Little Stalker

by Jennifer Belle

  I thought about Isaac Myman. Even though I had no intention of calling him, it was sort of nice knowing he was out there somewhere. The promise of a date was usually so much better than the date itself. I could keep him as a sort of insurance policy or savings account—if there was absolutely no one else, I could date him.

  I couldn’t see anything in the mirror anymore. The technician didn’t seem to be there. Then the clanging and vibrating finally stopped and I was slid back out of the oven. “Did you see anything?” I asked.

  “You not finished yet. You get injection and go back in. Injection to right up pituitary.” That didn’t sound good. He stuck a needle in the top of my hand.

  “But did you see anything so far? Anything wrong with my noodle?” The technician didn’t seem to understand. “My lo mein?”

  “You have to go back in.” He lowered the plastic cage and slid me back in again.

  This is what I got for always saying my life was an Arthur Weeman movie. Arthur Weeman was worried that he had a brain tumor in at least three of his films. There was nothing more Arthur Weeman than that.

  Lying in an MRI tunnel was so Arthur Weeman I practically expected to find him in there with me.

  I could almost see his next movie projected on the top of the tube, a close-up of his magnificent brain, the brain of a genius gently pulsating on the screen. The credits roll, and then we see his feet sticking out of an MRI machine, surprisingly big considering his less than average height, wearing big black shoes.

  Then we see two male Chinese medical technicians playing mah-jongg, pointing at the brain on the screen. “Look. Big tumor size of pork bun,” one of the medical technicians says. Then we cut to Arthur Weeman eating alone in a Chinese restaurant. “I don’t know why, I just had this incredible craving for wonton soup all of a sudden. . . . I don’t know I. . . .” He becomes too wrapped up in slurping his soup to finish.

  I stared up at the white rounded ceiling of the tube through the white bars of the mask covering my face. I thought about Arthur Weeman standing in the window looking down at the Gardener School playground and I wondered what it was he was looking for. It wasn’t enough to have seen him, as I always thought it would be. I wanted to talk to him. And that’s when I got the idea that I should write him a letter.

  7.

  At 33, she begins correspondence with filmmaker Arthur Weeman

  When I left the hospital and burst out onto Union Square across from the Virgin Megastore, I felt extremely sorry for myself. My possible tumor pulsed in my brain like a second heart. I was sure my brain was big and it was already a pretty tight fit in my skull, so everything was shifting in there to make room for it. I tried to embrace it, welcome it in, make pleasant introductions, “Tumor, Brain. Brain, Tumor.” It was strange knowing it might be in there. It was hard to wrap my brain around it. I certainly had no intention of going back to my father’s office for the rest of the day.

  When I got home I sat in my gondola and picked up the phone. I desperately wanted to call someone, but I couldn’t think of any friends who didn’t have babies and would want to drink martinis at the Algon-quin for a while.

  I thought about calling Isaac Myman, since I could be going blind and this might be my last sighted date, but then I remembered that I’d thrown out his number and calling him would involve calling Ivy Vohl, and I’d already been through enough for one day.

  I felt different. Not so much transformed, as transported. I felt like I had been in a time machine instead of in an MRI. I had gone from child to old woman in one shot. Or maybe I had gone from old to young. I wanted to call a friend but I really didn’t have any friends. I had a lot of friends but no one you would want to call. I had a lot of male writing buddies, Omar, Nick, Pat, but whenever we got together all they did was rant about how their careers were in the shitter and did I see this one’s author photo and that one’s review in the Times. I remembered once I had complained to my ex-shrink about not having a real girlfriend anymore and she had asked me to invent my perfect best friend and I had thought my perfect friend would be exactly like me in every way but a little more exotic, probably English or Japanese.

  I ordered from Suzie’s, I was starving for Chinese food, and watched TV while I still had the eyes to watch it. I could have an aneurysm at any moment and die. I thought about the possibility of dying. It would put an end to my problems. But no, I thought, death would just present you with a different set of problems.

