She comes back with pages, not a sledgehammer. He decides that’s lucky for him, but he has to think about it.
“I’ve chucked what I was working on. I decided I wasn’t going far enough. I want to write something more like Rachel Cusk is doing, blurring fiction and memoir. Or Sheila Heti.”
She begins to read:
Gerry Andersen’s new apartment is a topsy-turvy affair—living area on the second floor, bedrooms below. The brochure—it is the kind of apartment that had its own brochure when it went on the market in 2018—boasted of 360-degree views, but that was pure hype.
To be fair, she didn’t say it would be her fiction and memoir that she wanted to blur. As she reads on, uncannily aware of Gerry’s inner life and thoughts, he begins to wonder what happens to him if Leenie steals his voice.
Again, to be fair—it wasn’t as if he was using it.
2018
“ARE YOU SO BUSY that you couldn’t afford dinner at a real restaurant?” Margot asks, pulling her shawl closer around her shoulders, as if City Diner, almost too warm on this early autumn night, is making her cold.
“Diners are real, Margot. And, yes, I’m slammed for time. I went straight from Penn Station to the apartment, to make sure it was ready for the walk-through tomorrow—”
“I would have been happy to do that with you.”
Gerry knew this, which was why he had done it alone. He didn’t want to be anywhere private with Margot. Especially the apartment. The lack of furniture would not inhibit her.
“Then I met with Thiru. I was supposed to go to Berlin this fall, but clearly that’s not happening.”
She arches an eyebrow when he asks for onions on his cheeseburger, knowing that’s not usual for him. She limits herself to a cup of black coffee, from which she takes only a few sips, leaving a vivid crimson imprint, then helps herself to his french fries without asking.
“So you’re really gone.”
“Yes, so it would seem. Once I have the cash in hand from my sale, I need to move quickly to buy in Baltimore. I think it’s only a matter of time before my mother is in hospice, but—the doctors have been saying that for months—”
“We never had a proper breakup,” Margot said. “We just drifted apart.”
In Gerry’s point of view, they’d had multiple breakups; Margot simply refused to recognize them as such. She was still squatting in his apartment as recently as a month ago. His Realtor, a formidable woman, forced her out with the co-op board’s help.
“I don’t see you in Baltimore,” Gerry said, then regretted it. He shouldn’t even raise the possibility. But he is polite, to a fault. To a fault. He moves quickly to change the subject. “You did forward all my mail, right? When you were living there? I’d hate to think any bills went missing.”
“Of course I did. God, you were always so obsessed with your mail.”
“Was I?” He genuinely didn’t remember it that way.
“Your mail and your bills. Have to pay the bills on time or God knows what might happen. You’re such a good boy, Gerry.”
She was mocking him, he can tell, but he doesn’t know why.
“It’s a habit,” he said. “One thing I’ve done right, consistently.”
“I’m sorry,” she says, offering him a sincere smile. “Walk me home tonight? It’s lovely out, our first real autumnal evening.”
The word autumnal grates—so pretentious—but it was a beautiful night and what harm could there be in a walk? “Where is home these days?”
“I’m staying at a friend’s place at 102nd and West End. We can walk through Riverside Park.”
He did and didn’t regret what happened on the bench. Margot, with her praying mantis limbs, her voracious mouth—he counted himself lucky that he got out of this relationship without her biting his head off.
April
GERRY IS TRYING to wean himself from all his medication. Senses must be sharp! He cannot afford a sleep so drugged and heavy that he misses another homicide, possibly his own. Funny, it doesn’t occur to Leenie to watch him swallow his pills. Maybe she believes him to be addicted by now, or at least keen for his nightly oblivion. At any rate, he holds the nighttime pills under his tongue until she goes back downstairs, eager to be reunited with her manuscript. He then takes them out and crushes them as best he can, shutting them inside whatever hardcover book is on his nightstand, sprinkling the dust on the rug. It’s not as if Leenie even pretends to clean anymore. She leaves that to a housekeeper who comes every other week, the only outsider who still enters the apartment. Can the housekeeper save him? It seems a lot to ask, given that he doesn’t even know her name. Carolina? Carmen? Carmela? No, that was the wife on The Sopranos. Anyway, her English isn’t very good and Gerry speaks no Spanish at all.