Dream Girl

by Laura Lippman

  “That’s—interesting.”

  “It’s called a floating staircase.”

  “Oh, I’m familiar with the concept. But wouldn’t it make more sense in an open space, where it could be seen? Rather wasted here. It’s like staring down a mouth. A mouth with big gaps between the teeth.”

  “I didn’t design the apartment,” Gerry says. “And I needed something in move-in condition. Most of the furniture was part of the staging and I asked to keep it. The only things I brought from New York were my Herman Miller reading chair, my desk and desk chair, my books, and the dining room set.”

  Thiru’s eyebrows, thick and furry, make a perfect inverted V on his forehead, then quickly relax. Gerry decides that Thiru’s teasing is a form of envy. It’s a beautiful apartment and Baltimore, which he fought so hard to escape, feels serene after New York. Maybe this is all he needs to get back to work, a change of scene. A change of scene, no more Margot drama, no more suspense over the quality of his mother’s end of life. He will be able to write again. Soon.

  “Anyway, I’ve brought some things that came to the agency—the usual fan mail”—Thiru grins, because Gerry’s mail runs to anti-fans—“and speaking requests, some for quite good money.”

  Thiru hands Gerry a manila folder of envelopes. He notices one is addressed in cursive, an undeniably feminine hand, so perfect that he suspects it’s a machine posing as a person. But it’s postmarked Baltimore and the return address is vaguely familiar. Fait Avenue. He’s filled with warmth and then—his mind goes blank, he cannot remember the person, someone who provokes nothing but affection, who lived on Fait Avenue. This occurs more and more, this blankness. He knows, technically, what has happened. His frontal cortex has seized up and will not be able to provide the information that Gerry wants, not now. Later, when he’s relaxed, it will come to him easily. But for now, the memory is locked, like a phone on which one has tried a series of incorrect passwords. This is not a sign of dementia. It’s not, it’s not.

  Thiru insists on taking an Uber to the train station, as Gerry’s new assistant, Victoria, has yet to return from her errands. Gerry doesn’t own a car, unless one counts his mother’s beloved wreck of a Mercedes, parked in his deeded space until the estate clears probate and he can take legal possession to sell it. For himself, he has decided to make do with Zipcars, Ubers, and the occasional water taxi.

  “I look forward to seeing what you’re working on,” Thiru says. Again, a perfectly normal thing to say, especially given that Gerry, for almost forty years now, has always been working on something. He’s not the most prolific writer—only seven books total—but thanks to Dream Girl, he doesn’t have to be.

  He has, however, always been a disciplined writer, working every day from eight to twelve and three to six. Lately, he can’t write at all and it’s not the view’s fault; he keeps the blinds drawn to avoid glare in his downstairs office. He writes on a computer with a special display, one that resembles an actual page. It’s amazing to Gerry how many writers fail to grasp the visual context of their books. Then again, with people reading novels one paragraph at a time on their phones, maybe he is the one who’s out of step. He has a perfect chair and a perfect desk and he keeps his assistant out of the apartment as much as possible, having learned that he cannot stand to have a breathing human in his space when he’s writing.

  Still, the words aren’t coming.

  When Thiru leaves, Gerry goes dutifully to his office, taking the two bundles of mail with him and sorting it—one pile for recycling, one pile for bills, one pile for personal and professional correspondence—but he can’t find the energy to open any of it. Should he entrust Victoria with doing that as well? She’s an eager beaver, approaching thirty, but with no defined ambition. She won the job when she told him that she loved to read yet had no desire to write. The worst assistants are the little vampires who try to turn an essentially menial job into a mentorship. They’ll suck you dry, literally and figuratively, those young women.