  Then I lugged the typewriter from Literary Suicide over to the desk from the same film, and put a piece of paper in it. I placed my fingers on the keys that Arthur Weeman had placed his fingers on before me. I typed the words “Dear Mr. Weeman” on the top of the page. I liked the typewriter. It was sort of nice to begin a letter without an animated paperclip with eyeballs popping up and asking if I wanted help.

  Dear Mr. Weeman,

  My name is Rebekah Kettle and I am the author of The Hard Part, a novel. I have never written a fan letter before but

  I ripped the page out, put another in, and tried again.

  Dear Arthur Weeman,

  Thank you for your movies. I know you have animosity for your fans, but

  I couldn’t type another word. This was impossible. If he ever even received and read a letter as stupid as this one, he would have nothing but disdain for the idiot who would write, “Thank you for your movies.”

  I didn’t know what I really wanted to say to him anyway. Just that in a world where people do nothing but disappoint each other, he had never disappointed me.

  Again I tore the paper out of the typewriter—it made a rewarding sound—crumpled it and threw it away. It was almost midnight, way too late to visit Mrs. Williams. I had been so wrapped up with my possible brain tumor, I hadn’t even given her a thought all day. She had probably gone to bed hungry, having gone through every scrap of food I had put in her refrigerator. I felt worried about her. Annoyed, but worried. I wondered if checking on her even this late would be better than not checking on her. The doorman could let me in and I could fill her fridge with food for tomorrow’s breakfast. Arthur Weeman was known to stay up late at night and write. I could just go quickly and see if his kitchen light was on.

  I dressed nicely and warmly in case I had an aneurysm and ended up lying on the sidewalk for any length of time, and headed uptown to Mrs. Williams’.

  Just before we approached Thirty-fourth Street, the cab took a wide U-turn and I instinctively started yelling at the guy.

  “We can’t go this way,” he said.

  “Why not?” I asked. There usually wasn’t much traffic this time of night.

  “You no see nothing unusual?” he said, completely exasperated.

  “No,” I said, glancing out my window.

  “You no see no elephants?”

  I turned around and looked at what turned out to be the most incredible thing I had ever seen. It was the type of experience that you usually had to go to Africa or India for, not Thirty-fourth Street. Until that moment my favorite sight in New York, the most beautiful thing in New York so far, had been the giant sparkling sombrero sign hanging outside the Mexican restaurant Gonzalez y Gonzalez on lower Broadway. Whenever I went downtown I always made the cabdriver go down Broadway so I could see that sombrero, all multicolored glitter. The second most beautiful thing in New York was the wisteria tree climbing up someone’s town house on Tenth Street between Fifth and Sixth, but only for about two weeks in May. And the third most beautiful thing was snow, freshly fallen. But now all that had changed because now we had elephants.

  The cabdriver started backing up away from them. “Stop,” I said. “I have to get out.”

  I followed the elephants and watched them descend into the Midtown Tunnel. I got snippets of information along the way: they were leaving the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, and the only way they could leave Manhattan was to walk.

  Everyone was acting nonchalant, but my heart spun around like a red souvenir flashlight
at the end of a plastic cord.

  I tried to go right down in the tunnel with them, but a policeman stopped me. “I’m a reporter for Maxim magazine,” I told him.

  “I don’t care if you’re a reporter for my dick,” he said.

  “Where are they going?”

  “I don’t know, maybe Philly,” he said.

  It wasn’t every day wild animals, however tamed, were in the streets! The biggest animals in New York up until now were rats and the occasional horse clomping around under some fat cop. The closest we had come to having giant animals were those hideous cow statues that inexplicably popped up all over town for a while and tried to turn New York into a country quilt. It occurred to me that my brain was like New York, the West Side and the East Side, uptown and down, and my possible tumor was like one of those cows.

  But if you thought about it, there was nothing more New York than elephants, gray and smart, weathered but resistant. With a giant trunk that throws dirt at people.

  I hailed another cab and got in. “Can you take me to Philadelphia?” I asked.

