Dream Girl(74)

All he has to do is sell Leenie on one small change.

“When we submit your book,” he says, “let’s do it under my name.”

She puffs up like a cobra, ready to strike. “Are you trying to steal my work?”

“No! I’m trying to get you the attention you deserve. If this book goes out as the work of a twenty-nine-year-old unpublished woman, even with my endorsement, it will be read with—skepticism. Maybe even as a kind of fan fic. If we submit it as my first piece of autofiction-slash-memoir, it will be taken seriously as a significant departure for me. The reveal of its actual authorship, the fact that I authorized this but did not write it—ta-da!”—he mimes a magician’s sleight of hand—“will knock people on their keisters.”

He’s not sure why he uses a vaudeville word such as keister, but it feels right.

“It will be like the reverse of that writer who submitted Jerzy Kosinski’s Steps under a fake name, only to have it rejected by every major publishing house. Everyone will want this book. When we reveal the ruse, that you are my student and wrote this with my permission and approval, they’ll only want it more.”

He watches Leenie trying to absorb this idea. She’s no dummy. She’s suspicious of him. But it has never occurred to her that he is planting land mines throughout her book so that her beloved manuscript will save him, that Thiru unwittingly showed Gerry how he could signal his distress by mentioning what words and themes would arouse his concern should Gerry ever use them.

Maybe they are more like Thompson’s Doc and Carol than they realize.





2008




GRETCHEN HAD TAKEN to drunk-dialing him late at night.

“I see you’re dating again,” she said without preamble. “I hope you realize it’s on Page Six because of her, not you. She’s the famous one.”

“Yes, it’s her only drawback.”

“Tell her to get a prenup,” Gretchen said.

“We had a prenup. At your insistence. You were so worried about protecting the apartment, your income.”

“No, no, that wasn’t it at all. I would have split everything fifty-fifty, but you didn’t want to share the proceeds from your work. I supported you. You wrote Dream Girl on my dime; I was your venture capitalist and I didn’t get any return on my investment.”

“Rewrite history however you want, Gretchen.”

Life had not been kind to Gretchen. She had been working at Lehman Brothers when the crash came. Now she was unemployed and bitter.

“Look, between us—who was Aubrey? I know you had to be fucking someone while we were married.”

“I was faithful to you, Gretchen, which isn’t something I’m sure you can say. There is no Aubrey. I made her up.” An old complaint from James M. Cain floated into his head, Cain’s rejoinder at being accused of imitating Hammett. It really doesn’t work that way.

“Tell me the truth, Gerry.”

So he did. He shared with Gretchen the story he had never told anyone, not even Thiru. He told her the identity of the Dream Girl.





April




“I DON’T KNOW HOW TO END IT,” Leenie says.

“Endings are hard,” he commiserates.

“I feel as if something big should happen.” She mimes an explosion with her hands, makes fireworks noises with her mouth. Gerry shakes his head.

“If I may offer an observation—you have always been a bit enamored of deus ex machina.”

She glares. “I am the deus here, in case you’ve forgotten. Therefore, I am entitled to my machinations.”

For some reason, this reminds Gerry of that bridge in Trenton, the one that can be glimpsed from the train: TRENTON MAKES, THE WORLD TAKES. She sounds put-upon, as if no one can understand what she has suffered. Congratulations, Leenie, you’re a real novelist now.

He gentles his tone. “It’s obvious in the text that ‘Leenie’ is the mastermind. Not Victoria. Don’t start getting hypersensitive. I’m simply advising you to remain true to your characters. Nothing can happen now that hasn’t been prepared for. As writers, we must stay within the reality we’ve created.”

In her book, she has reached the point where she has started moving his funds and taken his electronics away. She has not bothered to imagine how dreary this is for him. He rereads favorite books, watches CNN. He cannot imagine reading something new right now, the single most compelling argument for the possibility that he is already dead and this is his singular hell.

She slumps in the chair near his bedside. “I haven’t always been truthful with you.”

Where to begin? What could be left?

“Yes,” he says, then decides to dare a joke. “It’s sort of the basis of our relationship.”

“You asked me if I found letters in Margot’s purse.”

He waits.

“There was something and I need to tell you. But I just can’t figure out the right way.”

He is not without fear. Leenie’s habit is to “write” herself out of a tough situation with an act of violence. A letter opener to the eye, a statuette to the head. He glances around the room to see if there are any heavy, lethal objects close at hand.

But she can’t finish the book without him. She cannot sell the book without him. He is Scheherazade, forestalling the inevitable. As long as the story’s fate is pending, she has to allow him to live.