As Good as Dead (20 page)

Scott Anderson smiled at me. “Well put,” he said, “though I think you mean
jargon
.”

“Jargon,”
I said. I could hear myself say
jingo
. Christ.

“You should be a lawyer,” he said. That got a laugh, and the topic of the critic was dropped, but toward the end of the evening, when I learned that Will Ludlow’s area of interest was Italian Futurism, I felt the urge to needle him again, to dislike him. I happened to have read an article about the Futurists, and I said, “But weren’t they, like, a big influence on the Fascists?”

He nodded. “Aspects of their thinking were appropriated and distorted by the Fascists, but essentials of their aesthetic continue to be important to a number of contemporary artists.”

He sounded more serene about the matter than I thought he should have.

“Granted, I don’t know much about them,” I said, “but weren’t they, like,
Down with women!
?”

“Well, they were, but”—

“Charlotte,” Lydia Ott interjected, smiling, “a lot of important figures in history have been misogynists. I’m afraid that if we excluded all of the misogynists, we wouldn’t have much history to study.”

Will Ludlow nodded. “And, actually, your writing is probably influenced by the Futurists more than you know, Charlotte.”

I snorted—yes, I did—and said, “I doubt that!”

Scott Anderson laughed. He was walking around the table, just then, grating fresh nutmeg onto our scoops of vanilla ice cream, and while he grated away by my elbow, he said, “I’ll drive you up the hill in a bit, Charlotte. Deliver you and your bags to your dorm.”

Some part of me held on to a hope that Will Ludlow might offer to drive me to campus, and I said, “Oh, no need.” A flurry of discussion followed. Lydia objected that I couldn’t walk all that way with my luggage—and did I even have a room key yet? No. Then it was decided: Scott would drive me. Will Ludlow apologized. He would have offered, he said, but he himself had come on foot.

I was disappointed. Relieved.

The next morning, I awoke to the buzzer sounding in my new dormitory room. I went out into the hall and, after a short search, I located the telephone for the front desk. “I’m in two-twelve,” I told the girl who answered. “You buzzed me?”

“You have a guest waiting in the lobby,” she said.

Backlit, Will Ludlow stood by the entrance, staring outside. When I said his name and he turned, I saw that his flannel shirt was unbuttoned all the way, and there was nothing but bare skin under the shirt. I had been agitated by him the night before. Now I went limp.

I exchanged an unusual number of greetings with my fellow students as Will Ludlow and I walked along my little campus’s smooth and clean asphalt paths that morning. The school’s enrollment sat at under a thousand, and—because of my hermit’s ways—I knew only a small number of people well; but a lot of people were curious about me that day (I supposed because of both my accident and the handsome man walking at my side). How odd it would be, I thought, if the amount of attention we drew as we walked along made Will Ludlow imagine that I were “popular.”

He stopped, near the kiosk where campus events were posted. “I’ve been thinking about you and your story,” he said. “All night. You’re an artist.”

He wanted to know who I’d studied with, besides Lydia. Well, no one, but I talked a bit about Jean Rhys. Alice Munro and Chekhov and Nabokov. I regretted that I didn’t have sophisticated things to say about each of them. “They’re different from each other, but they’re all inspiring. I can tell they’re writing absolutely as well as they possibly can. And telling the truth about what they know. For me, those two things go hand in hand.”

Will Ludlow said, sounding younger, then, very enthusiastic, “The way that you expose yourself in your work—that moment when the girl walked on top of the roof.” He shook his head. “That was pretty dark. I admired that.”

It occurred to me that the students who passed by us were moving toward the gymnasium for registration—there, with a blushing wave, was the boy who had formerly supplied my gallons of vodka—and that I needed to register, too, but it hardly mattered because I was with Will Ludlow.

“I try not to be whimsical,” I told him. “I’m not interested in whimsy.”

He smiled. “Okay.”

It seemed to me he might be amused, so I added, “I think the Futurists are kind of whimsical.”

