“What!” he said, in total disbelief, as if he had no idea how this had gotten past him. “We thought you were coming home on the fifteenth. Why didn’t you come upstairs? Didn’t your mother call you at camp? We moved into 14D.”
That was the summer before they got divorced and sold 14D and my father moved to the West Side and my mother moved to SoHo and went to Woodstock on the weekends.
I couldn’t leave Mrs. Williams alone in my father’s office with nothing but WQXR and ghoulish classical music and commercials for Calvary Hospice in the Bronx and a treatment center for wounds that wouldn’t heal and insurance that covered one’s final costs.
This was why I could never have a dog. I was too good a person, much too caring, to have a dog. I couldn’t leave it alone for one minute, couldn’t relax, or go on dates, or eat in restaurants, or get any writing done. I couldn’t just leave and forget about her.
As I wheeled her to her building, I thought how natural it felt to be walking like that with someone, but then I realized that it should really be a baby in a stroller I was pushing, not an old lady I had never met before.
People we passed smiled at me. I had that good-deed look about me. I hated that.
What a nice young lady. Many girls her age would be getting fucked on a Friday night, not taking their old grandmother out for a walk.
As soon as we wheeled into her lobby, Mrs. Williams suddenly stood up out of the wheelchair, walked over to the elevators, and pressed the button. I had assumed she couldn’t walk. The doorman laughed when he saw the look on my face.
“It took me by surprise the first time I saw it too,” he said. “Nothing’s wrong with her legs, she just refuses to walk outside. She’ll walk right up to the edge of that marble there. And she also refuses to talk as soon as she’s outside. Come on, I’ll take you up. Always nice to meet the new home-care worker.”
“No, I’m a . . . writer,” I said.
“We don’t need you to take us up. We’re not children,” Mrs. Williams said.
The doorman took us up anyway and let us in. “Buzz down if you need anything.” He left, shutting the door behind him.
I was about to follow right behind him when it occurred to me that even though she had eaten three slices of pizza, I should make sure she had something to eat for later. I went to her kitchen and opened the refrigerator, thinking there would be what my grandmother always had, a cantaloupe and a container of cottage cheese, but there was just an old bag of onions and a bottle of Sprite. I opened her pantry but there was nothing, not even a can of Bumble Bee tuna. My grandmother wouldn’t have been caught dead without plenty of walnuts and raisins and, of course, fresh-ground sweet paprika in case someone wanted a little goulash. An old glass Tropicana grapefruit juice bottle filled with homemade applesauce. Pineapple was a very big thing.
Mrs. Williams reminded me a little of my grandmother. At least her apartment did. It had that same smell of Fracas perfume and stale olive oil. And it was filled with old spindly-looking Chinese furniture and green Chinese rugs. Everywhere you looked there were depictions of some kind of long-necked swallow-type bird. In the forties, you just must not have been a woman if you didn’t have swallows in your house, in rugs, carved in wood, inlaid in lacquer, engraved on silver ice buckets. Except for the lack of food, the kitchen was also like my grandmother’s, with its tin daisy chandelier hanging low over the table. The black and white tiles practically forced me to take off my shoes. This kitchen floor was old New York. Most people think that the heart of New York is concrete and asphalt but it’s not. It’s seventy-five square feet of black-and-white tile, a tiny splendid ballroom. I pressed my bare feet into it.
I heard screams coming from outside so I went to the kitchen window. It was just kids running around in the Gardener School courtyard. The same courtyard where I had spent almost half my life.
A girl about thirteen was sitting on the concrete bench, and I suddenly saw myself there practicing my Queen Margaret monologue from Henry the Sixth, Part III. Saying the word “entrails” over and over and letting a handkerchief float to the ground to signify someone’s—the Duke of York’s?—decapitated head. I wondered where that girl was who had ordered that guy’s head cut off with so much glee and gusto. What the hell had happened to me? I had sat on that bench and dreamed of being an actress. I was going to be a stewardess or a stripper while waiting for my big break. But I had let my dreams of acting and stripping completely die. I didn’t have the balls for either one of them. Instead, I was doing someone else’s job. I was in someone else’s apartment, with someone else’s grandmother, watching someone else sit on my old concrete bench probably playing my Queen Margaret.
