Little Stalker

by Jennifer Belle

  I was deep in the playground movie scene, when I noticed the light come on in Arthur Weeman’s kitchen.

  Then my cell phone rang. It was Isaac.

  “Do you have my ring?” I asked. He’d taken his time with it.

  “Don’t worry about that,” he said.

  “Well, don’t you think this whole engagement deal is very oral in nature?”

  “Not oral enough,” he said. “Guess where I am?”

  “I was hoping you’d be at Once Upon A Time on East Eleventh Street between University and Fifth, closer to University, handing your credit card to the woman behind the counter.”

  “Actually, I’m someplace even better.”

  “Harry Winston?” I asked. That would be better.

  “Arthur Weeman’s.”

  “What!” My eye went to Arthur Weeman’s window again as if I expected to see Isaac looking back at me.

  “I’m outside his building. Did you know he lives on Eighty-seventh Street in a double town house? Right near Mrs. Williams.”

  “Oh, yeah, I remember reading that,” I said, my voice catching a little. This couldn’t be considered cheating on Isaac, I thought, sitting in an old woman’s apartment looking into an empty window, but it somehow felt like it was.

  “I’m pretty sure I’m going to get him. He had an early reservation at Shun Lee East, so he should be coming home soon.”

  “That’s your big scoop? That he ate fancy Chinese today?” I hoped I respected Isaac enough to become his wife. It was important to respect what your husband did for a living. I thought of Ma standing at the window in a terrible blizzard, waiting for Pa to come home, a giant buck draped over his shoulders followed by a nice Indian whose life he would save at the end of the episode.

  “No, it’s that he ate fancy Chinese with a thirteen-year-old girl he seems to have taken a fancy to. He’s probably there right now teaching her how to fold a moo-shu pancake.” He did a bad Arthur Weeman impression. “You take the pancake like this, see, and you wrap it around my old-man dick.”

  As he was saying something obscene about an egg roll, Arthur Weeman appeared in the window, far back near the sparkling granite island.

  “Maybe he’s already home,” I said.

  “No, he’s definitely not. I’ve been standing here for two hours and there’s seven other schmucks here with me. There’s the Post, the News, the Times, E!, EW, ET, Fox, and me. And some private guy I think Candace Ann might have hired. Oh shit, is it raining? ”

  Arthur Weeman walked to the open kitchen window and shut it.

  "You’re just going to stand in the rain and wait for him?” I said.

  “I’m a hunter,” Isaac said.

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said.

  “Why? This is a huge deal. Arthur Weeman is hanging around with a thirteen-year-old. That doesn’t bother you?”

  “I care about his work, I don’t judge what he does in his personal life.”

  “Yeah, well, everyone else in New York does. This could be the start of a trial. The rumor is her name is Thalia. You would know this, wasn’t Thalia the name of one of the Greek muses?”

  I tried to say something but I couldn’t. The name Thalia coming out of his mouth like that made me speechless. He pronounced the Thal of Thalia like thal in thalamus gland, and in my mind I’d been pronouncing it like Thay-lia. I stopped myself from correcting him because it suddenly occurred to me that he knew about my letters. He was teasing me, he had to be. What kind of man would go through a person’s things? I wondered. But I almost always mailed the letters as soon as I wrote them so there was really no way he could have seen one lying around. Even if he had found my Arthur Weeman stationery collection—scenes from Venice, Charlie Chaplin, old Hollywood stars, old New York, rainbows, American Girl, Hello Kitty, New Yorker cartoons, Degas ballerinas from the Metropolitan Museum gift shop—he wouldn’t have any reason to think anything of it.

  So how did this rumor start? I wondered. What hands had my letters fallen into? Maybe he’d thrown them all in the garbage and some deranged fan had gotten them, or maybe some angry, frustrated Bukowski-type mailman had intercepted some of them. I certainly would have if I was a mailman. Or maybe he’d talked about them to someone.

  And then the terrible thought occurred to me that maybe I had gotten Arthur Weeman into some kind of trouble.

