“Hugh Nickelby’s a really good friend of mine,” I had said.
“You’re kidding,” Derek Hassler had said.
I wasn’t so much kidding as lying. I had never met Hugh Nickelby, but I had gotten an invitation to a book party that his American publisher was throwing for him. I had blurbed a book for the editor four years before and she had faithfully invited me to book parties ever since. Hugh Nickelby was going to be in New York on his book tour. “I’m actually having dinner with Hugh when he comes to New York in a couple of weeks. If you want, I can get you a signed copy of his book,” I had said.
I had never been so happy to be a writer, than at that moment, just to be able to pretend that I knew Hugh Nickelby.
I searched through the piles of papers in my apartment, stacks of paper everywhere like bales of hay, for the book-party invitation. My apartment, a co-op I had bought with my movie-deal money, was completely empty because I never found any furniture I liked. All furniture seemed ugly to me for some reason, especially coffee tables. It was ugly in stores and ugly in other people’s apartments. The only thing I had managed to buy was a mattress and box spring. I just told anyone who came over that I had moved in the day before. I had one friend in London, a girl named Sheba in Hempstead Heath, who had nice things, a headboard painted with swans and a gilt mirror in her kitchen reflecting beautiful china on an old wood table, but until I found things as nice as that, I felt better off with nothing.
I hadn’t committed to a garbage can yet either, so Ivy Vohl’s manuscript that she’d had promptly messengered to me, with its big-fonted cover page, sat in a plastic bag on a hook near the door, ready to be taken out to its smelly grave. Ivy Vohl, I’d noticed, was very big-fonted.
I couldn’t find the invitation but I remembered it was at The Spotted Pig and I’d remembered the date because it was a Sunday which was an unusual night for a book party. I got ready and went at seven. When I got there, I pushed over to the bar and got a martini. I noticed that there were a few of each of Hugh Nickelby’s books that were supposed to be for display purposes only, but I had an idea that I could have Hugh Nickelby sign one and send it to Derek Hassler to prove that Hugh and I were friends. I grabbed a paperback copy of Thank You for Not Writing and approached Hugh Nickelby. I told him how much I loved his books, and he incredibly nicely told me that he had loved my book. “I read it in two nights,” he said in his heavy English accent. “I couldn’t put it down.”
“That means I’d have to write over a hundred and seventy-five books just to keep you entertained for one year,” I said, which was extremely flirtatious for me. I was quickly falling for Hugh Nickelby. And why not? I thought. We were both writers, and I loved the way he looked—sort of shy and English and miserable to be in the middle of a crowd at his own book party. The place was totally packed.
“I wish you would write that many,” he said. “After I read it I talked about you on the BBC. I must admit I have a bit of a soft spot for strong American female voices.”
I had never been so happy to be a strong American female voice.
“Do you get to London? You should call me if you’re there. You can get my number from Charles.”
“I will!” I said. I didn’t know who Charles was but I would certainly make it my business to find out. The moment felt so auspicious that I thought he might be referring to Charles Dickens himself and it seemed almost logical that Dickens would be the one to set us up.
“You are writing another book, aren’t you? I’m looking forward to it.”
It was the nicest thing anybody had ever said to me. I had thought of reasons I should write another book—it would be good for my career; I needed the money; I was under contract and if I didn’t write another book, I’d eventually have to give the money back, money long since spent—but I had never thought about someone looking forward to reading my next book. It made me want to race home and get into bed with my laptop. Hugh Nickelby was looking forward to my next book. “Don’t take too long with it. Although maybe I shouldn’t put pressure on you. A watched kettle never boils and all that.”
He was referring to my name!
“I boil,” I said.
“I’m sure you do.”
My cheeks were boiling that was certain. I had to change the subject. “Would you sign this?” I asked him, handing him his book. “Make it out to Derek Hassler.”
“Sure,” Hugh said, looking a little hurt that it wasn’t for me. “Who’s Derek Hassler?” he asked.
