As Good as Dead (25 page)

Mentioning Will and Esmé—that struck me as entirely wrong, but, then, Jeremy Fletcher, down there, fiddling with my zipper—what on earth did he have to do with me, anyway? He could as well have been a salesman, eager to sell me a pair of shoes. While he tugged at my torn blue jeans, his stepladder rapped out a goofy
tap-tap-tap
(one leg of the ladder was shorter than the other, or else the attic floor was uneven).

“She
meant
for Will to see her without her clothes,” I said. “She called him out to the kitchen.”

He looked up from his efforts with a salesman’s friendly chuckle. “Well, she knows she looks good naked.”
Neck-ed.
Then he stood and guided me—bare-legged but still wearing my T-shirt and tweed jacket—in the direction of his unmade bed.

Sex might be required, but sex was not what I was after, and to inspire Jeremy Fletcher, I said (the improvisation sounded tinny in my ears), “You should be with me instead of Esmé”—and, then, because it seemed essential to step out absolutely as far as possible on that lunatic limb that I had constructed, I added, “I’d love you more than she does.”

“And you’re here to prove that, are you?” His expression was quite keen as he removed my jacket, very interested. It disappeared from view as he pulled my T-shirt over my head but when I recovered from that momentary compression of my eyelids—which still can make me feel like a tiny child, even when I remove a T-shirt on my own—I found him staring at my breasts, saying something admiring about their size and shape.

So it was that we got down to our unpleasant business.

I don’t remember every detail. Thank god. Suffice it to say that between our energetic episodes on that freezing bed, we smoked some more dope from the emerald-green bong, also downed shots of mescal and bourbon. At some point I fell asleep or blacked out (in the hospital, after my bicycle accident, taking the AA quiz, I’d thought:
But everybody has black-outs when they drink, right?
).

When I came around, I had no idea where I was. I’d worked my face into the angle where the attic’s sloped ceiling met a low perpendicular wall, and, when I tried to sit up, I bumped my head and got the panic-inducing idea that I was trapped. There was some light behind me, though, and, as I rolled toward it, the swell of the water bed told me where I was: naked and lying alongside naked Jeremy Fletcher.

The light—from fluorescents left on in the bathroom—revealed that Jeremy Fletcher’s eyes were closed. Was he asleep? On his back, with his red beard pointing upward, he looked like a pal of Falstaff, and I doubted I looked any better.

Although I felt sick to death of my entire self, my self-loathing did not stop me from recognizing that my knee hurt. Also that I was freezing. The attic was even colder than when I had arrived and whatever coverings had been on the water bed were now bunched under Jeremy Fletcher.

I wanted to escape, immediately, but how could I get out of the water bed without rocking him awake?

I could not bear the thought of talking to the man.

Maybe I would die. Right there. Just—turn to ash. Blow away. That would be a remedy.

My eyes in slits—if Jeremy Fletcher looked my way, I didn’t want him to see that I was awake—I studied the water bed’s exposed vinyl liner, a thing of a shrill blue that aptly conveyed the bed’s chill. Its surface was embossed with tiny ridges of waves, and it occurred to me, in that way that idle thoughts will even during unbearable moments, that had I been inclined to run a fingernail over the liner’s tiny ridges, they would have raised a tiny noise, a tiny
zip
. Also, I noted how, from a hummock of flesh-colored mole on Jeremy Fletcher’s shoulder, there sprouted two longish hairs. First, the hairs grew upward for about an inch. Then each grew laterally for half an inch or so before settling into a droop, and that droop—it put me dismally in mind of the weeping tree in a faux-Japanese print that had hung above the toilet in the bathroom of my parents’ house my entire life.

“Brontë? You awake?”

Terrible to have to open my eyes. Opening my eyes meant an admission of what had occurred, but, then, it was unavoidable if the world were to continue.

I opened my eyes.

