Dream Girl Read online

  “I saw it—her—go into the kitchen.”

  “I opened every cupboard, every door.”

  “There’s a back door, to the stairwell. I heard it close, I think. And you don’t need a key to go down, only up.”

  She shrugs. “So there you have it.”

  Have what?

  “But there should be video, right? There are cameras in the service corridor, on the elevators.” There is no camera in the communal hallway he shares with the sheikh and the swimmer, but there are cameras in the elevators. He thinks. And both elevators require a key to reach the twenty-fifth floor. Phylloh, at the main desk, has to insert it for guests.

  “It was probably a bad dream. Look, Mr. Andersen, I know you don’t like the sleeping medication, but tonight I think it might help.”

  “That stuff is addictive—have you followed the news about the Sackler family?”

  “Are they the meth heads who burned down that house over on Towson Street? Look, this is Ambien. It’s not a big deal.”

  “I’ve heard people do strange things while using Ambien. Sleepwalk, drive—”

  “Well, you’re not getting far, are you?”

  A stray memory, a mordant cartoon from the funny papers. He won’t get far on foot. Gerry’s mind feels like a kaleidoscope, endlessly rearranging bright bits of glass into patterns that dissolve with the next shake of his head.

  “It was so real,” he says. “It was real.”

  “Nightmares can feel that way. Dreams, too. Dreams can be awfully real.”

  “What were your dreams, Aileen?” Gerry is that desperate. He doesn’t want her to leave him. He doesn’t want to take the pill, surrender to sleep, a world in which he’s even less sure of what’s true.

  “What, you don’t think I’m living them?”

  He snorts, impressed by the fact that literal, humorless Aileen has made a joke. Only—she hasn’t, apparently, and she is angered by his reaction.

  “It’s funny to you, that I think I’m happy? A life like mine, it can’t be someone’s dream? I’m not saying it’s my first dream. I mean, when you’re a kid, everybody wants to be something they’re never going to be, right? A ballet dancer, a fireman?”

  Gerry nods, although he doesn’t remember a time when he didn’t want to be a writer. That was his first vocational dream, and his last. Before that, all he wanted was to be courageous.

  “But the second dream, the one you pick when you grow up—that’s all about comfort. Warmth. Enough food in your belly, not worrying about your car throwing a rod or how to pay your bills or whether you can afford to buy something better than the generic box of macaroni and cheese.”

  Her words were bizarrely familiar, but maybe it was just that they were so very bland. Although “throw a rod” had a nice specificity—oh lord, he was workshopping his night nurse’s sentences. Talk about the generic box of macaroni and cheese. His thoughts go back to the woman at the window, swathed, her face averted—that, too, is familiar.

  “She spoke to me—it reminded me of a movie. A terrible movie based on a very good book. Ghost Story!” He trumpets the book ’s name so loudly that Aileen winces. But being able to come up with that title makes him all the more sure that it wasn’t a dream, that his mental faculties are fine. “Did you ever read it, by chance?”

  He feels foolish as soon as the words are out. Aileen has made it very clear that she does not read. “It was a movie, too, although you would have been—” He has no idea how old she would have been. “Much too young to see it, maybe not even born. I was in my twenties when it came out. It had some very famous people in it. Fred Astaire. John Houseman.”

  Her face is so stolidly blank at those two names that he kind of wants to throttle her. She must be younger than she looks to be stone-faced at the mention of Astaire. Fred Astaire is a name that brings only joy; one would have to be a soulless, heartless husk of a person not to smile at the very thought of Astaire, even those who (wrongly) preferred Gene Kelly. Wait, was Gene Kelly in Ghost Story? No, but it did have Melvyn Douglas, who indirectly spawned that insanely gorgeous, curvy granddaughter, the one who showed up in some Scorsese films.

  It’s interesting, Gerry thinks, the order in which the men die (or don’t die) in Ghost Story, how it aligns with the audience’s natural affections toward the actors. Take Douglas Fairbanks Jr., the first to go. No one remembers him anyway. There’s a logic to Douglas’s death, a culpability in the larger story, but Gerry has forgotten the details. And of course frosty Houseman has to die.

