His mother looked at him strangely. He deserved that look. But what was there to say? Only—yes. He had to say yes. He could put it off for a while, but he would have to move to Baltimore and help care for her. And once she was in hospice, he would have to stay to the truly bitter end.
He had no desire to do this and he hated himself for his reluctance. Baltimore was a kind of death for him now. It didn’t matter that he had conceived and written the book that had changed his life here. Whenever he returned, he felt as if he were touring the history of his failures. Baltimore had tried to make Gerry small.
“Whatever you need, Mom.” He owed her.
“Thank you, Gerry.”
“Do you know why this place is called Al Pacino’s?” he asked. “All the years we’ve been coming here, I never thought to ask. And there used to be, what—three or four in the city and now there’s only the one.”
“Now there’s only the one,” his mother echoed.
Their food arrived. Gerry realized his pizza, which had red onions and mushrooms, was named the Golden Arm, in honor of Johnny Unitas’s Baltimore restaurant, which had closed more than twenty years ago.
March 18
BY THE TIME Victoria returns on Monday, it feels as if the world has righted itself. The buzzing noise has stopped, everything in the apartment is back in order, although the new freezer remains outside the laundry room. Victoria is an incurious person, but even she has to wonder at the sudden appearance of a small freezer.
“I hear you did a little Ambien shopping?” Victoria says, after giving him a dutiful report on her visit to Princeton’s special collections, perhaps one of the most tedious accounts he has ever heard. She may be a reader, but she has no idea how to tell the simplest story, what details to include, which to jettison. So she tells everything in straight chronological order.
“What?”
“Aileen left me a note, explaining that you, um, got a little weird and ordered an entire cow on the Internet, that she had to scramble to get a freezer when it arrived.”
“Oh, yes. I had a … bad night last week. I probably took a little more Ambien than I should.”
A bad night. That’s true, at least.
“But no more, uh, calls or incidents?”
The question jolts him. He realizes he has stopped thinking about the mysteries that were torturing him—the calls, the apparition. Was Margot his lady in black? It would have been wildly out of character for her. Margot, for all her faults, is not passive-aggressive. She always fought with a direct and terrifying viciousness. Margot is the type of person who figures out what will hurt a person the most and then uses that information to her advantage. She plunges the knife in face-to-face, straight to the heart.
Plunges.
Was, he reminds himself. Used. She had mocked him for being a “mama’s boy,” dismissed him as bourgeoise, unworthy of his own money. You don’t know how to live, Gerry, she had said more than once. They were an ant-and-grasshopper couple. A time for work and a time for play had been the moral of that Aesop fable. And while some modern educators had tried to gentle the story, with the ant taking pity on the grasshopper, in the original the ant had turned his back and allowed the grasshopper to die.
“No,” he says. “Life has been, if anything, too real.” Victoria gives him an odd look and he amends: “I mean tedious and boring. What’s more real than a life of tedium and boredom?”
“You’re not going to be immobilized much longer,” she says. “That’s something to look forward to.”
“Yippee.” He has tried for a light tone, something funny and self-deprecating, but he sounds self-pitying to his own ears. He watches Victoria gather her things to head downstairs to the study where she works, desperate to give her some Bluebeardesque order about the freezer, but, of course, the order is Bluebeard’s undoing. Well, it’s the undoing of his wives, except the last one. Gerry will have to assume that Victoria, a vegetarian, has no interest in a freezer full of what she believes to be beef. Wasn’t it a deer in Aileen’s original story? Didn’t she tell at least one freezer company that she had hit a deer with her car? Or maybe that was whoever sold her the cordless saw. Does it matter if she told different stories to different vendors?
Oh God—his life is completely dependent on the ingenuity and attention to detail of someone whose most beloved narratives are so-called reality television. But what other choice does he have?
“It is nice,” Victoria says, “that you’re going to donate the food to a local soup kitchen. I mean, there’s no way you could eat it all. You seldom eat beef, except for Chinese carryout and that flank steak salad.”
“Someone should benefit from my, um, temporary insanity.”
“And to give them the freezer, too—but, then, I guess you won’t need it once the meat is gone.” A tiny pause. “I should show you this chart, about how various meats affect the environment. I don’t expect everyone to follow a vegetarian diet, but different proteins have different impacts on the planet. Some of us are playing for larger stakes than others.”
He does not appreciate Victoria’s tone, or her dig at his age. He considers chiding her for her cheekiness, but he is suddenly anxious to go online via his phone and check his credit card bill. This is one area of his life where Gerry has embraced technology. He does not pay his bills online, but he likes being able to monitor his credit card accounts and his various balances.
He had given Aileen his Amex, the “business” card, and the transactions from last week have already posted. A cordless reciprocating saw from Home Depot. Multiple items from a kitchen supply shop. The inn in Princeton—right, Victoria has her own card linked to the account. How did a vegetarian spend that much on room service? She must have ordered an entire bottle of wine. Here is the invoice for a side of beef from a farm in New Windsor, Maryland, delivered to—he doesn’t recognize the street. Is it Aileen’s home? He’s not sure he approves of this. Why would Gerry enter Aileen’s address in an Ambien haze, when he doesn’t even know it?
Ah well. It’s her story. Let her sweat the details.
Aileen arrives that evening with a large insulated bag from Whole Foods, which appears to be empty, given the way it dangles from her wrist. When she says goodbye in the morning, it is slung over her shoulder, bulging with whatever has been stored inside.
Gerry takes his Ambien and asks no questions.
1986
“GERRY, THERE’S BEEN A COMPLAINT.”
The head of the Writing Sems looked sheepish, yet jolly. Still, his words hit Gerry hard. He was not used to being in trouble. He never got in trouble. He led an exemplary life. Just this week, he bought a case of wine at Eddie’s, for a party he and Lucy were planning, and when he got home, he realized he had been charged for one bottle, not twelve. He had called the store and made sure they charged his credit card for what was owed. It wasn’t expensive wine, not even eight dollars a bottle, but it was the principle of the thing.
“Gerry?”
“I don’t know what to say. From a student?” He had flunked a student last semester, which was rare. But the student had failed to do her work and received multiple warnings, even an extension into this semester. After assuring him she would submit her outstanding assignments, she called and said the registrar had said it was fine to grant her another extension. He had refused and given her an F, a rarity at Hopkins these days.
“Your colleague, Shannon Little.”
“Oh.”
“She says you, um, approached her and that you commenced a relationship.”