Jeremy Fletcher zoomed his face close to mine and grinned; then he arched his back and yanked at the mess of bedding under him. After a few tugs, he worked one sheet free, and this he snapped high in the air above us, made it billow in the same way that Will did, sometimes, after we made love. It was charming when Will did it. When Will did it, after the little breeze that he raised briefly suspended the sheet above us—our own unblemished, intimate sky—I would feel that our naked selves were as sweet as Adam and Eve.

So much for that notion.

After Jeremy Fletcher’s not very clean sheet settled over us, he boxed up his pillow, folded his hands behind him, and, with a contented sigh, rested his head. Grinning up at the slanted drywall ceiling, he might have been a pagan god whom I had vested with dread power. Maybe there were words that he could say—an incantation—that would make me less horror-struck at what I’d done or, even better, persuade me that I hadn’t really done it? There was just some drugged confusion on my part that needed adjustment, something like what I’d experienced when I first lay down on the water bed and, looking up, did not understand how there could be a trail of boot prints—
Red Wing, Red Wing,
read the boots’ tread—across the ceiling.

Jeremy Fletcher started talking, his voice sounding jubilant, the way it usually did when he told his stories:

He’d gotten caught in an infidelity once, back when he lived in Austin, Texas, and worked at a bar called the Broken Spoke. “Y’all heard of the Broken Spoke?”

I shook my head. Red Wing was the brand name of a manufacturer of work boots. A worker had walked over the sheet of drywall before the drywall had been installed. My heart thumped hard under my hands, which were clamped together so tight. It was hard for me to hear Jeremy Fletcher over my personal turmoil, but I forced myself to listen, and the words with which he ended this story, which featured his car being found parked in front of a house
where it shouldn’t oughta have been
, tears, and recriminations, were these:

“I want you to know, of course, I lied, Brontë.”

Of course, I lied.
The attic vibrated like a bell, just struck. Or else I did.

I never had felt that there was an
of course
to any of the lies that I’d ever told, but I hardly could claim the moral high ground with regard to a man from under whose ass I’d earlier in the evening drawn forth my ponytail in order to extricate myself from the position popularly known as 69.

His tacit warning—
I’ll say you’re a liar if you ever tell Esmé about tonight—
was completely unnecessary for my now sober and sadly sane self. Mustering as casual a tone as possible—trying to match his—I said, “Well, I’m gonna take off now.”

He laughed. “It’s”—he tilted his head backward to look at the clock on the nearby card table—“two
a.m
., Brontë. Go to sleep. We’ll eat Froot Loops for breakfast.”

No, I had a morning class, I said. I slid to the bottom of the water bed in order to avoid any unnecessary bodily contact, grabbed up my clothes and bag from where they lay, scattered across the attic floor, and hurried into the bathroom.

Idiot, idiot, idiot.

I cried. To cover the sound, I ran the faucet at full strength. A tube of toothpaste sat on the back rim of the little sink. I ignored it in favor of the powdered cleanser meant for scrubbing the sink. I considered my face in the medicine cabinet mirror while I scrubbed and scrubbed. Teeth, tongue. A little of Esmé’s black liner still encircled my eyes. It had run away with my tears and now made me look like a very old German shepherd.

When I emerged from the bathroom, dressed, smoking a cigarette, ready to go, I found Jeremy Fletcher sitting up on the water bed, Indian-style, with his bong. “You should know,” he said, voice squeezed tight around his toke as he raised his hand in a wave, “you did wow me, Brontë.”

Wow.

The night was very dark when I stepped out from that asphalt-shingled house, the moon only a suggestion behind dense, smoke-colored clouds.

As I pedaled toward the apartment, I could feel the wet spot where Jeremy Fletcher’s semen had leaked onto my underpants grow cold.
Wow,
I thought. A circus word. A word of entertainment and spectacle. Awful. Appropriate.

Chapter 18

In mid-December, Jeremy Fletcher headed to Mobile for winter break. Esmé drooped around our apartment that night (the first time she’d slept there in ages). The next morning, though, ready to leave for her own holiday, she was shiny with excitement. She was driving to O’Hare, leaving her car at the airport while she flew to New York for a week’s reunion with undergraduate friends from Columbia, then flying back to Chicago to spend the holidays with her family in Evanston.