“He’s just a friend of mine. But he’s a big fan of yours. He wants me to tell you that he disagrees with your taste in music.” I wished more than anything that I hadn’t mentioned Derek Hassler. “Just write—‘To Derek Hassler, too bad you cancel.’ ”
Hugh Nickelby opened his book and wrote, To Hassler, You have terrible taste, and signed his name. Hugh Nickelby was so sweet and humble that he hadn’t even had a pen at his own book party—I’d had to give him one. At my book party I had practically worn a tool belt of them.
“Can I get you a drink from the bar?” I asked. He was surrounded by hundreds of people, signing his books for them, and nobody had bothered to ask him if he wanted a drink.
“Oh, that would be great,” he said. “I would really appreciate that. I’ll have a Grolsch.”
“A what?” I asked.
“A Grolsch.”
“I’m sorry, a what?” I asked. I was really struggling to hear him in the noisy bar and I really had no idea what he was saying. It was like no word I had ever heard before.
“A Grolsch,” Hugh Nickelby said.
“I’m sorry, a what?”
“A Grolsch.”
“A what?” My whole face was screwed up in concentration. Each time he said “Grolsch” it sounded like a different word, the vowels, if there were any, and the consonants rolling differently. I was starting to panic. My feet wouldn’t move. I couldn’t bring myself to just go to the bar and say the word to the bartender and see if he could make it out. I just kept thinking I would somehow understand it if he would just say it one more time. “A grog?” I said.
“Grolsch.” He was so nice and patient each time, repeating that crazy word.
“I’m sorry, I’m having trouble hearing in here, what drink do you want?”
He looked dismayed. “A Grolsch,” he said.
I smiled at him, completely bewildered.
“I know they have it here. I had one before,” he said.
I was sweating through my Betsey Johnson book-party dress.
“A Grolsch,” he said.
I shrugged.
Then his editor came over and whisked him away. “Hugh, I want to introduce you to Leonard Lopate,” she said. She handed Hugh a Grolsch, which turned out to be a simple beer in a bottle with a green and white label.
I watched my relationship with Hugh Nickelby crumble in front of me. I didn’t know what had happened. I had been able to understand English people in the past, but this strange word “Grolsch” had ruined everything. I certainly couldn’t call him when I went to London if, when he answered the phone, I couldn’t even understand what he was saying. What if he told me to meet him at the corner of Grolsch and Grolsch in West Grolschglouster Grolschinshire at Grolsch o’clock. If we couldn’t even communicate about a simple drink order, we didn’t exactly have a future together, sitting side by side at one of those long desks built for two, typing in tandem and bringing each other coffee and Grolsches in between lovemaking sessions. I watched Hugh Nickelby treading water away from me in an Atlantic Ocean’s worth of fans.
I tried to remind myself of my theory that writers shouldn’t be with writers—we were better paired with movie stars—but I felt miserable.
I had blown it.
The next morning I brought the autographed book to Derek Hassler’s office at Maxim magazine and left it with the receptionist.
Without my asking, she hit speakerphone and punched in an extension.
"Y’ello,” Derek sai
d.
“You have a messenger here,” she said.
Now I was a messenger.
“Please, leave me to my work, woman,” Derek Hassler said. He was so weird. Editing Maxim magazine wasn’t exactly work.
I waited in view of the receptionist for the elevator and then when I got on and the doors closed, I realized I was going up instead of down. The doors opened a couple of flights up and I got out, deciding I would wait for one going down. As I waited, a plaque next to the door of an office near the elevator caught my eye. JASON LISCH, PSYCHOTHERAPIST. Then the elevator doors opened, and I was just about to get back on, when I stopped and let them close and went back to the plaque. Jason Lisch. That was the name of the boy I was in love with in Hebrew School when I was in the seventh grade. When I was twelve. Jason Lisch was the first boy I ever kissed, half-sitting on a twin-hydrant on Ninety-third and West End.
I wondered if I should go into the office and see if it was the same Jason Lisch. But I didn’t know if I looked good enough. I couldn’t really tell in the brass elevator doors. If I didn’t lose some weight by summer I wouldn’t deserve to wear a sundress, I thought. But then I told myself not to be so hard on myself. Even the fattest person in the world deserved to wear a sundress.
