But then, as Isaac started shooting, I held the brain away from me. A feeling of dread shot through me. What had I done? I wondered. Just when he had written to me, said he was devoted, I had ruined everything. Holding his brain, I felt like Queen Margaret in Henry the Sixth, holding the Duke of York’s head in my hands.
One more letter, I thought. Before it was all over, Thalia could at least thank him.
In Mrs. Williams’ kitchen drawer, I’d found an ancient box of yellowing note cards with a drawing of three old people having dinner in their underwear, with the words COME AS YOU ARE printed on the bottom.
I went to the drawer now, slipped a card out of the box, and quietly sat at the table and began to write.
July 23
Dear Awful Writer,
My heart is still pounding from opening your letter. Can someone who is almost thirteen have a heart attack? So you are devoted to me after all. I knew it I knew it I knew it! I will treasure your brain as long as I live. I will kiss it every night before I go to sleep. I’ll never let anyone see it. No matter what happens, I promise.
WRITE BACK SOON!
Your very happy,
Thalia
PS something terrible just ocured to me. Why did you get a brain Xray? Was it just a special present for me or is there something wrong with you? Please, Awful, write to me and tell me you’re fine.
I went out quietly to the hall to mail the letter, praying silently, my forehead and lips pressed against the brass of the mail chute, that everything would somehow be okay. Dear God, I thought, please let me be forgiven. Please forgive Arthur. And Y.G. And Isaac. I tried to think of the prayer that had to do with forgiving us for trespassing but I couldn’t come up with it right then.
Mrs. Williams was very surprised to find us both there in the morning. Isaac had his camera propped up on a stack of cook-books, aimed at Arthur’s window. The Levolor blinds were bent around it. It was sort of cozy, and I was tempted to try to make eggs or something but I didn’t want to spoil everybody and have them think it was going to be a regular thing.
Mrs. Williams and I watched Little House while Isaac stayed at the window and then, when Mrs. Williams went to take a nap, I set up my laptop on the kitchen table and started to write. And as soon as I started, the same thing that always happens happened: I started to cry, trying to hide my tiny crying sounds.
“What’s wrong?” Isaac asked, without turning around. “Did Mary go blind again?”
I stopped crying and smiled. Nothing had happened, I was just writing. “No, Nellie Oleson got engaged to Percival. She fell in love with him, even though he was short and Jewish.”
“Mrs. Oleson must not have liked that very much.”
“No, she didn’t.”
“Well, he was the only one who could tame her the same way I tamed you. You ever notice that Michael Landon takes every opportunity to hold other men’s hands or hug them or stroke their hair? In every other scene he has his arms around another man.”
“Don’t say anything bad about Michael Landon. He’s the greatest father of all time.”
“I’m going to be the greatest father of all time. And I’m not going to have to hug and kiss a lot of men in the process.”
While Isaac talked about the two or three little future paparazzi I would bear him, I wrote.
“Holy shit,” Isaac said, his camera clicking away. I didn’t even look up. Isaac was manning the ship now so I didn’t have to. I’d like to think that the first time I saw Arthur Weeman in the window, I had said something more interesting than “Holy shit.” Isaac didn’t exactly possess the poetry of Ishmael harpooning Moby Dick. “Holy shit, he’s touching her.”
24.
In 1826, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce takes the first recording of a negative image on a light sensitive material
Isaac and I rushed his film to a photo lab on Twentieth Street. Usually he dropped off his film at the Quille and didn’t bother to develop it himself, but for something like this he rented space.
I stood next to him in the tiny darkroom and watched him work with a sort of calm intensity, lovingly handling the paper. My job was to lean against the door, because once he had developed film there and someone had barged in and ruined his pictures. This showed how much Isaac trusted me. I could still go back on our deal. All I had to do was open the darkroom door and Isaac’s film would be exposed instead of Arthur Weeman.
“Do you want to see them?” Isaac asked.
“What about the door?”
“We’ll switch posts for a minute.”
He put his tongs down on a paper towel and we traded places, brushing up against each other in the process. “This is really why I wanted you here,” he said. “I love to get a big-titted girl like you into a cramped space.”
“I thought you needed me to lean,” I said.
“I certainly do. I need you to lean over or bend over or whatever makes you the most uncomfortable,” he said, slipping the metal hook into the metal eye on the door to lock it.
I pretended to be annoyed and sidled over to the counter. I peered down into the trays of chemicals and watched in total awe as Arthur Weeman slowly came into view in front of me. It was somehow more real than seeing him in person in his window; it was as if I had invented him myself, starting from the inside out with his brain and now finishing from the outside in with face and body, glasses and rumpled shirt. Watching him emerge atom by atom under the clear glassy liquid made me believe in God, the way a sonogram of a baby, or corny time-lapse photography of a flower blooming, or an Arthur Weeman film did.
I felt like I was hovering overhead, gazing down on Rebekah and Isaac in a strange, tiny temple, Isaac standing behind her with his hands on her breasts, as life was created in the glow of a red lightbulb.
