Little Stalker

by Jennifer Belle

  I looked at the appointment book and pulled the files for his third, fourth, and fifth patients because the first two were scheduled by him and I didn’t have time to decipher his handwriting. Then I grabbed a blank check from the office checkbook in case I didn’t have enough in my own account, and ran out of the office and slid into the back of the van.

  3.

  At 33, she tends to her father in his time of need

  As we drove through the Holland Tunnel, I tried not to think about terrorism, and by the time we got to the warehouse I was shaking with excitement. My headache had retreated like the English. I told the driver to wait for me.

  “How long?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure, five or six hours should do it,” I said.

  The warehouse didn’t open until eleven and it was about five till. A line had formed and I got on the end of it, scanning it quickly to see if I knew anyone and could therefore get closer to the door. I counted sixty people ahead of me. I sized up my competition. I was relieved to see that they seemed like a pretty grungy bunch. They didn’t look so much like fans as scary New Jersey flea-market people. The warehouse was surrounded by nothing but concrete. Fort Lee and Leonia had been a film capital at the turn of the century, but now Hermit Films Studio and this warehouse were the only remnants.

  The girl who was first on line pivoted around and smiled condescendingly at the crowd behind her and that’s when I saw that it was my fan from the Ziegfeld, Ivy Vohl. I shifted quickly so she wouldn’t see me. Even though talking to her might have meant moving up to the front of the line, talking to her wasn’t worth even that.

  When the doors finally opened, I pushed my way in as fast as I could but I had to wait a minute for my eyes to adjust to the dark. Kids who must have been interns stood around the perimeter of the huge room.

  I walked up to one of them. He was very short and fat, the kind of boy I had always liked since elementary school. “How are things arranged?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?” he said, looking at me as if I were a lunatic.

  “By film? By genre? In chronological order? Are comedies and dramas separate?” I was trying to get the lay of the land so I could come up with a game plan. I wanted to start with my favorites of his comedies, Adopting Alice and The Dim Sum of All Parts, and then go for his less popular works, where I would have a better chance of getting the good stuff. Since this was the last day of the sale I was sure there would be nothing left from Take My Life, Please, The Carlyle Capers, and The Analyst.

  “There’s no particular order, ma’am,” the intern said. I couldn’t help but notice the word “ma’am,” but I didn’t have time to confront him about it. “Furniture and props are on the first two floors and costumes are on the third.”

  “Is Arthur Weeman going to be here?”

  “Oh yeah,” the intern said. “He’s here. He just finished cleaning the men’s room and now he’s manning register number three.”

  The guy obviously thought I was an idiot.

  I turned and walked away but I heard him say, “Arthur Weeman fans are fucking nuts.”

  But I didn’t care. I walked over to two gondolas leaning against the wall, replete with red velvet cushions. A manila tag on the stern said LIFE IN VENICE on one side and $200 on the other. I tried to think of what I could do with two gondolas. Pretty much nothing. I decided to only take one of them. Next to it was a round black art deco end table with a tag that said THE MERMAID PARADE and was only fifty dollars. The Mermaid Parade was the second Arthur Weeman movie I had ever seen. I picked up the table and looked around for some kind of a cash register, but I couldn’t see anything. Besides the interns, a few people were milling around, but Ivy Vohl had disappeared.

  I marched back over to the intern, carrying my new Mermaid Parade end table. “I want this,” I said. “And I want a lot of other things.” He wrote out some kind of a receipt on a waiter pad and put a red dot on the table.

  “You get a sales slip from me for everything you want, and then you take the slips to the cash register there, all the way in the back.”

  I grilled him on the system for a while and when I was sure my end table was safe from other fans I temporarily abandoned it and ran over to the bed that I immediately recognized from Take My Life, Please. It was the very bed that Arthur Weeman and Lauren Bacall had made love on in the last scene. It was two thousand dollars. Next to it was the oxygen tank from The Tumorist. Behind that was the scale that they weighed the tumor on, and the chandelier from Fortune and Fame. And the actual bottle from Genius in a Bottle. I waved wildly to the intern who walked slowly over to me. "I want all of this,” I said, pointing to dozens of things. He filled out slips and put red dots on everything. I couldn’t believe Ivy Vohl was so stupid as to have skipped over these things.