“The Futurists?”

“They’d just say anything. They thought it was cute. Like they were bad little boys.”

He shook his head. “You’re thinking about Marinetti,” he said. “There’s more to the Futurists than what’s in his manifesto. They’re important historical figures. Let’s go to your library. I’ll show you some pictures.”

While we walked on, he had this very keen look on his face, looking ahead and about himself. He breathed deeply, as if he relished the air.
Avid.
Like a setter. I wanted him to put his hands on me.
Why do we have to go to the library?
I thought as we stepped out of the summer-warm day into the foyer’s air-conditioned cool.

“Wait, though.” Before we passed through the second set of doors, he took my hand and walked me back outside; guided me behind the shaggy arborvitae along the library’s foundation, and, with a sigh, clasped me to his long torso.

His big heart thudded deep in my ear.

We stood this way for a while; then he lowered his head toward mine and whispered something.

“I’m deaf on that side,” I said.

“Right. Lydia told me something about that.” He rubbed his knuckles gently across the top of my head. “What I said—I said I’m so glad I met you.”

Well, I was a goner, a quaint version of my former self.

I would soon discover, however, that Will Ludlow did not behave the way that I expected a boyfriend to behave. My previous boyfriends had wanted to be with me every second. Will Ludlow, on the other hand, was very busy with his work, whether teaching or doing his research or writing at his rental house in Mount Vernon. On the weekends, we cooked dinners together and we went to movies and things, but, during the week, I rarely saw him until nine thirty, when he drove up to my dormitory in his beater station wagon and ferried me back to his place. After sex, sleep, and, in the morning, baguettes with butter and jam and coffee made in his Chemex—he had adopted a Continental breakfast after traveling in Europe—he would go to his desk or to his car for his drive to Iowa City. If the weather was nice, I would walk across Mount Vernon to my own school’s campus to begin my day. The routine was not without romance, but it unsettled me. When I finally got up the nerve, I objected to the fact that we spent so much time apart.

“But you have your work to do, too, Charlotte,” said Will—clearly startled by my bursting into tears. “You always seem busy.”

“That’s because you’re busy!” I said, but either he was right or I changed, because soon it did seem as if my absorption with my writing quite precisely mirrored his with his scholarship.

Chapter 15

Drunk and stoned, the night after that party at the Victorian, I had told Esmé way too much about Will and myself. If I had been sober, I never would have shown her the letter (five single-spaced pages) that Will had mailed to me from Italy, a kind of treatise regarding his vision for our future. I viewed the letter as a testament to his intelligence and love, but Esmé hooted over the thing and insisted on reading aloud from it in a haughty voice (“We’ll want to defer having children until we’ve achieved some professional standing”). She and I had been reading
Middlemarch
in
Nineteenth Century British Novels, and she declared that Will sounded like Mr. Casaubon, and, then, of course—or so I thought—I had to correct that impression, and I went on and on about what a passionate and romantic person he was.

The morning after, for the first time since my accident, I woke up with a hangover. It was a bad one, and there stood Esmé, beside my bed in her fluffy pink bathrobe, saying, as if it were great news, “Charlotte! Look! Your parents are here!”

Truly. Standing in the door to my room, peeking in.

Esmé grinned and she crossed her eyes at me. I suspected that she felt as rocky as I did.

“Day’s a-wasting!” my dad called. More circumspect, my mother said a low “She’s not dressed, Dave,” and as they backed into the hall, she called to me, “The McMichaels gave us their tickets for the football game.”

Hurry
, Esmé mouthed; then said aloud, “I’ll make coffee!”

My parents were pretty dreadful, but I loved them (no doubt, they would have said something similar about me). Despite my agitation at their showing up unannounced and my hangover—would it be obvious?—I felt protective of them. They were getting old and they were exactly the types of Iowans that Workshop people found amusing as hell—both of them, I’d noticed, wore green polyester windbreakers emblazoned with the name of Webster City’s grain cooperative—and so I rushed into my jeans and sweatshirt.

