Dream Girl Read online

  And was he thinking about Obama because he couldn’t bear to ponder the ramifications of his mother believing that his father still visited her, made love to her, when he had been dead for at least ten years? He had died on September 11, 2001. Not in the towers, of course.

  “Mom,” he said, “what year is it?”

  “2012.”

  “And who’s the president?”

  “Barack Obama.” She practically beamed, saying his name. She loved Obama. Even when Hillary Clinton had been running in 2008, she had supported Obama. His mother despised Hillary Clinton, something he always assumed had to do with the Clinton marriage.

  “Mom—will you draw a clock for me?”

  She gave him a withering look, but she did it, and her clock was fine, more than fine. His mother drew beautifully.

  “I’m not losing my mind, Gerald.”

  “It’s just that—”

  “Do we have dessert?”

  “You haven’t touched your dinner.”

  “Gerry, I’m seventy-six years old. If I want to eat some ice cream, I’m going to eat some darn ice cream.”

  He laughed. She had a point. And her joke dispelled most of his worries. His mother wasn’t losing her mind. She was just making up a story that made her feel better, that restored the self-respect taken from her long ago.

  His first novel, meant to be a tribute to her, an explanation of how a beautiful, intelligent woman could end up with such an inferior, unworthy man, had hurt her terribly. “It wasn’t like that, Gerry,” she had said. It was the worst fight of their relationship, the only quarrel they had after his teen years. He tried to remind her it was fiction, and it was, but he always thought the problem was that he had gotten too much right. He wanted to say, I can do math, Mother. He had been born six months after his parents’ marriage. He had killed her, in the book, killed himself, to spare her the pain that followed. It was the inverse of the Sharon Olds poem. He was willing not to exist if that was what it took to spare his mother.

  Would your mother have been better off dead? An interviewer had tried to shock him with that question at a literary festival in 2010.

  “It’s fiction,” Gerry had said. “It’s not autobiography. I can’t help it if people conflate the two, but it’s not a line of inquiry that interests me.”

  He went to the kitchen and fixed his mother her favorite, Baskin-Robbins Jamoca Almond Fudge. The 31 Flavors they frequented had been in the little strip center that housed Morgan Millard, but now you could buy it at the grocery store anytime you wanted it. Why did that make him sad?

  Maybe he was just at an age where everything made him sad, even the reelection of the best president of his adult life. Of his entire life: he had little affection for Kennedy. He didn’t agree with Obama on everything, of course. And Carter, go figure, was clearly the best person to hold the office. Too good. When a saint becomes president, it’s discomfiting. One expects a president to make a few more deals with the devil, spend less time on the White House tennis court schedule.

  He opened the fridge, thinking to add Reddi-wip to the ice cream, and was surprised to see one of his mother’s bras lying on a shelf, carefully folded. It appeared to be a newer bra, brighter and bolder than the lingerie he remembered trying to avoid in the laundry room when he was a boy.

  His mother was watching the returns dreamily when he brought her the dish of ice cream.

  “Mom, you left your”—the word bra was impossible for him—“your, um, undergarments in the fridge.”

  “They’re calling Illinois,” she said. “Your father lives there.”

  “Ohio, Mom,” he said. “He lived in Ohio.”

  “Yes, years ago. He lives in Illinois now. Lake Forest. He’s a sexton.”

  He was impressed, in spite of himself, with his mother’s talent for detail in her fantasies. A sexton—one could imagine a novel with such a character. Not a Gerry Andersen novel, but maybe one by Anne Tyler. But then, that’s how his mother had survived her life, by telling stories. She conjured up fictions to comfort herself. Meanwhile, his father was a pathological liar. What choice did Gerry have but to become a novelist?

  He risked the word. “The bra, Mom?”

  “Oh. I read somewhere they last longer that way. If you keep them in a cold place.”

