As Good as Dead (18 page)

Olivia was going to share a confidence? Ellen did not feel prepared for that, not yet, but she hungered for the friendship to be intimate, and so—not to spoil things—she held Olivia’s blazing, dark-eyed gaze. “Olivia?”

Olivia grinned. “I’m thinking, Ellen—do you suppose we figured each other would be safe to live with since we’re both attractive? Like, we took each other’s looks as the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval?”

Ellen covered her mouth with both hands while she laughed and wagged her head back and forth in protest. This second helping of flattery had come too close on the heels of the first. Also, she resolutely refused to accept that Olivia included Ellen in her own class of good looks. Olivia’s nose was a perfect aquiline; Ellen’s came at you like a friendly cocker spaniel’s. Olivia had a fashionably slim body—not
boyish
, not at all, but she did not require a bra under her silky camisole top, let alone the five-hooked number that governed zaftig Ellen beneath her oxford-cloth button-down.

Even with the Chianti tingeing her teeth blue, Olivia looked lovely, likely to win at anything she put her mind to.

So is she fishing?
Ellen asked herself.
Am I supposed to say an aghast
‘But of course I’m not nearly as pretty as you, Olivia’
?
The idea rankled while she went on laughing into her hands, shaking her head, no, no. no.

“Well!” Olivia clapped, once, twice. “It’s something to think about!” Then she hopped up from the table and declared that they would leave the dishes for later. “It’s Saturday night and you’re my best friend in this one-horse town! At least
once
we’ve got to go out and get a little smashed, missy!”

Halfheartedly, Ellen lifted the wine bottle to indicate that they didn’t need to go out, but the bottle was empty, and Olivia—now up out of her chair entirely and jubilantly boogying around the kitchen—began to describe a place called Hooch’s, the bar to which she meant to take Ellen:

“It’s got a genuine jukebox, Ellen! Wooden booths! An old pressed-tin ceiling hung with plastic grape and chili pepper and pumpkin lights. It’s funky! They give out free popcorn! It could be our place!”

With the Chianti warm inside her—how much had she drunk?—Ellen thought Hooch’s did sound perfect.
Our place.
She went to her room to change.
Our place
. Two young artists. Best friends.
Attractive
. Swinging down the streets of Dinkytown after a day of hard work.

“Look at you! You look fabulous!” Olivia said when she came out. “Except, uh-oh, not the rearview.” She crooked a finger—
follow me
.

After she’d shut the two of them inside the apartment’s little bathroom, Olivia pointed to the mirror tacked to the back of the door. “Turn around,” she said. She folded her arms across her chest. “Check out your rearview. Are you
sure
you can afford to wear drawstring pants?”

“
Much
better,” Olivia said when, a few minutes later, Ellen—face still hot with embarrassment—emerged in the straight-leg pants that Olivia had encouraged her to buy the week before.

To the west, Dinkytown’s clouded blue horizon of trees and buildings swallowed the last of the early September sunset. In the silky air, as they hurried toward Fourth Street, they took turns reciting favorite poems (Olivia liked poetry, too, for Christsakes!). Ellen did Yeats’s “Adam’s Curse,” and Olivia did “Leda and the Swan.” Fourth Street was lively, drivers honking at the young people who walked straight into the traffic, determined not to look both ways—or even one way—to teach the drivers that
they
were the ones who needed to stop, be careful. The restaurants and bars glowed golden, like Ali Baba’s caves, as if they were piled high inside with magic lamps and trunks of coins, heaps of jewels. Up ahead—Ellen spied the bar’s name, carved into a wooden sign that hung over the street—the door to Hooch’s stood open, as if you were invited to walk in, be part of the music and talk and laughter inside. Still, Ellen would not have entered had Olivia not taken her elbow and tugged her into the foyer.

Beyond, in the bar proper, as Olivia had said, there were festive twinkle-light pumpkins and fruits. Just to make conversation, feeling awkward despite the wine, Ellen started to ask Olivia how she knew about Hooch’s, but then a number of people from around the bar were shouting, “Hey, Olivia!” and Olivia was smiling and waving in response.

