If She Were Dead Page 2

  “That would be great.”

  She was pleased there would be something stronger to drink. Things would move along smoothly; time would pass quickly: an easy slipstream moment. She pulled the cork from the bottle and poured out two glasses, one slightly fuller than the other.

  They sat near each other under the big umbrella. A huge splat of bird shit marred the white enamel table. Often she would print her latest pages and bring them outside to edit, and, pencil in hand, witness the endless defecations of the birds that roosted in the tree above the deck, the insane chatterings and cries of the rabid squirrels that terrorized them and stole their seed from the feeder. “Let me get that cleaned up,” she said, going inside for a wet paper towel.

  Now they were ready. She sipped her wine. The interviewer said, “The photographer is supposed to get in touch,” and Amelie said, “He was here two days ago.”

  The interviewer seemed confused. “Oh,” was all she said.

  “He’s actually someone from this area.”

  “I guess so. I didn’t make the arrangements.”

  “He lives in the next town,” and instinctively she nodded her head in a westerly direction. The photographer didn’t look like a photographer, or rather having imagined a Richard Avedon coming to her house, she found herself greeting what looked more like a stevedore who’d been sitting in a bar for a week in his Black Sabbath T-shirt, his saggy blue jeans, and several days’ growth of beard. And yet a moment later she changed her mind. Charming wasn’t the word at all. Nor captivating. Devastating: that was more like it. And instead of setting her at ease for what turned out to be two hours of posing and clicking, it left her tongue-tied and wondering, once he’d left, why, while he was there, she hadn’t thought of Ben for a single moment.

  The interviewer looked at her. “I just finished your new book last night. I thought it was wonderful.” She dug about in her shoulder bag and took it out, placing it on the table between them as if to provide some proof of her deed.

  “Thank you.”

  The woman took out a pen. “Would you…?”

  “Of course. I’d be happy to.”

  Amelie opened it to the title page. Beneath it, just above her printed name, she added the long, loping line of her signature, all loops and curves and serifs. The interviewer thanked her and closed the cover. “Amelie Ferrar. Is it your real name?”

  “Yes. But it’s pronounced with three syllables: Ahm-eh-lee. It was my grandmother’s name. She was French, she lived in Paris until just after the war.”

  The interviewer looked at her.

  “The second one,” Amelie said. And no, she wanted to add, the lady wasn’t a collaborator. Or so the woman had claimed a little too often.

  “It’s pretty.”

  “Thank you,” she said, though for years she’d hated her name. As a child she would berate her mother for having stuck her with it, for having named her after someone she had seen only in faded photographs taken in the distant monochrome past, a shapeless woman of eighty, her mouth sour and drawn. Now she liked it. She’d grown into it and had in some funny way taught herself how to use it, as though it were a stylish fashion accessory, something feathered, a veil.

  She looked up at the new leaves on the trees, gently and imperceptibly uncurling over the long April afternoons beneath the impossible blue depths of the sky. She remembered the soft darkness of the examination room, the elaborate instruments designed to test the surface of her eye, the curve of each orb, the strength of her vision. She remembered the photographer holding his hand in the air over his shoulder, requesting stillness, and then suddenly reaching over and moving a lock of hair from her face. After he had taken what seemed to be hundreds of shots she asked if he’d like something cold to drink.

  “I’d love it, but I have another session in an hour.”

  “Another writer?”

  He told her who it was and she winced a little. “Yes, I know him.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “You’ll find out soon enough, I’m sure,” she said, and they both laughed. For a long moment he gazed at her. It was an open, brazen look, the kind she wasn’t used to seeing in men, not even in Ben, who, now that she thought about it, was never quite there with her. But the photographer wasn’t mentally undressing her; it was more that he was absorbed by her.

  The photographer said, “Sorry I was staring. It’s your eyes.”

  “What’s wrong with them?”

  “Well, that’s the thing. Nothing’s wrong. They’re killer eyes. It’s a shade of blue I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. It’s probably why the camera fell in love with you.”

  The words had lingered with her, and returned to the front of her mind as she sat out on the deck with the interviewer, who seemed to be anticipating a response to an unheard question.

  Amelie said to the interviewer, “I’m sorry. Could you say that again, please?”

  “I was wondering if there’s been any film interest in the new book.”

  “I know that people have been reading it. Producers. Studios. No option has been taken out yet.”

  “Were you happy with the movie of your last one?”

  Amelie smiled a little. “Well,” she said, and together they laughed. Yet she’d been pleased it had been made, imperfect as it turned out to be. She’d enjoyed meeting the actors when they shot on location on the Cape, she’d liked the attention she received for the one day she was invited to be there. The actress playing the lead ate lunch with her at one of the folding tables that had been set up for cast and crew. She talked to Amelie about things that appeared in the script—peculiar things, uncomfortable things, naked things, dance things, word things, touch things—and Amelie had to point out that these things were not in the book and in fact had never crossed her mind when writing it. The actress turned to look at the director, who was eating a turkey sandwich and having a difficult conversation with one of the producers. “Scumbag,” she said quietly, returning to her lunch and her tête-à-tête with the author.

