As Good as Dead (24 page)

Esmé, now coming our way, called a teasing “Awfully quiet down there! What on earth are you two talking about?”

Chapter 17

That afternoon, once she and Jeremy Fletcher left the apartment, I went back to my room and tore down Will’s sheets of newspaper.

Miserable, I pressed my palms to the chill glass of the window that looked out on Burlington Street. I could not stop running certain moments through my head:

Whoops!
Esmé cried out in the kitchen. Red-faced Will hurried back to my room.

Jeremy Fletcher flicked the blue-and-white checked dish towel at me.
She thinks y’all are just a hick! Having a hissy fit ’cause your beau walked in on her naked!

Will stood on my desk chair and taped the sheets of newspaper to the window and explained that he had cashed in his ticket in order to prolong his stay in Italy.

I could tell he was attracted to me, of course,
Esmé said.

And Will:
Obviously, she did it on purpose, Charlotte.

Pounding the palms of my hands against each other, I walked back and forth through the crowded apartment (living room, kitchen, hallway, bedroom) again and again. At one point, stopped alongside my bed, I could smell Will. Bitter at the wondrous musk of him, I ripped off the sheets and pillowcases and crushed them into the bottom of my closet.

I could tell he was attracted to me, of course.

What I did with my teeth probably would have qualified as gnashing
.
I grabbed my hair with both hands and pulled it straight out from my head. I crouched into a ball in the middle of my room, wincing, swearing. I wanted right out of my skin—a feeling that led me to the lidded African basket on top of the toilet where Esmé kept her makeup and, at least some of the time, a hash pipe.

Had she taken it to Evanston?

No, there it sat, along with a turquoise Zippo and a foil-wrapped lump of hash.

Stoned, I felt . . . not
better—
I remained too upset about the events of the last few days, and maybe my whole life, to feel
better
. Still, for the first time since I’d been sick, I did feel hungry, and I went to the kitchen to see what I could find.

The refrigerator was empty. Even the box of baking soda that we kept in there to absorb odors was gone. Nothing in the freezer, either. What did that mean? I opened and closed the doors a few times, listening to the sucking, parting sigh made by the rubber gasket.

On her return from Evanston the following Wednesday, Esmé would explain that she had thought she should do a complete “kitchen purge” since we didn’t know exactly what had made us sick; she’d meant to tell me, but then had gotten distracted by her packing for her trip and,
You know, worrying you were angry at me, Charlotte.

The cupboard where we kept our boxes of cereal and crackers: empty. A tremble sounded in my head, as if a bowling ball rolled down an endless lane, the pins so far away that I never would know if the ball struck or not.

Had the gas been turned off? No, the round ring of blue flame popped up with its characteristic
wooomph
and
tick-tick-tick
. I stared at it stupidly—I don’t know for how long.

I dithered over the necessity of going out in search of food. I had a fair idea that I was not in any shape to drive a car. I went into the fetid bathroom. My face in the medicine cabinet mirror was pasty. What would be involved in taking it out in public? Brushing my teeth seemed advisable and, after that, so did drawing on some black liquid eyeliner that I’d noticed while extracting the hash pipe from Esmé’s makeup basket. Stuff that Esmé applied when she wanted to rock a glam cat-eyed look, the liner went on chilly and shiny.

I blinked at my spooky self in the bathroom mirror while the liner dried to a matte charcoal. That was not the first time that Jeremy Fletcher’s invitation passed through my head, but maybe the first time that I balanced it against the image I had concocted of Esmé standing naked in the kitchen that morning.

Probably that she had exposed herself to Will on purpose. What upset me more, however, was that Will had the same idea. Which meant that he did not think she cared much about me or else cared very much about making an impression on him.

And she had laughed about it to Jeremy Fletcher and said that she considered me a hick!

I smoked a little more of the hash. Put on the increasingly threadbare, shot-out-at-the-elbows tweed jacket that was all that remained of my Borgesian three-piece suit.