When they first had met, Olivia had told Ellen that she was shy, too. How could she possibly have thought that she was
shy
?

“Grab that”—Olivia pointed Ellen toward a booth—“I’ll get us beers.”

The Hooch’s crowd seemed to be a mix of students, some older than Olivia and Ellen, some definitely holding fake IDs, plus everything in between. Two old hippies with scraggly ponytails sat near a tableful of Dinkytown shopkeepers in pressed chinos and denim skirts. A huddle of beefy males in polo shirts and tasseled loafers stood at the end of the bar where a television was set to ESPN (alumni, apparently; to a one, each wore something either maroon or gold or both).

After fifteen minutes of waiting—Olivia kept getting into conversations with different tables of people on the way to the bar—Ellen slid to the edge of the booth and swung her legs around so that she faced the bar. Her goal: to insert herself into Olivia’s view.

Twenty-two minutes. She tried to keep a Buddha smile on her face, to look pleasant—though not as if she wanted a date.

People smiled up at Olivia with such interest while she stood alongside their tables or booths! Any moment now, surely, she would signal for Ellen to come join her, but Olivia’s gaze never shifted quite in Ellen’s direction, and, a little drunk from the Chianti, Ellen got to feeling quite morose, as if, like the singer on the jukebox, she had been abandoned by the one she loved.

Attractive
. She tried to warm her hands at that idea for a while; then at the idea of
our place
;
then at an idea for a new painting, something with words, something drawing inspiration from Magritte and Ed Ruscha and Jasper Johns and, hey, also from the booth’s tabletop, whose darkly shellacked finish was chipped and incised with raw wood drawings and declarations.
A hard man is good to find. Yo, Michelle! The bartender is a great fuck.
Some wag had transformed the arrow piercing a Valentine’s heart into a rocket-penis with an American flag on top. At the tippy-top of the flag, there stood a tiny, waving figure whose stick arms and corkscrew curl made it resemble something out of Dr. Seuss.

She resolved that she would not look at Olivia. For an entire cigarette, she blew her smoke toward the fruit and vegetable lights that twinkled so dreamily overhead, regarded the smudged tin ceiling.

Finally, she allowed herself to peek. And found Olivia nowhere in sight. Forty minutes. Suppose that she never came back to this booth in which Ellen didn’t even
want
to be sitting, in which she, like a castaway, out in an ocean storm, struggled to see over the tops of foamy waves? Feeling a need for safety, she now scooted to the booth’s back corner, contracted her surfaces as much as possible.

This did not stop her from feeling endangered.

What’s Dan up to tonight?
she wondered.

After a time, she returned to the edge of the booth. There was Olivia, at the bar, talking to an older painter from their program, a guy in a multicolor kufi hat. He was supposed to be a Big Talent. Bob Devereaux. Ellen thought Bob Devereaux was a bit much (his collection of kufi hats, his lazy Cajun accent, the blue tick hound that trailed him to the Art Department studios). The bartender set a beer in front of Olivia. One of the beers she was fetching for herself and Ellen? While Olivia pulled some bills from the back pocket of her jeans, the bartender set out a second beer.

Finally! But Olivia did not pick up the beers. She continued talking to Bob Devereaux and an older woman with cropped hair and what seemed to be lederhosen (some kind of stiff shorts with embroidered suspenders). The bartender set three shots up on the bar, and the woman in the lederhosen and Olivia and the painter downed them. Olivia’s made her cough, and Bob Devereaux rubbed and patted her back in a familiar way. Olivia grinned and laughed through her coughing, signaling she was okay, so Bob Devereaux and the lady in the lederhosen laughed, too—like they were all old friends, Ellen thought.

It pained Ellen to watch this. In part because she had the strange feeling that what went on at the bar was somehow her own story, too; that what Olivia did next would determine what Ellen herself did, and, as she thought this—a grim thought—Olivia turned from the bar with the beers. After all this time, for the first time since they had arrived at Hooch’s, Olivia caught Ellen’s eyes, watching her—

I noted how the Ellen-character flushed when “caught” by Olivia; the same way that I had flushed and tried to hide my tears after Esmé hugged me in Will’s and my front hall.

