As Good as Dead (3 page)

Above all, I wanted to make it possible to act surprised if Esmé gave me the cold shoulder in front of Will. If she gave me the cold shoulder, Will would want to know why, and he never could know why.

This being the case, when Esmé didn’t respond to my card or my call, I got nervous, and decided to pay Will a visit at his new Art Department office.

Will’s office hours (1:00
p.m.
to 4:00
p.m.
, Tuesday through Thursday) were neatly penned on an index card that he’d taped to the lower right hand corner of his door’s privacy glass. It was Monday and not quite eleven when I arrived in the Art Building. No lights shone behind the glass, but I knew that, outside of office hours, Will worked in the dark so that the office would appear empty. Mornings were his writing time and precious (we both felt the weight of our new jobs; on top of our teaching and the pressure to publish in the right places, we now were experiencing the burden of university committee work, too). After a soft rap on the glass, I whispered, “It’s Charlotte, I’ll just be a second,” then slipped inside.

“What’s up?” he asked but kept his eyes on the computer screen in front of him—something to do with his application for a Guggenheim Fellowship, I saw as I went to stand behind him and massage his tensed shoulders. I’d temporarily been assigned the office of a notoriously randy medievalist, off on sabbatical, and, while I proceeded to rub Will’s neck—I wanted to entertain him—I explained that, during my office hours that morning, I’d shoved a five-drawer file cabinet out of what I registered as an illogical spot and discovered that it hid three of those cheap full-length mirrors available at places like Wal-Mart.

“Crazy,” Will said, “but what you’re doing feels so great. Could you do my shoulders again?” and, rubbing away, I went on to tell him what I’d truly come to say:

“You know, something hit me today. Before we left Minneapolis, I sent our new address to Esmé Cole—because I’d found out she was living here?—and she’s never responded.”

Practicing these words as I’d walked across the sunlit, busy campus, I’d assumed that Will, distracted by his work, would pause only long enough to file my information in his prodigious memory, and that, friends, would be that. Instead, he swiveled in the squealing office chair and grabbed my hands. I still could view such gestures from Will as thrilling, but, on that particular morning, I’d envisioned a quick getaway and so I was startled by his attention. Also by the unexpected and rare expression of repugnance that crossed his face when he said, “That woman, though—I remember you being upset with her when I was in Italy, Charlotte. You called me, remember? And you haven’t heard from her in
years
, right?”

I nodded, but without looking at him. I stared at his office window. It sat so high in the wall that all I could see was sky.

“I’m sorry you’re disappointed,” he said, “but remember that Thanksgiving dinner from hell we had with her and her creepy boyfriend? Whom she married, right?” He grinned, the impish expression also uncharacteristic. “Look at the bright side! If you and your friend had reconnected, we probably would have had to see him, too! Maybe it’s not so awful!”

Such luck!
I’d thought. Will viewed Jeremy and Esmé Fletcher as merely a couple of people I’d known while he was off studying in Italy, people he had met over a dud Thanksgiving dinner that had left all of us with food poisoning.

To Will, they were inconsequential.

Chapter 3

Inconsequential.

Had he been in our front hall the morning that stout, pant-suited, forty-something Esmé suddenly stepped forward and wrapped her hefty arms around me, he would have seen my eyes fill with tears. Indeed, I was so affected—and startled, that was part of it—that I almost blurted,
I’m so sorry for what I did, Esmé!

But, then, as fast as she had stepped toward me, Esmé stepped away and turned and began looking around herself. If she noticed that I had gone teary-eyed, she did not let on. With one of her characteristic great whoops of laughter, she declared, “But, Charlotte, your house is adorable!” The tip of her tongue held merrily between her front teeth, she made as if to rap my arm with her wagging index finger. “Now why on earth aren’t you on Facebook, you?”

Confused, chagrined, I opened my eyes very wide to stop any tears from escaping. I worked to make my voice match hers, gave it a
droll
spin. “Oh, it’s—not for me, Esmé.”

