Dream Girl(36)

Was Luke happy? He could not ask the question without immediately jumping to the Auden line: The question was absurd. Of course Luke wasn’t happy. The things he had done in Atlantic City—that was not what a happy person did. That kind of compulsive behavior was the opposite of happy.

“I don’t know, Gerry,” Luke said, his eyes still closed. “Are you happy? Is anyone happy?”

Gerry had not spoken aloud. He was pretty sure he had not spoken aloud. Was Luke sitting there wondering at Gerry’s behavior, judging his choices?

“I certainly think happiness is possible,” he said.

“Even for people like us? I don’t know. If we were happy, we wouldn’t want to be writers, right?”

“There have been happy writers. Good ones. It’s possible. I have to believe it’s possible.”

“Which is it, Gerry? Is it possible or do you have to believe it’s possible?”

When Gerry failed to answer, Luke sighed and rolled to his side. “I can remove the cause,” he said, “but not the symptoms.”

It took Gerry a beat to realize that Luke was simply finishing the Rocky Horror song “Sweet Transvestite.”





March 12




“WHAT DID YOU DO TO PHYLLOH?” Victoria asks him.

“Nothing!” Gerry says, offended by the very suggestion that he’s in the position to do anything to anyone.

“She’s gotten terribly frosty.”

Phylloh is phrosty, he thinks. Then he remembers. He had called Phylloh’s supervisor, to make sure she wasn’t lying to him about the tapes. He had decided the girl meant no overt harm, but it had occurred to him that maybe she’d simply fibbed about watching the security tapes from the elevator. Phylloh had always struck him as a little lazy. He had forgotten that she’d told him she wasn’t supposed to review the tapes for residents under any circumstances.

“Maybe it’s a general mood? Or she has a specific grievance with you?” Phylloh should be happy she wasn’t phired, Gerry thinks.

He is trying to work the New York Times crossword puzzle with his astronaut pen, which turns out not to be an invention of Seinfeld but a real thing, an essential tool given how often Gerry is flat on his back. He has splurged on three, at a cost of $150 total, and he is careful to keep them in the drawer of the table next to his bed, along with his usual cache of Moleskine notebooks. He is horrified that he is having trouble finishing the Monday puzzle. During the months of caring for his mother, he had lost the habit of completing the puzzle daily, but he has been working it again since his accident and this is troubling. He sometimes used to stall on Saturday, the hardest day, but never Monday! Mondays were for morons.

Victoria says: “I can’t imagine anything I’ve done, but I don’t care if she doesn’t want to talk to me. She’s so chatty and it’s all so banal. I just want to pick up the packages and move on. If I didn’t have to check for packages, I would take the elevator from the garage straight to the apartment, bypass the front desk entirely.”

Sometimes he feels as if Victoria is trying on his personality, his attitudes. They do not suit her. In this world where people are quick to speak of entitlement and privilege, some nuances have been lost, it seems to Gerry. Yes, there are privileges in being white, male, and moneyed, and he supposes one should be alert to those birthright perks. He certainly tries to be. But there are privileges that one earns through accomplishment and sheer longevity. Victoria has no right to be haughty about another person being “chatty” and “banal.” Has she ever listened to herself? Besides, Gerry’s six decades of life trump Victoria’s two and change.

But if he said those exact words out loud, she would take great offense. She might even complain that the use of the forty-fifth president’s name as a verb triggered her. Triggered. A sloppy term, to Gerry’s way of thinking. A trigger is something someone deliberately pulls and it leads to a very specific sequence of events. If one is triggered, then one is the weapon or the snare, no? The recurrence of painful memories is simply day-to-day life. It’s nothing at all like firing a gun.

He does his upper-body exercises. At least his body seems to respond to stimulation, even if his mind does not. He is getting stronger above the waist, but sitting is still terribly painful and there is nothing to be done for that. Maybe he should cut back on his medication, although Aileen is phlegmatically determined that he take the full dosage.

The phone rings with the staccato double-buzz that indicates the front desk is calling. He’s so bored he picks it up.

“She’s back,” says Phylloh. She is frosty.

“Who?”

“Your wife.”

“Wife?” Lucy? Gretchen? Sarah? He’s so desperate for stimulation he’d be happy to see any of them. Even Gretchen.

“The one who was here in February.”

Keeping careful track of my visitors, are you, Phylloh?

“Oh. She was never my wife.”

“Well, she’s here.”

“I guess you can send her up.”

“I already did. She said you were expecting her.”

He isn’t. Then again, Margot’s talent is for the unexpected. Exciting in the early, heady days of dating, especially when applied to sex. Extremely tedious as life goes on.