Dream Girl Page 7

  “’lo?” she asks, breathing hard. A pause as she listens. “Hello? Hello?” She hangs up. “Nobody there.”

  He finds this encouraging. Assuming it wasn’t a wrong number, his mystery caller wishes to speak to no one but him. The fake Aubrey is trying to make him crazy, which proves he isn’t actually crazy. Or delusional.

  Of course, this means someone has targeted him for harassment, which is—not good? And it’s not random, it’s not as if there is some common scam in which someone, such as a Nigerian prince, calls novelists and claims to be their characters. Could there be a woman out there who sincerely believes she is Aubrey?

  Or is there a woman in his past who wants to stir him up? Who has he harmed, really?

  No longer content to keep a running tally in his head, he reaches for one of the little Moleskine notebooks he keeps nearby and writes down his list of the usual suspects. A name tantalizes him, a memory or something even more ephemeral—a whisper, a scent, a bit of gossip, a suggestion of a person wronged—no, a person who believes herself wronged, an important distinction. Not someone who was really in his life, but maybe someone who wanted to be, who mistook something casual for something more profound—

  The lights pop back on, creating that weird overreaction of relief and gratitude when something taken for granted has been lost and then restored. His thoughts scatter. At least he won’t be springing for a suite of rooms at a local hotel.

  “I guess I’ll make myself some tea,” Aileen says, clomping to the kitchen.

  She doesn’t even think to offer him any. Apparently Aileen is not aware that nurse and nurture derive from the same root. She makes herself a cup of tea and is about to go back downstairs when Gerry says: “My medicine?”

  At least she has the decency to look abashed for neglecting the central part of her duty. She goes to the kitchen and gets him a glass of water, brings two oxycodone.

  “Two?”

  “You missed one, I’m guessing.”

  “I don’t think medicine works that way.”

  “It’s cumulative. If you don’t take both now, you’ll feel it by morning.”

  He wants to argue. But he also doesn’t want to wake to acute pain. He feels like a child, staring up into his mother’s face, but—no, that’s unfair. His mother was beautiful. His mother loved him. Aileen performs a mother’s duties, a spouse’s duties, but for pay. Three ex-wives and no children. Is that natural? Has he unwittingly subverted a system in which he would have received affectionate care for free? Everything is contracted out now and the world is poorer for it.

  “I’ll take two pills,” he says, “and call you in the morning.”

  A small joke, but all jokes are too small to receive any acknowledgment from stolid Aileen.

  *

  BY MORNING, it seems ridiculous that the power was ever out; the storm was truly a case of sound and fury, all wind, almost no snow, at least not on the ground. Gerry enjoys watching the local weathermen and -women try to make it seem more than it was, storytellers aware that they have overpromised and underdelivered. They move their hands over what he knows to be blank screens; Gerry has done his share of local television talk shows, especially in Baltimore. Favorite son and all that. He knows—knew, he hasn’t done local television for years, hasn’t had to—the drabness of the studios, the indignity of sitting in some corner on a Saturday morning, hoping the regular adopt-a-stray segment didn’t run over, stealing the five minutes he had to try to explain his latest novel to a cheerful woman who wasn’t even chagrined not to have read it ahead of time.

  This was all before the expansion of the idea of content, but that’s what he was in those situations, content. A static, wallpaper kind of content, determined to be inoffensive at all costs. Local television shows traded in the known. The stories changed, but the format never did. Crime story, traffic story, and now something to make you feel better about human nature. Weather. Sports scores. Local news was like a familiar hymn playing in the background, intended to soothe and pacify.

  But national news now—wowza. It’s become an insane, coked-up party girl (or boy) who simply will not leave your apartment, yakking and yakking and yakking, moving from one topic to another without transition. Last year, the New York Times received a lot of criticism for an article about a man who had chosen to live without news. The ultimate in white privilege! Talk about a bubble!

  Gerry, whose news “diet” used to consist primarily of the Times, on paper, and the New York Review of Books, thinks people were simply envious of the man. They did not realize it was in their power to turn down the volume, literally and figuratively.

