As Good as Dead (31 page)

I tried to explain how surprised I’d been by Esmé’s visit. “I told you. She said she hadn’t known we lived here.”

He shook his head. “And you believed that. Why did you believe that, Charlotte? Seriously. In
eleven
years, how could she
never
have seen an announcement for a reading or book-signing by you, a local author? Never read a newspaper article that said you lived in Tucson?
Why
did you believe it?”

I bowed under the weight of the questions. “I don’t know,” I moaned. “I thought maybe I could make amends to her, Will. Maybe we’d even put it all behind us and be friends.”

“Christ,” he hissed, “did you really need a friend that bad?”

“I guess I thought I did. I’m not good at making friends. I get lonely.”

“Did you ever think about
me
in all this? You had me go to dinner at the house of a man you fucked? And his wife knows all about it, too! Why would you subject me to that?”

“I wasn’t sure what she knew, Will. Obviously, I’m an idiot.” I knew that Jacqueline would have disapproved of that, but I didn’t correct myself, and Will nodded vigorously.

“You are! You are! I feel like I don’t even know you! Christ!” He made a familiar motion of patting his front left pants pocket for his car keys. “Christ! And now we’ve got to go! Are you ready to go?”

“Ready to go?”

“To
school.
You have office hours and class. Hurry up. I’ll be in the car.”

Chapter 22

Neither of us spoke during the drive to the university, but when Will stopped the Subaru in front of Modern Languages to drop me off—just the way that he did every Thursday—I leaned forward, laying my upper body flat on my legs. “I don’t see how I can go in there now,” I said.

He stared straight ahead, silent.

“So are you going to your office, too?” I asked.

A shrug.

I sat up and rested my cheek against his upper arm. “I love you,” I said. His muscles tensed. Antipathy. “There’s a bus coming,” he said. “You need to get out.”

“I don’t want to go!”

“It’s better. I need to be alone.” The way he looked at that moment—he looked old, his features cloudy, as if hurt had dropped a veil of age over his face. It shocked me. He was as far from me as he ever had been, but not at all . . . mysterious. I had hurt him terribly and he stood revealed.

Behind us, the bus driver honked. Sick at heart, I kissed Will’s shoulder and climbed out of the car. My legs were rubbery as I made my way up the walk, like I’d just come off a ship or a trampoline. It seemed strange that everything could look exactly the way that it had the Thursday before when Will had dropped me off for office hours. The same scrawny plants of red salvia and purple verbena barely held on beneath the palo verde tree where I always waited for Will to fetch me on days when he drove me to school.

But then it also was true that the palo verde had reached maturity since I’d first walked up the sidewalk to Modern Languages. Also, near the bike racks, three tiny jojobas to which I’d occasionally carried cups of water—tubes of chicken wire had protected them their first years—now were as big as linebackers.

Almost as soon as I started down the central hall, a voice behind me called, “Charlotte, Charlotte!”

It was one of the graduate students. Eric Trelor. An intense, nervous guy. He waved a sheet of paper in his hand as he ran toward me. He had a heavy beard but wore red canvas sneakers that would have gotten him teased in certain quarters. I felt protective of him because he was younger than most of his classmates, and because it had occurred to me that if I’d had the baby when I was in graduate school, he or she would have been around Eric Trelor’s age.

Eric Trelor skidded to a stop beside me. “I got the telephone numbers for DFW’s agent and editor, Charlotte!”

“That’s cool!”
DFW
meant David Foster Wallace. Our program’s most famous alumnus, gifted David Wallace had hanged himself the month before. Eric Trelor had been working ever since to arrange a memorial weekend in the writer’s honor.

“The dean’s going to fund it!” Eric Trelor jumped up into the air, springy as a little kid. “It’s cooler than cool!” He grabbed my arm and gave it a friendly shake. “Listen, though, I gotta tell Dana! See you later!” and off he ran, down the hall.

