He eats his dinner at the kitchen counter watching the sunset. The city is beautiful at night. Flaws disappear, buildings glow. He finds himself wondering if he is obligated to get in touch with his father’s heirs about his mother’s death. Her lawyer was adamant that his father’s second family cannot make any claims on his mother’s estate. Everything goes to Gerry.
The problem is that “everything” is the house, which has three mortgages and an overwhelming amount of stuff. He’s going to put Victoria in charge of emptying it, but he can’t completely hand off the responsibility. His mother, it turns out, saved everything, including his juvenilia. Princeton, which has won his papers despite not being the highest bidder, wants a complete accounting. He’ll have to go through every carton and crate, just to be sure. He supposes he should set up a system for the mail, too, archiving emails and filing the regular mail—
The mail. Fait Avenue. How could he have forgotten who lived on Fait Avenue? Well, “lived,” given that she exists only in a book, his book. Fait Avenue was Aubrey’s address in Dream Girl. An inside joke, a little homage to Nabokov and his Aubrey McFate in Lolita, a bit of cleverness that went unnoticed by virtually everyone given that Fait Avenue is a very real place in Baltimore. He had placed Aubrey in the heart of Greektown, within hearing distance of the expressway, walking distance to Samos. Fait and Ponca, to be precise. But the address was contrived: there is no 4999? Fait Avenue, no basement apartment where an enchanting young woman, following her own mysterious agenda, seduced a slightly older man in despair over his life. Had that been the address on the letter, 4999? That should have jumped out at him, but he’s so distracted these days. No, he thinks there was no number, only the street name. He would have noticed the number. Fait Avenue, Baltimore, MD.
He has to know. He jumps up, bumping his knee hard on the underside of the table, then stumbles, tripping over the rowing machine, staggering and sliding across the slick floors. His foot strikes unsteadily on the first step of the floating staircase and he loses his balance, his arms windmilling, finding nothing because there is nothing to find, tumbling ass over teakettle, as his mother used to say—why did his mother say that, what does it even mean, a teakettle doesn’t have an ass—until he lands, a crooked broken thing, in a heap at the bottom. He tries to get up, but his right leg isn’t having it and there is nothing within reach that will allow him to pull himself up and hop. He tries to drag himself across the floor, but his leg hurts so much and is such an odd shape, it seems ill advised. What if he aggravates the injury by moving? He tries to find a comfortable resting position—fuck, distressed concrete, what a concept for a floor—and has no choice but to wait until morning, when Victoria finally arrives.
“Call 911,” he says with as much authority as he can muster, positioning his arms to hide the stain from where he relieved himself at some point during the long, miserable night.
1968
IT WAS THE HEATING PAD, the doctors later said, that caused his appendix to burst.
His mother was always slow to call the doctor. Not for fear of bills; not even later, when money was tight, would she ever skimp on medical care on the basis of its cost. Even as a child, Gerry was aware of what caused his mother financial anxiety (extras at school, broken things, the amount of milk that a growing boy can drink) and what did not, which was pretty much doctor’s bills and holiday gifts.
But doctors, in his mother’s view, were for surgery and bones, maybe the occasional prescription. It was a weakness to call them. So when appendicitis began making its claim on Gerry’s body, she treated each symptom as it came, never seeing them as parts of a possibly deadly whole. His father was away—his father, a traveling salesman, was usually away—so there was no adult to second-guess his mother. Vomiting? Put the boy to bed with flat ginger ale. Fever? Baby aspirin. Abdominal pain? She draped a heating pad, something Gerry normally loved, over his midsection. Olive green, with three color-coded buttons—yellow, orange, red.
Next thing he knew, he was waking up in GBMC.
His father was not there when he came out of surgery, but he made it back to Maryland the next day. Gerry woke from a nap to his parents by his bedside, hissing. He fluttered his eyelids and pretended to slumber. His parents never fought in front of him, never. He was curious about the words they said to each other when they thought he wasn’t listening.
“It’s not my fault I wasn’t here,” his father was saying. “It’s my job.”
“Your job,” his mother repeated.
“Yes, my job,” his father said, responding to some tone that Gerry hadn’t heard. It was as if the word job didn’t mean job when his mother said it. But what else could it mean?
Gerald Andersen sold school furniture. He had a suitcase that Gerry had doted on as a child, until a neighborhood boy had accused him of playing with dolls, rather ruining it for him. His father’s sample case had desks (for students and teachers), chairs, cunning little chalkboards. Gerry still sometimes unpacked the case when his father was home, marveling at the miniatures, the specially designed piece of luggage where each piece fit, almost like a jigsaw puzzle. His father’s territory was Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana, one of the better regions. The 1960s were a good time to sell school furniture. The population was soaring; new schools were being built, old ones upgraded. Gerry remembered the stunning headline in his Weekly Reader when he was in third grade, prophesizing that the United States would hit 200 million people by the time he was in fourth grade and now here they were, in the biggest and the best country in the world, even if Nixon had just been elected president, a profound disappointment to his mother.
He wasn’t so sure how his father felt about the election. “A man’s vote is confidential, buddy,” he had said in October, patting his breast pocket, as if all his secrets resided there.
“But we’re supposed to talk about current events at home,” Gerry had said. “We pick one story in the news and we talk about it at dinner, then bring in articles and make a presentation at school.”
“We don’t have to say who we’re for, though. It’s enough to know their positions, right? Okay, tell me what Humphrey is going to do.”
Gerry was having trouble keeping his eyes closed without scrunching them tight, so he tried to roll on his side. But he was tender from the surgery and the effort made him yelp.
“Hey, buddy,” his father said.
“How are you feeling?” his mother asked.
“Better. When do I get to go home?”
“Tomorrow. They just want to make sure there’s no risk of infection.”
His father said: “You can tell everyone at school that you almost died—and your mother gave you baby aspirin.”
His mother defended herself. “How was I to know?”
The question hung in the air, as unanswered questions sometimes do. How was she to know that this stomach pain was something more? Fair enough. How was she to know what her husband did on his endless trips to Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana? He called home late at night, when the rates went down, reversing the charges. He described his day, complained about the motels, the food. Gerry was asleep when he called, or supposed to be. His mother didn’t realize how late he stayed up, listening to Johnny Carson from the top of the stairs. Surely if she knew, she would have muffled her tears after these calls.
Once, when Gerry pulled the furniture from his father’s case, a strand of long blond hair came with the miniature desk, the one for children, but a seven-year-old boy had no context for such a discovery. He uncoiled the hair from the desk leg, even as the memory coiled itself inside his mind, waiting to spring back one day. Another child has been playing with these things. That seemed ordinary enough. If he had bothered to investigate the idea further, he would have imagined a school superintendent’s child being distracted by the objects during Gerald Senior’s sales pitch. Or maybe the items had been taken out during a school board meeting and a bored board member had fiddled with one.