  “Do you mind if I ask what you’re going to do with an oxygen tank?” the intern asked.

  “My father’s a doctor,” I said, as if that were the most obvious thing in the world.

  “And let me guess, your mother’s a gondolier,” he said.

  I bought chairs and lamps and rugs with the original ketchup bloodstains. I bought art, the giant plastic hot dog from the roller-coaster scene at Coney Island, and a wooden file cabinet that had been used in several movies. I paused over the desk from Adopting Alice, where Arthur Weeman as Mitch Eichman had written his failed novel. I had never owned a desk before—I’d only written in cafés or in bed—but this was too irresistible to pass up.

  On the third floor, I thought I would swoon. I was in a frenzy. One woman held up a private-school girl’s uniform from Adopting Alice.

  "I’m taking that,” I said, grabbing the costume. I was afraid to put down the Underwood typewriter from Literary Suicide that I had lugged up from the second floor after wresting it from the arms of what looked like a cab driver. I didn’t even bother to look at tags anymore. I just grabbed anything that looked like it would fit. I put a triumphant red dot on a wedding gown, a forties suit, a floppy hat, and a fringed suede vest.

  A few minutes before they closed, I paid for everything. It all came to just under twenty-two thousand dollars. I gasped at the amount. But then I thought it was only one thousand for each of Arthur Weeman’s films. Plus it would furnish my entire empty apartment. You would pay that much for a few ugly things at a horrible store like Crate & Barrel. All of this was an incredible bargain. I filled out my father’s check, making it payable to Hermit Films, and signed his name with my usual expertise, making the letters small and tense and look like they spelled the words “Mad Kill” instead of “Frederick Kettle.”

  The kid behind the cash register looked at the check.

  “Uh, are you Dr. Frederick Kettle?” he asked.

  “Yes, I am,” I said. “My friends call me Ricki. Dr. Ricki.”

  “Uh, do you have any I.D.?”

  "No, I don’t,” I said, sounding as annoyed as possible. “I came here straight from my rounds. One moment, please, my beeper just went off.” I pulled out my cell phone and dialed my father’s office. “Dr. Kettle,” my father answered. “It’s Dr. Ricki. Is everything okay?” I said. “Dr. Who? Rebekah?” he asked. “Are there a lot of patients for me tomorrow?” I asked. “What? Does that mean you’re coming in tomorrow?” my father said. His other line was ringing and he sounded desperate. "Yes,” I said, "it sounds urgent. I’ll be there, stat.” I hung up and the boy just stood there looking at me.

  “Wait here,” he said, and carried the check away to show it to someone. A few minutes later he returned. “I can’t find anyone to approve this,” he said. “Just write your phone number on it.” I wondered for a moment if I had made a mistake to buy so much when I was running out of money, when I saw the old-fashioned liver-pink shrink’s couch from The Analyst leaning against the counter. I couldn’t believe it hadn’t been sold.

  “I want this,” I screamed at the intern.

  “The sale’s over,” he said. “It’s six o’clock. The cash registers are
closed.”

  “I have to have this one last thing,” I said. I was also regretting not having bought the second gondola.

  “The sale is over, ma’am,” he said.

  I had arranged for delivery for the bed and the gondola and some of the bigger pieces of furniture I had bought, but I was planning to load the end table and some of the smaller things in the minivan. As soon as the intern turned away, I started to pull the shrink’s couch out of the warehouse doors.

  The Tel-Aviv driver saw me and got out of the car to help me. The shrink’s couch wouldn’t fit into the back of the van.

  “Please,” I said, “you have to help me.”

  “We can tie to roof,” he said.

  I helped him hoist it up onto the roof of the van and he got a bungee cord from the front seat and started to tie the V-shaped wooden legs of the couch to the handles on the doors. I went back in to get the rest of the things I had bought.

