Little Stalker

by Jennifer Belle

  Arthur Weeman pushed his plate away. He reached into his pocket for a slim digital camera and started taking photos of her, showering her in tiny flashes.

  She ate two cakes.

  Arthur directed her to her velvet seat, and while she craned around looking at him, he monkeyed up the scaffold and turned on the projector. He joined her in the velvet seat attached to hers, as Adopting Alice began to play.

  As a New Yorker, I’d seen only two or three movies outside in my entire life, and only as a child from the backseat of a car or sitting on the grass in some crowded, rat-infested park. I would have to add this to my list of most beautiful sights in New York: Adopting Alice in Technicolor lighting up the night sky. Although I’d watched it hundreds of times on video, I hadn’t seen it on the big screen since it came out, and every moment of it was like seeing fireworks instead of just remembering them. After this, I worried, movies would be spoiled for me. I’d never be able to enjoy a movie the regular way again.

  For the first half hour Arthur Weeman sat rather stiffly while the girl squirmed next to him, looking all around and vying for their shared armrest. At one point she took out some sort of small wireless device and appeared to be texting someone. She seemed entirely uninterested in the film, and, to my astonishment, during one of the best scenes in movie history, when Arthur Weeman and Alice walk through Central Park wheeling the baby carriage, which happened at that moment to be parked in the corner of my bedroom with my dirty laundry in it, Y.G. did a remarkable thing. She simply stood up. She went back to the cart and poked her fingers in the cakes again.

  Arthur Weeman gestured to the screen but she wasn’t interested. Instead, she took off her puffy jacket and went to stand right in front of him. Facing him, with her back to the screen, Y.G. slowly unbuttoned her uniform blouse, slipped it off her shoulders and arms and let it fall to the ground.

  Arthur Weeman clownishly picked up her blouse and tried to cover her with it, with a “What, are you crazy? I could get arrested” kind of a gesture. Y.G. laughed, and pushed him back down in his seat. She reached behind her and unhooked her bra—it was white or maybe the palest pink—and let it fall to the ground with the blouse.

  My arm ached in its position, holding up the opera glasses, and I let it drop to my side. On the screen, Arthur touched Alice’s hair and she swatted his hand away.

  “Stop it,” I said. I sort of whispered it as if we were in a movie theater with other people. “Stop it. Stop it. Stop it.” I wasn’t talking to Arthur Weeman, or to Y.G. exactly. I was the one who had taken off my own embroidered Mexican blouse and unhooked my own white bra in Disney World. The regular old Disney World, not the one created by Arthur Weeman. I was talking to myself.

  Y.G. put her arms up in the air and twirled, this time topless, against the movie backdrop. The movie played on her face and chest. Her breasts were in that impossible stage of development, just after they’ve appeared out of nowhere and right before you’re used to them. I remembered my own at that time, a lot like hers, almost all nipple, as magical as Pez dispensers. As tender and painful as they were, with them came the fortuitous feeling that good things were going to happen, all was as it should be, and life was all up from here. She approached Arthur and, still facing him, tried to climb on his lap, in an awkward half-straddle, because one of her long booted legs was forced to drape over the empty velvet seat. Arthur put his hands on her breasts and she squirmed off of him, grabbing his glasses off his face at the same time.

  Without realizing it, I had returned the opera glasses to my eyes.

  I’d never seen him without his glasses. He wore them in kissing scenes and sex scenes, shower scenes, rain scenes, and even in the boxing scenes in Swan Song. But now she had them and, like a little bully, she took off with his famous signature egg-shaped frames. He got up to chase her, but faltered a little as he passed the food cart, putting his hand out to steady himself. He was off by several inches, clearly disoriented, his peripheral vision failing him.

  She came back to him then and sweetly handed them over. He put them on, talking to her heatedly, throwing his hands up and then clutching his heart, which sent her into spasms of laughter. I couldn’t help but smile and feel a strange gratitude to her at that moment for her laughter. Without his glasses he had become old, but her laughter had restored him. He grabbed her and pushed her against the cart and spanked her cartoonishly, his hand moving under her uniform skirt, as the movie continued on without them.

