Ha ha, funny, Thiru. Gerry gives him 15 percent of a smile.
His agent peers down the staircase to the darker rooms below—Gerry’s office, Gerry’s study, Gerry’s bedroom. The intention was to make guests almost impossible, with the medium-size bedroom used as his office and the third, smallest one dedicated to the overflow of books that didn’t fit in the study or the upstairs shelves. If Margot should propose visiting—doubtful, someone like Margot would never be drawn to Baltimore—he will be able to tell her there is no proper spare bedroom, only the so-called study with its pullout sofa bed. He hopes it is understood that Margot is no longer welcome in his bed.
“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.