March 13
THUD, THUD, THUD. Thud, thud, thud.
It's a familiar sound, but Gerry can't identify it, not with the blood pounding in his ears and his mind darting around, trying to make sense of the tableau before him.
Thud, thud, thud.
Maybe it's the telltale heart, although how would one bury a body beneath a floor of poured concrete? If only. If only there were a heart still beating inside that black puddle of cloth, if only a brain were still humming inside Margot's damaged skull.
Thud, thud, thud.
It's Aileen's heavy tread on the stairs. Shit. She always comes up to say goodbye in the mornings, although Gerry usually feigns sleep to avoid conversation with her. Maybe he should do that now, play possum. Maybe he is asleep. A dream would be dreamy. This is a dream, it has to be a dream, and when he awakes, the shape will be gone, in the same way the apparition disappeared that one night. Opioid-fueled delusions, dementia, who cares? All that matters is an explanation for what he thinks he sees on the floor. He closes his eyes. Maybe his eyes were always closed.
Thud, thud, thud.
Then—nothing. The moment of silence stretches out. He keeps thinking she will scream and when she doesn't, it gives him hope. Her breathing is regular, in and out, a little huffy as always after she climbs the stairs, but normal, measured.
"Oh my," she says. "What happened here?"
He opens his eyes. There stands Aileen in her puffy coat, arms akimbo, the not-so-little teapot, tall and stout. Her knitting bag dangles from the crook of her elbow.
"I don't know, I honestly don't know," Gerry says. "She showed up yesterday, but I sent her away. She attacked me, she scratched me, and I fended her off, but I didn't—I wouldn't. And that was earlier, when Victoria was here. I didn't—I couldn't—I don't know how—"
"She sneaked back in," Aileen says. Or asks. Her calmness is surreal, but she is a nurse, she has seen things that others have not.
"She must have. I don't know how. She knows I have to leave the front door unlocked, maybe she hid in the stairwell between the floors—"
He sounds ludicrous. Could he have done this? That sounds ludicrous, too, the idea of Margot spending hours in a stairwell. But Victoria was here until five and there was no body on the floor when Aileen arrived at seven. This has happened overnight. He is proud that he can pinpoint this, then appalled. Margot is dead, in his apartment, and not even she is drama queen enough to plunge a letter opener into her own eye.
"This is bad, Mr. Andersen." For once, he is grateful for Aileen's flat aspect, her gift for understatement.
"I guess we need to call the police," he says.
"Sure," Aileen says, although she doesn't move. "Obviously, it was self-defense."
"Yes," he says. "I mean, I think. I don't remember anything." He wonders if sleep-murdering is another potential side effect of Ambien. "Any statement I give would be inherently false."
"You need time," she says. "The worst thing to do in an emergency is go off half-cocked without a plan."
"Yes," he agrees fervently. "Maybe call a lawyer or—"
"No, not a lawyer. Trust me," she says. "I can take care of this."
"How?"
"Trust me," she repeats. She takes off her coat, drapes it over a chair. He does not remonstrate with her for this. "Put yourself into my hands."
Not the image he would have chosen, but he will do exactly that. He has to. He literally cannot imagine what it would be like to follow any other course of action. To call the police or a lawyer. To tell Thiru. No, he will trust Aileen.
She continues with appealing confidence, energized by this new task: "Cancel Claude. Then call Victoria and tell her not to come in today."
"On what grounds?"
"You're the writer. Make something up."
He does. He calls Victoria and tells her that he needs her to drive up to Princeton and inspect its special collections. "I want to find out what the experience of accessing my papers will be like for future researchers," he says. "Tell them that you are interested in seeing the collections of Toni Morrison and, say, F. Scott Fitzgerald."
"Do you think those are the best, um, comps?"
An impertinent question, but he doesn't have the luxury of challenging Victoria's assessment of his place in American literature. Although, he can't help noting to himself that his body of work is larger than Fitzgerald's.
"My thinking is that those will be two of the most in-demand, that library staff should be used to scholars asking to see their papers. If they can't handle this request, then I can't expect them to do well by those who might want to examine my papers."
"The drive alone—"
"I know. It is a lot. You could take the train, but it wouldn't save much time in the end. And it will be a long day no matter how efficient you are. Why don't you stay in a hotel—I can recommend a nice inn, near campus —and spend the night, break the work up over two days and then take Friday off to make up for all the extra hours."
Aileen, who is scrubbing the floor, gives him a rubber-gloved thumbsup.
Aileen's efficiency today surprises him. Aileen, so slow and dull when going about her normal job of caring for him, has rallied admirably in the matter of removing a corpse and cleaning up after it. It's like a reality television show in his own living room. He had watched from his bed as she wrapped Margot's body in a fitted white sheet, presumably one of the ones he keeps for the never-used sofa bed in his study, then dragged it down the stairs like a toboggan.
