Imagine that being one’s impulse when a woman is lying dead at one’s feet. To wipe a phone and reset it.
Thinking quickly, speaking gently, he says: “But don’t you see—it’s safer, I think, if we don’t continue, um, living together. Together, we will draw too much attention. I mean, at some point, I simply wouldn’t have a nurse.”
“But you could have a girlfriend. You wouldn’t be the first man to fall in love with his caretaker.”
He is truly nonplussed now. Also, the only such relationship he can summon up is Henry VIII and Catherine Parr and she was the one that the Tudor king did not outlive.
“Anyway, I’m glad there are no more secrets between us. Because I have something to show you.”
She goes downstairs. Gerry wonders briefly if she’s going to go full Annie Wilkes and hobble him, so he will remain in her care longer. But he’s more terrified by the idea that Leenie wants him to get well. Wants him to be her boyfriend.
She comes back with pages, not a sledgehammer. He decides that’s lucky for him, but he has to think about it.
“I’ve chucked what I was working on. I decided I wasn’t going far enough. I want to write something more like Rachel Cusk is doing, blurring fiction and memoir. Or Sheila Heti.”
She begins to read:
Gerry Andersen’s new apartment is a topsy-turvy affair—living area on the second floor, bedrooms below. The brochure—it is the kind of apartment that had its own brochure when it went on the market in 2018—boasted of 360-degree views, but that was pure hype.
To be fair, she didn’t say it would be her fiction and memoir that she wanted to blur. As she reads on, uncannily aware of Gerry’s inner life and thoughts, he begins to wonder what happens to him if Leenie steals his voice.
Again, to be fair—it wasn’t as if he was using it.
2018
“ARE YOU SO BUSY that you couldn’t afford dinner at a real restaurant?” Margot asks, pulling her shawl closer around her shoulders, as if City Diner, almost too warm on this early autumn night, is making her cold.
“Diners are real, Margot. And, yes, I’m slammed for time. I went straight from Penn Station to the apartment, to make sure it was ready for the walk-through tomorrow—”
“I would have been happy to do that with you.”
Gerry knew this, which was why he had done it alone. He didn’t want to be anywhere private with Margot. Especially the apartment. The lack of furniture would not inhibit her.
“Then I met with Thiru. I was supposed to go to Berlin this fall, but clearly that’s not happening.”
She arches an eyebrow when he asks for onions on his cheeseburger, knowing that’s not usual for him. She limits herself to a cup of black coffee, from which she takes only a few sips, leaving a vivid crimson imprint, then helps herself to his french fries without asking.
“So you’re really gone.”
“Yes, so it would seem. Once I have the cash in hand from my sale, I need to move quickly to buy in Baltimore. I think it’s only a matter of time before my mother is in hospice, but—the doctors have been saying that for months—”
“We never had a proper breakup,” Margot said. “We just drifted apart.”
In Gerry’s point of view, they’d had multiple breakups; Margot simply refused to recognize them as such. She was still squatting in his apartment as recently as a month ago. His Realtor, a formidable woman, forced her out with the co-op board’s help.
“I don’t see you in Baltimore,” Gerry said, then regretted it. He shouldn’t even raise the possibility. But he is polite, to a fault. To a fault. He moves quickly to change the subject. “You did forward all my mail, right? When you were living there? I’d hate to think any bills went missing.”
“Of course I did. God, you were always so obsessed with your mail.”
“Was I?” He genuinely didn’t remember it that way.
“Your mail and your bills. Have to pay the bills on time or God knows what might happen. You’re such a good boy, Gerry.”
She was mocking him, he can tell, but he doesn’t know why.
“It’s a habit,” he said. “One thing I’ve done right, consistently.”
“I’m sorry,” she says, offering him a sincere smile. “Walk me home tonight? It’s lovely out, our first real autumnal evening.”
The word autumnal grates—so pretentious—but it was a beautiful night and what harm could there be in a walk? “Where is home these days?”
“I’m staying at a friend’s place at 102nd and West End. We can walk through Riverside Park.”
He did and didn’t regret what happened on the bench. Margot, with her praying mantis limbs, her voracious mouth—he counted himself lucky that he got out of this relationship without her biting his head off.
April
GERRY IS TRYING to wean himself from all his medication. Senses must be sharp! He cannot afford a sleep so drugged and heavy that he misses another homicide, possibly his own. Funny, it doesn’t occur to Leenie to watch him swallow his pills. Maybe she believes him to be addicted by now, or at least keen for his nightly oblivion. At any rate, he holds the nighttime pills under his tongue until she goes back downstairs, eager to be reunited with her manuscript. He then takes them out and crushes them as best he can, shutting them inside whatever hardcover book is on his nightstand, sprinkling the dust on the rug. It’s not as if Leenie even pretends to clean anymore. She leaves that to a housekeeper who comes every other week, the only outsider who still enters the apartment. Can the housekeeper save him? It seems a lot to ask, given that he doesn’t even know her name. Carolina? Carmen? Carmela? No, that was the wife on The Sopranos. Anyway, her English isn’t very good and Gerry speaks no Spanish at all.
It strikes Gerry that he has a very bad bargain in this fake marriage, a “wife” who provides the minimal care he needs and focuses most of her energy on her writing.
It strikes Gerry that this is who he would have been as a wife.
Although neater. He has always been a generally tidy man, even when living alone, and his years in New York made him vigilant about food waste, which attracted cockroaches and rats. From his bed, he can see the dishes piling up in the kitchen. And there is a smell. She has thrown something in the bin and not bothered to take the trash out despite the fact that it is a short walk to the utility room with the trash chute. An old television theme song plays in his head. Moving on up, moving on up. Here he is, in his dee-luxe apartment in the sky, and he might as well be in the ghetto.
Maybe things were better when he was taking his pills.
But he is grateful to have his senses when the phone rings at two A.M. His cell phone, though, not the landline. Changing up the game, are we, Leenie? He grabs it on the first ring. There is a short silence, although he can hear breathing on the other end. If ever a pause was pregnant, it’s this one. He waits, wondering what he will do if “Aubrey” speaks to him again. Then he clearly will be crazy or demented, because Victoria and then Leenie played the part of Aubrey, and Victoria is dead. Then again—he never saw Victoria’s dead body, he has only Leenie’s word for it—
“Gerry Andersen? Is that you, Gerry Andersen?” A female voice, unfamiliar, definitely not one he has heard before. A slurred voice. Someone has drunk-dialed Gerry.
“This is Gerry Andersen,” he says. He listens intently. Is Aileen moving downstairs? Will she try to eavesdrop? He thinks of himself as a child, stealthily picking up the heavy phone in the kitchen when his father made calls from the bedroom, the need to place one’s finger on the button, then let it slide out slowly, so there would be no telltale click.
“Why didn’t you answer my letters? Why did you ignore me? We could have worked something out. I didn’t mean to make you angry. I only wanted what was fair—”
“Who is this?”