  “It was an interesting experience,” Amelie said to the interviewer.

  “Would you do it again?”

  “Sell film rights to one of my books? I have to make a living, don’t I?”

  The young woman considered it. She fingered her glass and began to get a clever look on her face. “Even if they screw it up again.”

  Amelie smiled. “You thought so too?”

  “Well, no. Not exactly.”

  “I certainly did.”

  “But you’d do it again.”

  Amelie smiled. “Without a moment’s hesitation,” she said.

  4

  After the interview was over, Amelie and the woman stepped off the deck and walked down into the garden and onto the gentle slope that eventually led to the brook. The interviewer said, “It’s nice here. Do you live alone?”

  “I’m divorced. My daughter’s in her first year at college.”

  “It’s quiet here,” the interviewer said.

  She’d seriously considered selling the house and moving elsewhere, perhaps to Manhattan or Los Angeles, a place where people ate in interesting restaurants, where people smiled and grew thinner by the day. It seemed ridiculous for her to remain alone in a house large enough for a family of four, and yet she was used to it, she had learned to fill the spaces. She worked in a small room overlooking the garden, she took her meals alone or with invited friends in the dining room, she read and listened to music in the living room. In this house nothing remained of her life with Richard, as if a crime had been committed and all evidence destroyed.

  Even her memory had grown cloudy, and sometimes she would try to summon certain recollections of him, to picture him when she’d first known him, when she’d found joy with this man, and although for a fleeting moment she would catch sight of him, or remember some detail, a moment o
f laughter, an interesting conversation, he would inevitably slip away into another life, another place.

  There were a few photographs from their earlier days together, the two of them with longer hair and the worst jeans ever designed, and though she had always meant to throw them away, she had stuffed them in a shoebox with other snapshots on a shelf in the cellar. It was strange how nothing was ever truly final. People might return, change their minds, take back their words. The dead might haunt, cross your path, chill your blood.

  They spoke more often than most divorced couples she knew, mostly about Nina, about which of them was visiting her and when it would take place. For most of the summer before she left for college, Nina was fine. She enjoyed the job she’d taken at a local bookstore. And then everything seemed to tumble into disaster.

  As August wore on, she grew moody and combative, and then a week before she was due to leave for college she decided she wasn’t going to go, that she was taking a year off to travel. By then deposits had been made, loans had been granted, a whole new wardrobe purchased, and she sat and stared at her mother and folded her arms and said nothing. Precisely what Amelie had done before she left for Mount Holyoke all those years ago. Except in her case it was a statement of independence. Amelie had told her mother that she was going to move to New York. What she was going to do there was still up in the air, but that it would involve visits to Studio 54 and maybe sweeping floors at CBGB, a comment that compelled her mother to take up drinking straight gin after three years of sobriety. In the end, Amelie did go to Mount Holyoke and graduated magna cum laude four years later.

  Amelie tried reasoning with her daughter, something her mother had utterly failed at. “But Wellesley was your first-choice school, remember? And when we toured it you said you loved it,” and Nina said, “Yeah, so?”

  Amelie called Richard and insisted he come over so they could provide a united front, and he turned out to be as helpless as she was, battered by his daughter’s absurd counterarguments. To Amelie’s dismay, he tried bribery, pulling twenties and fifties from his pocket and holding them in the air like live bait at a crowded fishing hole, and Nina only said, “I don’t want your money. I’ve decided I’m going to hitchhike to LA, and then maybe one day if I feel like it I’ll go to college.” In California she was going to be a fashion designer, she said, and when Amelie explained that the competition for that sort of thing was, well, a bit stiff, especially as her daughter’s experience with clothes was primarily in buying and returning them, Nina told them she would get a job at a TV show, as a production assistant or something. “Or maybe I’ll write a script. Or take up acting.” She shrugged a sullen whatever. Which looked more like one giant fuck you.

  “Do you have any idea what it’s like, thumbing rides across the country? Do you have any idea what’s out there?” She pictured her daughter on a lonely road in the hot Mojave Desert, and saw motorcycles and outlaws descending upon her, and then one day, long after she’d disappeared, they’d find her remains in a gully off Mulholland Drive.

  “You’ll meet some cool guy in his vintage Mustang, and he’ll tell you how beautiful you are and invite you to a party, and you’ll go and meet all these other girls like yourself and these cool guys, and before you know it they’ll be sending you out to fetch firewood, or taking you down to the Valley to dive for food in dumpsters, and then you’ll start sleeping with them, and one day you and your pals will drive to someone’s house in Benedict Canyon and butcher them in cold blood. And when they hunt you down and arrest you…” Exhausted, she let her words drift into silence. It was a story she’d heard before, and it didn’t seem worth the recounting.

  “You have a really twisted mind, Mom, you know that?”

  She knew it all too well. Sometimes Amelie wished she’d been born without an imagination; she found that it only led to grief and nightmare, as though by simply dreaming up things she allowed them a kind of life apart from her, like some monster in a film, growling and roaming the countryside, throwing innocent children to drown in the lily pond.

