As Good as Dead (5 page)

As I got closer to the university and rode through the old and historically desirable Sam Hughes neighborhood, I spotted classic adobes—always well-kept family homes—that investors now crammed with as many student renters as possible. Boys, mostly. Former front yards held multiple pickup trucks and SUVs. Riding home recently—dark coming earlier—I’d noticed several living rooms lit up with neon signs for Corona and Dos Equis.

During our house hunt, Will and I had looked at an adobe in this neighborhood—it had been far out of our reach. Maybe it still would have been, collapse or not, but now its arched window sported what had to be a student’s Confederate flag.

That flag. One of the great and terrible features of being human is surely the way that—just trying to build a good warning system based on information about our past errors—the brain captures dreadful moments of our lives with the finest brushstrokes. So it was that a veritable Vermeer of Jeremy Fletcher’s attic apartment in Iowa City came into my head as I passed that flag—just like the flag tacked to the wall above Jeremy Fletcher’s stove.

The flag, the crusts of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on a card table that also held several spiral notebooks, some new and still sleek, others fluffed up by use (the turning of pages, the addition of pencil lead or ink). Also on the card table: the cloudy emerald-green bong of which Jeremy Fletcher and I had made use the evening that I visited the attic apartment. Across the dun, unpainted drywall ceiling over his water bed, an initially confusing, gray ghost trail of boot prints had been left by some long-gone construction worker.
Red Wing, Red Wing.
And here was Jeremy Fletcher’s attic bathroom: varnished car siding as shiny and brown as pretzel sticks, towels the dark green of pine needles—the towels gifts from Esmé, I knew, because I had been with her when she purchased them to replace “the regular horrors” she’d found when she first stayed over.

And now Jeremy Fletcher himself. A fleshy man, older than most of the Workshop students in ’88, already well into his thirties. His fine hair had started to recede. Wrinkles radiated out from his rheumy blue eyes and formed a light necklace along the fold of a double chin not entirely concealed by a red sea-foam beard.

On a green light, I pedaled across Campbell Avenue and continued toward the Modern Languages Building. The sun was high, the sky almost white, as if the heat of the day had baked out the color, but I shivered at the memory of Jeremy Fletcher. In his bathroom, sitting next to the base of his toilet, there had been a can of Comet cleanser, and, before heading back to Esmé’s and my apartment, I had sprinkled rills of that bleachy blue stuff on my index finger; scrubbed it into my teeth and my tongue before bending low over the tiny sink, there, and rinsing out my mouth with water that whined as it made its trip up to the attic. “Brontë!” Jeremy Fletcher had called from bed as I turned the doorknob to escape his apartment.
Brontë
was a joke that he had started a few days before, over the Thanksgiving dinner that he and Esmé and I had been ready to tuck into when—the most fantastic surprise, it seemed at the time—my beloved boyfriend, Will Ludlow, just flown in from Italy, had shown up at the door of Esmé’s and my place on Burlington Street.

How about:
I was so young
?

How about:
I was raised by wolves
?

No, no good blaming the wolves for what I did back then. The wolves themselves had been raised by wolves, and, no doubt, the same holds true for our dour British Isles ancestors who picked away in coal and slate mines and survived on soda loaves and potatoes and are known to me strictly from sepia studio photographs (some of them in finery rented from studio photographers: the women with ruffs of fur around their necks, the men in top hats and long, heavy coats done up with glossy silk frogs instead of everyday buttons).

How about:
I was
—as folks sometimes described themselves at AA meetings—
an egomaniac with an inferiority complex
?

