As Good as Dead (13 page)

The cat stuck its nose right into the rich, fishy oil oozing golden out of the top of the can while I worked the opener around the lid. “Hold on!” I said, worried the animal might get cut on the sharp metal.

“Charlotte! What are you doing?”

More than twenty years together, but Will’s voice made me jump as if it belonged to a stickup artist. The way my heart raced—and his disingenuous question—both made me angry! “You can see what I’m doing,” I said without turning his way.

“I don’t want you feeding that cat, Charlotte.”

“It’s hurt! And starving!”

“All the more reason.”

“That makes no sense.” In my rush, I had neglected to bring a plate with me and so—although it didn’t seem quite nice—I dumped the opened can onto the dirt. Immediately, the cat started to eat. I stroked my hand along its neck, avoiding the spot that had made it cry out before. I looked over at Will, standing in the doorway. Such disapproval on his face! “It’s not like I feed it regularly,” I said. “This is only the second time I’ve seen it in ages.”

“You start feeding it, it will be around all the time, and, pretty soon, every cat in the neighborhood will show up.”

I scratched the cat behind its delicate ears. Its nose had a pink scrape, as if it had been in a fight. I would have liked to have stayed there, but it was time to leave for the Fletchers
’
, so I stood.

Once, when I first knew Will, after we had made love, I said, “Penny for your thoughts,” and he’d responded, “Somebody used to say that to me, Charlotte, and I always hated it,” so I had learned to launch subjects myself—even after some tension. That evening—standard fare—as we started along the skirt of the mountains in northwest Tucson, I asked if there were any topics he wanted to avoid at the Fletchers’.

“Movies that the other people haven’t seen,” he said (with a grumble, but at least he was talking). “That’s always deadly.”

“But a little of it’s okay,” I said, “if somebody wants to make a recommendation.” Two bunches of salmon pink alstroemeria sat erect in cellophane cones alongside my left foot. If the mood were right, I would point out to Esmé that, in their native Peru, alstroemeria were a sign of friendship and devotion.

“So do the two of them still write?” Will asked.

“I didn’t know if I should ask.” I rested my hand on the warm skin on the back of his neck. We were talking. I breathed easier. “She’s a real estate broker—I think. There was a time that he was a journalist—at least before the Workshop—but maybe he switched to advertising?” I’d added a pinch of pity to my voice, hoping Will would be willing to let the evening be okay, a gesture of kindness.

It had been a long time since we’d driven in that area. During the housing bubble, the gravel roads had given way to asphalt. The unbroken vistas of native mesquite, creosote bush, ocotillo, cholla, and saguaro were gone. Now we rolled along on a four-lane equipped with stoplights between housing developments as uniform as the cornfields of my Iowa childhood. Roofs topped with faux tile, exteriors sprayed with the thinnest coat of buff stucco, Plexiglas windows that couldn’t hold a steady reflection; those houses—they looked almost like stage sets, like they might be up to the rigors of a high school theater production but not actual lives lived.

“Millions of cats,” I murmured, thinking of the famous children’s book by Wanda Gág; its drawings of hillsides covered, every inch, by the millions and billions and trillions of cats who had followed a little old man towards his little old cottage, where his little old wife waited for him to bring her a single kitten (which, come to think of it, had looked—scrappy creature that it turned out to be—like a young version of the cat Will and I had left eating tuna in our front yard).

Will brought the car to a stop at a red light alongside an intersection crowded with commerce. A Burger King, a gas station, and a Wells Fargo tangled awkwardly at the corner of a vast parking lot anchored at its far end by a big-box store. A lady in the Burger King’s drive-up line honked and waved from her rolled-down window, indicating to the driver behind her,
back up, let me out.
Probably she had hoped to make a transaction at the Wells Fargo drive-through or to fill up her tank at the gas station. Whatever, I identified too much with the distress on her face, and I looked away, toward Wells Fargo’s large red and black and gold sign, slowly rotating above its tiny manicured plot of grass. We banked at a similar Wells Fargo branch, and I knew, as soon as the sky got dark, a light would come on inside the sign, emphasizing the golden stagecoach that raced along behind a surging team of golden horses and was, no doubt, intended to make us feel some confused, heartwarming nostalgia toward that miscreant corporate giant.

