“Yes.”
“But the tweet disappeared within twenty-four hours, followed quickly by the account itself.”
“Yes, but my assistant saw it, she can vouch for its existence.”
“The calls—the first two weren’t on the call log at all and the third time the listed number took you to the main switchboard at WYPR?”
“Yes.”
She nods and smiles, still without judgment. “What do you think is going on, Mr. Andersen?”
He couldn’t feel more ridiculous.
“Someone’s trying to—I don’t want to say gaslight, that word is everywhere now, no one even remembers what it means.”
“It’s from the film, of course. The husband manipulates the lights.”
Oh, he likes her. “Yes. The things this person is saying, they’re just not true. I made the character up. People want to think it’s a true story—people always want to think there’s a true story—and I made it a policy not to be drawn into that conversation about my work and my silence has become a void that people fill with their own crackpot ideas. But now I’m beginning to think—well, what if she says she expects money from me, to be repaid? What if this is leading to some kind of attempted extortion? Even a frivolous claim could burn up quite a bit of money. And time.”
Not that time is a precious commodity for him now, stuck in bed, not writing.
“That’s a legal issue. The attorney I work for—he’s not really much on intellectual property, but he could find someone—”
“I don’t think someone is actually going to come after me for money.”
“Then I’m sorry, Mr. Andersen, I don’t understand. What do you think is happening?”
“Someone is harassing me. Someone wants to upset me. But I don’t know why. I thought, maybe, my second wife—she waived all her rights to my writing income, which proved not to be the smart thing to do. Technically, Dream Girl was marital property.”
“And where is your second wife?”
“In New York, as far as I know.”
“So for her to call from the local radio station or to mail a letter with a Baltimore postmark—” The private eye was smiling, sympathetic, but he still feels foolish.
“There’s another woman.”
“Well, there were two more wives, based on your Wikipedia page.”
He doesn’t like this, although he supposes it’s pro forma for an investigator to investigate. “No, we parted on good terms.” Close enough to the truth. “But I had a girlfriend”—ugh, the word sounds so horribly teenage. “We were living together in New York until about a year ago, but it wasn’t really a formal arrangement. She sort of showed up and never left. Then I sold my apartment and bought this place. My mother was ill and I assumed I would be here caring for her for a while. She died.”
“I’m so sorry.”
There is a refreshing frankness to everything she says, but maybe it’s because he’s been spending so much time with Victoria, whose voice is always sliding up into uncertainty, and Aileen, whose responses are always a little off, as if she’s in a slightly different conversation.
“Thank you. Anyway, my ex—Margot—showed up here recently.”
“And?”
“And she went back to New York on the train. With a ticket I bought. But Margot’s very sticky.”
“Sticky.”
She repeats the word without judgment and yet he feels judged. He is judging himself. He sounds silly and paranoid. He sounds not unlike Margot, who was always convinced that people were speaking about her, plotting against her. “What was that woman saying to you?” she would demand when they got home from a party. Or: “I happen to know for a fact that someone on the committee changed my table assignment at the luncheon.” Manufactured drama in a life where the only drama was who was going to pick up the tab for Margot’s lifestyle. Which, it now occurs to Gerry, is a pretty big dramatic conflict, Maslow’s hierarchy.
“Margot is an unusual woman. She’s sort of like a virus, a cold, that moves from host to host. The only way to get rid of her, usually, is to introduce her to her next—” He doesn’t want to say victim, because he hates thinking of himself that way. Besides, Margot isn’t a conscious schemer. She is helpless, in her own way. One can’t blame her for how she is. It’s like faulting a flower for trying to get water.
“Do you know the Cheever story?” he asks abruptly.