What I had done with Jeremy Fletcher—on top of my betrayal of Esmé and Will—the whole thing had been a crazed, nightmare collaboration against myself. And to think how lucky, lucky, lucky I’d felt those early September mornings in Iowa City when I walked down the apartment’s twig of hallway and found my new best friend, Esmé Cole, bundled in her puffy, pink fumble of bathrobe at our Formica dinette! By the time that I got up, Esmé already would be smoking a cigarette, drinking a cup of the strong coffee that she brewed each morning, and undertaking—with the help of a makeup mirror surrounded by many small lightbulbs—those beauty routines whose results I envied but whose execution I could not have withstood (running a pin through her eyelashes to eliminate telltale clumps of mascara, plucking her brows as fine as a flapper’s, trimming her cuticles with a metal device that left each moon of her perfect nails impeccably revealed). If it isn’t
triceratops
! I would say, in honor of the jumbo-size pink plastic rollers that she used in order to establish the requisite volume for her grand Gibson Girl hair.
Miss Piggy
,
she’d call me (she considered it scandalous that I sometimes went to class in the same clothes I wore for running and rarely folded what I brought home from the Laundromat).

We did not see each other as much as I had imagined we would since I usually studied and wrote at the library or the computer lab, both of which sat close to the English-Philosophy Building, where I taught and attended classes, but I cherished our friendship. Minus Will—and writing stories for the Workshop, studying nineteenth-century British novels, and teaching two classes of undergraduates—I sometimes felt untethered. I loved that Esmé always was at the apartment in the mornings. We had our little routines. “Pill time!” Esmé would say, and, together, we’d go into the kitchen and pull our respective birth control packages from the back of the silverware drawer and down our pills with orange juice. Then, as if we were a cozy married couple, we would carry cups of coffee into the living room. We’d arranged the furnished sofa and Esmé’s futon to face each other and, from the futon, Esmé would read aloud to me the crime reports that, having grown up near Chicago and done her undergraduate degree at Columbia, she found hysterically innocent
.

A red leather Coach bag containing a matching wallet, keys, and a DynaTAC cell telephone was reported stolen from a first-floor carrel at Main Library, approximately 1:30
p.m
.

Officers were called to a disturbance near playground equipment at Mercer Park. Staunton Overby, 21, of Coralville, Iowa, was arrested and charged with procuring alcohol for a minor and resisting arrest. Two juvenile males were released to the custody of their parents.

Drug paraphernalia and several ounces of marijuana were reported found in a washing machine at Suds and Duds.

She loved to read “Dear Abby” aloud, her voice ringing with the old-fashioned advice columnist’s displeasure, “Going to the man’s wife and admitting to your affair might make
you
feel better but could end any chance of the couple’s repairing their relationship!” Or, applying a soothing balm to a question of etiquette, “Though you should
not
wear a white wedding gown if you and your fiancé currently are living together, I’m sure that you would look lovely in a street-length costume in ecru.”

We made each other fall into that breed of delicious laughter where we had to get down on our knees and
hoot-hoot-hoot
and snigger and plead,
Stop, please, I mean it, stop.
Helpless, we pounded the apartment’s worn wooden floors with our fists. Then, after a period of panting and leaning up against her futon frame, Esmé would jump up and put a CD in her boom box, maybe the acid house music that was big in Chicago and also in London, where she and a person named Sarah had spent the summer—or it might be Shostakovich or Bach partitas or yowling Sinéad O’Connor or one of those work-your-heart-to-a-bloody-stump musicals that she had been raised on and that I already had learned to love. We’d sing—looking into each other’s eyes, egging each other on, grinning like maniacs, unless the song was sad, in which case, we might get choked up—and that, too, could result in our laughing our heads off. “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair” from
South Pacific—
Esmé liked that one because of her recent breakup from a Dartmouth guy she’d met in London, and I, suffering a constant, low-grade, irritable fever over the absence of Will, liked being saucy about him in Esmé’s company. “There’s A Boat Dat’s Leavin’ Soon for New York.” That was fun. Stephen Sondheim’s “Every Day a Little Death” or “Not While I’m Around.”

