As Good as Dead (30 page)

“Please,” I said. “Do something a whole lot worse. I’ll be consoled.”

She laughed at that and I did, too, and then I coughed a little sob. “He’ll never forgive me.”

Firmly, Jacqueline said, “Now I don’t believe that, Charlotte. I’ve seen you two together. There was that big Fourth of July picnic when we sat together, and a couple of New Year’s Eve Alcathons. I could see straightaway that Will recognized what a fine person you are—which told me he was a man of real substance.” She seemed satisfied with this for a moment, then blurted, “But that’s not the point, darn it! Whether he forgives you or not! Work on forgiving yourself. And everybody else, while you’re at it. Forgive your old friend, and if you’ve got a beef against her creepy husband, forgive him, too. Hell, forgive your mom and dad, too, while you’re at it. Everybody. Otherwise, you’re just treading the same old dirty bathwater.”

I nodded, but it was a nod of defeat rather than agreement.

“And Will,” Jacqueline said. “Forgive him, too.”

“Will? For what?”

She ground out her cigarette with the tip of one of her pointy-toed shoes. “For not always being exactly the way you want him to be? Not getting on board about having kids?”

“I never told you he wasn’t . . .
on board
. Where’d you get that idea?”

Jacqueline opened her mouth. Her face went a flushed pink (I could guess mine was the same color). “Forget I said that, Charlotte. That was presumptuous of me. I apologize.” She glanced at her watch. Its delicate gold band looked as if it had grown too tight, as if it might be cutting into the soft flesh of her wrist. “We better get going,” she said, “or else we’ll miss the ten o’clock meeting, too!”

I think we both felt a bit awkward after that. We didn’t talk as Jacqueline drove east on Twenty-Second Street. As she turned north on Columbus Boulevard.

Was what she had said about Will true?

We passed a large, straw-colored building. The words
UNCLE BOB
’S POPCORN
were spelled out in red paint on its south side. I usually passed Uncle Bob’s Popcorn when I went to a meeting at the Alano Club. The painted words always looked oddly naïve to me, like a child’s writing
store
on a building in his drawing of a little town.

My head—it seemed to be filled with concrete that was starting to set.

“Christ, I make myself sick,” I said.

“Well, exactly!” Jacqueline said. “So cut it out!”

I had never been to a ten o’clock meeting in the annex. The group was small, under fifteen people. Most of the world already had gone to work. Five or six of the people present were older and dressed in the type of casual knits that Jacqueline wore and that I associated with retirees. One young man in a suit and tie looked as if he’d be headed to an office when the meeting ended. In the front row, there sat a sexy, rather scruffy young woman in a turquoise halter top and very low-slung jeans. She seemed impatient for the meeting to begin. She kept tossing her long dark hair around her bare shoulders, and her expressions ping-ponged between what appeared to be bitter brooding and astonished delight. She was seated between two of the older people in knits, and, from the fond way that they looked at her, and then back at each other, I surmised that they were her parents. The people who appeared closest to me in age were a biker in a pirate bandanna and a sweatshirt whose cutoff sleeves exposed his slabs of heavily tattooed muscles, and a bald, handicapped woman who rode into the building on a motorized scooter decorated with a silky red, white, and blue Arizona Wildcat pennant flying off its rear end.

My people. Not exactly what I’d had in mind when I started out in life, but, hey, as Jacqueline and I had found seats around the table, I’d seen a lot of hand shaking and hugging. People were laughing. They were doing something right. Most of them knew one another and seemed to be friends. Which was the way it was supposed to be. You weren’t supposed to graduate from the meetings or drop in every once in a while. You were supposed to attend regularly and be a member of the group and wise up and stick around and share what you learned with newcomers.

Not just periodically ask to be rescued.