“Not for you.” She seemed to contemplate the taste of the words. She rolled her mouth a little, like someone testing a sip of wine. “But do you remember Ann Abbot, Charlotte? She’s how I found out about you! You remember Ann?”

“Sure, sure. Pretty. Published a collection with Knopf when we first graduated. Boyfriend wore his hair in a mullet. I remember everybody from back then.” Not all that smart, making claims about your memory to a woman whose now-husband you once screwed in the bad old days, so I added, “Which can be a curse!” followed by a laugh that came out punier than I would have liked, but it didn’t seem to matter. Esmé was off, talking at a gallop, very emphatic, smiling, nodding. I felt dazed. Esmé in my front hall.

“Of course, I read your
P in Paris
, but I could have sworn the jacket copy said Charlotte Price lived in Minneapolis!” She jabbered something—briefly, her voice rose to a pitch I found hard to hear—something about the “reformed poet” whom I’d run into all those years before at the Walker Art Center: “I’m positive
she
told me you lived in Minneapolis, but maybe I got it wrong! Maybe she just said she’d
seen
you there. You and
Mystery Man
!” She zoomed her face toward me—I remembered Jeremy Fletcher doing that in the old days, an imitation of the Guy Caballero character from the popular
SCTV
—“Anyway!” She clapped three times in quick succession, like a grade school teacher getting the children’s attention before moving them along to the next activity. “Anyway, last week, Ann saw a copy of
another
book by you—with glowing blurbs!—and it said you and Will lived
here
and taught at the U!” She shook her index finger at me again and said a playful, “Why didn’t you let me know, you?”

Queasy and a little unsafe. That’s how I felt. Also exhilarated. She’d made no reference at all to my postcard or telephone call of eleven years earlier, and I asked my dizzy self,
Is it possible that somebody at her office mistook the postcard for junk mail? That she never got the phone message?
These questions were high-flying, multicolored balloons whose dangling strings I happily grabbed. With daffy hope—I
had
treasured the friendship—I let them loft me right over her twenty years of silence. My voice small, I said, “I did, though—eleven years ago—I did write you, Esmé. With our address. Here.” I raised my hands, indicating the house around me.

Well, her mouth fell open. “Are you serious?” Her voice was low, sorrowful. “My god. You’re serious, Charlotte.” When I nodded, she grabbed my hands with hers and she squeezed them and said, “Oh, honey! How can that be? For
years
, you mean, we could have been seeing each other?”

A rueful, smiling nod from me. Here was Esmé. Standing in my front hall. Not hating me. My old friend. The same lovely lips with a pretty petunia-petal crinkle to them. I didn’t dare mention that I’d left a telephone message at her office, too. I wasn’t sufficiently confident that she could have missed both. I decided to be satisfied that she wanted to see me again.

“But how fabulous is it,” she asked, “that you’re living out our dream, girlfriend? A famous writer! And tenured! Will, too, I suppose? Hey, and Jer and I can claim we know you both!”

Compliments always had come easily to Esmé, but I felt self-conscious at her calling me a famous writer; also uncomfortably obliged to contradict it (she had to know that I was strictly a midlist author). I crouched to tug flat the rug that I’d rumpled in opening the front door. “Tenured, yes,” I mumbled. “Famous, no.”

“Oh, well!” She laughed and stepped around me and into the living room. “Eventually you’ll be famous, right? Make the old Workshop proud!” She rubbed a hand across the top of one of the pair of wingback chairs that flanked the fireplace, and, her back to me, she asked, “But did you ever write about hanging around the playground when you were little, hoping a teenage boy would think you were your playmate’s babysitter and ask you out on a date?”

I warmed to the thought that she recalled our ancient conversations; then remembered what a terrible gut spiller I’d been in those days. Still could be. Beware. “No, I never did.”

“You should!” She leaned over and picked up a pillow that sat on the wingback and, from my vantage point, appeared to plump it before she walked toward the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves at the back of the room. “Let’s see what all you have hidden here, Charlotte!” she said.

