Dream Girl Read online

  “I suppose so,” he said, opting for the answer that would end this meeting as quickly as possible. “See you tomorrow.” Then, in an imitation of Dianne Wiest in that Woody Allen film, he threw up his hand and said in a hoarse, patrician voice. “Don’t speak!”

  The girl frowned and gathered her things, insulted. If he had explained the reference, she probably still would have been insulted. People aren’t allowed to like Woody Allen anymore. He tried to salvage the moment.

  “Good luck with your performance of The Silent Woman.” She looked at him, confused, clearly never having heard of the Ben Jonson play. Who was Gerry kidding? She’d never heard of Ben Jonson.

  The next day, she showed up for class with two lines of tape across her mouth, in the form of an X, but she had to remove the tape to suck from her enormous fountain drink. He was glad she wasn’t speaking, as one of the stories up was by Mona, one of the best students in the class. Also the most beautiful, but that was sheer coincidence.

  March 22

  “WE NEED TO TALK.”

  “Funny,” he says to Aileen. “I was about to say the same thing.”

  Also funny, he thinks, how those words, the worst words a person in a relationship will ever hear, can be neutral in other contexts. Yes, he and Aileen need to talk.

  “I guess you may go first,” she says.

  She has taken to sitting next to him with her knitting in the evening, although they seldom speak. The click-clack of the needles drives him crazy; the click-clack of the needles also soothes him, helps him sleep. Along with the drugs, which he is still taking. To which he looks forward now, if he’s honest, his Ambien and oxycodone chased some nights with a calcium supplement. Without the pills, there’s no way he could sleep. It’s temporary, he assures himself. He won’t always need to dope himself up so much, not forever.

  He tells her about the New York detective, shows her the recording on the phone, says she can listen to it if she likes.

  “But it’s better if you don’t, I think, because none of this would be known to you. The key point, if he should come back to talk to you, is that you know nothing.”

  She seems affronted. “I know everything.”

  “Of course you do. It’s like playing a part, in a play. You have to remember—you never met Margot. Never saw her, never heard me speak about her. Victoria met her, drove her to the train station the first time, overheard our argument. But you know absolutely nothing about her.” He pauses, decides to air his worst fear. “Unless you and Victoria gossip.”

  “How could we gossip? We never see each other.”

  Fair point. Gerry’s being paranoid.

  “Meanwhile, I’ve figured something out. How she came back, how she got in.”

  “Huh.” Is it “Huh” or “How”? At any rate, he decides to tell her.

  “Did you find my keys or the pass in her purse? You and Victoria always come and go through the lower level—”

  “The service entrance,” Aileen says. Service or servants’? She really has the most terrible diction. A stray memory darts around his mind. Speak up, don’t mumble so. He sees a pen-and-ink drawing of a monstrous child. Augustus Gloop. Willy Wonka. Willy Wonka would accuse the children of mumbling when he didn’t like what they said. But, no, it was Mike Teavee that Wonka pretended he couldn’t hear.

  “Anyway, that’s how she got back in. And that means if anyone ever pulls the security footage from that night, they will see her returning in the middle of the night, but there will be no footage of her leaving a second time.”

  Aileen’s eyes widen. “Then we have to do something about that security footage.”

  “No. NO. That’s a fatal error. There are hours of footage and, as of now, there’s no one saying she came back at all, so no one’s looking at the tape. We do nothing.”

  “I don’t know, maybe there’s a way to erase the footage. I saw this TV show recently where someone used a magnet—”

  “We do nothing,” he says sternly. “Every action carries a risk. Inaction has far less. If it were to be discovered, we would both say, plausibly, that we have no memory of her returning to the apartment, that we heard nothing and saw nothing. It’s not on us to explain why she’s on the footage, coming back later that night. Real life is filled with things that don’t make sense.”

  “Right,” she says. Yet she still seems angry and affronted. “I was only trying to help. I’m in this up to my neck, you know.”

  Not an appealing image, Aileen in something up to her neck.