  February 15

  GERRY ANGLES HIMSELF so he is more on his side than his back and taps on his laptop, using only his left hand. It’s awkward, but it’s less painful than trying to sit on his bruised coccyx. There is almost no position in which he doesn’t feel pain or discomfort. It’s an alien sensation to him, this chronic throbbing. He had never considered his pride in his health hubristic. He took care of himself. He walked, he didn’t overeat, he seldom drank. Everything else was a genetic lottery—or so he had been modest enough to say when complimented on his youthful appearance, his full head of hair. Like most lottery winners, he secretly credited himself with his luck.

  Genetic lottery. He taps only four letters into the Google maw—deme—and is instantly rewarded with a slew of dementia subjects, including “Dementia versus Alzheimer’s,” which sounds like the worst action movie franchise ever. He changes the search to dementia delusions and ends up on the website of the Canadian Alzheimer’s Society, where he quickly learns a distinction he should have already known, fussy as he is about words. Whatever happened last night was not a delusion, but a hallucination. Oh boy, sweet victory.

  Feeling very much like the Scotland Yard inspector in Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time, he rolls onto his back and reviews last night’s events as logically as possible. He heard the phone ring. (Or did he?) He answered it. Assuming it had, in fact, rung. A woman spoke to him and insisted she was Aubrey. What sort of person would do such a thing?

  What does he know?

  One: It is someone who has his number, which is unlisted, although Gerry knows the Internet is lousy with services that can fetch such information, for a fee. So, basically, anyone with a little money to throw at their mischief.

  Two: The voice was female, he is sure of that. So now the pool of suspects has been halved.

  Three: It’s someone who is familiar with his book. Hmmm. It has sold three million copies in English alone and who knows how many used or library copies have been perused. But, okay, let’s say it’s a woman, a woman who knows the book but, more importantly, knows him. The very use of Gerry indicates intimacy—those who have not met him always lead with Gerald, a name he despises because he shares it with his father. If he had it to do over again, he would publish under Gerry, but when he was young, his nickname felt callow. Gerry always wanted to be old, serious, imbued with gravitas.

  Mission accomplished. Alas.

  The woman did not sound like Margot and, frankly, this kind of mind-fuckery is not Margot’s style. And although the voice is tantalizingly familiar, he can’t imagine any of his ex-wives pulling such a stunt, either. He has had no contact with any of them, not really, for years, although Lucy and Sarah wrote notes after his mother died. His mother had liked both of them quite a bit; she had no use for Gretchen whatsoever. On the eve of his wedding to Sarah, a suitably low-key affair for a third-timer but a wedding nonetheless, his mother had two glasses of wine at the so-called rehearsal dinner and blurted out: “I like all of Gerry’s odd-numbered wives.” Everyone had laughed uproariously at his mother’s wit, but Gerry recognized the confession as a moment of alcohol-fueled candor.

  Then there was his colleague at Hopkins, Shannon Little, who at one point tried to claim she had inspired Aubrey—he wonders if she is newly emboldened by #MeToo to assert this nonsense again. It’s true that it was very, very bad form for Gerry to have sex with a colleague, but Lucy had practically thrown him into Shannon’s arms. Being accused of faithlessness when one is faithful quickly becomes tiresome; it’s only natural to feel that one might as well commit the crime of which one is constantly being accused. And Lucy’s paranoia about Gerry and other women was particularly wounding t
o him, which she knew. He had set out to be as different from his father as possible. When the day came that he succumbed to another woman—a woman who was actively pursuing him—he practically wept as he bent her over his desk and sodomized her.

  Shannon Little. He tries Googling her, but the name is too common. More than one hundred profiles on LinkedIn alone and so many personae—a doctor, a salon owner, a vet.

  A common name and an apt one, too—not because she was small in physical stature, but because the thing between them had been inconsequential, or should have been. She seemed determined to seduce him, if only to have something to write about. He gave in and had sex with her because he was tired of being berated by Lucy for the affairs he wasn’t having. Funny, how Lucy’s jealousy metastasized, mutated. She was so determined not to be envious of Gerry’s professional success—publishing his first novel to respectful reviews, winning an obscure but cash-laden prize—that she became crazed with jealousy of other women. Talk about delusions, or would they be hallucinations? At any rate, Lucy saw evidence of Gerry’s philandering everywhere. Except in the place where it was happening.

