Dream Girl(6)

He wasn’t so sure how his father felt about the election. “A man’s vote is confidential, buddy,” he had said in October, patting his breast pocket, as if all his secrets resided there.

“But we’re supposed to talk about current events at home,” Gerry had said. “We pick one story in the news and we talk about it at dinner, then bring in articles and make a presentation at school.”

“We don’t have to say who we’re for, though. It’s enough to know their positions, right? Okay, tell me what Humphrey is going to do.”

Gerry was having trouble keeping his eyes closed without scrunching them tight, so he tried to roll on his side. But he was tender from the surgery and the effort made him yelp.

“Hey, buddy,” his father said.

“How are you feeling?” his mother asked.

“Better. When do I get to go home?”

“Tomorrow. They just want to make sure there’s no risk of infection.”

His father said: “You can tell everyone at school that you almost died—and your mother gave you baby aspirin.”

His mother defended herself. “How was I to know?”

The question hung in the air, as unanswered questions sometimes do. How was she to know that this stomach pain was something more? Fair enough. How was she to know what her husband did on his endless trips to Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana? He called home late at night, when the rates went down, reversing the charges. He described his day, complained about the motels, the food. Gerry was asleep when he called, or supposed to be. His mother didn’t realize how late he stayed up, listening to Johnny Carson from the top of the stairs. Surely if she knew, she would have muffled her tears after these calls.

Once, when Gerry pulled the furniture from his father’s case, a strand of long blond hair came with the miniature desk, the one for children, but a seven-year-old boy had no context for such a discovery. He uncoiled the hair from the desk leg, even as the memory coiled itself inside his mind, waiting to spring back one day. Another child has been playing with these things. That seemed ordinary enough. If he had bothered to investigate the idea further, he would have imagined a school superintendent’s child being distracted by the objects during Gerald Senior’s sales pitch. Or maybe the items had been taken out during a school board meeting and a bored board member had fiddled with one.

“Can I have ice cream?” Gerry asked his parents.

“That’s for tonsils, buddy,” his father said.

“Yes,” said his mother.





February 12




THE NIGHT NURSE is named Aileen and she does not read. This is almost the first thing she tells Gerry about herself, after inspecting the shelves that cover the top floor’s walls. The shelves were one of the few things that Gerry had to have installed in the apartment. He brought more than thirty boxes of books from New York, and that was after a ruthless culling. He had four boxes of kitchen equipment.

“You have so many books! I hardly read at all. I suppose I should.” Her complacent tone suggests she doesn’t really believe this, that her admiration for his books is a social nicety.

“How will you pass the time?”

She turns and looks at him as if he’s not very bright. “Time passes on its own. It doesn’t need my help.”

That’s almost wise, he has to admit.

“I mean at night, when you’re here. It must be—” He’s about to say boring, but stops. No one wants to hear one’s job described as boring. “Lonely.”

“Why, I’ll watch television,” she says. “Maybe movies.”

“The study, which is probably the best place for you to hole up, doesn’t have a television. I’m afraid the only television is up here.” He points to the plasma screen, mounted to the center of the wall and now surrounded by books. The wall is really a nonwall, an architectural feature that, the Realtor said, was intended to define the various living spaces of the top floor. Gerry had shelves affixed directly to it, so the television is now surrounded by books; it almost disappears within the wall of books, a visual effect of which he approves. “It looks like something one might see in a gallery,” Thiru had said, adding, “A very jejune gallery.”

Gerry likes it, anyway. The news, glowing softly from inside this collage of books, has less impact, more context.

“Oh, I won’t need a TV,” Aileen says. “I have my tablet.” She brandishes an iPad in a case covered with a pattern featuring cats doing human things. Cooking, riding bicycles, knitting. Reading. So cats read, but she doesn’t. Whenever Gerry hears the word tablet, he imagines Moses holding the Ten Commandments, but now a tablet is a hunk of plastic, probably assembled by tiny children’s hands in China. “You have Wi-Fi, I was told.” She holds up a bag with yarn and needles. “I knit, too. If you don’t bother me too much, I’ll finish this coverlet before you’re ready to let me go.”

Gerry wants to protest, to insist that it is his prerogative to “bother” her as much as he likes, given the wages he will be paying her, but he decides she’s what people now label as “on the spectrum.” A little dense, emotionally and mentally, artless as a child, garrulous as a senior citizen. Perhaps that’s a good quality for someone whose job involves wiping another person’s ass.