Speak Ill of the Dead
Part One of Two
We had been dating a long time when Albert died.
He did not "pass away", like the preacher said over the grave. He died. I saw him do it.
I helped.
I don't mean I killed him. I wouldn't do that. I'm not like that. As I said, though, we had been dating a long time, and things were...well, not exactly sour between us, but off, like meat that's been in the drawer a couple days too long. You can still eat it. Probably has some nutritional value left. But it's not the first thing on the menu, and you only eat it because there's nothing else in the fridge and you're too tired to go to the store.
Albert ran an accounting firm, a good-sized one, in the city. He and two other guys started it, and over a few years grew it to be something that printed cash. The others drifted out of the firm--or were pushed, I wonder about that now, after what's happened--and left Albert on top. I met him at a charity function my roommate dragged me to, some masque shindig. I'm just now realizing how appropriate that is.
I had just two or three really nice outfits, and one of them, this slinky black number that shows off my limited cleavage to best effect, is too fancy to wear. I mean, I don't get taken to Delfino's in the District, you know? But this ball was a kind of thing I could wear it to, so I did, snatching at any chance. My mask was a bird-faced affair with a long beak, shiny white that glowed like a star in the blacklit dining hall. He said he saw me the second I came in. Maybe he did.
He wasn't there alone, of course, but by the end of the evening he might as well have been. Or, what I mean is, he had kind of switched horses in midstream, if you take my meaning. I was a little buzzed and hadn't had a man in a while. He was good-looking...okay, he was fit and rich. Richer. Richer than I was.
We dated a while. He was obviously doing better than I was--working at the university is prestigious, but adjunct faculty in the Classics wing does not pay. I kept up an appearance, picking up some better dresses at the outlet mall, trading in my Sentra for an Audi. We always ended dates at his place, a four-bedroom place in town with a slick view and plenty of space. Eventually I got some of that space and didn't go home a lot. I didn't move in with him. That's not what happened.
Albert was hard to satisfy. He picked at things. "You going to wear that again?" he'd say, with a little shake of his head and a tightening of the line of his mouth. He had a hard mouth. He knew how to use it.
He got me into a gym and kept track of when I went. Not obsessively. He'd just say, "Hey, the gym says you haven't been by in a while," and I'd say, "It's finals week, I have a lot of students in for consultations," and he'd say, "I'll make dinner," and it would be half a salad, with a hard-boiled egg chopped on top. If I hid a box of Triscuits underneath a stack of books in my tiny office, that wasn't because I was ashamed of them. A girl gets hungry, sometimes.
I like my hair short--I don't have a lot of time to fuss with it--but Albert liked it longer and kept talking about how much sexier I was when I let my hair grow. I did. It was easier. You didn't--I didn't--like to buck him when he expressed a preference. Things could get uncomfortable.
He never hit me. That wasn't his way. He wasn't a bad guy.
We got stale. I started inventing excuses not to see him, or to have to spend the night at my dusty place across town. It was closer to the U than his place downtown. We'd still go out, and I'd go back to his place, and things would be normal. He'd ask about my day and tell me I should get a raise and a promotion, that I was better than the job I had. By now he'd figured out that my job really wasn't anything to brag about. My attempts to dress fancy weren't fooling him, either. He'd give me money and tell me to go buy something decent to wear, that didn't make my hips look a mile wide. It was kind of nice.
He even stocked the bathroom with good towels, though he knew I hated garish red, and toothpaste, though it wasn't my brand. The tube wasn't new, either, so I knew he was sharing with me. I thought it was cute, like it had been at the beginning. For just a minute I thought things would be good again.
And then he was gone.
We were walking home from Fromaggio's, where he'd insisted I get the escargot even though he knew how my stomach reacts to things in shells. I told him I wouldn't, that I didn't want them, and he ordered them anyway and put them on my plate. Always trying to broaden my horizons, I guess. Anyway, I got offended by it. Silly, but even when he was being nice it kind of chafed, somehow. The meal was not a pleasant experience. My fault, probably, because it usually was.
On the way home, at one point I stopped to take off my shoes. My feet were killing me--I can't wear heels for long, but Albert said if I didn't put them on I'd walk like a pregnant duck all night again, and he couldn't stand that--and the six blocks to his apartment were an agony. Finally I couldn't stand it any more, and stopped to lean against a newspaper box for support while I ripped the hellish things off my feet. He rolled his eyes and checked his watch. He liked a tight schedule with no delays, and it was a little bit selfish of me to take a minute there, even though I planned to walk faster to make up for it, once my feet didn't threaten to fall off my ankles.
