On his third thrust, he connects and sends Margot flying. She lands hard on the floor; her purse flies open, the contents scatter. She still carries a healthy supply of condoms, Gerry sees. It’s a paradox worth noting that the spontaneous courtesan has to be prepared.
Victoria comes running up the steps, only to freeze at the tableau before her. Margot rises to her knees, makes a great show of rubbing her backside, but Gerry knows what a fractured tailbone feels like and he is confident she would be screaming in pain if she had injured herself seriously. She begins crawling across the cement floor, gathering her things.
“Call the police.” But it’s Margot who says this to Victoria, not Gerry. He has no desire at all to bring police into this ugly scene, to have it recorded officially. Victoria, her back pressed against the wall in horror, would seem to be in accord with him.
“I don’t think that’s what you want,” he says, pointing to his face. “You drew first blood.”
“I’m surprised you have blood, you amphibian.”
“Just go, Margot,” he says. “And don’t come back. The front desk will be informed to have security escort you out if you show up here again. I’ll get a restraining order, if that’s what it takes. Stay away from me—”
“Or?” she says with a sneer, still daring to question his manhood despite the fact that she’s just been bested by him. She takes her things to the kitchen counter, puts her purse back together, in no hurry at all.
“You’ll be sorry.”
“No, you’ll be sorry. I know things, Gerry. Things you don’t know I know, things you wouldn’t want anyone to learn.”
He has no idea what she’s talking about.
She sees his wallet on the counter, where it has sat for weeks now, used primarily by Victoria when she orders food deliveries, but always with some cash. Gerry feels insecure without cash. Margot picks it up, rifles it, takes out several bills. “The least you can do is pay for my fucking cab,” she says.
At the front door, she stops by a little mirror that hangs next to it, an organizer with hooks for keys, a shelf for mail. She checks her hair, touches up her lipstick, taking her sweet time.
“Could you just leave, Margot?”
“This isn’t over,” she says.
“No, I’m pretty sure it is.” He feels an enormous burden lifted when she goes, slamming the door behind her. He has survived the curse of Margot Chasseur.
*
HE IS WORRIED, as he drifts off to sleep that night, that the delusions will return. It was after Margot’s last visit that he received—or thought he received—the first call. He swallows his Ambien and calcium pill and, for the first time in a while, enjoys an almost dreamless sleep, one in which there is an overall feeling of wellbeing. The phone doesn’t ring; no terrifying apparitions interrupt. When he opens his eyes it is past seven o’clock and light has begun seeping into the room. Daylight saving time arrived only a few days before, so the dawn’s early light isn’t quite as early as it was a week ago. In the gray, gauzy gloom, he looks at the ceiling and wonders at his sense of contentment. He feels warm this morning and, strangely, loved, although the one person who loved him reliably is gone. He doesn’t remember dreaming, but he feels the way a child might after being comforted for a nightmare.
He finds the remote that raises the blinds. The sky to the east is shot through with streaks of orange-red. When he bought the apartment, he had pretended to be disdainful of this high-tech touch, but the blinds were essential, given the eastern exposure. And the remote secretly gave him a thrill. In his childhood, villains and playboys always had lairs with remotes that closed screens, turned on music, lowered desks, raised beds. “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.”
He thinks of Francis Scott Key watching Baltimore hold its own against the British in the War of 1812. His mind is lively this morning, his mind is itself again, hopscotching from cultural reference to cultural reference. When he visited St. Paul’s Cathedral in London as a cheeky twentysomething, how he had delighted in reminding his tour guide that the illustrious Major General Ross, honored there with a plaque near Wellington’s tomb, had not been victorious at the Battle of North Point. The rockets’ red glare! Bombs bursting in air! Gave proof through the night. Oh, say can you see? Or, if you’re at an Orioles game, OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, say can you see?
Francis Scott Key was one of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ancestors, Gerry thinks, enjoying the free association. Gerry used to take women to Fitzgerald’s grave site in that little cemetery smack-dab in the middle of Rockville. He had ambivalent feelings about Gatsby, but he almost always got laid after that maneuver. God, he misses sex.