Little Stalker

by Jennifer Belle

  “Dad, there’s something I have to talk to you about. I can’t work here anymore,” I said. My arm was starting to throb from the tourniquet.

  “Oh? I was afraid that was coming,” he said.

  “I’ve been writing,” I said. “I have to work on the book full-time. I’ve almost finished a draft, and my editor says if I hand it in now it might be able to be published this fall.” I was so used to lying about this, it was hard to believe it was true.

  “Okay,” my father said. “Well, that’s great news. I’ve liked having you here, Toots. I know I haven’t always been such a good Dad...” His voice trailed off and I wondered if I was supposed to interrupt him. I wondered if he was going to tell me about Sascha. “I appreciate your helping me out.”

  “Dad, there’s something else I have to tell you. I sort of did something.” I wanted to tell him I was sorry for getting pregnant and keeping it from him and making such a mess out of things. “I used one of your checks to buy twenty-two thousand dollars’ worth of props from the Arthur Weeman warehouse sale.”

  “You mean this?” he said, pulling his wallet out of his back pocket and handing me the canceled check. It was like one of his magic card tricks.

  “I understand if you don’t want to help out with the wedding, and I can pay you back as soon as I get the check from my publisher. ”

  He put up his hand to stop me. “I haven’t even been to your apartment yet. It sounds like an interesting place. When I had the check investigated they said something about a gondola. I should stop by.”

  “I’d like that,” I said.

  He smiled. “Consider it a bonus for a job well done.” He unwrapped a needle and I looked away. “You shouldn’t tell a man holding a needle that you stole twenty-two thousand dollars from him.” He stuck the needle into me and I grimaced. “See that wasn’t so bad.”

  He was right. I had expected him to blow his lid, demand I keep working to pay him back. Then I was going to tell him I knew about Sascha and suggest we call it even. I was surprised he was just going to let me go.

  “Dad,” I said. “Twenty-two thousand. It’s too much.”

  “It’s okay,” he said.

  “Thank you,” I said, but I was still looking away from the needle so I wasn’t sure what his reaction was. “The wedding plans are coming along,” I said, stiffly. “Besides Uncle Russell, Aunt Jackie, and Chelsea, was there anybody else you wanted to invite? Mandlebaum or anyone from the hospital?”

  “Well, let me think.” He mentioned a couple of his doctor friends and an old patient of his who took him to Peter Luger’s once a year. “I’m going to wear my tuxedo,” he said.

  The proud way he said it made me laugh out loud. “It’s not that kind of wedding, Dad. It’s in a restaurant.”

  “I don’t care if it’s in the monkey house at the zoo, I’m the father of the bride and I’m going to wear my tuxedo. Ha.” He made a fist and knocked on my head with his knuckles. “Numbskull.”

  I thought that was a strange thing to say to a bride-to-be with a brain tumor. “Okay, all done,” he said, pulling the needle out of my arm, and removing the tourniquet. He put a cotton ball over the healthy droplet of blood that had formed where the needle had been. “Apply good pressure, please.”

  I handed him an invitation.

  He opened it and studied the card. “Wait, it’s on a Friday night?” he asked, sounding upset. “Jews can’t get married on a Friday night.”

  I looked at him in disbelief. He hadn’t acted Jewish one day in his life.

  “Well, the restaurant wanted twice as much for a Saturday night and I just thought any true Jewish God would want us to save money.”

  I couldn’t believe his nerve. If he was such a good Jew then why did he have a mistress and an illegitimate daughter? “I’d like to invite Irmabelle,” I said, Ivy Vohling him with my eyes.

  “Why not get married on a Tuesday for Christ’s sake?”

  “So, if it’s okay with you, I’m going to invite her.”

  He turned his back to me and pretended to be busy writing my name on the labels that went on my six vials of blood. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” he said.

  "Why not?”

  “I don’t think she’d come.” He turned around and pulled a deck of cards from a drawer in the metal cabinet. “Pick a card, any card,” he said, fanning them out in front of me.

  “Irmabelle should have the option.” My throat tightened with frustration like it did when I was little girl and he forced me to play chess in Washington Square Park.

