She is a wispy girl, with big glasses and a messy updo, given to enormous sweaters, long skirts, and ankle boots. In an old-fashioned movie, she would take off her glasses, shake out her hair, cinch the sweater, and be revealed as a beauty. Even in a modern film, she might be transformed, although it would probably be in a makeover montage supervised by friendly gays, who, in movies, seem overly preoccupied with helping heterosexual women find romance.
Inappropriate. All of these thoughts are inappropriate. If he says these things aloud, even to Victoria, who knows what might happen? Words, words, words—ha, that’s a lyric from the ultimate makeover musical, My Fair Lady, which, strangely, is one of the few concrete memories he has of enjoying time with his father and mother.
“Well, if you see it around—it had a return address on Fait Avenue, here in Baltimore. That’s what I remember.”
“Why would someone from Baltimore write you in care of your agent when you’re right here in Baltimore?”
“I don’t think it’s widely known I’m here.”
“They wrote about it in Baltimore magazine, I think. Did your agent open it?”
“Baltimore magazine?”
“The letter. Did he read it? Did he see what it said?”
“No, it was unopened, I’m sure of that.” Less and less sure the letter existed, but absolutely sure that it was unopened. He wonders if Thiru would remember, but probably not. Thiru has an eye for details, but they are the details of contracts and money, beautiful clothing and beautiful women.
“I’ll go look around your office later. Now let’s do your exercises.”
For now, his “exercises” involve Victoria manipulating his good leg, her gaze averted. He wears heavy pajamas and, during the day, he insists on changing to a T-shirt and sweater above the waist. He is vain of his torso, which isn’t bad for his age. Through the sheer power of his mind alone—and the avoidance of certain foods—he manages never to have a bowel movement during the day. That’s for the night nurse, trained to do such things.
“Are you sure, Victoria, that you’re okay doing this?”
“You saw the quotes, for full-time care. I’m happy to do this on the days you don’t have PT, especially as it means a little more money for me.” Sadly, softly, suddenly. “Baltimore’s not cheap anymore, I don’t care what anyone says.”
“I had an apartment in the 1990s here—I couldn’t get over how much space and light we got, for so little money. But then, we had moved down from New York, so I guess everything is relative.”
“Hmm.” Victoria tunes him out whenever he talks about his past.
“On the north side, near Hopkins, the Ambassador. It’s where I wrote Dream Girl.”
“I like the Indian restaurant on the ground floor.”
Dream Girl, the novel about a girl called Aubrey, who lived on Fait Avenue. Dream Girl, the novel that changed his life, the novel that launched a thousand guessing games about his inspiration, endless wonderment about how a man like Gerry had uncannily channeled this woman. Then, more recently, a thousand revisionist histories about older men and younger women. (His characters were only fifteen years apart; that shouldn’t be scandalous, even now. It’s not as if a fifteen-year-old could really be someone’s father, unless he was a most unusual fifteen-year-old, one of the boys with mustaches who loitered on the edges of the package store parking lot on Falls Road.)
Dream Girl was, by design, an absolute product of Gerry’s imagination, written in a feverish two-month period in which he had cut himself off from all stimuli to prove that novelists didn’t have to embed or research every arcane detail of some tiny plot point in order to be relevant. A novel written on a computer, but an old one, without Internet access, under a cross-stitched sampler made by his first wife and inspired by the last lines of Eudora Welty’s memoir: Serious daring starts from within. Dream Girl was what Gerry took to describing, in interviews, as an inside job, delighted by his own wordplay, the implication of a crime, but within one’s own mind. “I stole a moment and created a life.” He declined, always, to describe that moment.
Yet so many people wanted to believe it was, on some level, true, that Gerry Andersen had been “saved” by a seventy-two-hour romance with a younger woman. They hated learning that Aubrey was not real. Then again, readers hated being told that anything in fiction wasn’t real.
Aubrey had never existed.
So who had written him from Fait Avenue?
Assuming that letter actually existed.
It did, it did, it did, it did. The letter was real. Aubrey was not, but the letter was real. He’s not confused about what’s real and what’s not. Not yet.
His mother’s bra in the refrigerator. He should have known then. Still, Aubrey is not real.
“Who’s Aubrey?” Victoria asks.
He is surprised to realize he has been speaking aloud. More surprised that Victoria has not read Dream Girl. She claimed to be familiar with his work when she interviewed for the job. Ah, but she had been clever, extolling the virtues of his earlier novels, the unloved middle children between his first and his fourth.
That was probably why he hired her.
“Any mail?” he asks, picking up his letter opener, a Bakelite dagger emblazoned with the name of the company for which his father had once worked, Acme School Furniture, a jaunty salesman for its handle.
“You just asked me that.”
Shit, he did.
“Would you get my doctor on the phone? I’d like to ask about my medication.”
Victoria smiles at him sorrowfully. He understands her sad smile when, an hour later, she reports back that the doctor says he will try to call Gerry next week. He feels naive. “My” doctor. No one has a doctor anymore, unless they pay for one of those fancy concierge services. Gerry’s mother, who worked as a doctor’s administrator, is firmly opposed to that on principle. Was. There’s no present tense left in his mother’s life, which is still hard to absorb. There’s not a lot that Gerry hopes for in his seventh decade, but he would like to live long enough to see health care for all in the United States. Good lord, he had been allowed to stay longer in the hospital for his burst appendix than he had for his quad tear. (They had moved him to a rehab facility, but, still, when had care become so careless?)
He turns on CNN. Everything is chaos. Forget the Dow. What the world needs is a ticker showing how the status quo, as embodied by the world’s leaders, rises and falls hour by hour. Today, things are plummeting. Maybe everyone has dementia, maybe that is the final joke on the world and the millennials. The inmates are running the assisted-living facility.
He falls asleep as the sun sets, enjoying the happy sliver of time when he is alone in his own apartment.
1983
“HOW DID YOU FIND THIS?”
“I have my ways.”
A minute ago, Gerry had been trying to mask his disappointment at the Tiffany box that emerged from the silvery gift wrapping. A pen, a fancy pen, he guessed. He was surprised that Lucy would stoop to such a cliché, that she would waste her—their—money on such a generic gift. True, he kept a notebook and a pen on his person at all times, jotting down observations about the world as his characters would see them. But he often lost his pens, so he never invested in nice ones. Besides, a pen such as this, one that had to be refilled—certainly that was more likely to stain the breast pocket of his shirt.
Except, it wasn’t a pen. Lucy had tricked him, probably knowing that all these thoughts would rush through his mind before he opened the box and found the old letter opener on a little bed of cotton.
“How did you—”