She doesn’t know Astaire, but she has seen these films? “How old are you, Aileen?”
She stiffens. “That’s not a question to ask a lady. I’m older than I look, let’s just leave it at that.”
Funny, he would have sworn it went the other way, that her weight and mannerisms aged her. “Did you grow up in Baltimore? Do you remember Picture for a Sunday Afternoon?”
Her eyes are fixed on the screen. The film’s alleged shocks seem to have no effect on her. They are pretty weak and she is, after all, a nurse. But she pays strict attention. She does not answer his question, does not speak again until the end of the film, when she says, “That makes no sense. The woman’s still dead. They still killed her. Why do any of them get to live?”
“In the book—”
“I”—She stops, almost as if she is trying to tamp down anger, out of respect, but she’s not quite successful. “I don’t care about the book. This is a movie, I’m watching a movie, and according to this movie, if four men put a girl in a car and roll it into the lake while she’s still alive and she dies a horrible death, one of them gets to take his wife to France!”
“He is the least culpable,” Gerry offers, thinking, And it’s Fred Astaire. You don’t kill Fred Astaire. In The Towering Inferno, Jennifer Jones died, but Astaire lived. Gerry saw that film in the old Rotunda Cinemas, where he saw so many movies. Monty Python and the Holy Grail, most of Woody Allen’s work. Was that the Baltimore theater that had shown The Rocky Horror Picture Show? Antici—SAY IT—pation! No, that had played in another, larger venue. The Rotunda had been a dark, smelly dump of a place, off a narrow hallway in a large brick building that was sort of a mini-mall. Gerry felt up a couple of girls in that movie theater. He misses it. The last time he drove past the Rotunda, the old enclosed shopping center was surrounded by new apartments, and the movie theater was now a detached structure, something called a CinéBistro. What the fuck is a CinéBistro? What is happening to words?
Aileen marches downstairs, grumbling to herself. Gerry sleeps better than he has in days, paradoxically relaxed by the movie’s insipid, special-effects horrors. Maybe he should watch more movies, less news.
When he wakes, he can barely wait for Phylloh’s shift to start so he can ask her to review the security camera’s video. She hems and haws, says she’s not supposed to do this for residents, but he cajoles and bullies until he gets his way.
She calls back at about eleven A.M.
“I looked at the hours between midnight and three,” she says.
“And?”
“There’s nothing on your floor, Mr. Andersen. Nobody coming and going. Nobody. No one in the elevator.”
“How can that be?”
“I guess nobody came to see you then, after all?”
“HOW CAN THAT BE?”
A rhetorical question, but dutiful Phylloh tries to answer. “It is an unusual time to pay a call.”
That night, he stays awake like a child waiting for Santa Claus. Like a child, he can’t go the distance. Like a child, he sees nothing.
Like a child, he still believes.
1970
AT THE AGE OF TWELVE, Gerry was much too old to believe in Santa Claus. But this, the first Christmas since his father had moved out, he decided to give his mother whatever pleasure he could by pretending to keep the faith. He even wrote a letter to put out with the cookies and milk, promised not to wake her up too early.
Only this year, he had no problem falling asleep and he knew he would have no problem staying in bed until a reasonable hour.
Christmas Eve had been a flat, gray day, with no chance of snow. The next day was expected to be quite cold, in the teens. He would be cooped up in the house with his mother, with no place to go, even if he did get the new bike he coveted, the one with the banana seat.
He was pretty sure he wasn’t getting a new bike and the cost was only part of the problem. A week ago, his mother had struggled for hours to secure the tree in the holder, at one point going into the kitchen to weep. But she had come back out, eyes defiantly dry, and managed to get the tree up.
Still, he couldn’t imagine his mother assembling a bike. What would he get tomorrow? He had, of course, taken a careful census of the presents beneath the tree. There had been one or two gifts large enough to be promising. And his stocking was always filled with interesting things.
When Gerry woke up and saw that it was four A.M., he was determined to go back to sleep, let his mother sleep in until at least eight. He wondered why he had awakened. Oh no. She was crying again. Or maybe talking in her sleep. More than once, he had heard her call out his father’s name at night, angry and bitter. At least, he assumed that was the Gerry whose name she called, given the tone.