As Good as Dead (14 page)

Esmé laughed—the effect had been funny. I laughed, too, then asked if I could do anything to help with dinner.

“No, no. Have a seat.” Esmé waved toward the room that she had passed through a minute before, empty except for a burgundy leather sectional and a large photo collage that stood against the wall by the fireplace. “We’ll call you in a moment.”

I had viewed it as a triumph that, in the more than forty-eight hours that had passed since Esmé left our house, I never had said a word to Will about the change in her appearance; but Will was much more impressive than I was. After the Fletchers left us alone in their living room, he did not lift his eyebrows to me in the way that most people (myself included) would have to signal some surprise in the change in both Fletchers’ appearances. Nor did he give me a look to suggest that it was odd for the Fletchers to abandon us in the marble jaws of their almost empty living room. He did not so much as whisper
I guess they’re moving
.

Instead, perfectly silent, he crossed the room to the photo collage, a thing maybe three feet by four. In my continuing effort to create a feeling of togetherness between us, I trotted along behind him. I leaned over to inspect the collage in the same way that he did (hands splayed on his thighs). Along with photos of what had to be the Fletchers’ sons at various ages (babies, toddlers, Boy Scouts, teenagers dressed up with their dates before proms) there were family pictures from Christmases and birthdays and picnics and trips on a houseboat. There were SAT scores, report cards, lines scissored from letters, bits of children’s drawings, blue ribbons won for soccer and swimming.

“Good-looking kids,” Will said.

“Smart, too.” Feeling as if a litter of something had hatched inside my belly, I then fled to one of the big front windows and looked out at the street and the For Sale sign there. Will followed me. He squeezed my hand. “Best girl in the whole world,” he said.

I squeezed back. “Best
boy
,” I whispered, “only I’m telling the truth.”

“
I
told the truth.”

From what I supposed was meant to be the dining room—curtains and a brass chandelier were all that remained in there—Jeremy Fletcher drawled, “Come and get it or we’ll throw it out.”

We followed him deeper into the house. The kitchen turned out to be one of those granite monuments to the idea of the good life. Its preponderance and variety of dark wood cabinetry (solid doors, glass doors, tambour doors) and stainless-steel appliances (some having applications at which I could only guess) struck me as absurd. Still, I picked up the stink of that envy of mine that could cause me to feel the lack even of things that I disdained if I supposed they made the people who possessed them happier than I was with what I possessed.

“We’re about ready!” Esmé sounded cheery as she closed the door of an enormous stainless-steel oven. “Why don’t you take them outside, Jer?”

Without moving from where he stood, Jeremy Fletcher jerked a thumb toward French doors that opened onto a flagstone patio. The light coming in through the patio doors gilded his skinny self; made him—with his long smile and untucked Mexican shirt and beer—look eerily like the giant novelty toads offered for sale in Nogales (real toads, their skins stretched and stuffed and made to stand upright; then outfitted with things like miniature violins and golf clubs and teeny bottles whose bits of blue and white suggested the Corona label).

Will and I stepped past him and out onto the patio. Except for the wrought-iron table already set with silverware and dark blue napkins—also, I noted, like a good alcoholic, two open bottles of red wine, four wineglasses—the patio was as bare as the inside of the house.
I’m just going to stick with water, thanks.
A little mental practice. In the Fletchers’ nice lap pool, a softly humming Kreepy Krauly made its trips across the pool bottom, cleaning, filtering. I took a whiff of the air. When we first had moved to Tucson and I left the house to go to the university in the mornings, I would pause to savor the distinctive bleachy, holiday smell rising from the city’s thousands of outdoor pools:
A vacation smell, the smell of my summer days as a kid at the city pool!
I’d thought,
and marveled at the idea that I had come to live in a place where, when you flew in or out, the land stared up at you with swarms of turquoise-blue eyes. That smell surely had not gone away, but I apparently had grown so used to it that I no longer registered it.

“Do you remember—when we first moved here—how you could smell the swimming pools?” I asked Will. “Do you still smell that? In the mornings?”