  But never Astaire. Astaire survived even the Towering Inferno.

  As did O.J.

  With Aileen’s help, he navigates the “SmartHub” on the television and finds a version to rent, inviting her to watch with him. She looks dubious. “Seems a bad idea, to watch a scary movie now.” But Gerry assures her that the scares are mostly jump shocks. He screened it for his class at Goucher, after having them read the novel on which it was based. The exercise was intended to make his students see what the written word could do with suggestion, how flat-footed film, with its myriad tricks, could be. He could watch Ghost Story all night long and never feel anything deeper than annoyance. But he wouldn’t read it tonight on a bet. The book was absolutely terrifying and surprisingly erudite. The passages about teaching—an instructor at the height of his powers, his subsequent fall from grace—are outstanding, as good as any Gerry has read. Maybe even written.

  And yet, he feels as if this is the scene that has just played out, his own Ghost Story—a woman, face averted, with that beautiful voice.

  The voice he stole.

  The voice he stole.

  Not from the real-life Aubrey, who does not, in fact, exist, not really. When he gave his creation a voice—how had he never realized this before—he had taken the beautiful vowels of the actress in this movie, the one who also had been in Chariots of Fire. For a moment, when he was in his twenties, she had seemed to be everywhere. Then, suddenly, she was nowhere. The culture has such an endless appetite for beautiful young women, like a volcano, requiring sacrifice after sacrifice. Only a few women have long acting careers and they are seldom the great beauties.

  But the culture does it to young men, too. And not just handsome ones. Not just actors! Gerry has written better books since Dream Girl, even critics agree on this. But he has never mattered quite as much as he did in that fleeting moment; nothing can be written about him without citing that one particular novel, whereas older writers were allowed to transcend individual titles. Gerry always felt more in step with the writers of the previous generation. They were the little pigs who built their houses of brick, whereas Gerry’s peers tended more to straw and wood.

  And, oh, how people loved to blow them down. Everybody huffs and puffs, intent on destruction. What do they call it now? Cancel culture.

  Lord, the movie is really terrible, even worse than he remembered. He hopes Straub got a lot of money for it. Yet it’s so naked, so wonderfully literally naked, in a way that movies aren’t anymore. Alice Krige—ah, yes, that’s the actress’s name—has very natural breasts that are on display quite a bit, but there’s also the leading man’s penis. He’s falling to his death from a great height when you see it, but still, it’s an example of equal opportunity nudity.

  “The women in this movie have nothing to do but bicker at the men,” Aileen grumbles at one point. “They’re better actresses than that.”

  “Alma is a huge part. She’s the center of it all.”

  “Not her. The wives. One of them is—well, that one”—she indicates Patricia Neal, on-screen with Astaire—“she’s famous, right?”

  “She is, and yet—I couldn’t name a single film which she was in.”

  “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” Aileen says promptly. “Funny because she shouldn’t even be—anyway, she’s in that and she was in The Subject Was Roses.”

  She doesn’t know Astaire, but she has seen these films? “How old are you, Aileen?”

  She
stiffens. “That’s not a question to ask a lady. I’m older than I look, let’s just leave it at that.”

  Funny, he would have sworn it went the other way, that her weight and mannerisms aged her. “Did you grow up in Baltimore? Do you remember Picture for a Sunday Afternoon?”

  Her eyes are fixed on the screen. The film’s alleged shocks seem to have no effect on her. They are pretty weak and she is, after all, a nurse. But she pays strict attention. She does not answer his question, does not speak again until the end of the film, when she says, “That makes no sense. The woman’s still dead. They still killed her. Why do any of them get to live?”

  “In the book—”

  “I”—She stops, almost as if she is trying to tamp down anger, out of respect, but she’s not quite successful. “I don’t care about the book. This is a movie, I’m watching a movie, and according to this movie, if four men put a girl in a car and roll it into the lake while she’s still alive and she dies a horrible death, one of them gets to take his wife to France!”

