Neurotica

by Sue Margolis

  Gerald's most frequent purchase was Bloom's salami. He spent much of his time driving round northwest London from one deli to another, chatting to his former rivals about the iniquities of the Inland Revenue—and buying up all their salami, the kind without garlic. He never asked for it to be sliced. He preferred to buy the whole thing. Because he had run out of fridge space, he decided to keep his salami collection in the bath, which he kept refilling with cold water so that the meat wouldn't go off. When Shelley walked into the bathroom one day to go for a pee, she discovered dozens of thick foot-long salamis in their bright-red Bloom's skins bobbing about in the water like little kosher torpedoes.

  Realizing that her father wasn't so much going to Sainsbury's as going insane-sbury's, she sat him down and insisted he go to the doctor and get some psychological help. To his credit Gerald recognized this was what he needed and when the GP suggested he join a support group where people with similar obsessions met to talk over their problems, Gerald needed no persuading.

  If nothing else, he reasoned, it would be a way of getting out of the house and meeting new people.

  There were ten or twelve regulars who came to the group. Most of them were women, which for a widower, thought Gerald, couldn't be a bad thing. At his first session he had to stand up and announce, “My name is Gerald Brownstein and I am obsessed with buying food.” Then everybody clapped and in unison yelled, “Welcome, Gerald.”

  Each week, members of the group confessed how many times they had washed their hands, checked the gas was switched off or cleaned the kitchen floor. At the end of every session they were given homework by the group therapist. The obsessive cleaners were usually asked to do something like empty the contents of an ashtray onto the carpet and see how long they could walk past the mess without cleaning it up. They then had to report back.

  One of the compulsive cleaners was a woman who had been going to the group for years and had still to make the slightest progress. She didn't own an ashtray, refused to buy one and had never got further with the homework than neatly arranging a couple of previously rinsed and ironed Quality Street toffee wrappers in a Waterford crystal sweet dish and leaving the dish and its contents on the floor for two minutes before feeling compelled to clear it up. One week, her face beaming, she announced her best time yet. She had managed to leave the sweet dish for three minutes nineteen seconds, after which, she explained to the group, she had been overtaken by feelings of extreme anxiety and had to rush back into the room, pick up the sweet dish and sponge the area it had occupied on the carpet with 1001.

  The woman's name was Gloria Shapiro. She was slim and expensively dressed, with beautifully coiffed blond hair and long red nails. Gerald knew she was married, but he was smitten.

  In fact he was more than smitten. As the months went by she became his second obsession. Every evening about six he would pour himself a sweet sherry, put on one of his Joe Loss records and imagine what it would be like to go out with the glorious Gloria. In no time his mind was full of romantic trysts, gentle fox-trots and lingering goodnight kisses.

  It didn't take long before Gerald wanted to turn his fantasy into reality. When she happened to mention to the group that her husband was in Israel for six weeks supervising the redecoration of their flat in Eilat, he saw the perfect opportunity to ask her out. But knowing full well she would turn him down, and suspecting he wasn't strong enough to cope with the rejection, he formulated an alternative plan. He decided it would be sufficient to just catch a glimpse of her every day. Overnight Gerald Brownstein became a stalker.

  Gloria kissed Martin Solomons good-bye. Even though he was her dentist and had just finished the last of her root canal work, she didn't feel she was overstepping patient–practitioner boundaries by giving her best friend's son, whom she had known since the day he was circumcised nearly forty years ago, a quick peck on the cheek. Besides, she adored Martin. Not only was he, in Gloria's opinion, the best dentist in northwest London, but he was also one of the gentlest, kindest men she knew. She put this down to him being gay.

  Gloria still had her doubts about whether God had meant to put homosexuals on the earth. If he had, wouldn't he have created Adam and Steve? Still, she had to admit that like a lot of women she felt very much at ease in the company of gay men and she looked forward to her appointments with Martin because he chatted away over the amalgam about his boyfriend troubles and always asked for her advice, which she gave willingly, albeit in fits and starts, every time he allowed her a break for a mouth rinse.

