GERRY IS LOOKING at his checking account online. There is more money than he expects—not just the electronic royalties deposited by Thiru’s agency (why did he resist this for so long?) but also an electronic deposit of $215,000. Foreign payments? Foreign money is forever dribbling in. Sometimes gushing in. The Germans love his work.
Wait—a payment for $9,500 went out the next day, via something called a Zelle P2P payment. It takes him a while, but he finds the site within the site where he can view his Zelle activity. There is only the one transaction.
The recipient was one Aileen Rachel Bryant.
“Leenie,” he brays. Then, in the tone of a parent who wants his child to know how much trouble she is in: “AILEEN RACHEL BRYANT.” He’s not even sure how he knows her middle name. Oh, wait—IT’S THERE ON THE ZELLE PAYMENT SHE MADE TO HERSELF.
She takes her time and is all sweet innocence when she arrives at his bedside.
“Is something wrong?”
“How did nine thousand, five hundred dollars of my money go from my bank account to yours?”
“Oh, I used Zelle. It’s like Venmo or PayPal but—”
“I’m not asking how”—okay, he did, in fact, ask how—“I am trying to understand who moved that money and why.”
“I moved it. On your computer, the one I’ve been using—you saved all your passwords, so I can access lots of things.”
Lots. Of. Things.
“Why did you feel”—he decides to choose his words carefully—“you should transfer this money?”
“I’ve been working so hard on the book and, even if it does sell, it will be a while before I see any payment.”
“But—you have your nursing salary. Not to mention free room and board here.”
“Not forever. You made that clear. We won’t be together forever.”
“It’s safer that way, don’t you think? Leenie—we have to go our separate ways. We’re not Doc and Carol.”
“We could be.”
He thinks of Thompson’s Carol, he imagines the cinematic Carol. Two very different creatures, but both alluring. What does one say to an unbeautiful woman? He has no idea. Unbeautiful women have never interested him much. There is no democracy in sexual attraction and there is not, in his estimation, a lid for every pot. There are many, many lidless pots in the world, although most of them, Gerry would wager, are men. Aileen can find a man, if all she wants is a man. But she cannot have him. Even her burgeoning talent has not made her attractive to him, and that is the ultimate unfairness. Gerry, at sixty-one, is desirable because of what he’s accomplished. Aileen, at twenty-nine, now showing glimmers of ability, will never write her way into a man’s heart. Gerry didn’t make the rules. The rules made him.
“I’m sorry, but that’s not an ending I can envision.”
“Okay, then,” Leenie says. She walks over to the bed, picks up his cell phone, disconnects the landline, grabs his laptop. Luddite Gerry, antisocial Gerry, anti–social media Gerry cannot believe how hard his heart is beating at the loss of these things. They are his only connection to the outside world, after all.
Leenie says: “Once my book is finished and under contract, we’ll say goodbye.”
Gerry knows how Leenie says goodbye.
April
ONLY A NA?F would try to buy time by switching up and giving Leenie a harsher critique. Gerry is not Penelope, he’s not going to tear up the weaving every night. He goes the other way, praises things that could be improved, swallows his revulsion for cheap plot devices, Leenie’s Achilles heel. It’s all good. It’s all fine. The sooner he can get this book to Thiru, the sooner he will have a chance to be free. In his editing sessions, he makes tiny suggestions that would seem to be inconsequential, but Thiru will know, Thiru will see through it, as he once joked. Thiru knows Gerry doesn’t care what the Oxford English Dictionary says, he’s sticking by the old meanings of literally and hopefully. Thiru knows all Gerry’s bugaboos, to use that peculiar word that Lucy loved. Gerry has been fighting New York copyeditors for almost forty years over the word rowhouse. What Baltimoreans have joined together, he would retort in the margins, let no copyeditor tear asunder.
All he has to do is sell Leenie on one small change.
“When we submit your book,” he says, “let’s do it under my name.”
She puffs up like a cobra, ready to strike. “Are you trying to steal my work?”
“No! I’m trying to get you the attention you deserve. If this book goes out as the work of a twenty-nine-year-old unpublished woman, even with my endorsement, it will be read with—skepticism. Maybe even as a kind of fan fic. If we submit it as my first piece of autofiction-slash-memoir, it will be taken seriously as a significant departure for me. The reveal of its actual authorship, the fact that I authorized this but did not write it—ta-da!”—he mimes a magician’s sleight of hand—“will knock people on their keisters.”
He’s not sure why he uses a vaudeville word such as keister, but it feels right.
“It will be like the reverse of that writer who submitted Jerzy Kosinski’s Steps under a fake name, only to have it rejected by every major publishing house. Everyone will want this book. When we reveal the ruse, that you are my student and wrote this with my permission and approval, they’ll only want it more.”
He watches Leenie trying to absorb this idea. She’s no dummy. She’s suspicious of him. But it has never occurred to her that he is planting land mines throughout her book so that her beloved manuscript will save him, that Thiru unwittingly showed Gerry how he could signal his distress by mentioning what words and themes would arouse his concern should Gerry ever use them.
Maybe they are more like Thompson’s Doc and Carol than they realize.
2008
GRETCHEN HAD TAKEN to drunk-dialing him late at night.
“I see you’re dating again,” she said without preamble. “I hope you realize it’s on Page Six because of her, not you. She’s the famous one.”
“Yes, it’s her only drawback.”
“Tell her to get a prenup,” Gretchen said.
“We had a prenup. At your insistence. You were so worried about protecting the apartment, your income.”
“No, no, that wasn’t it at all. I would have split everything fifty-fifty, but you didn’t want to share the proceeds from your work. I supported you. You wrote Dream Girl on my dime; I was your venture capitalist and I didn’t get any return on my investment.”
“Rewrite history however you want, Gretchen.”
Life had not been kind to Gretchen. She had been working at Lehman Brothers when the crash came. Now she was unemployed and bitter.
“Look, between us—who was Aubrey? I know you had to be fucking someone while we were married.”
“I was faithful to you, Gretchen, which isn’t something I’m sure you can say. There is no Aubrey. I made her up.” An old complaint from James M. Cain floated into his head, Cain’s rejoinder at being accused of imitating Hammett. It really doesn’t work that way.
“Tell me the truth, Gerry.”
So he did. He shared with Gretchen the story he had never told anyone, not even Thiru. He told her the identity of the Dream Girl.
April
“I DON’T KNOW HOW TO END IT,” Leenie says.
“Endings are hard,” he commiserates.
“I feel as if something big should happen.” She mimes an explosion with her hands, makes fireworks noises with her mouth. Gerry shakes his head.
“If I may offer an observation—you have always been a bit enamored of deus ex machina.”
She glares. “I am the deus here, in case you’ve forgotten. Therefore, I am entitled to my machinations.”