Dream Girl

by Laura Lippman

  All he has to do is sell Leenie on one small change.

  “When we submit your book,” he says, “let’s do it under my name.”

  She puffs up like a cobra, ready to strike. “Are you trying to steal my work?”

  “No! I’m trying to get you the attention you deserve. If this book goes out as the work of a twenty-nine-year-old unpublished woman, even with my endorsement, it will be read with—skepticism. Maybe even as a kind of fan fic. If we submit it as my first piece of autofiction-slash-memoir, it will be taken seriously as a significant departure for me. The reveal of its actual authorship, the fact that I authorized this but did not write it—ta-da!”—he mimes a magician’s sleight of hand—“will knock people on their keisters.”

  He’s not sure why he uses a vaudeville word such as keister, but it feels right.

  “It will be like the reverse of that writer who submitted Jerzy Kosinski’s Steps under a fake name, only to have it rejected by every major publishing house. Everyone will want this book. When we reveal the ruse, that you are my student and wrote this with my permission and approval, they’ll only want it more.”

  He watches Leenie trying to absorb this idea. She’s no dummy. She’s suspicious of him. But it has never occurred to her that he is planting land mines throughout her book so that her beloved manuscript will save him, that Thiru unwittingly showed Gerry how he could signal his distress by mentioning what words and themes would arouse his concern should Gerry ever use them.

  Maybe they are more like Thompson’s Doc and Carol than they realize.

  2008

  GRETCHEN HAD TAKEN to drunk-dialing him late at night.

  “I see you’re dating again,” she said without preamble. “I hope you realize it’s on Page Six because of her, not you. She’s the famous one.”

  “Yes, it’s her only drawback.”

  “Tell her to get a prenup,” Gretchen said.

  “We had a prenup. At your insistence. You were so worried about protecting the apartment, your income.”

  “No, no, that wasn’t it at all. I would have split everything fifty-fifty, but you didn’t want to share the proceeds from your work. I supported you. You wrote Dream Girl on my dime; I was your venture capitalist and I didn’t get any return on my investment.”

  “Rewrite history however you want, Gretchen.”

  Life had not been kind to Gretchen. She had been working at Lehman Brothers when the crash came. Now she was unemployed and bitter.

  “Look, between us—who was Aubrey? I know you had to be fucking someone while we were married.”

  “I was faithful to you, Gretchen, which isn’t something I’m sure you can say. There is no Aubrey. I made her up.” An old complaint from James M. Cain floated into his head, Cain’s rejoinder at being accused of imitating Hammett. It really doesn’t work that way.

  “Tell me the truth, Gerry.”

  So he did. He shared with Gretchen the story he had never told anyone, not even Thiru. He told her the identity of the Dream Girl.

  April

  “I DON’T KNOW HOW TO END IT,” Leenie says.

  “Endings are hard,” he commiserates.

  “I feel as if something big should happen.” She mimes an explosion with her hands, makes fireworks noises with her mouth. Gerry shakes his head.

  “If I may offer an observation—you have always been a bit enamored of deus ex machina.”

  She glares. “I am the deus here, in case you’ve forgotten. Therefore, I am entitled to my machinations.”

  For some reason, this reminds Gerry of that bridge in Trenton, the one that can be glimpsed from the train: TRENTON MAKES, THE WORLD TAKES. She sounds put-upon, as if no one can understand what she has suffered. Congratulations, Leenie, you’re a real novelist now.

  He gentles his tone. “It’s obvious in the text that ‘Leenie’ is the mastermind. Not Victoria. Don’t start getting hypersensitive. I’m simply advising you to remain true to your characters. Nothing can happen now that hasn’t been prepared for. As writers, we must stay within the reality we’ve created.”

  In her book, she has reached the point where she has started moving his funds and taken his electronics away. She has not bothered to imagine how dreary this is for him. He rereads favorite books, watches CNN. He cannot imagine reading something new right now, the single most compelling argument for the possibility that he is already dead and this is his singular hell.

