As Good as Dead (9 page)

That was the chore that I picked.

It was not easy to get Will to agree to a day—he had this to do, that to do—and then the day we picked turned out to be incredibly hot. When it was time for us to get to work, the brick shed was an oven. “Are you sure?” Will asked. I was sure. While Will went to the alley to fetch the wheeled recycle bin, I attacked one of the big cardboard boxes marked
CHARLOTTE
.

“Watch this!” I called to Will as he returned, wheeling the awkward, rattling bin across the rocky yard. “Open up the lid!”

His gaze from under the bill of his baseball cap suggested skepticism but he did open the big bin’s flabby plastic lid. And I did pitch in the entirety of my first box (papers from my undergraduate days, it had turned out to be). Will moved past me and into the shed and pulled a box of his own from one of the dusty shelves and set to opening it with a pocket knife. Always prepared. Methodical. Neat. I admired that about him.

The heft of my next box surprised me.
WRITERS
’ WORKSHOP/DRAFTS
read the fat Magic Marker letters scrawled across it. I peeled off the crackling length of paper tape—almost all of its old glue gone—that I’d used to seal the top so many years before. Inside was a mess of papers. Letters, manuscripts—mine and my Workshop classmates’— and drafts of stories I’d abandoned. “Blotto” by Charlotte Price sat on top of the heap. I picked it up, meaning to lift the title page and read a bit of that almost forgotten story, but what I spotted beneath the manuscript stopped me:

Three torn-in-half-and-taped-together-again photographs—all nearly identical—that I’d thought lost forever.

In the photographs, two very eccentric-looking old ladies, each holding a yellow plaid coffee cup, leaned into one another in what seemed to be both friendliness and support. Poor old creatures. Their bran-colored stockings drooped around their ankles so, you might have imagined the old dears were in the process of shedding their skins. Both wore cardigans (sprung in the elbows and missing buttons and doing nothing to conceal the sorry-old-lady saggy boobs that hung just above the waistbands of pleated wool skirts that, I knew, reeked of mothballs). Faces powdered a ghostly white. Eyebrows drawn on in loony, pitiful scrawls. Mouths painted a dead red and puckered as the tops of drawstring bags.

Esmé and I, circa 1988, decked out in clothes from Goodwill, standing in our kitchen on Burlington Street.

Once our costumes and selected pose had reached what we deemed perfection, Esmé had set the timer on her camera and run to get into the frame. By sheer luck, a week or so later, I’d found the torn-up photographs in the trash can before they had been covered over by a milk carton or a wad of paper towel. “They’re
way
too authentic, Charlotte!” Esmé had protested when she found me taping the pieces together. She was unconvinced when I insisted that we would love looking at them when we truly were little old ladies, but after I promised never to show them to anyone else, she allowed me to keep them.

“My girl,” Will said.

I looked up from the taped-together photographs. With a drip of sweat clinging to the tip of his nose, Will held up an unfolded sheet of blue paper that he, apparently, had found in his box. He proceeded to read aloud:

I’m glad you had a good Easter with the Biancos. I miss you like crazy, but can see it was smart I didn’t try to come. Since Esmé moved to Mobile, I’ve been getting a ton of work done. Finished grading student essays, which means the whole weekend is clear for a
rigorous
revision of my camp story. If you haven’t started reading the version I sent, please wait for this one. As Nabokov would say, I’m “cracking the whip.” Tote that barge, lift that bale!

Will folded up the letter. “That’s a keeper,” he said and smiled at me.

I smiled back, grateful, humbled. Guilty. He had no idea that my spring days in Iowa City without him had not been so simple and cheery as they sounded in that letter.

Were there old letters from him in my Writers’ Workshop box? Old letters from Esmé?

To my left, at eye level and clinging to a rusted window screen that one of us must have tipped up against the shed wall years before, a cicada had left behind the transparent, pale orange husk of its molt, and I felt just about that hollow as I set the three taped-together photographs back into my box. Tucked the flaps of the cardboard lid over and under.

I carried the thing to a vacant shelf. When I shoved it into place, the grit that had accumulated on the metal shelving raised an ugly squeal.