  Today's session had lasted nearly an hour. Afterwards Gloria wrote out the check at reception and then ran back briefly to remind Martin in front of his new patient and within earshot of a waiting room full of people, several of whom were bound to have been raving homophobes, that in her opinion, lack of communication was the reason most relationships broke down and had he and Rob considered counseling?

  It was then that she planted the good-bye kiss on his cheek—and it crossed her mind how embarrassing it would be if Martin knew that she always referred to him at home as the Tooth Fairy.

  With that thought ringing in her ears, along with Martin's reminder not to chew on her left side for the next couple of hours, she closed the surgery door behind her and walked down the steps and onto the pavement.

  As both sides of the main road were painted with double yellow lines, Gloria had left the car round the corner in Sainsbury's parking lot. She decided she would pop into the supermarket and get a few bits and pieces for Anna. She'd had a surreptitious stock-take of her daughter's cupboards a few days ago and was horrified to discover that Anna was down to her last half-dozen tins of red salmon.

  Gloria was a firm believer in tinned fish. She frequently made the point to Anna that if anybody popped round unexpectedly, it was the most versatile standby. Gloria herself was never to be found without cupboards groaning with food. Although she only had to cook for herself and Harry these days, and despite a full-time job, she retained a profound maternal need, not uncommon in Jewish women, to provide food in abundance.

  This afternoon Gloria's assistant, Sylvia, was minding Maison Gloria, which meant she could take the rest of the day off. She would spend an hour or so wandering round Sainsbury's, piling up her cart with treats for Amy and Josh, and then pop over to see Anna and dispense goodies to the children. Anna had said she would be home by four because she had to pick the children up from school. Denise, the baby-sitter, had sprained her ankle line dancing and had taken the day off.

  Thanks for Gloria's food-buying efforts would be bestowed in two ways. The children's would come in the form of exuberant hugs, kisses and whoops of “Wow, Gran, thanks. You're the best gran in the world. Mum never lets us have Mars Bar ice creams.” For a second or two, Gloria would bask in the nourishing warmth of conditional love. Then Anna would spoil the moment with her usual speech about how undermined as a mother she felt every time Gloria went against her express wishes by feeding the children the kind of crap she and Dan had banned except for Saturday-mornings treats.

  Gloria was incapable of mending her ways. She walked towards one of the snakes of supermarket carts outside the main doors. As she struggled to remove the first cart, something caught her eye. She focused on the inside of a midnight blue Jaguar parked ten or fifteen yards away.

  A trilby hat appeared to be bobbing up and down behind the steering wheel. For a second or two, Gloria thought it was simply somebody with their head down, searching through the glove compartment. Then a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles came level with the dashboard, bringing with them an oversized nose and a thick gray mustache.

  “Oh, Gawd,” Gloria heard herself mutter. “It's that bloody schmo from the group.”

  All the obsessive compulsives agreed that even by their standards, Gerald Brownstein was a bit odd. Gloria, however, was having particular problems with him. At the end of each meeting he would make a beeline for her. Just as she was getting her coat, she would look up to find him standing beside her. T
he first couple of times this happened he said nothing. He simply stood there breathing through his half-open mouth, making soft snoring sounds. She smiled politely, said good-bye and disappeared. Lately he seemed to have plucked up the courage to speak to her. The last couple of times he had made conversation, it had lasted over half an hour. In his silly high-pitched voice he had gone on and on about how much the group was helping him tackle his food-shopping compulsion, how lonely he was since his wife died and how he could really do with some female company. This final sentence was always followed by a long, heavy silence, during which Gerald's eyes widened and his tongue protruded slightly from his open mouth.

  A few weeks ago, Gloria had spoken in private to Julian, the group's therapist. She suggested it might be better for everyone if Gerald left the obsessive compulsives and joined the neurotics downstairs, but Julian had said that in his opinion Gerald was making excellent progress and should stay where he was. He went on to suggest, much to Gloria's irritation, that he didn't like members of the group being turned into scapegoats and that maybe it was Gloria who had the problem, not Gerald.

