As Good as Dead (6 page)

I rapped together the papers that my kick had disturbed. Glanced at the clock. Each clock in Modern Languages displayed a slightly different time and I could not remember if this one was fast or slow. Was it time for our break? I was ready. For fear that their own stories might be critiqued harshly, most of the students in that bunch made tepid remarks about one another’s stories (“Good read, man!” “Held my interest despite a few typos!” “LOL!”), which meant that I’d had to do the heavy lifting for the psycho kid-killer story (when I’d finished, the author—a guy with hair shaved down and dyed the green of pool table felt—had muttered, “I guess you didn’t get that it was supposed to be
funny
”).

Bang!
At the rear of the room, the door swung open.
Esmé,
I thought, in the fraction of a second before a male voice from the hallway said, “Sorry! Wrong room!”

Nervous laughter filled the room as the door swung shut. “So, okay,” I said, “this is probably a good time to take a break. Fifteen minutes, please.”

I’d known that Esmé was on my mind even before that door to-do. Twice, I’d caught myself wondering what she would think of my classroom presence. Maybe my flamboyant kick at the table had been for her benefit. Once, at Iowa, she’d shown up while I was in the middle of teaching one of my undergraduate classes. She’d looked about the room with her usual sunny curiosity while she unwound a gigantic pink scarf from her neck and then removed her creaking leather motorcycle jacket. Fortunately, I’d planned that day’s class carefully and been able to recover from the surprise of her visit. Afterward, radiant Esmé had run up to the front of the room and thrown her arms around me and declared, “You were magnificent!”

And here I was, a score of years later, walking through the halls of Modern Languages, on my way to check my mail, Esmé’s “You were magnificent!” still ringing absurdly bright around me—though I also recalled wishing that she had delivered her praise in a softer voice because, as two students turned our way, Esmé stuck out her tongue at them and said, “Brats! You had no right to act bored!”

Had they been bored? I could not say. I always had tried to teach a good class, but after years at it, I knew that certain undergraduates thought I was great and others wanted to string me up by my thumbs, and often for the same reason: I gave their stories very thorough edits and required that they read and analyze the work of published authors, and—this was the main sticking point—thoroughly revise their own stories.

Sometimes I doubted my decision to support my life as a writer through teaching. Maybe I should have been an editor? All that time and energy Will and I had spent getting tenure, our lives on hold! Now promotion to full professor lay ahead—ever more publishing in the right places and getting good teaching evaluations and serving on the right committees, all of it stuff to list on the performance review that each faculty member had to turn in each year (and try to fashion in such a way that, while sounding humble, we also proved ourselves figures with a “national presence”).

Ah, cigarettes! In the breezeway that linked the two halves of Modern Languages, a cluster of the Advanced Fiction students were lighting up their break-time cigarettes. Another vice of mine that long ago had bitten the dust. Maybe seeing my old cigarette-smoking pal Esmé was stirring up that longing in me. A yip of laughter. That would be my student Jaime. Jaime stood no more than five feet tall, and his cheeks were flamingo pink beneath what I took for a veil of ointment (he’d mentioned a character’s skin condition in one of his stories), and he wrote work as interesting as anything that I’d read in recent
New Yorker
s or the top quarterlies. Every year, Creative Writing selected its incoming class of graduate students from a big applicant pool, so the people in our graduate workshops were generally pretty terrific; I found it uncanny, though, how often—at least once a year—a truly gifted writer turned up in my undergraduate workshop. It was like finding the Hope Diamond in a jewelry box that, otherwise, held a few nice sterling silver bangles, a sweet rhinestone costume piece or two, then a bunch of those plastic bead necklaces people throw all over New Orleans during Mardi Gras. Always, I’d been a cheerleader on behalf of the gifted undergraduates when they came in during office hours:
Apply to our graduate program—any graduate program—and I’ll write you recommendations! Be persistent! Start sending out work now so that editors get to know your voice! Guard your time!
Very few had stuck with writing, though, and, thinking of this, I felt a pang of sadness.