Certain words came to me, then, as distinctly as if I heard them spoken aloud:
Why, you’re as good as dead to Esmé, Charlotte!

Terrible words. For a moment, they knocked the breath right out of me—the pain was the pain I’d felt as a kid after I fell from a neighbor’s apple tree and landed flat on my back.

As good as dead.

Up until that moment, almost seven years into our time in Tucson, I had retained the habit—evidently as much from expectation as from fear—of keeping an eye out for Esmé at the various reading and film series around town, at concerts and gallery openings. That day, though, as I went on working alongside my dear, unknowing husband, I concluded that my being as good as dead to Esmé was a blessing. I had paid dearly for my sins and would do well to think of her as dead, too.

Chapter 9

But Esmé Cole Fletcher was not dead.

I was not dead to Esmé.

We had stood together in my front hall, both of us very much alive, and I was glad.

As I rode my bike home from the university, I deliberated how best to fit the news of Esmé’s surprise visit into my end-of-the-day conversation with Will. Not treat it like a big deal, definitely not, but like something worth mentioning:
It was so nice to see her after all these years! We didn’t have much of a chance to talk, but she seemed to be doing well!
Then quickly move along to other things.
The frame shop called. You can pick up your print any day but Monday. And the Kovacs want to know if we’re interested in seeing that movie at the Loft.

As for Esmé’s dinner invitation: I’d tell Will that he didn’t have to come. It might be better that way. If Jeremy Fletcher behaved badly—who knew what he would be like now?—I wouldn’t have to endure Will’s glowering. In the future, I’d limit socializing to Esmé and myself (lunch dates or coffee).

I wheeled the bike through the carport and around to the ramada. I could see Will through the sliding doors, bent over his laptop at the dining room table. Still a very handsome man at age forty-five. Also, a person who knew about subjects as divergent as black holes, the comics of R. Crumb, the Peloponnesian War, the riot grrrl band Bikini Kill, and Saint Augustine—he’d contemplated graduate work in theology before art history—and could talk about all of these topics in an interesting way to most anybody. Not a show-off, though. A kind man. Patient. Loyal.

Still, I did wish, as I mucked through my bag for my bike lock, that he were the type who would think to look up from his work when his wife came into the house; smile at her, say hello. Or, better yet, do it
automatically,
from happiness at their reunion. I had never entirely gotten over some concern that one day he would look up from his work and announce that he didn’t actually love me.
I just was being polite, Charlotte.
If I ever mentioned such worries, he would frown and say,
Don’t be ridiculous. I practically worship the ground you walk on!
Still, all that a person could know of her marriage was what she experienced of it, and Will did maintain an aura of distance.

Mystery Man. That morning, Esmé had used the nickname, which I’d first heard at a lawn party thrown by some of Will’s doctoral program friends in Iowa City. I’d never met any of those people before. Right after we arrived at the party, Will had disappeared, and I ended up helping the dreadlocked hostess level a card table on her bumpy grass. While we worked, I explained that I was finishing my bachelor’s degree at a small college twenty miles to the north, that I hoped I’d be going to the Workshop the next year, that I’d met Will through one of my professors. As soon as the hostess and I had the card table level, she turned to the people nearby and pointed at me: “She says she’s Mystery Man’s girlfriend!” Some people smiled at me, some smiled at one another, some looked at me with curiosity. Later, when Will and I were alone, he had brushed off my being upset that none of his fellow graduate students seemed aware of my existence. “I value my privacy, Charlotte,” he said. “That Mystery Man business—it shows why I don’t tell people anything personal.”

Not an entirely satisfying answer since his need for privacy had seemed to extend to me—and, in a way, continued to, twenty-one years later. But who was I to complain? I’d accepted my own secrets, and my husband was the best person I knew. He not only visited each and every one of his colleagues who wound up in the hospital but offered to pick up their relatives on the way. If someone (myself, a student, the janitor of his building) were in distress and needed to talk, he dropped everything and made himself available. After the failures of my pregnancies, when I admitted to him that the thought of alcohol kept coming into my mind, he gave up drinking; “to keep me company,” as he put it. Although my father never had stopped behaving as if the work that Will and I did were on par with collecting aluminum cans from ditches, Will had flown to Iowa with me the summer before to help me move the man—and my mother, too—into “independent living.” “Bet you can’t wait to see me kick the bucket!” my dad had said to Will the day we headed back to Tucson, and Will had responded, without a blink, “Nothing could be further from the truth, but I hope before that happens, you’ll realize that your daughter is a gem.”

