Unexpectedly, she does. She comes up later that evening with more pages and they are better. Still not good, no, never good, but she is listening, trying. She’s not even thirty. At her age, Gerry wasn’t the writer he would become by age forty. He was better than this, he was better than this at age eighteen, but he wasn’t the writer he would become. As he listens to Leenie’s new pages, he finds in himself the man he was in his twenties, a serious and thoughtful reader, a man who had aspired to nothing more than a tenured position in a good writing program, a little house, sabbaticals. A like-minded partner.
Of all the women in his life, he misses Lucy the most. It had taken real effort to screw that up. If only the Hartwell juror had been more of a prude; but Lucy’s instincts for willing co-conspirators were good, too good. In that brief, giddy time when they brought other women into their bed, he had felt as if he had been initiated into a vampiric cult. Sleeping with Shannon Little, outside Lucy’s sight, had been the only way to break the spell, break the marriage. Lucy was making him bad and he was determined to be good. It was all he had ever wanted.
But the best thing about Lucy was that she had been there in the beginning, when his hopes were modest. He remembers the nights in the funny little duplex on Schenley Road, drinking cheap wine from the three-dollar bin at Trinacria. Whatever happened to Lucy? He thinks she’s a teacher somewhere, publishing in the better journals, more poetry than fiction these days. Gerry has always had a soft envy for poets and their economy with words.
He marks up Leenie’s pages and recommends books to read—Francine Prose’s Blue Angel, Richard Russo’s Straight Man, John Irving’s The Water-Method Man. He doesn’t like academic satires, but if she’s going to attempt this, she might as well read the best. She is touchingly earnest about his advice. It occurs to him that this is all she wanted, after all, the singular focus of the writer-teacher by whom she felt ignored all those years ago. The silly campaign she and Victoria cooked up was nothing more than a bid for attention. She now has an exclusive seminar. He almost enjoys it. This, more than anything in months, has engaged him, made him feel mentally astute again. I’m not dead yet! I don’t want to go on the cart. He feels strangely good.
Until he remembers that two women are dead.
April
IT’S SAD, how long it takes for anyone to inquire after Victoria, and when it finally happens, it’s her landlord. Leenie has told Gerry that Victoria has parents, but she’s not particularly close to them, and it’s been over a year since she had a boyfriend. Before disposing of Victoria’s phone, Leenie signed her up for a dating app and cast a wide net, “swiping right” on the most unsavory types possible, setting up a date with one at a Baltimore bar a week after Victoria was well past the point of dating anyone. If he showed, he was stood up, but let him prove that if the moment ever comes.
Two days later, Leenie packed a bag with Victoria’s clothes and drove to the airport. She left the clothes in various donation boxes in the city, tossed the suitcase in a dumpster, parked in long-term parking, dropped the keys in a sewer, and returned to the city via light rail. No one seemed to notice Victoria had shuffled off this mortal coil until the rent was overdue. For it turned out that Leenie had never paid her share to Victoria in March, something she had neglected to mention to Gerry.
Gerry and Leenie have only the two minutes it takes for the landlord to get past Phylloh and ascend in the elevator to review their agreed-upon story. Yes, Victoria and Leenie were roommates. Yes, Gerry was aware of that. But does the landlord know that? Even if he doesn’t, it strikes Gerry as a bad idea to omit this information. Such a needless, heedless lie could come back to haunt them.
“Let me take care of it,” Leenie says with what Gerry feels is unearned confidence. So far, Leenie’s off-the-cuff improvisations have been a little too “exit pursued by bear” for him, only it’s more like “exit in insulated freezer bags, body part by body part.”
The landlord is a pale white bald man who looks as if he never stops sweating, no matter the weather. The seams of his blue oxford cloth shirt are damp, and there’s a sheen on his forehead, which he mops with a handkerchief, almost as if he had climbed the twenty-four flights to the apartment.
“I’m sorry to bother you, but I’m worried. Victoria was one of the most responsible tenants I ever had, but she paid only part of the rent in March and now she’s missing. I went by the apartment when she didn’t answer my calls and it seems as if she hasn’t been there for quite some time.”
“I know,” Leenie says. “I was her roommate until I moved in here to provide full-time care for Mr. Andersen.”
“You weren’t on the lease.”
“I had lost a job and Victoria was kind enough to take me in.” Gerry notes that Leenie is avoiding timelines. Good. “We’ve known each other forever. She did this, even back in college. Disappeared at times. She—well, I don’t want to violate her privacy, but sometimes she thinks she knows better than her doctors what she needs. She always comes back, she’s always fine.”
“Have you called her parents?”
Leenie sighs. “Her parents are the last people she would turn to when she’s like this. I didn’t know what to do. And I didn’t know what to tell Mr. Gerry”—she turns to him—“I’m sorry, I kept hoping she would show up and you would be okay with her continuing in this job again. There’s so much stigma around mental illness. That’s why I told you she had a personal emergency. It’s true, if you think about it.”
It is true and Gerry doesn’t want to think about it. Being bashed in the head with the Hartwell Prize is a very real personal emergency.
The landlord looks concerned, but also confused. “I mean—I have to start eviction proceedings. I can’t not enforce the lease. But she’ll have some time to respond. If she shows up—”
“Fingers crossed,” Leenie says, and she actually holds up her right hand, showing how she has crossed her index and middle finger. Of course, this is also what children do when telling a lie, only with their hands behind their backs.
“I could cover her rent for the month,” Gerry says impulsively.
“Why would you do that?” the landlord asks.
Leenie glares at him, the same question evident in her dark eyes, but less open-ended. You’re acting like a guilty schmoe, she seems to be saying, and he is.
“She’s not here to collect her salary. If I pay the rent for the month, it gives her a chance to come back, regroup. Come May, if she hasn’t returned—then, I guess, you’ll have to pursue eviction.”
And Leenie will have time to go back and check the apartment thoroughly, make sure that Victoria has left nothing behind that can pose a problem. What if she kept a journal? Gerry had always proselytized for journals with his students, showing them the miniature Moleskines he was never without.
He explains his idea to Leenie after the landlord leaves and it takes the edge off her anger.
“She didn’t keep a journal as far as I know and I don’t think I’ll find anything, but okay. It was awfully generous of you to pay the rent.”
Yet something in Leenie’s tone suggests she’s put out by his largesse, by his willingness to expend funds on anything that doesn’t benefit her directly. He can’t help noting how proprietary she seems about his money.
“The thing you said about her, um, mental illness. Was that true?”
“Yes and no. I mean, she did have episodes at school where she disappeared. She’s got a prescription for Lexapro. But almost every-one’s taking something these days.”
“What will happen to her things?” Gerry asks. “Eventually, I mean.”
“If she doesn’t come back to get them, the landlord will probably just put them in the street.”
If? Is Leenie beginning to believe her own lies?
“Now can we get back to workshopping?”
April 15