Dream Girl(53)

He didn’t care. He was flattered. He was going to go home and ask Sarah for a divorce. Tell Sarah they were getting divorced. Life was too short and he had too many opportunities, still. It was time to enjoy himself. On with the dance, let joy be unconfined. All his life, he had tried so hard to be good, and where had it gotten him?





March 25




GERRY’S PHYSICAL CONDITION is improving, day by day, and he couldn’t feel worse. The longer, prettier days mock him through his huge windows, cheery postcards from a world he cannot imagine himself ever visiting again. He longs for a particular scent in Baltimore’s early-spring air, but he can’t smell it up here on the twenty-fifth floor. Sometimes he feels as if he can’t smell anything at all.

But then there are the days when he thinks he can detect the fragrance of “real life” coming off Victoria and Claude—although not Aileen, never Aileen, Aileen smells like Lysol and iron ore. He wants to smell fresh-cut grass, sun, mulch. Then he remembers that is a detail in a short story he loved as a boy, about the people who live in a department store, pretending to be mannequins by day, coming to life when the store is closed. A writer, a poet, goes to live in the store, thinking it his singular brainstorm. He is delighted to find an entire colony of dropouts like himself. But the girl he loves is in love with the night watchman because he smells of the outside world. The story had been in one of those Alfred Hitchcock or Rod Serling collections that Gerry gobbled up as a child, collections that often had quite good stories. He had been astonished to realize in college that he had read a chapter from Waugh’s A Handful of Dust in its original incarnation as a short story, “The Man Who Liked Dickens.”

Waugh. Do people still read Waugh? Does Waugh matter? Do any writers matter anymore? Wah! There’s Shakespeare, of course. No one argues against Shakespeare. They will, one day, Gerry thinks. Some information will come to light, they’ll decide his wife wrote the plays or that he yearned to be a woman and cross-dressed in his spare time. Do people still speak of cross-dressing? He knows not to say tranny anymore and is proud of himself for that knowledge, but he’s a little confused about the difference between gender and sex.

The bottom line is that Gerry is terrified of full recovery, because then what happens? As long as he stays in this bed, it seems possible to ignore the terrible thing that occurred in this room. Once he is himself again, won’t he have to plumb his memory, determine his responsibility, and finally choose to act? Once he can stand on his own two feet, he will really have to stand on his own two feet.

Victoria comes in. Even if he can’t actually smell the world on her, he can see it in the way her wardrobe is changing. For much of the winter, she wore a huge, fluffy yellow coat over black leggings so she resembled a tiny Big Bird. Today she is in a jaunty plaid trench coat. She just misses being his type, he thinks. His old type, the kind of woman he liked in his twenties, a Lucy. Margot, Sarah before her, even Gretchen—those had been attempts to change his type. He should have stayed true to himself. As Shakespeare would have said.

“Good morning, Vic—”

“Did you give Aileen a parking place?” She is working hard to control her emotions, whatever they are. Her cheeks are flushed, her voice trembles.

“I have arranged for her to park in the building,” he says. “She was feeling vulnerable, walking here after sunset.”

He wonders at his immediate impulse to fudge the information—arranged for her to park in the building. As if the plan is temporary—it is, he won’t need Aileen forever—as if it’s an act of kindness, no more. Gerry has always thought of himself as an essentially honest person, and not simply out of virtue. He lies for a living, he doesn’t want to do it for free. Besides, it’s wearying to lie, a waste of time and energy to track one’s mistruths. Being honest is expedient and efficient.

Yet soft, tactical lies, so-called white lies—is it okay to call them white or is that now racist?—are the social WD-40 of day-to-day life, greasing all the tiny connections, keeping things frictionless. It’s his money. Victoria has no right to inquire how he spends it. Victoria is on a need-to-know basis, whether she knows it or not. How did she even hear about Aileen’s parking place? The two women never cross paths, as Aileen pointed out.

Phylloh, he thinks. Phylloh is stirring the pot.

“I’m the one who comes and goes, running your errands during the day,” Victoria says. “If anyone gets a parking space, it should be me.”

“I hadn’t thought about it that way,” Gerry says. “But given that your schedules don’t overlap, why can’t you share it?”

She opens her mouth, as if to object to this reasonable offer, then closes it, nods stiffly. She’s gotten what she wants, yet she’s still unhappy. Gerry has spent a lifetime trying to please women like this, women who cannot allow themselves to let go of their grudges and principles.

“Anyway, remember that registered letter they tried to deliver to your mother’s house? The one I had you sign for? It was a wrangle, but the post office finally agreed to let me take it, after I showed them your mother’s death certificate, then explained why you couldn’t come in person. It took three trips.”

Victoria offers him a legal-size envelope. It’s certified, not registered. Not an important distinction, but one that irks Gerry. An assistant should be detail-oriented. He extracts what appears to be a will, accompanied by a note from a lawyer.