  In an effort to give Gerald the impression that she hadn't noticed him, Gloria opened her handbag and began rifling through it as if she had lost something. Every so often she would glance surreptitiously towards the blue Jag. One minute Gerald's face was above the dashboard, the next it had disappeared and all she could see was the trilby. Then Gerald became bolder. The next time he looked up, he took off his glasses and leaned forward. Then he pressed his face against the windshield the way children do on buses. She took one look at the straining myopic eyes, the squashed outsize nose and flattened clownlike grin, and felt sick. There was no doubt in Gloria's mind that she was being watched. Julian had got it all wrong. Gerald Brownstein had developed a new obsession. Her.

  Gloria suddenly became aware that he could have been following her since she left home that morning to go to the Tooth Fairy, and that their simultaneous arrival in Sainsbury's parking lot was no coincidence.

  She was more furious than scared. Nobody in the group thought for one minute that Gerald, at sixty-something and a shambling five foot seven, would do anybody any harm.

  Gloria decided she could either go over to the car, scream at him and threaten to call the police, or she could remain dignified and aloof and get on with her shopping. She was determined not to give him the satisfaction of seeing that she was disturbed by his behavior. She decided she would do her best to ignore him and confront him only if he followed her round the supermarket.

  In an effort to look fearless and bold, Gloria lifted her chin and stuck out her plentiful chest. In one easy motion she pulled a cart from the cart line and guided it round to face the automatic doors. She stood still for a second or two and with one hand pulled down on the hem of her short jacket. Then she tried to make the first of what she intended to be huge, fearless strides into the supermarket. Unfortunately she was wearing a tight pencil skirt and four-inch heels.

  Gerald Brownstein's eyes were getting tired without his glasses. He took his face away from the windshield, picked up his thick-lensed spectacles and positioned them on their usual spot, a good inch down from the bridge of his nose. As his eyes refocused, his mouth opened even wider than usual. There was a small but unmistakable stirring inside his Aertex Y-fronts as he watched Gloria wiggle and totter into Sainsbury's, looking about as fearless and bold as a geisha girl.

  Gloria pushed her cart towards the fruit and veg, trying hard to force her mind away from Gerald Brownstein and back towards Anna's shopping. As she picked up a bunch of seedless grapes and stuffed a couple into her mouth to test them for flavor, she decided she had to make some effort to stop annoying Anna by bringing the children so many sweets. She decided the grapes would do and put four bunches into the cart. To these she added a couple of Ogen melons, several pineapples, two dozen nectarines, some plums, a large bag of Granny Smiths, another of Cox's and three nets of Jaffa oranges. She then moved on to the exotic fruits, to the phylasses, the custard apples and kumquats.

  After five minutes she had loaded her cart with enough vitamin C to keep an entire shipload of eighteenth-century sailors free of scurvy for six months. She knew she should make her way to the checkout. Amy and Josh wouldn't love her any less, she reasoned, if she bought them Cox's instead of Coke. But suddenly Gloria was reminded of their gleeful little faces, their wide eyes looking up at her as she handed out the jumbo bars of Galaxy and six-packs of Crunchies. She forced the heavy cart left into pastas and flour, wheeled it past the cook-in sauces and headed for her usual stamping ground among the cans of Fanta, high-fat yogurts with sprinkles on top and tubes of Refreshers.

  A few minutes later, she was bending down into a huge deep freeze to take out three or four banoffee pies when she sensed somebody behind her. She knew exactly who it was. She could hear the familiar soft snoring sound. Gloria straightened up, but didn't turn round. For a while she stood facing the ketchup and salad creams on the shelf above the freezer and took a couple of deep breaths. Then she began to turn slowly.

  First she saw the trilby hat, then the thick lenses and unkempt mustache. Finally she noticed the cheap Man at Woolworths trench coat and even took time to wonder why people with money were so often too mean to buy decent quality clothes. It must have been several seconds before Gloria noticed that the front of the trench coat was being held wide open to reveal two puny bare legs and a pair of baggy Aertex underpants. Stuffed inside Gerald Brownstein's underpants and exiting from the right leg as far as his knee was a very thick and very red Bloom's salami—without garlic.