“What’s your name, dear?” Mrs. Williams asked. She was standing behind me.
“Rebekah Kettle,” I told her, without turning around. She stood next to me so she could look out the window too.
“Where have I heard that name Kettle before?”
“I’m Dr. Kettle’s daughter.”
“Who?”
“I used to go to that school,” I said, still looking down at the courtyard. “I wish I could talk to that girl.” I pointed to the girl on the bench. “I want to find out who she is and tell her she should be a stripper if she wants to.”
“That sounds like very sensible advice,” Mrs. Williams said.
She shifted her gaze to the building facing us on the other side of the courtyard. “Oh, there’s that pervert again,” she said. “What pervert?”
She was talking about a man who was standing at his window, looking down at the girls kicking a soccer ball. He was in a kitchen too, with black-and-white tile and fancy copper pots hanging behind him.
“You know, the motion-picture actor. Arthur Weeman,” she said. “I usually keep those blinds closed.”
I got so excited I banged my nose against the glass because the window was closed. My face was tingling.
Everyone I knew had had an Arthur Weeman sighting at one time or another. On a movie set, getting out of a town car, in Central Park. But I never had. I had never in my whole life laid eyes on him in person before.
“He’s certainly a no-talent,” Mrs. Williams continued. “Putz.”
Suddenly it occurred to me that she was a senile old woman and she was wrong. It wasn’t him. I was a fool to think that it was. “That’s not Arthur Weeman,” I said. “Arthur Weeman lives on Sixty- . . .” But then I remembered that he had moved to a town house overlooking the Gardener School. I had read it on Page Six. It was him. It was definitely him.
I was seeing him.
I couldn’t believe I was watching Arthur Weeman watching the girl I would have been if I was thirteen years old again.
“Rebekah, would you care to study Latin?” Mrs. Williams asked. I turned away from the window to see her sitting at the kitchen table with a text book. When I turned back, Arthur Weeman was gone.
I went to the table and sat next to Mrs. Williams. The wrought-iron metal of the café-style chair dug into my back.
I needed a moment to calm myself down and figure out how to see Arthur Weeman again.
“Why do you say he’s a pervert?” I asked.
“Who?”
“Arthur Weeman,” I said.
“He likes little girls.”
“He likes women of all ages. What about the sex scenes with Lauren Bacall in Take My Life, Please?”
“What about the one where he kidnaps the little girl?”
“It’s fiction,” I said. “And he doesn’t kidnap her.”
“It’s disgusting,” she said. “And he spends enough time staring at them down there.”
“Down there?” I asked. But she pointed down toward the playground.
“He stands there at his window just looking at them. Sicko. Vir parvam puellam cotidie spectat. Can you translate?” She waited expectantly and for some reason I couldn’t stand the fact that I was going to disappoint her.
“Spectat. To watch,” I guessed.
“Very good. The man watches the little girl every day. Specto, spectas, spectat, spectamus, spectatis, spectant.”
My mind conjugated what I had just seen in a kaleidoscope. Artho, Arthas, Arthat, Weemanamus, Weemantis, Weemanant.
“Oh, you’re very good. If you like we can read The Metamorphosis by Ovid.”
I didn’t care what we did as long as I was near that window. I kept looking toward it the way, since September eleventh, I compulsively stared at the Empire State Building, afraid that one time it wouldn’t be there.
Finally I went downstairs to the D’Agostino’s and bought Mrs. Williams some tuna, mayonnaise, a cantaloupe, cottage cheese, tea, milk, applesauce, and a pound of Genoa salami. I bought ten cans of pineapple rings, pineapple chunks, and crushed pineapple, and peaches in heavy syrup, and then I remembered frozen blintzes and a container of sour cream. I grabbed a big box of Depends and put it in my cart. This seemed to be a message to a man who had been smiling at me, because he turned quickly away.