  Usually it just led to just another book, although when people misbehaved in hers they didn’t cut people’s throats or shoot them in the back of the head. They said hurtful things, and sometimes walked out of their lives; yet behind the gentle sarcasm of the dialogue and the apparently innocent actions—phone calls, afternoon visits, meals with friends—seemed to lurk something much darker, touching upon the baser human feelings of betrayal, revenge, the bleak mindful joy of people destroying one another: things that never usually made their way to the forefront of her mind.

  She always felt that was why her readers remained faithful to her. Somehow she knew just what they were thinking and plotting, sensing what kept them awake at night. It was why she’d built such a wide readership, mostly of other women. We read, we speculate, we live vicariously outside the confines of our own existence. And then life, in all its dull passing of time, always seems to get in the way. Until someone makes the next move.

  She sat beside Nina and looked her in the eye. “I understand how you’re feeling. Believe it or not, I was a lot like you.”

  “You wanted to murder people?”

  She couldn’t tell whether Nina was serious or simply treating her mother like the idiot she appeared to be. In fact, Amelie had been nothing like Nina. Never beset with the usual adolescent complaints—weight gain, excessive acne—she became the object of admiration and then lust of the boys in her school, leading to outright resentment from the other girls. Presumed to be a slut, she was instead bookish and solitary, happy to sit with an apple and a novel in a corner while her mother practiced Bach preludes on the piano downstairs.

  “Because I’m nothing like you,” Nina went on, and Amelie waited as the words hung in the air.

  “And I’m glad you’re not,” Amelie said. “You’re your own person. Just like I did, you’ll make your own mistakes, you’ll earn your own rewards, and I can’t stop you from doing any of that.”

  “So I can go to LA?”

  “Yes. But I just want you to be safe when you do this, not find yourself lost in some, I don’t know, some roadside saloon surrounded by a bunch of tattooed bikers with beers in their fists. This is your life and I need to respect your choices. Just watch out for the guys with no teeth.”

  Nina laughed, and Amelie was surprised to find her daughter hugging her. And without another word, the matter was settled. A few days before they were due at Wellesley, Nina asked if they could leave earlier on the first day so she could tour the town one more time before classes began. “And I need a new pair of jeans.”

  Amelie gleefully shared the news with Richard over the phone, and he wondered aloud how she did it without waving cold, hard cash in front of their daughter.

  “She came to the decision on her own,” Amelie said. “Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be?” She wondered if that’s how he’d won the heart of his new wife, by offering monetary bribes to make up for all his many shortcomings.

  When her new book appeared in the shops only a week before her interview on the deck, Richard had taken the time to congratulate her and say he was anxious to read it. “Your jacket photo’s different,” he said, and she explained that her publisher thought it was time to update the portrait. This time the photographer, who actually did remind her of Avedon, had been careful to retouch it in subtle ways: the lines around her eyes, the ones that had begun to show about her mouth. Like a copy editor of human physiognomy, he granted her the veneer of eternal perfection.

  “You look good,” Richard said. Did she detect the slightest nuance of desire in his voice, did some hazy vision of her from years earlier suddenly rise up in his memory like a mist?

  “How’s Sharon?” she said.

  “She’s fine.”

  There was a pause.

  “Actually,” he said, “she’s expecting,” and at first Amelie didn’t quite grasp what h
e was saying. Did he mean something was supposed to arrive in the mail, or delivered by the UPS man, shoes or a skirt or something for the kitchen?

  “Oh” was all she could say when it dawned on her.

  “It’s due in September.”

  “Congratulations.” She couldn’t imagine her ex-husband suddenly thrust all these many years later back into the role of father to a newborn infant, unable to picture him, in the grip of middle age, rising in the small hours to change a diaper or prepare a feeding. She thought of Nina: pink and soft, as though instead of lying in the murky waters of her womb she had been bathing in milk for nine months. Simply holding her little girl had made her feel whole and decent and clean, and watching her grow with all the usual issues had only made her love Nina all the more.

  It was as if, with the birth of her daughter, her life had been redeemed in a way that her writing had failed to do. There were no words to spill, no paragraphs to indent, no chapters to plot. There was simply Nina and Amelie, and for a time it was all that she needed. And then, as Nina grew, Amelie saw with a kind of melancholic satisfaction that she’d given birth not to a perfect creature but to someone very like herself, a person who stumbled into error, who rose to the occasion when called upon, who at times worried over her life a little too much. She hoped Nina wouldn’t become a writer, spending her life hiding behind fictions, composing sentences to be worn like a mask. At readings, people had no idea what Amelie was really like, how utterly messy her life had become, and the thought of it brought her a degree of joy. Because it was the mess that she loved: the risks, the secrets, the utter deceit of the thing. It was like living on the lip of a cliff, like surfing in a hurricane sea.

  “I’m glad for you,” she said to her ex. “And Sharon.”

  “Thanks. We’re…” And he left the sentence unfinished.

  Amelie said, “I’m thinking of driving down to see Nina next weekend.” The idea had just come to her.