First the outline of his face, long and narrow with its firm jaw, then his slightly egg-shaped glasses, then the deep furrows of his forehead and the creases running down his cheek and jowl. Only one side of his face was visible because he had been shot in profile. He was kissing Y.G. Openmouthed. Passionate. Behind his glasses, his eye was closed tight, swollen and wrinkled, and hers was wide open, alert, aware, and smiling.
“Holy shit,” I said.
I wondered if this girl would one day lose her spark. If she would go from that great girl in the picture to some used-up, washed-up, bun-headed wife, never really moving on from the time she was thirteen, experiencing the thrill of womanhood with Arthur Weeman. Would she be as faded as an old Polaroid just ten or fifteen years into her time line?
I had spent my childhood thinking ahead and my adulthood thinking back to my childhood. And it was stupid. There was no reason I would lose my spark if I did fun interesting things, like making love to Isaac in darkrooms.
I turned my back to the photo and kissed Isaac as hard as I could and reached for his belt buckle.
“Better make it quick,” Isaac said. “This place is costing me fifteen dollars an hour. I might have a condom in my tote bag.”
“Forget that,” I said. I didn’t want to think about tote bags.
He pushed me against the door and we did it for at least three dollars and seventy-five cents’ worth. I felt myself coming back from old-fashioned sepia to vivid Kodachrome.
The next day Isaac’s photos were on the front page of the Post and the Daily News and on every television network. The girl was being called “Thalia” and her parents were suing Arthur Weeman and the Gardener School.
Isaac was moody. He should have been ecstatic but instead his success had made him nervous. Ivy wasn’t speaking to him and I wasn’t being too sympathetic. I couldn’t help but get a little thrill at the idea of Ivy waking up next to Derek Hassler and opening her morning paper to the headline WEEMAN’S MUSE SUES, and the tiny words “photos by Isaac Myman.”
When I got to Mrs. Williams’ he wasn’t there but the papers were spread out across the kitchen table. I put down the two plastic bags of groceries I had brought and looked at the article i
n the Times. With just four weeks left to the August 25th release of his new film . . . it began.
I had been so busy on my book that I had completely forgotten it was almost time for the new Arthur Weeman, and I’d had no idea it was opening on my wedding day.
I said hi to Mrs. Williams who was looking out the kitchen window. She didn’t turn around.
I put away most of the groceries. I got her gefilte fish, which I had discovered to be her favorite thing, white horseradish, kugel, applesauce, paper towels. Watermelon for me, a grapefruit for her. I had gotten used to throwing a box of Depends in my cart along with my Tampax, denture glue in with my Herbal Essences.
“What are you looking at? Is he there?”
She didn’t say anything, and I wondered for a moment if old people could sometimes die standing up. I got a terrible feeling that something was wrong.
"What is it?” I said, walking up to the window. I stood behind her, looking over the shoulder of her Talbots sweater.
Mrs. Williams pointed out the window. I followed the direction of her finger with my eyes but I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. I wasn’t looking at anything. It felt like a kind of blindness.
There were no copper pots and pans, no cappuccino maker and blue ceramic mugs on hooks, no granite island, wooden salad bowl, modern pepper mill. My private movie was over. The credits had rolled and the projector had been turned off. His kitchen window was covered—not with a red velvet curtain like at the Ziegfeld that would rise again at the next showing—but with wooden shutters, sealed up tight as coffin lids on every window on the house.
I started to panic the way I had when I came home from school to find that my father moved out, his clothes and books and treadmill gone, his hanging skeleton, his wok and Chinese cookbook, all the plants.
I didn’t know which was more shocking, the barricaded windows or the fact that Mrs. Williams had started to sob. I had never seen an old person cry before. I couldn’t believe she had that much moisture in her. The tears and mucus slid down her wrinkles and the rims around her eyes turned bright red in stark contrast to her white face. She was bent over and shaking like a palm tree in a tropical storm. I was afraid her back would break or she would have a heart attack. I put my hand on her slight hump, fighting back my own tears.
“But you don’t even like him,” I said.
“That’s true, but I love him.”
“You loved Arthur Weeman?”
“No, my husband. Howard. He got out of Croftville again. They called but I didn’t know how to answer the phone.” She was sobbing too hard to talk. Isaac had insisted on replacing her light blue rotary with a black cordless. A square of brighter yellow wallpaper that had been hidden for at least four decades framed the new smaller phone. “A voice came out of the phone and said Howard was missing. And then he showed up here. I’m not going to make him go back there.” She stopped crying, and dried her eyes with the backs of her permanently cupped hands. “I’m going to tough it out with him.”
“Where is he?” I asked.
“I thought they were calling to tell me he had passed. I never should have let him go to that place.” She started to sob again. “He’s taking a nap.”
I led her to the sectional and got a roll of toilet paper from the bathroom so she could wipe her eyes and blow her nose. I sat down next to her and held her hand. Even though I had helped her shower and put on her underpants this felt more intimate somehow. I wasn’t the kind of girl who was always hugging other women and holding their hands. At Bennington I was one of the few girls who didn’t make a point of walking around naked all the time and climbing into every other girl’s bed.