I wondered if she might be giving our modest house a quick appraisal. She had worked in real estate; maybe she still did. Should I ask about her work? Or would the housing market’s recent collapse make the subject awkward?

Hands behind her back, like a kid who has been told not to touch, she leaned forward and inspected the opalescent vase of purpled Venetian glass that Will had brought me when he’d returned from his studies in Italy back in 1989. It never had been to my taste, and I wished—stupid, I knew—that I could convey the fact to Esmé, to make certain that she didn’t think less of me for owning the thing.

She moved along to looking at a photo of Will and me and the poet-professor who had introduced us. It might be that she expected me to ask if she and Jeremy Fletcher still wrote. Would be insulted if I didn’t ask. Or—if the answer were no—would be uncomfortable if I did. Not long after she had stopped responding to my letters, a very good story of hers had appeared in a quarterly that everyone at the Workshop admired. I hadn’t seen work from either her or Jeremy Fletcher since those days but that did not mean they weren’t writing. Or publishing. Publishing had already started undergoing big changes when we were at the Workshop. Now there were so many literary magazines—print and online—that no one could read them all. I’d always found Jeremy Fletcher’s work histrionic, pretentious—Southern Gothic mates with Synonym Finder—but, for all I knew, the man had an online fan base of a million members.

“Charlotte”—Esmé turned from the bookshelves and said, her voice low—“I don’t see evidence of kids.”

I shuddered inwardly but responded with what I hoped sounded like a preoccupied, “No kids,” and proceeded to make a little theater piece of myself: The parlor maid in laced boots and white mob cap nimbly goes up on tiptoes to push open the drapes to the left of the fireplace (the drapes through which I had peeked out at my guest minutes before), then the drapes to the right. No denying that Esmé and I had “talked kids” in the old days. For the sake of our writing, we would limit ourselves to two apiece.
And if the sexes work out right
, Esmé had declared—I was incredibly flattered—
we’ll force them to marry each other so you and I can be related!

“Your books are your kids, though, right, Charlotte?”

Thank you, thank you for that.
I turned to smile at Esmé and nod but was stopped by the dramatic way her lower lip stuck out, revealing its wet and pink inside.
Pity
, I thought, and a wave of anguish passed through me, followed close by a wave of confused tenderness for this old friend, for our history. When I was able to speak, I said—the words coming out in a croak—“You have two boys, right?”

She nodded, her face still grave. Then she sighed and said, “They’re getting old, Charlotte. Rob Roy is already off at college, and Brannon will go next year.”

But here we were, together! I wanted to shake off the gloom! Now it was my turn to clap my hands like a schoolteacher. “Come out in the kitchen! I’ll make coffee!”

“Oh, no, no”—she looked toward the window—“I’d love to, sweetie, but Jer’s waiting.”

Sure enough: When I looked out to the gravel road beyond the screen of fine-leaved creosote bushes, I made out a beige SUV holding a gray figure behind its gray-tinted windows.

The idea of Jeremy Fletcher so nearby made me feel slightly ill, but Esmé was laughing. “He said, ‘Tell Charlotte I apologize for not coming to the door, but I am in a foul, foul mood and would not want to expose another soul to it!’”

After twenty years, she could ape his Southern accent to a T. I made a friendly humming noise meant to signal,
You can tell me more or not; no problem, either way
.

“Oh, you know Jer, Charlotte!” She smiled the lovely smile. Gave her head a fond shake.

She always had taken pride in everything about the man. His moodiness, outré redneck views, overwrought Gothic fictions, the Confederate flag tattooed on the back of his hand.
Isn’t he brilliant, Charlotte?
I never had understood. Now, however, it struck me as simply wonderful.

Chapter 4

My first view of Esmé Cole, back in August 1988, had been from below and behind.

I’d just entered the dim hallway of a squat brick apartment building where I was to meet a rental agent. I heard swearing from the narrow staircase rising in front of me. There, a young woman, her legs coltish in cutoff blue jeans, was kicking at the corner of a fat, navy-blue futon that had gotten wedged into the landing.