She’s strong, his niece, he’ll give her that, but it’s on him to get the job done. He uses his aspirational walker like an oar, pressing hard on the floor, awkward and unwieldy as it is. He may never use his upper-body strength to transfer himself to a wheelchair, but he’s making good use of it now. He needs only two, three hard pushes to take advantage of the trajectory that Kim has started. The bed sails forward, catching Leenie at her midsection as she crests the stairs. She tries to throw the suitcase at him, but her reflexes are slow, her aim off, and it caroms to the side. The bed knocks her backward down the floating staircase exactly as Gerry planned.
What Gerry has failed to anticipate is that the bed keeps going, accelerating, a runaway chariot straight out of Ben-Hur, rolling over Leenie’s body—oh, the terrible cracks and squishes, he has never heard noises such as these, his intention was only to knock her out, not flatten her—then hitting the wall opposite the staircase with enough force to catapult him out of the bed and—
1999
GERRY WALKED. He had been walking every night for hours, ever since Gretchen left. He didn’t miss her, but he was angry, offended. How dare she leave him?
He did not have much affinity for nature, preferred New York City above all cities, but late April was the one brief season when he liked the outdoors and Baltimore. The weather still had a cool sharpness, while the air, at least here in North Baltimore, smelled of blossoms and soil. He walked through the Wyman Park dell. He walked to the sculpture garden at the BMA.
Mostly, he walked along the path through Stony Run that led, eventually, to Cold Spring Lane and Alonso’s.
He did not miss Gretchen. He had not loved her. She was right, he didn’t even like her. Gretchen had been a rebound. Not from Lucy, but from New York City in general, his anxiety over Luke’s diagnosis, Tara’s decampment for the suburbs. Gretchen had been a safe haven. Marriage had been designed as an institution of safety, an economic proposition. In his second marriage, Gerry had been a Jane Austen female, mating for security. He had felt he could not risk another Lucy, who had seemed so sensible and right but had always had that wildness, and it was, he realized, the wildness that drove him away. You couldn’t write the kind of poems that Lucy wrote if you weren’t a little kinky, he had decided, but it was not a lifestyle that worked for Gerry.
And then Luke died and Tara stopped speaking to him and he was left with Gretchen. No, he didn’t miss her. But he resented the fact that she had lured him back to Baltimore, then abandoned him. That wasn’t fair play. Neither was the prenup, in which Gerry had agreed to waive any claim on the Gramercy Park apartment. Gretchen was selling it now, planning to move downtown.
The park was full of children tonight. Gerry did not want children and, in the end, women almost always did. That had to be the reason Gretchen left. But the best way not to become one’s father is to never be a father at all. He had tried to be kind and faithful to his romantic partners and, for the most part, he felt he had been true to his own standards. He had been faithful to Gretchen, no small thing. Gretchen had started out as a most provocative bed partner; the contrast between her suited daytime self and the wanton body in bed at night had heightened his attraction to her. But she seemed less and less interested in him as her paychecks rose and his earnings stagnated. She did not respect him. By the time she left him, their sex life had long been dead.
He suspected she had a lover, up in New York. He didn’t even care.
Alonso’s was quiet tonight. The bar had been renovated recently, updating the dark, homely little tavern into something sleek and modern, much to Gerry’s disappointment. He preferred its original incarnation. He and Lucy had lived half a block from here. They had doted on its horrible pizza, pizza so bad that he craved it still. They had eaten the too-salty mozzarella sticks, tried to wrap their mouths around cheeseburgers almost as large as their heads. Then they would go across the street to Video Americain, take home one of the staff recommendations. Gerry still stopped into Video Americain on his walks, still heeded the staff recommendations. Last week, he had watched a film called Funny Bones, which had surprised him because he realized, in the final minutes, that he didn’t know if he was watching a comedy or a tragedy. See, art can do this, he’d said to Luke across the void. It is possible to create a story where people aren’t sure what happens next.
He spoke a lot to Luke, in his head.
As he sat at the bar, drinking the first of the two beers he allotted himself, he became aware of a couple sitting across from each other in a booth. The woman was twentysomething, a mix of ethnicities; he had never seen anyone like her—Asian, yet freckled, her skin a warm olive cast. Not beautiful, something better. One would never tire of looking at that animated, lively face.
The man across from her could have been Gerry. Forty, give or take, full head of hair, Waspy. The couple’s eyes were locked on each other; no one else existed as far as they were concerned. The man would speak; she would laugh. And yet, they did not touch. They were conspicuously not touching. It was an act of propriety, an attempt to convince those who saw them that this was a friendly meal, nothing more.
It was one of the most erotic things Gerry had ever seen. It was another one of Luke’s before moments. These people had not slept together yet. The woman was trying to decide if she would sleep with this man. It was her choice, not his. The wheel was spinning, spinning, the ball was bouncing. Where would it land? Who was this woman? She was a fantasy, an apparition. The man opposite might as well have conjured her for the express purpose of torturing him. She might sleep with him, but she would never be his, she would never belong to anyone. She was quicksilver, a treasure that would flow through a man’s fingers.
Then, in an unguarded moment, she took a french fry from the man’s plate and ate it. Gerry realized he practically had a hard-on. There was nothing arch or sensual about the act; a french fry is technically phallic, but it is a limp phallus, especially in a place like Alonso’s, crinkle cut and undercooked. No, it was her assumption that the man’s food was hers to take. She would take what she wanted from this man, then move on. Not in a mean, avaricious way. She was not a gold digger. She wanted this man for her own pleasure, nothing more, and she would offer pleasure in return. She would be generous and wholehearted, but she could never be possessed.
Gerry would give anything to know a woman like that.
He paid for his first beer and left without having a second. He had to get home, he had to write. Fuck the maximalists, the Tom Wolfe imitators, the worst of whom was Tom Wolfe these days. Last fall, Alice McDermott had won the National Book Award over Wolfe and some people had tried to make it a literary scandal, claiming Wolfe was robbed because of political correctness. No, McDermott was showing the way with her human-scale stories, but she was too modest to make a case for herself. Gerry would write a piece about where fiction should go and then he would show everyone.
He would show everyone.
The wheel spins, the ball bounces, bounces, bounces. Where will it land? Will you get the girl? Will your name be read from stages, the recipient of important prizes? Will your name be remembered? How will it be remembered? Will you be remembered at all?
Everything is in the before moment. That’s where life is richest, in that moment of possibility and antici—say it, the audience screamed at the screen—pation. That’s what Luke had been trying to tell Gerry.
And then the ball finds its slot and the story ends even as it begins.
September 27, 2019
“I HAVE TO ADMIT,” Thiru says, “it’s not at all what I was expecting. Talk about mixing low and high—and autofiction yet.”
“But you like it, right? And you’ll set up an auction?”
“Ben will be hurt that he’s not being allowed first crack, but—yes.”
“He has no right to feel he is owed this book.”
“Quite right. Look, I have to know—the thing about Columbus, the sex. Did that really happen?”
“God, no. It is fiction. Almost none of this happened.”