I supposed the sadness was related to Esmé’s visit, too. Esmé and Jeremy Fletcher—true, I’d never liked his work, but, back in 1988, both were deemed talented enough to be admitted to Iowa. Had fiction simply not sunk its claws deep enough into them? Demanded that they stay the course? Getting a story right could drive me crazy, but writing remained—along with Will—my greatest treasure. You could see the proof on my right shin: a large, still-pink scar from a day when—high on a story I was in the midst of composing—I gleefully ran from my desk to the kitchen for a fresh pen; crashed, full force, into the open door of the dishwasher; and then—rather than stop for the stitches that a scolding doctor later swore I should have had—with a fresh pen in hand, I’d hustled back to my desk and let my sock and running shoe go soggy with blood while I resumed writing.

Chapter 7

In the murk of the fourth-floor hallway—due to the anti-education legislature’s hacking away at our budget, each ceiling fixture now held a single fluorescent bulb instead of four—I determined that the angular, towheaded figure coming my way was my colleague Jenny Ambrose. Jenny’s adorable twin daughters—four-year-olds adopted from China—had stopped to mess with the spout of water that I knew for certain had overshot the drinking fountain’s basin for at least ten years.

Jenny waved to me while she called over her shoulder, “Come on, girls!” then she twirled her raised arm and fist overhead, as if she worked a lasso up there that she soon would turn and drop over the dawdling twins. When they continued to ignore her, she called in my direction, “Is anybody witnessing this? Can I get a witness here?”

I laughed and wagged my hand in the air as Jenny abandoned her cowpoke bit and proceeded to transform herself into a dull-eyed bull (head below her shoulders, one foot pawing at the linoleum). She adored the twins but liked to act beleaguered. “Look at me, girls!” she called. “I’m turning into the serious mother!”

Bobbed, silky black hair flying straight out from their heads, the girls came running. Poppy and Dolly. Darlings in lace-trimmed anklets and overalls decorated with pink and purple hearts and flowers. Once they reached Jenny, they stood behind her floor-length black skirt and made a game of peeking out at me. “You remember Charlotte,” Jenny said. Poppy gave me a thrill by smiling at me with her tiny, perfect white teeth, but Dolly, who had cuddled in my lap at the English Department’s picnic just a month before, declared a fierce, “No, we don’t!”

As the four or us made our way into the much more highly lit office of the Department of English, Jenny muttered to me, “We call Dolly the Drama Queen”; then she added in a louder voice, “Of course you do, silly. Charlotte’s the friend who gave you your Tickle Me Elmo dolls last Christmas.”

Oh, Christmas. And birthday parties. A chance to tuck somebody into bed at night. Buy little socks and, later, bigger socks. Stick glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. From where I stood, the lives of people with children looked like a fairyland, a sugar-encrusted delight. “I’d invite you guys to my office”—a student recently had brought me a piggy bank that doffed its hat when you dropped a coin in the slot on its back; the twins would like that—“but I’m on break. I’m just here to check my mailbox.”

The twins ran to the break room to see if anyone had left “treats” behind. Jenny raised her arms in a big stretch, the very loose sleeves of her linen top falling all the way to her shoulders, exposing the tender skin of the undersides of her arms, a milky crease of deodorant. She yawned extravagantly. A woman at ease. “Look at me, Charlotte!” she demanded. “I’m growing addlepated from lack of sleep! Some twin or other always needs a glass of water or for me to drive off the monsters under her bed or else Gregor’s elderly prostate has him up, peeing for the umpteen millionth time!”

Gregor was Gregor Poulos, a paper products mogul who’d been newly retired and widowed a few years ago, very much at loose ends, hence, overjoyed at taking on the much younger Jenny and reinventing himself as a papa—also the patron of the novel prize for which I was to be the judge (I pictured that puke-green envelope on the chair of my home office, the novel within as yet unread).

“Don’t look smug, Charlotte!” Jenny said. “Give Will fifteen years; it’ll happen to him, too!”

Impossible for me to imagine that I had looked smug at the thought of Gregor Poulos’s poor prostate. I did not feel smug. “It’s just my face,” I said, which would have impressed me if I hadn’t been fairly certain that it was a line I’d picked up from some saucier soul in a movie or a book.

