Little Stalker

by Jennifer Belle

  “You have to get Irmabelle back. It’s okay, Dad. Whatever happened you can work it out.”

  He ignored me and just kept dialing the phone. “I just wanted to sit and enjoy my champagne. A patient gave it to me when I saved his life.”

  I thought about that for a minute. For a minute I understood his disappointment at my not being a doctor. My editor had sent me flowers when I sold the first hundred thousand copies of my book. My agent had sent me a chocolate cake in a wooden box. But I had never saved anyone.

  “It’s been a very hard week,” he said. As much as I hadn’t wanted to work here, it had occurred to me that it might be nice to spend some time with my father. But to him I was less important than Irmabelle. I was my father’s temp. “The last time we did this, Irmabelle made wonderful pork patties. I’ll certainly miss those pork patties,” my father said.

  When I got to the Pierre Hotel the next day at four, Irmabelle was already there, sitting at a table in the Rotunda, looking nervously from side to side. She had lost a little weight and her hair was the way I liked it, in a big puffy pom-pom on the back of her head. She had the kind of body type that was sort of round on top with skinny legs so she always looked a little pregnant. She had deep, dark circles under her eyes. When I was a teenager I thought that dark grooves under your eyes was the most attractive attribute a person could possess. I used to wear no makeup, except for half-moons of plum eyeshadow under my eyes. I told people I had insomnia, even though I slept at least ten or twelve hours a day.

  I sat in the chair facing her and looked at the fresco—clouds and a pointy-titted statue and a bare-chested man in a tree. I remembered my old shrink had once said, when I was ready, there’d be men falling from trees.

  “Thank you for coming here,” Irmabelle said. “I know this is going to sound a little strange to you, but I have always wanted to take you for tea since you were a very little girl. Remember, you used to wear that long calico dress all the time.”

  I wondered if she was disappointed that I wasn’t wearing it now. I was wearing a white Debra Rodman dress and white high-heeled boots with rhinestone Pilgrim buckles.

  “How’s your father?” she asked. She was sweating in her flowered rayon blouse and black dress pants.

  “The same. But he wishes you would come back.”

  “Did he say that?” she asked.

  “I can tell,” I said. “He still has champagne on Fridays.”

  “Yes, he always liked to do that.” She looked angry.

  The waiter came by and I picked up my menu, sticky from some other child’s jam. I had to say it was almost worth forty-two dollars each for a tea bag and three tiny plastic-tasting sandwiches to sit there and watch people walk by with their Hermès luggage, unfolding their accordion maps. Around us in the oval room, at almost every table, sat a woman and a little girl ranging in age from three to eleven, unless you included me and then the range was three to thirty-three.

  When our disappointing, paltry, two-tiered tea tray came, Irmabelle brightened. “It’s nice,” she said. “I almost got the Royal Rotunda tea but I’m glad I stuck with the Peaches and Ginger. What did you get?”

  “When are you coming back to work?” I answered.

  “I’m not,” she said. “I was wondering if you would do something for me.”

  “Sure,” I said. No can do, I thought.

  “I have a photograph that I want your father to have and I didn’t want to put it in the mail. It’s of the two of us. Remember when your father took me to New Orleans for that medical convention? ” She said medical convention as if it was in quotes.

  “No.”

  She took a photo out of her fake Louis Vuitton purse and handed it to me. It was one of those old-fashioned photographs, set in an oval mat, from one of those places where you dress up in a silly costume. Under the photo, New Orleans, Louisiana was printed in corny Gold Rush lettering.

  It was of my father and Irmabelle in ridiculous costumes, standing under a street-sign prop that said BOURBON STREET. The sepia made their skin seem almost the same color. My father was wearing little gold spectacles, funny baggy wool britches and a long wool coat and fedora, and holding a tall rifle. Irmabelle was wearing a white lace wedding gown, off the shoulder, with her breasts pushed up under the cameo worn on a ribbon around her neck. She had on a Juliet cap with a chapel-length veil spread out on the floor next to her. They both looked somber and cold. My father had his arm stiffly around Irmabelle’s ample waist, and Irmabelle held in her arms a life-like doll wrapped in a blanket, wearing a white lace bonnet.

