“Money is important only insofar as it provides for our basic needs and safety. Relative to being fed and having a roof over one’s head, love is a luxury.”
“Then why aren’t there more good movies about people trying to be fed and putting a roof over their heads?”
“Don’t be ridic—” He decides to soften his critique. “There are such movies. And books. There are great stories about man versus the elements, intent only on his survival.”
“Like what?”
“Well—” Gerry finds himself struggling. He is sure that he used to give a lecture on this very topic and yet all he can think of right now is The Old Man and the Sea, a novel he loathes. “Actually”—wait, men are not supposed to say actually anymore—“there are many, trust me. But you’re right, it wouldn’t apply here. Margot may have wanted my love, but even Margot had to realize we were done. So, fine, money. Let’s accept your theory that she and her partner want money. Do you think the partner’s desire for money would trump any concern about Margot’s well-being, her possible murder?”
“People overlook a lot,” Aileen says, “when they’re greedy.”
Gerry has to concede this. Greed, lust, desire—they do lead a person to rationalize.
“Okay, but how was—how is—this elaborate prank supposed to shake money loose?”
“Margot said she knew something about you, right? Her partner would know whatever it is. The partner wanted you to recognize Margot’s number, wants you to panic. They want you to see through the trick this time.”
“They?”
“Well, she, now. The bill’s going to come due, mark my words.”
And the irony, Gerry realizes, is that now he does have something to hide, whereas he didn’t before.
“What do we do?”
“Nothing. Remember your own advice—inaction is better than action. We do nothing, we wait. She’ll make another move.”
He shakes his head. He can’t put his finger on it, but the logic of the story isn’t tracking. Something is wrong. Margot was too sophisticated to think that unearthing a woman who said Dream Girl was her life story would matter to him. He had weathered that attempt to scandalize him already, when Shannon Little published her anemic little book. Oh, such a claim might warrant a new flurry of attention, but unless someone could prove his book had been plagiarized from another text, or stolen from a student’s manuscript—no, no one would care and Margot, literary hanger-on that she was, would have been shrewd enough to know that. Besides, he hadn’t done those things. All he had ever done was refuse to tell the world “who” the dream girl was. Magicians are allowed to safeguard their tricks; why aren’t novelists?
“What do you think happens next?” he asks Aileen. “If you’re right—if there is someone out there in whom Margot confided, someone who has ended up with Margot’s phone and has reason to believe I know something about her disappearance—what’s her next move?”
She throws up her hands. “Who knows?”
“So you’re a pantser, not a plotter?”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
2001
“ONE LAST QUESTION? And then Mr. Andersen will be happy to sign some books.”
Gerry was in an independent bookstore in Bexley, Ohio. He was pretty sure he was in Bexley, Ohio. The days had run together long ago. This was the last stop of what felt like a never-ending tour and he hoped this was truly the last question he would answer for a while. If someone told him tonight that he would never have to speak about himself or Dream Girl ever again, he would be a happy man.
“Gentleman in the back?” the store’s manager said.
“You don’t seem to like men very much,” the gentleman said. And Gerald Arnold Andersen Jr. found himself looking at Gerald Arnold Andersen Sr. for the first time in almost twenty years, since his father had insisted on showing up at his college graduation in Princeton. （“I paid for some of it,” he said, which was not untrue, but his contributions were fitful and unreliable.） From that day on, Gerry had refused to have any relationship with his father. In interviews, he went out of his way to make it clear that he had been raised by a single mother, that his father was not in the picture at all. He omitted any mention of his father’s bigamy out of fealty to his mother.
“My characters are my characters,” he said. “I think it’s somewhat naive, as a reader, to talk about whether writers ‘like’ their characters. That’s not the point of what I’m doing. But perhaps I’m not the writer for you. I have you pegged as more of a MacDonald guy.”