  The driver turned around and looked at me. “Oh good, for a minute I was worried you were going to say Brooklyn. Sorry, Baby, that only happens in the movies.”

  “How much would it—” but I stopped myself. I couldn’t just follow elephants like a groupie. And I couldn’t spend two hours in a cab with a driver who called me Baby.

  I got out of the cab on Mrs. Williams’ corner and stopped into the twenty-four-hour deli to buy some more provisions and carried two shopping bags to Mrs. Williams’ building. The doorman buzzed but she didn’t answer. I was sure she was dead. The doorman let me in and I walked cautiously through the house. I found her in her bed under a hundred afghans. I went to her bedside but there was no breath and no movement. The doorman was waiting in the hall. “Mrs. Williams,” I said, loudly, shaking the pile of covers. “Mrs. Williams,” I shouted. She sat up completely alarmed and screamed.

  After I straightened her out and calmed her down and apologized, I told the doorman I was going to stay with her for a while and he left.

  I brought her a glass of water in bed and she propped herself up on pillows and just breathed noisily with her hand on her chest. I sat on a kitchen stool she had by her bed, which she probably used to help herself get in and out.

  “I haven’t been that scared since I was a schoolgirl,” she said. “When I was a schoolgirl, we went camping in Central Park.”

  “No wonder you were scared,” I said.

  “Oh, it was so much fun. It was wilderness then. Our entire class would go and pitch our tents and make a fire and sleep in sleeping bags. The chaperones scared us to death with ghost stories. I’d love to do that again some time. We swam in the lake in our bathing suits. I was the bravest one.”

  She closed her eyes and turned on to her side, and in that moment she wasn’t old anymore. She was a young girl on a camping trip and her skin was glowing, not in the light from the hall bathroom, but in the light from a roaring fire.

  I walked into the kitchen. For a long time I just stood at the window expecting Arthur Weeman’s kitchen light to turn on at any moment. But it didn’t.

  If I were twelve again, and sitting in that playground, I would know what to say to him, I thought. I would know how to reach him. Now I really had no right to write to him, but my old self, the girl who used to see all his movies at the Thalia movie theater on Ninety-sixth Street before it closed, she could have gotten his attention.

  There was nothing more selfish than a fan letter. People who wrote fan letters were delusional and grandiose and didn’t really care about the person they were writing to. A fan letter should be like a gift, and if you couldn’t give the recipient something pleasurable, it shouldn’t be given at all.

  If a child wrote a letter, though, that was different. That wasn’t selfish. Words from a child could inspire men to greatness, make them hit home runs out of the park and things like that.

  I picked up a notepad from the counter and the AMBIEN pen I had taken from Irmabelle’s desk, and brought them over to the window seat. I tore off a sheet of paper and started a letter.

  November 13

  Dear

  I paused for a moment before coming up with what to call him. . . .

  November 13

  Dear Awful Writer,

  I happen to know that you hate your fans and think they’re idiots so I’ve decided to call you Awful Writer instead of Arthur Weeman so you will know that this is not a fan letter and I am not a fan. I am just a girl who has seen all your movies and has certain strong opinions about them but I won’t tell you what they are.

  My name is Thalia and I am almost thirteen.

  I am writing to ask you a question. Q:How do you describe the most beautiful thing you have ever seen? Now I know why you want to make movies instead of write books so you can just show the most beautiful thing in the world without clumsily taking up page after page.

  Last night I was in a cab at midnight heading from Tribeca to the Upper East because I was supposed to sleepover at my friend L.E.’s loft, but I had to leave in the middle for certain reasons pertaining to L.E.. Anyway, when we got to 34th St. you would not believe what I saw.

  Elephants! Real ones. At least a dozen of them. They were walking East on Thirty-fourth street, actually trunk to tail. Slowly trudging right down the center of the street like a river. There were police cars and everything was gray on gray and trunks and tails and a strange blue smokey light pouring down from somewhere like it was a Bergman film.