  Then Y.G. appeared. She went to the window and opened it up again and stuck her head and shoulders all the way into the rain. Her hair got wet and she was laughing. Arthur Weeman came up behind her and put his hands tentatively on her shoulders. I could tell he was trying to get her to come back in.

  “This must be him now,” Isaac said. “There’s a limo coming around the corner. I have to get off the phone so I can hold my camera under an umbrella.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Shit, it wasn’t him,” Isaac said.

  “It was probably him, and he didn’t get out when he saw us,” I heard someone say.

  “That definitely wasn’t his limo,” Isaac told the guy.

  “Arthur Weeman doesn’t travel by limo,” I said. “He uses a town car.”

  “He uses a limo too,” Isaac said.

  “No, he uses a town car. That guy was probably right. You should go.”

  “I’m not leaving,” Isaac said. “This is going to be a great shot. Don’t you want me to be successful, Rebekah? I happen to love what I do, not a lot of people can say that. And it’s how I make a living, Rebekah. It’s how I’m going to pay for your ring, for instance. ”

  I didn’t want the ring if it was at Arthur Weeman’s expense.

  “I just think it’s a little ridiculous to stand around stalking Arthur Weeman,” I said.

  “A shot like this could get me a hundred thousand dollars. An exclusive of him in a compromising position could get me a million. ”

  I felt so incredibly guilty with my picture-perfect view of what Isaac so desperately needed.

  Through the slats of Mrs. Williams’ vertical blinds, Isaac could make a million dollars.

  “I don’t see what’s so ridiculous about it. I’m actually surprised you’re not here stalking him with me.”

  “How do you know Arthur Weeman is with a thirteen-year-old girl named Thalia?” I said. I pronounced Thalia his way.

  “Ivy Vohl told me.”

  “And how does she know?” I asked, trying not to let my voice quaver.

  “They go to the same shrink.”

  My heart started to really pound. “The shrink told her?” “No—and this is between you and me—she spied on him. She waited outside the shrink’s office at all hours until she discovered when his appointment was. Then she managed to be there in the waiting room during his session and she pressed her ear against the door. Apparently there’s a white-noise machine in the waiting area and she simply turns it off and then she can hear everything. She has a gift for gossip.” He said this with a voice filled with respect.

  “That’s horrible! Who would spy on a person like that?”

  “The public has a right to know if Arthur Weeman is fucking a thirteen-year-old girl.”

  “That’s disgusting,” I said. “Just because he’s visiting with a thirteen-year-old doesn’t mean he’s fucking her. Maybe she’s an actress. Maybe he’s getting material. Maybe he’s helping her, tutoring her or something.”

  “Yeah right,” Isaac said. “I’m sure he’s in the fucking Big Brother volunteer program and he’s just helping her with her algebra. The man’s a pervert. He’s probably got his hands up her skirt right now. Anyway, where are you?”

  “I’m at Mrs. Williams’,” I said. I couldn’t stand talking about this anymore.

  “So we’re a block away from each other. When I’m done here I can come over and pick you up and take you to dinner.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Maybe I should just let him come up and get his stupid sleazy picture, I thought. Someone would get the shot sooner or later, why shouldn’t it be Isaac? Ar
thur Weeman was asking for it, letting a little girl take off her clothes in the playground for him. That was the amazing thing about Arthur Weeman, he simply didn’t care what anyone thought enough to hide anything for long.

  “Okay?” Isaac said.

  Arthur Weeman was patting Y.G.’s hair dry with a white towel. She wrapped her hair in the towel like a turban and I was suddenly reminded that there is nothing more glamorous than being thirteen and wrapping your hair in a towel.

  I was as torn as when I hadn’t wanted to tell Ivy Vohl that Sascha was my sister. Isaac was my future but I had to protect Arthur Weeman, and even more than Arthur, I had to protect Thalia. I had created her, and I couldn’t let her end up with Ivy’s filthy black inky fingerprints all over her.

  “Maybe I’ll come meet you,” I said, gently.

  “Okay. I love you,” he said.

  “I love you too,” I said, and hung up.

