Little Stalker

by Jennifer Belle

  “She’s a nice gal,” he said. I hated when people used the word “gal.” “Yes, yes, I’m getting a reading on you. Okay, now tell me what’s bothering you.”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “She told me to call you.”

  “I think you’re fragmented,” he said. “You’ve given away parts of yourself and that’s why your back hurts.”

  “My back doesn’t hurt,” I said.

  “It does, you’re just so used to it you don’t even realize it. Your soul is outside of yourself which is causing pain in your chest. I see good things happening for you at work. There’s a powerful woman looking at you.”

  “A powerful woman?” I didn’t think he meant Mrs. Williams dozing on the sectional. Maybe he meant my editor. My mind flashed to Ivy Vohl.

  “What about men? You don’t have a boyfriend.” He sounded kind, and I imagined he was Reverend Alden, with a full head of white hair and a doughy Irish face. It was so nice of him to care if I had a boyfriend. My own father never asked me about that. This was why I preferred a holistic approach to health care. Blood tests didn’t hold all the answers, sometimes you also needed the wisdom of a kindly old priest. And I respected this man for considering my loneliness. For treating my loneliness as seriously as if it were a brain tumor and as politely as if it were a person sitting next to me taking up space. It almost made me wonder how I could have felt alone when I had loneliness with me all along. I hated when people tried to ignore it, dipping my loneliness in sticky pink sugar and handing it back to me on a paper cone.

  “No, I don’t have a boyfriend,” I said.

  “Well, from the reading I’m getting, that could be because you really look like you could rip the balls right off a man.”

  For some reason this was not what I had expected to hear from a priest. I was a bit taken aback.

  “You intimidate men,” he said. “If a man fell out of the sky, I think you would probably grab him by the balls and throw him out the window.”

  This was especially shocking since I was sitting in the window seat at the time, leaning against the window.

  “What should I do?” I asked, and tears started inexplicably pouring down my face.

  “I want you to stop wearing makeup. And don’t wear power suits.”

  I listened intently to every word he said, looking down at my jeans and the peach cashmere cardigan I had borrowed from Mrs. Williams. It seemed delicate, with coral beading in the shape of a flower on the breast, but I realized I was wearing it like a power suit. I thought of the aggressive jeans and boots I had worn on my date with Hugh Nickelby and cringed remembering the eye shadow. And the top I wore had a pattern of wheat stalks embroidered on it! How powerful and aggressive that wheat must have seemed to Hugh, conjuring in his mind plowing fields and locusts and homesteading together. And now that I thought about it, I was pretty sure it was a fertility symbol too. He probably thought I had been hinting that I wanted to have a baby with him.

  “And the next time you meet a man try to be a little nicer. Not such a dragon lady.” His warning sent chills up my spine to the root of my cerebellum. I looked down at my hands expecting to see long talons painted red, but my nails were short and painted a pale, sheer pink called Limo-Scene. But they were off-putingly shiny. My brain turned soft and receptive like an apple and my tumor woke up and wriggled his wormy head out.

  “There is one man,” I said, thinking of Isaac Myman.

  "Go out with him!” Father O’Mally said urgently. "You’re going to be fine, Rebekah. We’re going to gather up all the broken pieces of your soul like an eggshell and put them back together. Now find a fixed point in front of you and stare at it softly.”

  I looked down at the concrete schoolyard below, picturing my messy eggshell. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men stood on either side of the schoolyard in perfect chess formation, waiting to put me together.

  Then I lifted my eyes to Arthur Weeman’s window. “Okay,” I murmured.

  “Open your mouth.”

  I opened my mouth.

  “Wider.”

  I opened it wide, like I was at the dentist, and kept my eyes on the window. Just then Arthur Weeman appeared in it. He was wearing a tuxedo. Someone else was with him, handing him a mug.

  Once I had been at a book party at Elaine’s and some editor I was talking to suddenly pointed to the large window. Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney were outside on the street, wearing stylish coats, deep in conversation with each other. “Now that’s quite a picture,” the editor said, wistfully, with reverential tears in her eyes as if we were in Milan beholding The Last Supper. “What we’re witnessing right now is literary history.”