  She got away from him and smoothed down her skirt. Pouting, she went to where her bra and blouse lay on the ground, and scooped them up, bending at the waist with her legs completely straight.

  Arthur Weeman pointed to the screen where he—I knew it so well I didn’t even have to look—was about to kiss Alice. Y.G. stopped and watched, cocking her head slightly, and then laughed again. The same laughter that had restored him to greatness a few moments before, now cut him down to size.

  She took off again, trotting over to the projector scaffold, threw her blouse and bra over a low bar, and began to climb it like a jungle gym, bending her legs over a high bar and hanging from it upside down, her skirt flopping over to reveal her panties.

  Arthur watched from below in a panic, desperately begging her to come down. When she was good and ready, she reached up and grabbed the bar with her hands, pulled herself up, unhitched her legs, and climbed down to the ground. Again he gestured heatedly to the screen, as if he was telling her that if she tried to concentrate on his film for a moment, she might actually like it.

  How clever she was to ignore the movie! I could never be that coy. I’d have twirled and eaten my hamburger neatly and sat quietly and watched the movie, weeping in my seat at its greatness. She had whipped him into a frenzy, and instead of going back to her velvet seat, she moved close to him, stood on her toes, and kissed him hard, with her mouth wide open.

  My letters were nothing compared to this.

  Then she charmingly dropped to her bare knees and worked to pull down his zipper.

  I was startled to my feet by my cell phone ringing. It was Isaac. I was late. He was already waiting. “I’ll be right there,” I said, “I’m getting into a cab now.” I turned my back to the window and got off the phone.

  My heart beat as hard as if I was running. She had gone too far. Stupid, stupid. What was wrong with this girl, putting him in jeopardy like this? Even though he had clearly rented out the whole school and playground and probably had the entrance manned with guards, how could he be completely sure he was safe? What about the photos he’d taken and the text message she’d sent?

  I knew what it felt like to drop to my knees like that. I could feel the cold rough ground beneath me, feel the power of being both stewardess and pilot of my own magic carpet. She would never be more beautiful and she would never be more ruined. But she won, I thought bitterly. She was smarter than me. She got a hamburger and silken cakes and a velvet seat and a thousand lights, and she twirled like Salome before the adoring eyes of the greatest filmmaker of all time, while I, on the other hand, had gotten myself knocked up by a man dressed as a pirate. She had been chosen by Arthur Weeman and he was willing to destroy himself for her.

  At first, I was sure, he must have protested. But then I imagined he had stood still, looking all around at the dark windows of the Gardener School building, the dark windows of his own town house, and the back of Mrs. Williams’ building, almost all brick-wall with just the one window exposed. Could he not see from that angle that the blinds that were always drawn were now open? Then, as she pulled out his cock and started sucking it like a little expert, he would look nervously over at the screen, as if he was suddenly afraid his own characters might tell on him.

  I sat in Mary’s Fish Camp, the tiny, cozy seafood restaurant on the corner of Fourth and Charles with Isaac, rewinding what I had seen in my mind and then fast-forwarding to the part I hadn’t. We ate oysters, and lobster rolls, and a hot fudge sundae.

  As I talked to Isaac
, I knelt at the window and watched Arthur Weeman in the schoolyard.

  Although it had been an Arthur Weeman production, it suddenly didn’t seem like one anymore. Something this blatantly distasteful would never have happened in his movies. Now it was an X-rated film by Rebekah Kettle, and under the black Oscar de la Renta, my panties were wet, as helplessly gushingly wet as they had been when I was young.

  As if he had read my mind, and felt another director edging into the playground, he urged her to stand up. He zipped his pants, and helped her into her blouse and puffy jacket. She shoved her bra in the jacket pocket, and with his arm around her protectively, he led her out of the playground and through the school door, right out of my frame.

  When I was Y.G.’s age and I had seen Adopting Alice, of course I had identified with Alice, never dreaming there was any other side to things. Then one day, watching it alone in my apartment, I was shocked to discover that I couldn’t help but sympathize with Candace Ann! Then, to test this condition again, by way of a second opinion, and third, and fourth, I watched several movies and realized again, to my dismay, that it wasn’t the Y.G. I cared about, but the other. It was Diane Keaton who kept me spellbound, while Mariel Hemingway left me cold.

