The doctor turns off his vacuum machines and tells me it’s over and for a single moment I cannot distinguish between myself and it, I think I must be gone too, but then I realize I am alive and I think the terrible thought that the unborn are not as important as the already born. That I care more about myself being alive than anything.
My mother says this can be our secret; we don’t have to tell my father. She doesn’t give the doctor my real name in case the doctor knows my father. But there is a girl, another girl in the waiting room with me. She is wearing roller skates and she is getting an abortion too. However, when hers is over she roller skates out of there, her blond ponytail swinging, as if nothing at all has just happened to her, while I, on the other hand, am bent over, hobbling. The procedure didn’t go so well for me and I get an infection and end up missing the whole rest of the school year, so in the end, my father knows, but he doesn’t say anything. I don’t see much of him because he moves out and they get a divorce.
And it is that year, I think, that I merge with Arthur Weeman. I am too old for Paul Revere and Sir Francis Drake and Little House, but behind the red-velvet curtain at the Ziegfeld is Adopting Alice, is Arthur Weeman under the spell of a thirteen-year-old girl, and I think finally here is someone who understands me. I see it seventeen times and replay key scenes in my mind when I am lying in bed at night. I imagine that I’m in the movie, and my Disney World and abortion experiences are hilarious and yet moving scenes that he and I have improvised together.
Something in the way he looks at Alice with so much attention and interest and respect makes me see how much deeper he is than all other men. He even makes New York seem different, the place where I have lived my entire life. Here was the real adult New York, where a girl not unlike myself, could step from the playground where she did not belong, into a penthouse where she clearly did. It is then I follow Arthur Weeman up that spiral staircase and make my escape to him. I do not become a woman by having sex in Disney World. I become one by seeing Adopting Alice. I go to the box office at the Ziegfeld and say, “One child’s ticket please,” and when I come out at the end of the movie, my ticket stub reads FULL-PRICED ADULT.
The door next to Jason Lisch’s office opened, startling me. A man walked out, looked at me quickly, and then turned away politely, probably figuring I was a nutjob waiting for the shrink.
That was it. The key events in my life. That was all I had accomplished in my thirty-three years.
I couldn’t believe how little I had achieved and how little I was probably gonna.
The thought reminded me of the dream I had the night before that I was supposed to meet someone at a movie theater on - Thirty -third Street, and I accidentally walked all the way to Eighty-third Street without realizing it. In the dream I stood looking up at the street sign, 83RD ST, bewildered. I suddenly realized what it meant. I was thirty-three years old, supposed to meet someone, a man maybe, on Thirty-third Street, but instead go alone all the way to Eighty-third—the age a psychic once told me I would die. The age Paul Revere died. It was one of those dreams that flattened me all day. My life was rolled out into a New York City street map. Flat like a board game. Engraved like a plaque.
Jason Lisch, I thought, must be a really great shrink if just standing outside his office door made me think about my life like that and analyze my own street sign dream.
It had been a long time since I had thought about my abortion. I had never really thought about it at all actually. The memory had just floated mute in its airtight jar of formaldehyde.
I leaned against the wall with my head on the plaque, exhausted. Then my mouth opened up wide and I started to cry silently. My mouth stretched open wider and wider.
At thirty-three, I date some guy named Derek Hassler. I meet and almost marry the writer Hugh Nickelby, but that doesn’t work out. I stand outside Jason Lisch’s office door, who may or may not be the same Jason Lisch I went to Hebrew School with, and even if it is, what good will it do and what exactly do I expect will be accomplished by talking to Jason Lisch and reminiscing about Paul Revere and all that one if by land two if by sea nonsense, and I bawl my eyes out, crying harder than I have ever cried.
Paul Revere was in the past. He was dead to me now.
I pressed for the elevator and got on, still unable to completely stop crying. Unfortunately there was a pregnant woman already in it. She was the stylish type of pregnant woman who looked like she probably worked energetically at her office until the very last second, her water breaking all over her oxblood shoes, calling her secretary with instructions up until she crowned. After a few floors she said, “Are you okay?” The last thing you expect when you are crying in a New York City office building is to be confronted with it. I was so surprised by her question that I answered it.
“I was pregnant,” I told her. It felt strange to say the words out loud.
“Oh no,” she said.
I wiped my eyes dry on my sleeve. I looked up into her eyes and just nodded my head.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. Then she hugged me. She put her arms around me and her big round stomach pressed into my chest because she was so much taller. I felt my heart beating against her stomach. If the baby kicked at that moment it would kick me in the heart, I thought. She rubbed my back in little circles. “You must feel so empty.” I nodded, my head against her breasts. “But that feeling will go away. I know it will,” she said.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Your hormones are probably doing a number on you. You should drink a lot of chamomile tea. You know, you should go to my psychic kinesthesiologist, she can help you with all that. Her name is Anita Stefano. She’s in the book. You’ll get pregnant again in no time.”
She said it with so much force I thought maybe I would. We got off the elevator and stood on the mosaic floor of the lobby. “When’s your due date?” I asked.
“April eighteenth.”
“That’s the date of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,” I recited. “April eighteen, seventeen seventy-five.”