“Do you remember when we stayed at the funky place in the Chiracauhuas and the owner showed us the ruts from the old Wells Fargo line?” I asked Will.

He smiled in profile. “Are you sure you didn’t dream that?”

“No, no! It was—in Sun Glow? Sun-something? Behind the motel. There were grooves worn in the rock. We were impressed!”

“Okay.” He nodded. “Maybe.”

I flushed. He so easily remembered titles of paintings and sculptures and poems and their dates and places of execution, but often forgot things from our past.
But I never forget that you’re the most important thing that ever happened to me, right?
he had said the first time that I had pointed this out.

Up ahead loomed one of the cathedral-size Walgreens drugstores that had popped up all over Tucson, its trademarked name uncoiling in handsome red cursive. Would Will be entertained if I told him—offering up my non-elitist creds—that I had thought it over recently and concluded that, if I ever had to do my own shopping, the Walgreens stores could fulfill almost all of my basic needs? The stores had yet to provide gasoline, true, but, look, I mostly walked and rode my bike, and while that clever corporation kept me waiting for prescriptions, it had equipped me with items far beyond makeup and hair products and toothbrushes. I had bought bras and yoga pants at Walgreens, a not too awful Adirondack chair, bamboo plants, Bombay Sapphire gin and tonic water for drinking guests at a Fourth of July picnic. Though I had instituted our household’s diet of organic produce and whole grains, while reconnoitering Walgreens’s grocery aisle, I had confirmed that therein was sufficient stuff to keep a body going: cans of mandarin oranges and mixed vegetables and evaporated milk and tuna; boxes of Quaker Oats and raisins and bags of nuts (the refrigerator cases stocked cheese and eggs and so on, but I relished the image of myself exiting the store, pioneer-like, with strictly nonperishables).

Unlikely, though, that Will would want to hear that his wife had figured how she could equip herself for life without him.

I studied the eastern sky outside my window. “I should drive more often when the two of us go places together.”

He nodded. “It’s just—I may as well be driving when somebody else is. Plus, you don’t get bored like I do.”

“Mare’s tail.” I pointed through the windshield at a long and wispy cloud.

“There you go,” he said. “I rest my case.”

We left behind the heavy concentration of shops and housing, drew closer to the turnoff that, on the Google map, resembled a fill-in-your-family-tree diagram that Martie and I had worked on for a while. The Fletchers’ neighborhood. The upper stories of several large houses lurked above a crest up ahead. Some red gum eucalyptus, the fast-growing favorite of developers, came into view.

“You’ll turn right,” I said, “next turn.”

SIERRA NORTH
, a large stone and stucco marker announced. I had not realized from the address Esmé had given me that she lived in Sierra North. Thinking that I might soften Will’s feelings about dinner with the couple, I said, “This is a neighborhood that PBS used in a show on the housing crisis. Over half the houses here are worth less than their mortgages. Underwater.” That show had been the first place I’d heard the term
underwater
used to mean that a house was worth less than its mortgage. Also the satirical term
McMansion
. According to the PBS show, a number of Sierra North’s residents had crept away in the night, so afraid of creditors that they had left everything: clothes, big-screen TVs, pots and pans, dinner dishes in the sink, bikes and toys in the yard.

The houses we passed were new, with garages big enough for three cars. The designers had gone for a hybrid Tudor-hacienda look (multiple stories with a lot of timber and stucco and corbels; pebble dash; herringbone brickwork). I told Will, “Where she grew up—in Evanston—it was nothing like this. She brought photo albums to Iowa. Her family’s house was elegant.”

Hard to say which homes stood empty in a neighborhood where the front yards had no grass to go unmown and blended together in one long river of pink gravel held in place by concrete curbing marked with street numbers stenciled in white on black. Many For Sale signs stuck up from the pink gravel. One seemed equally poised between the Fletchers’ street number and the number of the house to the east, and, as he parked, Will asked, “Did she say they were moving?”

