Dream Girl(73)

“You were eavesdropping, Gerry? I’ve told you time and again not to do that.”

“Mom, he has another family.”

“I’m sure you misunderstood. Your father has always been a magnet for women who need someone strong to lean on. Are you sure he’s not just out, wiring her money or …” Here, his mother’s imagination faltered. She had finally run out of excuses for her husband.

“He’s gone, Mom. He packed all his clothes and put them in the trunk of his car, then left. He’s going to wherever they are.”

“No,” his mother said. “He’ll come back. He always comes back.”

“I told him we don’t want him to come back. I told him he had to choose. He chose them.”

He did not tell his mother how triumphant he had felt when he laid down the law to his father. And that he was not altogether disappointed when his father elected to leave, if only because it confirmed what he knew.

“Oh, Gerry, what have you done?” His mother walked slowly out of the kitchen, then broke into a run. Her bedroom was over the kitchen and he could hear her sobbing.

He rescued the milk from the pantry, found the Sealtest ice cream—his favorite, chocolate chip—still in the grocery sack and stowed it in the freezer. He put everything away, rinsed out his glass and put it in the dishwasher.

We’ll be better off without him, Gerry told himself. She’ll see.





April




GERRY IS LOOKING at his checking account online. There is more money than he expects—not just the electronic royalties deposited by Thiru’s agency (why did he resist this for so long?) but also an electronic deposit of $215,000. Foreign payments? Foreign money is forever dribbling in. Sometimes gushing in. The Germans love his work.

Wait—a payment for $9,500 went out the next day, via something called a Zelle P2P payment. It takes him a while, but he finds the site within the site where he can view his Zelle activity. There is only the one transaction.

The recipient was one Aileen Rachel Bryant.

“Leenie,” he brays. Then, in the tone of a parent who wants his child to know how much trouble she is in: “AILEEN RACHEL BRYANT.” He’s not even sure how he knows her middle name. Oh, wait—IT’S THERE ON THE ZELLE PAYMENT SHE MADE TO HERSELF.

She takes her time and is all sweet innocence when she arrives at his bedside.

“Is something wrong?”

“How did nine thousand, five hundred dollars of my money go from my bank account to yours?”

“Oh, I used Zelle. It’s like Venmo or PayPal but—”

“I’m not asking how”—okay, he did, in fact, ask how—“I am trying to understand who moved that money and why.”

“I moved it. On your computer, the one I’ve been using—you saved all your passwords, so I can access lots of things.”

Lots. Of. Things.

“Why did you feel”—he decides to choose his words carefully—“you should transfer this money?”

“I’ve been working so hard on the book and, even if it does sell, it will be a while before I see any payment.”

“But—you have your nursing salary. Not to mention free room and board here.”

“Not forever. You made that clear. We won’t be together forever.”

“It’s safer that way, don’t you think? Leenie—we have to go our separate ways. We’re not Doc and Carol.”

“We could be.”

He thinks of Thompson’s Carol, he imagines the cinematic Carol. Two very different creatures, but both alluring. What does one say to an unbeautiful woman? He has no idea. Unbeautiful women have never interested him much. There is no democracy in sexual attraction and there is not, in his estimation, a lid for every pot. There are many, many lidless pots in the world, although most of them, Gerry would wager, are men. Aileen can find a man, if all she wants is a man. But she cannot have him. Even her burgeoning talent has not made her attractive to him, and that is the ultimate unfairness. Gerry, at sixty-one, is desirable because of what he’s accomplished. Aileen, at twenty-nine, now showing glimmers of ability, will never write her way into a man’s heart. Gerry didn’t make the rules. The rules made him.

“I’m sorry, but that’s not an ending I can envision.”

“Okay, then,” Leenie says. She walks over to the bed, picks up his cell phone, disconnects the landline, grabs his laptop. Luddite Gerry, antisocial Gerry, anti–social media Gerry cannot believe how hard his heart is beating at the loss of these things. They are his only connection to the outside world, after all.

Leenie says: “Once my book is finished and under contract, we’ll say goodbye.”

Gerry knows how Leenie says goodbye.





April




ONLY A NA?F would try to buy time by switching up and giving Leenie a harsher critique. Gerry is not Penelope, he’s not going to tear up the weaving every night. He goes the other way, praises things that could be improved, swallows his revulsion for cheap plot devices, Leenie’s Achilles heel. It’s all good. It’s all fine. The sooner he can get this book to Thiru, the sooner he will have a chance to be free. In his editing sessions, he makes tiny suggestions that would seem to be inconsequential, but Thiru will know, Thiru will see through it, as he once joked. Thiru knows Gerry doesn’t care what the Oxford English Dictionary says, he’s sticking by the old meanings of literally and hopefully. Thiru knows all Gerry’s bugaboos, to use that peculiar word that Lucy loved. Gerry has been fighting New York copyeditors for almost forty years over the word rowhouse. What Baltimoreans have joined together, he would retort in the margins, let no copyeditor tear asunder.