“I think I’ll have to tell my accountant, though,” he said. “So they can calculate the taxes. That’s how it’s always worked with my assistants. There’s withholding so they don’t end up having a big tax bill at year’s end.”
“You know what? Once we calculate the amount for this weekend, just write on the check ‘Supplies.’ So it looks as if you’re reimbursing me for something I paid out of pocket.”
“Ooookay,” he says.
Gerry doesn’t want to be a snob, but it seems to him that Aileen speaks differently since what he has decided to think of as the accident. Of course it was an accident. Gerry has never raised his hands to anyone, except in consensual, mildly kinky moments. Sarah had liked a little light spanking. It was her idea and he had to be persuaded. He had felt mildly ridiculous. He doesn’t like women with daddy issues. He has his own daddy issues and he prefers to keep them out of the bedroom.
“What are we doing, Aileen?” he asks.
“Buying time,” Aileen says. “Trying to figure out exactly what happened. Maybe in a day or two you’ll remember and we can take it from there.”
Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so. Gerry wants to do the right thing and he can’t help believing, childlike, that there is a way out of this dilemma that he just hasn’t been able to envision yet. He simply cannot believe he killed Margot, not even if she attacked him while he was in an Ambien haze. Buying time—yes, that’s all they’re doing. Affording themselves the time to figure out the best way to proceed.
“I wonder if I will ever remember,” he says.
“It must have been a horrible shock, something that didn’t even register as a dream,” Aileen says. “That woman sneaking back in here and doing God knows what as you slept. It was only natural to protect yourself. The letter opener was right next to you, as it usually is. What else could you do?”
“If only I had the presence of mind to call for you.” Had he been terrified of making a scene even while in a fugue state? Luke had always said that decorum was Gerry’s fatal flaw, that it would be his failure to ask for what he wanted that would kill him, in the end. You wouldn’t ask for a glass of water in the desert. Yet it was Luke, who never had any problem demanding what he wanted, who had been dead by the age of thirty-one.
“I can’t believe you didn’t hear anything,” he says, then feels guilty for implicitly reprimanding the woman who is now trying to save him.
“I am a sound sleeper,” she says, frowning, as if angry at herself, which makes Gerry feel even worse. This isn’t Aileen’s fault. Margot was crazy. That threat she made—he doesn’t even know what she was talking about. Gerry has an exceptionally clear conscience for a man in his seventh decade. He has hurt some people, yes, who hasn’t? But he did right by his wives; his fortune would be threefold what it is if he had not. Some of the things he has done would not pass muster today, but in the times that he did them they were socially acceptable.
Had a clear conscience. He had a clear conscience. Now he has a hole in the center of his memory, a lost sequence of events in which he did something horrible, yet he has not even a whisper of recollection. Must he feel guilty for that?
And what did Margot think she knew about him? Had her threats not been so empty, after all? What if she had told someone else whatever she thinks she knows?
Thought.
The service bell, the one on the lower level, rings. “Delivery!” Aileen says. He has never seen her so animated. She goes downstairs and there is the sound of something large-ish being moved around. “Try here,” she instructs someone, who mumbles back in a low, masculine voice. “I know it’s an odd place for a freezer,” Aileen replies. “It’s temporary. My father decided to buy an entire cow on the Internet, lord help him. He read something about climate change and thought ordering a side of beef from a small farmer would reduce his carbon footprint. He thought a side was like, I don’t know, four steaks and some ribs.”
What is going on? Better not to know.
He dozes, only to wake later to another ring of the bell. Aileen comes up and gives him an afternoon dose of Ambien, which he takes without protest. He drifts in and out of sleep, aware of a loud buzzing sound, which reminds him of something. And now the leg. Aileen comes in with his dinner, more pills. She seems so much more energetic, flush with purpose. Perhaps babysitting a sixty-one-year-old man has not been the most stimulating of activities. She needed actual problems to solve.
“Isn’t it amazing,” she says, “what you can find on YouTube. They have a how-to video for everything.”
2017
HIS MOTHER ASKED to go to Al Pacino Pizza after the meeting with the neurologist and how could he say no? He certainly didn’t want to remind her that the Al Pacino’s they had loved had been over at Belvedere Square and that they had stopped going there years ago because the quality declined, and then it closed. For now, when possible, he was trying to avoid reminding his mother at any lapse of her memory.
It was a dull November day. Would Gerry write it that way, in a novel? Or was the weather too on the nose? What kind of weather would work for a scene in which a mother and son eat pizza together after receiving her death sentence?
“I’ll have the Monzase,” she said. “That was always my favorite.”
She was right about that, at least, but her syntax made him want to cry. Last week, she’d had a brief moment of confusion in which she thought he was his father, which had fucked with his head on so many levels. For one thing, he never wanted to be confused with Gerald Andersen Sr. Worse still, he did not want his mother, in her confusion, to say urgently: “I still love you, Gerald, and I’m so glad you realized you love me, too. But what will Gerry do when he finds out?” His father had been dead for sixteen years and his mother hadn’t seen him for almost forty years.
But today had been a good day. It would not be the last good day, the doctor had said. Soon, however, the bad days would outnumber the good. They needed to act quickly, have a plan in place for when she could no longer care for herself. They did not have the luxury of a “normal” meal. There was no more normal.
He plunged in.
“Mom—money is no object, not for me. I can afford to give you the best, not one of those grim, overlit places. More like a hotel than—well, like a five-star hotel.”
“I want to stay in my house, Gerry, until it’s time for hospice. You heard the doctors. It’s not as if it’s going to be a long time.”
“But the quality of your life—they said in a relatively short time—”
“I know, I’ll need care. But, Gerry, all I want is to stay in our house for as long as possible. Can’t you move down here? As you said, it’s a relatively short time.”
Probably shorter than his mother realized. Gerry had to give her credit. Eleanor Andersen didn’t settle for ordinary Alzheimer’s, oh no, she had to go Creutzfeldt-Jakob.
He supposed he should feel lucky, having only her to care for. Other people his age complained of being the sandwich generation, pressed on either side, scorched paninis crushed by such differing demands. But, although he had been looking after his mother in his own way since he was barely a teenager, he felt he would be more prepared to step up here if he had been a parent at some point. He was missing a basic skill set. He could not imagine caring for his mother’s physical needs, which meant a nurse, 24/7. Nurses. The house on Berwick Road would feel suffocatingly small with even one more person there.
“You know the doctor who received a Nobel for some of the initial research into this, the proteins—he had a Maryland connection, I think. But then he was arrested for child sexual abuse. He died in Norway.”