After a moment’s hesitation, Olivia raised her smooth, tanned shoulders and made a comic grimace, as if to say,
Sorry for the delay, Ellen, but people wouldn’t let me go!
In practically the same instant, however, a long arm in a flannel shirt shot up at the next table and Olivia crouched down by that table, too! All that Ellen could see of Olivia was her claw of bangs, identical to other fashionable claws of bangs poking up here and there throughout the crowd, and what she felt then—her longing not to be alone one moment longer, her jealousy and resentment of her friend’s ease in the world—it
roared
in her ears, so loud she had to turn her face to the back wall of the booth, stare at the stainless steel napkin dispenser and the bottles of catsup and mustard and Heinz 57 in their neat metal corral. Not only did she mean to prevent any possibility of Olivia’s spotting her hurt and anger; she also wanted to insure that she did not see whatever Olivia did next. Something in all this reminded her of how, at Saint Olaf—after she’d accidentally walked in on a snarky dorm-room conversation about herself—she had taken to making as much noise as possible before she entered a room.

“Whew!” The booth’s wooden seat registered a bounce. It was Olivia, now dropping down beside her. Olivia’s eyes drooped a little from the drinks that she had received during her trip around the bar, but she smiled happily at Ellen and she said, “If it isn’t my best pal in the whole world! Sorry it took so long to get away from people, best pal!”

Best pal
. So maybe she actually understood what she’d put Ellen through with this wait? Never would do it again?

“Whew!” Olivia repeated, and then, to Ellen’s surprise, Olivia gave her a sustained hug. The hug—Ellen’s own family did not hug except on big occasions, and Olivia’s hug restored Ellen, set her glowing, as warm and festive as the pumpkin and grape and chili lights overhead, and she went on glowing while she downed her beer and Olivia pointed out different people in the bar and told their stories:

“Bob Devereaux—he’s a genius!”

“That pretty brunette in the halter top—I guess she’s a slut!”

“The lady in the lederhosen bakes the cookies at Nellie’s Bakery, and she says she’ll give us free samples if we come by.”

Us.
So Olivia had mentioned Ellen to the lady. That was good. That was excellent. Ellen gestured toward the bar, for Olivia to let her out of the booth. “I’ll go up and get us another round.”

“It was empty when we got here.” So said the people who sat in the booth when Ellen returned with two beers. “Sorry!” they added, but not as if they were about to yield the spot.
Finders keepers, losers weepers.

It took Ellen three trips around the bar before she found Olivia in a booth positively crammed with young men and women, three of the latter being the pretty women whom Olivia referred to as the Bimbettes.

“Oops! Gotta go!” Olivia said when she saw Ellen and proceeded to climb over the laps and arms of the people hemming her in.

“Esmé!” they protested. “Don’t go!”

Esmé,
I had written, not
Olivia
. My god. Suppose that I had submitted the story and it had been accepted and a proofreader had not noticed the error!

Olivia did not look at Ellen but, as if they were spies or gangsters, she murmured out the side of her mouth, “Let’s blow this pop stand!”

In the foyer, while they stood alongside a muscle-bound guy with a terrible case of acne—a bouncer?—Olivia downed the beer that Ellen had been carrying for her, and she said between gulps, managing to sound both exuberant and mournful, “I won’t claim I wasn’t having fun talking to those people, Ellen, but I’d rather be with just you any day!” Then she told the big guy, “This is my best buddy, here.” The poor guy—he looked as if larvae pupated under his skin; some already poked out the tips of their tiny red heads.
Angry
—that was even a way of talking about disturbed skin, wasn’t it?
Angry-looking skin?
The man’s skin, even more than his outsize muscles, suggested that he’d tear off somebody’s head at the least provocation; still, Olivia insisted on letting him know how “breathtakingly” smart her good friend Ellen was: