a bit of jealousy showed up, too: When, and how, had Esmé and this woman been friends? It was Esmé and I who had sat up until all hours singing songs from
A Little Night Music
and creating Cindy Sherman-esque tableaus and discussing whether or not we had the right to call ourselves writers before we published our first books (Esmé declared a vehement
no;
I, an equally vehement
yes
). It was Esmé and I who could recite poems to each other—or even in tandem—because, before we met, both of us had memorized some of the very same works.

To be born woman is to know—

Although they do not speak of it at school—

That we must labor to be beautiful.

And so I elbowed in. “Sad that Esmé and I lost touch, given that we were roommates and all.”

A sharp look. The poet ran her index fingers to the stark beginnings of the black wings of her dramatic eyebrows, traced the fingers along the eyebrows to their ends, stopping at her temples. I had the queer sensation that she was preening, using me for her mirror. I should have excused myself, walked off, but I was flummoxed in the way that I—a hick, the only student actually
from
the state of Iowa during our years at the Workshop—regularly had been flummoxed by people there.

“Roommates?” she murmured, then demonstrated that she knew all kinds of up-to-date things about Esmé that I did not:

I knew that Esmé had the one child, of course, and that he’d been given a Southern-sounding name, Rob Roy, which I’d supposed was Jeremy Fletcher’s choice; the poet knew not only that there was a second boy, Daniel, but what sports the boys played. Esmé, the poet said, had become a real estate broker after the boys started grade school. My surprise at the idea of Esmé as a businesswoman must have shown, because the poet laughed. “Oh, yes! Unlike some of you, Esmé and I have to work in the
real
world! She’s doing well, though! Jeremy sells advertising, I think—and maybe does some journalism?—but Esmé brings home the real money.”

So Esmé’s life was good. The news gratified me. For a moment, I  even thought,
Suppose that, in Tucson, she and I wind up friends again!
a notion quickly followed by a firm mental correction:
No
! While the reformed poet talked about the resort—La Paloma—at which she’d stayed on a visit to Tucson, I scoured the art center’s crowded lobby for a sign of Will. There. The back of his dear, shaggy head. The band of skin exposed between the collar of his blue work shirt and fair hair suggested that he was talking to someone of a more average height (at six foot five, Will regularly had a sore neck after such events). Oh, he was patient, Will was. Even if a person happened to wax on about Will’s specialty—Italian Futurism—Will listened, made a correction only if an error were truly egregious. I hoped the person he spoke to was a male. Often, Will did end up talking to the best-looking woman at a party. “She came up to me!” he would say in his own defense, and, true, he was not flirtatious. In fact, I’d assumed he thoroughly disliked me the night we met, which had not prevented my being flattened by his loping, lanky Abe Lincoln good looks (blond, but his dreamy blue eyes had looked out from under a ledge of caveman’s brow; his big and knobby wrists poked boyishly from the too-short sleeves of his flannel shirt).

Both from pride—I remained astonished that he’d chosen me—and to change the subject, I said to the reformed poet, “You remember Will Ludlow?”

“The art historian! Of course! Mystery Man!”

I had not heard the nickname in years. It was something dreamed up by certain female graduate students at the University of Iowa who had found Will’s desire for privacy both annoying and tantalizing. I pointed across the crowded lobby. “Over there. He and I are married now.”

“Charlotte! Congratulations!” The poet held up her free hand for a high five. Easier to go along than leave my hand hanging, looking like a party pooper. She rattled her plastic cup of ice cubes at me. “Trip to the bar? A toast?”

A familiar voice told me that running a fire-hose blast of vodka around inside my brain would scour away the edgy crap filling my head, but then the voices of people from the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings to which I too infrequently dragged myself reminded me: Girl, you and alcohol never, ever are going to get to hang out together again, be any sort of pals.

“I think I’ll just wander around a bit,” I told the poet. We started to move off in different directions; then I steeled myself and turned back and called, “Hey, you wouldn’t happen to have Esmé’s address with you, would you?”

