Dream Girl

by Laura Lippman

And then he began to hope that would be the case. No one could blame him for missing the train, right? It’s not as if anyone were expecting him. In fact—how would anyone know if he had been there? Tara wasn’t the type to check behind him, to call the hospice and inquire if Gerry Andersen had visited Luke Altmann. He remembered shaking hands with Luke that first day at Princeton. “I know—I look like a Hitler youth, but my people ran away from Germany in the 1930s.” The shock of blond hair that he was forever pushing out of his eyes. Young Gerry’s heart had sunk at the thought of having such a good-looking roommate. What a laugh they’d had over that later.

  7:21. 7:22. 7:23. It was about to be his turn at the window.

  No one really knew how this disease worked. They said it couldn’t be caught through casual contact, but how could they be sure? Would he be expected to take Luke’s hand? What would he say? Could Luke even hear?

  7:24.

  He stepped out of line and left the station just as the announcement for the New York–bound train began. He waited two days before he checked in with Tara and described his visit with the dying Luke.

  “Was it hard,” Tara asked, “seeing the lesions on his face?”

  “Yes,” Gerry said. “Very tough.”

  “Gerry, there are no lesions on his face.”

  Luke died a week later. Tara and Gerry never spoke again.

  April

  WITH VICTORIA GONE and, along with her, the framework of her Monday-through-Friday schedule, Gerry no longer knows what day of the week it is. He’s fine with that.

  “Gerry?”

  “Yes?” He still doesn’t like the sound of his name in Aileen—Leenie’s—mouth.

  “We need to talk.”

  Not about marriage, he hopes.

  “Okay,” he says, not looking away from his downloaded copy of The Daughter of Time.

  “Wouldn’t it make sense for you to give me Victoria’s money? Without her kicking in, it’s going to be hard for me to make rent and we pay rent on the fifteenth.”

  “How do I give you Victoria’s money?” he says. “I don’t have access to it.”

  “Her paycheck, I mean. If you’re not paying her, why not pay me double?”

  He almost says yes. That’s how weak he is, how feeble he has become. He’s not thinking things through clearly. Luckily, he sees the flaw before he agrees.

  “Aileen—”

  “Leenie.”

  God, this is exhausting. “Leenie, if anyone ever did a forensic accounting”—he thinks that’s the term—“and saw this huge increase in your salary, it would be very suspicious, don’t you think?”

  As “Aileen,” Leenie had thought physically, like Rodin’s Thinker, all furrowed brow and bent body. Leenie stands stock-still, her chin on her hand.

  “I can’t make rent,” she says.

  “You could find another roommate, couldn’t you?”

  “No, Victoria’s the only one on the lease. I had some credit problems a few years ago and we thought it better that way. Legally, I don’t have standing. I could get in trouble if I brought another tenant in.”

  So she’s comfortable carving up bodies and disposing of them, but worries about being hauled into rent court.

  “That is a tough situation,” he says, trying to sound sympathetic, “but I’m not sure how this is my problem.”

  “If you hadn’t killed Margot, I wouldn’t have had to kill Victoria.”

  Gerry is pretty sure there’s a fallacy lurking in that reasoning, but he can’t be bothered to find it. Instead he asks what he has asked before, hoping for a different answer.

  “Did I kill Margot, Leenie? Did I? What really happened that night?”

  She stomps downstairs, offended. She has bashed in the head of her friend, but she apparently takes great exception to the suggestion that she might have plunged a letter opener into Margot’s eye.

  Not that even Gerry can persuade himself she did it. Why would she have killed Margot? Did Margot, of all people, figure out what was going on and return to the apartment to confront Aileen? No, that makes no sense whatsoever.

  The landline rings. Thiru.

  “I’ve received your royalties and gone over the accounting. Any chance you’ll ever surrender your love for paper checks and let me use ACH to deposit these things?”