  “Rebekah,” my father said, putting the cards back in his pocket. “There’s something you don’t know about Irmabelle. She and I actually . . .”

  I sat on the examining table looking up at him, my legs dangling off the edge. I was the patient but he was the one in pain. He rolled his little round stool over to me and sat on it. Then he took my hand in his.

  “Irmabelle was more than my employee,” he said. “She was . . .” His whole face tightened with pain. “Like my wife.”

  “I know,” I said, and burst into tears. I pressed the cotton ball into the crook of my arm with all my might.

  “I’m sorry, honey.”

  It was like when he took me to Chinatown for dim sum to tell me he wasn’t going to be living with us anymore, knowing the news beforehand hadn’t helped at all. Every kid I knew was divorced, I was completely prepared, unfazed, relieved even, but somehow I hadn’t thought about him actually moving out. He hadn’t seemed until that moment to be an integral part of my life, but suddenly it was as if my right arm had announced it was going to another body, or my brain stood at the door with a packed suitcase and said it was leaving but would call me every single night and see me on the weekends. When you are twelve, a goodnight call is nothing like a kiss goodnight.

  He stopped squeezing my hand, got up, and tore the wrapper off a Band-Aid, securing my cotton ball in place.

  “And there’s someone else I want at my wedding, Dad. I want Sascha to be there,” I gasped.

  I used the folded paper hospital gown to wipe the tears that were pouring out of me.

  “I know about her,” I said.

  “Oh my,” he said. He had a wild, trapped look in his eyes that I had seen someplace before, but I couldn’t think where. Then I remembered. The wolf alone in the tundra.

  He doubled over on his stool and shook with terrible silent sobs. Then he got a hold of himself. That was the difference between the way men and women cried. Men always cried very quickly.

  “I want her address.”

  “She lives on St. Mark’s Place over the Porto Rico coffee shop, apartment number two, on the third floor,” he said.

  So that’s what my father had been doing the day he’d lied to me, standing on St. Mark’s Place when he was supposed to be on Eighty-sixth Street. He hadn’t been buying African elephant pants, he’d been visiting my sister. I had spent so much time wondering where in this big wide city she lived, what borough, what neighborhood, what street, and all along she lived less than five blocks away from me.

  “She has to come to the wedding, Dad,” I said.

  He smiled. “I don’t think your mother would like that too much.”

  I smiled back at him. Then we both just sat there feeling exhausted and exposed, without our secrets to cover us.

  “Well, I’ll put these in the refrigerator,” my father finally said, standing up and leaving the room with my blood.

  I sat there for a few minutes too stunned to move and was startled to hear yelling coming from the waiting room.

  “How dare you accuse me of stealing,” Mrs. Siegal screamed.

  “Get out of my office,” my father yelled.

  I jumped off the table and went to see what was going on.

  “She dismembered my nightblooming cereus,” my father said. “And you’ve done it before, you lying, crazy, c—” He stopped himself for a moment. “Oot. That’s it, you are no longer a patient here. I
’ll be happy to refer you to another physician, but I will not examine you again. Good day, Madam.”

  “I didn’t go near your plant,” Mrs. Siegal said.

  “Oh no?” He grabbed her pocketbook from her shoulder and opened it. The woman screamed. My father pulled out a slender green tentacled stalk in a plastic ShopRite bag. "What do you call this?”

  “That is a cutting from my friend’s plant.”

  I noticed a wet patch form at the crotch of her white pants and start to spread down her thighs. She had wet herself, but my father didn’t seem to notice.

  “I know my nightblooming cereus inside and out. I’ve raised this plant for twenty-one years,” my father said. “This plant is like a child to me.”

  Suddenly my father had turned into King Lear with three daughters instead of two. One lived in a one-bedroom apartment with furniture bought with money stolen from him; one lived on St. Mark’s Place over the Porto Rico coffee shop; and one lived in an Italian ceramica planter in his waiting room. Although she was the least doting, she was also the least competitive, and the least demanding, and so she was his favorite of the three. If Sascha was at my wedding, this plant should really be there too. I suddenly boiled with loyalty for my father.