  Now that he thinks about it, maybe Victoria was the one who told him that Baltimore was popular with millennials, although she arrived here as a college student and seems to have stayed out of sheer inertia. They eventually figured out that she had been at Goucher the year he was the visiting professor in creative writing, in 2012, but she had switched her major to biology by then, so their paths never crossed. She has no idea why she studied biology, no idea what she really wants to do. This is baffling to Gerry, who has known since he was thirteen that he wanted to be a writer, fought with an indifferent world to make it so, and was past forty when it was finally acknowledged that he wasn’t a one-trick pony but someone built for the long term. He’s not one for millennial-bashing—as a tail-end boomer, he resents the stereotypes heaped on his generation, which have almost nothing to do with him. But he is suspicious of this current mania for happiness. To paraphrase Citizen Kane, it’s not hard to be happy, if all you want to be is happy.

  He forces himself to turn on his computer and a few words trickle out. He is trying to write a novel about Berlin in the early 1980s. A memoir! How could Thiru suggest that yet again? It isn’t out of respect for his mother that Gerry has avoided writing about his father; it’s out of respect for his own imagination. He has nothing to say about his father, a stultifyingly ordinary man who did one extraordinarily despicable thing. Gerry wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of taking up that much mental real estate. Not that his father would know; he’s been dead for almost two decades.

  Gerry gives up on his own writing and reads for the rest of the afternoon until he hears Victoria entering the apartment above, dropping off his dinner. Gerry does not cook and has no patience with all the attention heaped on food nowadays. Food is fuel. Part of Victoria’s job is to bring him something ready-made, from Whole Foods or Harris Teeter, for dinner every evening. He can handle breakfast on his own—oatmeal warmed in the microwave, fruit and yogurt. Lunch is a turkey sandwich, maybe with some carrots. As a result, Gerry remains quite lean and fit, requiring no exercise beyond walking and a rowing machine. He wouldn’t even have the rowing machine, but it was part of the apartment’s staging and the Realtor assumed he wanted it when he asked if the furniture could be included. So sometimes he puts on gym shorts and a T-shirt and he rows, twenty-five floors above the water, feeling like he’s in some goddamn ad, although an ad for a rowing machine would feature a younger man, he supposes.

  He eats his dinner at the kitchen counter watching the sunset. The city is beautiful at night. Flaws disappear, buildings glow. He finds himself wondering if he is obligated to get in touch with his father’s heirs about his mother’s death. Her lawyer was adamant that his father’s second family cannot make any claims on his mother’s estate. Everything goes to Gerry.

  The problem is that “everything” is the house, which has three mortgages and an overwhelming amount of stuff. He’s going to put Victoria in charge of emptying it, but he can’t completely hand off the responsibility. His mother, it turns out, saved everything, including his juvenilia. Princeton, which has won his papers despite not being the highest bidder, wants a complete accounting. He’ll have to go through every carton and crate, just to be sure. He supposes he should set up a system for the mail, too, archiving emails and filing the regular mail—

  The mail. Fait Avenue. How could he have forgotten who lived on Fait Avenue? Well, “lived,” given that she exists only in a book, his book. Fait Avenue was Aubrey’s address in Dream Girl. An inside joke, a little homage to Nabokov and his Aubrey McFate in Lolita, a bit of cleverness that went unnoticed by virtually everyone given that Fait Avenue is a very real place in Baltimore. He had placed Aubrey in the heart of Greektown, within hearing distance of the expressway, walking distance to Samos. Fait and Ponca, to be precise. But the address was contrived: there is no 4999½ Fait Avenue, no basement apartment where an enchanting young woman, following her own mysterious agenda, seduced a slightly older man in despair over his life. Had that been the addr
ess on the letter, 4999? That should have jumped out at him, but he’s so distracted these days. No, he thinks there was no number, only the street name. He would have noticed the number. Fait Avenue, Baltimore, MD.

  He has to know. He jumps up, bumping his knee hard on the underside of the table, then stumbles, tripping over the rowing machine, staggering and sliding across the slick floors. His foot strikes unsteadily on the first step of the floating staircase and he loses his balance, his arms windmilling, finding nothing because there is nothing to find, tumbling ass over teakettle, as his mother used to say—why did his mother say that, what does it even mean, a teakettle doesn’t have an ass—until he lands, a crooked broken thing, in a heap at the bottom. He tries to get up, but his right leg isn’t having it and there is nothing within reach that will allow him to pull himself up and hop. He tries to drag himself across the floor, but his leg hurts so much and is such an odd shape, it seems ill advised. What if he aggravates the injury by moving? He tries to find a comfortable resting position—fuck, distressed concrete, what a concept for a floor—and has no choice but to wait until morning, when Victoria finally arrives.

