Dream Girl(15)

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 to 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.