“Let her up, the front door is unlocked,” he says wearily. He is that bored.
Margot looks at once better and worse than remembered. Her body is almost terrifyingly lean, her face uncannily—uncanny valley-ily—smooth. She always insisted that she had not had “work” done, a turn of phrase that amuses Gerry, as it implies that tightening and plumping the body is a job in a way that other surgery is not. No one speaks of heart work. She cultivates a style that he recognizes as high fashion, although he’s never really liked it. Her fine-featured face has a symmetrical perfection that can survive the strangest embellishments. Overlarge, overthick eyeglasses, a severe Louise Brooks bob, an all-black outfit with a “statement” necklace, only what is the statement? “Hello, I am confident enough to wear this very large, ugly necklace.”
Even when he was besotted with her, she reminded him a little of a praying mantis, and everyone knows what they do to their mates.
“Gerry!” she says. She’s standing at the foot of his bed, yet declaiming as if she’s trying to reach the back row of a vast theater. “I have to admit, I wasn’t sure I believed your assistant when she said you’d had an accident.”
“Victoria shouldn’t be telling anyone such personal information.” And she should be telling me when people call, Gerry thinks.
“Not anyone, I agree, but I’m not just anyone. We lived together. We were engaged to be married for a time.”
They had not been, not officially, they were not, never, but it didn’t matter now that he was free of her. He could be gracious enough to allow her to tell whatever story made her feel better about herself.
“What brings you to Baltimore?”
“You, of course. Happy Valentine’s Day, lover. I had to come after I heard. Do you know the statistics on broken hips?”
“It’s not really my hip—”
“The thing is,” she said, flinging her coat over the sofa, a habit of hers that had always irked him, “there’s a problem at the apartment.”
“I sold the apartment. The transaction closed almost four months ago and you were given plenty of notice. How can there be a problem now?”
“I left some of my things in your storage unit and they’re gone!” She says this with great drama and flair, the way the CNN announcers every day share some new snippet of information about the unending drama in Washington.
“The storage unit conveyed with the apartment. Surely you understood that.”
“Of course, but I thought I would be given the courtesy of a call.”
He tries to remember the hectic weeks of last fall. Had he been told there were still things in the storage unit? Had he cared? He feels guilty, then anger at the guilt. He definitely told Margot to get her things out of the apartment; even she had to understand that applied to the storage unit as well.
“I don’t know what to say,” he says, and he cannot be more sincere, more literal.
“There were some very valuable things there,” she says. “Jewelry. Clothes from my modeling days, things that are impossible to replace. Priceless things.”
And yet he suspects there will be a dollar amount placed on these items, eventually, and he will be asked to pay it. Margot is a shakedown queen, a good one. She is the kind of woman—the kind of person—who has a genius for getting others to take care of her. She has no visible means of support, yet she is always in expensive places—New York City, Nantucket, Paris, St. Barts—and, although she never eats, she does her not-eating in the very best restaurants, wearing beautiful clothes. When they met, she was living in the Carlyle and Gerry had assumed she must have her own money. What she had was a married boyfriend who was resigned to paying her hotel bill until she found her next mark. Cheaper to keep her, as the song said, but it is not cheap to keep Margot, and it can be even more expensive to rid oneself of her. She has to be foisted off on another. Gerry’s mother had given him an out, and then the co-op board, fearsome in its own right, had accused her of being an illegal subletter and made Margot vacate the premises. Gerry saw daylight and bolted.
“I don’t know anything about this, Margot. Sorry. A waste of a trip for you, I’m afraid.”
“Oh, it’s such an easy trip,” she says. “I took the Acela, not even three hours, although the cab ride here—well, the cab was very dingy. Besides, I thought you could use some hel—”
“No,” he says. Then, in a gentler tone: “I have Victoria during the day, a nurse at night. There’s no need—and no space.”
“But the place is huge,” she says, twirling around, then heading for the floating staircase that was his undoing.
“No,” he says again, his voice stern enough to arrest her stride. “There are only two rooms, my office, and a study, and the night nurse uses that. As for my bedroom—” His mind casts about for something, anything, that will keep Margot out of the master bedroom suite. “It’s being treated for bedbugs.”