I walked boldly up to the door and looked at the plaque. JASON LISCH, PSYCHOTHERAPIST. So he was a shrinker. The plaque looked expensive and had unusual lettering and an interesting design of two sort of African-looking heads. The plaque was so nice it made me wonder if Jason Lisch had turned out to be gay.
I had been determined to knock on the door, but now I couldn’t. If he was a shrinker he could be in the middle of a session with someone and he’d be furious if I knocked.
I stood outside the door for a while, hoping someone would walk out of the office, maybe even Jason himself. I wondered if he would remember me. When we were friends I had worked on a project for Social Studies. My topic was Paul Revere, and Jason had helped me invent a board game called One If By Land, Two If By Sea that incorporated the events of Paul Revere’s life with little plastic horses as game pieces. We worked on it a few times after Hebrew School in my bedroom—a trail from Beacon Hill to Lexington, with funny stops along the way like Ye Olde Mc-Donald’s. You had to draw cards and answer questions about Paul Revere and the Revolutionary War.
I remembered the time line I had made. In 1734, he is born. At 12, he apprentices as a silversmith and earns extra money as a bell ringer at the Old North Church. At 22, he marries Sarah Orne. One year later, he becomes a master goldsmith and his first child is born. At 35, he buys the house that can still be visited today in Boston. At 38, his wife dies during the birth of their eighth child. At 39, he participates in the Boston Tea Party. At 40, he rides to Lexington with warnings that the British are coming. This will forever be remembered as the midnight ride of Paul Revere. At 52, his sixteenth child is born to his second wife. He does many other things, including working as a dentist, and at 83, he dies.
He could lie in bed at night, a lantern flickering on his bedside table, and hear the sound of his bells chiming all over Boston. He would drift off happily to sleep, thinking about the Stamp Act or something important, not have to take two Excedrin PM like I did every night.
I wondered what it would be like to date a great man like Paul Revere. I dated men like Derek Hassler who, by age 37 shared a one-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side and worked as an editor at Maxim magazine. In three hundred years you probably wouldn’t find too many kids making a board game out of the life of Derek Hassler.
If Jason opened the door, I was prepared to recite the entire life of Paul Revere but what would I say about myself, I wondered. I thought of my time line turned into a game, sprawled across an oaktag gameboard, with little Excedrin bottles as game pieces. At 22, I graduate from Bennington, where I have spent the better part of four years taking the bus home to New York. At 26, I publish my novel, The Hard Part, which becomes a critical and commercial success, and I sign a contract for a second book. At 28, I fail to hand in any pages and I am in default of my contract. In 2001 the World Trade Center is destroyed by terrorists.
The last thing on my time line—the World Trade Center attacks—hadn’t really happened to me, I realized, it had happened to New York, so it didn’t really count.
There had to be more. I’d made a lot of friends, but one by one they had all moved to L.A. to become either studio executives or marry them, coming home every few months at first and taking in great swallows of the New York air, but eventually coming back in lighter and lighter jackets and finally never darkening New York’s door again with all their sunshine. So I had become strangely friendless. There were, I counted on my fingers, nine serious long-term relationships, if I counted Richard De La Croix twice, but those didn’t seem at this moment exactly like accomplishments. My mind went blank. And then, oh, yes. I realized I had skipped something.
At almost 13, I am sent to Florida by myself to visit relatives I have never met before during Easter break. There is an air of urgency and panic surrounding the trip and I’m not exactly sure why I’m going. I miss my flight because my father gets confused and drives me to JFK instead of Newark, and as we sit in the airport waiting for the next flight out, my father tells me that he has a headache. The reason I remember this so clearly is that my father, a doctor, has never been sick or had anything wrong with him in his entire life. He sends me to the airport store to buy an individual pack of ibuprofen and a cup of black coffee. Caffeine, he explains, helps a headache, it’s a stimulant, the medicine moves more quickly through the bloodstream. Strangely, I am intrigued by this conversation, this rare father-daughter talk. I get the feeling it is in lieu of the birds-and-bees lecture I have been half-expecting. He has taught me something valuable that I can take with me. I watch in amazement as he swallows pills I have never seen him take. When he hugs me at the gate, I feel that something has changed. I have not been allowed to drink coffee up to this point, but now I feel that I have been given the go-ahead and choose it for my beverage on the plane.
