As Good as Dead (23 page)

So: That woodenness of Will’s at the Thanksgiving dinner did worry me.

Also, I hated the way that he lowered his hand over the mouth of my glass when Esmé came around the dinette with a bottle of B & B.

Jeremy Fletcher laughed at that and asked, “You countin’ Brontë’s drinks, man?”

“She doesn’t normally drink at all,” Will said—his gaze absolutely nowhere, his voice perfectly bland; he could have been addressing the sofa for all the interest and inflection that he granted Jeremy Fletcher, and, soon after that, in the kitchen, where Esmé and I started to make coffee and whip the cream for our pies, Esmé came around to my good ear to whisper an indignant “He’s handsome, but way too controlling! My god!”

I laughed. I didn’t feel like laughing, but I couldn’t let her talk about Will that way. “He worries about me drinking. Because of my accident. That’s all.”

She nodded. “
?
‘I want to know that both of our lives make a difference,’
?
” she said. The sentence came from that five-page letter that Will had sent me from Italy.

Suppose she quoted to him from his letter! I moaned—frightened, guilty—“I never should have shown you that!”

“Oh, don’t be such a worrywart, Charlotte.” She put her arm around my shoulder and tilted her head against mine. “Your secret’s safe with me.”

That night, the first night of Will’s three-night visit from Italy, after Esmé and Jeremy had left for Jeremy Fletcher’s attic—and before Will and I had started making miserable treks back and forth to the apartment’s mildew-ridden bathroom to be sick—Will told me about his plans to stay on in Italy for another semester.

We were in my room at the time. I sat on the bed, the sheets and blankets mussed by our afternoon lovemaking. I’d been admiring his profile—in the low lighting, a silvery version of the Lincoln penny—as he stood on a chair and noisily tore off strips of masking tape and used them to tape sheets of newspaper over one of the room’s two windows (he disapproved of my not having curtains, although the only way anyone in Iowa City could have seen into that third-story apartment was with a pair of binoculars and an airplane).

I already had begun to feel nauseated—
Too much rich Thanksgiving food,
I thought,
and now this bad news.
It seemed like a cheat to me, Will’s telling me about a major change in his plans while he stood up on a chair, busy with his tape and newspapers, and I said something to that effect.

“That’s silly. Anyway, you’ve been getting a lot of good writing done while I’ve been away, right?” He stepped down from the chair and moved it to the next window and started in again with his tape and newspaper. “You’ve told me so. My being gone will just give you more time.”

It was true that I had been writing well—but always with the assumption that there was only the one semester for me to get through without Will, that we would be together in mid-December.

“This could make a big difference in my career, Charlotte. And, anyway—we’re planning to be together the rest of our lives.”

“Planning,”
I said darkly. It might have been my feeling sick that prompted me to say a reckless “Maybe it won’t happen, though. Maybe you won’t even come back. Who knows?”

“Don’t be crazy,” he said. One of my dad’s lines. Used on both my mother and me.

“I am not crazy! Don’t ever say I’m crazy!” I snapped.

He took a seat on the chair he had been using as a stepstool. Keeping his distance. The warship of himself sat on the far horizon, a silhouette, its most prominent features the twin muscles of his gritted jaw, poking out like matching cannons; and then the discussion was over anyway, because I had to run to the bathroom.

The next morning, Friday, Will—not as bad off as I turned out to be—got out of bed and went to answer the telephone. When he came back, he reported, “Your friends are sick, too.”

On Saturday morning—I still could not keep down even a sip of water—Will got up and dressed and met with his dissertation adviser. My own major accomplishment that day was to go to the living room and telephone Esmé at Jeremy Fletcher’s apartment. Esmé reported that she successfully had kept down a bowl of the broth from a can of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup and now was reading snatches of a book called
Blood Meridian,
which was a favorite of Jeremy Fletcher’s. I did not tell her that Will would not be coming home in December. I felt humiliated by that development. What had seemed like a romantic gesture—the surprise visit—had turned out to be merely a considerate one. Cheek resting on the dinette’s Formica top, I said only, “Will’s leaving tomorrow and pretty much all he’s seen me do is throw up.”

“Poor baby. Is he a good nurse, though?”

“He bought me ginger ale and Pepto-Bismol. What about Jeremy?”

“Jeremy!” Esmé laughed. “Jeremy was sicker than I was, girl!”

I did hold on to the hope that I would be able to drive Will to the airport on Sunday morning, but on Saturday afternoon he decided this was not a good idea, and he arranged for his friend Bernard to take him.

Sunday morning, he got up and showered and dressed in what I thought of as his uniform (gray cotton pants, flannel shirt, work boots). His bag packed, he lay down beside me on the bed and stroked my face. He spoke with admiration about a story of mine that he had read during his visit. I was not inclined to be mollified; nevertheless, waiting for his friend to arrive, we wound up having a last, quick round of sex.

“You see,” I said when he stood to zip up his pants. “I could drive you. Why don’t you call Bernard? He may not have left his house yet.”

Will was telling me that I needed to stay in bed and adjusting the covers around my shoulders when the familiar racket of someone working to unlock the apartment’s tricky front door started up. “Early for Esmé,” I said, but those definitely were her high-heeled boots that now began to tap down the hallway and I was happy to hear them.

“Anybody in there?” She knocked on the bedroom door.

“Come in!” I called.

“I have returned to the living!” she crowed as she flung open the door. She did a double-take at the papered-over windows; then danced a cute jig toward the bed. Will—sitting on the edge of the mattress, holding my hand, making me feel both cherished and infantile—said, his voice solemn, “Charlotte’s still not a hundred percent.”

I mugged for her, tongue out, eyes crossed.

She laughed, then asked Will if he needed a ride to the airport. He explained about Bernard.