  “I don’t mean to sound bossy,” he says, even as he thinks: I am your boss. “But I was interviewed first; my version has to be the official one. I was here, the detective visited, I’ve started the story. Certain things are set in stone and cannot be revised. It’s like a serial novel. We can’t pull anything back. Now, what was it that you wanted to tell me?”

  “Oh, not tell,” she says. “Ask.”

  He waits, but she is suddenly tongue-tied, shy.

  “Yes?” he prods.

  “You know, I really hate parking on the street when I come here. If you were to get a parking place in the building, I could use it.”

  “I have a space, the one that is deeded to the apartment. But my mother’s car is in it and I can’t do anything with it until her estate clears probate.” His mother’s car is a 2010 Mercedes-Benz that needs body work and repairs to the engine. He had it towed to the garage to get it out of the elements up in North Baltimore.

  “Can’t you get a second space?”

  “I could, but it’s expensive.”

  “How much?”

  “I don’t recall the exact figure. I know only that each unit here comes with one deeded spot, but the second one is dear—they were trying to discourage two-vehicle households, which is funny, given how unwalkable this neighborhood is.”

  “Hmmmm. I just thought—I’m so scared at night, when I walk those three or four blocks. Scared and cold.”

  “Spring is coming. And it’s staying light later.”

  “Gerry.”

  She has never used his first name before. Now that she has, he realizes what is happening—the bill has come due. She cleaned up his mess, and she expects to be compensated. No such thing as a free lunch. No such thing as a free accomplice. Everyone always has an agenda. He stares at the cats frolicking on Aileen’s tablet cover, which is peeking out of her knitting bag. One, a black one with round eyes, seems to be staring back at him, taunting him, stopping just short of sticking its tongue out at him. I know you, he thinks. I have seen you before.

  “Is the parking space all you require, Aileen?”

  “For now,” she says.

  2014

  “YOU’RE NOT FROM HERE, ARE YOU?”

  Gerry was in the hotel bar. He didn’t really want a drink—if it were alcohol he had required, he could have remained at the reception held in his honor after his talk that night at the university. But Gerry’s standing joke was that his fee for speaking doubled if he was expected to make small talk.

  Still, he had dutifully made the rounds, put in a respectable forty-five minutes at the reception and then retreated to his hotel, driven by a student. He asked the student if he knew the story of David Halberstam’s death in a car accident, while being driven by a student. The student did and they had made the twenty-minute trip in silence, which was what Gerry wanted.

  He had been to Columbus several times before, visiting the Thurber House, once even staying in the no-frills apartment on the top floor, the very place where the bed had fallen. He had loved Thurber when he was young. He even liked the television show that used Thurber’s drawings, My World and Welcome to It. He would have preferred to be in the Thurber House right now. It was quiet at night, near downtown yet removed. Hotels made him feel lonely. So he sat at the bar and drank Bushmills, which he had taken up years ago because his father disdained it. “Protestant whiskey,” said his father, a Jameson man. Gerry didn’t even like it that much.

  T
he woman who had spoken to him had come in after he did, chosen a stool three seats down, ordered a white wine, and taken out a book. She looked familiar at first, then he decided she just had one of those faces. Pretty, but not shockingly so. Light eyes, blond hair worn in a ragged bob. But the brows and lashes were dark. Eyes put in with a dirty finger, his mother would have said. An Irish expression, more meaningful before all women, everywhere, began darkening their eyelashes, outlining their eyes as if they were Cleopatra, wearing false eyelashes. Women were increasingly fake these days. Gerry liked real women—slender, small-breasted, with their natural hair color.

  Like this woman, although she was young, much too young for him, in her twenties.

  Still, she had spoken to him. It was only polite to answer.

  “Safe question to ask in a hotel bar,” he said. “People in hotels generally are from somewhere else.”

  “I’m from here.”

  “Ah.” She was flirting, he was sure of it. He liked it, and what was the harm in a little banter? “Is this one of your hangouts?”

  “Hardly. A bit on the expensive side to be a regular hang. But I needed a treat tonight, after I got off work. I just wanted to sit with a glass of wine and my book.”