  But this sight, Arthur Weeman in his kitchen, being handed a mug, with my mouth open taking it all in, this was almost too much to handle. He moved his hand as if he were swatting a fly. He pushed his glasses up on his nose. Every gesture was filled with Charlie Chaplin brilliance. My open mouth filled with gratitude for this private Arthur Weeman viewing. An Arthur Weeman silent movie that only I could see.

  “Now, concentrate on all the pieces of yourself coming back into you through your mouth.”

  Arthur Weeman brought the mug to his lips.

  “That’s it. You’re doing great. Now, close your mouth and swallow.”

  I gulped down the pieces of myself like a protein drink.

  “Okay, now you’re whole again.”

  “That’s it?” I whispered.

  “That’s it.”

  “Thank you, Fa . . .” I didn’t know what to call him. It felt strange to call him Father. I didn’t even call my own father Father.

  “You’re quite welcome, young lady. You should send me a picture of yourself before the next time you call me.”

  “What do I owe you?” I asked.

  “You can send a donation if you like. Whatever you feel is appropriate,” he said.

  Then, when I went out to get groceries, I did an incredibly benevolent thing. I smiled at a pregnant woman. It caused her to wipe the foul expression off her face and smile back. I was overwhelmed with a feeling of religiosity. I really was a truly good person and my good deed filled me with hope.

  Since Arthur Weeman had been wearing a tuxedo, I figured he’d be out for the whole evening and I should go home. I wanted to take a shower and think about what Father O’Mally had said. I fed Mrs. Williams and promised I would see her in the morning.

  She was watching The Golden Girls. “I’m having dinner with my friends tonight, out on the lanai,” she said.

  I went back to my own apartment, the psychic priest’s words ringing in my ears. I should try to be nice. I should be open, less critical, more easygoing. I thought of Isaac Myman going out to buy my book. I could practice being nice on him, I thought. I called information and was relieved he was listed so I didn’t have to get his number from Ivy Vohl.

  Just do it already, I said to myself.

  “Ivy?” he said, instead of hello.

  “No,” I said. I paused, thinking that might be enough romance for one night, and maybe I would hang up and go to a movie by myself.

  “This is Rebekah Kettle, we met at the Arthur Weeman movie. Well, we didn’t meet but Ivy . . .”

  “The writer,” Isaac said.

  “Right.”

  “I bought your book,” he said.

  “Oh, you didn’t have to do that. I would have given you one,” I lied. When you wrote a book, people always assumed you had hundreds of free copies of it lying around your house. “So, Ivy said you’re a photographer. What do you photograph?”

  “People,” he said. “Celebrities for magazines and newspapers. That’s how I know Ivy, she’s my boss at the Quille.”

  “Have you ever photographed Arthur Weeman?” I asked.

  “Yeah, a few times,” he said.

  The idea of meeting Isaac suddenly seemed very appealing. “You sound a little like him,” I said.

  “Yeah, I get that a lot. That’s how I
got to shoot him. I called his doctor’s office pretending to be him and asked when my appointment was once. I do things like that.”

  “That sounds great,” I said. It already sounded more interesting than talking to Derek Hassler about his strenuous, highpressure job at Maxim magazine.

  “Well, I don’t want to give the wrong impression. Usually it’s just any monkey could do it, but once in a while something interesting happens.”

  “I love monkeys,” I said. I cringed as soon as I said it.

  Isaac laughed. “Is that so? Well, how about having dinner with me on Sunday night then? I can’t do it Saturday because I have to go to a wedding.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Where?”

  “How about the Monkey Bar at eight?” he said, laughing.

  When I got off the phone, I was inspired to carry a vase of almost dead Casablanca lilies into the kitchen to change their water. The color rust spread on my fingers from their stamens and I felt suddenly transformed, anointed, as if my skin had been painted with henna, and life was finally rubbing off on me in a good way. I felt like Cleopatra on the Nile, not Rebekah Kettle at her leaky sink.