"Good thing you like the skinny ones," Aileen had said, huffing and puffing.
"Where will you—"
"The fewer questions you ask," she told him, "the better. Not knowing anything, not remembering anything—that's an asset."
So the body has been removed, the floor is scrubbed. She has washed the letter opener, a cheerful Lady Macbeth, humming as she works, and placed it back on the end table he uses as a nightstand. Gerry asks the Google app on his phone a question: "How do police find blood evidence on objects?" This takes him down a rabbit hole of luminol stories. The letter opener is far from their only problem. Maybe they should just get rid of it? But they can't get rid of the poured concrete floor, which potentially could hold on to its trace memories of Margot's death forever. 
Aileen, do you think that—?"
"You have to let me do the thinking."
Terrifying, but he accedes.
She asks for his credit card and makes a series of mysterious phone calls. He catches references to cubic feet and expedited delivery. Aileen gets testy at one point. "Tomorrow is not expedited," she says. "Today is expedited. Don't you know what words mean?" She hangs up on that person, dials another number. This conversation is odder still. "Yes, I am aware that deer season is over, but I hit one with my car."
And, more often than usual, given that she is not normally here during the day, she appears by his bedside with pills. He wants to protest, but he is so grateful for the sleep, which provides the hope that this is a nightmare from which he will wake.
He picks up the letter opener, presses it to his own face, just below the eye. Skin and bone would be no match for it.
2016
"YOU MUST HAVE THE UNI."
Gerry looked up, skeptical. Already grumpy at being tricked into going to a fancy restaurant—he had thought he was meeting Thiru for soup dumplings, having no idea where Extra Place was, beyond being on the Lower East Side—he was in no mood to be told what he must eat, or drink. He wanted to get out of the restaurant as fast as possible.
But this Momofuku Ko was not designed for speedy dining, much to Gerry's dismay. The only option available was a "tasting menu," dreaded words to Gerry's ears. Probably Thiru's reason for choosing it. He had an agenda, one that would take time to lay out. And the service was oversolicitous, which Gerry hated. He preferred the gruff indifference of the city's diners, places that were disappearing one by one. Where was the New York of the late 1980s, or even the one at the beginning of the twenty-first century? After the second or third course, he stopped the pretense of eating, regarding his food with arms folded, like a grumpy child.
But the woman who was insisting that he must try the uni was another patron. Tall, thin, stylish. Sexy, frankly. She didn't linger or try to introduce herself, simply returned to her table, where she was dining with what Gerry assumed was a finance type, based on the pinstripes and the pocket square.
He didn't realize he was still looking at her until Thiru snapped his fingers to get his attention. "Gerry."
"What?"
"I was saying Rudin gets things made." Thiru began ticking off the names of various film and television projects, most of which meant nothing to Gerry.
"He didn't get The Corrections made," he said. Although Gerry disdained most gossip, even literary gossip, there were certain writers whose careers he tracked. He didn't consider Franzen the gold standard of his generation, but others did, so he kept tabs. And he was sincerely disappointed when the Corrections adaptation fell through. He had hoped the television series would highlight what Gerry considered the novel's myriad flaws.
"No one bats a thousand," Thiru said.
"Look, it's not even a good option. It's insultingly low."
Dream Girl had been optioned three times so far. The book was like a trick wallet, tied to a string. Gerry and Thiru put it on the sidewalk and people kept chasing it. But he couldn't tell Thiru that he would prefer just optioning it over and over. The film production of his first novel had been disappointing, in large part because no one seemed to care that much. Gerry had hoped for either an outstanding adaptation or a total botch that would lead to impassioned tributes to the source material. No one had anything to say about the movie, good or bad. They took his firstborn, in many ways his sweetest and most pliable child, and rendered it dull. Boring, polite, bloodless, with nothing really there in the end. So, no, he didn't want to see Dream Girl produced. He wanted people to pay him for it over and over again.
Also, he was miffed that Rudin had bought Franzen's book, not his, back in 2001. He didn't want to be anyone's second choice.
"Options have changed, Gerry. It's hard to get that big money now. But an actress is attached, someone who wants to play Aubrey." Thiru shared a name that meant nothing to Gerry, then showed him a photograph on his phone.
"Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. Too beautiful, in fact. Aubrey isn't conventionally pretty. That's central to the book."
"Jesus Christ, Gerry, of course she's going to be beautiful. Have you been to the movies?"
"Not recently, no. I do like that one television show."
"Which one?"
"That one that people talk about."
"You're going to have to narrow it down, Gerry." "He sells drugs?"
"Breaking Bad?"
"That's it."
"Gerry, it's not even on the air anymore."
"I guess I'm watching it on iTunes."
He sampled the uni. He had no idea what it was, but he had to admit, it was pretty good.
"What's next?" Thiru asked.