  The book was The Master and Margarita, one of his cherished favorites, although he did not recognize this particular cover featuring a black cat with a forked tongue. Gerry told the bartender to upgrade the woman’s chardonnay from the house brand to the most expensive one on the list, then moved down one stool. Good taste in literature deserved to be rewarded.

  “I’m Gerry Andersen,” he says. His name evinces no recognition. Good.

  “Kim Barton.”

  *

  TWO HOURS LATER, the woman was in his room, but suddenly much shyer than she had been in the bar, where she had touched his arm. Her leg had even brushed against his once, he was sure of it.

  “I knew who you were,” she said. “All along. I was at your talk tonight and I know from my days at the university that they put the big-name speakers up here. In fact, I majored in creative writing and I used to work on this speaker series.”

  Her confession had the odd effect of at once amplifying and suppressing desire. Felt like a bit of a rigged game, if his reputation preceded him. But who cared? She was so pretty in that midwestern way. Technically, her features and coloring were not that different from his. But there was a milk-fed, corn-fed quality to her heartshaped face. She looked like—America.

  He was a little buzzed.

  “How did you know I’d be in the bar?”

  “I didn’t. I really did stop in for a treat. Your talk was great, by the way. As I said, I have a degree in creative writing, but—I work in a nursing home. In administration, not in care.”

  The distinction seemed to matter to her, although Gerry couldn’t fathom why.

  “I’m married,” he said.

  “I know. You mentioned her during your talk. It’s your second marriage?”

  “Third.”

  His matrimonial record hung over him, like that black cloud that hung over the character in Li’l Abner, Joe Btfsplk. He knew in that moment that he and Sarah would divorce within a year. It would be costly to him, and not only financially. Sarah Kotula was the wife he had taken—archaic phrase, but apt—in the flush of success. She was perfect in every way, even more perfect than Lucy had been. Sarah was a gift he had chosen for himself in much the same way he had splurged on furnishings for his New York apartment. Sarah was a top-shelf prize at boardwalk Skee-Ball, suddenly, finally within reach. A little bit younger than Gerry, but not young enough to make him look ridiculous. An accomplished journalist in her own right, with family money. She was so perfect that she was a bit of a turn-off. Even their best sex had a workmanlike aspect. He was Sarah’s trophy, too. This young woman wanted him, he could tell. Did it matter if she desired him as a man or as GERRY ANDERSEN?

  He put his hand on her hair and waited. She looked down at her lap, but she didn’t move away, so he leaned in to kiss her neck. Very quickly, he had her flat on the bed, her skirt pushed up, her sweater pushed up, his face pressed against her midsection.

  “No,” she said.

  “Let me put my mouth on you.” He pulled down her tights—no underwear beneath them, oh, these young girls—and tasted her. “I just want to make you happy.”

  “No. Please—no.” But she didn’t try to move from the bed and her back arched, her body responding to his touch. He was on his knees, his face buried between her legs. She could get away from him if she really wanted to. Heck, she could break his nose with her foot or her knee. She was moaning now. She was excited and her excitement was a tonic for him. She yelped when she finally came and he could tell it was a long orgasm, one that flowed and rippled. She was panting.

  He went to the bathroom, swirled some mouthwash around, returned to the bed and kissed her gently, then placed her hand on his crotch. “What about me?”

  She looked startled. “I—do you have a condom?”

  “I don’t.” He wasn’t a cheater. He really wasn’t. But it had been months since Sarah had touched him with genuine passion and this girl had clearly wanted him.

  “Maybe I do,” she said, rummaging around in her purse.

  “Would you prefer that to—”

  “Yes, I would like that better.”

  She flipped over so she was on all fours. Oh, these younger women were so interesting. She seemed to come again, he couldn’t be sure, but the important thing was he did. After it was over, she went to the bathroom. He hoped she wouldn’t stay, and she didn’t.

  In the morning he found her book, a name inscribed inside. Kim Karpas. The surname was not the one she had given in the bar, he noticed that. But it was a used book, so maybe that was the name of the previous owner. He wondered if she had known it was one of his favorite novels, an easily sussed-out fact. Maybe the whole encounter had been carefully planned to seduce him.