  “No—” he begins. Then he remembers that Victoria was the one who deposited his checks. He does not want to entrust this task to Aileen, does not want her to see what Dream Girl puts back into his coffers every six months. “Yes. Yes, I think I will change. How does one go about that?”

  “I just need some basic information. Routing number, account number. Your assistant can—”

  “No.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Victoria is gone. Stopped coming to work, with zero notice. But I can give you that information now. I keep a checkbook in the drawer of my nightstand.”

  Gerry realizes that lying, once it has begun, never stops. He has lied to the detective about Margot and now he has lied to Thiru about Victoria. In their long partnership, he has never before lied to Thiru, although he was sometimes obscure about the infidelity that ended his first marriage. Thiru would have been scandalized, not by Gerry’s adultery, but by his ability to screw up what most men would have considered a dream scenario.

  Thiru assumed men were unfaithful, he called it the nature of the beast. But all Gerry had ever wanted was to be good, not his father. For much of his life, he had been able to achieve this not inconsiderable goal. He considered the two episodes of adultery—the stupid fling with Shannon Little, the one-night stand when he was married to Sarah—to be forced errors. The enormous guilt he still felt about both was proof that he was not a sociopath.

  “Gerry Andersen, giving up paper checks. It’s almost like that Internet meme that goes around from time to time.”

  “What?”

  “Do I need to define ‘meme’ for you, or this one in particular?”

  “I know what a meme is, Thiru, I just don’t get this one.”

  “I’m thinking of the one where people try to craft a message that would alert others they are in danger, while seeming neutral to their captors. You giving up paper checks—that’s darn close. If you said something rhapsodic about Wuthering Heights, I would know for sure that someone had a gun to your head. Or if I ever saw the word ‘limn’ in your work.”

  Gerry laughs as best he can. The primary thing is, there will be no checks arriving, no record of his money for Aileen/Leenie to see. It has become all too clear to him that Leenie is very, very interested in money, especially his money.

  She’s going to do something stupid with the purse and the phone cover, he is convinced of it.

  1972

  THE SHOEBOX WAS from Hess at Belvedere Square. Gerry believed he knew exactly what pair of shoes it once held. Two-toned spectator oxfords with a slight heel. His mother was vain about her feet, which were small and delicate, a size six. Whenever they went shopping for his back-to-school shoes, she usually ended up buying a pair for herself, too. How the Hess salesmen loved to wait on her. Gerry knew his mother was pretty, although he tried not to think about it. But whenever he saw her calf in the hands of a shoe salesman, he was reminded not only how pretty she was, but how she must have had her pick of men, and yet she still chose his father.

  He was not looking for the shoebox, of course. Who would look for a shoebox in the pantry, behind boxes of generic pasta from the Giant? He had been looking for his mother’s secret stash of chocolate, a game of sorts. She hid her chocolate; he found it, ate a few pieces; she pretended to be outraged. Then she hid it again. He wasn’t snooping, not really. It had never occurred to him to spy on his mother. The only thing she had ever tried to keep from him was his father’s awfulness. But his father was gone, had been gone for almost two years now.

  The shoebox was light, too light to hold even a dainty pair of size sixes. Curious, Gerry pulled it down from the shelf and opened it.

 
; Envelopes with cellophane windows. Bills. Six months of bills. He didn’t know much about bills—what fourteen-year-old boy did?—but he quickly realized these were unpaid.

  They don’t make money off of us. They make money off people who don’t pay their bills.

  His mother had said that to him once when he was trying to understand why a simple piece of plastic could be substituted for cash, why stores would accept it. In the 1960s, there was a single Baltimore charge card, accepted by all the local department stores. He had hovered at his mother’s elbow, watched the clerk press down on it with the metal machine that looked like a stapler. It made no sense to him. All he understood was his mother’s pride at not being one of the people that the store made money from.

