Dream Girl Read online

  He has been told repeatedly how lucky he is—lucky that he didn’t hit his head, lucky that he was on the floor for “only” twelve hours, lucky that he can pay for a nursing aide at home, otherwise he would have to be in a rehab facility. Aileen arrives at seven o’clock every evening, in time to lead Gerry through a round of exercises, serve him dinner, and then sit through the night as he succumbs to the jumbled slumber of medicated sleep. She departs at seven in the morning, leaving him alone for only two hours before Victoria arrives for her shift, which spans nine to five. And what is “alone” really? The front desk is a mere twenty-five floors and one phone call away, although it is unmanned—unwomanned—until Phylloh arrives at eight Monday through Friday.

  Because the apartment’s top floor has a full bathroom with a walk-in shower, it has been decided to keep him here, although it will be weeks before he visits the bathroom on his own. The walker at his bedside is, he supposes, an aspirational object. And because of the apartment’s layout, the best spot for the bed is in the center of the great room, facing the very stairs that tried to kill him, perpendicular to the wall with the TV. The bed is a bad smell, an insult, an indignity, a reminder of what waits for everyone. Even Victoria, as young and incurious as she is, seems nervous around the rented bed. The rolling tray used for meals also allows Gerry access to his laptop, but he cannot work on a laptop. He needs his full-size screen, he needs the darkness of his office; who can write in all this light? Gerry would have been well-suited to serve on a submarine in his youth, not that men his age had to worry about serving anywhere.

  His coccyx was badly bruised in the fall as well, another excuse not to try to write because even if he could struggle to a sitting position, he couldn’t hold it long. The word registers in his mind—excuse. He had been looking for an excuse not to write and here it is. Those lacy spots in his bones will respond, presumably, to the calcium supplement, which Aileen provides every other day with his nightly dose of pain and sleep meds. His bones will be fine. It’s the lacy spots in his brain that he’s worried about.

  “The day I fell,” he says to Victoria when she enters with his lunch, “the day I fell—I was going for some mail I left in the office.”

  “Yes, you tried to talk to me about it when I, um, found you.” Victoria seemed terribly embarrassed by discovering him, probably because he had been forced to relieve himself. And yet—she has insisted on helping him in his recovery, saying she will learn to do whatever is necessary so he will require only one nursing shift, not 24/7 care. Which, frankly, he does not want. The idea of other people being under his roof constantly is the worst nightmare he can imagine. During the last year, the annus horribilis when Margot basically squatted in his New York apartment, he learned he can no longer bear living with anyone. Maybe he never could, which is as good an explanation as any for three failed marriages.

  But Victoria quickly learned how to be here without making her presence known. He hopes she can teach Aileen the same trick.

  “Any mail?” he asks.

  “Nothing real.” Mail itself is barely real to Victoria, who conducts her life via her phone, even depositing her paycheck by app. But Gerry insists on paper bills, paper checks, paper records.

  “The night I fell—there was one letter in particular—a local one, in a—” He almost says woman’s hand, but quickly corrects course. “In an old-fashioned cursive handwriting. Did you find that?”

  “You asked me that already,” she says.

  “I know,” he says crossly. “I just wanted to check again. I’m quite sure there was a personal letter among the things Thiru brought me.”

  “No,” Victoria says. “There was nothing like that.”

  She is a wispy girl, with big glasses and a messy updo, given to enormous sweaters, long skirts, and ankle boots. In an old-fashioned movie, she would take off her glasses, shake out her hair, cinch the sweater, and be revealed as a beauty. Even in a modern film, she might be transformed, although it would probably be in a makeover montage supervised by friendly gays, who, in movies, seem overly preoccupied with helping heterosexual women find romance.

  Inappropriate. All of these thoughts are inappropriate. If he says these things aloud, even to Victoria, who knows what might happen? Words, words, words—ha, that’s a lyric from the ultimate makeover musical, My Fair Lady, which, strangely, is one of the few concrete memories he has of enjoying time with his father and mother.