  “Call 911,” he says with as much authority as he can muster, positioning his arms to hide the stain from where he relieved himself at some point during the long, miserable night.

  1968

  IT WAS THE HEATING PAD, the doctors later said, that caused his appendix to burst.

  His mother was always slow to call the doctor. Not for fear of bills; not even later, when money was tight, would she ever skimp on medical care on the basis of its cost. Even as a child, Gerry was aware of what caused his mother financial anxiety (extras at school, broken things, the amount of milk that a growing boy can drink) and what did not, which was pretty much doctor’s bills and holiday gifts.

  But doctors, in his mother’s view, were for surgery and bones, maybe the occasional prescription. It was a weakness to call them. So when appendicitis began making its claim on Gerry’s body, she treated each symptom as it came, never seeing them as parts of a possibly deadly whole. His father was away—his father, a traveling salesman, was usually away—so there was no adult to second-guess his mother. Vomiting? Put the boy to bed with flat ginger ale. Fever? Baby aspirin. Abdominal pain? She draped a heating pad, something Gerry normally loved, over his midsection. Olive green, with three color-coded buttons—yellow, orange, red.

  Next thing he knew, he was waking up in GBMC.

  His father was not there when he came out of surgery, but he made it back to Maryland the next day. Gerry woke from a nap to his parents by his bedside, hissing. He fluttered his eyelids and pretended to slumber. His parents never fought in front of him, never. He was curious about the words they said to each other when they thought he wasn’t listening.

  “It’s not my fault I wasn’t here,” his father was saying. “It’s my job.”

  “Your job,” his mother repeated.

  “Yes, my job,” his father said, responding to some tone that Gerry hadn’t heard. It was as if the word job didn’t mean job when his mother said it. But what else could it mean?

  Gerald Andersen sold school furniture. He had a suitcase that Gerry had doted on as a child, until a neighborhood boy had accused him of playing with dolls, rather ruining it for him. His father’s sample case had desks (for students and teachers), chairs, cunning little chalkboards. Gerry still sometimes unpacked the case when his father was home, marveling at the miniatures, the specially designed piece of luggage where each piece fit, almost like a jigsaw puzzle. His father’s territory was Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana, one of the better regions. The 1960s were a good time to sell school furniture. The population was soaring; new schools were being built, old ones upgraded. Gerry remembered the stunning headline in his Weekly Reader when he was in third grade, prophesizing that the United States would hit 200 million people by the time he was in fourth grade and now here they were, in the biggest and the best country in the world, even if Nixon had just been elected president, a profound disappointment to his mother.

  He wasn’t so sure how his father felt about the election. “A man’s vote is confidential, buddy,” he had said in October, patting his breast pocket, as if all his secrets resided there.

  “But we’re supposed to talk about current events at home,” Gerry had said. “We pick one story in the news and we talk about it at dinner, then bring in articles and make a presentation at school.”

  “We don’t have to say who we’re for, though. It’s enough to know their positions, right? Okay, tell me what Humphrey is going to do.”

  Gerry was having trouble keeping his eyes closed without scrunching them tight, so he tried to roll on his side. But he was tender from the surgery and the effort made him yelp.

  “Hey, buddy,” his father said.

  “How are you feeling?” his mother asked.

  “Better. When do I get to go home?”

  “Tomorrow. They just want to make sure there’s no risk of infection.”

  His father said: “You can tell everyone at school that you almost died—and your mother gave you baby aspirin.”

  His mother defended herself. “How was I to know?”