That meeting gave out coins (“chips,” in AA parlance) to celebrate milestones in its members’ sobriety. There was a one-month chip, a two-month, a three-month, and so on; eventually, the chips marked years of continuous sobriety. There also was a twenty-four-hour chip that you did not have to do a thing to earn, and when a very tanned old gentleman in a banana-yellow golf sweater—“Randolph, alcoholic”—started out the day’s chip giving by holding up a silver twenty-four-hour chip and asking, “Anybody here want a twenty-four-hour chip? Good-day, bad-day chip? Going-out-of-town chip? My-dog-has-fleas chip?” I raised my hand.

Randolph smiled and nodded, and I walked around the table to the head of the room. “Charlotte, alcoholic,” I said. Old Randolph hugged me, and he set the twenty-four-hour chip into my hand and gently folded my fingers over it. I turned and faced the group. “I need to come to meetings more often,” I said. “I’m thankful all of you are here, and . . . I’m here.”

“Welcome!” the people around the table said. “Glad you’re here!”

I returned to my chair. Randolph—grinning, humming “Camptown Races”—looked through the plastic chip box to see if it held a six-month chip for the pretty young woman in the halter top. She was clowning around, excited, standing on tiptoe, lightly clapping her hands together and smiling and smiling at the couple—they were smiling, too—whom I’d taken for her parents.

“Pass your chip,” Jacqueline whispered to me (a ritual; each member would briefly hold the chip before it finally made its way back to the recipient).

Forgive everybody.

I tried to pay attention. The man with the tattooed biceps suggested as a topic “how expectations lead to resentments,” and I (along with the woman on the motorized scooter) groaned in appreciation.

When it was my turn to speak, however, I said only, “I’m Charlotte, and I’m an alcoholic, and I’m just going to listen today.”

Jacqueline passed, too, but at the very end of the meeting, she said, “I’m so happy my friend Charlotte and I could join you today. Some of you remember Mitzi—lots of sobriety when she died, thirty-some years I think—and Mitzi used to say she kept her memory green by coming to meetings. I’ve always remembered that. We get civilized here, and if we want to stay civilized, we keep coming back.”

After the meeting ended, a couple of people nodded at me and smiled. I didn’t get the big, open-armed welcome that I’d always wanted, but, then, I probably couldn’t have handled it anyway. Jacqueline introduced me to the parents of the young woman who had received the six-month chip. “You mind if I say where you work?” Jacqueline asked me, and when I said no, she explained that the couple worked at the university, too. “Music Department,” the woman said; “Engineering,” said her husband. The man with the tattooed biceps patted my shoulder in passing and said, “Keep coming back!”

“Thanks,” I called after him.

Jacqueline turned to me and smiled. “Maybe you need to get a tattoo,” she whispered as we started out of the building. “A motto, like, ‘What other people think of me is none of my business.’”

“Right.”

Will’s Subaru sat parked in the carport, alongside mine.

“I guess I kind of hoped he wouldn’t be home,” I said.

Jacqueline squeezed my shoulder. “Do I need to drive around for a while so you can recite ‘I’m a good person’ a hundred times?”

“No.”

“All right, then. Remember: Don’t grovel. And have some compassion for yourself! You didn’t grow up with the tools you needed, Charlotte. You did the best you knew how at the time.”

“
That
is not something he’d want to hear.”

“So don’t say it to him, for pity’s sake! But make sure you remember that it’s true!”

I gave her a good-bye hug. “One of these days,” she said, “I’d be willing to bet money, you’re going to see all this as a gift.”

I grimaced.

She laughed. “I know, I know, honey, you don’t believe everything happens for a reason, so forget I said that, but think how you’re going to be able to go forward, from here! Those secrets have made you kind of a scaredy-cat in your marriage, you know.”

I nodded. I knew.

Will was seated at the dining room table, at work on his laptop, but he stood as soon as I slid open the door. His face was pale. “I want to know,” he said, “what was going on at your friends’ place? Esmé’s? Something was going on. Tell me what it was.”

