Dream Girl(3)

He turns the key and pushes the button marked ph, although Gerry will never call his apartment a penthouse, never. “You can go straight to the apartment from the garage, of course,” he says. “If you have the key card.”

“Of course,” Thiru says.

Thiru’s bright eyes continue to appraise everything. It’s almost like being in the room for the unbearably long periods when Thiru has one of Gerry’s new manuscripts.

“Can you imagine what an apartment like this would cost in New York?” Gerry asks. Tacky to talk about money, but Thiru knows to the penny how much money Gerry has earned. He had to certify Gerry’s net worth when he bought the New York co-op in 2001.

“Yes,” Thiru says. “But—then it would be in New York, Gerry.”

“I’ll be back,” he says. “I need to stay here a year to two years so I don’t lose too much money when I resell. And then I’ll downsize, maybe try another neighborhood. I was getting tired of the Upper West Side anyway.”

“Is real estate appreciating here, then? I thought the city had been rather, um, challenged in recent years. There were those riots? And the murder rate is rather high? I feel as if I read a piece in the Times about it not that long ago.”

“Millennials are drawn to Baltimore,” Gerry says, parroting something he heard, although he can’t remember from whom. “It’s the most affordable city in the northeast right now. Real estate has been a little soft since, um, Freddie Gray.”

He does not add that it’s a fraught choice in Baltimore, whether to refer to the events of 2015 as the riots or the uprising. Gerry can’t bring himself to use either term.

“Hmmmm.” Thiru begins pacing the top floor, not bothering to ask if he can look around. He is a tiny man with an enormous head, only eight years older than Gerry. But the two men have been together for forty years, since Thiru read one of Gerry’s stories in the Georgia Review, and the age gap remains significant to Gerry. Thiru has longish hair that he wears in a brushed-back, leonine mane. The once blue-black hair is silvery now, the peak has receded, but there is still quite a bit of it, thick and shiny. His suits are bespoke. They probably have to be, given his height. He still terrifies Gerry on some level, although their relationship has outlasted seven wives (three for Gerry, four for Thiru).

“Are you working on something, Gerry?”

“You know I don’t talk about my work in progress.”

“Fiction.”

For a second, Gerry assumes this is an accusation, not a question, but that’s probably because it is a fiction that he is working. He hasn’t written for months. Reasonable, he thinks, under the circumstances, although he was able to write through every other difficult period of his life.

“Of course. What else? You know I have little patience for literary criticism right now. Most American writers bore me.”

“I thought with your mother gone, you might consider that memoir we talked about.”

“You talked about. The memoir is a debased form.”

“But it’s such a good story, the thing with your father.”

“No, Thiru. It’s sad and banal. And I used what interested me about the situation for my first novel. I have no desire to revisit the material.”

“It’s just that—your publisher would like you to sign a new contract, but they are entitled to know what you’re working on.”

“And when I have finished a new book—the new book—we shall. I don’t like advances, Thiru. That’s what undercut my second and third novels, that’s what made Dream Girl, and everything that followed, different. I won’t take money up front for an unwritten book. I can’t—”

He stops, fearful that he is about to say the thing he doesn’t want to say out loud: I can’t write anymore. It’s not true. It can’t be true. But given the circumstances of his mother’s death, how can he not worry about receiving a similar diagnosis one day? This thing runs in families.

“Well, the view is really something,” Thiru says, his admiration sincere. “In fact, I’m not sure I could work with such a panorama spread out before me. I like the fact that you can see the working part of the harbor, not just the fancy stuff.”

“This used to be a grain silo,” Gerry says. “The site of the building, I mean.”

“Good thing you’re not gluten intolerant.”

Ha ha, funny, Thiru. Gerry gives him 15 percent of a smile.

His agent peers down the staircase to the darker rooms below—Gerry’s office, Gerry’s study, Gerry’s bedroom. The intention was to make guests almost impossible, with the medium-size bedroom used as his office and the third, smallest one dedicated to the overflow of books that didn’t fit in the study or the upstairs shelves. If Margot should propose visiting—doubtful, someone like Margot would never be drawn to Baltimore—he will be able to tell her there is no proper spare bedroom, only the so-called study with its pullout sofa bed. He hopes it is understood that Margot is no longer welcome in his bed.

“That’s—interesting.”

“It’s called a floating staircase.”

“Oh, I’m familiar with the concept. But wouldn’t it make more sense in an open space, where it could be seen? Rather wasted here. It’s like staring down a mouth. A mouth with big gaps between the teeth.”