  Then I took a long bath and lay in my new Arthur Weeman bed and watched Debbie Harry singing on TV. She was so fantastic-looking that something about her made my heart swing inside me like a Murano glass chandelier. She had beautiful cupid’s bow lips painted purple. And I thought, all you need to get by in this world is the perfect shade of lipstick and a sense of humor. And, at least once in a while, if only a phone-call’s worth, love.

  Once I had a love and it was a gas . . .

  I sang along with her.

  9.

  At 33, she meets her future husband, Isaac Myman

  When I got to work on Friday, I was completely exhausted. Working for my father was killing me. It was so boring and tedious. The kitchen smelled bad because no one had taken out the garbage. My father didn’t seem to have a cleaning lady. That couldn’t possibly be my job.

  Just then he called which surprised me because I had assumed he was at his desk with the door closed. I was over an hour late, I had just parked Mrs. Williams in the waiting room and taken off all of her layers—her scarf, wheelchair blanket, hat, and down jacket, which she called her “car coat”—and hadn’t even sat down in Irmabelle’s chair yet. I had to say she looked quite attractive. She had started dressing up to come to work with me.

  “Where have you been? I’ve been calling,” my father said.

  “What do you mean? I’ve been right here for over an hour,” I said.

  “That’s strange.”

  “Weird.”

  “Anyway, I’m not coming in til the afternoon. I’m at the hospital visiting a patient. But we’ll celebrate at the end of the day.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “Champagne Fridays,” he said. “Irmabelle and I always had champagne on Fridays to celebrate the week being over.”

  This was a very strange image, my father and Irmabelle, arms pretzeled, sipping champagne from crystal flutes.

  “Dad,” I said, “I’m not sure how much longer I can work here.” I couldn’t just keep coming to this office day after day after day like that. I realized that at first I had thought of it as a sort of joke, something I would do for a week or two to help out the old man, but now it was getting serious. I was really here. That morning, Laura had started teaching at the school in Walnut Grove. Not so long ago she was a student herself, reciting her essay by heart for Ms. Beadle. Life was moving on without me.

  As soon as I hung up with my father, the phone rang again and I answered, “Dr. Kettle’s office.”

  There was silence and then the person hung up.

  I looked at the new caller ID. BRANCH, IRMAB. It took me a second to figure out it was Irmabelle. I had never known her last name, I realized. I put the receiver down.

  About fifteen minutes later the phone rang and BRANCH, IRMAB came up on the caller ID again.

  “Dr. Kettle’s office,” I said.

  “Yes, hello, I’d like to make an appointment with the doctor,” Irmabelle said in her unmistakable Haitian accent, or wherever she was from.

  “Okay,” I said. I waited for her to say something. “May I ask who’s speaking?”

  “Uh, my name is Maryanne.”

  “Have you been here before?” I asked.

  “No, I’m a new patient. Have you been working for the doctor for a long time?” I almost laughed. She really didn’t think I knew it was her.

  “No,” I said. “I’m his daughter and I’m just filling in until his real office manager comes back. Her name is Irmabelle and we’re just a mess without her. When would you like to see the doctor?”

  “Oh, well, I’ll call you back,” Irmabelle said, and hung up.

  Half an hour later the phone rang again. It was Irmabelle. “Dr. Kettle’s office,” I said.

  “Is this Rebekah?” she asked.

  “Yes, may I help you?”

  “Rebekah, it’s Irmabelle,” she said.

  "Irmabelle!” I said. "When are you coming back? I’m overrun with patients here, and I can’t do it without you.” I looked out at Mrs. Williams sitting all alone like one of my father’s plants. “My father’s not in right now, but he’ll call you as soon . . .”

  “No, I called to talk to you. I want to meet you someplace. Will you meet with me?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Why don’t you come here?” I had absolutely no desire to go to Brooklyn or Queens or wherever she probably lived.

  “No, I want to meet you tomorrow afternoon. I want to take you to tea at the Plaza. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time.”