  Mrs. Williams came into the kitchen and asked me if I would help her take a shower and get ready for bed.

  “It’s only four o’clock,” I said.

  “I’m tired,” she said.

  She sat on the edge of her bed, her feet dangling several inches off the floor. I squatted down and untied her pointy white sneakers and slipped them off her feet. I wondered why she bothered to struggle into them in the first place. I helped her stand and tugged her striped shirt up above her breasts, which were bare and the shape of dill pickles, and slowly eased her wings out of the armholes and over her head. She worked on the elastic waistband of her pants until she had gotten them down to her thighs. I squatted again and pulled her pants down, backed her onto the bed again, and slid them off, and then her white stocking socks. I got a towel from the closet and draped it over her before we headed into the bathroom.

  Arthur Weeman was drying the hair of a thirteen-year-old girl and I was going to be drying off Mrs. Williams. But I didn’t mind. I had gotten used to her body the way I had gotten used to the hanging skeleton my father had in our living room when I was growing up. There was something about her curved Styrofoam back that gave me comfort, like a favorite Royal Crown Derby teacup. You had to be so delicate with it, it became the most valuable thing in the world to you. Her decaying body was more alive, not less. She was hyper-alive, every breath could be her last, I could break her spine with two fingers. Like a cut flower, her days were numbered.

  “Do you want a massage?” I asked.

  “No, your father said it makes it worse.”

  I ran the shower on a low drizzle and helped her in.

  When I had dried her and put her in her cotton nightshirt I tucked her into bed. I put a cup of peppermint tea and a plate of Lorna Doones on her bedside table and made sure she hadn’t knocked the phone off the hook the way she usually did.

  “I’m so excited about tomorrow,” she said.

  “What’s tomorrow?”

  “The camping trip!” she said, as if I was completely crazy for forgetting. “It’s the spring trip. We made maps and sewed our own sleep sacks. Oh no!” She sat straight up.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Mother, the marshmallows. Did you remember to get them?”

  I nodded as reassuringly as possible under the circumstances and she settled back down. “Oh, thank goodness!” she said.

  She closed her eyes and said, “Goodnight, Mama.”

  "Goodnight,” I said. I paused and then kissed her on the forehead, and left.

  I found Isaac and his cohorts still standing in the rain in front of Arthur Weeman’s building, and like a doting wife-to-be, I stood under Isaac’s umbrella with him staring at Arthur Weeman’s door for the next four hours.

  One by one, the other paparazzi left and Isaac and I were left alone at Arthur Weeman’s mahogany door.

  “Well, this seems like a good place to do this,” he said, smiling.

  He reached deep into his PROTOPIC (TACROLIMUS) OINTMENT tote bag that I had given him from my father’s office and handed me a black film canister.

  “What’s this?” I asked, thinking maybe it was some shots of Arthur Weeman.

  “Open it.”

  I flipped the lid and poured its contents into my hand. It was my engagement ring.

  “Look,” Isaac said, pointing to a town house across the street. An old gnarled wisteria vine climbed up it in full bloom, bright purple flowers, like wild grapes, peaking into every window. “Is that it?”

  I had almost forgotten it was spring, and as if on cue, I felt the yellow silk lining of my Paul Revere coat start to tear.

  We kissed and then hugged, and over Isaac’s shoulder I saw the door open and Y.G. slip out and walk quickly down the street, stopping only once to pull up one navy blue kneesock that had slipped down to her calf.

  22.

  At 34, like a plant regenerating its stem cells, she heals an old wound

  Finally I agreed to start seriously planning our wedding. I had never dreamed of my wedding growing up. I had always been more interested in the honeymoon. Eventually my fantasy wedding, the plan that seemed the most romantic to me, was a City Hall affair with just me and my betrothed and our respective shrinks. We’d say our vows, sign the papers, and have separate private therapy sessions before heading off to Italy. Maybe since Isaac didn’t have a shrink (yet) we could invite Arthur Weeman’s shrink, Dr. Schneider, instead.

