Dream Girl(23)

“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 Kennedy-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.

But the only thing people today want to slow down for is food. Artisanal this and artisanal that. It’s fuel. Who cares where your potato came from?

“Gerry, the woman has fourteen followers,” Thiru said. “Ignore her for now.”

“She’s using an image from the cover of my book as her avatar. Isn’t that an infringement of the artist’s copyright?”

“Possibly. But attention to a troll is like, like—well, it’s what they want. They blossom, they get bigger with attention. Your account is verified. When fake Gerald Andersens sprout, we do go after them, sometimes. But usually the best course of action is to ignore. This is an unknown person pretending to be a fictional person.”

A fictional person who has been writing me and calling me, claiming to be a real person who inspired the fictional person when no such person exists. A person who says I have an unsightly penis. It is not an unsightly penis. It is simply uncircumcised, something that would be known by almost forty women.

Who is Gerry kidding? He knows the exact number, which is thirty-seven. He was a late bloomer, a truly late bloomer, in part because of his early marriage. He had more partners in his forties than he did in his twenties and thirties combined. But not a single woman—not a wife, not a girlfriend, not even Margot—had ever commented unfavorably on his penis, even in passing, even if it was their first of that variety. Circumcision was a false aesthetic, like fake breasts, that had somehow become the norm. He gave his parents credit for very few things, but Gerry was proud of them for resisting circumcision at a time when almost all U.S. boys went through the procedure. That said, he never doubted it was his father’s usual narcissism at work: My son has to look like me.