As Good as Dead (15 page)

I was happy to say, “Well, I’m envious! We’ve got old plants, big ones, and I’ve never seen a bat feeding!” I looked at Will. “Have you?”

“Nope.”

In a gently chiding voice—not the velvety DJ-thing from earlier; this more Lady Aberlin remonstrating with stubborn King Friday on
Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood
—Esmé said, “You have to be
patient
, Charlotte. You always were impatient.”

Esmé had thought of me as impatient? Well, I supposed I had been. Continued to be.

She went on. “I sit out here for hours some nights. Granted that we
do
have an amazing view. Almost every night, I see shooting stars.”

“Esmé’s Kools get at least half the credit for her patience,” Jeremy said. “I don’t allow indoors smokin’ no more.”

Esmé stood and picked up one of the bottles of wine from the table. A Merlot. To my surprise, Will let her pour some wine into his glass. When she moved alongside of me, I looked up at her, fatuously behaving as if I were not even aware of what she did with her hands. “Oh, I
still
miss Kools, Esmé!” I declared. The picture of myself smoking a cigarette was the best distraction that I could think to offer Will as Esmé filled my wineglass. Not good enough. I felt the look that he beamed my way, and, then, once Esmé sat down again, I had no choice but to lower my gaze. Impossible to pretend ignorance of the glass of Merlot, which sat directly above my knife and my spoon.

Esmé had filled the glasses very full, and she leaned forward and lifted her own just an inch or two from the table in order to take a sip without spilling.

“My, my,” Jeremy Fletcher said, and, like a boy preparing to bob for apples, he grasped his skinny arms behind his back and lowered his face toward his own glass and proceeded to lap at the wine with his tongue. Esmé looked away but flicked a fingernail against her own glass. Jeremy straightened at the crisp
ding.
The dark wine dribbled onto his chin. Two tiny channels continued on down his neck and into the open collar of the pale green guayabera. “Refreshing!” he said and slapped at the wine as if it were aftershave.

I beamed a message of warmth toward Esmé—
What he’s doing doesn’t matter among friends!—
and I said, “Your boys must be very smart! Both of them National Merit Scholars, right?”

Scooping his hands down into his collar for a final rub-a-dub-dub at his skin, Jeremy Fletcher asked, “You two got any supersmart kids, Will?”

Will offered Esmé a reassuring, good-guest smile of his own. “That didn’t happen for us,” he said, “but we’ve been—”

“Esmé, honey!” Jeremy Fletcher interrupted. “Our guests are gonna get wine all over themselves, too, if you don’t rustle ’em up drinking straws or sumpin’!”

“That’s okay,” I said. Jeremy Fletcher’s dive into the wine had dampened my interest in a flirtation with the Merlot. “We’re fine.”

“Oh, for Christsake!” Esmé squawked and pressed her hands to her black turban so fiercely that she looked as if she were about to lift off her head. She grabbed up my glass of wine, dumped a good half of the contents onto the pink gravel, then set the glass back in front of me with a
thunk
. “Hardly any left, so no worries, right?” She didn’t wait for me to answer before she laughed and shifted a rather wild smile in Will’s direction. “Unless you still count her drinks, Will!”

“I do not count her drinks,” Will said.

“Well, good! That’s progress!”
Scrawl
went her chair as she backed it away from the table and stood and began to gather up the salad plates. “So—I’ll get the lasagna.”

I got up, too. “Let me help.”

“Stay,” Esmé said, “It’s under control!”

Jeremy Fletcher followed Esmé’s swift progress toward the house (despite her size, she was no slouch). Then, like a kid who waits for his mother to leave the room so he can talk about what he really wants to talk about, he turned to Will and began to discuss—with great enthusiasm—his recent wins at “the horses.” His racetrack jargon meant little me, and I doubted that Will understood either. After several minutes of waxing on, hooting over some particular or another, he did think to ask, “So, Will, you follow the races?”

“You know, I never have,” Will said. “How was it that you got interested, Jeremy?”

