Victoria says: “I can’t imagine anything I’ve done, but I don’t care if she doesn’t want to talk to me. She’s so chatty and it’s all so banal. I just want to pick up the packages and move on. If I didn’t have to check for packages, I would take the elevator from the garage straight to the apartment, bypass the front desk entirely.”
Sometimes he feels as if Victoria is trying on his personality, his attitudes. They do not suit her. In this world where people are quick to speak of entitlement and privilege, some nuances have been lost, it seems to Gerry. Yes, there are privileges in being white, male, and moneyed, and he supposes one should be alert to those birthright perks. He certainly tries to be. But there are privileges that one earns through accomplishment and sheer longevity. Victoria has no right to be haughty about another person being “chatty” and “banal.” Has she ever listened to herself? Besides, Gerry’s six decades of life trump Victoria’s two and change.
But if he said those exact words out loud, she would take great offense. She might even complain that the use of the forty-fifth president’s name as a verb triggered her. Triggered. A sloppy term, to Gerry’s way of thinking. A trigger is something someone deliberately pulls and it leads to a very specific sequence of events. If one is triggered, then one is the weapon or the snare, no? The recurrence of painful memories is simply day-to-day life. It’s nothing at all like firing a gun.
He does his upper-body exercises. At least his body seems to respond to stimulation, even if his mind does not. He is getting stronger above the waist, but sitting is still terribly painful and there is nothing to be done for that. Maybe he should cut back on his medication, although Aileen is phlegmatically determined that he take the full dosage.
The phone rings with the staccato double-buzz that indicates the front desk is calling. He’s so bored he picks it up.
“She’s back,” says Phylloh. She is frosty.
“Who?”
“Your wife.”
“Wife?” Lucy? Gretchen? Sarah? He’s so desperate for stimulation he’d be happy to see any of them. Even Gretchen.
“The one who was here in February.”
Keeping careful track of my visitors, are you, Phylloh?
“Oh. She was never my wife.”
“Well, she’s here.”
“I guess you can send her up.”
“I already did. She said you were expecting her.”
He isn’t. Then again, Margot’s talent is for the unexpected. Exciting in the early, heady days of dating, especially when applied to sex. Extremely tedious as life goes on.
“Gerry,” she says, sweeping in, “you are going to have to find me a place to stay.”
She is wearing a voluminous cape. No—a coat with a cape-like attachment. Dark and velvety. Not unlike what the woman in the window wore that night, but if at night all cats are gray, then all coats are black.
“Why?”
“Because you sold the apartment, silly.”
“Months ago, yes. Besides, what about your place? Don’t you still have that studio in Chelsea?”
“The tenant, the subletter, is refusing to leave. Can you believe it?”
Yes, he can. He also can believe that there is no tenant, that Margot no longer has her studio apartment in Chelsea, that she was, in fact, the subletter.
“Surely you have some legal standing?”
“Thiru thinks it will be okay when the lease is up—that’s what I get for doing things according to Hoyle.”
The quaint old saying, something that has no meaning in today’s world, reminds Gerry of why he was charmed by Margot once upon a time. Ditzy as she can be, she is clever and well-read; he never had to explain his references. It had not been a mistake to take up with her. His only mistake was thinking that he would have any more luck than his predecessors when it came time to leave her. Clearly, foisting her off on Thiru isn’t working, not yet. Thiru is much smarter about women than Gerry. Despite or maybe because of having logged one more marriage.
“Margot, I’m going to have to tell you a hard truth. I cannot provide for you and, furthermore, I am under no obligation to provide for you. What we had was lovely. But it’s over. It’s been over for quite some time, as we both know. I thought you understood that when I came down to Baltimore and put my apartment on the market six months ago.”
“I assumed you would be moving back.”
“So did I.” He still does, just not for a year or two. New York is a much better place to grow old than Baltimore, he is sure of that now. Oh why had he sold the apartment up there? He is never going to be able to buy anything as nice as he had. New York seems determined to shed itself of everything but billionaires and those old-timers who had the good luck to buy and hold property when it was cheap.
“What am I supposed to do? Where am I supposed to go?”
He has the strangest feeling of déjà vu or, as dreamy Dr. Bevington described it, a sequencing error. He realizes that she’s basically playing the final scene of Gone with the Wind. She swept in here like Scarlett visiting Rhett in jail, and now she’s jumped to the end of the story. He can’t say he doesn’t give a damn; he’s not that cold.
But he doesn’t give a damn.
“Margot, I’m sure there’s someone who can help you. Right now, I’m not that person. Obviously, I’m not in the position to help anyone.”
Her eyes narrow. “You always were a selfish bastard. Everyone thinks you’re so good. You think you’re good. But you’re a terrible person, Gerry. Nothing’s worse than a bad person who thinks he’s good.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way, but then—all the better that we cease contact.”
“I know things about you. Things you wouldn’t want me to tell people.” Her voice is rising. There’s no doubt that Victoria, at work in his office downstairs, can hear the tone, if not the actual words. “You think your secrets won’t catch up with you, but some have. I could make life very difficult for you, Gerry.”
This threat of exposure, the penny-ante blackmail essence of it all—hollow as it is, Gerry is enraged, which is probably what Margot is counting on. Gerry has always had a horror of being talked about. He has been lucky to have the kind of career in which his biography is of little interest, despite the three marriages. He never lied about himself, but he downplayed the more extreme aspects. Only child of a salesman and a housewife, parents divorced when he was young, father remarried and had a second family. No one needed to know that the two families had overlapped for almost ten years. He’s lucky that no one ever tried to find Gerald Andersen Sr. when he was alive. Gerald Senior would have been happy to talk, talk, talk to anyone who expressed interest.
“If you have stories to tell, Margot, tell them. Better yet, write them down for that memoir you’re always threatening to write. Oh, wait, that’s the one thing you can’t do, create. You’ve had to settle for fucking the men who can.”
He knows his words are cruel, that he has used his intimate knowledge of Margot to locate her single greatest insecurity and press hard on it. Still, he is not prepared when she slaps him and then, for good measure, scrapes her fingernails across his cheek, drawing blood.
He yelps, more in shock than pain. No one has ever touched him in this way, no one. And he has never longed to put his hands on a woman, but he does now. He pushes her, hard, and when she comes back at him, he instinctively reaches for the heretofore useless walker by his bed and deploys it as a combination shield–jousting pole. Some ludicrous part of his mind triumphantly dredges up a fact: Jousting is the official sport of Maryland! Not lacrosse, as many people assume, but jousting.
On his third thrust, he connects and sends Margot flying. She lands hard on the floor; her purse flies open, the contents scatter. She still carries a healthy supply of condoms, Gerry sees. It’s a paradox worth noting that the spontaneous courtesan has to be prepared.