  “Well, if you see it around—it had a return address on Fait Avenue, here in Baltimore. That’s what I remember.”

  “Why would someone from Baltimore write you in care of your agent when you’re right here in Baltimore?”

  “I don’t think it’s widely known I’m here.”

  “They wrote about it in Baltimore magazine, I think. Did your agent open it?”

  “Baltimore magazine?”

  “The letter. Did he read it? Did he see what it said?”

  “No, it was unopened, I’m sure of that.” Less and less sure the letter existed, but absolutely sure that it was unopened. He wonders if Thiru would remember, but probably not. Thiru has an eye for details, but they are the details of contracts and money, beautiful clothing and beautiful women.

  “I’ll go look around your office later. Now let’s do your exercises.”

  For now, his “exercises” involve Victoria manipulating his good leg, her gaze averted. He wears heavy pajamas and, during the day, he insists on changing to a T-shirt and sweater above the waist. He is vain of his torso, which isn’t bad for his age. Through the sheer power of his mind alone—and the avoidance of certain foods—he manages never to have a bowel movement during the day. That’s for the night nurse, trained to do such things.

  “Are you sure, Victoria, that you’re okay doing this?”

  “You saw the quotes, for full-time care. I’m happy to do this on the days you don’t have PT, especially as it means a little more money for me.” Sadly, softly, suddenly. “Baltimore’s not cheap anymore, I don’t care what anyone says.”

  “I had an apartment in the 1990s here—I couldn’t get over how much space and light we got, for so little money. But then, we had moved down from New York, so I guess everything is relative.”

  “Hmm.” Victoria tunes him out whenever he talks about his past.

  “On the north side, near Hopkins, the Ambassador. It’s where I wrote Dream Girl.”

  “I like the Indian restaurant on the ground floor.”

  Dream Girl, the novel about a girl called Aubrey, who lived on Fait Avenue. Dream Girl, the novel that changed his life, the novel that launched a thousand guessing games about his inspiration, endless wonderment about how a man like Gerry had uncannily channeled this woman. Then, more recently, a thousand revisionist histories about older men and younger women. (His characters were only fifteen years apart; that shouldn’t be scandalous, even now. It’s not as if a fifteen-year-old could really be someone’s father, unless he was a most unusual fifteen-year-old, one of the boys with mustaches who loitered on the edges of the package store parking lot on Falls Road.)

  Dream Girl was, by design, an absolute product of Gerry’s imagination, written in a feverish two-month period in which he had cut himself off from all stimuli to prove that novelists didn’t have to embed or research every arcane detail of some tiny plot point in order to be relevant. A novel written on a computer, but an old one, without Internet access, under a cross-stitched sampler made by his first wife and inspired by the last lines of Eudora Welty’s memoir: Serious daring starts from within. Dream Girl was what Gerry took to describing, in interviews, as an inside job, delighted by his own wordplay, the implication of a crime, but within one’s own mind. “I stole a moment and created a life.” He declined, always, to describe that moment.

  Yet so many people wanted to believe it was, on some level, true, that Gerry Andersen had been “saved” by a seventy-two-hour romance with a younger woman. They hated learning that Aubrey was not real. Then again, rea
ders hated being told that anything in fiction wasn’t real.

  Aubrey had never existed.

  So who had written him from Fait Avenue?

  Assuming that letter actually existed.

  It did, it did, it did, it did. The letter was real. Aubrey was not, but the letter was real. He’s not confused about what’s real and what’s not. Not yet.

  His mother’s bra in the refrigerator. He should have known then. Still, Aubrey is not real.

  “Who’s Aubrey?” Victoria asks.

  He is surprised to realize he has been speaking aloud. More surprised that Victoria has not read Dream Girl. She claimed to be familiar with his work when she interviewed for the job. Ah, but she had been clever, extolling the virtues of his earlier novels, the unloved middle children between his first and his fourth.