  He didn’t care. He was flattered. He was going to go home and ask Sarah for a divorce. Tell Sarah they were getting divorced. Life was too short and he had too many opportunities, still. It was time to enjoy himself. On with the dance, let joy be unconfined. All his life, he had tried so hard to be good, and where had it gotten him?

  March 25

  GERRY’S PHYSICAL CONDITION is improving, day by day, and he couldn’t feel worse. The longer, prettier days mock him through his huge windows, cheery postcards from a world he cannot imagine himself ever visiting again. He longs for a particular scent in Baltimore’s early-spring air, but he can’t smell it up here on the twenty-fifth floor. Sometimes he feels as if he can’t smell anything at all.

  But then there are the days when he thinks he can detect the fragrance of “real life” coming off Victoria and Claude—although not Aileen, never Aileen, Aileen smells like Lysol and iron ore. He wants to smell fresh-cut grass, sun, mulch. Then he remembers that is a detail in a short story he loved as a boy, about the people who live in a department store, pretending to be mannequins by day, coming to life when the store is closed. A writer, a poet, goes to live in the store, thinking it his singular brainstorm. He is delighted to find an entire colony of dropouts like himself. But the girl he loves is in love with the night watchman because he smells of the outside world. The story had been in one of those Alfred Hitchcock or Rod Serling collections that Gerry gobbled up as a child, collections that often had quite good stories. He had been astonished to realize in college that he had read a chapter from Waugh’s A Handful of Dust in its original incarnation as a short story, “The Man Who Liked Dickens.”

  Waugh. Do people still read Waugh? Does Waugh matter? Do any writers matter anymore? Wah! There’s Shakespeare, of course. No one argues against Shakespeare. They will, one day, Gerry thinks. Some information will come to light, they’ll decide his wife wrote the plays or that he yearned to be a woman and cross-dressed in his spare time. Do people still speak of cross-dressing? He knows not to say tranny anymore and
is proud of himself for that knowledge, but he’s a little confused about the difference between gender and sex.

  The bottom line is that Gerry is terrified of full recovery, because then what happens? As long as he stays in this bed, it seems possible to ignore the terrible thing that occurred in this room. Once he is himself again, won’t he have to plumb his memory, determine his responsibility, and finally choose to act? Once he can stand on his own two feet, he will really have to stand on his own two feet.

  Victoria comes in. Even if he can’t actually smell the world on her, he can see it in the way her wardrobe is changing. For much of the winter, she wore a huge, fluffy yellow coat over black leggings so she resembled a tiny Big Bird. Today she is in a jaunty plaid trench coat. She just misses being his type, he thinks. His old type, the kind of woman he liked in his twenties, a Lucy. Margot, Sarah before her, even Gretchen—those had been attempts to change his type. He should have stayed true to himself. As Shakespeare would have said.

  “Good morning, Vic—”

  “Did you give Aileen a parking place?” She is working hard to control her emotions, whatever they are. Her cheeks are flushed, her voice trembles.

  “I have arranged for her to park in the building,” he says. “She was feeling vulnerable, walking here after sunset.”

  He wonders at his immediate impulse to fudge the information—arranged for her to park in the building. As if the plan is temporary—it is, he won’t need Aileen forever—as if it’s an act of kindness, no more. Gerry has always thought of himself as an essentially honest person, and not simply out of virtue. He lies for a living, he doesn’t want to do it for free. Besides, it’s wearying to lie, a waste of time and energy to track one’s mistruths. Being honest is expedient and efficient.

  Yet soft, tactical lies, so-called white lies—is it okay to call them white or is that now racist?—are the social WD-40 of day-to-day life, greasing all the tiny connections, keeping things frictionless. It’s his money. Victoria has no right to inquire how he spends it. Victoria is on a need-to-know basis, whether she knows it or not. How did she even hear about Aileen’s parking place? The two women never cross paths, as Aileen pointed out.