  It looked realistic. My father looked quite handsome for him, but Irmabelle looked fat and awkward, her chin up in the air, the camera having caught her in between expressions.

  The picture had to be one of the strangest things I had ever seen in my life, and it was impossible to imagine my father slapping down the ten or twenty bucks a photo like that would cost, and yet it somehow seemed like the most natural thing in the world. The weirdest thing about it was the doll Irmabelle was cradling. I wondered if it was supposed to represent me.

  I wasn’t sure what surprised me more, the fact that my father and Irmabelle had been having an affair or the fact that my father had put on that costume.

  “Your father loved that picture, but he wouldn’t let me hang it in the office. I thought he might like to have it now.”

  Once I had drawn a picture of my father and Irmabelle, using a half-empty box of crayons at my father’s office. I had colored him in peach and her, black, and she had said, “Is that what you think my skin looks like?” holding her brown hairless arm up to the drawing.

  “Your father and I were very close,” Irmabelle said. “I worked for him for thirty years.”

  “What does a-bop-ted mean?” a little Chinese girl asked a gray-haired woman at the table next to us.

  If we were at the Plaza there would have been a harp.

  Suddenly I felt eyes on me and I saw a camera flash over Irmabelle’s shoulder. A man was standing on the golden sweeping stairway that led to the grand ballroom, taking pictures with an enormous camera, three gowned women on a balcony painted above his head. I looked behind me to see what celebrity was there but, unless the little girl sliding off her chair under the table was a movie star, there was no one. I turned back around, and even though I was now looking right at him, he kept shooting. He was shooting me, now I was sure. He was wearing a sleazy-looking long trenchcoat and a fedora, a look which was way too old for him and not unlike my father’s outfit in the photo. He put his camera down and checked something, a beeper or a phone, I couldn’t tell which. He walked quickly away.

  I hadn’t been photographed like that in a long time and I wondered if I was being followed, and if Ivy Vohl was behind this.

  For some reason I was furious at being photographed just as I was looking at this photograph of my father and Irmabelle. The moment would be captured forever. I wanted to get up and follow him and grab the camera away from him, but I just sat in my chair and couldn’t feel the floor under my feet, as if my white high-heeled boots had changed to Mary Janes.

  “Irmabelle, I don’t think I can give this to my father,” I said, handing the picture back to her. I didn’t want to look at it anymore. “You should give it to him yourself.” I couldn’t really imagine sliding it in between his lab reports and putting it on his desk. He liked things placed on his desk in a certain way: lab reports on the near right-hand corner, the day’s charts on the near left-hand corner, the charts of patients who wanted to talk to him on the phone on the far left-hand corner, and mail in the exact center, under the celadon elephant paperweight. He hadn’t told me where old-fashioned photos of him and his mistress went.

  The waiter brought our enormous check and Irmabelle grabbed it. “I’ve always wanted to do this,” she said. I felt like an old file she was making her notations on—bill paid, no further examination necessary. I didn’t know what she wanted from me but I knew I hadn’t given it to he
r.

  “I know my father would like you to come back,” I said.

  A bride walked by us with a veil covering her face, and we paused to respectfully envy her. The Grand Ballroom at the Pierre was the closest we came to the Taj Mahal in this country.

  “Thank you,” Irmabelle said. “I’m going to leave now.” She stood up and walked away, stopping for a moment to steady herself on the table in the center of the Rotunda.

  She had left the photo.

  I couldn’t just leave it there on the table, so I slipped it in my bag and stood up, trying to think of what to do next. The Café Pierre bar for a martini seemed like a good idea. I definitely didn’t want to go home. Then I saw the bride again, with a man I assumed was her father, heading toward the red-carpeted stairs. I suddenly had the urge to go to her wedding. I had to go somewhere to think about everything that had just happened, and the wedding seemed like as good a place as any.