Once she had left the room, Will started talking about places he thought that we could rent in Iowa City when he came home in May. He had leads. His dissertation adviser was going to keep his eye out, too. We also discussed places in Italy that he wanted to show me the May after next, Charlotte, once I finished with my degree—

“Anybody down there need coffee?” Esmé called from the kitchen.

Will raised a finger to signal a pause in our conversation. “Let me grab a cup. I’ll be right back.”

It was only a short distance to the kitchen. Hardly any time at all passed before I heard Esmé laugh and say, “Whoops!” and, then, “I didn’t mean it was already made!”

Will’s heavy footsteps sounded in the hall. He returned to my room, red-faced. He shut the door behind him. “That wasn’t cool,” he said.

“What?”

“Your friend”—he jabbed his thumb toward the kitchen—“was undressed.”

“What do you mean,
undressed
?” He had to have been exaggerating. In all the time that we had lived together, I never had seen Esmé in less than underpants and a bra.

“As in
naked
, Charlotte.”

On the other side of the now-closed bedroom door, Esmé called a laughing, singsong “Sor-ry! I was going to call when it was ready!”

“No problem,” Will said, but he was scowling—at me! Shaking his head! I hated Esmé then.
And
Will. Which must have shown on my face because he hissed, “I couldn’t help seeing her! And, Christ, she obviously did it on purpose, Charlotte.”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” How I regretted ever complaining to him about her! Now he thought that she was flirting with him! Worse, in the street below, a car began to honk its horn. Will walked to the window that looked out on Burlington Street and he pulled back the edge of one of the taped sheets of newspaper. He turned toward me. “It’s Bernard,” he said. His face full of distress—anger or sadness, I couldn’t tell which—he picked up his bag. “I have to go,” he said. “I hate to leave like this, but I can’t miss my plane.”

As soon as he left, I felt the need to get up, take a shower, move around, but I stayed in bed because I did not want to see Esmé. I could not imagine what I possibly could say to her.

She was making quite a bit of noise. Packing for her trip home, I supposed. Twice, she left the apartment and returned. The third time, after I heard the front door click, I got up and went to one of my windows and looked out from behind its newspaper curtain. There was her BMW, parked on the street. No Esmé, though. Then I heard the metallic yawn of someone opening our building’s big blue Dumpster and I went to the other window.

Esmé. Chucking in a big black plastic garbage bag.

After that, she got into her car and drove away. Gone without a good-bye? Well, fine.

Food still had little appeal, but I took a shower, and, afterward, I left my door open so that if Esmé came back, she would see that I had gotten up and sat at my desk—supposedly working, everything normal.

She returned at noon. I heard Jeremy Fletcher’s voice, too. Then, not raising her usual staccato beat with her high-heeled boots, she came down the hall and knocked on my open door. “Sweetie?” she said.

The expression on her face was . . . both wistful and impish. For the first time since the day that I had met her, her hair was done up in the Pippi Longstocking braids. She stepped a little ways into the room, tiptoeing, like she was afraid of me. “Are you going to bite?” she asked.

I shook my head. “I’ve got a ton of work to do, though.” I pointed at the pile of student papers on my desk. “Catching up.”

“Oh, Charlotte! You’re upset about this morning! I’m such an idiot! But I was as startled as Will, trust me!”

In a voice that I hoped sounded bored, I said, “Hey, let’s just forget it.”

“Oh, thank you! Thank you! That’s what I want to do, too!” She started to back out of the room, then stopped and sputtered a laugh. “If only . . . Well, I
do
wish you could have seen the expression on his face. I mean, I could tell he was attracted to me, of course, when we had our little dinner, but, so what, right? He
loves
you, right? Still”—she laughed again, deep in her throat, like a jolly baby—“the way his eyes popped: It
was
funny!”

I could tell he was attracted to me, of course.

How could she not know that a friend wasn’t allowed to say such a thing?

Of course, Will was attracted to her! Anybody would be attracted to her! But for her to
say
to me that she could tell—that was not allowed. Absolutely not.

None of this, of course, excused what I went on to do.

Because if I claim that I was raised by wolves, then I also have to grant that the wolves did imbue me with at least a scrap of pack decorum.

It was, in fact, pack decorum that stopped me from crying out a few hours later, when Jeremy Fletcher, coming up behind me as I lit the stove, pressed a lump of erection into my backside and slid his hands up to my breasts. With a low, wolfish snarl, I tussled out of his reach. I imagined that I protected Esmé—down in the bathroom, maybe ten feet off—from the pain of knowing what this unsavory man she loved was up to behind her back.

Jeremy Fletcher laughed. He grabbed a dish towel hanging from a nearby hook and flicked it at my shoulder. “Oh, Brontë. She thinks y’all are just a hick! Having a hissy fit ’cause your beau walked in on her naked!”

Neck-ed
.

She had told him about it. And that I was upset. Although I had told her I was not upset.

Was Jeremy Fletcher upset?

Grinning, he leaned in and whispered, “You and me are going to be all on our lonesome the next few days. We oughta make the best of it, doncha think?”

This wounded me through and through! I was not a slut! Did not dress like a slut! Did not act like a slut! Did not even flirt! And Jeremy Fletcher—had he never picked up a sense that any friendliness I showed toward him was a matter of politeness and largely on behalf of Esmé? No one could have convinced me that I ever had sent a message of desire to him!

Sad to say, however, my next thought was that this puffy-faced, red-nosed man who now snapped a blue-and-white checked dish towel at my shoulder was the treasure of the young woman flushing the noisy toilet down the hall; that friend whom I alternately adored and resented. That friend who did not seem to want me to have any friends beyond her; who wanted all of the friends in the world for herself; who that morning had exposed her naked self to the man I loved, and then bragged to me about his response—and apparently to her boyfriend, too.