The night before, I had pictured myself down on my knees, but Jacqueline had said, “Don’t grovel,” and I didn’t allow myself to drop down into a keening ball. My words, though, when I spoke, came out like sludge, dark, heavy, and so
big
that they hurt not only my throat but my temples, my jaws, as if I were forcing the whole of myself, inside out, through my mouth:

That Thanksgiving. You told me you weren’t coming back, and I was so upset. Esmé . . . out in the kitchen, without her clothes.

He growled, “What did
you
do, Charlotte?”

It was infuriating, I understood, for him to have to watch me bawl, shoulders heaving. I covered my face with my hands as I said a choked, “I’d give anything if I could change it.”

“Go on.”

“Esmé—I know it’s no excuse—but after you left for the airport, she said she knew you were attracted to her. I got upset, and then Jeremy told me she’d laughed about me being upset. She left town that day, too, and I got stoned—”

Silence. Then a familiar metallic click that I recognized as Will setting down his glasses. I lowered my hands. He was rubbing the red indentations where the glasses’ guards pressed too tightly against his nose. “Tell me you didn’t fuck that creep,” he said.

I raised a terrible index finger. Once.

“Christ.” He kicked the leg of the table hard enough that his glasses scooted off the other side and fell to the floor. “So, all that coy shit!
Eat your green beans, Charlotte.
While I’m sitting there like a chump! And, you—you were the one who worried I’d be unfaithful to you while I was in Italy!”

I lifted the neck of my T-shirt and used it to wipe my face. “I’m so sorry, but there’s more, Will.”

He opened his mouth. Closed it. His expression of fury shifted to one of utter boredom. He glanced away, up toward the light fixture that hung over the table. He had become an official forced to listen to the most tired and improbable tale from a known reprobate.

Was it all rubble between us now? I went on. “After Thanksgiving, I kept feeling sick and losing weight, and when I didn’t get my period, I told myself—”

One gape-mouthed glance. Then he snapped to again and said, “Speak up! I hardly can hear you!”

“My being sick threw off the birth control pills. I was pregnant. I didn’t know—”

He smiled a poisonous smile, but there was a metallic alarm in his voice when he asked, “Did you tell
Jeremy
?”

I wanted to take hold of him and remind him that I was Charlotte; but, although he never had hit me, I had a feeling that if I were to put my hands on him, then, he might well shove me across the room. “I didn’t tell anyone! There was no way I could tell you—I was terrified you wouldn’t love me anymore!”

He thrust his arms upward in a big V. Bent forward from the waist. I recognized this dramatic posture as one his father employed at the pulpit. It was nothing I’d ever seen from Will. “I’m sure you were right!” he boomed.

“
No one
was supposed to know, ever, but I got an infection. It was bad. I needed Esmé’s help.”

His lip curled. He suspected that I wanted to arouse some sympathy in him, and, understandably, that disgusted him. I was beyond that though. I wanted only to finish the story.

“I told her nobody could know—not even you. She assumed you were the father—”

“Well, of
course
!” he said, very jolly.

But that was too much! I raised my hands in the air and made fists. “Please, Will!”

He looked away. “Just . . . finish.”

I was shaking again, but now partly in anger. “Esmé saw I was judging the Poulos Prize, so she submitted Jeremy’s novel. Now it’s a finalist and she wants me to make it the winner. She didn’t come right out and say it, but the threat was clear: either I name it the winner or she’d tell you about my being with Jeremy. And that I aborted a baby that might have been ours.”

He glared at me; then clasped his hands to his head. “You can . . . drop that baby bullshit, Charlotte. We wouldn’t have had a baby back then.”

“I might have, though! If I’d known it was ours! Or that having the abortion meant I’d never have a baby at all!”

He stepped to the sliding door and, with a great
whoosh
, shoved the door open on its track. The thing banged so hard against the far side of the frame that it rebounded, came back to a close, the glass shaking, just after Will had stepped out onto the ramada. Almost as fast, though, he flung the door open again and demanded to know why we had gone to the Fletchers’ for dinner.