  He was fourteen. He wanted to shove the box back on the shelf, continue to look for her chocolate. Instead, he sat at the kitchen table and made neat stacks of bills. She had been using a charge account at Graul’s from time to time; strange, because she seldom shopped at that grocery store despite it being in view of their house. She always claimed it was too expensive. But it was the kind of store that would allow customers to have charge accounts. Bills for clothes, but all for him, and not many because he wore a uniform to Gilman. The car payment. Utilities. C&P Telephone.

  It was a school day, late afternoon, the sky gray, a boisterous wind whipping around the house. When his mother came through the kitchen door and saw what he was doing, she didn’t seem particularly surprised. If anything, her reaction seemed to be one of relief.

  “Gerry,” she said.

  “Get your checkbook, Mother. And your paystubs. I can get us out of this—and make sure it never happens again.”

  He did, eventually. He worked out payment plans with those who were owed money, then created a household budget. He also got a job—at Graul’s, as a stock boy, which meant not only did he contribute money to the household, he sometimes was allowed to take home unsellable goods—badly dented cans, cans with missing labels. His mother made a game of concocting dinners from these rejects. They were not particularly good dinners, but he admired what they jokingly called her “can-do” attitude.

  And every month, he sat at the kitchen table, filling out the checks and then passing them to his mother to sign. He couldn’t help noticing that his father’s name was still on the account, which worried him to no end.

  April

  “I GAVE UP MY APARTMENT,” Leenie says.

  “What?”

  “I told you I couldn’t make the rent without Victoria. Besides, you have all this space here. I told Phylloh that I would be staying here until you’re healed.” She frowns. “She asked me about Victoria. I don’t like her. I think she’s nosy.”

  Gerry chills at this pronouncement. Time was, he would have agreed. Now he worries something might happen to her. Curvy, innocent Phylloh, who reminds him of a poppy seed muffin, which is something one’s not supposed to say anymore, but can he at least think it? In his aging body and his aging mind, can he allow himself the thoughts and metaphors and pronouns that were permissible when he was young? Is that so much to ask?

  “There’s no spare bedroom,” he says. “As you know, there’s only my office and the little study, with the sleeper sofa.”

  “That’s okay. I’ll sleep in your bed. You’re not using it, after all.”

  He does not like the idea of Leenie in his bed, for which he is filled with overwhelming nostalgia. One thing Sarah had taught him during their brief marriage was the importance of good sheets and linens. His bed is a basic wooden frame and he doesn’t go in for all those extra pillows that have to be removed at night—what’s the point of pillows that one removes every night?—but he misses his king-size bed. He wants to leave this bulky, ugly hospital bed and go back to his true love. Except—he also never wants to leave this hospital bed. It’s complicated.

  “Is this really necessary?”

  “I told you, I can’t afford the apartment without Victoria.”

  “Not even for another month?”

  She shakes her head.

  “If you must—you must.” He can buy new sheets, when this is over. Will this ever be over? How does it end?

  “Also—may I use your computer?”

  This is even more disturbing than the thought of her in his bed.

  “For—”

  “I told you I’m working on something. I’d like your feedback when I’m done. Oh—and I told Claude to stop coming. I can do what he was doing. It’s amazing what—”

  “You can learn on YouTube. I know. I know.”

  April

  STRANGELY BUT ALSO HAPPILY, Gerry sees less of Leenie now that she’s living downstairs. When she does come up to minister to him, she wears her own clothes instead of the polyester nurse scrubs. She tends toward tight jeans and too-short tops, in which she looks rather bulgy. She has quite a few tattoos, including a rose on the small of her back, which Gerry sees when her shirts ride up. He remembers a verse from a book of doggerel he read as a child, about a “little Hindu” whose pants and shirt don’t quite reach. Good lord, what a terrible thing in retrospect, almost as bad as Little Black Sambo. Yet Gerry still owns the tiny red Helen Bannerman version of that tale because his mother gave it to him on his birthday, with an inscription. The sight of her pretty, spiky cursive writing fills him with so much joy that he cannot bear to jettison the book. Should that go to Princeton? Maybe with a note about why he still owns it?