“Really!” she said, sounding thrilled and lighting up like a copper lantern. “Thank you so much for telling me that.”
They say that when one door closes, or stays closed as in the case of Jason Lisch’s office door, another door opens. And when I got home that night there was a strange message from the girl I had met a few days before, my annoying fan from the Ziegfeld, Ivy Vohl, saying that the man she’d been there with really wanted to meet me.
I thought of him walking up the aisle and smiling at me.
I called her back. “How’d you get my number?” I asked.
“Your father gave it to me,” she said. “I called him at his office and asked him if you were dating anyone and he said no.”
“Well I am dating someone,” I said. “Quite seriously. My father doesn’t know about it because he lives in England.”
“Great, then you can go out with my friend, and the English guy will never know,” she said.
“Why couldn’t your friend come over and talk to me himself ?” I said.
“Well that’s really my fault. I forced him to go because I wanted to talk to you alone.”
“What does he do?” I asked. He was probably a hot-dog guy or something.
“He’s a photographer. He works for me at the Quille.”
“What’s his time line?” I asked.
“His what?”
“His time line.”
“What’s a time line?” she asked. “You mean his schedule?”
“No, his history.” Ivy Vohl and I had nothing in common.
“I don’t know, he’s from New York. He’s Jewish.”
“What’s wrong with him?” I asked.
“Nothing really,” she said. “He’s great.”
Still, I didn’t trust her. She didn’t know me, we had only had one horrible ten-minute conversation, and she would have no way of knowing what I looked for in a guy, especially since I didn’t even know.
&n
bsp; “I don’t think so,” I said.
“Even though he looks like a young Arthur Weeman? Don’t worry, I didn’t tell him you’re obsessed with Arthur Weeman.”
“I’m not obsessed with Arthur Weeman,” I said.
“Yes you are. You even defended his terrible movie.”
“That’s because he’s the greatest filmmaker of all time.”
“I really think you should go out with him, Rebekah. He said he was going to go out and buy your book. That’s already going to more effort than ninety-nine percent of men would go to.”
“What’s his name?” I asked.
“Isaac Myman.”
She gave me his number which I wrote down even though I had no intention of calling him.
“So are you reading my manuscript?” she asked. “I could really use that blurb. I’m such a big fan of yours, it would really mean a lot.”
“I have a lot of things on my desk,” I said, looking around my deskless apartment. Arthur Weeman wrote on a legal pad sprawled out on a queen-sized bed in his office. That was the kind of office I would like.
I got off the phone and went back downstairs to buy some chamomile tea. Even though my abortion had happened twenty years before, I thought I should take the pregnant woman’s advice and try to balance my hormones. The elevator stopped on the second floor and two men got on wheeling a gurney. “Watch your back,” one of them said to me. I moved into the far corner of the elevator and they wheeled the thing in at an angle. That’s when I realized that on the gurney, was a corpse fully encased in a gray body bag.
“Oh my God,” I said. “Who is it?”
“Old woman in 2B,” the man said. In one day I had ridden in elevators with a pregnant woman and a dead one. They wheeled her off the elevator and I followed behind them, horrified to be so close to death. Death had been in my building and I had been home at the time.
If souls rise, hers had risen through my floor and ceiling. Or it had blown past my window if souls leave through the window like they did in the early film versions of Little Women and Wuthering Heights.
“This is the last time I open the door for you, Mrs. Davis,” the doorman said sarcastically.
The men wheeling the gurney laughed.
At the end of my time line, when I was wheeled out of my building in a body bag, I didn’t expect a big procession like Evita, or paparazzi like Jackie O, but I did hope for more than just a nasty remark from the moronic part-time doorman. All night I thought I smelled death. I had one of my recurring movie-theater dreams, but in this one the movie theater was outside in some kind of tropical paradise. The screen was suspended in midair and there were rows of spouting fountains on each side of the seats, and I was there with someone. When I woke up I realized the movie theater in my dream was heaven and I was there with Arthur Weeman. Then I thought, no, maybe it was that man, Isaac Myman, I was with.
I got out of bed and walked into the kitchen, trying to shake it off. Anyone who associated with Ivy Vohl wasn’t the man for me. I looked down at the Sweet ’N Low packet I had written his name and number on. Isaac Myman. I ripped it open, emptied its precious contents into my coffee, and threw it away.
Then I guiltily turned on my laptop and Googled him just to be thorough and a girl of my time but all that came up were religion sites and Bible quotes.
Rebekah consented to marry Isaac even before she ever met him.
And it came to pass, when he had been there a long time, that Abimelech King of the Philistines looked out a window, and saw, and, behold, Isaac was sporting with Rebekah his wife.
Rebekah lifted up her eyes, and when she saw Isaac she dismounted from the camel.
I had noticed him at the Ziegfeld, his Bob Dylan hair and uncanny resemblance to Arthur Weeman, but I wouldn’t exactly have gotten off my camel if I’d been on one, married him, and gone around sporting in windows.
I had forgotten Isaac was the name of the character Rebekah married in the Bible.
