Dream Girl(30)

“Given that this is our first meeting, let’s start with an exercise—I want you to take the line, ‘He was vacuuming the rug when the phone rang’ and proceed from there.” They looked disappointed by the prosaic line, or maybe they just didn’t understand a world where phones sat on tables and rang. He would tell them when they were done that the line was Raymond Carver’s and Carver had written a short story once with nothing more than that opening line in mind. Not that Gerry was a big Carver fan, but it was a good exercise.

Or was it? When he asked who wanted to share their work, he was amazed at how their imaginations defaulted to mundane or hyperbolic. One girl had a SWAT team enter in the second paragraph. Another simply described vacuuming. The best were two of the three boys; they were clearly the most talented, and that was going to be tricky in this environment, but what can one do? Luckily, the third boy was a moron, so that balanced the scales a bit.

One of the gorgeous girls was also surprisingly good—there was real wit in what she wrote and her comments on others’ contributions were compassionate but incisive. When the class left at the end of the three hours, Gerry noticed the moron had his hand on the small of the gorgeous girl’s back, piloting her, the way some men do with women. It always made Gerry think of a wind-up toy with a key in its back. Well, this girl was quite a toy. Slinky, Asian— “Mr. Andersen?”

Another student had planted herself in front of him, blocking his view. A large girl with cat-eye glasses and blue hair.

“Yes?”

“I want to work on a novel.”

“As I said, we should talk about that during office hours.”

“Which are—?”

“It’s on the syllabus.” “See you then.”

God help him, it was the girl with the SWAT team.





March 6




“THERE’S NOBODY HERE,” Aileen says.

“Are you sure?”

“Where would she be?” With a sweep of a thick arm, she indicates the lack of hiding spaces on Gerry’s top floor. Really, the only place for an adult human to hide would be under his bed, and isn’t that something to contemplate.

“I saw it—her—go into the kitchen.”

“I opened every cupboard, every door.”

“There’s a back door, to the stairwell. I heard it close, I think. And you don’t need a key to go down, only up.”

She shrugs. “So there you have it.”

Have what?

“But there should be video, right? There are cameras in the service corridor, on the elevators.” There is no camera in the communal hallway he shares with the sheikh and the swimmer, but there are cameras in the elevators. He thinks. And both elevators require a key to reach the twenty-fifth floor. Phylloh, at the main desk, has to insert it for guests.

“It was probably a bad dream. Look, Mr. Andersen, I know you don’t like the sleeping medication, but tonight I think it might help.”

“That stuff is addictive—have you followed the news about the Sackler family?”

“Are they the meth heads who burned down that house over on Towson Street? Look, this is Ambien. It’s not a big deal.”

“I’ve heard people do strange things while using Ambien. Sleepwalk, drive—”

“Well, you’re not getting far, are you?”

A stray memory, a mordant cartoon from the funny papers. He won’t get far on foot. Gerry’s mind feels like a kaleidoscope, endlessly rearranging bright bits of glass into patterns that dissolve with the next shake of his head.

“It was so real,” he says. “It was real.”

“Nightmares can feel that way. Dreams, too. Dreams can be awfully real.”

“What were your dreams, Aileen?” Gerry is that desperate. He doesn’t want her to leave him. He doesn’t want to take the pill, surrender to sleep, a world in which he’s even less sure of what’s true.

“What, you don’t think I’m living them?”

He snorts, impressed by the fact that literal, humorless Aileen has made a joke. Only—she hasn’t, apparently, and she is angered by his reaction.

“It’s funny to you, that I think I’m happy? A life like mine, it can’t be someone’s dream? I’m not saying it’s my first dream. I mean, when you’re a kid, everybody wants to be something they’re never going to be, right? A ballet dancer, a fireman?”

Gerry nods, although he doesn’t remember a time when he didn’t want to be a writer. That was his first vocational dream, and his last. Before that, all he wanted was to be courageous.

“But the second dream, the one you pick when you grow up—that’s all about comfort. Warmth. Enough food in your belly, not worrying about your car throwing a rod or how to pay your bills or whether you can afford to buy something better than the generic box of macaroni and cheese.”

Her words were bizarrely familiar, but maybe it was just that they were so very bland. Although “throw a rod” had a nice specificity—oh lord, he was workshopping his night nurse’s sentences. Talk about the generic box of macaroni and cheese. His thoughts go back to the woman at the window, swathed, her face averted—that, too, is familiar.

“She spoke to me—it reminded me of a movie. A terrible movie based on a very good book. Ghost Story!” He trumpets the book ’s name so loudly that Aileen winces. But being able to come up with that title makes him all the more sure that it wasn’t a dream, that his mental faculties are fine. “Did you ever read it, by chance?”