I had seen Will use this tactic before. Yielding the floor spared him the effort of trying to play conversational catch and allowed him to go on thinking his own thoughts. Sometimes, I even spotted him using the trick on me. I thought that Jeremy Fletcher himself might have spotted it. He drew in his chin and gave a little snort; nevertheless, he answered at length:

Stuff about horse and dog racing back in the “’Bama” of his youth. Trips to Del Mar and Saratoga. “They run at Turf Paradise in Phoenix, October to May. That’s a good time. You can go to Greyhound Park here, course, but there ain’t no fucking people in the stands! The SPCA spoiled it for the greyhounds here.” He shook his head in disgust. “Phoenicians know those dogs are bred to run!” He laughed. “Phoenicians are still up for a good time! Mostly, though, I do off-track at Famous Sam’s. They got simulcasts. Santa Anita. Belmont. Churchill Downs, you name it. Horses and dogs. Sit in air-conditioned comfort and have a beer.” He peered at Will. Checking to see if he listened? “You know Famous Sam’s, Will?”

Will did not hesitate: “Isn’t there one on Pima Street?”

“That’s right, but I go to the one on North Oracle. You can bet a couple bucks, bet your whole 401(k), bet nothin’! It’s all good.” He looked in the direction of the house. Through the French doors, it was possible to see Esmé, transferring a very large, wobbling slab of steaming lasagna from a casserole onto a plate.

“It gets you out,” he said. “What say I take you some afternoon, Will?”

“Nice of you to offer”—Will sounded appreciative, I suppose; or, at least, polite—“but when I have free time, I generally use it on my work.”

Jeremy Fletcher lowered his face just enough to suggest that he meant to hide his amusement. “Still chipping away at the rock of art, huh, Will?” he asked.

“This is hot, hot, hot!” Esmé called, bursting through the French doors with a large tray, and Will and I both stood to help.

“No, no,” she said. “Just—it’s fine.” She frowned at Jeremy Fletcher as she settled a crescent of the tray on the edge of the table and began handing around plates loaded with lasagna and a green bean dish.

“What about you, Charlotte?” Jeremy Fletcher asked. “You still pecking away?”

“She’s got a novel coming out next fall,” Will said. “Her fourth book.”

I groaned and shook my head, a superstitious tribeswoman warding off the jealous gods by publicly announcing that her baby is grossly deformed, ugly, useless.

“A
fourth
book!” Esmé said. “Good grief! Now, everybody, please be aware that I may have gotten carried away with the crushed red peppers.”

“We like hot stuff,” I said and, after a first bite, Will said, “Delicious!”

I chimed. “Delicious.”

Jeremy Fletcher did not appear to be interested in eating. He screwed up his eyes in the direction of a dog barking somewhere in the distance. The forward thrust of his chin suggested that he would have been happy to pop somebody in the nose.

Esmé smiled at Will. “Needless to say, no one would expect you to be on Facebook, you being such a private person, but Charlotte—”

“Oh, I’m a Luddite,” I said.

“A troglodyte is more like it,” said Will.

“But don’t you Google yourself, Charlotte?” Esmé asked. “To see what people say about your work?”

Honk!
Jeremy Fletcher blew his nose into one of the navy-blue napkins. Slapped the napkin down on the tabletop. “Es,” he said and drew an index finger across his throat. Raised that same finger to his lips. Covered his mouth entirely with both hands, like the speak-no-evil monkey.

Once again, I rushed in—imagining myself Esmé’s savior—“I know my computer’s an amazing resource, Esmé, but I’m not safe there! Last week, I realized you could watch Stravinsky conduct the lullaby from the
Firebird,
and then I thought,
Well, I don’t actually know anything about Stravinsky,
so I clicked a link to a documentary about him—a little problematic since the filmmaker didn’t bother translating when people spoke French—and you know how those links go. Three hours later, when I came to, I was studying tips from supermodels on how to create a pouty mouth.”

