Dream Girl(25)

Technically, W YPR is part of Johns Hopkins, or used to be. There was definitely some sort of affiliation. Gerry thinks of the moment that Dream Girl came to him, the young woman who—

But he had not written about that young woman, he did not know that young woman, and he had never told the story to anyone.

Or had he? Had he told someone and forgotten? Was tonight’s conversation even real?





2015




“OUR NEXT QUESTION is from Gretchen in Baltimore,” the interviewer said.

But my Gretchen is in New York, Gerry thought, then laughed at his own solipsism. The world was full of Gretchens. And this voice—a young, lilting voice—was nothing like his second wife’s, not even when she was in her twenties.

“I know you’ve always been obscure about the actual inspiration for Dream Girl—” the caller began.

“Not obscure,” Gerry said. “I just don’t think it’s important. The book was a feat of imagination. The book and the character. The story. I made it all up. That’s what novelists do and I felt that concept had become lost in a world where people spoke of ‘creative nonfiction.’ I had no patience with these reported stories, all these writers bragging about their copious research. Per Eudora Welty, I wanted to show that a quiet life can be a daring life—”

“Yes, yes, because all serious daring starts from within.” There was a familiarity in the way the woman finished his sentence, a good-natured impatience, as if she were a former student. Or a former wife. “The thing is, the Aubrey sections, when we see her view of things—they are outstandingly nuanced. In your other novels, you’ve never managed to write a female character as credibly as you did with Aubrey.”

“I have to take exception to that.” He tried to say this with good humor and thought he pulled it off.

“Of course you do.” The caller laughed. It was a warm laugh, seemingly without malice. “But I have to ask—did you actually have a collaborator on the novel? Did a woman write or extensively revise the Aubrey sections?”

This was a new one. “That’s a new one,” Gerry said dryly. “All these years, no one’s ever thought to question whether I had a secret collaborator.”

“Or maybe there was something you read, a student paper, when you were teaching—”

“Dream Girl came out in 2001. I taught at Goucher in 2012.”

“And at Hopkins in the 1980s and 1990s, no?”

“Believe me, I did not—” He stopped himself from saying, I did not have a student whose work was worth stealing. “I’m sorry, these are inflammatory charges.”

He looked to the host for help, but she seemed to be enjoying the discussion. Served him right for being gracious, doing this nonsyndicated radio show because it was easy to stop in Baltimore after last night’s event for PEN America down in DC.

“But even you would have to concede that Aubrey is an outlier in your work? You had never before written a female character as complex as she is, nor did you do it again. Although you did kill her. Even Aubrey had to die. It’s reminiscent of the Mary Gordon essay, ‘Good Boys and Dead Girls’ in which she posits—”

“I am familiar with the essay, which applies that critique to Faulkner, Dreiser, and Updike,” he said. “I understand your point. But just because you say something doesn’t make it true.”

“Which part isn’t true? The part about Aubrey being your best female character or my speculation about how that came to be?”

“I reject your thesis, which means that your speculation is specious to me.”

The host interrupted. “I’m afraid we’re out of time. Our guest today was Gerry Andersen, a prizewinning novelist and a Baltimore native. His latest novel, Isolation, is now out in paperback.”

Gerry left the radio station. It was less than ten blocks to the train station and he decided to walk, despite the typical April weather—blustery, cutting back and forth between clouds and brilliant blue skies, a very Jekyll-and-Hyde day. He could not quiet his thoughts. The woman knew him, he was sure of it, but it was not Gretchen, not his Gretchen, with whom he had not spoken for years. She had sounded so pleasant, yet the conversation had felt aggressively nasty. It was true, when Dream Girl was published, there had been a lot of praise lavished on Gerry for his depiction of Aubrey, for giving a voice and an inner life to what the novel’s main character, Daniel, saw merely as an object of his desire. Daniel’s inability to see Aubrey as a person was the tragedy of the novel. Somewhere, in the notebook he had kept while working on Dream Girl, Gerry had jotted in the margin: “The Sterile Cuckoo, but good.”

As he walked to the train station, he thought about his youthful discovery of John Nichols, a writer he now disdained. Thesis and antithesis, leading to synthesis. Was that not the path of a creative life? Embrace, reject, combine the two, move on. Was that not the path of his life? He was fifty-seven years old, thrice married, thrice divorced. But—but!—he was admired, an acknowledged leader in his field, and quite wealthy to boot. And the work (his true drug, his true obsession) was getting better, despite what anyone thought.

Baltimore’s Penn Station seemed absurdly small to him now, but pretty in a way that New York ’s Penn Station could never be. He sat on one of the wooden benches that lined the high-ceilinged space, waiting for his train to be called. He was rising to his feet to go down to the track when his phone rang. A Baltimore area code. Had he left something at the radio station?