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—”
“Okay, okay—” She was almost dancing around him. The kitchen in their duplex was large but plain, and he sat at the wooden table where they ate most of their meals, his mug of postdinner tea warm in his hand, the late-summer sunset shooting streaks of orange-gold across the old black-and-white linoleum.
The letter opener was bright red. His father had this letter opener. Not this letter opener, of course, but one like it. His letter opener went with him when he finally left. Or did it? For all Gerry knew, this could be his father’s letter opener. After he had been gone a year, his mother had swept all his things into boxes and dropped them at Goodwill. Gerry imagined the letter opener’s life—someone buying it at Goodwill, then maybe taking it to one of the antique stores on Howard Street, or putting it out on their own little lonely card table of cast-off things at a yard sale, where Lucy—
“Don’t you like it?” Lucy asked, no longer dancing.
“I love it,” he said. It was the truth. You can love something that makes you sad.
She knelt beside him. Lucy was petite, put together. Her style icons were Barbara Stanwyck and Myrna Loy, but she adapted their trim, sophisticated looks to the 1980s, so she didn’t look like one of those campy girls who shopped in vintage stores and treated every day like a costume party. She wore her hair in a simple, smooth bob, always shining and neat. Her lipstick was dark, her brows arched and slender. Even on a summer night, in shorts and a blouse, she looked polished, soigné. The shorts were crisp linen, the shirt a sleeveless gingham. Add a scarf and a pair of platform heels and she could have walked straight out of one of the old movies they loved. But, again, Lucy was too tasteful to veer into camp. He should have known she would never give him something as ordinary as a pen to celebrate his first book deal.