Dream Girl(70)
“Please, Leenie, this isn’t a time to dwell on metaphors.”
“I grabbed the letter opener. I was only trying to defend myself. Whatever happened, happened.”
Gerry finds himself thinking of a famous parody of passive voice. Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind. In the same way that Leenie became hyperfocused on describing what she saw when slapped, he finds himself thinking about that one word, reels. A reel can be a dance, but most people associate it with fishing. A reel is an orderly thing. It unspools, it winds up. His mind is spinning like a top, a wobbly metal top, the kind that one pumped up and down, then set loose on the world. How could Margot describe him as a pervert? They had been two consenting adults and she had been the one inclined to push the envelope, including that last time in Riverside Park. Besides, public sex didn’t make one a pervert. His conscience is clear. Clearish. Even what happened with Lucy, the shameful episode with Shannon Little, the one time he cheated on Sarah—none of those things make him a pervert who should fear shame and exposure.
“Did she explain what she meant?”
“No,” Leenie said. “Things happened pretty fast. I’m glad I took advantage of her phone being unlocked. I deleted the photos, then I reset it to the factory settings.”
Imagine that being one’s impulse when a woman is lying dead at one’s feet. To wipe a phone and reset it.
Thinking quickly, speaking gently, he says: “But don’t you see—it’s safer, I think, if we don’t continue, um, living together. Together, we will draw too much attention. I mean, at some point, I simply wouldn’t have a nurse.”
“But you could have a girlfriend. You wouldn’t be the first man to fall in love with his caretaker.”
He is truly nonplussed now. Also, the only such relationship he can summon up is Henry VIII and Catherine Parr and she was the one that the Tudor king did not outlive.
“Anyway, I’m glad there are no more secrets between us. Because I have something to show you.”
She goes downstairs. Gerry wonders briefly if she’s going to go full Annie Wilkes and hobble him, so he will remain in her care longer. But he’s more terrified by the idea that Leenie wants him to get well. Wants him to be her boyfriend.
She comes back with pages, not a sledgehammer. He decides that’s lucky for him, but he has to think about it.
“I’ve chucked what I was working on. I decided I wasn’t going far enough. I want to write something more like Rachel Cusk is doing, blurring fiction and memoir. Or Sheila Heti.”
She begins to read:
Gerry Andersen’s new apartment is a topsy-turvy affair—living area on the second floor, bedrooms below. The brochure—it is the kind of apartment that had its own brochure when it went on the market in 2018—boasted of 360-degree views, but that was pure hype.
To be fair, she didn’t say it would be her fiction and memoir that she wanted to blur. As she reads on, uncannily aware of Gerry’s inner life and thoughts, he begins to wonder what happens to him if Leenie steals his voice.
Again, to be fair—it wasn’t as if he was using it.
2018
“ARE YOU SO BUSY that you couldn’t afford dinner at a real restaurant?” Margot asks, pulling her shawl closer around her shoulders, as if City Diner, almost too warm on this early autumn night, is making her cold.
“Diners are real, Margot. And, yes, I’m slammed for time. I went straight from Penn Station to the apartment, to make sure it was ready for the walk-through tomorrow—”
“I would have been happy to do that with you.”
Gerry knew this, which was why he had done it alone. He didn’t want to be anywhere private with Margot. Especially the apartment. The lack of furniture would not inhibit her.
“Then I met with Thiru. I was supposed to go to Berlin this fall, but clearly that’s not happening.”
She arches an eyebrow when he asks for onions on his cheeseburger, knowing that’s not usual for him. She limits herself to a cup of black coffee, from which she takes only a few sips, leaving a vivid crimson imprint, then helps herself to his french fries without asking.
“So you’re really gone.”
“Yes, so it would seem. Once I have the cash in hand from my sale, I need to move quickly to buy in Baltimore. I think it’s only a matter of time before my mother is in hospice, but—the doctors have been saying that for months—”
“We never had a proper breakup,” Margot said. “We just drifted apart.”
In Gerry’s point of view, they’d had multiple breakups; Margot simply refused to recognize them as such. She was still squatting in his apartment as recently as a month ago. His Realtor, a formidable woman, forced her out with the co-op board’s help.
“I don’t see you in Baltimore,” Gerry said, then regretted it. He shouldn’t even raise the possibility. But he is polite, to a fault. To a fault. He moves quickly to change the subject. “You did forward all my mail, right? When you were living there? I’d hate to think any bills went missing.”
“Of course I did. God, you were always so obsessed with your mail.”
“Was I?” He genuinely didn’t remember it that way.
“Your mail and your bills. Have to pay the bills on time or God knows what might happen. You’re such a good boy, Gerry.”