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.”