Auntie Mame had declared, Life is a banquet and most poor sons of bitches are starving to death. Gerald Andersen Sr. lived by a similar motto: Life is a buffet; take what you want, skip what you don’t, stick your head under the sneeze guard if necessary.
But Gerry was skeptical from a very young age of what he called buffet culture, a problem that became more pronounced with each technical innovation. Watch what you want when you want to watch it! And music, don’t get him started on music. Like most men of his generation, he had a lovingly gathered collection of albums and he respected the fact that the album was a whole, not a series of singles; that the artist had dictated the order. The occasional duds on, say, Pete Townshend’s first solo album were part of the experience. The CD had seemed ominous enough, with its ability to skip songs. Then came shuffle and now people had their own “stations” on streaming services. Everyone’s so worried about political bubbles, but what about art bubbles? Was it only a matter of time before museums created virtual reality versions of themselves, in which visitors were allowed to curate—hideous word, but at least correct in this instance—the experience they desired? No, no Motherwell for me, show me only the Rothkos.
Then they would come for the books, allowing readers to reorganize the chapters, the sentences. The crime novelist Elmore Leonard, whom Gerry respected about as much as he could respect any genre writer, had famously said to cut out the parts that readers skip. Gerry hated that glib aphorism. If anything, writers should be committed to putting in more passages that readers were likely to skip. More details about the whaling industry in Moby-Dick, please! In a world that was speeding up, novelists were obligated to make people slow down.
But the only thing people today want to slow down for is food. Artisanal this and artisanal that. It’s fuel. Who cares where your potato came from?
“Gerry, the woman has fourteen followers,” Thiru said. “Ignore her for now.”
“She’s using an image from the cover of my book as her avatar. Isn’t that an infringement of the artist’s copyright?”
“Possibly. But attention to a troll is like, like—well, it’s what they want. They blossom, they get bigger with attention. Your account is verified. When fake Gerald Andersens sprout, we do go after them, sometimes. But usually the best course of action is to ignore. This is an unknown person pretending to be a fictional person.”
A fictional person who has been writing me and calling me, claiming to be a real person who inspired the fictional person when no such person exists. A person who says I have an unsightly penis. It is not an unsightly penis. It is simply uncircumcised, something that would be known by almost forty women.
Who is Gerry kidding? He knows the exact number, which is thirty-seven. He was a late bloomer, a truly late bloomer, in part because of his early marriage. He had more partners in his forties than he did in his twenties and thirties combined. But not a single woman—not a wife, not a girlfriend, not even Margot—had ever commented unfavorably on his penis, even in passing, even if it was their first of that variety. Circumcision was a false aesthetic, like fake breasts, that had somehow become the norm. He gave his parents credit for very few things, but Gerry was proud of them for resisting circumcision at a time when almost all U.S. boys went through the procedure. That said, he never doubted it was his father’s usual narcissism at work: My son has to look like me.
Joke’s on you, Dad. While Gerry has his father’s coloring and blond hair, his father was a small, narrow-shouldered man. When things were at the very worst between him and Gerry’s mother, in the years when he refused to make child support payments, Gerald Senior had once suggested that Gerry wasn’t even his son. “How I wish that were so,” Gerry Junior said to his father, hoping they would be the last words he ever spoke to him. And they almost were.
Done with Thiru, Gerry summons his assistant back. “How did you find this Twitter account?”
“She tagged you.”
“What?”
“She used your handle in her tweet, so it was in your mentions. You don’t get tagged a lot. When you—I—post poems or the sentences from books you love, there are retweets and a lot of replies. But it’s unusual for someone to tag you in an original tweet.”
“Did anyone notice?”
“She received”—Victoria checks her phone—“seven likes and no replies. Whoa!”
“What?”
“Just like that, it’s unavailable. It disappeared while I was looking at it. I should have grabbed a screenshot.”
She showed him the phone.
“What do you mean? She—‘she’—is still there.”
“The account is there, but the tweet is gone. I wonder what happened? Did your agent complain after all, do you think?”
“No, he was adamant that we should ignore her. Victoria—is there any way we can find out who this is?”
“I don’t know. Maybe some kind of IT person knows how to do it. But I wouldn’t worry about it. You gotta remember—you’re seeing this, but most people aren’t. And now it’s gone.”
“But if there’s a Twitter account, that could be connected to the letter and the phone calls.”
Victoria nods politely. Has Aileen briefed her? Does she also believe the calls are a figment of his drug-assisted imagination? It’s true, the caller ID once again showed no evidence of a call. And the next call, the one in which no one spoke, turned out to be a wrong number. He had asked Aileen to call back and the person, an elderly woman, had been quite huffy.
Finally, finally, the day ends with no more penis drama. Gerry has begun to think of the two hours between Victoria’s departure and Aileen’s arrival as his best hours. Even when the girls (women, sorry) are quiet, he feels their presence. To be alone is at once a luxury and a poverty. He craves it, he needs it, but he cannot afford it for more than a few hours right now. Victoria still comes and goes during her shift, but she feels more present these days, hovering.
And while Aileen appears to be avoiding him as much as possible—her work as a night nurse seems to have been chosen because it allows for quite a bit of napping time—he can feel her in the apartment, imagines he can hear her, wheezing like an old dog in her sleep.
The days are getting slightly longer, the sun setting at about six. An orange light suffuses the apartment, the kind of sunset that tempts a writer to do his worst work. Sunsets are for painters or photographers; writers should leave them be. Elmore Leonard also told writers never to begin with the weather, yet Dream Girl begins with the weather—
The phone.
He lets it ring three times before he picks up.
“Gerry? I’m so sorry.”
“You have to stop this stupid prank—”
“I never should have said that. About—you know. I got a little drunk last night. I miss you so.”
“I have your number on caller ID.” He doesn’t, but it will be on the other phones; he will tell Aileen to look for it the second she arrives.
“I can’t wait to see you, Gerry. It’s been far too long. I have such a wonderful idea. I shouldn’t say anything, but—well, I’ve figured out how you can repay me.”
“Repay you?”
“For my story. My lawyer said I could sue you for half of everything you’ve made since Dream Girl was published, but I don’t want to do anything that contentious. Also it sounded so tedious—forensic accounting, blah, blah, blah, and it’s really hard to separate Dream Girl from your net worth because it’s the foundation of your net worth, you know? I mean, if you’re worth ten million dollars, one could argue that I deserve five—”
“YOU DON’T EXIST. Even if you did—”
“Oh, I exist, Gerry. I exist. And I’ll see you very soon.” With that, she’s gone.
When Aileen comes to work, he asks her to check the caller ID.
“Someone did call,” she reports from the kitchen. “At six thirty-seven.”
“Is there a name?”
“Wipper.”
“What?”
“Wipper.”
“WHAT?”
“WIPPER.” She writes it down for him. W-Y-P-R.
“That’s the local NPR station.”
“Is it?”
“Bring me the number.”