  “He is the least culpable,” Gerry offers, thinking, And it’s Fred Astaire. You don’t kill Fred Astaire. In The Towering Inferno, Jennifer Jones died, but Astaire lived. Gerry saw that film in the old Rotunda Cinemas, where he saw so many movies. Monty Python and the Holy Grail, most of Woody Allen’s work. Was that the Baltimore theater that had shown The Rocky Horror Picture Show? Antici—SAY IT—pation! No, that had played in another, larger venue. The Rotunda had been a dark, smelly dump of a place, off a narrow hallway in a large brick building that was sort of a mini-mall. Gerry felt up a couple of girls in that movie theater. He misses it. The last time he drove past the Rotunda, the old enclosed shopping center was surrounded by new apartments, and the movie theater was now a detached structure, something called a CinéBistro. What the fuck is a CinéBistro? What is happening to words?

  Aileen marches downstairs, grumbling to herself. Gerry sleeps better than he has in days, paradoxically relaxed by the movie’s insipid, special-effects horrors. Maybe he should watch more movies, less news.

  When he wakes, he can barely wait for Phylloh’s shift to start so he can ask her to review the security camera’s video. She hems and haws, says she’s not supposed to do this for residents, but he cajoles and bullies until he gets his way.

  She calls back at about eleven A.M.

  “I looked at the hours between midnight and three,” she says.

  “And?”

  “There’s nothing on your floor, Mr. Andersen. Nobody coming and going. Nobody. No one in the elevator.”

  “How can that be?”

  “I guess nobody came to see you then, after all?”

  “HOW CAN THAT BE?”

  A rhetorical question, but dutiful Phylloh tries to answer. “It is an unusual time to pay a call.”

  That night, he stays awake like a child waiting for Santa Claus. Like a child, he can’t go the distance. Like a child, he sees nothing.

  Like a child, he still believes.

  1970

  AT THE AGE OF TWELVE, Gerry was much too old to believe in Santa Claus. But this, the first Christmas since his father had moved out, he decided to give his mother whatever pleasure he could by pretending to keep the faith. He even wrote a letter to put out with the cookies and milk, promised not to wake her up too early.

  Only this year, he had no problem falling asleep and he knew he would have no problem staying in bed until a reasonable hour.

  Christmas Eve had been a flat, gray day, with no chance of snow. The next day was expected to be quite cold, in the teens. He would be cooped up in the house with his mother, with no place to go, even if he did get the new bike he coveted, the one with the banana seat.

  He was pretty sure he wasn’t getting a new bike and the cost was only part of the problem. A week ago, his mother had struggled for hours to secure the tree in the holder, at one point going into the kitchen to weep. But she had come back out, eyes defiantly dry, and managed to get the tree up.

  Still, he couldn’t imagine his mother assembling a bike. What would he get tomorrow? He had, of course, taken a careful census of the presents beneath the tree. There had been one or two gifts large enough to be promising. And his stocking was always filled with interesting things.

  When Gerry woke up and saw that it was four A.M., he was determined to go back to sleep, let his mother sleep in until at least eight. He wondered why he had awakened. Oh no. She was crying again. Or maybe talking in her sleep. More than once, he had heard her call out his father’s name at night, angry and bitter. At least, he assumed that was the Gerry whose name she called, given the tone.

  Yes, there it was again. His name. But also his name, the man who had left them. She was saying it over and over and over. “Oh, Gerry. Gerry, Gerry, Gerry. Please, Gerry.”

  He hated hearing this, but it usually ended after a minute or two. He never tried to interrupt because waking up a sleep talker had to be as bad as waking up a sleepwalker.

  Only it didn’t end tonight. She sounded as if she was in pain. He got up and tiptoed to the hall. His mother’s door, usually closed tight at night, was cracked. Gerry put his eye to the gap.

  His mother was sitting upright in bed, moving up and down, as if she were on a merry-go-round, but going very fast.

  She was on top of a man.

  She was on top of his father.