  Now, walking casually downstairs to the ladies’ room and locking the door behind me, and reaching my fingers inside my panties as if they were someone else’s, I was learning the secret that all former Y.G.s are forced to one day learn, a secret that no man, not Arthur Weeman or Lewis Carroll or even Nabokov understood, that in the end we Y.G.s don’t grow up to be over-the-hill Lolitas—sexless and worn and fat with child—we simply turn into the very thing that had once lusted after us.

  Lolita in the end becomes Humbert Humbert.

  And I had turned my back on Alice to find myself seeing things through Arthur Weeman’s eyes. I, like all Y.G.s everywhere, had become, to my shock and horror, nothing more than a little dirty old man.

  My fingers were cold and sopping as morning grass.

  On the screen, playing to the empty schoolyard, Alice ran on Park Avenue, her fingertips skimming along a wrought-iron gate, and Arthur Weeman chased her. On the screen he was young, twenty years younger to be exact. On the screen, he caught her and she pushed him away and grabbed a fistful of tiny green leaves from a potted shrub at the entrance to a building.

  18.

  At 33, she meets a long-lost relative

  When I got to work the next day, my father was in his office talking to a patient. He ducked his head out to inform me that he was expecting a new patient who he had neglected to write in the appointment book. I looked down at the day’s schedule and noticed that he not only hadn’t written in the new patient, he hadn’t written in the one he was in with now.

  I was early because they had only shown one hour of Little House. For some reason the second hour had been preempted by a terrible sitcom called Mama’s Family. The Mama’s Family theme music, when I was expecting the soothing Little House theme music and Ma and Pa pulling up in their wagon and watching Carrie fall in the grass, had been a complete assault.

  The doorbell rang and I got up to let the new patient in. I was dismayed when I opened the door to see Ivy Vohl standing there. She was wearing a vintage halter-top dress which, unfortunately for all of us, didn’t allow for a bra. “Hi,” she said.

  “Ivy, I can’t hang out right now. I’m working,” I said.

  “That’s what you wear to work?” she asked. It was actually my favorite thing to wear to work, one of those old skeleton X-ray front and back T-shirts with all the ribs and vertebrae and everything that I’d had since high school. “I’m here to see Dr. Kettle,” she said, in a formal tone. “I’m a patient.” She looked down at her man’s watch that I was sure she wore to go for the For-Esmé-with-Love -and-Squalor look. That was the sure sign of girl with a father-figure complex, a thin-wristed woman wearing a huge old-fashioned man’s watch. I would have bet any amount of money she was completely obsessed with Philip Roth. “Oh, I’m early.”

  That meant she would be sitting in the waiting room trying to talk to me for at least fifteen minutes. I showed her in and handed her the clipboard with the medical questionnaire attached to it and reluctantly wrote her name on a manila folder and put blue V and O stickers on it.

  For a brief moment I wondered if Page Six would be interested in publishing the medical questionnaire of its biggest competition.

  “I thought I was supposed to be his first patient,” she said.

  “Well, he’s been practicing for forty years.”

  “I mean today.”

  “He’s very busy,” I said.

  “Well, I really appreciate you setting me up with your father.”

  “I’m not setting you up with him,” I said.

  “As a doctor. I really needed a new doctor. My last one and I got into a sort of a weird power struggle. My new shrink said I was in an S and M relationship with him.”

  "I prefer alternative medicine,” I said, trying to knock the image of Ivy whipping some nice old doctor out of my mind.

  “Like what?”

  "Kinesthesiology, acupuncture, Chinese teas, that sort of thing.”

  “That’s not very Jewish,” Ivy said. “What about analysis? You’re in analysis, aren’t you?”

  “I quit, actually,” I said.

  “I just started with someone new. In fact, guess who my new shrink is?”

  “Well, your new doctor’s my father, and I don’t have any relatives who are shrinks, so I have no idea.”

  “Come on, guess.”

  “I have no idea.”

  “My shrink is Arthur Weeman’s shrink,” she said.

