For some reason, this reminds Gerry of that bridge in Trenton, the one that can be glimpsed from the train: TRENTON MAKES, THE WORLD TAKES. She sounds put-upon, as if no one can understand what she has suffered. Congratulations, Leenie, you’re a real novelist now.
He gentles his tone. “It’s obvious in the text that ‘Leenie’ is the mastermind. Not Victoria. Don’t start getting hypersensitive. I’m simply advising you to remain true to your characters. Nothing can happen now that hasn’t been prepared for. As writers, we must stay within the reality we’ve created.”
In her book, she has reached the point where she has started moving his funds and taken his electronics away. She has not bothered to imagine how dreary this is for him. He rereads favorite books, watches CNN. He cannot imagine reading something new right now, the single most compelling argument for the possibility that he is already dead and this is his singular hell.
She slumps in the chair near his bedside. “I haven’t always been truthful with you.”
Where to begin? What could be left?
“Yes,” he says, then decides to dare a joke. “It’s sort of the basis of our relationship.”
“You asked me if I found letters in Margot’s purse.”
He waits.
“There was something and I need to tell you. But I just can’t figure out the right way.”
He is not without fear. Leenie’s habit is to “write” herself out of a tough situation with an act of violence. A letter opener to the eye, a statuette to the head. He glances around the room to see if there are any heavy, lethal objects close at hand.
But she can’t finish the book without him. She cannot sell the book without him. He is Scheherazade, forestalling the inevitable. As long as the story’s fate is pending, she has to allow him to live.
“I trust you, Leenie. You’ll do the right thing. You’ll come up with something clever.”
It almost makes him feel bad, how her round face brightens from his praise. But he’s trying to survive. Where on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs does one find storytelling? Technically, he supposes, it’s near the narrow top, a part of self-actualization. Yet it feels as if it’s the entire foundation to Gerry, as if even the basics of water, food, and shelter rely on one’s ability to make sense of the narrative of one’s life.
April 29
IT IS GERRY’S LAST DAY fully immobilized. Tomorrow, the doctor will visit, assess his healing. The brace will not come off even if he gets a good report, but he will start learning how to heave his body into a wheelchair. He wonders if he will, in fact, get a good report. Leenie was sure she could replicate the exercises that Claude gave him, but who knows?
It’s like living in a sensory deprivation tank. He knows the weather only because CNN keeps the temperature in the corner of the screen; today is forecast to be in the eighties, unusually hot for this time of year. But there is no weather in the apartment. Sometimes, at his request, Leenie will slide open the doors to his terrace. His terrace. A place where he has not passed a single hour, given how cold it was when he took ownership of the apartment. He had imagined himself sitting there in the evenings, watching the sun go down over Baltimore, maybe having an occasional glass of cognac, an indulgence he picked up during the Margot years. Margot liked to drink and she didn’t like to drink alone, so, Margot-like, she had bullied Gerry into accompanying her. He also had wondered if he could put the rowing machine on the terrace when the weather was fair, perhaps with a protective cover.
The rowing machine. He glares at it. You are the source of much of this. Able-bodied, he never would have been tyrannized by those two young women; their scheme would have fizzled quickly. They were insane if they thought their gaslighting campaign would result in much of anything. There was no Aubrey. Why can’t people believe that? He remembers how disappointed he was to discover that Roth had based Brenda Patimkin on a real woman. Are there any pure acts of imagination? Outside his mother and himself, Gerry has never used real people in his work. What’s the point? It’s a slippery slope, in his opinion, that quickly leads to a trashy roman à clef guessing game; you might as well be Jacqueline Susann.
Deprived of his phone and laptop but allowed his hand weights, he picks them up and does a few half-hearted biceps curls. He actually has to be careful about overdoing it. His muscles are sore, his shoulders achy. He has built up quite a bit of upper-body strength, which he will require in the next stage of his healing.
Leenie has gone out on some mystery errand. He tries to think of a way to take advantage of her absence, but his imagination fails him. If he could unbrake the wheels on the bed—but that would put him in danger, would it not? Once the wheels were unlocked, where would he go, how would he control it? Even if he could find a way to steer the bed, it’s too wide to allow him passage to the kitchen, where the nearest phone sits, and he would have to risk sliding past the chasm of the staircase.
And should he make it to the phone, whom would he call, what would he say? Help, I’m being held hostage in my own apartment by a woman who has killed two women, crimes in which I am an accessory after the fact. If only he had insisted on calling the police upon finding Margot’s body. But he had been so doped up and confused, and Leenie out-thought him. That day. Now that he continues to crush his drugs in the hardcover books he is allowed, he stays sharp, and Leenie doesn’t suspect a thing. It’s not like she’s ever going to look inside his books, or clean closely enough to see the residue on the table, in the sheets, on the carpet. God, the smells in his apartment. That’s one sense he wishes he could be deprived of, his sense of smell.
About an hour after she left, Leenie returns. He can hear voices; someone must be with her. Is today the day for the doctor’s visit? Has he screwed up the dates yet again?
But the person who enters the apartment with Leenie is a woman who appears to be about her age, wheeling a small carry-on suitcase. Blonde, with a familiar face, or maybe it’s simply a generic one. Conventionally pretty, what people used to call corn-fed.
“I guess you remember Kim Karpas,” Leenie says. “Normally, I’d let the two of you get reacquainted privately, but I don’t have the luxury of allowing you to have privacy. After all, I need to know how the story ends.”
The woman’s confusion is evident; she looks to Leenie, then to Gerry in the hospital bed, back to Leenie. “But he emailed me.” Turning back to Gerry. “Right? You said you wanted to do the right thing, that by buying me a plane ticket—first-class, yet—you hoped you could prove how honorable your intentions were. That you would come visit me if not for your injury, but if I wanted the money, I would have to travel to Baltimore and talk to you, figure out how that could be arranged.”
Kim Karpas. Kim Karpas. Does he know a Kim? The money. What money? Gerry closes his eyes and sees a cat staring at him, a cat from the cover of a book. The girl from the bar in Columbus that time. Why is she here? How did Leenie find her?
“I guess I have to reintroduce you in a sense,” Leenie says, almost chortling, she is that delighted with herself. “Kim, I have to confess, Gerry never got your letters. You sent them to his New York address, where an old girlfriend of his read them. I guess it was her plan to use them to make trouble for Gerry, but now they’re in my possession. Quite a tale you spun, I have to admit.”
“It’s not a tale,” says the woman. Kim. “It’s true.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt a word of it. He basically raped you in that hotel room, which would have been bad enough under any circumstances—”
“Rape!” Gerry yelps. “I invited you up to my room and you came. What followed was absolutely consensual. If I recall, you were the one who had the condom, you were the one who chose to have intercourse, you were—”