  Shannon Little would be in her late fifties now. They had screwed—really, that was the best word for it; the sex was mechanical and emotionless—only once. Shannon, ironically, was the one woman Lucy never suspected, probably because she didn’t hold her in high esteem. Lucy’s paranoia centered on better writers. She was terrified that Gerry would outpace her professionally, but she was too proud to allow that conscious thought into her mind. So she created these phantom affairs, disrupted his writing time to hurl accusations at him. And that, more than anything, was the reason they broke up. That and the prize money that made it possible.

  To be fair, the success of his first book changed him. Success always changes people, just not in the way others think. When someone enjoys success—although it’s Gerry’s belief that no one truly enjoys it—the fear among friends and family and lovers is that they will be left behind, that success is a luxury ocean liner and they are put off with a brisk “All ashore who’s going ashore.” Gerry, having achieved a modest success at a relatively young age, simply wanted to make sure that he kept moving forward. His second and third books were slight misfires, unfavorably compared to his first, but that bothered him not at all. The important thing was, they were different, they showed he wasn’t going to be mining his own slender life for material. Gerry planned to be a literary distance runner. The first thing he had to distance himself from was that first book, so popular and pleasant.

  He never admitted to the stupid dalliance with Shannon Little, but he recognized it as the proof that he had checked out of his marriage. Whatever Gerry was, he was not a cheater. That was Gerald Andersen Sr.’s territory. He just became a bad enough husband that Lucy didn’t fight him when he asked for a divorce, and then he moved to New York, where he was generally treated like shit by the cooler, hipper writers of the moment. Best thing he could have possibly done. Best thing they could have possibly done. Fifteen years later, when Dream Girl ticked all the boxes and achieved that rare literary grand slam of prestige, sales, film rights, and zeitgeist, Shannon Little came out of nowhere to publish—self-publish, in truth, although she managed to disguise that fact for a while—her “rebuttal.” But it was so crass, so poorly written, that nothing came of it. Not even Lucy seemed to notice. If she did, she didn’t bother to contact Gerry.

  Plus, Shannon’s publication date was September 11, 2001, which didn’t help.

  Victoria comes in with his lunch, the mail, and his letter opener, the Acme School Furniture Bakelite dagger that Lucy gave him. I’m an orphan, Gerry thinks for the first time. He has lived without his father for so long that his status did not occur to him when his mother died. He is an orphan. He has no siblings, no heirs. No enemies, not really. Shouldn’t he have a longer list of potential enemies; can you have lived a life of consequence if you don’t have people who really, really hate you?

  If the call happened—OF COURSE THE CALL HAPPENED—it was some sad person’s idea of a joke, a variation on asking if one’s refrigerator was running or if a store had Prince Albert in a can. Gerry spends as little time as possible on social media, but even he has heard there was an Italian man who specialized in death hoaxes and fake accounts targeting literary figures; he went so far as to manufacture an interview with Gerry at one point. It’s plausible to believe that there’s someone who lives to make prank phone calls to well-known authors, pretending to be their main characters.

  Still, as he slices through his mail, he wishes that his Fait Avenue correspondent would write again, if only to confirm that the letter had existed. No letter, no entry on the caller ID log—there must be a logical explanation, one that doesn’t go to his own state of mind.

  Or lack thereof.

  1986

  “MY FATHER DRANK VANILLA when he was desperate. It was awful.”

  Gerry had heard this story before. So had Luke. Tara had shared tales about her father’s alcoholism their freshman year at Princeton, in that fit of hyperconfiding that happens in college dorms, when one finally realizes that everyone has secrets. Even then, Gerry had been careful with his. But they were the three amigos, the ones who joked that their eating club should be called Descendants of Shitty Fathers.

  But why was Tara telling this story again, here at this new club, Dante’s? They were only twenty-eight, after all. Weren’t they too young to be repeating themselves?