  “Taking a small cutting doesn’t hurt the plant,” Mrs. Siegal said, calmly. “You obviously don’t know anything about it.”

  Then my father got more upset than I’d ever seen him in my entire life. “I don’t know anything about nightblooming cereus, selenicereus grandiflorus, epiphyllum oxypetalum? You, Madam, don’t know a thing about horticulture. You are a sociopath and a liar.” He was waving my blood at her and his face was red with rage. His whole body was shaking.

  “I’m going to report you to the American Medical Association. ”

  “Very well, Madam, you do that. Get out before I wring your neck. Crazy old bitch.” He grabbed her coat off the coatrack, opened the front door, and threw the coat and her purse into the lobby. He took her by the top of her arm and pushed her out after them and slammed the door as hard as he could.

  I remembered after dim sum, he had dragged me with him to the courthouse so he could get out of jury duty, and when his request was denied, he had screamed and yelled at the stubborn black woman behind the desk until we were thrown out by some kind of bailiff. He had called that woman “Madam” a lot too.

  “I’m closing the office for the rest of the day. Call my last three patients and tell them,” my father said. “Carlos should be here for the bloods soon, then you can leave.”

  I pointed to the small pool of urine Mrs. Siegal had left on the Persian carpet. I shrugged. “It’s not really my job anymore,” I said. “I’m no longer a medical office assistant. I’m a writer.” I felt the sad, enormous relief of that.

  “Fair enough,” my father said. He got a roll of Bounty and a bucket of soapy water from the kitchen, kneeled on the carpet, and started sopping up the piss. I kneeled down too and we worked next to each other, kneading the paper towels into the rich, wet wool.

  When I got to the Porto Rico coffee store on St. Mark’s Place, I looked up at the third-floor apartment above it. It had a run-down terrace covered in potted plants. I could see where my father would be more at home here with Nightblooming Cereus Jr. than at my place. I couldn’t take my eyes off that terrace and I stood Romeoing up at it for so long, I started to get self-conscious. People in Myoptics were staring at me. Finally I decided to see if she was home. The label on the buzzer read KETTLE #2.

  Kettle #1 rang Kettle #2 but there was no answer.

  I dropped her invitation in the mailbox on her corner, never so excited to mail anything in my whole life.

  23.

  At 34, in a gruesome Orwellian spectacle, she is witness to the murder of one of God’s creatures

  On the morning of Ivy Vohl’s stupid thirtieth-birthday party at the Boathouse in Central Park, Isaac announced that I had to buy her a present. The invitation sat on top of the television facing us.

  “Pick out a nice blouse or something,” Isaac said.

  Sometimes Isaac sounded like an eighty-year-old woman when he said things like “blouse” and “bonnet.”

  On Little House, a newspaper was started in Walnut Grove and Mrs. Oleson volunteered to write a column called “Harriet’s Happenings.” It turned out to be a nasty hurtful gossip column about her neighbors. Just in case Isaac didn’t make the obvious connection, I said, “Harriet Oleson is exactly like Ivy Vohl.”

  I went to Arthur Weeman’s desk from Literary Suicide, that I had moved into the kitchen, turned on my computer and got to work.

  I noticed I was scratching my hands and looked down to see eczema sprouting up on my fingers. I’d had terrible eczema on my hands when I’d written my first book. I got up from Arthur Weeman’s desk and walked around the apartment for a few minutes, scratching my hands and thinking about my old book. I thought about it sitting by itself on the book bum’s table while all the other books were snatched up one by one like children being chosen for a team.

  I grabbed my bag and ran downstairs to the street.

  I rushed up to his table and noticed my book wasn’t shackled in its usual stockade in the center of town. A growing panic overcame me, but I didn’t ask the book bum what had happened to it, I just walked slowly back and forth along the table, eyeing each and every book. Its constant companion of the last six months, Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens, was still there.

  “Are you looking for your book?” the book bum asked, smugly.

  “No,” I said, picking up Little Dorrit, which seemed to flinch at the human touch.

