As Good as Dead (28 page)

“Actually,” he said—a very nice man—when I picked up the second time, “you’re not the first writer who’s done that.”

The story was dark, he said, but he thought that it earned the darkness.

“Oh, good,” I said and hoped Will would not mind that a bit of the story’s dialogue drew on a conversation he’d once had with his little sister (she’d confessed she couldn’t stay in a relationship once “the magic wore off”).

The amount that I would be paid for the story was inconceivable to me, but, at that moment, even though I needed money, the payment mattered to me strictly because it meant that that the
Atlantic Monthly
would publish the story. As the editor and I said good-bye, I felt a sense of success unlike anything that I had felt in the past, different from receiving high test scores or a scholarship to college or even my graduate assistantship. I felt . . . full. Good. Right with the world. And I was not drunk.

My movements fluid, graceful, I set the receiver in the cradle. I smiled. Then something very curious and sad happened. As if holes had opened in the bottoms of my feet, all of the good things that I was feeling—they rushed right out of me,
whoosh
, head to toe. Like that, they were gone.

I consoled myself with the thought that at least I still had the news to share.

I telephoned Will at the Milan apartment he shared with several other art history people (I reasoned: If I waited until five, when the rates went down, it would be midnight there). Will was not at the apartment, but the young man—an American—who took my message was excited. “The
Atlantic
! That’s incredible! And you’re Charlotte. Got it! Great! Congratulations, Charlotte!”

I wished that Esmé would come home! Everyone in the Workshop longed to publish in the Big Three (the
Atlantic
,
Harper’s
,
the
New Yorker
), but I didn’t see how I could tell anyone but Esmé about the sale without seeming to brag. They’d just have to see the story in the magazine.

A drink would have been so nice! Maybe it would have brought back that elation I’d felt for one moment. I paced the apartment.

I wanted
not
to want to telephone my parents, but, at five o’clock, there I was, on the line, waiting for someone to pick up at the house in Webster City.

“How much are they going to pay you?” my dad asked. He was impressed by the amount, although he never had heard of the
Atlantic Monthly
.

“It’s been around for over a hundred years, Dad.”

My mother got on the line to ask—sounding both happy for me and nervous—“Are we going to have to hide our heads when people read it? I haven’t come off very well in the stories of yours I’ve read so far!”

“It’s fiction, Mom,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”

Esmé had given me the number for Jeremy Fletcher’s place. Before that day, I had viewed it as something to use strictly in an emergency, but, in the end—wouldn’t she chew me out if I didn’t tell her?—I telephoned her.

“Brontë,” Jeremy Fletcher said before handing me off to Esmé.

After I told her my news, she blurted, “Damn you!” Then laughed. “But—of course, that’s fantastic! Hold on.” She covered the telephone for a moment. “Jeremy says you should make sure it isn’t a prank, though.”

I hadn’t imagined such a thing. “Who would do that?”

“Call Curtis back!” she said. “You can get the office number from my
LMP
! Top shelf of the bookcase. Right side.”

In the background, I could hear Jeremy Fletcher ask Esmé what story I had sent. When Esmé passed along my answer, he chortled and said a loud,
“Really?”

“Call their office and let us know what you find out,” Esmé said.

Well, I couldn’t. Which drove Jeremy Fletcher and Esmé almost insane. That night, the two of them actually drove over to the apartment with carryout Chinese and beer to try to cajole me. At one point, Jeremy Fletcher gave me a look that I thought was a bit too familiar—like
Hey, I know you; you want to do this
—but, eventually, he and Esmé gave up. He lay on the futon with his head in Esmé’s lap. He began to talk about the weaknesses of the Workshop and his classmates and where he pictured himself, overall, in what he termed
the field
.

“With all due respect, I reckon no one currently writing English prose composes a finer sentence than I,” he said, then added with a chuckle, “course, it may be a magazine like the
Atlantic
—a magazine pitching to the mass audience—don’t appreciate the level at which I work.”