  Weren’t they too old to be in this bar? Gerry hadn’t left his marriage and moved to New York to sit in clubs and shout over the music. He was a serious writer and nothing felt more serious than living off his savings in an illegal sublet on the Upper West Side. Thiru had gotten him a modest advance for his second novel, but the jackpot of the Hartwell Prize, even halved by his divorce from Lucy, made it possible for him to live without teaching for the first time. Tara and Luke were living similar lives, although their parents subsidized their ambitions.

  It was nice, spending time with Tara and Luke again, but Gerry wasn’t sure they brought out the best in one another. Tara was drinking too much and dating an abusive jerk. Luke, always on the prowl, seemed determined to make the worst choices. And Gerry—well, Gerry had no criticism for himself other than his loyalty, which led him to meet his college friends in these loud, frenetic places and then sourly contemplate their lives.

  “Do you worry,” he asked Tara now, “that you might share your father’s legacy?”

  “What an offensive question,” she said. “How would you feel if I asked you the same thing?”

  “There’s a genetic factor to alcoholism,” he said. “Surely you know that.”

  “There is not,” Tara said. “You’re full of shit.”

  Luke laughed.

  “I’m sorry, Tara, but that’s just a fact. I’m not trying to be provocative or cruel.”

  “Oh no, Gerry is never provocative. Or cruel.” She threw her arms out, her drink sloshing. Tara had taken to drinking vodka martinis. It was a calculated choice. Everything Tara did was calculated, a conscious decision to create an image. She was wearing a teeny-tiny hat with a veil tonight and a 1950s vintage dress. She would look so much better in those ski pants and oversize shirts other women were wearing now.

  “Tara, I don’t want to fight with you.”

  “Gerry never wants to fight,” Luke said, his eyes searching the club for tonight’s entertainment.

  Gerry got up to go to the bathroom. In this particular club, the bathrooms were designated as “devils” and “she-devils.” There was a long line of she-devils waiting. He noticed one woman in particular when he went in. She was still waiting when he came out. She looked out of place, a preppy girl, in pearls and a sweater. He was charmed by her, although her calves were quite thick.

  “If you want to use the men’s room,” he said, “I’ll spot you.”

  The gym nomenclature meant nothing to her and she stared at him as if he had said something rude. />
  “I’ll guard the door, I mean. There’s a stall. And it’s, um, relatively hygienic.”

  “That’s okay,” she said. “I’ll wait my turn.”

  “I’m Gerry,” he said.

  “I’m Gretchen.”

  “Okay if I wait with you?”

  “It’s a free country.”

  Charmed by the cliché, which she did not appear to know was a cliché, he waited with her. And he waited when she went in and used the bathroom. Then he proposed they go to a diner. She ordered french fries, nothing more, and ate them daintily, dipping them in mayonnaise instead of ketchup. She was the most earnest person he had ever met. He walked her home, to her apartment in Gramercy Park, the first sign that this apple-cheeked girl had a real life, a real job, at a brokerage. He kissed her on one of her apple cheeks, but that was all. “May I have your number?” he asked. She wrote it on his wrist, with an ink pen.

  He called her the moment he got home.

  February 20

  THE PHYSICAL THERAPIST, a man named Claude, comes twice a week. By all appearances, he is constantly, chronically high, but it’s a low-grade buzz that doesn’t interfere with his job or, Gerry has to hope, his driving. He is a quiet man, which normally would be a relief, but Gerry is desperate for masculine company, cooped up with only Victoria and Aileen. Funny, he never thought of himself as much of a man’s man. He rather dislikes men. Of course this goes back to his father; Gerry has never bothered to pay an analyst to delve into that matter. Writing is better than therapy—same results, but he gets paid for it. His wastrel father, then the Gilman jocks, who were nice to him yet still kind of awful, directing so much energy into destruction. He noticed, even then, that they were especially dangerous when they had too much time to spare, given to cow-tipping and other stupid pranks. And, although he never thought about it before, probably date rape and trains and other horrible things.