Ésme laughed. Good, good. I actually started to relax while she and Will discussed the upkeep of the lap pool. Then, however, I noticed Jeremy Fletcher’s pink, pulpy eyes fixed on my face. “Bron-të!” he said in a terrible, bawling voice. He lifted himself up out of his chair and leaned over the table toward me—too much of a demand on his current sense of balance. He tipped. One elbow galloped forward, knocking over his water glass; the other landed in a basket of baguette slices. Briefly, he considered this state of affairs; then, elbow pulling the basket across the table, he resumed his seat. “Brontë.” His voice was quieter now, labored. “You be a good girl, Brontë,” he huffed, “an’ eat your damned green beans.”

The way that Will straightened in his chair reminded me too much of a party in Manhattan at which I’d had to get between him and some tough-guy painter who’d told me to get fucked when he learned that I hadn’t attended his opening the night before. My turn to squeeze Will’s leg.
Let it go. The guy’s obviously drunk.

This had no effect on Will’s tense posture. “Would you care to repeat that, man?” he said.

Man
was not good. My heartbeat picked up as Jeremy Fletcher pointed his gnarly chin in Will’s direction. “I
said
she should eat her green beans,
man.
I notice y’all are eatin’ yours, William. Gotta get our five servings a day, right?”

Esmé stood and briskly began to clear the plates. “Who’ll have decaf?” she asked.

“I’d love some,” I said, my voice a Minnie Mouse squeak. “How about you, Will?” The V of vein that stood out on his forehead like an earthworm was familiar to me from our more serious quarrels and watching him lift heavy weights at the university rec center.

Esmé said, “If you’ll give me a hand with the door, Charlotte. I’ve got spumoni for us, too.”

Now, when I wanted to stay put, monitor whatever drunken Jeremy Fletcher might be inclined to say next, she wanted me to come.

I held open one of the French doors and Esmé passed inside. A grand screech sounded behind us: Will, pivoting his wrought-iron chair away from Jeremy and the table.

Christ.

Once she’d set down the dirty plates, Esmé opened the freezer and took out a shiny white box, topped with a red satin bow. She lifted the lid from the box, which turned out to be divided in sections, each section holding an individual serving of spumoni in a pleated gold foil cup.

“Pretty,” I said. How soon before Will and I could start making noises about leaving?
Gotta work tomorrow.
Would half an hour be too bizarre? Esmé pointed me toward the cupboard where I’d find coffee cups and saucers. A tremble in my hands set the dishes rattling as I transferred them to the counter.

Esmé placed four dessert plates on the counter, too, each banded with gold and decorated by a different flower. “I’m sorry Jer’s not great company tonight. Sometimes he drinks too much.” She centered one of the foil cups on a circle of bluebells. “I’ve tried to talk to him about it.”

Her trusting me with a piece of such intimate information touched me. Maybe, seeing that Will and I were not drinking, and knowing some of my history, it had occurred to her that we might be able to offer help—

I set my hand on her shoulder.

The face that she turned toward my hand was blank—but blank in the way that the surface of a pond appears blank from a distance, reflecting the sky. Get up close and look down into the pond for a bit, and the sky disappears, and you see the skeletonized leaves and broken bits of twigs, rocks, and rusted cans, a crayfish leaving a ghost of trail as it skates across the tan muck of the bottom.

Once I removed my offending hand, I had a sense that she resumed breathing.

One by one, she began to place the dessert plates and cups of coffee on a large serving tray. “I’ve thought about you a lot over the years,” she said, “and, with what Will said about your not having kids—well, naturally, I’m curious: Do you ever regret that abortion?”

When we lived together on Burlington Street, the two of us had been very impressed by a response that “Dear Abby” offered a reader who did not know how to answer when people asked why she and her husband did not have children. “Simply say,” Abby advised,
I wonder why you ask.
”
I wonder why you ask.
At one point in my life, I actually had practiced saying that in front of a mirror.
I wonder why you ask.
It sounded elegant, simple. It returned the ball to the other person’s court, but Esmé’s question was loaded with knowledge, and the best that I could come up with was a small “Things have worked out for us.”

She laughed. “I should say so! You’ve been downright lucky!” She turned her face toward the patio doors and peered out. “I think Jer was nervous about having you come to dinner. What do you think?”