He shook his head. “I never had your nose.”

“This is so nice!” I said as Esmé and Jeremy Fletcher came out, carrying plates of green salad.

“Great view,” said Will.

“Prime,” Jeremy Fletcher said. Esmé was quiet, though. After she set down the plates of greens, she peered off at the Catalinas, as if she needed to think about the view, make up her mind. This unsettled me.
She does know about me and Jeremy
, I thought.
She planned for the dinner to be a test; to see if it would be possible for us to be friends again, and she already regrets it.
I also had the thought—so stupid, so simple-minded—that her excess weight might be a punishment for Jeremy.

A puff of breeze lifted a few bits of arugula from the salad plates, and Will and I bent down and picked them up from the flagstones.

“Leave ’em!” Jeremy Fletcher said. He sounded stern, like some Western’s sheriff telling the robbers to drop their guns. I laughed—he had meant to be comical, I was sure—and I dropped the leaves of arugula and, like a proper outlaw, raised my hands in the air. Will, though, stuck what he’d grabbed into his pants pocket, and I wished that I’d done the same, not what Jeremy ordered.

“Earth to Esmé!” Jeremy Fletcher cupped his hands around his mouth to call. “Earth to Esmé!”

She turned and smiled at him—a real smile?—then extended her arm toward the wrought-iron table. “Charlotte, Will. Your salads,” she said. Very stilted, as if she were playing an Edwardian butler, but she immediately repaired the effect by adding, “Well, that sounded weird! I guess that’s what you get from spending your childhood watching videos of
Upstairs, Downstairs
!” and everybody laughed while taking seats at the wrought-iron table

—well, no, Jeremy Fletcher did not laugh, but the evening might roll along anyway. He and Esmé had two bottles of wine to drink, after all. I envied them that. Even in the face of the wreckage of Jeremy Fletcher, there came into my mind the notion (its design as clever as that of the bugs that can walk on water without breaking the surface tension) that it might not be so awful, for old times’ sake, with people whom I now sincerely doubted we’d ever see again, if I were to accept a glass of that wine. Will would flip, of course. And, then, I supposed our asking for water earlier had tipped Esmé off to our being nondrinkers. At Iowa, initially, I had told Esmé that I could not drink because of “medications”; but, later—drunk—I’d blabbed everything to her (the bike accident, “droll” stories about my penitent attendance at AA meetings back in Webster City).

That was all so long ago, though. Who knew what she remembered?

I hoped that it was not a problem that Will asked Jeremy Fletcher if he
still were
involved in journalism. Jeremy Fletcher shrugged, but Esmé said, “Jeremy’s interested in border issues, Will. He was down in Organ Pipe last week. Lots of illegal crossings there.”

Jeremy Fletcher grunted. “Let’s not let the cat out of the bag, though, Es.”

For a moment, I thought that she looked irritated, but then she smiled and said, “Fine, fine,” and turned toward Will and got him talking about his teaching, thank god, because Will was always interesting, talking about teaching—

“But, y’all”—Jeremy Fletcher rapped a spoon against my glass of water, hard enough that it would not have surprised me if the glass had broken, the water spilled—“let’s be honest, now. You, too, Charlotte. Are the undergrads at Arizona as bass-ackward dumb as the ones we taught at Iowa?”

I smiled. “Oh, I always have some good undergrads, Jeremy, but, hey, you don’t want to get me started about education! It’d like to ruin your supper!”

While Jeremy and Esmé laughed at my Southerner imitation, Will gave me a look of mild reproof. “Charlotte’s a very dedicated teacher,” he said. “And, I have to ask myself, sometimes, what I looked like to my professors back when I was an undergraduate.”

“Oh, Will”—Esmé patted Will’s hand where it lay on the metal tabletop—“you were a brilliant student! As Charlotte reminded everybody at least fifty-three times a day!”

“I’m afraid the people who’ve heard Charlotte talk about me are bound to be disappointed,” Will said. “I must seem like . . . the movie version of a really good book.”