When I unlocked my bicycle from the iron railing at the back entry of the apartment building, it was my intention to ride only to John’s Grocery or Hamburg Inn. John’s? Hamburg Inn? I went back and forth, ignoring my knowledge that both places lay not far beyond the grimy, asphalt-shingled house where Jeremy Fletcher rented the attic.

I drove to John’s Grocery. A tiny store. Best known as the place to get kegs of beer. Not wanting anyone to guess that I was stoned out of my head, I walked—as briskly as I could in the cramped space—right past the rack holding a prominent display of Pepperidge Farm cookies packaged as handsomely as a birthday gift. No to delicious Doritos. No to enticing Cheetos. Something healthy to regain my health, damn it. I lifted a heavy navy-blue and white tub of Mountain High yogurt (plain) from the dairy case. Very good. I thought an apple would be the right accessory for the yogurt, but given all of the high drama on stage in my diminished brain, choosing between the store’s three corky-looking Granny Smiths proved beyond me, and I carried only the yogurt toward the checkout counter.

I had forgotten that my eyes were lined like those of a tribal idol, and so I was flustered when the girl at the cash register looked up at me, grinned, and said, “Woo-oo!”

Woo-oo!
Outside the store, I set the yogurt in the wire basket on the front of my bike. I was so screwed up—and cold, shivering in just my old suit jacket and a T-shirt—getting the combination right on my bike lock took forever.

That I rode off with one hand covering my nose to keep it from getting red should have been a tip-off that I was in danger of going to Jeremy Fletcher’s place—
beware—
though I don’t think I even noticed that I drove one-handed until I hit a slick of ice hidden beneath a litter of maple leaves and could not steady myself in time—

“No!” I cried, but the bike continued with its unkind tilt until my left knee hit the concrete with a crack.

The carton of yogurt fell from the basket. Exploded with a splat.

No one around, I was happy to see as I righted myself.

Like a good citizen—gripping the carton by its relatively clean bottom—I carried the remains of the yogurt to the nearest alley garbage bin. I did not want to look at my knee. It hurt like hell. I could tell it was bleeding and that my jeans were torn. Quietly, feeling some righteous fury, I said, “Fuck it,” and got back on my bike and pedaled onward, very hard.

Just ahead, a right turn would take me down the street that ran by the house in which Jeremy Fletcher lived.

I turned.

I told myself that I meant only to see whether or not his stupid Ford Ranchero sat out front. To see if he were home, pining for Esmé, or out running around, having the time of his life. I hoped the latter. At that moment, I held Esmé responsible for the miserable end to Will’s visit, the fact that I’d had to go out to buy food that I now was not going to get to eat, which related to my fall off my bike, which related to the clerk’s “woo-woo!” and even the voice of my father, in my head, singing, “I won’t go hunting with you, Jake, but I’ll go chasing women!”

There sat the Ranchero, its windshield opaque with dust, one tire up on the curb, suggesting general dissolution.

Were you out of your mind?
I’ve asked myself that a thousand times over the years.

Teeth chattering loud as castanets, I rode up the sloped, brown lawn between the sidewalk and the shingled house. I shoved my bike out of sight in the thicket of yews that grew all around the foundation and then halfway up the windows of the first story, too. My crazy thinking went something like this:

Jeremy Fletcher’s wanting to spend time with me—even if it was only for sex—restored some justice in the world over which Esmé Cole judged herself queen. Granted that I had no personal interest in Jeremy Fletcher, at that moment, it seemed to me I would be able to
redeem
his interest in me, as in, when a fisherman lands the biggest fish, he can release the fish after there’s acknowledgment that he is the winner. As in, at a carnival, the person who wins the ring toss takes home a watch, a stuffed animal, a bottle of perfume from the shelf at the back of the booth, and not the rings.

