As Good as Dead (22 page)

At the same time, I did yearn for what she said to be true.

So I nodded. I smiled. I said, “Right.”

Chapter 16

It was Esmé who suggested that we stay in Iowa City for the Thanksgiving break, do our own holiday dinner, and I was game. “Maybe we could invite a couple of people?” I said.

“No, no. Just you and me—and Jeremy.” She and Jeremy Fletcher were a couple by then. “That would be more fun, don’t you think?”

Thanksgiving morning arrived, so icy cold that I wore my bathrobe over my jeans and sweater while I rolled out the dough for a pumpkin and a pecan pie. Any caulk that ever had held the apartment’s windows tight had long since moldered and rattled away. After a time, the heat from the oven turned the kitchen windows steamy, fuzzing my view of the gray sky. As the morning progressed, almost as if in response to the mournful cello music that Esmé set playing in the living room, the windows began to run, little rivulets. She’d been on the telephone with her family for quite a while, but now she came into the kitchen to tell me she had decided to go to Evanston on Sunday.

“Mother thinks I need a new coat and”—she jerked a thumb toward the living room—“we’re going to hear some Bach.” She grinned. “Also, I want Jeremy to have the experience of missing me.”

So,
I thought,
people really do that!
I had supposed it was the stuff of characters in novels (Madame Bovary, Becky Sharp, and Anna Karenina).

After we carried the dinette set from the kitchen into the living room, I decided to go out for a run. Esmé had worked out the timing for everything. Once the turkey was done, it would need to sit for forty-five minutes. Jeremy Fletcher would arrive at one, dinner would be served at two, and we—and she hoped Jeremy Fletcher, too—would go to a movie around five. “We have to go to a movie on Thanksgiving!” she said. “It’s a family tradition!”

I liked the idea of family traditions. A movie on Thanksgiving. Well, good.

I went to Oakland Cemetery for my run. Oakland Cemetery sat on the eastern skirt of Iowa City. Its roads wound between bare oak trees and evergreens, and I liked the way that I could leave the asphalt for dirt paths or old roads of red bricks that were rounded by wear, broken up, or disappearing altogether. Still, in a hooded sweatshirt of Will’s, with my face covered by a plaid scarf, I felt a little lonely and anonymous.

I wondered:
Should I have gone home to Webster City?
My mother had sounded disappointed when I said I would not be coming. Then I thought:
If I were in Webster City right now, I’d probably be alone, out for a run at the cemetery.

I put on my Walkman. The CD I listened to was one that Esmé once had teased me about. “Gloria Estefan? You’re worse than I am, Charlotte! Why do you suppose we want to be
agitated
all the time?”

The question surprised me. I supposed it was true, though, that I sometimes sharpened my loneliness to a needle point. The taut-wired guitar
thwang
that signaled Gloria Estefan was about to sing the sad “Can’t Stay Away from You”—it ravaged my heart. Did I want my heart to feel ravaged?

Shouldn’t that have changed now that I had a good man to love? The way my eyes teared, you would have thought that, like the girl in the song, I loved not Will but a faithless dude who toyed with my affections or had abandoned me, and though I knew that I should forget him, I couldn’t, couldn’t, couldn’t.

Heart full of missing what I sensed was not entirely Will—a feeling that had been with me at least since I was old enough to understand the lyrics of love songs on the radio and my mother’s Johnny Mathis records—I started around the cemetery’s largest and most famous grave, a monument topped by a giant figure that some people called the Black Angel and invested with both terrors and benedictions. “Don’t want to be your second choice,” Gloria Estefan sang, sorrowful and angry and baffled in equal measures, and ahead of me, like an object in the can-you-find-it pictures that I had loved as a kid, the perfectly still figure of a buff-colored deer magically detached itself from the cemetery’s early winter background of dun grass and leafless hedges and headstones. I stopped. I supposed my breathing was loud, but all I could hear was the plaintive song of Gloria Estefan. A deer, two deer, three. They blinked their big, long-lashed eyes—at me, it felt like. Then so very delicately they shifted and turned, cantered off elegantly on their neat black hooves in the direction of a wire fence that divided the cemetery from the woods of Hickory Hill Park, and somehow—how did they do that?—their front legs lightly rose over the top wire just one fraction of a second before their back legs came after them.

“Thank you,” I called. Thanksgiving goodness. I could share it with Esmé and also with Will, in my next letter.