  The question hung in the air, as unanswered questions sometimes do. How was she to know that this stomach pain was something more? Fair enough. How was she to know what her husband did on his endless trips to Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana? He called home late at night, when the rates went down, reversing the charges. He described his day, complained about the motels, the food. Gerry was asleep when he called, or supposed to be. His mother didn’t realize how late he stayed up, listening to Johnny Carson from the top of the stairs. Surely if she knew, she would have muffled her tears after these calls.

  Once, when Gerry pulled the furniture from his father’s case, a strand of long blond hair came with the miniature desk, the one for children, but a seven-year-old boy had no context for such a discovery. He uncoiled the hair from the desk leg, even as the memory coiled itself inside his mind, waiting to spring back one day. Another child has been playing with these things. That seemed ordinary enough. If he had bothered to investigate the idea further, he would have imagined a school superintendent’s child being distracted by the objects during Gerald Senior’s sales pitch. Or maybe the items had been taken out during a school board meeting and a bored board member had fiddled with one.

  “Can I have ice cream?” Gerry asked his parents.

  “That’s for tonsils, buddy,” his father said.

  “Yes,” said his mother.

  February 12

  THE NIGHT NURSE is named Aileen and she does not read. This is almost the first thing she tells Gerry about herself, after inspecting the shelves that cover the top floor’s walls. The shelves were one of the few things that Gerry had to have installed in the apartment. He brought more than thirty boxes of books from New York, and that was after a ruthless culling. He had four boxes of kitchen equipment.

  “You have so many books! I hardly read at all. I suppose I should.” Her complacent tone suggests she doesn’t really believe this, that her admiration for his books is a social nicety.

  “How will you pass the time?”

  She turns and looks at him as if he’s not very bright. “Time passes on its own. It doesn’t need my help.”

  That’s almost wise, he has to admit.

  “I mean at night, when you’re here. It must be—” He’s about to say boring, but stops. No one wants to hear one’s job described as boring. “Lonely.”

  “Why, I’ll watch television,” she says. “Maybe movies.”

  “The study, which is probably the best place for you to hole up, doesn’t have a television. I’m afraid the only television is up here.” He points to the plasma screen, mounted to the center of the wall and now surrounded by books. The wall is really a nonwall, an architectural feature that, the Realtor said, was intended to define the various living spaces of the top floor. Gerry had shelves affixed directly to it
, so the television is now surrounded by books; it almost disappears within the wall of books, a visual effect of which he approves. “It looks like something one might see in a gallery,” Thiru had said, adding, “A very jejune gallery.”

  Gerry likes it, anyway. The news, glowing softly from inside this collage of books, has less impact, more context.

  “Oh, I won’t need a TV,” Aileen says. “I have my tablet.” She brandishes an iPad in a case covered with a pattern featuring cats doing human things. Cooking, riding bicycles, knitting. Reading. So cats read, but she doesn’t. Whenever Gerry hears the word tablet, he imagines Moses holding the Ten Commandments, but now a tablet is a hunk of plastic, probably assembled by tiny children’s hands in China. “You have Wi-Fi, I was told.” She holds up a bag with yarn and needles. “I knit, too. If you don’t bother me too much, I’ll finish this coverlet before you’re ready to let me go.”

  Gerry wants to protest, to insist that it is his prerogative to “bother” her as much as he likes, given the wages he will be paying her, but he decides she’s what people now label as “on the spectrum.” A little dense, emotionally and mentally, artless as a child, garrulous as a senior citizen. Perhaps that’s a good quality for someone whose job involves wiping another person’s ass.

  Gerry’s injuries are severe, but his hope for a fullish recovery is reasonable. He is in good health, although he was shocked to discover that X-rays revealed his bone density had already been compromised. He thought that was a female thing. But his primary injury is a bilateral quad tear in his right leg. He needs to remain flat on his back for eight to twelve weeks in this hulking beast of a hospital bed. His injured leg is braced to keep it immobilized and a “trapeze” hangs over him—he has to grab that if he wants to change his position in his bed or use what Aileen calls the “commode”—the correct word, yet one that irritates him to no end.