  I suddenly felt that she was my best friend and I absolutely could not miss her wedding. She seemed so pure and innocent, and normal. This bride, walking with her father, had probably never had a horrifying tea experience like the one I had just had. She didn’t notice that I was following close behind her like a bridesmaid.

  For one thing, I wondered why my father wanted Irmabelle when I’d had a perfectly good mother at home. Although my parents hated each other, and had been divorced since I was thirteen, I still couldn’t imagine how my father could choose Irmabelle over her.

  A string quartet played “Here Comes the Bride” as she walked down the aisle with her father. I waited for a moment and then slipped into a seat in the back row that was covered in white gauze. Everything was beautiful. The bride and groom stood facing each other. Potted topiary marked the altar.

  Everything was perfect except for the wedding photographer who was crouched in the aisle, which was extremely tacky. It was distracting to have someone taking pictures like that in such a holy place. Then, as if he had read my mind, he moved to the side of the room and that’s when I saw that it was the same guy who had taken my picture in the Rotunda. I hadn’t recognized him right away because he had taken off his hat and coat.

  He turned his head and saw me. And then he pointed his camera at me and started shooting, rapid-fire. I sat frozen in my seat, unsure of what to do. The rings were exchanged and he almost missed it, he was so busy shooting me. The photo of their first kiss as man and wife was of me, a total stranger, grimacing uncomfortably. I had to get out of there.

  I got up just before they marched back up the aisle, and ran down the stairs, through the Rotunda and the Café Pierre, and out the doors onto the sidewalk. I ran, dodging traffic, diagonally across the street and stopped in front of an enormous gold statue I’d never noticed before of a man on a horse, and tried to catch my breath. I read the plaque—GENERAL WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN, BORN FEB. 8, 1820 AND DIED FEB. 14, 1891—and that’s when I saw the photographer running toward me. I felt like Cinderella being chased by the prince, or rather, stalked by the paparazzi surrounding the Palace.

  Cinderella, Cinderella, how do you feel out here alone in the street? Aren’t you too old for this? Any comment on your father’s affair?

  The photographer walked right up to me. He had a plodding gait and his camera was bouncing on a strap around his neck.

  “Rebekah Kettle,” he said.

  “Yes?” I said, in the same trapped-bear tone I used with American Express when I accidentally answered the phone. I didn’t get recognized very often but I had to admit it was a huge thrill when I was.

  “It’s me, Isaac Myman—Ivy’s friend. We have a date tomorrow night. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “I’m not scared,” I said, but I was. I didn’t exactly enjoy being chased. “You should have put on your coat before you came outside. It’s cold out.”

  “I’m not cold,” he said. I liked a guy once who played basketball at the West Fourth Street courts and I was always finding good reasons to walk right by there and look at him through the diamonds of the chain-link fence. I ruined that relationship by one day telling him he shouldn’t be wearing shorts because it was too cold. I had a problem being too maternal when it came to good-looking men. “I guess you didn’t recognize me. I mean, I guess I didn’t expect you to recognize me from the Ziegfeld.”

  “I’m sorry, you were taking my picture and . . .”

  “You know the photo on your book doesn’t really look like you. I figured you could use something more recent.”

  I was slightly insulted and I thought of a line in the song “Black Diamond Bay” by Bob Dylan:

  She looks a-nothing like that

  Then I was annoyed to hear music in my head at a time like this.

  “Anyway, it’s a nice surprise running into you. I’m photographing the wedding for the Quille. Of course I’ve done weddings for friends, but never anything like this. I had to photograph the bride getting ready, you know getting into her . . .”

  “Wedding gown?” I said.

  “Right. Wedding gown. She insisted I shoot the whole time and I’ve got three rolls of her wearing nothing but a white lacey thong. The groom’s in for trouble.”

  “It sounds like it’s going to be an interesting wedding album, ” I said, not enjoying this conversation in the least. It was a bad sign that he didn’t know the word for “wedding gown” but the word “thong” rolled off his lips effortlessly. I wasn’t wearing a thong, and I didn’t want to hear about him zooming in on one all afternoon.

  “How do you know Wal and Kelly?” he asked.

