Dream Girl

by Laura Lippman

  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.

  “Let me take care of it,” Leenie says with what Gerry feels is unearned confidence. So far, Leenie’s off-the-cuff improvisations have been a little too “exit pursued by bear” for him, only it’s more like “exit in insulated freezer bags, body part by body part.”

  The landlord is a pale white bald man who looks as if he never stops sweating, no matter the weather. The seams of his blue oxford cloth shirt are damp, and there’s a sheen on his forehead, which he mops with a handkerchief, almost as if he had climbed the twenty-four flights to the apartment.

  “I’m sorry to bother you, but I’m worried. Victoria was one of the most responsible tenants I ever had, but she paid only part of the rent in March and now she’s missing. I went by the apartment when she didn’t answer my calls and it seems as if she hasn’t been there for quite some time.”

  “I know,” Leenie says. “I was her roommate until I moved in here to provide full-time care for Mr. Andersen.”

  “You weren’t on the lease.”

  “I had lost a job and Victoria was kind enough to take me in.” Gerry notes that Leenie is avoiding timelines. Good. “We’ve known each other forever. She did this, even back in college. Disappeared at times. She—well, I don’t want to violate her privacy, but sometimes she thinks she knows better than her doctors what she needs. She always comes back, she’s always fine.”

  “Have you called her parents?”

  Leenie sighs. “Her parents are the last people she would turn to when she’s like this. I didn’t know what to do. And I didn’t know what to tell Mr. Gerry”—she turns to him—“I’m sorry, I kept hoping she would show up and you would be okay with her continuing in this job again. There’s so much stigma around mental illness. That’s why I told you she had a personal emergency. It’s true, if you think about it.”

  It is true and Gerry doesn’t want to think about it. Being bashed in the head with the Hartwell Prize is a very real personal emergency.

  The landlord looks concerned, but also confused. “I mean—I have to start eviction proceedings. I can’t not enforce the lease. But she’ll have some time to respond. If she shows up—”

  “Fingers crossed,” Leenie says, and she actually holds up her right hand, showing how she has crossed her index and middle finger. Of course, this is also what children do when telling a lie, only with their hands behind their backs.

  “I could cover her rent for the month,” Gerry says impulsively.

  “Why would you do that?” the landlord asks.

  Leenie glares at him, the same question evident in her dark eyes, but less open-ended. You’re acting like a guilty schmoe, she seems to be saying, and he is.

  “She’s not here to collect her salary. If I pay the rent for the month, it gives her a chance to come back, regroup. Come May, if she hasn’t returned—then, I guess, you’ll have to pursue eviction.”

  And Leenie will have time to go back and check the apartment thoroughly, make sure that Victoria has left nothing behind that can pose a problem. What if she kept a journal? Gerry had always proselytized for journals with his students, showing them the miniature Moleskines he was never without.

  He explains his idea to Leenie after the landlord leaves and it takes the edge off her anger.

  “She didn’t keep a journal as far as I know and I don’t think I’ll find anything, but okay. It was awfully generous of you to pay the rent.”

  Yet something in Leenie’s tone suggests she’s put out by his largesse, by his willingness to expend funds on anything that doesn’t benefit her directly. He can’t help noting how proprietary she seems about his money.

  “The thing you said about her, um, mental illness. Was that true?”

  “Yes and no. I mean, she did have episodes at school where she disappeared. She’s got a prescription for Lexapro. But almost every-one’s taking something these days.”

  “What will happen to her things?” Gerry asks. “Eventually, I mean.”

  “If she doesn’t come back to get them, the landlord will probably just put them in the street.”

  If? Is Leenie beginning to believe her own lies?

  “Now can we get back to workshopping?”

  April 15

  FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HIS LIFE, Gerry files for an extension on his taxes, which depresses him. But at least he knows t
he date for once because his accountant has emailed him the forms he needs to fill out and file electronically.

  Although Gerry has an accountant, he refuses to have a business manager, preferring to keep his own books and do as much tax prep as possible. Thiru has always twitted him about this, but long before the world at large knew about predators such as Madoff, Gerry had not wanted anyone to touch his money. After his first marriage, he never mingled money again. The marriage counselor that Sarah insisted on seeing when he asked for a divorce had proclaimed this “interesting” in a tone that suggested she disapproved. Gerry didn’t care.

  But his finances are unusually complicated this year, with the sale of the New York apartment and the purchase of another one, and his mother’s estate still pending, although that shouldn’t affect his taxes.

  His father’s estate still pending. His mother’s executor has said to look for official paperwork on that soon, but it hasn’t arrived.