  “Don’t you wanna know where it is?”

  I smiled at him as if I didn’t speak the English, and continued to consider Little Dorrit.

  “Someone finally bought it.”

  “Well,” I said, “congratulations.”

  “No, I mean this man just walked right up and said he wanted it. Although he tried like hell to Jew me down. I told him I’m not taking less than three dollars for that thing.”

  My eye fell on a copy of Memoirs of a Geisha, and I remembered a line from it that some women sold their virginity for thousands and thousands of yen, and I felt like I had sold mine for three. Still I felt some relief that it had been sold and not sent to whatever the next circle of hell was for books like mine. If it didn’t make a book table like this one, it could end up in a cardboard box on the street or worse. Once I had found a copy of my book in a bar with unbelievably filthy pornographic cartoons drawn in the margins of every page.

  “I’ve seen you with him,” the book bum said.

  “Who?” I asked, feeling almost frightened that I would have been seen by this man with anyone.

  “The man who bought your book.”

  I put Little Dorrit back in her cell, leaving her to rot.

  “Short guy with wavy hair, glasses. You know who he looked like? A younger Arthur Weeman.”

  I smiled thinking of Isaac coming along to save me. Slipping me into his raincoat pocket and walking away with me.

  “He’s my fiancé,” I said, proudly.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me! That guy? You could do a hellofa lot better than that jack-me-off. If I’da known you was interested in going out with the scum of the earth I’da asked you myself.”

  But I wasn’t standing there at the book table anymore. And I wasn’t me. I was my character writing a letter to the movie director she adored.

  When we got to Ivy’s party, I had to admit the place was beautiful. There may have been joggers lying in bloody murdered heaps all around us, but here, at the Boathouse, you would think Central Park was the enchanted forest. A buffet was set with lobsters and every kind of shellfish—an odd choice for Ivy, who seemed to practically consider herself a rabbi and was always grilling everyone on how Jewish they were—and enormous trays of some kind of impressive-looking meat. A band was playing “I Could Write a Book,” and even though it was so early in the party, people were
already dancing and having a good time. Ivy was in the middle of everything in a green satin dress, pointing for people to put their presents on a big table near the bar.

  When she saw Isaac, she ran over to us like a fawn in her Marni high heels and gave him a big hug.

  “Happy birthday,” I managed.

  “Thanks!” Ivy said, eyeing the little La Petite Lolita shopping bag I was holding that contained the matching thong to the bra I had gotten her. “Bret Easton Ellis is here! And I really want you to meet my shrink.”

  “Your shrink is here?” I asked. “My shrink would never come to my birthday party.”

  “Yup, he goes to all Arthur Weeman’s premieres and he’s at my party. Speaking of premieres, I thought I’d see you at Hugh’s New York premiere.”

  “Hugh who?” I asked.

  “Hugh who? Hugh Nickelby!” Ivy said.

  “What premiere?” I asked. I hadn’t mentioned to Isaac that I had gone.

  “See, Rebekah,” Isaac said. “I always tell you, you have to get out more and go to parties.”

  I bristled, remembering how my mother always called my father a hermit.

  “I go to parties. If I don’t go to parties then how am I here? And I go to Bret Easton Ellis’ Christmas party every year, don’t I?”

  “I didn’t see you there at the last one,” Ivy said. The reason she didn’t see me there was because Bret’s loft was packed with so many supermodels who were all a foot and a half taller than me, so I was forced to move through the crowd like a submarine. People talked over me, and ate over my head, dripping pumpkin soup he’d served in tiny cups on top of my hair, which I didn’t notice until I got home. The only person I managed to talk to was Monica Lewinsky because she was around my height. “So you guys are really engaged?” Ivy said, looking at my ring.

  “That’s right,” I said, matching her dry tone.

  “Are you going to move to another apartment or squeeze into your one bedroom?” she asked.

  “We’re going to squeeze,” I said.

  “Rebekah has a really big apartment,” Isaac said, trying to defend my honor as a woman and a New Yorker.

  “Yeah, but it’s just a one bedroom, isn’t it?” she said.