Dream Girl(59)

Leenie and Tory. Aileen and Victoria.

What is happening? Why are two of his former students downstairs in his apartment, arguing? How did one of them become his night nurse? Why had Victoria not reminded him that she was in his class when she applied to be his assistant? I was there at the same time, but I majored in biology.

WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING?

He must be dreaming or hallucinating. He will start cutting back on the Ambien, the oxycodone. He will, he will.

“I’m going to tell him.”

The voices stop. There is the thud of something falling, then a sound unlike anything Gerry has ever heard, as if a wild animal is rampaging. He would not want to see what’s making that sound.

Footsteps on the stair, heavy and slow; has to be Aileen. Leenie. Huffing, puffing, carrying something cumbersome in her hand. It’s the Hartwell, his first prize, a marble book on a brass base, his name and the year, 1986, inscribed on the book. The prize has sat on his desk in various cities for almost thirty-five years now, a testament to young promise fulfilled. Gerry has won other prizes since then, but none has carried the literal and figurative weight of the Hartwell.

There is something clinging to it, something dark, liquid, viscous, with pale flecks. He doesn’t want to think about what’s clinging to the statuette. Gerry glances at the clock. It’s eleven thirty P.M., thirty minutes left of April Fool’s Day. If this were a terrible practical joke, he wouldn’t mind.

“I’m going to have to get another freezer,” Aileen says. She puts the prize on his bedside table, goes to the kitchen, returns with a glass of water and his medication, including the calcium pill, which he usually doesn’t take two nights in a row.

He takes them. Who cares if he never wakes up?





1986




“THIS IS SO CIVILIZED,” Lucy whispered to Gerry. “None of that short-list savagery, no putting people through the suspense of it all for everyone else’s amusement. Just a dinner, a presentation, and ‘remarks.’ I love this.”

Gerry loved it, too, although he was trying to pretend he didn’t. He had entertained, for a brief moment, not showing up for the dinner. Thiru had been furious with him. “You are not going to be that kind of writer,” he said. “I’m not asking you to be Truman fucking Capote, running around with society types and appearing on The Tonight Show. But when someone gives you a prize, you are going to show up and you are going to be properly grateful. Jesus Christ, it’s eighty thousand dollars—that could be a year off from teaching. Go someplace like Mexico or Costa Rica and it could be two years. You don’t have to kiss anyone’s ass, but you will attend, and you will be properly grateful.”

He was properly grateful. He had even splurged on a proper tuxedo. In the fitting room at Hamburger’s, as the tailor measured his inseam, he had been surprised, then terrified and, finally, elated, at a fleeting thought: I will wear this tuxedo many times. I will win other awards. I will be given prestigious honors. This is only my first book.

But, much as he would like to go away and do nothing but write, Lucy couldn’t leave her teaching gig and there was no way she would let him take even a brief writing sabbatical. Lucy had no intention of allowing Gerry out of her sight for so much as an evening, which was why she was here. She had made that very clear when he reported Thiru’s comments to her—how he must attend the dinner, even though it was in Mobile, Alabama, a wretchedly difficult place to fly, and a not-inexpensive one.

“You mean, we’ll go,” Lucy had said.

“I only meant to spare you a night of tedium.”

“Sure.”

And here she was, her arm linked through his, eye-fucking every woman who spoke to him. Lucy, who had never expressed the least bit of professional rivalry with Gerry, had suddenly become jealous of other women. It was at once incredibly erotic and a bit of a drag. He looked at her in the dress she had insisted spending three hundred dollars on in a Cross Keys boutique—three hundred dollars! She had never splurged on clothing before. It was a bubbly thing, apparently the current style. It didn’t suit her. Worse, it was out of place here in Mobile, where the women tended toward a kind of era-less soap opera beauty. Big hair, low necklines, lots of sparkles.

“You can stop looking at her tits now,” Lucy hissed after he greeted one of the jurors.

“I wasn’t,” he said, and he hadn’t been. But then he had to look and—well, they were worth regarding. He had never been a breast man and, in marrying Lucy, he had figured he had cemented his preference for slender, small-breasted women.

What if he hadn’t?

That question was like the fleeting thought in the dressing room at Hamburger’s—thrilling, awful, wonderful. When he married Lucy, he had been “promising.” Now he was beginning to fulfill that promise. This was only his first book, not his last. Would Lucy really be the last woman he ever had sex with? Of course she would, that was the promise made. He didn’t believe that adulterous thoughts counted. He was pretty sure that a marriage’s only chance was in each partner having a lively inner life, fantasies that could never be shared. But it had not occurred to him that professional success could nudge those fantasies closer to him, like someone moving a plate of brownies toward you when you were adamant that you were dieting. Just have one. What could it hurt?