“No.” Once we were out of the car and side by side, I whispered, “Should we ask?”

He stopped and tugged enough of the hem of his shirt free from his pants that he could use it to clean his glasses. “They’ll say if they want to.” He held the lenses up to the sky, squinted at them. “Let’s make sure we’re out of here by nine, tops. I’ve got work to do, and I know you do, too.”

I wanted so much for him to sound less somber! “Are you okay?” I asked.

“Absolutely.” He resettled the glasses on his nose. “You’re going to have a chance to see your old friend. You’ll have a good time.” He started toward the house. “That’s all the matters to me.”

Well, I hated that! His acting as if everything he did in life he did to please me! It was absurd! And did he mean to irritate me at this inopportune moment? I grabbed hold of the elbow of his shirtsleeve and whispered, “It’s not certain that I’ll have a good time, so you can—stop thinking that!”

He did not stop walking or slow his pace. Brow beetled—a man with a job to do—he stepped into the covered entryway and pressed the doorbell. “All right, then,” he muttered as we stood waiting, “we’re here for you to have a bad time.”

I was not beyond the occasional
fuck you
,
and, obviously, I could be a dope, but nobody needed to tell me that a woman should not say
fuck you
to her husband while she waited with him to be welcomed into the home of their evening’s host and hostess. Not if she hoped, as I did, to enjoy something that at least approximated a civilized evening.

It was only because I recognized Jeremy Fletcher’s voice as he shouted, “Guests!” that I could smile and say, “Hey, Jeremy!” when he opened the door. Like Esmé, Jeremy Fletcher appeared to have been taken over by some other person. This Jeremy Fletcher was skinny with a little pot under his pale green guayabera. He was a beach-bum-looking guy in baggy shorts and blue flip-flops, his damp hair pulled back in a tiny snail of ponytail. The bottle of beer in his hand was familiar, though—and probably the reason his nose looked so gray. The nose made me sad. Yes, the man was older than the rest of us—in his mid-fifties—but his nose was the nose of a corpse; a strawberry gone blue with mold, ready for the compost heap.

Silent, he flattened himself against the door as we passed into the home’s imposing and disorienting foyer (floor-to-ceiling mirrors on all of the walls, brass candelabras and sconces, slabs of tawny marble underfoot). He did wear a smile—lips closed but stretched so wide in his bony face that their tips reached almost to his ears. “Y’all hear me?” he shouted toward the back of the house. “Esmé?”

On she came, smiling, wearing what was apparently a turban—a black turban, yes, and a swishing emerald-green caftan. I smiled and then—disconcertingly—found that her flesh-and-blood twin now walked my way from an opposite quarter of the house. I glanced back at the mirrored duplicate. Gone.

“Will! Charlotte!” Her costume and great size made her formidable—I was about to say that I felt underdressed, but, suddenly, Jeremy Fletcher’s fingers came darting right at my face—

He laughed as I jumped back. “Lookee, Es!” he said. “Charlotte got her smile fixed!”

A reference to that triangle of teeth I’d lost while intervening in the high school fistfight.

Esmé, smelling of scotch and toothpaste, squeezed both Will and me to her chest in a big, emphatic hug. “You hush, Jer!” she said, then winked at Will as she released us. “Charlotte’s smile has always been just fine, hasn’t it, Will?”

Will frowned at Jeremy Fletcher. “The best smile in the world.”

To shove us off from that spot of tension, I chirped, “All praise to the university and dental benefits!”

“Ah, benefits,” Esmé said in a breathy, velvety voice—I remembered her doing that voice sometimes, usually as a joke, pretending to be a sexy late-night DJ. What she meant by it at this juncture, I did not know, but, then, she resumed her normal voice, and said it was fantastic that we were all together, wasn’t it? What would we have to drink? Had Jer offered us drinks yet?

Will and I answered, in one voice, that we were fine for now; then followed this up with almost identical versions of,
Boy, your house is really something!