Jeremy Fletcher had arrived while I was out for my run. He lay stretched full length on Esmé’s futon, a glass of whiskey in one hand; his head—in its fedora—rested on Esmé’s lap. While I hung up my jacket, he declared, “Iowa Girl, when y’all come in out of the cold that nose of yours is the reddest nose I ever did see.”

A person with multiple fluffy chins, man-breasts in no way concealed by one of the various floppy vests that were part of his uniform—a completely unappetizing specimen with an
always
red nose, little capillaries giving away the fact that he drank too much. Why did I pay any attention to his insults? Because they felt like home? That seems too easy, but he got under my skin, and, worse, he knew it, and that I wouldn’t respond in kind. In the kitchen, washing lettuce for the dinner salad, I had no choice but to listen to his telling Esmé of a good old time when he and his little brother, “both of us dumb as dirt,” stole a jar of chloroform from their high school’s science lab and used it to knock out a neighbor’s cat so they could see what it was like to perform a little surgery. “We reckoned what we cut out was the appendix. Leastways it wadn’t nothing essential ’cause, sure enough, we saw the creature sunning itself on a porch swing a few days later.”

Esmé protested, “But that’s awful!”

“Way of the world, little lamb,” Jeremy Fletcher said, “way of the world. Speaking of which”—he raised his voice so there was no way that I could pretend not to hear—“Iowa Girl, I was in the office the other day, just curious, takin’ a peek at some files”—he chuckled—“and I saw that one of your recommenders, a Professor Stone, called you ‘an extremely attractive person’!”

“Oh, goody!” Esmé said. “You hear that, Charlotte? One of your professors had a crush on you!”

I raised my voice to call, “I’m covering my ears, guys!”

“Charlotte!” Esmé protested. “Don’t you want to know what else he said? I want to know!”

“Go out in the hall, then!”

She laughed. “All right, all right, we’ll go out in the hall!”

I tried to shake the words—
extremely attractive person—
out of my head after they closed the door behind themselves. I worked salt into the garlic with the back of a spoon, the way that I’d seen Esmé do, rubbing the mess ever finer, then adding vinegar, and a pinch of dry mustard. Professor Stone? Maybe he had simply meant “pleasant company,” but suppose the Workshop’s admissions committee had, like Jeremy Fletcher and Esmé, taken him to mean “good to look at.” People often commented on the fact that the female graduate students were prettier than average, while the same did not hold true for their male counterparts.

Suppose I was at the Workshop because Helmut Stone had thought I was pretty?

Since the party at the Victorian, I’d been trying my hand at “careful drinking,” and after I finished making the vinaigrette, and Jeremy Fletcher and Esmé—still giggling a little—returned from the hall and resettled themselves on the futon, I poured myself an orange juice glass of the bourbon that Jeremy Fletcher had brought along as his Thanksgiving Day offering. I carried the glass out to the living room and I sat down with it at the dinette. At the Webster City AA meetings that I’d attended after my bicycle accident, I’d been told by a painfully sunburned boy—he’d blacked out while picnicking under the July sun—“Once you admit you’re an alcoholic, drinking’s not as much fun.” I thought of that boy sometimes. I very much liked the way that Jeremy Fletcher’s bourbon was dilating my brain, making me feel instantly more at ease; I also caught myself worrying that the orange juice glass of bourbon might not be enough. There had been an afternoon when I had looked in the Iowa City telephone book at the number for Alcoholics Anonymous, but I didn’t see how I could be in the Workshop and live with Esmé and go to AA meetings.

“Oh, I just remembered! Toffer’s hash!” Esmé hopped up from the futon and, before long, she and I were singing “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair.” I hardly minded that Jeremy Fletcher was there, by then. He was as stoned as we were and seemed to find us thoroughly entertaining.
My Fair Lady
’s
“Without You”—we sang that. Esmé invited in the neighbor who came knocking on the door to tell us to keep it down, and Jeremy Fletcher gave the man an orange juice glass of bourbon, and he settled himself on the futon for the duration of Esmé’s and my heartfelt, if out of tune, version of “Summertime.”

The two of us were arranging the steaming bowls and platters of our feast on the kitchen counter when there was more knocking on the door. I was in fine fettle, and, assuming it was another neighbor, come to complain, I said—feeling delightfully impudent—“
I’ll
go this time!”

It had been five months since I last had seen Will, and, for a moment—he had cut his hair very short and looked much thinner than I’d ever seen him—I did not quite understand who he was. I actually let out a gasp when he grabbed my hand and pulled me out into the hall.