Mrs. Williams cried when I unpacked the groceries. “The other girl starved me,” she said. She ate the entire pound of salami, and then went into her bedroom and passed out on her bed. I took off her shoes but that was as far as I was going to go. That was as far, I was sure, as Rabbi Hillel would have gone. I was quickly realizing that my new job involved dressing and undressing old people.
I went back to the kitchen, took one last look at Arthur Weeman’s dark window, and tried to decide what to do. With all the food in the house, she’d be fine until Monday, my father was right about that. And I could call her. I jotted down her number which was printed on the phone with the old-fashioned exchange, Yorkville 6. I could see her, and with any luck Arthur Weeman, again on Monday.
“It’s still here,” the bum said as I passed his book table on the way to my apartment.
My book was in a precarious standing position, facing out toward the street like a prostitute in Amsterdam.
“One person almost bought it,” he said. “She looked at it anyway. I told her, hey it’s signed by the author that wrote it.”
“Well, that’s all you can do,” I said, trying to sound cheerful.
“She didn’t take it.”
“I see that.”
“It’s still here.” He looked angry, as if I should be providing rent. “I sold Three Plays by Chekhov a little while ago.”
“Well, Chekhov’s a better writer than I am.” What was it Chekhov said? I thought. Houseguests, fish, and autographed books start to stink after three days? Something really did smell rotten at that moment, the compelling, musty-chocolate smell of decaying mice, and I brought my book slowly up to my nose. But it wasn’t my book, it was the man and the tree’s piss puddle he was standing in front of. Everyone in New York knows never to stand anywhere near a tree for any reason.
I thought about buying my book but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. When you write a book you have to let it go after a certain point. You can’t hand-place every single copy like little refugees. Buying it wouldn’t have solved anything. It would be on my bookshelf, but at the same time it would still be there, on that table, in spirit.
Sometimes something has a life of its own, its destiny so stubborn there is nothing you can do to change its course. When I was younger, nineteen to be exact, I met Nathan, the man I thought I would marry. It’s really what my novel was about: this much older man, this five-year relationship, this brokenhearted crying girl. And even though now I was completely over him and relieved that it hadn’t worked out, in fact thankful to God that I wasn’t still with him, a part of me was still with him. Even though we never married, and broke up, a part of me had continued life with him, was married to him, and living in Oregon with him, while the rest of me was simultaneously living my real life in New York.
“I’m not gonna give up on you,” the man said.
Funny, that’s what my editor told me when my deadline had come and gone. Funny, you never feel more given up on than when someone tells you something like that.
6.
At 33, she is diagnosed with a life-threatening illness and bravely carries on
When I got to work on Monday, my father asked me to come into his office and sit in the patient chair. He was looking through someone’s chart with a concerned look on his face. I didn’t think he could have gotten the canceled twenty-two thousand dollar check from the bank so quickly.
“I’ve been looking at the lab reports,” he said, holding up a computer printout. “Prolactin level is elevated. Now prolactin levels are controlled by the pituitary gland.”
“Do you want me to get someone on the phone?” I asked.
“You mean an endocrinologist?”
I had no idea what he was talking about. Hearing the word gland first thing in the morning was enough to make me want to throw up. I had already started the day by sobbing my eyes out as Mary, Adam, Joe, and Hester Sue all traveled to open a new blind school in Walnut Grove. All the little blind children followed the wagon on foot, holding on to a giant rope. They walked for days and days, blind, and unsure of what lay ahead, and I had taken a taxi to work, too lazy to take the subway.
"I don’t know. Someone. The patient.” I stood up and pointed to the chart in front of him on his desk. “Do you want me to get the patient on the phone?”
“You’re the patient,” he said.
I sat back down.
“It’s nothing to be too concerned about.”
I stood back up.
“My guess is you have a pituitary tumor.”