“So I suppose you’re going to move on now,” she said. “You’re on to bigger and better things. I don’t think I can hold your attention as much as a big-time movie star.” She batted her sunken eyelids comically.
I hadn’t thought of that before. That, if I were honest, the reason I had been there all this time was for Arthur, not for her. But now I loved her. I couldn’t imagine eating pizza without her, or watching Little House, or not wheeling her to work with me in the morning or to the hairdresser once a month. I tried to think of what my life was before her. I had a vague memory of life before her, of something a little more glamorous. I know I drank a lot of coffee alone in a lot of cafés.
It wasn’t normal for Isaac and me to spend so much time with her. We were going to be newlyweds and the maid’s room off her kitchen with its olive carpet and tiny cot, wasn’t exactly the honeymoon suite I’d always dreamed of. But Isaac and I could be newlyweds with Mrs. Williams, I decided, even if Arthur Weeman was no longer in the picture. I couldn’t have stood losing Arthur Weeman and Mrs. Williams in the same day.
“I’m still going to come here to visit you. And you and Howard can go on double dates with us,” I said, but I somehow knew they wouldn’t be up to it.
“Well, that may or may not be, but we have to get me a new girl,” Mrs. Williams said. “A nice black. A live-in.”
“Okay,” I whispered, feeling as replaced as Irmabelle must have felt. “I’ll tell Isaac to come and put your old phone back.”
“That’s probably not a good idea. It’ll upset Howard. He’s just never been the same since our son died.”
“I didn’t know you had a son.”
“He died of a brain tumor when he was very young,” she said.
I thought of Mrs. Williams burying her small son. “How old was he?” I asked.
“Forty-six. His name was Norman after my father. He was a doctor.” She said doctor proudly, as if she was trying to set us up.
We were interrupted by a strange heaving sound coming from the bedroom. She looked stricken. “What is that?” I said.
“Oh, no, Howard’s found his old harmonica. I thought I’d hidden it sufficiently. You’d better go.”
“But you haven’t told me about Norman.”
“Please, dear, just go.”
She didn’t get up, just stared straight ahead, as I packed all my things in shopping bags, scooped up the newspapers from the kitchen table, and left.
The next day I printed my manuscript, put two big rubber bands around it, and headed uptown to deliver it to my editor in person.
I wore my long white Morgane Le Fay sleeveless top with tails that fluttered out behind me in the wind and I felt like Jo March sneaking off triumphantly into town to drop off her story and get all her hair chopped off.
“What’s that?” someone asked coming up beside me.
I thought it was a short black man, but it was Robbie Finch, the girl who was always giving me a hard time because I didn’t have enough black people in my book.
“My new book,” I said.
“Oh yeah? I’m working on a screenplay. It’s about a girl who’s obsessed with Philip Roth.”
“I thought you were a lesbian,” I said.
“I am but I’d make an exception for Philip Roth. What’s it about?” She gestured disdainfully at my manuscript.
“Just a girl in New York,” I said. "A lighthearted romp.” Where were all the cabs? I wondered, thrusting my arm in the air, like an Olympian.
“Any black people in it?” she asked.
“As a matter of fact there are,” I said.
“Really! So, who is it, this alleged black person in your book, a light-skinned maid or a homeless lady or something?”
“No, it’s the sister. The girl’s sister is black,” I said.
“What do you mean the girl’s sister is black?”
“The protagonist discovers she has a half sister who’s half black.”
“That sounds ridiculous,” Robbie Finch said.
A cab finally pulled up and I dove in, clutching my manuscript to my chest like a bullet-proof vest. Robbie Finch was filled with rage, but I sort of liked running into her from time to time. It felt like a good omen seeing her on the day I was handing in my book. She was kind of like my muse the way she showed up out of nowhere like that, a
ll four-foot-ten of her, with her scraggily short Afro with the single braid sprouting out the back like a broken dandelion, and tiny square wire-rimmed glasses, and old leather bomber jacket.
“I’m getting married next week,” I said.
“Mazel tov.”
“Would you like to come?”
“To your wedding?” She looked extremely dubious.
“There’ll be other black people there,” I said. “Well, two others.”
“And what are you having, like four hundred guests?”
“One hundred.”
“Alright, I guess I can help you out,” she said.
I gave her the info, slammed the cab door, and we took off.
When I got to the publishing house I was treated like a king. A poster of the cover of my book still hung in my editor’s office.
“This is going to be big,” my editor said, handing my manuscript carefully to her assistant, a girl named Huck, to be Xeroxed. “We’re going to speed up publication to capitalize on this whole Arthur Weeman little girl controversy. This just couldn’t be better. We already have a designer working on the cover.” I started to feel faint with excitement. I couldn’t wait to see my new pair of legs.
25.
At 34, she marries
On my last night as a single woman, I wrote one more letter to Arthur Weeman.
Dear Awful Writer, I wrote.
Then I crossed that out and wrote Dear Arthur Weeman because I knew it was my last letter to him.
August 24
Dear Arthur Weeman,
Little Stalker Page 30