Dream Girl(67)

“Because you’re my Humbert Humbert and you’re going to rape Moana.”

“What?”

“It’s thematically consistent. You rape the woman whose life inspired Dream Girl. Metaphorically.”

“There was no woman whose life inspired Dream Girl and that book was almost fifteen years old by the time I taught at Goucher.”

“But isn’t there a woman with a secret you don’t want anyone to know? Weren’t you worried that was the secret that Margot was going to share with the world?”

There’s a weird faux innocence about Leenie’s question. How does she even know what Margot threatened to do? He remembers the fight with Margot, how she raked his face with her nails, the strange things she said. Victoria was here. What had she heard? What had she inferred? What had she told Leenie? He still had no idea what terrible secret Margot knew, or thought she knew, but it wouldn’t have been about Dream Girl, because there was no secret there.

“Aren’t you troubled by giving a Chinese American girl a name from a Disney film about a Hawaiian girl?”

“Well, later I’m going to get into how Harry, like most men of his generation, fetishized Asian women. There’s going to be a lot of wordplay with Moana and ‘moan.’”

Of course there is.

“Anyway, what do you think?”

He decides to risk honesty, of a sort. “It hasn’t gotten started.”

“What do you mean?”

“Put me, the reader, in the classroom. Show me the characters, let them define themselves by action and dialogue. This sounds like a dutiful summary. You’re tapping on the mike, clearing your throat. You literally cleared your throat before reading. Start, Leenie.”

Unexpectedly, she does. She comes up later that evening with more pages and they are better. Still not good, no, never good, but she is listening, trying. She’s not even thirty. At her age, Gerry wasn’t the writer he would become by age forty. He was better than this, he was better than this at age eighteen, but he wasn’t the writer he would become. As he listens to Leenie’s new pages, he finds in himself the man he was in his twenties, a serious and thoughtful reader, a man who had aspired to nothing more than a tenured position in a good writing program, a little house, sabbaticals. A like-minded partner.

Of all the women in his life, he misses Lucy the most. It had taken real effort to screw that up. If only the Hartwell juror had been more of a prude; but Lucy’s instincts for willing co-conspirators were good, too good. In that brief, giddy time when they brought other women into their bed, he had felt as if he had been initiated into a vampiric cult. Sleeping with Shannon Little, outside Lucy’s sight, had been the only way to break the spell, break the marriage. Lucy was making him bad and he was determined to be good. It was all he had ever wanted.

But the best thing about Lucy was that she had been there in the beginning, when his hopes were modest. He remembers the nights in the funny little duplex on Schenley Road, drinking cheap wine from the three-dollar bin at Trinacria. Whatever happened to Lucy? He thinks she’s a teacher somewhere, publishing in the better journals, more poetry than fiction these days. Gerry has always had a soft envy for poets and their economy with words.

He marks up Leenie’s pages and recommends books to read—Francine Prose’s Blue Angel, Richard Russo’s Straight Man, John Irving’s The Water-Method Man. He doesn’t like academic satires, but if she’s going to attempt this, she might as well read the best. She is touchingly earnest about his advice. It occurs to him that this is all she wanted, after all, the singular focus of the writer-teacher by whom she felt ignored all those years ago. The silly campaign she and Victoria cooked up was nothing more than a bid for attention. She now has an exclusive seminar. He almost enjoys it. This, more than anything in months, has engaged him, made him feel mentally astute again. I’m not dead yet! I don’t want to go on the cart. He feels strangely good.

Until he remembers that two women are dead.





April




IT’S SAD, how long it takes for anyone to inquire after Victoria, and when it finally happens, it’s her landlord. Leenie has told Gerry that Victoria has parents, but she’s not particularly close to them, and it’s been over a year since she had a boyfriend. Before disposing of Victoria’s phone, Leenie signed her up for a dating app and cast a wide net, “swiping right” on the most unsavory types possible, setting up a date with one at a Baltimore bar a week after Victoria was well past the point of dating anyone. If he showed, he was stood up, but let him prove that if the moment ever comes.

Two days later, Leenie packed a bag with Victoria’s clothes and drove to the airport. She left the clothes in various donation boxes in the city, tossed the suitcase in a dumpster, parked in long-term parking, dropped the keys in a sewer, and returned to the city via light rail. No one seemed to notice Victoria had shuffled off this mortal coil until the rent was overdue. For it turned out that Leenie had never paid her share to Victoria in March, something she had neglected to mention to Gerry.

Gerry and Leenie have only the two minutes it takes for the landlord to get past Phylloh and ascend in the elevator to review their agreed-upon story. Yes, Victoria and Leenie were roommates. Yes, Gerry was aware of that. But does the landlord know that? Even if he doesn’t, it strikes Gerry as a bad idea to omit this information. Such a needless, heedless lie could come back to haunt them.