  That was probably why he hired her.

  “Any mail?” he asks, picking up his letter opener, a Bakelite dagger emblazoned with the name of the company for which his father had once worked, Acme School Furniture, a jaunty salesman for its handle.

  “You just asked me that.”

  Shit, he did.

  “Would you get my doctor on the phone? I’d like to ask about my medication.”

  Victoria smiles at him sorrowfully. He understands her sad smile when, an hour later, she reports back that the doctor says he will try to call Gerry next week. He feels naive. “My” doctor. No one has a doctor anymore, unless they pay for one of those fancy concierge services. Gerry’s mother, who worked as a doctor’s administrator, is firmly opposed to that on principle. Was. There’s no present tense left in his mother’s life, which is still hard to absorb. There’s not a lot that Gerry hopes for in his seventh decade, but he would like to live long enough to see health care for all in the United States. Good lord, he had been allowed to stay longer in the hospital for his burst appendix than he had for his quad tear. (They had moved him to a rehab facility, but, still, when had care become so careless?)

  He turns on CNN. Everything is chaos. Forget the Dow. What the world needs is a ticker showing how the status quo, as embodied by the world’s leaders, rises and falls hour by hour. Today, things are plummeting. Maybe everyone has dementia, maybe that is the final joke on the world and the millennials. The inmates are running the assisted-living facility.

  He falls asleep as the sun sets, enjoying the happy sliver of time when he is alone in his own apartment.

  1983

  “HOW DID YOU FIND THIS?”

  “I have my ways.”

  A minute ago, Gerry had been trying to mask his disappointment at the Tiffany box that emerged from the silvery gift wrapping. A pen, a fancy pen, he guessed. He was surprised that Lucy would stoop to such a cliché, that she would waste her—their—money on such a generic gift. True, he kept a notebook and a pen on his person at all times, jotting down observations about the world as his characters would see them. But he often lost his pens, so he never invested in nice ones. Besides, a pen such as this, one that had to be refilled—certainly that was more likely to stain the breast pocket of his shirt.

  Except, it wasn’t a pen. Lucy had tricked him, probably knowing that all these thoughts would rush through his mind before he opened the box and found the old letter opener on a little bed of cotton.

  “How did you—”

  “Okay, okay—” She was almost dancing around him. The kitchen in their duplex was large but plain, and he sat at the wooden table where they ate most of their meals, his mug of postdinner tea warm in his hand, the late-summer sunset shooting streaks of orange-gold across the old black-and-white linoleum.

  The letter opener was bright red. His father had this letter opener. Not this letter opener, of course, but one like it. His letter opener went with him when he finally left. Or did it? For all Gerry knew, this could be his father’s letter opener. After he had been gone a year, his mother had swept all his things into boxes and dropped them at Goodwill. Gerry imagined the letter opener’s life—someone buying it at Goodwill, then maybe taking it to one of the antique stores on Howard Street, or putting it out on their own little lonely card table of cast-off things at a yard sale, where Lucy—

  “Don’t you like it?” Lucy asked, no longer dancing.

  “I love it,” he said. It was the truth. You can love something that makes you sad.

  She knelt beside him. Lucy was petite, put together. Her style icons were Barbara Stanwyck and Myrna Loy, but she adapted their trim, sophisticated looks to the 1980s, so she didn’t look like one of those campy girls who shopped in vintage stores and treated every day like a costume party. She wore her hair in a simple, smooth bob, always shining and neat. Her lipstick was dark, her brows arched and slender. Even on a summer night, in shorts and a blouse, she looked polished, soigné. The shorts were crisp linen, the shirt a sleeveless gingham. Add a scarf and a pair of platform heels and she could have walked straight out of one of the old movies they loved. But, again, Lucy was too tasteful to veer into camp. He should have known she would never give him something as ordinary as a pen to celebrate his first book deal.