  When I approached the van again, I saw someone talking to the driver. The driver was yelling something. I walked as quickly as I could, wheeling the baby carriage from Adopting Alice, and I saw that the person the driver was talking to was Ivy Vohl and she was trying to remove the bungee cord and pull down my therapy couch.

  “Oh, hi,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

  I looked at her in disbelief. What would I not be doing here? I had never hated anyone more than at that moment. How could she have known about this sale and not told me about it on the phone the night before? “When did you find out about this sale?” I asked.

  “I was the one who first announced it in my column. I would have thought you would have been the first one here on Monday.”

  “Why are you stealing my therapist’s couch?” I asked.

  “I bought it,” she said. She waved the receipt in my face and bore her finger into the red dot on the fake leather surface that I hadn’t noticed.

  “There must be some mistake,” I said. I had to have this couch. The Analyst was Arthur Weeman’s most beloved movie, and he had lain on that couch in at least six scenes.

  “I’m sorry, Rebekah, but the couch is mine,” she said.

  “What should I do?” the driver asked, looking miserable.

  “Since it’s already up there, we might as well just make two stops,” Ivy said, getting into the back of the van and slamming the door closed. I got in on the other side. She told the driver her address in Brooklyn. “I hope you won’t let my getting the best thing at the sale interfere with your giving me a blurb.” She looked at me, smiling.

  “Ivy, I would love to blurb your book, I’m sure it’s great, it’s just that I have a strict policy of reading everything I blurb and I’m just not sure I can get to it in time.”

  “Oh, there’s plenty of time. I gave myself a whole year to get blurbs.”

  “Great, then there’s no rush.”

  “What if I gave you the couch? No, that would be insulting your integrity.”

  I had to be careful because I wasn’t sure if she was really offering me a deal, and, as much as I wanted the couch, I knew I couldn’t blurb a book its own author had referred to as chick lit. I felt for my prized possession in my pocket to give me strength. It was one of the wax prosthetic ears from Swan Song. It had been spirit-gummed to Arthur Weeman’s head, next to his beautiful brain, and now it was in my pocket. He had Q-tipped it and my laughter had filled the Ziegfeld.

  “Look what I have,” I said, showing her my treasure.

  “Ewww,” she said.

  Perhaps that could be the blurb I gave her. I could write it on my letterhead and mail it to her publisher. “Ewww.”—Rebekah Kettle.

  My headache clomped back in on its heavy hooves.

  We pulled up in front of Ivy Vohl’s building on Henry Street and I sulked in the car while the driver got the couch down.

  “Do you want to come up and see how it looks in my apartment? ” she asked.

  I shook my head no.

  “Are you okay?” she asked, peering at me.

  “Do you have any painkillers?” I asked. I thought about telling her that I’d had an abortion and my hormones weren’t balanced yet, but I decided against it. “I have a headache,” I said.

  “I have Lodine, Tylenol with codeine, and Vicodin—is that good?”

  Maybe we could be friends after all.

  The driver helped Ivy carry Arthur Weeman’s therapist’s couch up the stairs to her apartment and I followed after it, wishing I was lying on it the whole time. He promised to wait for me and went back down to the van.

  Ivy’s apartment was long and thin with one austere brick wall. I noticed my book on her bookshelf. Her bedroom was all the way in the back, dark and windowless. I remembered something Derek Hassler had said to me once, that he knew I wasn’t the girl for him because there were too many windows in my bedroom and he liked to sleep in pitch blackness like a bat.

  I lay on Arthur Weeman’s couch and waited for Ivy Vohl to bring me a Vicodin.

  It had been a long time since I had lain on a therapist’s couch. I thought of something my ex-shrink had said to me at our final session, that my problem was I was a slave to symbolism. I had imagined symbolism spanking me with a paddle. “That’s the reason you live in an apartment without any furniture. The reason you can’t choose a couch, for instance,” she had said, “is that you want the couch to represent something else. Sometimes it’s okay for a couch to just be a couch. You never buy anything unless it reminds you of something. What color nail polish are you wearing?”