David Wallace had left the program many years before I arrived, but we’d met, we’d corresponded. The last time I’d seen him, we’d been seated at opposite ends of a long table at the noisy seafood restaurant where Creative Writing usually took visiting authors. We’d had little chance to talk. He was as charming as ever, and his reading was a knockout, but he looked bloated; with a grimy bandanna forming a kind of queer chimney around his mess of hair, he could have been mistaken for one of the homeless winos who begged in supermarket parking lots.

The hanging had not been entirely a shock. Given his depressions, everyone who knew him had worried that it could happen; still, when a mutual friend called with the news, I shouted, “No!” and I cried and cried. Since September, now that the answer was “David can’t think of this at all, David is dead,” I had come to understand how often, writing, I asked myself, “What would David think of this?”

At the thought of that extraordinary man—Will’s own age, forty-six—hanging from a beam in his home garage, my heartbeat ticked upward, and I stepped to the side of the hall and pulled my cell from my bag.

“Please, tell me,” I said as soon as Will answered, “should I be worried about you? Hurting yourself? Or anything?”

He hesitated. His voice husky, he said, “I’m not going to hurt myself, Charlotte, but I don’t want to talk to you right now.”

I appreciated the fact that he’d waited for me to say
Okay
before he said
Good-bye
and hung up.

The office of staffer Pema Barkley was on the fourth floor, in a side hall, off to the left, after you entered the main hallway. From the main hallway, I could see a parallelogram of milky light on the linoleum that indicated her office door stood open, and, before I went toward it—wanting to keep our encounter short—I unzipped the top of my briefcase and removed the green envelopes holding the books of three of the Poulos finalists.

At my knock on the doorjamb, Pema looked away from her monitor and smiled. “Hey, Charlotte! How are things going?”

I nodded. “Good, good. I’m bringing these Poulos finalists back, though.” I held up the envelopes. “I’m not going to be able to judge the contest after all.”

“Oh!” She looked crestfallen. “But I have three more for you!” She waved toward a large plastic tub decorated with teddy bears—a baby’s tub—that she’d recently begun using as a place to stash the great quantities of mail that came to Creative Writing. “I was going to give them to you today, once I put them in envelopes.”

“Well,” I chirped, “no need now! I’m going to talk to Robert, so you hold on to them—and these three, too—until he tells you where they should go.”

She already was looking back at her monitor. Dog accessories. Brightly colored collapsible water bowls. Reflective leashes and collars for nighttime walks. I asked, “Should I put them on your desk, or—”

Absently, she patted the top of her cluttered desk (I supposed it was no worse than my own). “Here’s good,” she said. “Yeah. Thanks.”

I walked on down the hall to the main office. In one corner, a beige plastic cubicle similar to the one I’d had as a TA at Iowa had been installed (to block easy access to the office of the department chair?) Inside the cubicle sat the chair’s excellent assistant and gatekeeper.

Who had gotten braces on his teeth since I’d last seen him. Comment or not? Probably not. We were not intimate.

“I’m sorry, Charlotte”—the assistant offered a mild, suitable face of proxy apology—“but Robert’s in a meeting right now.”

“I’ll just leave him a note.” On a sheet of paper torn from my notebook, I jotted:

Dear Robert,

I apologize for the inconvenience, but I must recuse myself as judge for the Poulos Prize as I’ve discovered that I know one of the finalists. If you need suggestions for someone else who might be willing to take on the job, please let me know and I will try to help.

All the best,

Charlotte

After that, I went to my own office. No one had signed up for an appointment on the scheduling sheet taped to my door, but I turned on the lights and nudged the brown rubber stop under the door with my toe, the way that I must have done a couple of thousand times over the previous eleven years. I did not have Gregor Poulos’s number in my phone, but I had Jenny Ambrose’s, and, luckily, she was at home and able to turn me over to Gregor.

(Who sighed at my news, “Oh, Charlotte! Sweetie! Say it isn’t so!”)

