Dream Girl(49)

The detective listens politely, but he is clearly bored. Good, that’s what Gerry intends. He plays the part of the garrulous old man shut-in, rambling and desperate for company. It is discomfiting how easily this persona comes to him, how readily this younger man accepts this version of him. He is sixty-one, not eighty-one! Two months ago he was in vigorous health, a person who required no medications beyond a daily vitamin.

He wonders if the detective is indulging Gerry’s wandering narrative, in part, because he hopes Gerry is going to offer up some inconsistency on which he can pounce. But one of Gerry’s great strengths as a writer is POV. The man in his bed is not him. The man in his bed is “Gerry Andersen,” an injured writer who has no idea what has happened to his former lover, Margot. Where did Margot go, he wonders. How did Aileen dispose of her?

He thinks about the incinerator where he and his mother used to drive their crab feast refuse. She was particular about this; they must never allow the shells and cartilage to stay on their property overnight. She believed they would lead to terrible odors that could never be eradicated if left inside the house. But in a trash can outside, they would attract raccoons, who would scatter them across the backyard. So they would wrap up the newspapers littered with crab carcasses and put them inside garbage bags and drive them all the way into town, to that terrible hulking furnace.

It was one of the favorite moments of his youth. His father had done this task before he disappeared, but always with reluctance and complaint, and refusing to let Gerry accompany him. Once he was gone, Gerry joined his mother in the front seat—remember when kids could ride in the front seat?—and he had felt powerful, grown-up. There was a sense of mission about the journey.

If it wasn’t too late, they stopped at Windy Valley for soft-serve and he patted the ponies that were penned there.

He is aware of his brain working on all these levels—Gerry the writer, telling the story that will bore/beguile the detective; Gerry the twelve-year-old riding in that old Ford station wagon with his mother. He sees himself as Duncan in The World According to Garp, reaching for his brother’s hand as they descend into the hellmouth of their driveway, toward the literal and figurative collision of their parents’ failings, failings that will take one child’s eye and another child’s life.

“Well,” the detective says as Gerry finally winds down, “you’ve given me a lot to think about.”

Of course, no one says that unless they mean the opposite, so Gerry is pleased. He has bored the detective into submission.

“Happy to help.”

“Okay if I talk to your assistant?”

“Sure. She’s downstairs.”

The detective gone, Gerry pulls his smartphone out from under his blanket. He turned on the audio recorder when Victoria opened the door to the detective. He has fallen in love with his phone, for its capabilities and potential. It is a smart phone. It is smarter than anyone who works for him, that’s for sure. And generally silent, bless its heart. He will listen to the recording later, commit his own words to memory.





2012




“SO I WON’T be able to speak in class tomorrow, but I don’t think that should affect my grade.”

Without his class roster in front of him, Gerry could never remember this student’s name, only that she kept reminding him that it rhymed with the name of a character in a Judy Blume book, as if that would be helpful to him. He thought of her as Wizard Girl because she submitted fantasy stories about wizards and warlocks and vampires. Never had fantasy been less fantastic.

“Just so I understand, tomorrow is a day of solidarity for gay people—”

“LGBT.”

“And by not speaking, you are somehow helping them. As an ally.” That had been her word, ally, and she had seemed keen for Gerry to know she was not, in fact, described by one of the letters for which she was willing to be silent.

“It’s a symbolic gesture, but it’s my right to participate.”

Gerry wondered from where, exactly, such a “right” would be derived. He supposed the freedom of expression had a corollary, the freedom not to express oneself. He loathed this idea on principle, saw it as a cheap way to slack on the participation requirement, but why argue? Nothing could affect Wizard Girl’s grade. She was a B-minus student at best. Bad as she was at writing, she was even worse at workshopping her classmates’ stories, overly prescriptive. It would be a relief to be spared Wizard Girl’s “ideas.”

“It’s fine,” he said. “As long as you bring your copies of the other students’ manuscripts, marked up and annotated. In fact, maybe put a little more work into your written comments, which will make up for your decision not to participate. But, please, don’t tell the other students what to do, only what you think.”

She glowered, then nodded. Having won what she came for, she made no move to gather her books and the enormous fountain drink she was never without, which was now sweating all over Gerry’s desk.

“Professor Andersen—”

“I’m not a professor, merely a writer. MFA, no Ph.D.” In his heart, he secretly believed novelists superior to professors.

“Do I have potential?”

“Everyone has potential. By definition. It would be rare to be without potential.”

“But do you think I could be a novelist?”