When I was a kid, did I have an IQ that sent my public school teachers into raptures during parent-teacher nights? I did, which goes to show how much stock people should put in those numbers, since their owners obviously can operate without consulting their brainpower at all. Really. Because, to make this even more wacky, you need to know that, somehow, this marvelous brain of mine harbored the dopey notion that—since I had no intention of
keeping
Jeremy Fletcher—when all was said and done, Esmé and I would be able to go on being friends. On a better footing. Once she understood that she was vulnerable, too.

Not guilty by reason of insanity!

Because—forget Esmé—how could I have been sane and done what I did when I loved Will?

But, honestly, while I dislodged myself from the yews growing so rampantly up the side of that shingled house, brushed the crumbly bits of greenery and twigs from my jacket and hair—I am sure that I looked like a madwoman—Will was as absent from my head as physics, algebra, and other subjects that I once had studied but never comprehended and couldn’t have told you one thing about even if you’d put my head in a vise and cranked.

All that I could think of—if
think
were the right word—was my enormous need for Jeremy Fletcher to treat me as an object of desire. This would topple the monumental enemy against which I saw myself acting out of necessity (Esmé was Goliath; I was David). At that moment, I was such a wild combination of the untutored, greedy, and needy that I hardly gave a thought to the monstrosity of what I was about to do. Like some prodigious waterfall whose thundering and spume drown out all other sounds and sights, my sense of necessity blocked any scruples that I ordinarily possessed.

Jeremy Fletcher—no fedora, hair rumpled, bleary-eyed—answered my knock. He wore baggy sweatpants, felt slippers, and a heavy white shirt with broad black stripes (a shirt like a prisoner would have worn in the olden days). Obviously, he was not expecting me, but I was hysterical—akin to prison escapees who must, as fast as possible, wriggle through tight tunnels, crawl on their bellies through mud and under barbed wire, scale fences with no regard for the fact that they have skin. I wanted the man to greet me with a fervent,
It’s you I love, Charlotte, not Esmé!
Riding up the lawn, for some reason, this had seemed possible. Now, I saw this was not yet possible, not yet, and, agitation mushing the words, I told Jeremy Fletcher that I had fallen on my bike. For proof, I extended the aching, bleeding leg.

“Whoa.” He opened the door wider. “Y’all oughta . . . come in and wash up.”

He directed me to a stepladder by his kitchen sink. I sat. I looked around myself while he went to his bathroom for a towel. A strange place, that attic.
Cold
. Drywall had been hung on the slanted ceiling and two walls, but one wall had its pink insulation exposed, and another was bare studs. “The Garret,” Esmé called it. She’d told me it came cheap because the landlord had run out of money before he could finish it.

While I sat on the stepladder and dabbed at my knee with a wet towel, Jeremy Fletcher fired up a green bong that he’d retrieved from a littered card table (half-filled cups, notebooks, pencil sharpener, paper plate holding the remains of a sandwich). He took a toke and then carried the bong to me. “Here you go. Ain’t no Tylenol in the house.”

Not talking, businesslike, we passed the bong back and forth. I suspected he, too, already had smoked a bit that afternoon. We relaxed pretty soon.

“But, Charlotte, y’all—” He laughed a little
heh-heh
laugh, and it made me laugh, too.
Snigger
. That’s what I did. Sitting on the stepladder, rocking back and forth. My goofy snigger made Jeremy Fletcher snigger, too. He closed his eyes and slapped the fronts of his thighs. I wanted to ask him,
What were you going to say?
but I couldn’t push the words around my hopeless snigger.

He leaned in to kiss me, then. I kissed him back. His tongue was like a giant oyster in my mouth, and his breath made my nose sting, so I did not mind much when he crouched in front of me and began unbuckling my leather belt. Or that the belt was stiff in the cold attic, a bit unyielding. My teeth went back to chattering while I looked down into the whorls of thinning hair on top of Jeremy Fletcher’s head.

“I reckon,” he said, “Will and Es would be mighty surprised if they knew what we two were up to.”