Dream Girl(46)

“She’s a liar, Harry. I made a horrible mistake. But this is outright slander. And you know what? I won’t have it. I will not stand for these false accusations. How can I continue to work alongside such a woman? I recognize that this situation is my fault and therefore my responsibility. I will look at other programs—I know people at Columbia, Stanford—”

Coleman was rattled now. “Gerry, please don’t overreact. We’ll work something out. You can see why I had to have this discussion. I have no reason to doubt your version of things—it’s not as if you denied everything. It’s not as if there’s anything wrong with two colleagues having sex. Please don’t do anything rash.”

“I won’t.”

Was it rash to go home that very night and tell Lucy that he was going to leave the Writing Sems and use the Hartwell Prize to allow himself the gift of being a full-time writer, for at least a year or two?

Was it cruel to say that he wanted this adventure alone, that he no longer wished to be married to her? He had broken her only rule, a generous rule, a rule that most men would kill for in a marriage. If he told her the truth, she would kick him out anyway. So why not just go, without hurting her feelings? Wasn’t that the kindest thing to do? Make the break in a way that would hurt her the least—and deprive Shannon Little of whatever power she thought she had over him. By leaving now, he was offering everyone a clean slate.

He was so tired of women thinking they could control him. Be regular and orderly in your life, so you can be violent and original in your work, Flaubert had recommended.

Fuck Flaubert. There was no reason Gerry couldn’t do both.





March 21




MARGOT WAS DEAD, to begin with.

That riff on A Christmas Carol’s opening line plays in Gerry’s head. He keeps expecting Margot to haunt him, although in Chanel instead of chains. He waits for all his ghosts—past, present, future.

Yet since Margot’s death—since the accident—everything has stopped. No more phone calls, no more “visits.” The obvious answer is the obvious answer. Margot had been taunting him, Margot thought she had something on him. But what?

Life goes on. For everyone but Margot. Aileen no longer arrives with her insulated sack; the freezer has been donated to a local homeless shelter, along with a side of beef from New Windsor, Maryland. Clever Aileen—the shipping address was for the shelter, not her home. It’s a fine little story, as clever and compact as the ones he used to read in those Alfred Hitchcock Presents anthologies. Kill your husband with a leg of lamb, serve the leg of lamb to the detectives. And maybe this is a dream from which he will finally wake.

As if on cue, the phone rings, the short staccato tone signaling a call from the front desk. So, no, he’s awake.

“Mr. Andersen?” Phylloh from downstairs, still phrosty. Were you Margot’s collaborator? He knows that someone had to be helping Margot. Why not Phylloh? It would explain how Margot got back into the apartment that night.

“Yes?”

“There is a man here to see you.”

“A gentleman?”

“A police officer.”

The first o is long, the tone skeptical. Phylloh probably has many reasons, life experiences, not to think that Officer Friendly is friendly, whereas Gerry is a white man who has spent six decades driving, walking, running, existing without fear of police officers. Oh, sure, he has known the frisson of nervousness when glimpsing a patrol car in his rearview mirror, but the fear is of a ticket, not death.

Now his heart feels as if it’s throwing itself against his rib cage, a bird stuck in a soffit, trying to escape. (This happened in his mother’s house when he was away at college. She listened for days to the terrible scratching and did nothing until Gerry came home from Princeton and found an infestation of flies in the linen closet, as the bird had finally starved to death.)

Terror has feathers, too, Emily Dickinson. A woman has died in his apartment. He may be responsible. (He is definitely responsible.) The body is gone. Another person has made that possible, which gives that person significant power over him. Gerry is in bed, taking far more Ambien than he should. He could use his condition, his pain, his fog, to send the officer away.

Yet when an inspector calls, the suspects always open the door to him. The only way the guilty can pretend to innocence is by acting as if they have nothing to hide.

“Send him up, by all means.”

The detective who arrives a few minutes later, admitted by a clearly curious Victoria, does not fit any archetype that Gerry knows, but then every detective archetype Gerry knows is from television or literature. He is not a slow-talking good ol’ boy with a shrewd intelligence under his coarse, buffoonish manners. He is not a Black Dapper Dan with an ornate vocabulary. He does not wear a rumpled raincoat. He is a man of indeterminate race named John Jones, who looks as if he were made in a factory. His one distinctive feature is his glacial blue eyes, but those only make him seem more android-like.

“I’m with the NYPD. A woman—Margot Chasseur—has gone missing. We believe you may be one of the last people to see her.”

Dates are fuzzy for Gerry, but that’s to his advantage. There was nothing momentous about his final meeting with Margot. Okay, his penultimate meeting, and she attacked him, forcing him to push her hard enough that it might have left bruises, not that there’s any skin left to inspect. Still, he honestly can’t remember the date.