Esmé whooped, delighted. “That reminds me of how Charlotte and I used to say that we should have some great photographer take pictures of us when we were looking particularly fabulous, and then we’d get the pictures blown up, life-size, and hold them in front of us and make a good impression wherever we went!”

I grinned. “Portable wind machines, we wanted those, too. To muss our hair in just the right way.”

The conversation stopped while Jeremy Fletcher disappeared under the table. “Damn,” he said, “nobody’s got a skirt I can see up!” He surfaced, holding a fat handful of the pink gravel that ran alongside the patio. “Scat!” he called and pitched a piece of the gravel toward a calico cat moseying through a neighbor’s planting of
Tecoma stans
. The cat looked unperturbed by the gravel, but it did run off when Jeremy Fletcher backed his metal chair away from the table with a rough scrape and shouted, “GIT!” and let the rest of the gravel fly.

“Good grief, Jer,” Esmé grumbled, but ever-resourceful Will got things back on track, saying, “I gather from the pictures in your living room that your sons are at Northwestern.”

“Junior and a freshman,” Esmé said. “A wonderful school.”

“Won-erful, won-erful.” Jeremy grabbed the bottle of Merlot from its spot on the table, poured himself a glass, pinched his nose between his thumb and index finger, and chugged the stuff down. With a shiver—and a wink at me—he added, “Awful stuff!”

As if she had not noticed, Esmé went on. “Actually, we’re moving back to that part of the world. My parents are getting old—well, you probably saw our sign out front.” She laughed. “So if you know anybody in the market for a great house—”

She quirked her mouth to one side, as if she’d been only kidding. I smiled at her while, under the table, Will gave my leg a squeeze. Did it cross through his mind, as it did mine, that we might now know the real reason why we sat on the Fletchers’ patio: My friend was offering everyone she could think of a home tour in the guise of dinner?

“Seriously, though!” The beautiful Esmé smile. “There will never be a better time to buy real estate! Naysayers continue to abound, but there’s going to be an upswing in the works! Mark my words: Two years from now, prices will be even higher than before the bust!”

A second squeeze from Will. I treasured his camaraderie, but my keenest feeling was a swelling grief:

I was at least partly responsible for this altered Esmé, wasn’t I? When she had told me that she was pregnant and meant to marry Jeremy Fletcher, I’d thought only of myself. For fear of losing her friendship and good opinion, I had not told her,
Hey, I’m a rat, and the man you mean to marry is a rat, too.
Jesus, I could have told her
before
she got pregnant. She might have ditched him and had a better life, only I hadn’t given her the chance.

And Jeremy Fletcher himself—while Esmé explained that she had been offered an administrative job at the Art Institute, Jeremy Fletcher tapped his skinny fingers fretfully on the wrought-iron table’s pierced metal top. Out the corner of my eye, I could see a twitch in the tendon of his bony, bare forearm. The skin there had a shiny, crazed look—it was hairless, I realized—and reminded me of the skin on the arms of my long-gone Aunt Patty. I was partially responsible for the mess of Jeremy Fletcher’s life, too, wasn’t I? Maybe things would have been better for him, too, if I’d told Esmé the truth and they’d gone separate ways.

In the pink gravel alongside the patio there grew a young, waist-high, night-blooming cereus—
Cereus repandus
, the Peruvian apple—and, to ground myself, I reached out and ran my index finger down one of the waxy green channels between the still relatively short spines. We had one at our place, at least twelve feet tall. If the plants received support when they were young—got a start at, say, the foot of a palo verde tree—they could grow as high as thirty feet. Eventually, this little one would have multiple limbs, vertically ridged, like giant wales of corduroy, and each ridge would be topped with the needle-sharp spines that protected the plant against predators and also provided it with a surprising amount of shade, and helped it to catch the dew and rain that then could run down the plant’s channeled sides and water its roots—

The conversation at the table had died. I looked at Esmé, at Jeremy Fletcher. “Has your cereus bloomed yet?” I asked.

“Oh, yes!” Esmé said. “I’ve even watched the bats feed at the blossoms!”