The heels were too tight--somehow a size too small, but they were the ones in his closet--and I had to really pull them to get them to slide off. The strap had bitten into my ankle. I lost my temper, and gave a violent tug, and the shoe slipped out of my hand and landed in the street. I knew Albert would be angry. The street was wet from a recent shower, and the dirt got all over the gold straps.
Knowing I'd blown it, I staggered into the street to retrieve the shoe. I heard him call out, "Helen!" and grab my arm, heaving me back onto the sidewalk. A cab whished by scant inches from my butt, close enough that the sucking wind dragged on my right side. That was where Albert had grabbed me, and it carried him past me and off the curb. He missed his footing and started to fall.
I knew it was dangerous. I knew I'd been lucky, that he'd saved my life. It was a decent--no, heroic--thing to do. But my feet hurt. My gut heaved from the escargot. And it flashed through my head that he might fall and hurt himself, and that could give me a couple weeks to myself. I'm ashamed of this. His tie was right there, flapping in front of me, and my empty hand only an inch away. I only had to close my fingers, and stop his fall.
But my hand was dirty, and he hated to get things on his tie.
And, God forgive me, I was frozen by the creamy, white deliciousness of a couple of weeks to myself.
I didn't close my fingers.
Two things happened.
He fell backward, arms flailing. His face passed from disgusted to surprised to wide-eyed fearful. His head started to turn into the brightening glow of oncoming headlights. The tie slipped through my fingers. I meant to scream, but never got breath. The car tagged his head a glancing blow and he jerked sideways to land in the gutter. Now there was a scream, but it wasn't my throat that made it.
The car slammed on its brakes, far too late. Albert's head lay at a crazy angle, his body splayed half in the lane of traffic and half in the muddy gutter. Blood poured out of him, ran back down toward me like my bare feet called to it.
I didn't move. Not right away, and not for a long time. Blood spatter dripped from my dress. My arms. My face. I could smell it. But I couldn't do anything about it. Whirling lights came and took us both away, to separate places.
They had a closed casket. I went, of course, and there were a lot of people there, most of them females. I knew some of them from the office, but there were a lot more, probably people he knew from his charity work, where a slim figure and pretty face come in handy. I even wore heels. I knew he'd have wanted me to.
But I didn't cry. For a couple of days I wandered around aimlessly, lost in a world where Albert had saved my life, and I had let him die for it. I used my key to get back into his apartment, to get my things. It took a long time.
At first, I stood in front of the closet--our closet, at least some of the time. I couldn't find my clothes. There were dresses there I had never worn. A couple of them I never could have worn. Albert wasn't observant about that, and I tried to persuade myself that was why those dresses were hanging there.
But all of a sudden it was so clear. I still didn't cry. But the numbness spread, a little at a time, until it covered me from crown to toe. How many others? For how long?
I couldn't help myself. I imagined his face, replaying the moment, over and over, that he realized I wasn't going to save him. I hadn't meant to kill him, but all of a sudden I wasn't sorry I had let his tie, and so much more, slip through my fingers. I thought anger was hot, but this fury was cold like sudden November.
I piled all the dresses, all the underthings--more evidence there, I won't be a size zero even in the resurrection--into a cardboard box, carried it out back into the dumpster and tossed in a match. The lovely glow lit my way back into the building.
The only thing I nearly kept was the star-shaped locket he'd given me early on in our relationship. It meant something to me, the four-pointed star, like a map compass legend. That was why I'd admired it in the first place. But in the end, I decided to leave it. I distinctly remember hanging it from the corner of the mirror in the bathroom. I remember because I spoke, a kind of benediction to our ended life together. I stared at myself in the mirror, and brushed back a strand of mouse-brown hair. I'm gonna get that cut tomorrow, first thing. I squared my shoulders, and looked myself in the eye. And I said,
"Everyone says it wasn't my fault. But you and I know, don't we? I could have saved you."
And then--it was probably this that did it--"I want you to know, I'm glad I didn't."
The mirror seemed to ripple, as if a stone had been tossed into a pond. Then it was gone, and everything was the same as it had been a moment before.
Only it wasn't.
See you Thursday.
~Cristof