  Mum, I can't believe I'm hearing this.” Anna turned away from her mother for a second or two as she stretched across the kitchen table and took out a couple of kumquats from one of the Sainsbury's carrier bags.

  “What do you mean,” she continued, shivering with revulsion at the bitterness of the kumquat, “by saying there's no need to involve the police. This Brownstein creep has been stalking you, for Christ's sake. Heaven knows for how long. There you are standing with a banoffee pie in each hand and an old Jewish man comes up to you and starts playing with his salami. Brenda, would you please tell my mother she is completely barking.”

  Brenda, who was staying with Anna and Dan for a few days in order to escape the reporters she assumed would be camping outside the Holland Park house any minute over the Giles Hardacre business, said that as far as she was concerned not going to the police went beyond Barking and was, in fact, getting on for Dagenham and even Upminster. With that she put a slice of custard apple into her mouth, decided she couldn't swallow it and got up to look for some paper towels while at the same time mumbling something about it being no mistake that the conquistadors brought back oranges from the tropics and not custard apples.

  “Look, he ran off sobbing his heart out. I'm convinced he felt terribly ashamed. Maybe I'll have a word with him next week at the group. I can't go to the police. They'll charge him with indecency and throw him into a cell. He could even end up spending months on remand. Anna, people commit suicide on remand. What if he killed himself? How would I feel? And think of the headlines in the Jewish Chronicle.”

  “Yeah,” said Anna, suddenly seeing the funny side. “ ‘Salami Stalker Found Sliced in Cell.' ”

  Then the three of them broke into giggles and began making up dafter and dafter headlines, culminating in “Salami Madman Goes from Bad to Wurst.” When Dan, who had spent the day working at home, came into the kitchen five minutes later to get a cup of coffee, they were all sitting round the kitchen table laughing their heads off like anally obsessed seven-year-olds in the grip of the latest turd howler.

  Dan asked who was for coffee, but nobody took any notice because they were all still having hysterics. Anna took even less notice because she was laughing and at the same time trying to yell at Amy and Josh. For the last half hour they had been charging round the kitchen demanding to know where Anna had hidden the Hula Hoops and Twixes and going yuk,
puuuke, when she suggested they help themselves to some of the wonderful fruit Grandma had brought.

  Dan filled the kettle to the top anyway. While he waited for the water to boil he propped himself against one of the kitchen units, and started to smile. He couldn't remember the last time he'd seen Anna laugh. He thought how beautiful she looked and how much he loved her. Dan knew that after everything he'd put her through in the last couple of years she had every right to leave him. As quickly as it had appeared, the smile vanished.

  He'd spent ages in his first session with Virginia Livermead telling her how scared he was of Anna leaving him, and how he really had tried his best to stop himself worrying about getting ill and dying. In fact, he had been so nervous when he arrived at Virginia's flat that he had started to blurt it all out while standing in her hallway wearing that ridiculous hat the cabby had given him. She had simply smiled briefly, nodded and started to lead him into her consulting room. It was only when he caught sight of himself in the hall mirror that he realized he was still wearing the hat. He did an emergency stop in midsentence and ripped the thing from his head. It was then that he saw what was written across it. In an instant he was hit by the full humiliating horror of turning up to see his shrink wearing a kiss-me-quick hat. For a split second he thought of running away. Then he looked up. Virginia appeared utterly composed and unruffled as she stood holding open the door of her consulting room waiting for Dan to go through. He decided the reason she seemed so relaxed was either because she was used to dealing with loonies and could tell he wasn't violent, or because the flat was fitted with umpteen panic buttons connected to the local jail, and she knew an armored police van was already on its way.

  He glanced sheepishly at Virginia Livermead, who was in her late fifties and wore her gray hair in a severe crop. He mumbled an apology for the hat and said it was a long story. Then he stuffed it into his pocket.