  My parents hadn’t been in the same room together since I was thirteen. It just didn’t seem like a wedding at the Pierre with ballroom dancing lessons and flowers and calligraphy seemed like a good idea. My mother wanted us to do it at her inn, but I wanted to smell like jasmine perfume on my wedding day, not Deep Woods OFF!

  Isaac said no to the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum in Walnut Grove, Minnesota, and he said City Hall seemed too cold. For me, Vegas was out of the question. I hated Las Vegas, it was like land of the living dead. I’d rather get married in a cemetery, standing on the site of my own grave.

  At Irmabelle’s desk, I worked on my novel and made my wedding preparations for a ceremony and reception at a beautiful restaurant in an eighteenth-century carriage house on Barrow Street called One If By Land, Two If By Sea. On June second, my thirty-fourth birthday, Isaac had taken me there, and as soon as we saw it, we put a deposit down.

  I sat bent over Irmabelle’s desk, looking at the small guest list Isaac and I had come up with. His people consisted of his mother and several unsavory photographer friends. Ivy Vohl was right up at the top. Isaac was also insisting we go to her thirtieth-birthday party the following week. “It’s a very big deal. I don’t want an argument. We have to go,” he had said.

  I looked out at the empty waiting room. The modern sleeper sofa and the two antique chairs. The industrial carpeting with the fringed Persian carpet over it. The large square coffee table with the two tiny tot chairs that I had once sat in and that probably hadn’t been sat in since. The nonworking fireplace with the seven Christmas cards still taped to it, mostly written to Irmabelle, even though it was the middle of July. My father’s three VIP’s— very important plants—watered weekly, propped up with bamboo, carefully prodded and poked and cared for, even more than his patients.

  I had spent so much time staring at the beige-walled waiting room with the tacky Matisse print, purchased on my parents’ honeymoon. The white teddy bear hanging from the ceiling in the corner. It was strange enough that Irmabelle had brought teddy bears into the office of an internist with absolutely no child patients, but the practice of suspending them from the ceiling I found disturbing.

  For almost a year I had sat on the outskirts of the waiting room watching people wait, but really I had been the one waiting. I was the one who had been waiting to see my father the whole time.

  Then I realized that if I wanted to see the doctor I would have to make an appointment.

  I squeezed Kettle, R in the appointment book just above my father’s four o’clock and pulled my own chart. The doorbell rang and I explained to the patient, an old woman dre
ssed in sporty white pants and a sleeveless floral sweater like she had just gotten off the bus from Florida, that the doctor was a little backed-up and she would have to wait. Then, when my father’s 3:15 left, I buzzed him through the intercom and told him his four o’clock had arrived, and walked into his office. I put my own chart on the center of his desk.

  “Where’s the patient?” my father asked.

  "Right here,” I said, sitting in the patient chair. “I’m willing to have a checkup. You said we have to monitor everything.”

  “I also said you should go to Brown instead of Bennington and major in history,” he said, smiling. He picked up my chart. “No one in this country knows anything about history or politics, ” he muttered comically to himself, perusing my last bloodwork lab results.

  “I know a little history,” I said. I knew about the pioneer days on the prairie. I knew about the Korean War from M*A*S*H*. I knew about Paul Revere. I knew a little more family history than he thought I knew. “Anyway, I’m ready to have my bloodwork done and take the peripheral vision test or whatever you want to give me.” I held my finger in front of my nose and moved it from side to side to remind him.

  Suddenly he laughed. “Is this an attempt to extort more money for the wedding?”

  I followed him into the examination room and after I refused to get on the scale, he wrapped a tourniquet tightly around my arm.

  “Wait a minute, I thought I had Frances Siegal at four,” he said.

  “She’s in the waiting room.”

  “What! I don’t want her in my waiting room unattended.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “She’s a kleptomaniac and a sociopath.”

  I couldn’t imagine anything in the waiting room that a little old lady would want to steal. “I’m sure she’ll be fine,” I said.

  “There was a prior incident,” my father said. “Unfortunately my accusations are well-founded.”

  I didn’t want to spend my appointment talking about Mrs. Siegal.