“I told you I couldn’t make the rent without Victoria. Besides, you have all this space here. I told Phylloh that I would be staying here until you’re healed.” She frowns. “She asked me about Victoria. I don’t like her. I think she’s nosy.”
Gerry chills at this pronouncement. Time was, he would have agreed. Now he worries something might happen to her. Curvy, innocent Phylloh, who reminds him of a poppy seed muffin, which is something one’s not supposed to say anymore, but can he at least think it? In his aging body and his aging mind, can he allow himself the thoughts and metaphors and pronouns that were permissible when he was young? Is that so much to ask?
“There’s no spare bedroom,” he says. “As you know, there’s only my office and the little study, with the sleeper sofa.”
“That’s okay. I’ll sleep in your bed. You’re not using it, after all.”
He does not like the idea of Leenie in his bed, for which he is filled with overwhelming nostalgia. One thing Sarah had taught him during their brief marriage was the importance of good sheets and linens. His bed is a basic wooden frame and he doesn’t go in for all those extra pillows that have to be removed at night—what’s the point of pillows that one removes every night?—but he misses his king-size bed. He wants to leave this bulky, ugly hospital bed and go back to his true love. Except—he also never wants to leave this hospital bed. It’s complicated.
“Is this really necessary?”
“I told you, I can’t afford the apartment without Victoria.”
“Not even for another month?”
She shakes her head.
“If you must—you must.” He can buy new sheets, when this is over. Will this ever be over? How does it end?
“Also—may I use your computer?”
This is even more disturbing than the thought of her in his bed.
“For—”
“I told you I’m working on something. I’d like your feedback when I’m done. Oh—and I told Claude to stop coming. I can do what he was doing. It’s amazing what—”
“You can learn on YouTube. I know. I know.”
April
STRANGELY BUT ALSO HAPPILY, Gerry sees less of Leenie now that she’s living downstairs. When she does come up to minister to him, she wears her own clothes instead of the polyester nurse scrubs. She tends toward tight jeans and too-short tops, in which she looks rather bulgy. She has quite a few tattoos, including a rose on the small of her back, which Gerry sees when her shirts ride up. He remembers a verse from a book of doggerel he read as a child, about a “little Hindu” whose pants and shirt don’t quite reach. Good lord, what a terrible thing in retrospect, almost as bad as Little Black Sambo. Yet Gerry still owns the tiny red Helen Bannerman version of that tale because his mother gave it to him on his birthday, with an inscription. The sight of her pretty, spiky cursive writing fills him with so much joy that he cannot bear to jettison the book. Should that go to Princeton? Maybe with a note about why he still owns it?
Leenie is standing at the foot of his bed, a sheaf of papers in her hand, clearing her throat to get his attention.
“I thought I would read my story to you, the way we did in class.”
“Okay.” What else can he say?
She clears her throat again. “It’s called ‘Mobius Dick, aka Great White Male.’”
“Hmmmmm.”
“Please hold your comments until I finish reading.”
“If I had a copy it would be easier to follow.”
“Just listen.”
It was supposed to be an honor, getting in the seminar taught by Harry Sanderson. It was not so long ago that he was the flavor of the month, anointed as the face of American literature in the earlier twenty-first century. The best-selling book he published in 2001 was at once small and large—although it centered on a weekend in the life of a man in an early midlife crisis, it also seemed to anticipate the 9/11 attacks and the way the world would be reordered by them.
There were ten girls and two boys in the class. This was not unusual. Beardsley had been coed for almost twenty-five years by this time, but it was still overwhelmingly female. On college visits, boys would lean into other boys and inform them: “The odds are good, but the goods are odd.” Yet, somehow, the two boys were the only students that Harry Sanderson seemed to care about. The two boys and the girlfriend of one—a girl named Moana who looked as if she could be the character Sanderson had described in his most successful novel.
She looks up from the page, her face expectant. Where to begin? Seriously, where to begin?
“I notice that you are choosing names that are barely different at all from what I would assume are their real-life inspirations. Harry Sanderson for Gerry Andersen. Moana for Mona—”
“Oh, her you remember.”
“You’ve jogged loose quite a few memories of that semester at Goucher. It was only seven years ago, after all.” And she was quite beautiful and also by far the best student in the class. Life is unfair, Leenie. If you haven’t figured that out when you’re almost thirty years old, that’s a problem. “Anyway, why such thinly veiled identities? Why not a memoir if you’re going to hew closely to the truth?”
“It’s a choice,” she says. “I’m trying to make a point, that it’s a very thin line between fiction and real life, that all fiction is appropriated from the lives of others, so it’s better to be transparent about it. All these labels, what do they mean? Everything is fiction and everything is true. It’s very meta.”
Gerry allows himself an inner Princess Bride moment. I do not think that word means what you think it means.
“So why does Goucher get a pass? Why call it Beardsley? Why not … Groucher?”
“Because Beardsley’s the name of the private school in Lolita.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Because you’re my Humbert Humbert and you’re going to rape Moana.”
“What?”
“It’s thematically consistent. You rape the woman whose life inspired Dream Girl. Metaphorically.”
“There was no woman whose life inspired Dream Girl and that book was almost fifteen years old by the time I taught at Goucher.”
“But isn’t there a woman with a secret you don’t want anyone to know? Weren’t you worried that was the secret that Margot was going to share with the world?”
There’s a weird faux innocence about Leenie’s question. How does she even know what Margot threatened to do? He remembers the fight with Margot, how she raked his face with her nails, the strange things she said. Victoria was here. What had she heard? What had she inferred? What had she told Leenie? He still had no idea what terrible secret Margot knew, or thought she knew, but it wouldn’t have been about Dream Girl, because there was no secret there.
“Aren’t you troubled by giving a Chinese American girl a name from a Disney film about a Hawaiian girl?”
“Well, later I’m going to get into how Harry, like most men of his generation, fetishized Asian women. There’s going to be a lot of wordplay with Moana and ‘moan.’”
Of course there is.
“Anyway, what do you think?”
He decides to risk honesty, of a sort. “It hasn’t gotten started.”
“What do you mean?”
“Put me, the reader, in the classroom. Show me the characters, let them define themselves by action and dialogue. This sounds like a dutiful summary. You’re tapping on the mike, clearing your throat. You literally cleared your throat before reading. Start, Leenie.”