  Which is not to say that Gerry has no interaction with social media at all. There is a Twitter account, verified, run by Victoria, which sends out one or two items a week, almost always links to favorite but obscure poems, short stories, sometimes articles about the neglected writers of other countries. His avatar (ugh, stupid word, corrupted word, but at least it hasn’t been as wronged as icon) is a circular snapshot of his own shelves, taken at such close range that it appears to be a beautiful abstract painting, all those lovely worn spines, muted jewels. (The paper covers are stored because they’re dust catchers.)

  It is also Victoria’s job to maintain a Google alert on Gerry—and to keep him wholly ignorant of it. Piracy issues are to be directed to Thiru, anything that smacks of libel goes straight to his lawyer, etc., etc. Oh, there was a time when Gerry Googled himself, checked his Amazon ratings, but that was in the early days of the Internet, which happened to be around the time his third book was published. He was young—well, youngish—and there was enormous novelty in obtaining any sort of data about one’s books.

  Then one morning, as he typed his latest title into Amazon’s search box, he found himself quivering, there was no other word for it, and he recognized the feeling, even though it was not his: he was like a gambler in the moment before the roulette wheel came to rest. Gerry had never gambled in his life, not in any meaningful way, but his friend Luke had a chronic gambling problem and had described the emotions vividly.

  So when Gerry felt that rush, he recognized it for what it was, and knew to avoid it at all costs. Long before other people began using programs to block their Internet access, he had set up his work life so he would not be disturbed. He doesn’t know the password to the apartment’s wireless service, so he didn’t use it on his laptop until his accident. He can get email on his phone, theoretically, but he almost never does, not real ones. Again, Victoria culls it every day and handles the account through his website, a website so basic that it was kind of a punch line, or had been for a day or two last month. “You’re trending,” Victoria had said. “That is, #GeraldAndersensWebsite is trending. Some big literary blogger went viral when she made fun of it.”

  “Speak English,” Gerry said, and he wasn’t joking.

  So today, when Victoria appears with her sheaves of paper and phone, ready to talk business and errands, he is not initially alarmed when she says: “Um, before we talk about anything, I guess I have to tell you there’s something on Twitter.”

  “There’s always something on Twitter,” he says, meaning to be jovial, but she winces as if he’s been cruel. “Something about me?”

  “Not directly. Someone tweeting at you.”

  “You know how to handle it. Queries about work or public speaking can be directed to the proper avenues. Everything else is to be ignored.” The Gerald Andersen Twitter account follows exactly three other accounts: Barack Obama, God, and Marina Hyde, a UK columnist he admires. Yet he is followed by almost three thousand people, although Victoria says at least half of them are probably robots, or bots, as she calls them.

  “It’s just that this one—it’s a woman named Aubrey. I mean, her handle is DreamGirl@Aubrey. The avatar is, um, your book.”

  “There is no Aubrey. How can Twitter allow this?”

  “I checked, but it doesn’t violate the terms of service? It’s pretty common, I think?”<
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  He can’t help himself: “Victoria, are you asking me questions or telling me these facts?”

  “Telling you? I mean, telling you. This isn’t a violation. Because Aubrey’s not real, she—he—isn’t really trying to deceive anyone.”

  Gerry gets that. He follows God, after all. Although only on Twitter.

  “So I care about this because—”

  “I thought you should know about the content?”

  Is it so wrong that he wants to hold her head under water every time she ends a sentence on a rising note?

  “What is the ‘content’?”

  “Yes, well, I think I should probably show it to you, or paraphrase it, or just—”

  “Victoria, please tell me what this ‘Aubrey’ is doing that has you all bollixed up.”

  “She was tweeting about your penis.”

  At least she finally managed a declarative sentence.