  Leenie is standing at the foot of his bed, a sheaf of papers in her hand, clearing her throat to get his attention.

  “I thought I would read my story to you, the way we did in class.”

  “Okay.” What else can he say?

  She clears her throat again. “It’s called ‘Mobius Dick, aka Great White Male.’”

  “Hmmmmm.”

  “Please hold your comments until I finish reading.”

  “If I had a copy it would be easier to follow.”

  “Just listen.”

  It was supposed to be an honor, getting in the seminar taught by Harry Sanderson. It was not so long ago that he was the flavor of the month, anointed as the face of American literature in the earlier twenty-first century. The best-selling book he published in 2001 was at once small and large—although it centered on a weekend in the life of a man in an early midlife crisis, it also seemed to anticipate the 9/11 attacks and the way the world would be reordered by them.

  There were ten girls and two boys in the class. This was not unusual. Beardsley had been coed for almost twenty-five years by this time, but it was still overwhelmingly female. On college visits, boys would lean into other boys and inform them: “The odds are good, but the goods are odd.” Yet, somehow, the two boys were the only students that Harry Sanderson seemed to care about. The two boys and the girlfriend of one—a girl named Moana who looked as if she could be the character Sanderson had described in his most successful novel.

  She looks up from the page, her face expectant. Where to begin? Seriously, where to begin?

  “I notice that you are choosing names that are barely different at all from what I would assume are their real-life inspirations. Harry Sanderson for Gerry Andersen. Moana for Mona—”

  “Oh, her you remember.”

  “You’ve jogged loose quite a few memories of that semester at Goucher. It was only seven years ago, after all.” And she was quite beautiful and also by far the best student in the class. Life is unfair, Leenie. If you haven’t figured that out when you’re almost thirty years old, that’s a problem. “Anyway, why such thinly veiled identities? Why not a memoir if you’re going to hew closely to the truth?”

  “It’s a choice,” she says. “I’m trying to make a point, that it’s a very thin line between fiction and real life, that all fiction is appropriated from the lives of others, so it’s better to be transparent about it. All these labels, what do they mean? Everything is fiction and everything is true. It’s very meta.”

  Gerry allows himself an inner Pri
ncess Bride moment. I do not think that word means what you think it means.

  “So why does Goucher get a pass? Why call it Beardsley? Why not … Groucher?”

  “Because Beardsley’s the name of the private school in Lolita.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Because you’re my Humbert Humbert and you’re going to rape Moana.”

  “What?”

  “It’s thematically consistent. You rape the woman whose life inspired Dream Girl. Metaphorically.”

  “There was no woman whose life inspired Dream Girl and that book was almost fifteen years old by the time I taught at Goucher.”

  “But isn’t there a woman with a secret you don’t want anyone to know? Weren’t you worried that was the secret that Margot was going to share with the world?”

  There’s a weird faux innocence about Leenie’s question. How does she even know what Margot threatened to do? He remembers the fight with Margot, how she raked his face with her nails, the strange things she said. Victoria was here. What had she heard? What had she inferred? What had she told Leenie? He still had no idea what terrible secret Margot knew, or thought she knew, but it wouldn’t have been about Dream Girl, because there was no secret there.

  “Aren’t you troubled by giving a Chinese American girl a name from a Disney film about a Hawaiian girl?”

  “Well, later I’m going to get into how Harry, like most men of his generation, fetishized Asian women. There’s going to be a lot of wordplay with Moana and ‘moan.’”

  Of course there is.

  “Anyway, what do you think?”

  He decides to risk honesty, of a sort. “It hasn’t gotten started.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Put me, the reader, in the classroom. Show me the characters, let them define themselves by action and dialogue. This sounds like a dutiful summary. You’re tapping on the mike, clearing your throat. You literally cleared your throat before reading. Start, Leenie.”