  I had to admit I had chosen Prairie Dust because of the name and not the dull beige color. I could practically feel her sitting in her ugly brown leather chair behind me. “But unfortunately, we have to stop now,” I could hear her say.

  I sat up obediently and washed the pill down with a Diet Coke.

  I could feel the horse chomp on it like an apple and settle down.

  “I have to get going,” I said to Ivy.

  “So, who’s your boyfriend?”

  “What boyfriend?”

  “The guy you’re dating in England,” Ivy Vohl said, peering at me again. Her question startled me. She had a certain way of startling you with questions and then peering at you until you answered them.

  “Just a guy,” I peered back.

  “How did you meet him?”

  “Our friend Charles set us up.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “His name is Hugh.”

  “It’s not Hugh Nickelby, is it?”

  Her guess made me wince. “Why do you think that?”

  “Just curious,” she said.

  I hadn’t heard the words, “just curious,” said quite like that since high school and I was suddenly filled with paranoia, the intense paranoia that came with a hopelessly unrealistic crush. It was always the girls who said “just curious” in just the right way in high school who grew up to be famous gossip columnists. All you said was his name is Hugh, I told myself. But I also said he lived in England. I had merely based my imaginary boyfriend character on Hugh Nickelby, I hadn’t used the real-life person. I tried to think of another Englishman I could base my boyfriend on, but all I could see were Buckingham Palace guards, Beefeaters and double-decker-bus ticket sellers, a barkeep in a pub, and Hugh Nickelby drinking his damned Grolsch. I had been to London a million times and I couldn’t think of a single eligible man I had ever seen there.

  “He lives in London but he’s Australian,” I said, hearing the accent change in my head. I felt dizzy from the pill. I was convinced that this was somehow going to get back to Hugh.

  “Did you call Isaac Myman?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I’m telling you, Rebekah, he’s perfect for you. If I called him, I bet he’d come over right now. It’s so funny because he was going to come with me to the sale but he got a lead so he decided not to. You two keep missing each other. If you got married I’d automatically go to Jewish heaven because you’re both Jewish and I’m the
one setting you up. I’m the shadchan. What’s your bra size?” she asked.

  Maybe this was how the Internet generation spoke to each other, I thought. Talking to Ivy Vohl felt like some kind of dirty email exchange. Perhaps she thought she was instant-messaging me instead of talking to me face to face.

  "Uh, 34C,” I said.

  “Really? I’m surprised. I’m a 34DD and I was pretty sure we were the same size. Where do you get your bras? I can never find a place that carries my size. All of mine are kind of old lady.” She pulled her sweater up to her chin to show me. I looked at her chest in disbelief. Her bra was white and shiny like the satin edging of an electric blanket, but it wasn’t so much that it was old lady as her breasts themselves, freckled and shapeless. “Maybe we could go bra shopping together.”

  “Sure,” I said, standing up and walking to the door. That was one thing I was sure would never happen—bra shopping with Ivy Vohl.

  “I’m sorry about the couch. I know you understand.”

  “Sure,” I said. I didn’t even want it anymore after seeing it in her apartment, pushed up against the brick wall. I felt a little disappointed that Arthur Weeman would just sell his things to anyone.

  “Do you want to see where I do all my writing?” she asked. She peered at me expectantly. I laughed but then I realized she was serious. She actually thought I wanted to see where she wrote, as if we were in the historic house of Keats or Balzac or Shakespeare or Dante, instead of in the house of Vohl.

  “I really have to go,” I said, and got out of there as fast as I could.

  After I got home and unloaded all of my Arthur Weeman things, and paid the driver for eight hours—over five hundred dollars plus tip, which Ivy Vohl hadn’t thought to contribute to— I took a shower. And that’s when I had one of the strangest experiences of my life. Strange, to say the least. Looking down at my breasts, I noticed a milky substance pooling around my nipples. It looked like I was leaking milk. As if tears had started streaming down the face of Mary in a painting in a church somewhere, I had started spontaneously lactating. I had no idea how it could be happening. I knew I wasn’t pregnant.