  I turned and pretended to find a chart so she couldn’t see whatever look I was sure had registered on my face. “Who is he?” I asked, realizing I didn’t know who Arthur Weeman’s shrink was. I hated when my knowledge of Arthur Weeman was shown to be incomplete.

  “Dr. Ulrich Schneider. He’s eighty-four years old. It’s really hard to manipulate him. I’m seeing him three times a week because I don’t know how much longer he has left.”

  This is how irrational my jealousy always was. If I found out someone got a forty-thousand-dollar advance for their first book, I got insanely jealous even though I got a five-hundred-thousand -dollar advance for my first book. Somehow, at that moment, in my mind, forty thousand was more than five hundred thousand. And that was how I felt about Ivy Vohl seeing Arthur Weeman’s shrink. Even though I, thanks to Mrs. Williams, had a private viewing into Arthur Weeman’s kitchen, night and day whenever I wanted it, even though I could see Arthur Weeman himself, and after what I’d seen in the playground might even know more about him than his own shrink, it didn’t seem as great as getting to go to his shrink. Ivy Vohl was closer to him.

  "Excuse me for a minute, I have to develop some X-rays in the other room,” I said. I went into the examining room and lay on the table for about ten minutes with my eyes closed, trying to relax. Ivy Vohl did not have more than I had. I could call Dr. Schneider and make an appointment with him before he died just as easily as she could. What kind of shrink had a pedophile for a patient? I wondered. But then I thought, what kind of girl had a pedophile for an idol? I wondered if Arthur had told him about Y.G. Or about Thalia. Then I heard the phone on Irmabelle’s desk ring and I went back into the reception area to answer it. Ivy Vohl was lounging on the couch in the waiting room, staring at me. She held a book on her lap, her place marked with her finger, and from where I was standing I was pretty sure it was The Human Stain.

  The call was from my father in his office. “Would you go to Abe’s and see if I received a fax?” my father asked.

  “Why don’t I call over there first?” I said.

  “No, I’m sure it’s there, please go get it. It’s urgent. I also wouldn’t mind a bagel. Toasted onion with scallion cream cheese. Light on the cream cheese.”

  “Okay,” I said. Going to the copy shop on the corner and Bagel Time was better than
having to talk to Ivy anyway.

  My father hung up without saying good-bye as usual. “Does your father know I’m here?” she asked.

  “He’s in with another patient. I’m going to pick up a fax,” I said, standing up.

  “You don’t have a fax machine?”

  “Nope,” I said, enjoying our faxlessness for the first time. I went to the door and opened it to leave, but then I thought better of it, shut the door, and went back to Irmabelle’s desk. I didn’t like the idea of leaving Ivy Vohl alone in the office. I was sure she would snoop through the files, find mine, and probably my sister’s. The fax could wait. The door to my father’s office opened and the patient walked out and went into the bathroom.

  Ivy stood up and I signaled to her that she could go right in to my father’s office. Before my father had a chance to pop his head out, she sauntered in, proudly carrying her medical questionnaire as if it were the most fascinating document of all time, and shut the door behind her.

  I heard the toilet flush and I prayed my father hadn’t asked for urine. I was feeling a little too shaky from my encounter with Ivy Vohl first thing in the morning to be pouring urine like a bartender. The patient came out of the bathroom, down the corridor, and stopped when she saw me sitting there.

  My father hadn’t given me her index card so I didn’t know if I was supposed to charge her. She was a pretty black girl with my favorite hairstyle, a big soft Afro. Once I’d tried on an Afro wig just like it and I got a million compliments. It made me look taller and thinner and was the perfect shape for my face.

  “I like your hair,” I said.

  She didn’t say anything back, just stared at me. Something about her seemed familiar, but I couldn’t think of where I had seen her before.

  “Let me just ask the doctor if you owe anything for today,” I said.

  “I don’t,” she said. Then she looked down and shook her head and laughed bitterly. “I’m all paid up.”

  “Okay,” I said. I opened the desk drawer and lifted up the metal tray, poking my fingers around the three paltry checks that had been there for a week. “Well, let me just make a note of it. What’s your name?”