Oh, Will. Who leaned me up against the wall and kissed me and kissed me, for how long I do not know.

When we finally returned to the apartment, Esmé and Jeremy Fletcher grinned at us. “Ho-ho-ho! Merry Christmas!” Esmé said. “I guess the famous Will has come!”

The look on the face of Will—Mr. Privacy—demanded,
What have you said about me?
and that set Jeremy Fletcher and Esmé giggling. I started giggling, too—you had to have been there, drinking, smoking Toffer’s hash, as Will had not. Esmé bowed at the waist and said, “Tweedledee” and Jeremy did the same and said, “Tweedledum,” and I couldn’t stop laughing completely until Will and I were down in my room, pulling off each other’s clothes.

In all the years that followed that surprise Thanksgiving visit, Will and I never did discuss the visit’s upsetting parts:

That I’d been drunk and stoned when he arrived. That he’d flown to Iowa—having cashed in the ticket that was to have brought him back for good in December—to let me know, in person, that he’d been offered another semester in Milan and so would not be coming home again until May; that our long adjournment to my room after his arrival left the stuffed turkey to breed salmonella or something equally onerous that made all of us violently ill; that the dinner itself—even when we were unaware of its dangers—was a bust, with Will and Jeremy Fletcher squaring off as alpha males, and leaving Esmé and me to create all of the sociability on our own.

I had been aware that Will did not show any appreciation for Esmé’s and my friendship during the dinner. True, I had complained to him about her, but I’d sung her praises, too, and I felt embarrassed by his coolness. At one point, talking about our pity for the poor young soldier in Chekhov’s “The Kiss”—so devastated by his discovery that it took mere seconds for him to share with his comrades the story of his life’s greatest moment of bliss—Esmé and I both had stretched our mouths open woefully wide and pressed our hands hard to our cheeks, like the figure in Edvard Munch’s
The Scream,
and Will wrinkled up his nose and turned away from the table, as if it were absolutely necessary that he make plain his distaste for our little shtick.

But Esmé and I were working so hard to get a conversation going! “Now, Will,” Esmé said, “you have to tell us all about your work and where you’ve gone and what you’ve seen! I had an astonishing time when I was in Milan, but I was only seventeen, so I’m sure I missed most everything important!”

He nodded. “I’m kind of tired right now, though. I just want to enjoy being here with Charlotte.”

“Of course.” Esmé smiled her beautiful smile. She looked so perfect in the candlelight, I suddenly felt certain that Will would begin to wish
she
were his girlfriend. “Dear Charlotte. Isn’t Charlotte a great name, Will?” Esmé said. “Why couldn’t I have been named Charlotte? Think of . . . Charlotte Brontë. Really, what writer is more glorious than Charlotte Brontë?”

I started to respond—anything to keep the conversation going—that Esmé was the lucky one, but Jeremy Fletcher interrupted with an amused bellow: “Charlotte-fucking-Brontë?
Glorious
?”

I was in a big George Eliot phase at the time, but I agreed with Esmé that Charlotte Brontë was glorious—Emily Brontë, too—

“Glorious!” Jeremy Fletcher bellowed again. From that point onward, he insisted on calling me Brontë. “Brontë, will y’all pass me the rolls?” “Tasty taters you made, Brontë, honey!” Which was apparently too much fun at my expense for Will—or maybe it suggested to Will that Jeremy Fletcher and I were true amigos when he was not around. Whatever it was, Will grew increasingly rigid and silent as he sat chewing bites of the Thanksgiving dinner. I understood that he was tired from his long flight—his face looked scooped out under the cheeks from lack of sleep—but the way he knitted his heavy brow worried me. He was a man who could get physical. Once, walking down the street in Mount Vernon, right in front of us, an unnerving clutch of bodies in T-shirts and jeans had come churning out the door of a bar called the Southside. Two larger men were pounding on a third man, who crouched under their blows, trying to protect himself, and, just like that, Will grabbed the largest man from behind and lifted him off his feet. It was an awful moment, the man kicking backward at Will’s legs (while I—like a little lady in a comedy—swung my purse at the other bully). Providentially, the panic-inducing
wheeeee
of a siren had sounded in the distance. It would prove to be the siren of an ambulance on its way to a nearby nursing home, but the sound of it made Will release the man, and all three men from the bar took off running, leaving Will and me to stare at each other, breathless, amazed.