I looked at my hands after I got off the phone with Gregor. Although my hands did not show it, since my conversation with Will at the house—while talking to Eric Trelor, Pema Barkley, the chairman’s assistant, Jenny, and Gregor—I had been trembling. Inside. It was an odd sensation. Like I was a set of dinner dishes in a cabinet during an earthquake.

I didn’t know what to do about Esmé. I wanted to be done with her, but she wasn’t likely to be satisfied by my simply telling her, “Will knows everything, and I’m not going to be the judge, so good-bye.” Would I have to bring Will along to testify that this was so? Would he go?

For distraction, I took out the notes I’d made on my impressions of job candidate Melody Murphy. I decided to type them up so I could hand them around at the meeting, and I rolled my chair over to the office computer. Despite my trembling, I felt uncharacteristically brisk and efficient in my movements, just then. Posture perfect—Joan Crawford—I leaned over and pulled open the drawer of my desk and extracted a package of printer paper. This had something to do with a sense that I was under observation and needed to demonstrate that I could proceed through the day
properly
.

I was trying to be Will, I think. I had the idea that I was acting the way Will would if he were in his office.

At five minutes before the graduate workshop was scheduled to start, I crossed the breezeway and headed to the seminar room.

In the car, on the drive to school, I’d entertained the idea that maybe I’d take a seat in the back of the seminar room that afternoon and say, “I’m tired of hearing myself talk. I’m going to shut up today and let you guys run things.” I did that on occasion, but I found that I needed to be the teacher that afternoon, walk back and forth in front of the whiteboard, write down my own and the students’ pertinent comments with my red dry-erase marker.

During the critique of the first story, I took a minute to discuss setting. “My favorite definition,” I said, “comes from R. V. Cassill.”

I wrote on the board: “An arena suitable for the conflict.”

“That doesn’t mean you need an old house for a ghost story. You can use any space for a ghost story—you could use a
Walgreens
for a ghost story, right? I can see it. As writers, what could you do with a Walgreens to make it feel like a suitable arena for a ghost story?”

The students smiled while they considered the question. I thought of Will kicking the dining room table that morning. Then of myself, on Monday, kicking the table in ML 201, trying to make a point of my own.

A solid sense of the physical world. That would be an important part of my answer to the question. Otherwise, why would it be interesting if ghosts could walk through walls?

I abided by Will’s request that I not telephone that afternoon. At four o’clock, though, as soon as the students had circulated the stories for the next week’s workshop, I hurried out of the building and down the walk to the street.

Will usually was waiting for me when I came out. If he were late, it was rarely by more than ten minutes.

At four thirty, I called the house and then his cell: “I’m out front, waiting,” I told voice mail.

“If it isn’t Charlotte Price!”

I turned. A colleague of mine—a spunky woman from Rhet/Comp—was coming my way, and she called out to me over the whine of her big, wheel-along briefcase, “You look like you need a ride!”

I tagged along with her to the surface lot where she’d parked her car. I did not know her well—Karen Munsen was her name—but I learned that afternoon that she was very keen on the job candidate Melody Murphy. For most of the trip to my house, she worked to convince me that Melody Murphy was the person we ought to hire.

“That’s it,” I said. “Just ahead. The white stucco.”

Karen Munsen pulled her car to a stop at the walk that led to Will’s and my front door. “And on top of all that,” she said, “she’s a great dancer! Did you see her dance with Chris Baber out in the courtyard at El Charro?”

While I gathered up my bags, I said, no, that I’d missed that. “Thank you so much for the ride, Karen!”

She stayed, apparently to make sure that I got into the house. I felt self-conscious, going up the front walk. I also wished I’d told her to pull into the drive. That way, I’d have been able to see if Will’s Subaru were in the carport, and I could have gone around to the sliding door. To complicate matters, it turned out that the front screen door—rarely locked—was locked that afternoon, and I had to stop and consider which key on my heavy-laden key ring was the right one. After trying three without luck, I waved to Karen Munsen to signal that she really did not need to wait.