Each time that Esmé and I sang “Not While I’m Around,” I had the notion—it made me proud—that the song, with its sweet and fierce declarations of loyalty, was
our
song. A sad irony, as things turned out, of course, but that September I did feel as if I would do anything for Esmé—even risk my life for her, it once occurred to me (with a little thrill). I never had had a friend like her. I felt . . .
blessed
by her friendship. The word sounds pious, but
blessed
was precisely what I felt the morning that we walked home from our first pancake breakfast at the Hamburg Inn and she, laughing, plucked a gorgeous handful of red and yellow maple leaves from a grassy lawn and showered them down over my head.
Blessed
the afternoon that she showed up at the student union’s cafeteria—the River Room—where I sat eating my sack lunch near the floor-to-ceiling windows, and we wound up talking for four hours straight about the writers we adored (Edna O’Brien, Babel, Munro, Nabokov, Chekhov: swoon!). So very
blessed
the afternoon that I fell asleep on the sofa, grading student essays,
and woke up to her carefully covering me with her very own afghan.

Her family, I’d quickly learned, was given to acts of thoughtfulness. That afghan had been knitted for her by her grandmother. In the short time we’d lived together, several packages from her mother had arrived (scented soaps, hoop earrings, funny cards, a vintage cashmere cardigan of a charming greenish-yellow with seed pearls stitched on in a pattern of ferns upwardly unfurling—“She knows I’m crazy about citrine,” Esmé had confided). Even her little brother—Toffer, short for Christopher—mailed her letters and goofy gifts (one of the “bloody smiley face” T-shirts that people bought at raves and a plastic penis on wheels that Esmé kept on the kitchen windowsill). The petit point pillow on the futon was a gift from her beloved aunt and featured a blooming morning glory twisting its vines around dark blue letters that spelled
ESMÉ
. Her dad telephoned the apartment. “Just to gab,” Esmé would say afterward. She did not seem aware that there might be anything special about such attentions.

I had a sister, but she had graduated from high school the year before I was born. We hardly knew each other. There had been a rupture in my mother’s relationship with her family when she married my dad (he was not a Baptist-Methodist or a Methodist-Baptist or something along those lines) and both of his parents were long gone. The only relative from outside our immediate family that I ever had met was my dad’s sister Patty, whom—until she died at the age of fifty, liver shot from working overtime on gallons of Gilbey’s gin—Dad could not prevent from showing up at our house, now and then, drunk and rabid with apologies and recriminations.

To me, Esmé’s gesture with the afghan felt practically exotic. I was so afraid to break the spell of it that I pretended to go on sleeping. I didn’t even know in what
key
to respond, and so I had stayed on the sofa for a good half hour after she moved off before I finally allowed myself to sit up and produce a lot of noisy yawning and say a casual “Hey, thanks for the blanket!”

Chapter 6

From the front of Room 201 in the University of Arizona’s  Modern Languages Building, I addressed the sixteen undergraduate members of Advanced Fiction Workshop in their tablet desks. Told the students of the importance of regularly reminding readers that their characters exist in a physical world.

I wiggled my fingers in the air to suggest just how fast the world of the story could dissipate. “And if there’s no world, there’s no possibility of consequences, guys!”

Inspired by all this, I gave a kick to the leg of the table where my grade book and the students’ stories sat—a hard enough kick that I registered it in my big toe, and the grade book and papers slid across the table. I winced for my audience. “If your character can’t even stub his toe,” I said, “how can anything significant happen to him?”

A few students smiled, as if they took the point; a few frowned in what looked like disapproval of my theatrics. No response from the girl checking her cell phone. Nor from the boy using an index finger to work from behind one of his molars a white lump of what the crinkly wrapper on his desk indicated was a Subway sandwich. Nor from the girl with the platinum locks who had told me—how to respond?—during office hours that her life’s ambition was to
be
the heiress Paris Hilton, and who now looked up at ML 201’s ceiling and blinked and blinked again as she distilled Visine drops into her party-boiled eyes.

Really, I was too shy a person to ever be entirely comfortable in the role of professor.