It is the perfect thing to say. Margot not only retreats from the stairs, she grabs her coat from the sofa and puts it on, as if it will protect her.
“That’s why I’m up here,” he says, pleased by his own inventiveness. It’s the closest thing to writing fiction he has done in months. “Eventually they’ll have to fumigate. But for now, they’ve managed to contain the damage to my room. They took out the old stuff, of course, but they’re in there, just waiting. The nurse went in the other evening to get my favorite pair of reading glasses from the nightstand and when she came out, her ankles and wrists were circled with bites.”
Margot buttons her coat to the top. Has she had work done on her neck? It’s impossibly smooth.
“Maybe I should stay nearby,” she begins.
“There is no nearby,” he says, hoping she can’t see the Four Seasons on the other side of the harbor.
“That thing people do now, the Air thingy.”
“They don’t have that in Baltimore,” he says. “At least not around here.”
“I have to have somewhere to spend the night.”
“There’s an Acela every hour until nine,” he says. “Buses go later still.”
“You won’t believe the meal I had,” she says. “Or the wine. Worse than an airplane. But the meal—it was the stingiest little cheese plate, I couldn’t believe it.”
“Well, it’s really just a snack bar,” he says.
“No, I mean the meal they serve at your seat.”
So she had booked a first-class ticket, which meant she paid $150 extra for a mediocre meal and an assigned seat. How very Margot. He wonders who paid for her ticket. For all he knows, she has written his credit card information down somewhere and still uses it for purchases. He will have to check the statement.
Victoria returns, her arms laden with groceries and mail. She is clearly puzzled by Margot’s presence and her quizzical look reminds Gerry that Margot seems out of place in any remotely normal setting. At black-tie parties, art galleries, in first-class airline lounges, Margot fits in. But not in Baltimore, not in Gerry’s apartment.
“This is—” He pauses, not wanting to describe Margot as a friend, which she isn’t, and it seems rude to describe someone as a former anything.
“Margot Chasseur,” she says, reaching for Victoria’s hand with her long, bony arm. But Victoria’s hands are not available. She hugs the grocery bag more tightly to her chest. Victoria is quite slender, but Margot, despite her fashion-model height, has a way of making everyone else seem large and awkward. Gerry used to like that. He had felt very heroic next to her, a man capable of caring for a sought-after woman, and not just financially. Only the best men could afford a Margot.
“’Lo,” Victoria says, a sullen teen meeting her father’s new girlfriend.
“Victoria, can you run Margot up to Penn Station when you leave tonight? She’s taking the train back to New York.”
“I don’t have to go tonight—” Margot tries to interject.
“She was kind enough to come and check on me,” Gerry says, knowing that the only thi
ng to do with Margot is to keep talking, insistent on one’s version of things. It’s what she does, after all. “But, obviously, she can’t stay here—the bedbug problem in the bedroom—and there’s no place in Baltimore that’s really appropriate.”
Victoria nods. She’s a quick one.
“I just need a corner,” Margot says. “I barely take up any room. The sofa looks marvelously comfortable—”
“If you leave now, she can make the four thirty,” Gerry continues. “Put the ticket on my American Express, then head home, as your day will be nearly done.”
“I don’t want to be a bother—”
“Not a bother at all.”
“Perhaps we could have dinner first, and I could take a later—”
“Dinner’s sorted and I’m afraid I have Victoria buy things in very small portions, as I hate to be wasteful.”
Margot gives up. For now. She will be back if she doesn’t find a man soon. Gerry’s going to ask Thiru to take her to lunch. He will tell Thiru that it’s a favor to him, that Margot has spoken often of writing a memoir. (She has, but all she has are the usual party-girl memories of the 1990s, already done, and done better than she ever could. Also, Gerry would inevitably figure large in anything Margot might write, and Gerry does not need that.)
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!”
“It was dark,” she said. “And you know no one can see our backyard. All those trees. I felt as if I were fifteen again, Gerry.”
CNN had just called the election for Obama. Gerry remembered 2008, the one pure shining night of hope in his entire adult life as a voter. Schooled as he was in imagining the inner lives of others, he could not understand how people his age, people in his income bracket, people with his education, had considered the same thing a disaster. Could race alone explain these visceral reactions to Obama?
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