  “Who?”

  He gave me a strange look. “The bride and groom.”

  “Oh,” I said, trying to think of something. “Actually, I was at the wrong wedding. The wedding I’m supposed to go to is next week. I made a mistake.” I looked down at my white dress. “The wedding I was invited to is one of those all-white weddings.”

  He was about five-seven or maybe five-eight, with a beer belly, which was my favorite kind of man, unless they were self-conscious about it. I loved men who didn’t care that they were fat. It was exactly the kind of man I would be if I could, fat with low riding jeans and a big sloppy untucked shirt, maybe stained with spaghetti sauce, and a copy of Penthouse or the New York Post under my arm. The way men used to be before they became gay. Before Maxim and Men’s Health, when the only men’s magazines were respectable ones like Penthouse and Playboy. Before Will & Grace. If I were a man, I would drink scotch and go to OTB and date either a tall blond knockout or an ill-tempered woman from South America or a Jewish New York intellectual type with frizzy salt-and-pepper hair and John Lennon glasses.

  Isaac was wearing Arthur Weeman glasses, which he pushed up on his nose a few times with his middle finger, an unfortunate habit because he looked like he was giving me the finger every time he did it. He carried a tote bag that said CHANNEL THIRTEEN on it, a look I could only call old-lady chic.

  “Did you actually donate money to Channel Thirteen or did you mug my grandmother for that?” I asked. I was terrible at dating.

  “No, I sent them fifty bucks. I liked that series they did on old New York.” His voice was gruff, and he stuttered a little, pushing his cloud of black curls back from his forehead and holding his hair bunched in his fist when he talked.

  “What do you have in there? Packets of Sweet ’N Low you stole from a diner?”

  “You seem like a pretty tough customer,” he said.

  “More romantic words were never spoke,” I said, nonsensically.

  “Is that Shakespeare?” he asked.

  I tried to remember to flirt. I hadn’t been good at it since high school, when it was good to grab a boy’s wallet and look through it or make him let you wear his watch. At Bennington nobody flirted, we just had sex, and I’d been with Nathan the whole time anyway.

  I didn’t think, at thirty-three, it was a good idea to grab this guy’s watch, or his wallet for that matter.

  Besides, I really didn’t appr
eciate being stalked at the Pierre Hotel and having my picture taken, although I was wearing great boots and I had bothered to put on two colors of MAC eye shadow called Jest and Hoax, despite Father O’Mally’s advice.

  “You know, I reread your book this morning and I have to say you’re not too good at love scenes,” he said, smiling. “Every time she likes a guy, she’s nasty to him, and every time you start to have sex with someone, your mind wanders and goes off on all these tangents and then you skip straight to the guy ‘collapsing on top of you.’ ”

  “It’s not me, it’s a character.”

  “Right. Her. Collapsing on top of her. The character.” He said the words “the character” extremely sarcastically. “I like to get really turned on when I read a sex scene. You leave out all the good stuff.”

  “Well, I’ll try to work on that for the next one,” I said.

  “I can help you with it.”

  “Oh, yes I’m sure. Chapter one: Isaac Myman,” I said, pretending to be reading from an imaginary book.

  “I’d rather be in the last chapter than the first,” he said. “Also, you always have the characters saying nasty things to each other, followed by ‘he said, smiling’ or ‘she said, smiling.’ Like ‘You’re really not my type, he said, smiling.’ ”

  I wondered why he had chosen “You’re really not my type” as an example. I didn’t remember that being a sentence in my book, so maybe he was telling me I wasn’t his type. And at this point, I really didn’t care, considering I didn’t appreciate having my book criticized by someone who was basically a sleazoid photographer one step up from porno.

  “Well, thank you, I’ll keep that in mind. Aren’t you the reason Princess Di was killed?” I asked. “I mean, people like you?”

  He looked a little taken aback. “I also noticed you didn’t have anything good to say about men. All the men in your book are either disfigured with missing limbs or violent or fat and they’re all sociopaths. When I met you I thought you might have some guy’s testicles pinned to your bonnet.”