  Her back to him, her dark hair loose and wild, she couldn’t see him. But his father seemed to look right at him. It was all Gerry could do not to scream or run. But he backed away slowly and went to his room, marveling that they were still going. He had learned about sex in school that fall, but he had assumed it happened quickly, requiring no more than a few seconds. And he thought that the man had to be on top. But maybe that was for making babies. Clearly, his mother and his departed father wouldn’t be trying to make a baby.

  His mother’s voice notched up a bit. “Do you love me, Gerry? Am I the one you really love?” He couldn’t make out his father’s answer, a low rumble.

  He put his pillow over his head and, somehow, went back to sleep. When he woke to the cold house—their old oil burner was no match for temperatures in the teens—his mother was already up and dressed, her bed made.

  She was in the kitchen. Alone, thank God. It was a dream. It had to be a dream. What a strange, awful dream to have about one’s mother.

  “Look at you, slugabed. I guess you want to get right to the presents before breakfast. Just let me get my coffee.”

  When there had been three of them, they had each taken a turn opening a gift. This year, the first with just two, Gerry started by giving his mother his present for her, a boxed set of perfume and moisturizer from Hutzler’s.

  “Now you pick.”

  He knew which of the two big boxes he wanted to open first and was about to grab it when he noticed a third box, even bigger than the other two.

  “Where did this come from?”

  “Read the card,” his mother said.

  To Gerry, from Dad.

  “When did this get here?”

  “Oh, your father had it sent weeks ago.”

  “When, though? I get home from school before you come home from work. I’m the one who signs for packages.”

  His mother paused and he saw, in the pause, that she was deciding which lie to tell.

  “He sent it to Dr. Papadakis’s office, knowing what a nosy parker you are. It’s been hidden in the basement for weeks. I put it out last night,” she said. “After you went to bed. Your old mother still has a few tricks up her sleeve.”

  Oh, don’t you just. Could it have been someone else in his mother’s bed? Another man, not his father? Maybe another woman, too. There had been two strangers in his mother’s bed while she was readying the house for the morning. That made more sense than what he thought he had seen.

  His father’s gift to him was a tool kit, but a babyish one, insulting. Gerry was already using real tools, the tools his father had left behind, learning to make
small repairs as the house needed them. Sitting there with this toy in his lap, knowing he was long past toys, Gerry decided his next project would be going to the hardware store in Towson and buying a chain lock for the front door, which would keep him and his mother safe at night, while making it impossible for anyone to come and go.

  March 8

  AND SO, at the age of sixty-one, Gerry enjoys—no, that’s the wrong verb—Gerry receives his first actual house call from a doctor. It has not been easy to arrange. In order to find a specialist who is willing to see him in his home, he first had to join a so-called concierge medical practice, talk to the doctor, and then ask for that doctor’s help in procuring a neurogerontologist, one who is willing to travel to him. The head of the practice asks him a lot of questions about his pain medications, seems far more interested in those than his mother’s Alzheimer’s. But, ultimately, she finds him a specialist.

  The specialist has a name, Andre Bevington, that could be lifted from the pages of a romance novel—and a face to match. He is beautiful, there is no other word for it. Devastatingly beautiful, there is no other adverb for it. Gerry has never been attracted to men, was never comfortable with the way Luke joked about corrupting him. Complimented, but not comfortable. But this man is like a work of art. No—in portrait form, his beauty would be crass, not unlike that portrait of Donald Trump that Trump bought for his own country club, using his foundation’s fund. In art, this kind of perfection is tacky. But as a work of nature, it is something at which one can only marvel. Gerry finds himself thinking, Of course you work with geriatric neurological issues. If you worked with age peers, everyone would fall in love with you. Good lord, if you had been a gynecologist, women would be begging to climb into those stirrups three times a year. A connoisseur of beautiful women—isn’t every straight man?—Gerry has never really spent much time thinking about beautiful men. But this! What’s it like to walk around inside such a body? Does the doctor know? How could he not? Is he grateful? He’d better be.