While we carried her bags down to her car, she talked excitedly about clubs she wanted to visit. And had she told me that her friend Sarah was flying in from London? “There are going to be parties and dinners out at decent places!
And
I’m going to see if I can’t get my parents to send me to Mobile for New Year’s!”

“Brr, brr, brr,”
we said while we rushed out into the freezing cold morning, but the sun was out. It raised a golden nimbus on the mink brim of a fabulous hat that Esmé’s father had bought for her that fall while working on a case in Russia, and, as Esmé unlocked the car’s trunk, I said—I wore only a sweater and so I jumped up and down to stave off the cold—“Tell me again, what do you call that hat?”

“A
papakha.
”

From reading Russian novels, I could guess that the curly, butter-soft, pearl-blue stuff that formed the high cap must be what was called astrakhan
lamb
.
“It makes you look like a perfect czarina!” I said. “Your father must have great taste!” I felt pleased with myself. What I had said sounded like one of Esmé’s compliments, but Esmé frowned as she took the suitcases I carried, and, while she settled them neatly in the trunk, she said, “Actually, his assistant probably bought it. She went to Russia with him.
Denise
. Whom he’s probably boinking.”

This startled me. From sheer awkwardness—I never had heard Esmé say anything critical of her father before—I blurted a laugh, then apologized. “But you’re kidding, right?”

“No,” she said matter-of-factly. She shut the trunk of the car. Briskly slapped her gloved hands together. One, two, three. “Oh, Charlotte!”
She
laughed then. “You should see your face! You’re such a naïf, you sweet Candide! But here I am, rattling on like a ninny when I need to get on the road!” She hugged me. “Take care of yourself, you.”

I waved when she got into her car, then I ran up to the apartment—both to get myself warm and to shake off what Esmé had said. Did she mean that, about her father? And she thought I was a naïf? Well, maybe I was, but the mantra of the last weeks that ran in my head also let me know,
You are a rat
. Since Thanksgiving, both times that I’d been at the apartment when Jeremy Fletcher came by with Esmé, I had managed to stay in my room. I had not attended the last after-reading parties of the semester. I had stayed away from the Mill and sworn off alcohol and anything else that might bulldoze my apparently very shaky principles. “Really, I have so much work to do,” I’d said when Esmé complained, and she
was
aware that I hadn’t totally recovered since Thanksgiving. A low-grade nausea continued to dog me, often left me bowed ineffectively over the toilet.

Still, I worked well over the winter break. I had made up a tight schedule: what time to wake up (five thirty); how long to write; when to eat; when to break for a swim at the rec center or for a run. Thinking of Will—I knew he kept to a schedule—I followed my schedule religiously. I also continued to take my birth control pills each morning—hoping Will would change his mind—though I no longer took them with orange juice. Orange juice worsened my persistent nausea. Orange juice, coffee, the smell of the moldy bathroom (with Esmé gone, whenever I was not in the bathroom, I kept its window open and jammed towels along the base of the door to contain the smell).

What did I make of the fact that I vomited, or at least hung over the toilet, a couple of times a day? In classic denial, monogrammed to suit me, I attributed what I felt to: (1) the lingering effects of what must have been a truly terrible case of the flu, and not the simple Thanksgiving Day food poisoning from which the others had recovered; (2) overwhelming guilt and fear that Esmé or Will would find out about me and Jeremy Fletcher; and (3) the bathroom’s mold. In fact, I’d decided that if the mold were eradicated—maybe I’d become
allergic
to the mold—I probably would get better, and, after four telephone calls, I finally convinced the heavily mustachioed building manager to come by. Green cap, green overalls, he had to be trying to look like one of the Super Mario Brothers. He hemmed and hawed while I helpfully held back the shower curtain, but he got a surprise when he went to pick at the plaster with the tip of a key from his big ring, and it sunk right into the mush.