  Lucy was a writer, too. They had met in the Writing Sems, as the MFA program at Hopkins was known, where Gerry still taught. She was the acknowledged star of their class. She was so talented and full of promise that she was capable of being without envy, which astonished Gerry. She had been publishing her stories in the best literary journals since she was an undergraduate, yet here he was, with an offer for his first novel, a good one, from one of the top houses, and there was no doubt that she felt only joy. What would it be like to have so much confidence in your ability that you could celebrate someone else’s success?

  “It looks brand-new,” he said. “As if it’s never been used.”

  “Well, you’ll use it, right? You have to get serious about your archives, after all. Universities will be bidding for your correspondence one day.”

  “They’ll need an entire wing for the rejection letters.”

  “Stop.”

  She jumped into his lap. He loved her size, the lightness of her shape and spirit. He loved her.

  “Let’s drink to a deeply wonderful life,” he said, a toast taken from a short story they both loved. They clinked their tea mugs. They weren’t much for alcohol, for anything that distorted their senses. Lucy had never even tried pot and Gerry had used it only to hang with the jocks at Gilman, the boys who let him write their English papers for them, then paid him with their precious company.

  “It’s so sharp,” she whispered, pressing the point against her fore-finger. For a second, he thought he saw a drop of blood, imagined Sleeping Beauty at the spindle. But it was just the Bakelite’s red glow reflected on her skin.

  She was straddling him now. The best thing about Lucy was that she was, beneath her ladylike looks, a wild woman when it came to sex. It was so easy to rise, propping her on the table to remove those crisp shorts, then stand. She was the only woman he had ever done this with, have sex standing up. She weighed 101 pounds.

  The blinds were open on the south side of the house. Old Mrs. Pemberton sat in her folding chair, staring at them. Like that scene in Peyton Place, Gerry thought. He liked to teach that novel in his course on the pulps. Lucy was too far gone to notice, and even if she had seen Mrs. Pemberton, she probably wouldn’t have cared. Gerry made sure to stay in the frame, give the old woman the show she clearly wanted.

  He felt Lucy’s nails rake his back, or maybe it was the letter opener. Get a good view, Mrs. Pemberton.

  February 14

  THE PHONE TRILLS, the double ring that signals a call from downstairs. Gerry used to ignore such calls, but Victoria is out and he is bored. He never used to be bored. He lived by his mother’s maxim, Only boring people get bored. He considered this doubly true for writers.

  Yet now he is bored, despite the fact that his life hasn’t really changed that much, except for the bedridden part. He spent most of his time here in the apartment anyway, leaving only for his daily wa
lks and the occasional errand he didn’t wish to entrust to Victoria. Being forced to be here changes everything. At first, he tried to see it as a blessing. He would read more, write more. He would have time for quiet contemplation.

  Instead, he has ended up watching lots of television, usually CNN, which makes him jittery and unsettled. There is no discernment in the news today, no sense of scale. Everything is BREAKING, everything is URGENT.

  “Mr. Andersen?” Phylloh from the front desk. Oh, my little pie crust, he thinks, I miss seeing you.

  “Yes, Phylloh?”

  “There’s a lady here. To see you.”

  “A lady?” He racks his brain. “Is she from the hospital?”

  “No, she says”—Phylloh lowers her voice—“ she says she’s your wife.”

  “Which one?” An embarrassing but essential question.

  A muttered exchange between two female voices. Phylloh sounds polite but firm. The other voice sounds imperious.

  Margot, Gerry thinks, a split second before Phylloh comes back on the line and says, “Margot?”

  Margot is not one of Gerry’s ex-wives, although it wasn’t for lack of trying. That is, she had tried very hard to persuade Gerry to marry her, but he felt that three wives was all one was entitled to in a lifetime; a fourth wife made one ridiculous. For God’s sake, he wasn’t Mickey Rooney. And there was no doubt in Gerry’s mind that Margot would have become his fourth ex-wife and that being married to her would have been especially ridiculous.