  She slumps in the chair near his bedside. “I haven’t always been truthful with you.”

  Where to begin? What could be left?

  “Yes,” he says, then decides to dare a joke. “It’s sort of the basis of our relationship.”

  “You asked me if I found letters in Margot’s purse.”

  He waits.

  “There was something and I need to tell you. But I just can’t figure out the right way.”

  He is not without fear. Leenie’s habit is to “write” herself out of a tough situation with an act of violence. A letter opener to the eye, a statuette to the head. He glances around the room to see if there are any heavy, lethal objects close at hand.

  But she can’t finish the book without him. She cannot sell the book without him. He is Scheherazade, forestalling the inevitable. As long as the story’s fate is pending, she has to allow him to live.

  “I trust you, Leenie. You’ll do the right thing. You’ll come up with something clever.”

  It almost makes him feel bad, how her round face brightens from his praise. But he’s trying to survive. Where on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs does one find storytelling? Technically, he supposes, it’s near the narrow top, a part of self-actualization. Yet it feels as if it’s the entire foundation to Gerry, as if even the basics of water, food, and shelter rely on one’s ability to make sense of the narrative of one’s life.

  April 29

  IT IS GERRY’S LAST DAY fully immobilized. Tomorrow, the doctor will visit, assess his healing. The brace will not come off even if he gets a good report, but he will start learning how to heave his body into a wheelchair. He wonders if he will, in fact, get a good report. Leenie was sure she could replicate the exercises that Claude gave him, but who knows?

  It’s like living in a sensory deprivation tank. He knows the weather only because CNN keeps the temperature in the corner of the screen; today is forecast to be in the eighties, unusually hot for this time of year. But there is no weather in the apartment. Sometimes, at his request, Leenie will slide open the doors to his terrace. His terrace. A place where he has not passed a single hour, given how cold it was when he took ownership of the apartment. He had imagined himself sitting there in the evenings, watching the sun go down over Baltimore, maybe having an occasional glass of cognac, an indulgence he picked up during the Margot years. Margot liked to drink and she didn’t like to drink alone, so, Margot-like, she had bullied Gerry into accompanying her. He also had wondered if he could put the rowing machine on the terrace when the weather was fair, perhaps with a protective cover.

  The rowing machine. He glares at it. You are the source of much of this. Able-bodied, he never would have been tyrannized by those two young women; their scheme would have fizzled quickly. They were insane if they thought their gaslighting campaign would result in much of anything. There was no Aubrey. Why can’t people believe that? He remembers how disappointed he was to discover that Roth had based Brenda Patimkin on a real woman. Are there any pure acts of imagination? Outside his mother and himself, Gerry has never used real people in his work. What’s the point? It’s a slippery slope, in his opinion, that quickly leads to a trashy roman à clef guessing game; you might as well be Jacqueline Susann.

  Deprived of his phone and laptop but allowed his hand weights, he picks them up and does a few half-hearted biceps curls. He actually has to be careful about overdoing it. His muscles are sore, his shoulders achy. He has built up quite a bit of upper-body strength, which he will require in the next stage of his healing.

  Leenie
has gone out on some mystery errand. He tries to think of a way to take advantage of her absence, but his imagination fails him. If he could unbrake the wheels on the bed—but that would put him in danger, would it not? Once the wheels were unlocked, where would he go, how would he control it? Even if he could find a way to steer the bed, it’s too wide to allow him passage to the kitchen, where the nearest phone sits, and he would have to risk sliding past the chasm of the staircase.

  And should he make it to the phone, whom would he call, what would he say? Help, I’m being held hostage in my own apartment by a woman who has killed two women, crimes in which I am an accessory after the fact. If only he had insisted on calling the police upon finding Margot’s body. But he had been so doped up and confused, and Leenie out-thought him. That day. Now that he continues to crush his drugs in the hardcover books he is allowed, he stays sharp, and Leenie doesn’t suspect a thing. It’s not like she’s ever going to look inside his books, or clean closely enough to see the residue on the table, in the sheets, on the carpet. God, the smells in his apartment. That’s one sense he wishes he could be deprived of, his sense of smell.

