His hope is that she will become fixated on Thiru, with his lovely suits and even lovelier manners. He appears to be quite rich and maybe he is. Gerry has a hard time figuring out how much money others have because he has always lived quite modestly, relative to the money he earned after Dream Girl. Gerry’s very bad at being wealthy, a tightwad, still scarred by the money problems of his youth. If Thiru has six Gerrys, he basically has Gerry’s income, no? And of the clients Thiru represents, there are at least three potential Gerrys, although Gerry believes he is the number-one earner, the biggest jewel in the agency’s crown.
“Thank you, Victoria,” he says. And although it takes great effort, pain even, he rises to a true ninety-degree sitting position. Victoria’s eyes widen with shock; she knows how painful it is for him to sit. But she says nothing.
“I’ll be in touch,” Margot says. Alas, he believes she is telling the truth.
So when the phone rings in the middle of the night, that very night, and Aileen, who tends to doze, does not answer it within three rings, Gerry fumbles for the landline next to the bed, a mid-century Swedish design with a button on the bottom. His head feels cloudy, yet he is alert enough to assume the call will be from Margot, full of recriminations for being booked in business class, which means she has to fetch her own cheese plate from the snack bar.
“Hello?”
“Gerry? I’m coming to see you soon.”
“Who is this?” Because the one thing he’s sure of is that it’s not Margot. The voice is too sweet, too high, with a hint of a Southern accent. Also too nice.
“Oh, Gerry, you’re so funny. It’s Aubrey, Gerry. We need to talk. About my story, about what really happened between us, that mess with your wife. I think it’s time the world knows I’m a real person.”
“The mess—who is this?”
“It’s Aubrey, Gerry. Don’t be silly.”
“There is no Aubrey.”
“Well, not by that name. But I exist, Gerry. I always knew that I was Aubrey. And I was proud, so proud that I could inspire you.”
“WHO IS THIS?”
She hangs up.
Impossible to star-69 the call from this phone, assuming that one can still star-69 on any phone. He shouts for Aileen, who trundles sleepily up the stairs, taking her time.
“I just closed my eyes for a bit,” she says defensively, as if he has summoned her to his bedside to chide her.
“Please grab the phone from the kitchen, check the caller ID, and tell me what it says.”
She does. “No one’s called since this afternoon,” she announces.
“But the phone just rang. You heard it.”
“No, it didn’t. And it shows you right here”—she walks toward him with the receiver—“ the last call was from the front desk at three oh eight. No one’s called all evening. That’s why I didn’t wake up. There was nothing to wake me up until you yelled for me.”
He fumbles for his reading glasses. Yes, the phone’s screen is adamant: the last call was from downstairs, the one announcing Margot’s arrival.
Was it a dream? A delusion? The drugs? Some combination of the three?
The drugs, he decides. It has to be the drugs.
Please let it be the drugs?
2012
GERRY WATCHED the early returns with his mother, feeling silly for all the effort he had put into the day. He had been worrying about this election for weeks, running all the scenarios at fivethirtyeight.com. He voted early in New York, then drove to York, Pennsylvania, on election eve to help with get-out-the-vote efforts, then headed to Maryland, where he drove his mother to the polls, despite her reasonable protests that it wasn’t that vital for her to vote. Maryland was bluer than blue.
“How did blue become associated with Democrats, red with Republicans?” he asked his mother, just to be saying something.
“Well, Nancy Reagan favored red.”
“But that was a response, not a cause, surely? At any rate, it has a way of reducing the whole thing to a summer camp color war.”
He couldn’t believe how many terrible men he had voted against—and for—in his lifetime. His first presidential election was 1976. He chose Carter, yippee. He had supported Udall in the primary, but he no longer remembered why. In 1980, he voted for John Anderson. Mondale in 1984, Dukakis in 1988, Clinton ’92 and ’96, Gore, then John Kerry. What a remarkably bland slate from the Democrats, Clinton excepted. Gerry never understood the “Clinton as the first Black president” thing; surely that was offensive to everyone? Was it about his class roots? The wastrel father?
Wastrel father. He glanced at his mother. Her eyes were bright and focused on the television, but her dinner was untouched. She was not eating enough, nor was she moving enough. She was at once frail and plump. Fair enough, for a woman approaching eighty, but the house seemed increasingly ill-advised for her. Those steps, that bathroom. He wanted to remodel at least the upstairs bath, but she refused his aid. The only thing she would take from him was his company, the thing he was least capable of providing, living in New York. Was he selfish? She had sacrificed so much for him, worked so hard. He would do anything for her—except move back to Baltimore. He tried to make it home at least once a month, but it was more like every six to eight weeks, and then he was plunged into a miasma of errands. Doctors’ visits, home repairs. He still did many of those himself, as he had in his teenage years. He was handy, something that surprised people. He’d had to be, once his father decamped.
Decamped. That was a nice word for what his father had done.
Gerry did call his mother every Sunday night. After five P.M., at her insistence. “That’s when the rates go down,” she said, inured to this habit by his father’s days on the road, the collect calls coming from God knows where. Useless to try to explain to her that he could call on his cell for free.
“Mom—please eat.”
“It doesn’t taste right,” she said. “I think the shrimp is off.”
“We bought the shrimp salad today.” A treat. His mother would never buy Graul’s shrimp salad for herself. In fact, she wouldn’t shop at Graul’s at all, although it was literally walking distance from the house, could be seen from her front porch. She drove to the Giant on York Road and shopped with coupons. Graul’s was for emergencies and cakes.
“Nothing tastes right anymore. I told your father as much the other day, and he agreed.”
“Dad’s dead, Mom,” he said, not unkindly.
“Oh, I know we thought that. But can you believe it? He faked his death and skipped out on his second family.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Turns out he was in New York on Nine Eleven. Can you believe it? Or maybe he just said he was. Who would know, right? A colleague of his called his wife, said your father had an appointment at the brokerage there. The one named for a horse’s gate.”
This took a while to break down. Horse’s gate, horse’s gate—oh, horse’s gait. “Cantor Fitzgerald?”
“Yes.”
“I think that was a big hedge firm, Mom. Why would Dad have an appointment there?”
“Everybody needs office furniture,” she said placidly. “Besides, he wasn’t there. That’s the point. He saw an opportunity and he took it. He never loved her.”
“I’m not sure Dad ever loved anybody. That was his curse.”
“He loves me.”
The tense alarmed him. It was one thing to imagine his father alive, to entertain some cockamamie story about him faking his death (which, Gerry had to admit, would be absolutely in character). But for his mother to insist on his father’s love, something that Gerry was sure neither one of them ever really had—no, that was too much.
His first novel, Courting Disaster, had centered on their ill-fated romance, although his mother had died in that version, the victim of an illegal abortion. Why does Gerry Andersen’s art depend upon women’s death? was becoming a running theme in revisionist pieces on his work. But the novel had won a lucrative if unsung prize and it still sold robustly, so there.
“When did you see Dad?” he asked his mother.
“Oh, time is so vague to me. It was warm, but it might have been Indian summer, that spell of hot days we had in October? Yes, it was early October. We made love outside.”
“Mom!”