Dream Girl(13)

Decamped. That was a nice word for what his father had done.

Gerry did call his mother every Sunday night. After five P.M., at her insistence. “That’s when the rates go down,” she said, inured to this habit by his father’s days on the road, the collect calls coming from God knows where. Useless to try to explain to her that he could call on his cell for free.

“Mom—please eat.”

“It doesn’t taste right,” she said. “I think the shrimp is off.”

“We bought the shrimp salad today.” A treat. His mother would never buy Graul’s shrimp salad for herself. In fact, she wouldn’t shop at Graul’s at all, although it was literally walking distance from the house, could be seen from her front porch. She drove to the Giant on York Road and shopped with coupons. Graul’s was for emergencies and cakes.

“Nothing tastes right anymore. I told your father as much the other day, and he agreed.”

“Dad’s dead, Mom,” he said, not unkindly.

“Oh, I know we thought that. But can you believe it? He faked his death and skipped out on his second family.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Turns out he was in New York on Nine Eleven. Can you believe it? Or maybe he just said he was. Who would know, right? A colleague of his called his wife, said your father had an appointment at the brokerage there. The one named for a horse’s gate.”

This took a while to break down. Horse’s gate, horse’s gate—oh, horse’s gait. “Cantor Fitzgerald?”

“Yes.”

“I think that was a big hedge firm, Mom. Why would Dad have an appointment there?”

“Everybody needs office furniture,” she said placidly. “Besides, he wasn’t there. That’s the point. He saw an opportunity and he took it. He never loved her.”

“I’m not sure Dad ever loved anybody. That was his curse.”

“He loves me.”

The tense alarmed him. It was one thing to imagine his father alive, to entertain some cockamamie story about him faking his death (which, Gerry had to admit, would be absolutely in character). But for his mother to insist on his father’s love, something that Gerry was sure neither one of them ever really had—no, that was too much.

His first novel, Courting Disaster, had centered on their ill-fated romance, although his mother had died in that version, the victim of an illegal abortion. Why does Gerry Andersen’s art depend upon women’s death? was becoming a running theme in revisionist pieces on his work. But the novel had won a lucrative if unsung prize and it still sold robustly, so there.

“When did you see Dad?” he asked his mother.

“Oh, time is so vague to me. It was warm, but it might have been Indian summer, that spell of hot days we had in October? Yes, it was early October. We made love outside.”

“Mom!”

“It was dark,” she said. “And you know no one can see our backyard. All those trees. I felt as if I were fifteen again, Gerry.”

CNN had just called the election for Obama. Gerry remembered 2008, the one pure shining night of hope in his entire adult life as a voter. Schooled as he was in imagining the inner lives of others, he could not understand how people his age, people in his income bracket, people with his education, had considered the same thing a disaster. Could race alone explain these visceral reactions to Obama?

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.