  About an hour after she left, Leenie returns. He can hear voices; someone must be with her. Is today the day for the doctor’s visit? Has he screwed up the dates yet again?

  But the person who enters the apartment with Leenie is a woman who appears to be about her age, wheeling a small carry-on suitcase. Blonde, with a familiar face, or maybe it’s simply a generic one. Conventionally pretty, what people used to call corn-fed.

  “I guess you remember Kim Karpas,” Leenie says. “Normally, I’d let the two of you get reacquainted privately, but I don’t have the luxury of allowing you to have privacy. After all, I need to know how the story ends.”

  The woman’s confusion is evident; she looks to Leenie, then to Gerry in the hospital bed, back to Leenie. “But he emailed me.” Turning back to Gerry. “Right? You said you wanted to do the right thing, that by buying me a plane ticket—first-class, yet—you hoped you could prove how honorable your intentions were. That you would come visit me if not for your injury, but if I wanted the money, I would have to travel to Baltimore and talk to you, figure out how that could be arranged.”

  Kim Karpas. Kim Karpas. Does he know a Kim? The money. What money? Gerry closes his eyes and sees a cat staring at him, a cat from the cover of a book. The girl from the bar in Columbus that time. Why is she here? How did Leenie find her?

  “I guess I have to reintroduce you in a sense,” Leenie says, almost chortling, she is that delighted with herself. “Kim, I have to confess, Gerry never got your letters. You sent them to his New York address, where an old girlfriend of his read them. I guess it was her plan to use them to make trouble for Gerry, but now they’re in my possession. Quite a tale you spun, I have to admit.”

  “It’s not a tale,” says the woman. Kim. “It’s true.”

  “Oh, I don’t doubt a word of it. He basically raped you in that hotel room, which would have been bad enough under any circumstances—”

  “Rape!” Gerry yelps. “I invited you up to my room and you came. What followed was absolutely consensual. If I recall, you were the one who had the condom, you were the one who chose to have intercourse, you were—”

  She is one of those pale blondes who flushes bright pink when emotional. “I tried to say no, but you ignored me. And, given the circumstances, I was so overwhelmed. You weren’t going to let me out of there unless I, um, reciprocated in some fashion, so I chose the easiest, fastest way.”

  “The circumstances? You were, are, an adult woman who went to a man’s hotel room and didn’t seem to mind at all when things went the way they usually do in a man’s hotel room after a couple of drinks in a bar. In fact, it was my impression, in hindsight, that you were looking for me, you came to that hotel hoping to find me. I’m not going to have this turned into some sort of ‘Me, too’ moment.”

  “Yes, I was hoping to meet you, but—not for that. I wanted to see you, to get some sense of you, but I used a fake name just in case. I had wanted to be a writer, too—”

  God, was there anyone left in the world who didn’t want to be a writer?

  “You had loomed so large in my life, ever since I was a teenager. I read everything you wrote. Granddad would say, ‘It’s right there on your DNA. If your uncle can do it, so can you.’”

  Granddad. Uncle. What?

  Leenie smiles, pleased with her handiwork. She literally rubs her hands together in delight. “Kim is the daughter of your half sister, Gerry, the family that was cut out of your father’s will. They contested it, but they had no grounds—your father was within his rights to leave everything to your mother. So Kim’s mother, her grandmother, her aunt—the family your father actually lived with and supported for much of his life—they’re out in the cold and you’re going to get money that you don’t even need. Kim’s grandfather always said she would inherit enough to pay off her college debt. A good man would help her out.”

  Gerry sees himself as a boy, playing with his father’s sample case, pulling a long blond hair from one of the little chairs. Had it belonged to this girl’s mother? He sees himself picking up the phone, oh so stealthily, listening to his father speak first to his other wife, then to his daughters, comforting the one who had broken her arm. Was that this girl’s mother? It was the way his father spoke to the girls that hardened Gerry’s heart, the tenderness and sweetness, a tone he had never known. Maybe fathers were different with daughters than they were with sons, but Gerry felt in that moment that he knew where his father’s heart lay and that was why he ordered him from the house on Berwick Road, all the while hoping his father would say, “No, it’s a horrible mistake. I choose you! I choose you!”