Esmé nodded and stroked the fine strands of hair on top of his head (hair I could not swear that I myself had not stroked during all that falderal after Thanksgiving).

Two days later, FedEx delivered an envelope containing a letter from Mr. Curtis and the
Atlantic
contract. Jeremy Fletcher or Esmé saw it and, apparently, one or both of them told Workshop people about the sale. I went to pick up stories from the copy room, and the director called out to me as I passed by his office (actually, I hadn’t heard the man, but his assistant had, and, remembering that I was half-deaf, she kindly came after me). I’d never spoken to the director before—while other students felt free to drop in for a visit, I felt I would have had to invent some dull pretext for doing so—but he congratulated me like we were old friends, and, then, passing out into the hallway, on my way to meet Esmé at the River Room, I found that many more people suddenly knew my name and said hello.

Esmé and I had staked out a River Room table with our coats and backpacks so we’d have a place to sit once we got through the line when—snaking his way through the noisy cafeteria’s crowded tables, holding up his coffee cup like a scepter—Jeremy Fletcher called ahead of himself, “So, Brontë, will y’all still say hey to us when you’re rich and famous?” I’d looked forward to talking to Esmé without Jeremy Fletcher around, but Esmé was clearly delighted to see him. She kissed his cheek above his fizzy beard. “You two sit,” she said. “I have to run to the restroom.”

Jeremy Fletcher and I sat. As if he were Dr. Freud and I a case to be solved, he pulled his fingers through his beard and stared out at me from under the brim of his fedora. Whatever he was up to, I didn’t want to be part of it, and I turned toward the wall of windows and looked out. The Iowa was moving fast and wide. Their feet blazing orange against the snow-patched riverbank, a pair of mallards—the male glamorous with his emerald-green head and gold necklace, the female less so in her simple tweed—clambered toward a woman and tiny girl in matching red coats and berets who were in the process of opening plastic bags of Wonder bread.

“But, Brontë,” Jeremy Fletcher said. Nothing more.

I looked toward the hallway from which Esmé would return to the cafeteria. She was not in sight. “What is it?”

He dropped his eyes. “Brontë,” he said, “I swan I’m lookin’ at the burgeoning breasts of a pregnant lady.”

That fast, his fedora, his beard and heavy shoulders in their burgundy V-neck sweater, the students and professors standing and sitting and raising bites of bag lunches and cafeteria food to their lips, the windows and the riverbanks and the dark river and the Art Building and beyond—all of it unfurled like a rude wire-and-paper New Year’s party favor. Then, there was a moment in which I could not see a thing: The screen went gray.

Of course, he was right. Also could not be allowed to know that he was right.

The gray began to clear. Jeremy Fletcher, like everything else in that emergency moment, began to reemerge in staticky bits of color.

“New birth control pills, dude,” I said.
Dude.
Not a name that I used, except in jest, playing the part of a slacker or a stoner. “It’s a common side effect.”

He took another look at my breasts, smiled and shook his head. “Have it your way. Just don’t fuck things up for me and Esmé.”

I slid my chair back from the table and stood. When Esmé and I had arrived, I had taken off not only my overcoat but also the old Borgesian tweed jacket. The thing had grown so threadbare that as—trembling, dry-mouthed—I went to put it on, I mistakenly stuck my arm not into the actual sleeve but into the space between the sleeve and its lining. When I tried to extricate my arm, I brought along a length of the torn lining, a trail of satiny gray stuff—completely grotesque to my eyes at that moment, and damning, too, a sign of my lack of grace, my ineptitude and general cursedness. I swung my backpack onto my shoulder and bundled the torn jacket and my overcoat against my front.
My burgeoning breasts.
“Tell Esmé I couldn’t stick around, okay?” I said in Jeremy Fletcher’s general direction. “Tell her I remembered I had some papers I need to grade.”

“Sure. Sure. Work, work, work. Brontë’s busy like a bee-bee-bee.”