  He glances at his almost empty datebook. It has long been Gerry’s practice to jot down a few details about the day’s work—words written, ideas he should pursue in revision—but there has been nothing to jot down for weeks, months. Only Leenie’s work is moving forward. Maybe he could keep a record of her progress, note what he has accomplished as her teacher and editor.

  April 30 has been circled in bright red, but there is no text to indicate why. A day so momentous that it required no entry, yet he has zero memory of what was supposed to happen then. It’s not a birthday or anniversary of note. And then he remembers—it’s the day he’s supposed to start preparing to walk again, transitioning first to a wheelchair and then to a walker. Within weeks, the walker next to his bed will finally be used as it was meant to be used, not as a combination of lance and shield. Did he really push Margot? Did he really kill her? He is in his seventh decade and he has never put his hands on a woman in anything but love and passion. Well, what happened with Margot was a kind of a passion, he supposes.

  Leenie comes in with his lunch, a tuna salad sandwich on toast and some carrots. The food she prepares has improved and he now realizes that those terrible dinners she forced on him were part of his punishment, his gaslighting.

  “It’s going to be strange,” he says, feeling that he’s being expansive, “when you’re not here any longer.”

  “Where am I going?” she asks.

  Not my concern, he thinks. “I just glanced at my calendar—I’m going to be learning how to use a wheelchair in a week. That’s why I do the exercises with the pulleys, so I’ll have the upper-body strength to get myself in and out of the chair.”

  “There’s still a lot you won’t be able to do.”

  “Of course, but eventually—I will be ready to be on my own. I think I’m going to sell this place and move back to New York.”

  Leenie sits in the dining room chair that now is always at his bedside, ready for their “classes” together. “No,” she says.

  “No?”

  “I don’t have anywhere to go. Even with continuing payments from you—”

  Wait, there are going to be continuing payments? He misses a few words in his panic over the idea of what he now realizes is this inevitable and infinite blackmail.

  “—and I don’t want to live in New York anyway. We’ll never have this much space.”

  We? WE?

  “Leenie, how do you envision this ending?”

  “Happily ever after.” She laughs at the expression on his face. “Just kidding. But, we are in this together. Remember how you had us read The Getaway at Goucher, then screened the film for us? We’re Doc and Carol, in a sense. But we can choose whether we’re the ones in the book, who are miserable together, or the ones in the film, who are sincerely on each other’s sides.”

  There is too much to absorb in what Leenie has just said. All Gerry can do is focus on the least important aspect, that this thickbodied, plain woman has just cast herself as early 1970s Ali MacGraw. True, that makes him Steve McQueen, but—no, he is not Doc. He does not rob banks. He has killed no one.

  Finally, in that moment, he realizes this to be true. He did not kill Margot. This woman did and left the body for him to discover, hoping he would blame himself.

  “If we’re Doc and Carol,” he says, “the ones in the film, not the ones in the book, then we have to trust each other. That’s the key difference, right? In the book, they can never trust each other, but in the film, they have each other’s backs. I don’t want to live out my days thinking you’re going to betray me, and I assume you feel the same. Cards on the table, Leenie. What really happened to Margot?”

  She thinks about this, her eyes darting around the room.

  “No thinking. No stories. Talk to me.”

  Her words come out fast, with the whoosh of a child who has been dying to confess. “Margot returned that night, just after midnight. You’re right, she took the security pass. She had been drinking, I’m pretty sure of that. I’m not sure why she came back. Maybe she planned to stay here. Or maybe she was going to confront you about what she knew. Whatever it was she knew. She let herself in and—” Her voice falters.

  “And?”

  “She found us in bed together.”

  The sentence makes no sense. Gerry has not had sex since last fall; he is keenly aware of that fact. A stupid regression with Margot when he went back to New York, but she took him unawares on a bench in a shadowy corner of Riverside Park. Obviously, Gerry couldn’t have been in bed with anyone and if he could, it wouldn’t have been Leenie. What is she babbling about?

  “The pill I sometimes give you, the one I said was a calcium supplement? It’s my own scrip for Lunesta. Combined with Ambien and your pain meds, it made you sleep really soundly. I once banged a pot right in front of your face to test it. Anyway, on those nights, sometimes, I would get in bed with you. I couldn’t really spoon or hold you, and I was respectful of your body, but I would lie next to you, my head on your shoulder. Just for a little while. I didn’t see the harm.”

  “And you killed Margot because she saw that?”

  “She was yelling and trying to take photos of us. I grabbed her phone to delete it. She was scary, she wasn’t going to stop. She was saying you were a pervert, that she already had evidence of how awful you were, but this was just more proof and she was going to tell the world what she knew about you and she slapped me, hard. I really did see little black shapes circling my head. Not stars, I wouldn’t call them stars—”

  “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—”