  “That’s silly,” I said.

  “What’s silly about it?” she snapped, obviously insulted.

  “Well, the Plaza’s closed,” I said. I felt like I was talking to my father.

  “Oh, no! That’s terrible.”

  “Why do you want to take me to tea at the Plaza?” I asked, but then I looked down at the two little mouse dolls dressed as a doctor and a nurse stuck together in an embrace, and I suddenly knew.

  Tea at the Plaza in New York City was a very specific type of ritual that was pretty much the closest thing you could come to family court without having to hire a lawyer and draw up custody papers. It was a place a mother took a daughter. If a woman took someone else’s daughter to the Plaza, a goddaughter or a niece or the child of a close friend, it was a kind of staked claim that rivaled the labor and birth itself. It was where, for instance, every single New York stepmother had taken every single New York stepdaughter. There were only two kinds of people who went to tea at the Plaza, tourists and women on a sort of maternal feeding frenzy. Women with motherlust. I had been on both sides of the table many times, both as a child and as an adult taking my friends’ children the moment they turned five. It was known among all women in New York to be a solemn bond and, as I was thirty-three years old, being invited to partake of the ceremony now could only mean one thing.

  Irmabelle and my father had been having an affair.

  Tea at the Plaza. The hugging mice. Champagne Fridays. I suspected it had been a long one.

  “Now I don’t know what to do,” Irmabelle said, miserably.

  “There’s always the Pierre,” I said, to be kind.

  “Meet me there tomorrow at four? And don’t tell your father,” she said.

  At the end of the day, I pulled the charts for the appointments on Monday and got ready to leave.

  “Wait a minute,” my father said, standing in the doorway holding a bottle of Taittinger’s. “It’s time for our party. Please.”

  “Oh. Right,” I said. I wheeled Mrs. Williams back into the waiting room and stood there awaiting further instructions.

  “I’ll warm up the quiche in the oven,” he said.

  “Quiche?”

  “I always make a quiche on Fridays. I hope you like broccoli and cheddar.”

  We sat together on
the couch with paper plates of quiche on our laps. Mrs. Williams had already finished hers and was holding the plastic fork up in a somewhat scary pose.

  I took a bite. “It’s good, Dad,” I said.

  “Broccoli and cheddar. I hope it’s okay.”

  “I just said, it’s delicious.”

  “Well, the crust is store-bought, but I made the custard from scratch.”

  He popped the champagne cork and I made a little excited woo sound. He poured champagne into three paper cups from the bathroom, the same cups that were used for urine samples.

  “How about a toast?” my father said. “To your tenure here with me. I’m glad you’re here. I know it’s not what you want to do right now, but I just need you to stick by me a while longer. And to your next book. I expect you to do quite a bit of writing at your desk when there’s downtime.”

  Downtime was certainly a good way to describe it, I thought. This was definitely my downtime. “It’s Irmabelle’s desk,” I said.

  We were like Ma and Pa Kettle celebrating a great batch of eggs.

  “So you got Elsa off to Forest Hills okay?”

  “Forest Hills?”

  My father had asked me to call a car service to send one of his patients home but I was almost certain the address I’d given the dispatcher was not in Forest Hills. “I didn’t send her to Forest Hills, Dad. I sent her to someplace in Brooklyn.”

  “Why did you do that?” my father asked, getting flustered.

  I stood and went to Irmabelle’s file. I had referred to the wrong card. Elsa was on her way to someplace called Avenue L, which was nowhere near Forest Hills. My heart was pounding.

  “Oh my God,” my father said. “She has dementia. If she got out of the car there, she might never get home.”

  “Dad, I think it’s time for you to talk to Irmabelle and tell her to come back.” I wanted to tell him about Irmabelle’s call, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

  “This isn’t the time to discuss that,” he said. “I have to call the cab company. Tell me the number.” He was holding his cell phone and his hand was shaking. “This is an important job, Rebekah. With responsibility. A mistake could cost someone his life. The phone’s busy. Where’s redial?” He looked down at his phone in utter bewilderment.