  1975

  THE TOWSON PRECINCT of the Baltimore County Police Department was relatively quiet on the Fourth of July. The not-quite-arresting officer did not bother to put Gerry and his friends in a holding cell, but left them on a bench where, one by one, the other boys were picked up. Alex, Sean, Steve, Roderick. Still Gerry’s mother didn’t come and she didn’t come and she didn’t come. It was almost dark when she arrived and she offered no explanation for the delay.

  He had never seen his mother’s face so white and tight with fury, not with him. Not even with his father.

  “What happened?” she asked once he was in her car, a secondhand AMC Pacer.

  “There was this mass of wet leaves on the road and Alex was going a little too fast and he lost control—”

  “The police said there was beer in the car.”

  “It wasn’t our beer.”

  She gave him a look.

  “Alex picks up his father’s booze for him at the package store on Falls Road. Call him and ask. That’s how cool Alex’s dad is. Also, Alex turned eighteen two days ago.” A lie, except for the part about Alex’s age—his parents had held him back a year to allow him to excel at lacrosse—but he knew his mother would never call the home of Alexander Simpson III.

  “I have told you before and I will tell you again—I do not approve of this fast crowd you have fallen in with, Gerry.”

  “They’re not fast,” he protested. “They’re fun.” He wasn’t sure this was even true, but they were more fun than any other options he had. He helped them with their school papers and they, in turn, let him hang out with them with only a modicum of teasing. They spent their summer evenings scouting for beer, then used the liquid courage to approach girls. But they didn’t really know what to do with girls. All four were star lacrosse players and they could do marvelous things with a stick and a ball, but face-to-face with a girl, they were hopeless. That’s what they had been doing at the Elkridge Club all afternoon, splashing girls and tormenting them, then wondering why the girls didn’t want to go see fireworks with them. Gerry secretly thought he would do better with girls without Alex and his gang, but how would he ever get into any place as rarefied as Elkridge without Alex?

  They had been in Alex’s green Mercedes sedan when he lost control on a bed of wet leaves on Falls Road. That part was true, too. Alex had been driving much too fast for the curvy country road. The car spun in circles, making what felt like five rotations before it came to rest on the opposite side. No one was hurt, but the car hit a retaining wall, popping the battery cable. They had the presence of mind to hide the empties, so the only beer in the car was an intact six-pack. Still, the Baltimore County cop who came to their aid decided it was time they learn an important lesson about drunk driving, so he had taken them to the precinct and made them watch a film they had already seen in school, Mechanized Death, then called their parents to pick them up.

  “You cannot afford to screw up,” his mother said. “Do you understand that? Those other boys have parents, fathers, who can get them out of trouble. They have money. All you have is a mother who works as the office manager for a pediatrician.”

  “Jeez, Mom, I didn’t even do anything.”

  “You drank beer! You got into a car with other boys who had been drinking beer. You could have been killed.”

  “Maybe if Alex drove a piece of shit car like this we would have been hurt. He has a Mercedes; you could T-bone that thing and walk away without a scratch. If the battery cable hadn’t popped, we wouldn’t have ended up at the police station.”

  His mother carefully checked her blind spots, pulled over to the shoulder, and slapped Gerry hard enough that he saw strange lights around his eyes. So that’s what was meant by seeing stars. They weren’t stars, not exactly, but—

  “Apply yourself and maybe one day you can buy yourself a Mercedes. If you care about such silly, empty things. But you’ll have to work, and work hard, for any money you get. That’s how life is going to be for you. It’s not fair and it’s not right. But it’s not fair to me, either, and you don’t hear me complaining.”

  Gerry started to cry.

  “I’ll be good, Mama, I promise I’ll be good. And I’ll buy you a Mercedes. I swear I will.”

  “Just be a good man, Gerry. That’s all I’m asking. Be a good man.”

  “I will. I will.”

  February 22

  IT TURNS OUT that “scrubbing” one’s penis from the Internet is a thing. Of course it is. There is an entire industry designed to help people manage how they appear in online searches. But trying to delete a mention of one’s penis from Twitter is something else entirely—and more complicated.

