Dream Girl(63)

“Right. But ‘Aileen’ would believe that. I’m playing a character. Haven’t you gotten that by now?”

Oh, he has gotten it. Aileen is stolid and doesn’t read and doesn’t get jokes. Leenie is quicker, in thought and movement. Rash, one might say. But she reads.

She also writes, as it turns out.

She says she’s going to bring him her work, that she wants him to see how her writing has matured over the past seven years. He is not looking forward to it. He thinks about Roth’s alter ego, Zuckerman, trapped against a mailbox by Alvin Pepler, the Jewish marine and quiz show contestant, who demanded that the writer read his critique—of Zuckerman! Roth described it as the lion approaching Hemingway, keen to provide his thoughts on “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.”

But Aileen/Leenie is not Gerry’s character. She is very much her own character. This story, her story, is much more interesting than anything she ever put on a page when she was a student. Gerry is a secondary character, as long as he stays in bed.

And as long as he stays in bed, how can he be suspected of anything? He uses his phone to read, something he thought he would never do, but he has an urgent impulse to read Hiaasen and Leonard and Westlake, writers who could probably construct a story in which a man in Gerry’s (prone) position could somehow jettison the Inconvenient Nurse while making her the singular culprit. On his SmartHub, he watches films reputed to have airtight stories; he rereads Christie, whom he adored in early adolescence, then later rejected. The number three best-selling writer in history, according to Google, and given that number one is the Bible and Shakespeare is number two, doesn’t that really make her number one? The Bible has no single author and Shakespeare has no estate. What would Shakespeare do with this story and would it be a comedy or a tragedy? Some wild coincidence involving twins and eavesdropping. If only Gerry had a twin.

No, Gerry simply cannot plot his way out of this. Two women have been killed in his apartment, one by him, and he has sat here, doing nothing, while a woman carves up their bodies and takes them God knows where, possibly the very incinerator his mother used after crab feasts. He saw online that the city will be closing the facility soon and then how will people dispose of their crab shells and dead bodies?





1990




“ARE YOU GOING to make it to New York?”

“I don’t see how I can, Tara—it’s the end of semester, grades are due, I have so much to read—”

“Jesus, Gerry, all you have to do is get on a train. Three hours up, three hours back, fifteen minutes in his room.”

The cord on the wall phone in the kitchen is a long one and Gerry can pace while he talks to Tara. It drives Gretchen crazy, the way he paces when he speaks on the phone, but Gretchen isn’t here tonight. She has joined a book club in the building, although it seems like more of a drinking club to Gerry. Gretchen always waits to read the book until the last minute, then complains about the selection. Her club’s choices are pretty middlebrow, in Gerry’s unvoiced opinion, and he imagines the discussions are not of a particularly high caliber. The real emphasis seems to be on the themed refreshments. The current book is The Remains of the Day, which Gerry admires almost in spite of himself. Ishiguro is only four years older than he is and his third book has won the Booker! Gerry is reworking his third novel after Thiru’s careful notes. He has high hopes for it, but he had high hopes for his second novel, whose reception was basically “not like his first novel.” That was the point, of course.

“Will he even know I’m there, Tara?”

A long pause. “I don’t know, Gerry. I thought he registered my presence, but maybe it was wishful thinking. Still, I’m glad I did it. I’m glad I got to say goodbye. I think you’ll feel the same way.”

Easy for Tara, living in Greenwich, to say. She hadn’t required an entire day to make her visit. And she didn’t have a job, just a baby. Tara was probably happy for the melodrama of a deathbed visit. It relieved the tedium of her day-to-day existence, whatever that was.

“Is it—difficult? To see him, I mean.”

“Extremely. I worry it will blot out the memories I have of that gorgeous, gorgeous boy. But maybe it should, Gerry. Maybe if more people lose people they love, things will change.”

“Okay, Tara. I’ll go tomorrow.”

He hung up the phone, called Amtrak to check the schedules. There was a seven thirty train. He could reasonably expect to arrive at the hospice by eleven, be back in the apartment by four. He could do this.

I can do this, he said to himself the next morning, waiting in the line at Penn Station to buy his ticket. He had never realized what an active commuting culture Baltimore had. The station was bustling and full and he began to worry that the ticket line would not move swiftly enough for him to catch the seven thirty train.

And then he began to hope that would be the case. No one could blame him for missing the train, right? It’s not as if anyone were expecting him. In fact—how would anyone know if he had been there? Tara wasn’t the type to check behind him, to call the hospice and inquire if Gerry Andersen had visited Luke Altmann. He remembered shaking hands with Luke that first day at Princeton. “I know—I look like a Hitler youth, but my people ran away from Germany in the 1930s.” The shock of blond hair that he was forever pushing out of his eyes. Young Gerry’s heart had sunk at the thought of having such a good-looking roommate. What a laugh they’d had over that later.