That was Will.

After I got my bike locked to a pipe belonging to our hulking AC unit, I tried the dining room’s sliding door. Locked. I hesitated. Knock, or use a key? If I were hard at work on something, I would prefer that Will use his key, right?

I used my key.

He looked up as I dumped my bags inside the door. “Hey,” I said. He nodded. Absently, yes, but, then, the guy
had
started dinner: I could smell potatoes baking. Russets—and yams. There was a sweet burnt-sugar aroma on the aluminum foil that Will conscientiously would have set on the rack under the yams. “Thanks for putting in the potatoes,” I said.

“Be with you in a moment. I’m working on the itinerary.”

I kissed the top of his head on my way to the refrigerator. Will liked to solidify our summer plans early. He had long, prioritized lists of where he needed to go for his research; what buildings and artworks and archives and people he most needed to see. Next June, we’d be based in Milan; July, in Rome. A contact in Rome already had helped Will locate a girls’ school that, over the summers, rented dorm rooms with adjoining baths to “responsible adults” at a good rate. Our housing in Milan had yet to be determined, but Will would figure it out. I wasn’t picky, as long as I was assured of a quiet place with a desk where I could write in the mornings. Afternoons we usually spent together; or, if Will had other work to do, I’d take a walk—in Rome, through the gardens at the Villa Borghese, maybe, or along the Via Giulia, where I could poke my head into antiques shops. I might visit a painting that I felt a need to see. In Milan, I often just “wandered,” bought a couple sheets of good stationery and a piece of marzipan on pricey Via Montenapoleone and then, over a coffee, read and people-watched and wrote letters. I would have liked to vary the locations of our trips but, really, there was always something to do or see or learn in Italy.

On the kitchen counter, bringing them to room temperature, Will had set out dry-cured olives and a wedge of Stilton. Both sat on blue glass plates that—or so we’d been charmed into believing by a local shop owner—poor Mexican artisans had made in pre-plastic days by melting down bottles once home to practical substances (Noxzema, Phillips’ Milk of Magnesia, Vicks VapoRub). I opened the refrigerator and pulled out the plastic bag of romaine that I’d washed and spun the night before. I felt pleased with myself for my foresight.

“By the way, last month’s water bill came today,” Will said.

My heart sank. The water bill was one of our main arguments. Though I was willing to be careful about our expenses so that we could travel for his work in the summers, I did want at least one area of green in the yard, and the oleander hedge that I’d planted gave me green and shade—and gorgeous red flowers throughout the year—and it needed water.

“You know, some things aren’t meant to grow here, Charlotte,” Will said.

“Half the people in Tucson have oleanders,” I muttered, but I wasn’t keen on pressing my point just then. Not only did I want things pleasant when I told him about Esmé’s dinner invitation but I imagined that the bill had been higher than usual. A couple of weeks before, I’d forgotten the dripper hose until our sweet, old neighbors, Helen and Nick Schaeffer (in matching Elderhostel visors), appeared on our front steps to let me know that they’d noticed “puddling” along the hedge.

Would Will accept a change of subject? “Finney’s called this morning,” I said. “You can come by for your print anytime—except next Monday. Monday they’re all going to Phoenix.” Not looking his way, I pulled bottles of vinegar and olive oil from the cupboard. Salt. Dry mustard. Oregano. It pleased me to think that I could tell Esmé that my standard vinaigrette was hers, the one that she’d taught me to make during our days as roommates. While I took a whisk from the jug of utensils on the counter, I spied, from the corner of my eye, Will picking up a piece of paper from alongside his computer. The water bill. Even from across the room, I could make out its familiar fat blue columns showing water usage per month.