Dream Girl(40)

“The drive alone—”

“I know. It is a lot. You could take the train, but it wouldn’t save much time in the end. And it will be a long day no matter how efficient you are. Why don’t you stay in a hotel—I can recommend a nice inn, near campus—and spend the night, break the work up over two days and then take Friday off to make up for all the extra hours.”

Aileen, who is scrubbing the floor, gives him a rubber-gloved thumbs-up.

Aileen’s efficiency today surprises him. Aileen, so slow and dull when going about her normal job of caring for him, has rallied admirably in the matter of removing a corpse and cleaning up after it. It’s like a reality television show in his own living room. He had watched from his bed as she wrapped Margot’s body in a fitted white sheet, presumably one of the ones he keeps for the never-used sofa bed in his study, then dragged it down the stairs like a toboggan.

“Good thing you like the skinny ones,” Aileen had said, huffing and puffing.

“Where will you—”

“The fewer questions you ask,” she told him, “the better. Not knowing anything, not remembering anything—that’s an asset.”

So the body has been removed, the floor is scrubbed. She has washed the letter opener, a cheerful Lady Macbeth, humming as she works, and placed it back on the end table he uses as a nightstand. Gerry asks the Google app on his phone a question: “How do police find blood evidence on objects?” This takes him down a rabbit hole of luminol stories. The letter opener is far from their only problem. Maybe they should just get rid of it? But they can’t get rid of the poured concrete floor, which potentially could hold on to its trace memories of Margot’s death forever.

“Aileen, do you think that—?”

“You have to let me do the thinking.”

Terrifying, but he accedes.

She asks for his credit card and makes a series of mysterious phone calls. He catches references to cubic feet and expedited delivery. Aileen gets testy at one point. “Tomorrow is not expedited,” she says. “Today is expedited. Don’t you know what words mean?” She hangs up on that person, dials another number. This conversation is odder still. “Yes, I am aware that deer season is over, but I hit one with my car.”

And, more often than usual, given that she is not normally here during the day, she appears by his bedside with pills. He wants to protest, but he is so grateful for the sleep, which provides the hope that this is a nightmare from which he will wake.

He picks up the letter opener, presses it to his own face, just below the eye. Skin and bone would be no match for it.





2016




“YOU MUST HAVE THE UNI.”

Gerry looked up, skeptical. Already grumpy at being tricked into going to a fancy restaurant—he had thought he was meeting Thiru for soup dumplings, having no idea where Extra Place was, beyond being on the Lower East Side—he was in no mood to be told what he must eat, or drink. He wanted to get out of the restaurant as fast as possible.

But this Momofuku Ko was not designed for speedy dining, much to Gerry’s dismay. The only option available was a “tasting menu,” dreaded words to Gerry’s ears. Probably Thiru’s reason for choosing it. He had an agenda, one that would take time to lay out. And the service was oversolicitous, which Gerry hated. He preferred the gruff indifference of the city’s diners, places that were disappearing one by one. Where was the New York of the late 1980s, or even the one at the beginning of the twenty-first century? After the second or third course, he stopped the pretense of eating, regarding his food with arms folded, like a grumpy child.

But the woman who was insisting that he must try the uni was another patron. Tall, thin, stylish. Sexy, frankly. She didn’t linger or try to introduce herself, simply returned to her table, where she was dining with what Gerry assumed was a finance type, based on the pinstripes and the pocket square.

He didn’t realize he was still looking at her until Thiru snapped his fingers to get his attention. “Gerry.”

“What?”

“I was saying Rudin gets things made.” Thiru began ticking off the names of various film and television projects, most of which meant nothing to Gerry.

“He didn’t get The Corrections made,” he said. Although Gerry disdained most gossip, even literary gossip, there were certain writers whose careers he tracked. He didn’t consider Franzen the gold standard of his generation, but others did, so he kept tabs. And he was sincerely disappointed when the Corrections adaptation fell through. He had hoped the television series would highlight what Gerry considered the novel’s myriad flaws.

“No one bats a thousand,” Thiru said.

“Look, it’s not even a good option. It’s insultingly low.”

Dream Girl had been optioned three times so far. The book was like a trick wallet, tied to a string. Gerry and Thiru put it on the sidewalk and people kept chasing it. But he couldn’t tell Thiru that he would prefer just optioning it over and over. The film production of his first novel had been disappointing, in large part because no one seemed to care that much. Gerry had hoped for either an outstanding adaptation or a total botch that would lead to impassioned tributes to the source material. No one had anything to say about the movie, good or bad. They took his firstborn, in many ways his sweetest and most pliable child, and rendered it dull. Boring, polite, bloodless, with nothing really there in the end. So, no, he didn’t want to see Dream Girl produced. He wanted people to pay him for it over and over again.