Briefly, Jenny looked puzzled; then she laughed. While I pulled a wad of mostly junk mail from my box (notices; book catalogs; a menu from the latest ethnic restaurant; yet another of those envelopes that Creative Writing’s Goth-girl assistant, Pema Barkley, was using as she passed along the Poulos Prize finalists to me), Jenny said, “I’ve been meaning to call you, Charlotte, but Will always sounds so fierce when he picks up and—well, you know,
eek
!” She lifted her shoulders and clasped her hands: the frightened maiden.

I laughed (actually, Will’s brusque way of answering the telephone could mortify me).

“Anyway, I wanted to ask—Gregor’s curious—how’s your reading going, Char? For the book prize?”

I was tempted to explain that Pema Barkley had held up things. Pema Barkley was pissed—understandably—at having the administration of the Poulos Prize dumped on top of her other duties. In addition, Pema Barkley and a boy with heavily “gauged” ears were starting an Internet company (sports accessories, I gathered), and it had been a real challenge to get Pema to swerve her heavily outlined baby blues from her monitor’s hectic displays of bike helmets, water bottles, and workout gloves so that I could remind her to create a log for the contest entries; and, later, to circulate the entrants’ fifty-page samples and synopses to the screening panel; and, then—once the screeners had selected their top ten—to send the finalists the good news and request the complete copies of their books.

So far, Pema had given me just three of the ten finalists’ books. Still, I sympathized with her. I understood why she wanted out of a job that required that she spend most of her time dealing with the complaints of tetchy professors and students. And how could I honestly suggest to Jenny that I was concerned that I’d received just three of the novels when I’d read only two of them?

“Oh, Jen,” I said, “we—the fiction faculty—we just finished reading and evaluating the thirty pages that each grad student turns in for fall ranking, and, honestly, with all that stuff connected to Melody Murphy’s campus visit”—both Jenny and I had attended job applicant Murphy’s very fine lecture on Erasmus Darwin, plus her demo class and a lunch at the union and a dinner at El Charro in her honor—“I’ve just gotten a start, but I’m going to plunge in over the weekend.”

Jenny’s “Oh?” carried a touch of censure, but here came a fine distraction: her twins, laughing, the heels of their little patent leather shoes clicking on the linoleum floor as they ran out of the break room and straight toward their smiling mom. The twins brought themselves to a stop by grabbing hold of Jenny’s legs, tugging at the fabric of her long, black skirt. Jenny laughed and smoothed her hands down the girls’ silky heads. An automatic, enviable gesture. The twins must have calmed her because when she spoke again she sounded warm and friendly. “Of course, Gregor’s so grateful that you agreed to do it!”

“It’s an honor,” I said, which wasn’t exactly how I’d felt about taking on the job—the chairman of the department clearly had expected me to say yes—but I liked Gregor Poulos, his riddles, baggy eyes, and tomato-soup-colored pants, his sweet ways with the twins. Also, the state of Arizona needed every art patron and prize that it possibly could get.

Jenny smiled. “You and Will and Gregor and the girls and I—we have to get together!”

“I’d love that.” I crouched to the twins’ height. “If you come over, we can make cookies or something. I have a stuffed lion big enough that
both
of you could sit on it—and lots of kids’ books and toys, too.”

Dolly disappeared behind Jenny’s skirt again, but Poppy tipped her head back to ask, “Can we, Mama?”

“Well, Daddy and Mommy are kind of overwhelmed right now, sweetie.” Jenny widened her eyes at me: Help! “And so’s Charlotte. Right, Charlotte? Maybe over Christmas break?”

Poppy looked to me for confirmation. I smiled and nodded. “Sure. Over break would be great.” I doubted that those cookies ever would get baked. It had been a good two years since Jenny and I had managed even to meet for a cup of coffee.

After I said good-bye and started toward the door to the hall, Dolly peeked out at me from behind Jenny’s skirt one last time. Her face was blank. Pointedly blank? As if she wanted to unnerve me? Was that possible? “Feel my hair!” she had commanded while she snuggled in my lap at the fall picnic, and after I happily complied and said an admiring, “Oh, it’s so smooth, Dolly!” she had nodded and closed her eyes and murmured a satisfied, “I know. It feels just like satin.”