I was on the telephone with the appointment scheduler at the women’s clinic when the apartment door flew open and hit the wall behind it with a crash.

“Charlotte!” Esmé came running across the living room toward me. Her woolly, pastel pink scarf covered most of her face, but I still could see that she was crying. In a panic, I dropped the receiver into the cradle and flattened myself against the wall at my back.

“You have to swear you’ll never tell a soul!” she said while tearing off the scarf—under which was a crumpled, trembling, but joyful smile.

I nodded.

Like two different mothers checking her temperature at once, Esmé set the backs of both of her fine-boned hands against her glowing cheeks. Although she went on crying, she clearly needed to talk—she stopped and bent over and laughed and shook her head—“Remember how I thought I might arrange an accident with my pills?” she asked.

I nodded again.

“Well, it worked! It worked! I’m seven weeks along!” She shivered and laughed. “I told Jer right after you left! I’ve wanted to tell you, but I had to tell him first, of course. Anyway, he thinks it’s great!” She stopped laughing then, her face suddenly serious. “You understand, right? He thinks it was an
accident
.” Before I could answer, she put her fingers to her lips—
sh!
—and said, her voice loud, I guessed for the benefit of any neighbor who might have overheard, “It was an accident, but he’s really happy! We called my parents! We’re going to get married weekend after next!”

She hugged me and I hugged her; then she stepped back and held me at arm’s length and peered at my face. “You’re not worried about my half of the rent, are you, Charlotte? I’ll pay till the lease is up! You’re happy for me, right?”

Happy. Jeremy Fletcher was not a person whom I thought my friend should marry, but I was overwhelmed with gratitude that Esmé still viewed me as her friend, and I answered, “Honey”—and I meant it—“if you’re happy, I’m happy, too.”

Chapter 20

I’d driven by the women’s center (and the anti-choice picketers out front) dozens of times—in Will’s car and Esmé’s, and, in earlier days, in the van that occasionally ferried English majors from Mount Vernon to Iowa City for the Writers’ Workshop’s reading series. On the day of my first appointment, I did wish that the center sat on a less well-traveled street, but I was glad to see only one protester present (a man about my parents’ age and wearing a fur-ruffed parka, he waved a sonogram in my direction and called out, “Have you seen a picture of your baby, miss?”).

The gentle-faced lady with whom I met—puffy multicolored socks, nubby linen pants with elasticized ankles—was all kindness. I appreciated the warm hand that she patted against my icy one.

I brought my package of birth control pills out of my pocket (as a character witness, I suppose).

“Could you have vomited some pills?” she asked.

I nodded. I told her about Thanksgiving. “We all got sick.”

“In the future,” she said, “if you experience vomiting, keep on with your pills, but use another form of protection for a full month.” She patted my hand again and smiled. “You’re lucky you came in when you did. At your stage, very few people—one in a hundred—have complications. We like to say that it’s safer than having your tonsils out!”

I smiled to make her feel good about her job, but by no means did I feel “lucky.” After I’d been handed my appointment card and started walking toward the apartment (hurrying—collar turned up—to get onto a side street), I felt very alone, like a prisoner scheduled for execution who did not dare entrust even a cell mate with the knowledge that he secretly had dug an escape tunnel through the wall alongside their bunk.

Had Will been the only possible father, I would have told him I was pregnant. He would have expected—as I would have, in theory—that I would want an abortion. He would have been sorry that I would have to go through with the procedure (also, possibly irritated and perplexed that it had taken me so long to get the message).

At the library, I found a big book whose shadowy black-and-white photographs informed me that although the fetus was only an inch and a half long, it was already becoming either a boy or a girl. Also, it had webby—and undeniably dear—outlines of actual fingers and toes. In my notebook, I carried the same three-ring ruler that I’d had since grade school. “Charlotte Price” I’d gouged and re-gouged into its pale, varnished wood over the years. An inch and a half looked bigger than I would have liked.