“Is the parking space all you require, Aileen?”
“For now,” she says.
2014
“YOU’RE NOT FROM HERE, ARE YOU?”
Gerry was in the hotel bar. He didn’t really want a drink—if it were alcohol he had required, he could have remained at the reception held in his honor after his talk that night at the university. But Gerry’s standing joke was that his fee for speaking doubled if he was expected to make small talk.
Still, he had dutifully made the rounds, put in a respectable forty-five minutes at the reception and then retreated to his hotel, driven by a student. He asked the student if he knew the story of David Halberstam’s death in a car accident, while being driven by a student. The student did and they had made the twenty-minute trip in silence, which was what Gerry wanted.
He had been to Columbus several times before, visiting the Thurber House, once even staying in the no-frills apartment on the top floor, the very place where the bed had fallen. He had loved Thurber when he was young. He even liked the television show that used Thurber’s drawings, My World and Welcome to It. He would have preferred to be in the Thurber House right now. It was quiet at night, near downtown yet removed. Hotels made him feel lonely. So he sat at the bar and drank Bushmills, which he had taken up years ago because his father disdained it. “Protestant whiskey,” said his father, a Jameson man. Gerry didn’t even like it that much.
The woman who had spoken to him had come in after he did, chosen a stool three seats down, ordered a white wine, and taken out a book. She looked familiar at first, then he decided she just had one of those faces. Pretty, but not shockingly so. Light eyes, blond hair worn in a ragged bob. But the brows and lashes were dark. Eyes put in with a dirty finger, his mother would have said. An Irish expression, more meaningful before all women, everywhere, began darkening their eyelashes, outlining their eyes as if they were Cleopatra, wearing false eyelashes. Women were increasingly fake these days. Gerry liked real women—slender, small-breasted, with their natural hair color.
Like this woman, although she was young, much too young for him, in her twenties.
Still, she had spoken to him. It was only polite to answer.
“Safe question to ask in a hotel bar,” he said. “People in hotels generally are from somewhere else.”
“I’m from here.”
“Ah.” She was flirting, he was sure of it. He liked it, and what was the harm in a little banter? “Is this one of your hangouts?”
“Hardly. A bit on the expensive side to be a regular hang. But I needed a treat tonight, after I got off work. I just wanted to sit with a glass of wine and my book.”
The book was The Master and Margarita, one of his cherished favorites, although he did not recognize this particular cover featuring a black cat with a forked tongue. Gerry told the bartender to upgrade the woman’s chardonnay from the house brand to the most expensive one on the list, then moved down one stool. Good taste in literature deserved to be rewarded.
“I’m Gerry Andersen,” he says. His name evinces no recognition. Good.
“Kim Barton.”
*
TWO HOURS LATER, the woman was in his room, but suddenly much shyer than she had been in the bar, where she had touched his arm. Her leg had even brushed against his once, he was sure of it.
“I knew who you were,” she said. “All along. I was at your talk tonight and I know from my days at the university that they put the big-name speakers up here. In fact, I majored in creative writing and I used to work on this speaker series.”
Her confession had the odd effect of at once amplifying and suppressing desire. Felt like a bit of a rigged game, if his reputation preceded him. But who cared? She was so pretty in that midwestern way. Technically, her features and coloring were not that different from his. But there was a milk-fed, corn-fed quality to her heartshaped face. She looked like—America.
He was a little buzzed.
“How did you know I’d be in the bar?”
“I didn’t. I really did stop in for a treat. Your talk was great, by the way. As I said, I have a degree in creative writing, but—I work in a nursing home. In administration, not in care.”
The distinction seemed to matter to her, although Gerry couldn’t fathom why.
“I’m married,” he said.
“I know. You mentioned her during your talk. It’s your second marriage?”
“Third.”
His matrimonial record hung over him, like that black cloud that hung over the character in Li’l Abner, Joe Btfsplk. He knew in that moment that he and Sarah would divorce within a year. It would be costly to him, and not only financially. Sarah Kotula was the wife he had taken—archaic phrase, but apt—in the flush of success. She was perfect in every way, even more perfect than Lucy had been. Sarah was a gift he had chosen for himself in much the same way he had splurged on furnishings for his New York apartment. Sarah was a top-shelf prize at boardwalk Skee-Ball, suddenly, finally within reach. A little bit younger than Gerry, but not young enough to make him look ridiculous. An accomplished journalist in her own right, with family money. She was so perfect that she was a bit of a turn-off. Even their best sex had a workmanlike aspect. He was Sarah’s trophy, too. This young woman wanted him, he could tell. Did it matter if she desired him as a man or as GERRY ANDERSEN?