It was never a good idea to start Googling. It was the most lonely and desperate thing a person could do and I clicked on my “history” and cleared it, noticing that the last person I had Googled had been Derek Hassler. I wondered if Isaac Myman had Googled me.
Then I did what I did every morning from nine to eleven. I watched two back-to-back episodes of Little House on the Prairie. Since neither of my parents had believed in God while I was growing up, aside from a very brief stint at Hebrew School, Little House was my only real religious training. I was as much a sheep in Reverend Alden’s flock as the Ingalls, the Olesons, and Doc Baker. Because of Little House, I considered myself to be a deeply spiritual person. It was my church, even if I attended naked in bed.
Moments after it started I knew Mary was going to go blind again today. Doc Baker would come to the house and say it was because of a bout of scarlet fever she’d had as a young child. Pa would take her to Mankato. Mary would sit in a chair feeling sorry for herself. She wouldn’t let Laura brush her hair. Ma would give her a talking to.
I pulled the covers up to my neck. Mary pulled the lantern closer and closer to the book she was trying to read, and squinted up at Pa behind her little round glasses and already my eyes filled with tears.
The phone rang and I answered it even though it was my father. “I have to talk to you about something, Toots,” he said.
“Don’t call me ‘Toots.’ ”
“What do you want me to call you?” he asked.
“How about Half-Pint?” I said.
“Huh? As in a half pint of beer?”
“Never mind,” I said. I had to end this conversation before the commercial break ended. “I can’t really talk now.”
“You’re not watching that child’s program, are you?” my father asked.
“It’s not a child’s program.” My ex-shrink had said that I wasn’t alone. Many of her adult women patients watched it from nine to eleven every morning. Women everywhere were secretly doing it. That was one thing I really missed about her, she knew all kinds of facts about Little House on the Prairie and about Michael Landon, the actor who played Pa. Ivy Vohl might have called her a Prairieologist. She was also a huge Arthur Weeman buff.
“I’d like you to come into the office today,” my father said. When you are a writer everyone assumes you have nothing better to do all day than go to their offices, or even worse, sit in the playground with them and their toddlers. There was no way I was going to interrupt one minute of Mary going blind. He even had the nerve to give me an appointment. “My ten-fifteen is open,” he said. I could hear other lines ringing. “Oh Jesus,” he said.
“Where’s Irmabelle?” I asked.
“Oh Jesus, what button? Hold on,” he said and hung up.
I tried calling back but the phone just rang and rang. Then, as Mary had her eyes examined in Mankato, I started wondering what my father wanted to talk to me about. I had borrowed two thousand dollars from him about twelve years before, but he had never mentioned it, so I didn’t think that was it. So then I thought maybe he was sick.
I grudgingly took a shower and got dressed.
I stopped at the deli to get a chamomile tea for my hormones and then took the subway for what I decided would be the last time. I would never take the subway again, I decided, under any circumstances. I couldn’t stand to see everyone reading other people’s books. The woman across from me was completely immersed in a certain paperback I was particularly jealous of. It was my own personal anthrax attack. At least with anthrax you could wear one of those hundred-dollar gas masks, but with everyone reading other people’s books, you were totally defenseless.
I changed seats and found a nice-looking man to sit across from who was reading The New York Times. The girl I had just moved away from laughed out loud but I forced myself not to look. I just stared straight ahead.
That’s when I noticed the name Arthur Weeman in big letters on the back of the man’s paper. I leaned forward to get a better look.
Arthur Weeman
was having a sale. All of the props and furniture that had appeared in three decades of his films were being sold. He had been storing them all in a huge warehouse in New Jersey, near the Hermit Films studio. It was a four-day sale starting Saturday and now it was Tuesday. Today was the last day. It had been going on this whole time and I hadn’t known about it. I had been lying around doing nothing while the most precious objects in the world were being sold across the river. I memorized the address of the warehouse and ran out of the subway.
I called Tel-Aviv car service and ordered a minivan and driver for the day and told them to pick me up at my father’s office. Then, as soon as I got there, I told my father I had to leave.
“I was hoping you could help me out today,” he said.
“What!” I said, horrified. I was getting one of my headaches. It was like Paul Revere was riding his stallion through my brain yelling, “A headache is coming, a headache is coming.”
“I have a headache,” I said.
“Again?”
“Yes, again,” I said.
“Agh, I think it’s all in your head,” he said.
“Yes, Dad, my headache is in my head.”
The phones were ringing off the hook and he was just sitting hunched at his desk, obsessively shuffling a deck of cards.
“Where’s Irmabelle?” I asked.
“She had an emergency,” he said.
My cell phone rang indicating that Tel-Aviv car service was outside. “Just stay until four,” my father said.
“Sorry, Dad. I can’t.” There was no way I was going to miss the Arthur Weeman sale. “I have to go to a college in New Jersey to give a lecture on writing.”
“What college?” my father asked.
I suddenly couldn’t remember a single college in New Jersey. I was about to just make up a name when he said, “Princeton?” and I said, “Yes, they sent a car for me.”
“At least pull the charts,” he said.
That had been my job when I was a little girl, pulling all the charts of patients whose last names began with O through Z because A through N were too high up for me to reach.
Little Stalker Page 4