  “You’re not understanding me. I did not send anyone a ‘dick pic,’” Gerry tells Thiru. “I have never even taken a selfie, or allowed anyone to make a video, a sex tape, of me. I don’t know what this ‘woman’ is talking about. And let me remind you, no photograph has been posted. She’s just, um, claiming to know something about my personal anatomy.”

  He can’t believe he even has to say these words—dick pic, selfie, sex tape. To utter them is an affront to his dignity. He has been assiduous about not cluttering his mind, his work, his life with this silly digital world, and here it is, dragging him in, like some whirlpool or abyss. Then again, it wasn’t that long ago that a porn star told the world a sitting president has a penis shaped like a mushroom. The claim about Gerry is not only preposterous, it’s derivative.

  “But you are not, in fact, circumcised?”

  “Thiru.”

  “I’m sorry, it’s just that’s what she—”

  “If it is, in fact, a she. I have my doubts.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t think young women are that vulgar.” Gerry may have doubts about the gender, but he assumes everyone on Twitter is young.

  “Gerry, do you know any young women? Our firm signed a memoir by a twenty-seven-year-old the other day who could make Norman Mailer’s testicles retract in a casual conversation. You would not believe what these young women are willing to—”

  “Thiru, let’s not get sidetracked. What can be done about this?”

  “Not much. She didn’t violate the TOS.”

  “The what?”

  “Terms of service. She didn’t threaten you, she didn’t post a photo, she didn’t defame you. I mean, I don’t think it’s defamation to say that a man has an unattractive penis. Rude, subjective, but not defamatory.”

  Gerry wants to weep, literally. He has lived too long—and he’s only sixty-one! Did the world feel this way to his mother, his father, like some science fiction film in which everything jumps to warp speed? He had wondered, frequently, if the affair that led to his father’s second marriage was a reaction to the changing mores of the early 1960s, to the sense that the world was moving rapidly and Gerald Andersen Sr. had just missed the party.

  But that was part of his father’s myth-making, that he had met wife number two in an airport bar the week after Kennedy was shot, or maybe it was during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Something Kenn
edy-adjacent. Gerald Andersen Sr. wasn’t a run-of-the-mill horndog cheater, he was a man who believed himself on the brink of annihilation. They had been married by some local yokel justice of the peace who had asked for no proof of anything. And what proof would Gerald Senior have been forced to provide? As Gerry came to learn, to his great sorrow, proof is required if one remarries after a divorce. Much less paperwork is needed if one has not shed one’s current spouse. Of course, he married her a second time, once he was divorced from Gerry’s mother. He sent a postcard from their honeymoon.

  Auntie Mame had declared, Life is a banquet and most poor sons of bitches are starving to death. Gerald Andersen Sr. lived by a similar motto: Life is a buffet; take what you want, skip what you don’t, stick your head under the sneeze guard if necessary.

  But Gerry was skeptical from a very young age of what he called buffet culture, a problem that became more pronounced with each technical innovation. Watch what you want when you want to watch it! And music, don’t get him started on music. Like most men of his generation, he had a lovingly gathered collection of albums and he respected the fact that the album was a whole, not a series of singles; that the artist had dictated the order. The occasional duds on, say, Pete Townshend’s first solo album were part of the experience. The CD had seemed ominous enough, with its ability to skip songs. Then came shuffle and now people had their own “stations” on streaming services. Everyone’s so worried about political bubbles, but what about art bubbles? Was it only a matter of time before museums created virtual reality versions of themselves, in which visitors were allowed to curate—hideous word, but at least correct in this instance—the experience they desired? No, no Motherwell for me, show me only the Rothkos.

  Then they would come for the books, allowing readers to reorganize the chapters, the sentences. The crime novelist Elmore Leonard, whom Gerry respected about as much as he could respect any genre writer, had famously said to cut out the parts that readers skip. Gerry hated that glib aphorism. If anything, writers should be committed to putting in more passages that readers were likely to skip. More details about the whaling industry in Moby-Dick, please! In a world that was speeding up, novelists were obligated to make people slow down.