Leenie says: “Once my book is finished and under contract, we’ll say goodbye.”
Gerry knows how Leenie says goodbye.
April
ONLY A NA?F would try to buy time by switching up and giving Leenie a harsher critique. Gerry is not Penelope, he’s not going to tear up the weaving every night. He goes the other way, praises things that could be improved, swallows his revulsion for cheap plot devices, Leenie’s Achilles heel. It’s all good. It’s all fine. The sooner he can get this book to Thiru, the sooner he will have a chance to be free. In his editing sessions, he makes tiny suggestions that would seem to be inconsequential, but Thiru will know, Thiru will see through it, as he once joked. Thiru knows Gerry doesn’t care what the Oxford English Dictionary says, he’s sticking by the old meanings of literally and hopefully. Thiru knows all Gerry’s bugaboos, to use that peculiar word that Lucy loved. Gerry has been fighting New York copyeditors for almost forty years over the word rowhouse. What Baltimoreans have joined together, he would retort in the margins, let no copyeditor tear asunder.
All he has to do is sell Leenie on one small change.
“When we submit your book,” he says, “let’s do it under my name.”
She puffs up like a cobra, ready to strike. “Are you trying to steal my work?”
“No! I’m trying to get you the attention you deserve. If this book goes out as the work of a twenty-nine-year-old unpublished woman, even with my endorsement, it will be read with—skepticism. Maybe even as a kind of fan fic. If we submit it as my first piece of autofiction-slash-memoir, it will be taken seriously as a significant departure for me. The reveal of its actual authorship, the fact that I authorized this but did not write it—ta-da!”—he mimes a magician’s sleight of hand—“will knock people on their keisters.”
He’s not sure why he uses a vaudeville word such as keister, but it feels right.
“It will be like the reverse of that writer who submitted Jerzy Kosinski’s Steps under a fake name, only to have it rejected by every major publishing house. Everyone will want this book. When we reveal the ruse, that you are my student and wrote this with my permission and approval, they’ll only want it more.”
He watches Leenie trying to absorb this idea. She’s no dummy. She’s suspicious of him. But it has never occurred to her that he is planting land mines throughout her book so that her beloved manuscript will save him, that Thiru unwittingly showed Gerry how he could signal his distress by mentioning what words and themes would arouse his concern should Gerry ever use them.
Maybe they are more like Thompson’s Doc and Carol than they realize.
2008
GRETCHEN HAD TAKEN to drunk-dialing him late at night.
“I see you’re dating again,” she said without preamble. “I hope you realize it’s on Page Six because of her, not you. She’s the famous one.”
“Yes, it’s her only drawback.”
“Tell her to get a prenup,” Gretchen said.
“We had a prenup. At your insistence. You were so worried about protecting the apartment, your income.”
“No, no, that wasn’t it at all. I would have split everything fifty-fifty, but you didn’t want to share the proceeds from your work. I supported you. You wrote Dream Girl on my dime; I was your venture capitalist and I didn’t get any return on my investment.”
“Rewrite history however you want, Gretchen.”
Life had not been kind to Gretchen. She had been working at Lehman Brothers when the crash came. Now she was unemployed and bitter.
“Look, between us—who was Aubrey? I know you had to be fucking someone while we were married.”
“I was faithful to you, Gretchen, which isn’t something I’m sure you can say. There is no Aubrey. I made her up.” An old complaint from James M. Cain floated into his head, Cain’s rejoinder at being accused of imitating Hammett. It really doesn’t work that way.
“Tell me the truth, Gerry.”
So he did. He shared with Gretchen the story he had never told anyone, not even Thiru. He told her the identity of the Dream Girl.
April
“I DON’T KNOW HOW TO END IT,” Leenie says.
“Endings are hard,” he commiserates.
“I feel as if something big should happen.” She mimes an explosion with her hands, makes fireworks noises with her mouth. Gerry shakes his head.
“If I may offer an observation—you have always been a bit enamored of deus ex machina.”