  He sees himself with this woman in the hotel room. His niece. His stomach roils, yet surely she should be the one who is held accountable. It was consensual, he’s not responsible for her regrets. He didn’t know. It’s not as if he were some paternal figure who had watched her grow up. He didn’t even have an inkling she existed.

  Then again, Oedipus also was wholly ignorant of his relationship to Jocasta, and the gods didn’t spare him.

  Gerry thinks quickly. He has to get one of the women in this room on his side. He has to get the right woman on his side, even if that means saying things he doesn’t believe.

  “Leenie, this was cruel of you. You shouldn’t have lied to this young woman to get her here under a false pretext. You should have told me about her letters, what they said. I would, in fact, like to do the right thing.”

  He is struggling to keep his voice even, calm. He wonders what part of the saga Margot planned to make public if he continued to deny her request for financial assistance. The niece part was icky, but the #MeToo aspect was probably more of a news hook. The one-two punch—surely there was a salacious gossip site that would have enjoyed telling the story, which would then allow more traditional media to report on it with that disingenuous stance of reporting on the story’s existence, not the story itself. But was this going to be part of Leenie’s novel? Was this the climax?

  I have to win this young woman over. She’s my only hope. I have to say whatever will keep her here long enough to save me.

  “Kim, I am so sorry for the pain the men in my family have caused the women in your family. First my father and now me. I cannot begin to find the words for the injury done to you.”

  “Thank you,” she says stiffly.

  “We do need to talk. Leenie, would you take Kim’s suitcase downstairs and maybe fix us a light snack?”

  “She won’t need—” Leenie interrupts herself, but Gerry takes note of her words. She was about to say that Kim would not require a room here. Has Leenie secured a reservation for her elsewhere? Or is Kim going to be sacrificed for Leenie’s story before the day is through? “Fine, I’ll take it downstairs.”

  Gerry indicates the chair by his bed, the Leenie chair, as he thinks of it. He glances at his bedside table.
One thing Leenie has not thought to take from him is his Moleskine notebooks and astronaut pens.

  “Tell me about your mother, my sister,” he says. “I know nothing about my father’s other family.”

  Not surprisingly, she looks confused. Her confusion is only heightened when she reads Gerry’s scribbled note to her. Leenie is dangerous. She will try to harm you. Pay attention to what I write, not what I say.

  “I hope it’s okay if I take notes,” he says, wanting to set up a reason for having the notebook in hand when Leenie returns to observe them.

  “Um, sure. My mom—she’s like her mom. She’s really fun, outgoing. Bubbly. My sister, too. I always wished I had that personality. I was the family bookworm. I wanted to write, so I got an MFA. But all I ended up with was fifty thousand dollars in debt.”

  “I have an MFA myself, but I’ve begun to think it’s a bit of a racket.” He writes: Unlock the casters on the wheels, quickly and without drawing attention to what you’re doing. “Oh, I’ve dropped my pen. It’s rolled under the bed. Can you get it for me?”

  She’s catching on. She’s quick, now that she’s gotten her bearings. Leenie has climbed the stairs and is in the kitchen, grumbling to herself. The “snack ” that she puts together for them is two cans of LaCroix and a plate of crackers. No spread, no cheese, not even peanut butter, only crackers. She places the plate on the wheeled tray that Gerry uses for his meals. He positions it carefully so it sits between him and his guest, not across the bed as it normally would be.

  “You know, Leenie, you’re right, Kim shouldn’t stay here. After all, you’re using the master bedroom and the study has only that sleeper sofa, which is bound to be uncomfortable. Besides, Kim probably doesn’t want to stay under my roof, and who could blame her? I’m going to get her a room at the Four Seasons.”