Dream Girl(20)

“Leave how?” It would require a gurney to get him out of the apartment, a sobering thought. What would happen to him if there were a fire or some other catastrophic event? “Go where?”

“A hotel?” She sounds almost hopeful, as if a hotel is something she would like to experience. Must Gerry end up caring for all the women in his life, even the ones paid to care for him?

“Do the elevators work? It’s hard to imagine me walking down twenty-four flights of stairs.”

“I think the big things in the building are on some kind of backup system,” she says.

But what if they’re not? What if he is stuck here and something happens? What then?

The phone rings, but only the Swedish one by his bed. Unlike the fancy extensions in the kitchen and his office and his bedroom proper, this one can still operate without electricity.

“Would you get that?” he says to Aileen.

“You can reach it.”

“It’s not a question of reach. I want you to hear—I want to know—just answer it.”

Watching Aileen get out of the chair is almost like watching a Buster Keaton film, except it’s anything but silent. The comedy of her movements is accompanied by a startling symphony of grunts, groans, coughs. The phone continues to peal. It must be on the ninth or tenth ring when she finally picks it up.

“’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.