Dream Girl

Aileen leaves her chair and plops herself on his bed, which he finds odd, un-nurse-like, but he doesn’t feel he should protest. Still, her weight causes the mattress to shift, which gives him some discomfort in his braced right leg. First do no harm, Aileen. That’s for doctors, but nurses should strive for it, too.

“If someone can make you believe a dead Margot is calling you from beyond the grave, maybe that would be enough to send you around the bend.”

“But she didn’t say she was Margot. And what’s the point in sending me ‘around the bend’?”

“Wasn’t that the point of the whole campaign? These mysterious phone calls that no one else heard, the mysterious ghost you thought you saw, although I still don’t know how that would be possible.”

It would be possible if Margot stole his badge and keys the first time she visited. Everything is falling into place. The relief he feels is almost like, like, like—oh, never mind, Gerry hates similes anyway. He’s not losing his mind. He thinks not of Gaslight, but of Bette Davis in Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte, watching the laughing conspiratorial lovers waltz and talk, waltz and talk on the verandah below her, delighting in how they turned the poor woman’s mind against her. How his mother had loved that movie, which seemed to air every three months on Picture for a Sunday Afternoon. But between that film and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, young Gerry had been terrified of Bette Davis.

“Margot kept suggesting she had something on me. But it wasn’t Margot’s voice on the phone. Obviously.”

Aileen nods, taps her temple. “As I said, she has a partner. Probably someone right here in Baltimore—that’s the only way to explain that one call that came from a local number.”

“Whom could Margot possibly know in Baltimore? Why would someone else have her phone? And if someone does—they must suspect that something has happened to Margot. They want something, but what?”

“Money,” Aileen says. “Money or love. Isn’t that the reason for most things people do? We can live without one, but not without both.”

“Money is important only insofar as it provides for our basic needs and safety. Relative to being fed and having a roof over one’s head, love is a luxury.”

“Then why aren’t there more good movies about people trying to be fed and putting a roof over their heads?”

“Don’t be ridic—” He decides to soften his critique. “There are such movies. And books. There are great stories about man versus the elements, intent only on his survival.”

“Like what?”

“Well—” Gerry finds himself struggling. He is sure that he used to give a lecture on this very topic and yet all he can think of right now is The Old Man and the Sea, a novel he loathes. “Actually”—wait, men are not supposed to say actually anymore—“there are many, trust me. But you’re right, it wouldn’t apply here. Margot may have wanted my love, but even Margot had to realize we were done. So, fine, money. Let’s accept your theory that she and her partner want money. Do you think the partner’s desire for money would trump any concern about Margot’s well-being, her possible murder?”

“People overlook a lot,” Aileen says, “when they’re greedy.”

Gerry has to concede this. Greed, lust, desire—they do lead a person to rationalize.

“Okay, but how was—how is—this elaborate prank supposed to shake money loose?”

“Margot said she knew something about you, right? Her partner would know whatever it is. The partner wanted you to recognize Margot’s number, wants you to panic. They want you to see through the trick this time.”

“They?”

“Well, she, now. The bill’s going to come due, mark my words.”

And the irony, Gerry realizes, is that now he does have something to hide, whereas he didn’t before.

“What do we do?”

“Nothing. Remember your own advice—inaction is better than action. We do nothing, we wait. She’ll make another move.”

He shakes his head. He can’t put his finger on it, but the logic of the story isn’t tracking. Something is wrong. Margot was too sophisticated to think that unearthing a woman who said Dream Girl was her life story would matter to him. He had weathered that attempt to scandalize him already, when Shannon Little published her anemic little book. Oh, such a claim might warrant a new flurry of attention, but unless someone could prove his book had been plagiarized from another text, or stolen from a student’s manuscript—no, no one would care and Margot, literary hanger-on that she was, would have been shrewd enough to know that. Besides, he hadn’t done those things. All he had ever done was refuse to tell the world “who” the dream girl was. Magicians are allowed to safeguard their tricks; why aren’t novelists?

“What do you think happens next?” he asks Aileen. “If you’re right—if there is someone out there in whom Margot confided, someone who has ended up with Margot’s phone and has reason to believe I know something about her disappearance—what’s her next move?”

She throws up her hands. “Who knows?”

“So you’re a pantser, not a plotter?”

“What?”

“Never mind.”





2001




“ONE LAST QUESTION? And then Mr. Andersen will be happy to sign some books.”

Gerry was in an independent bookstore in Bexley, Ohio. He was pretty sure he was in Bexley, Ohio. The days had run together long ago. This was the last stop of what felt like a never-ending tour and he hoped this was truly the last question he would answer for a while. If someone told him tonight that he would never have to speak about himself or Dream Girl ever again, he would be a happy man.

“Gentleman in the back?” the store’s manager said.

“You don’t seem to like men very much,” the gentleman said. And Gerald Arnold Andersen Jr. found himself looking at Gerald Arnold Andersen Sr. for the first time in almost twenty years, since his father had insisted on showing up at his college graduation in Princeton. (“I paid for some of it,” he said, which was not untrue, but his contributions were fitful and unreliable.) From that day on, Gerry had refused to have any relationship with his father. In interviews, he went out of his way to make it clear that he had been raised by a single mother, that his father was not in the picture at all. He omitted any mention of his father’s bigamy out of fealty to his mother.

“My characters are my characters,” he said. “I think it’s somewhat naive, as a reader, to talk about whether writers ‘like’ their characters. That’s not the point of what I’m doing. But perhaps I’m not the writer for you. I have you pegged as more of a MacDonald guy.”

There had, in fact, been MacDonald novels in the house when Gerry was young and he credited his father’s detective stories with ushering him over the threshold into the world of adult books. His memories of MacDonald were nothing but fond. But he was thrown off by his father’s appearance and his words came out brackish, belittling. He had breached the basic etiquette of a book tour, in which the author must always be kind, no matter how ridiculous the question.

And no matter if it was asked by your wastrel father, who, go figure, had shown up as Gerry was finishing his victory lap. Ten weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and counting, a film option, and now his publisher was going to re-release his three previous novels in handsome new editions with covers in the style of Dream Girl.

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