Not that I thought Esmé would be anything less than polite, but, during one of our late-night talks, she had let me understand, her forehead wrinkled in polite correction, that, as far as she was concerned, people got what they deserved in this world. Her paternal grandfather, she explained, had arrived in the United States with nothing but a straight-edged razor and, through offering shaves in a cold-water flat in Chicago, he had financed his education and become the noted lawyer who founded the big firm where her own father now put in, as she said, “outrageously long hours, and, since he’s probably a genius and works so hard—well, it’s only fair that people like himself get a bigger piece of the pie.” Because my own parents worked hard, and I wanted Esmé to see that things did not always work out equitably, I told her my dad’s hard-luck story. My dad’s father had abandoned the family, and so, at thirteen, to help support his mother and sister, my dad had left school. “He never got to go back,” I said.

“But why not?” Esmé asked. “If he really wanted to!”

I’d wished—out of fairness to my dad—that I knew precisely how to answer Esmé, but I wasn’t sure any answer would suffice. Esmé never had heard of an egg handler or a brakeman, let alone known people who held those jobs. “Surreal!” she declared when I explained that my mother’s job consisted of loading trays of eggs onto the many shelves of a large trolley that she then wheeled into the hatchery’s incubators. Esmé did not understand why people who weren’t students at the Writers’ Workshop lived in Iowa, where there were no museums or clubs or restaurants or places to buy decent clothes.

Things seemed fine, though, when I stepped out into the kitchen the morning of my parents’ visit to the Burlington Street apartment. My dad, seated at the dinette, was laughing heartily at something that Esmé had said (
Dave
,
Esmé was calling him). My mother, shy like myself, had busied herself at the counter, making sure that the toast in the toaster didn’t get burned.

Touching, embarrassing—she and my dad had stopped before coming to the apartment and bought us a loaf of Wonder Bread and a pound of margarine. This was the sort of stuff that Ésme laughingly would refer to as “industrial food,” but, making toast from Wonder Bread was a fundamental task in our family. After Martie’s marriage had ended in divorce, both of my parents regularly mentioned that they had warned Martie against marrying Rex—and why was that? Apparently—I was a toddler at the time—on his first visit to meet our parents, at breakfast, Rex had taken toast from the toaster for himself and failed to ask if he should put in fresh slices for anyone else. “
Mean
,” my father said whenever the subject of Rex and the toast came up. It remained legend around my parents’ house.

To conceal my hangover breath, before I kissed my mother’s cheek, I took a deep inhale. “Jam?” asked my dad as I dropped a kiss on top of his head. I was eager to go to the bathroom for aspirin, but I pulled a jar of jam from the refrigerator and set it on the table. Gleefully, as he had throughout my childhood, my dad recited:

The jam, the jelly, the marmalade

And other pleasant things they made

Down at old Aunt Mary’s!

Esmé laughed, which my dad liked. Some girls I’d known, growing up, had said that he was cute, with his dimpled chin and bedroom eyes, but it could embarrass and pain my mother and me, the way that, around pretty females—waitresses, clerks, whatever—he’d get this obvious
twinkle
going. I could see a bit of the twinkle when he asked Esmé, “So you’re a writer, too?”

She dropped a curtsy with her fluffy pink robe. “Well, I’m writing, Dave. We’ll see what happens.”

“That’s the right attitude,” my mother said as she dutifully added fresh slices of bread to the toaster. “Not much of a career, writing stories.”

“Did Charlotte tell you her story got picked?” Esmé smiled at me. “This great new writer—Michael Chabon—he’s coming to read and do an afternoon workshop, and he picked Charlotte’s story to discuss!”

“Any money in it?” my dad asked—Esmé, not me.

“It’s an
honor
, Dave,” Esmé said, but in a teasing voice, as if she took his point.