When I get there, there is nothing to do. They don’t seem to really want me there, and I am forced to sleep on what they call the daybed—a hard wooden bench in the sewing room. For two weeks I swim in the pool that belongs to their complex, all day every day, coming back to their house only to eat meals of eggs and cheese and milk, like Heidi, and sleep on the wooden bench. I drink a lot of coffee with milk and sugar in it. The day before I am to return home, they take me to Disney World early in the morning and we decide, since we are interested in different things, to meet at “It’s a Small World” at a certain time.
In the ladies’ room, I don’t even recognize myself. I look taller and I have lost a lot of weight. My face is thin and my skin is dark brown. I am an entirely different person, thin and grown-up. I had waited on a couple of lines to go on a couple of rides but who knew that the line for the ladies’ room was the line for the most magical attraction of all? Maybe it came with the price of admission, the Disney hall of mirrors, you get to look like a completely new person. You get to like what you see.
That afternoon, the man who runs the “Pirates of the Caribbean” makes eye contact with me when I slide into the seat and snap the safety bar into place. When it’s over, he follows me and says it’s his break time and how would I like a behind-the-scenes tour of the place?
Finally this trip is getting interesting. If he had been a boy my age, I would have figured there was no way he liked me and I would have made a sarcastic comment and walked away. I would have been too shy to be myself. But because he is old, twenty-three he tells me, I look him right in the eyes (he has taken off his pirate patch at this point) and go with him, babbling something about how I have a lot of pirate experience myself because I had been in the chorus of a production of The Pirates of Penzance in sixth grade. I make sixth grade sound like it’s way in my past, and in a way it is, a whole year in the past.
Because he is not my age I suddenly
realize the power I possess over him. I wear my mouse ears like heart-shaped glasses. I can’t help myself. It’s just how I am. At least now that I have seen myself in the enchanted mirror. I’m beautiful now, so I’m irresistible to this man, and I’m from New York, so I’m tough.
We have sex in the employees-only lounge. It feels like nothing. Like a small mistake or a slip of the tongue. Or at worst, like something I shouldn’t be doing like buying potato chips after school.
I fly home, determined not to tell anyone my secret. It doesn’t matter, I decide, it’s just something I tried once. Big whoop. But I am pregnant. My period, which I have had eleven times already, doesn’t come.
The realization hits me in Ms. Gorney’s hygiene class as she is showing us a plastic model of a vagina. I have no uncertainty like girls have in young-adult books or in the movies. I simply know.
For one month I scramble to come up with a plan, but I can’t. My parents won’t let me have a dog so I’m pretty sure they won’t let me have a baby. I feel almost tough enough to go ahead and have it, and one day, when my parents and I are having dinner at Hunan Balcony, I secretly look up on the paper place mat that it will be born in the Chinese Year of the Dragon—which is compatible with me, a monkey—and name it Joshua if it is a boy, but in the end I tell my mother and have an abortion instead. My mother wants to know what boy got me pregnant and I tell her it was just a boy my own age I went on a couple of dates with in Florida. I base the character of the boy who got me pregnant on a boy I had seen at the pool who wore bathing trunks with sail-boats on them and had smiled at me one time.
I lie on a table in a doctor’s office staring in disbelief at a poster that has been taped to the ceiling. I find it very ironic because not only is it strange to tape a poster to the ceiling but it is a poster of a smiling, blond-haired blue-eyed baby wearing a diaper and the words EVERYTHING’S GONNA BE ALRIGHT printed over his head. I ask the nurse if it’s supposed to be a sick joke and she says she doesn’t know what I am talking about.
Little Stalker Page 3