I sat back down.
I wasn’t going to feel sorry for myself with those blind children holding on to a rope like that. “As long as I don’t go blind,” I said, knowing my father valued humor in the face of adversity above all other qualities. If a patient made a joke right before he died, my father thought he was the greatest man on earth.
“Only about five percent of people with this sort of tumor lose their vision,” my father said, sort of surprising me. He got up and stood behind my chair. He held two fingers up near my right ear.
“Now, without moving your head. How many fingers am I holding up?” he asked.
I slid my eyes over like an Egyptian.
“My vision is fine,” I said.
He walked back around so he was facing me. “Follow my finger, ” he said, slowly dragging his finger through the air, about three inches from my nose.
“Is your finger the most advanced medical technology we have?” I asked.
“I’m testing your peripheral vision.”
“My peripheral vision is fine. I live in New York. If there’s something wrong with my peripheral vision I’ll know about it without your finger.”
“We must monitor it. Brain tumors often affect vision and reflexes,” he said.
“Brain tumor!” I said. “Who said anything about a brain tumor?”
“That’s where the pituitary gland is located. Jesus. Fifteen thousand dollars a year to that damned private school. That biology teacher you had was a moron. Have you had any symptoms?” my father asked. “Any headaches, dizziness, even lactation?”
I looked at him in disbelief. “Lactation? No! You said my headaches were psychosomatic,” I yelled.
“That’s because you’re a real faker. You’re always crying wolf. Didn’t New York magazine call you the Queen of Hyperbole?”
“No,” I said. “They called me the Queen of Hilarity.”
My conversations with my father always had this same unhappy rhythm. Even with a brain tumor that would most probably make me go blind I couldn’t win. And I would be willing to go blind if there was an Adam Kendall in my future. But there wasn’t, I was sure. I would go blind and spend my life feeling around my father’s office and zipping old men’s zippers.
“I was able to get you scheduled for an MRI at Beth Israel hospital in an hour,” he said proudly, as if he had gotten me front-row tickets to Ringling Brothers.
“I’ll go another time,�
� I said.
“This is serious, Rebekah. You could have an aneurysm. We have to get a picture of your brain and then put you on medication.”
“I think I could cure this with pomegranate juice.”
I said this just to annoy him.
A white plastic catcher-style mask was lowered over my face and I was slid backward into the MRI tunnel for my brain scan. “Who am I, Hannibal Lecter?” I asked, but they didn’t hear me. They didn’t even speak English there at Beth Israel for some reason. All the signs were in Chinese. The Jews and the Chinese were becoming interchangeable. The last time I had been to a Jewish cemetery, when an aunt of my mother’s had died, I noticed a lot of Chinese headstones, with elaborate dragons and things, had popped up all over the place. Of course that made sense because Jews couldn’t face eternity without Chinese food.
“You have firring?” the medical technician asked.
“Furring? I’m sorry, I’m not very medical. I don’t know about furring.” It was bad enough having a possible tumor in my brain, but if the tumor had fur on it I wasn’t sure I could handle it.
“You have metar firring in teeth?” the technician said.
“I don’t know what that is.”
“You have healing aid, firring, eyeyoudee, or any metar device in body? Any pin in regs?”
“Pinninregs? I don’t know.”
He handed me ugly spongy earplugs, which I reluctantly put in my ears.
“Ray stirr. No movie.”
A tiny angled mirror on the ceiling of the tube made it possible for me to see the technician looking at the computer screen. The machine clanged loudly.
I could not relax my legs. They were sticking out of the tube into the freezing room. The technician frowned. His lips were moving. He was talking to someone I couldn’t see. I didn’t want anyone else looking at my brain, although I had a lot of confidence that it was even more beautiful than the woman’s before mine, like the inside of a genie’s bottle.
I tried to think nice thoughts, but all I came up with was being buried alive and several Holocaust images. Osama bin Laden in a bunker somewhere. The movie Coma.
Little Stalker Page 9