Later, I would flush when I noticed that the address that the poet had copied onto her cocktail napkin was not for Esmé’s home but for the brokerage firm where she worked.
Did
the poet know about Jeremy Fletcher and me? No matter. I felt certain of my next step, and, the very next day, dropping by the English Department at the University of Minnesota to deliver grades for a workshop I’d taught as adjunct, I nabbed a sheet of letterhead from the front desk and carried it with me to the lunch table in the faculty/staff break room. There, with a fountain pen—a fountain pen with blue-black ink can sometimes fortify me—I wrote, “Dear Esmé.”

That was as far as I got.

The expanse of good ivory bond beneath “Dear Esmé” and the handsome university insignia had opened before me as vast and daunting as Death Valley. I did not see how I could survive crossing all that space. And suppose that Esmé took the stationery as showing off. Was it showing off? Or, paradoxically, trying, from insecurity, to let her know that I had value? Both?
Curiouser and curiouser
, as Alice said when she found herself telescoping, taller and taller, and worried that her feet, now far out of sight, might no longer be willing to carry her where she wanted to go.

I tore the sheet of letterhead in half, threw it in the office recycle bin, and headed back to Will’s and my duplex, which was stuffed with the cardboard boxes we’d scavenged from behind liquor and grocery stores. I located and slit open an already taped-shut box labeled
CHARLOTTE
’S DESK
. It had held bananas and released a sharp stink while, from its strata of smaller boxes and bins, I removed a pretty postcard of the Ponte Vecchio at sunset that I’d rejected repeatedly over the years as its message area was so crowded with historical information. In what now appeared a blessedly tiny space, I wrote, “Dear Esmé—Will and I are moving to Tucson. We’ll be teaching at U of A.” We had purchased a house on a chockablock three-day trip to Tucson in early June, and I included its address before I closed, “It would be great to see you after all these years! XO, Charlotte.”

The exclamation point. Maybe it was simply the writer in me, but I worried about it at the time and later. Suppose she found it . . .
fulsome
? It made her want to vomit? Suppose I’d left it off, and she’d written back and everything had turned out differently?

After Will and I had been settled in Tucson for a month or so, and Esmé hadn’t contacted me, I’d driven my car north, into the foothills of the Catalina Mountains. I had enough sense of the town by then to know that the brokerage firm she worked for must be upscale as it sat in Casas Adobes Plaza. In suave black script, the firm’s name scrolled across a creamy canvas awning that wasn’t doing much for the scorched tropicals out front but still conveyed a sense that the people within had class.

I drove by the office twice, but I could not make myself stop to say hello. Not too long after that, however, I did telephone—albeit very late on a Sunday, when I felt certain that no one would be in, and I’d be able simply to leave a voice mail. Even so, I was incredibly nervous.
Please, please
,
I found myself praying as soon as the telephone started to ring,
please
,
shoulders tight up around my ears,
let the next voice I hear be a recorded one.

It was.

The reprieve allowed me to sound genuinely cheerful and enthusiastic when I left my name and new telephone number and a closing, “It would be wonderful to see you, Esmé!”

I must clarify: I
did
believe that it would have been wonderful—in the best of all possible worlds (as the optimists had sung on Esmé’s CD of
Candide
). I would have stayed on the line if Esmé had picked up the telephone. I would have been happy as a clam if she wanted to see me. But those waiting prayers of mine made it painfully clear to me that my call and earlier postcard had been, above all, preemptive strikes. By putting myself out there, pretending that never in a million years would it occur to me that Esmé Cole Fletcher would be less than pleased to see her old pal, Charlotte Price, I meant to lay a path for civility. I aimed to create a world in which I would not feel obliged to jump, heart thumping, behind a telephone pole if I saw Esmé coming down a Tucson street; to duck into a restroom or an alcove at a literary event, bookstore, gallery opening.