Dream Girl(14)

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.