  The best thing about it is that it wasn’t even a movie. It was real life. Those poor lucky elephants were leaving the circus for Christ sake. Poor because they’re in the circus. And lucky because they got to walk down the streets of New York which none of their friends in India will ever get to do. Apparently they leave Madison Square Garden and walk to Queens where they take a train somewhere. I don’t know what the blue lights are for. Maybe it soothes them.

  When I saw it I thought I was going to have a heart attack. But there were hardly any people around. I guess nobody cares about a beautiful stream of elephants. People in New York will stop to look at almost anything, any homeless person going to the bathroom on the street or fistfight is more interesting apparently than elephants. It was like a ghost town but with Elephants instead of blowing tumbleweed.

  It also reminded me of the play “The Rhinoscerous” by Ionesco which I loved.

  That’s why I am writing to you. You would be crazy not to open your next movie with elephants walking down the street at midnight.1. Ext. Thirty-fourth Street. Night. Twelve sad, beautiful, real ELEPHANTS walk trunk to tail while various random NEW YORKERS mill about, oblivious.

  I know, I know, you’re probably saying I should stick to writing crazy letters and you’ll take care of the screenwriting. Don’t worry, my Uncle is an Intelectual Property Attorney and I am officially signing the above screenplay beginning to you.

  I am reading How to Write a Screenplay by Robert McKee which I think is ridiculous, don’t you? He says that the flashback is the sign of a true amateur. I happen to know that isn’t true and Iris, Isabel, and Isolde is proof of that, not to mention Literary Suicide. I don’t want to write a screenplay, I was just interested in reading about them.

  All Best,

  Thalia

  P.S. Please let me know if you disagree with me about Robert McKee or any of the above.

  I folded the letter and tucked it into my pocket. I felt like I had opened a time capsule. I went into Mrs. Williams’ maid’s room, right off the kitchen, and lay down on its narrow cot.

  When I woke up in the morning Mrs. Williams and I watched Little House on the Prairie. Reverend Alden was thinking about leaving Walnut Grove, but I could hardly concentrate. I was thinking about the letter and wondering if I was really going to mail it or not. If I left Mrs. Williams’ building and turned two corners, I was sure I could figure out his address.

  I didn’t have a
change of clothes, but I washed up in the maid’s bathroom and was about to leave for my father’s office when I saw Mrs. Williams just standing in her foyer staring at me. “Nice having company,” she said.

  I always felt terrible when old people said things like that. “I’ll check in on you later.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” she said, petulantly. “I’ll call the agency and have them send over another girl. I prefer one from the islands.”

  I suddenly didn’t want a girl from the islands there puttering around the kitchen, sitting in my window seat. “I’m taking you with me,” I said.

  8.

  At 33, in a futile attempt to escape her critics, she adopts a nom de plume

  As soon as we came down in the elevator and crossed the threshold of her lobby, Mrs. Williams stopped moving and speaking. I almost admired her for it. Most people turned into someone else when they left the house, but she just shut down and didn’t bother.

  She didn’t say a word as I pushed her up Arthur Weeman’s block while I found his address. It was a beautiful red brick town house, with wooden shutters painted cinnamon. Like a sound track, you could hear the screams and laughter from the Gardener schoolyard behind it.

  We walked to the little copy shop on the block of my father’s office and I bought an envelope and paid two dollars for a thirty-nine -cent stamp. In New York the only people who go to the post office are old people, foreigners, and personal assistants.

  I put the letter in the envelope, wrote Arthur Weeman’s name and address on it, stamped it, drew a little rainbow on it, and put it in the mailbox on the corner. It felt somber with Mrs. Williams as silent witness.

  I wheeled Mrs. Williams into my father’s office and parked her in the waiting room. Then I pulled all the charts for the day’s appointments without even thinking how boring it was.

  I brought them into my father’s office and put them on his desk.

  “I have the results from the MRI, honey. It’s exactly what I thought. A pituitary tumor,” my father said.