by Jody Gehrman
A sob fills my chest like a balloon. I purse my lips against it, try to hold it in, but it escapes. It’s a desperate gasp in the quiet room. The rain goes on hammering its staccato rhythm against the skylights. My arms tighten around you, trying to keep you with me. I ache all over, but most of all in the place where I think my heart is.
“Go on,” I whisper. “I’m listening.”
Your blue eyes work hard to stay with me, to hold my gaze. Your hands reach for me, then fall back to your lap, exhausted by the effort. “You saw me. I know you saw me.”
There is so much I want to tell you. About the nights I curled into a ball under the blankets with your book and a flashlight. The way I flipped back and forth between your photo on the jacket and the pages, delighting in your words and your enigmatic smile. How I pored over your meager, stingy bio, committing it to memory. I carried your characters and images and metaphors with me like a rosary, pulling the memory of them out and stroking them with the concentration of a saint when the Motherfuckers screamed or Vivienne passed out or the darkness in my head threatened to eclipse everything good and reasonable and true.
But there’s no time to say any of it. You’re sinking deeper into me now, collapsing against my lap. I try to clutch you to me, but you’re limp. Your eyes are almost empty. You’re almost gone.
I have never been a screamer, but so much raw, empty despair surges inside me, I throw back my head and let out a sound that is not human.
Thank god I still have the gun. I lift it to my temple. Keeping my eyes on your face, my fingers in your hair, I put my finger on the trigger, and I squeeze.
KATE
It’s twilight, and I’m doing one of my favorite things: watching a man watch a woman.
I suppose, after all that’s happened, I should be repulsed by anything that reminds me of you. Of what you did. Of your eyes drinking me in. Still, on evenings like this, standing on my balcony in the Village, a gin and tonic in my hand, the cool night air falling like a whisper-soft veil over the streets, it’s difficult not to indulge in something like nostalgia.
The man’s sitting at a sidewalk café. He’s too old to be young and too young to be old—thirty-five, perhaps. In his prime. I would have liked to see you at that age. You would have been handsome with crow’s feet. I would have loved to read your writing after it had time to steep a bit, to become, if not seasoned, at least a little salty.
The man’s dark-haired and blue-eyed, like you. He’s watching a woman waiting tables. She’s a dancer. You only have to glance at her to know it. She wears a simple wrap-dress; her mass of dark curls sits piled atop her head in a messy bun. Gathering cups onto her tray and wiping the table with an effortless swipe, her body moves with the bone-deep agility of a woman who spends most of her hours leaping and twirling around a studio. She practically pliés when she delivers a round of mimosas to a table full of old women.
The man’s eyes drink her in. He’s trying to be subtle, but he’s not. He sips his coffee, glances at his paper. Again and again, his gaze returns to her, magnetized. It’s not a leer, though it’s clear he wants to touch her. The way he studies every line of her body, every curve, every movement, makes it worshipful, not dirty. When she disappears behind a cluster of customers momentarily, he cranes his head slightly, working to keep her in sight, as if losing her even for a moment will prove unbearable.
I know it’s crazy, but I miss the way you looked at me. The way you saw me. That wolfish fascination stirring deep behind your eyes. The total concentration, like I was the only woman who ever lifted a teacup, or opened a door, or gazed at a snowflake.
I have a scar like an angry starburst as big as my fist. I can feel it under my left bra strap, an inch below my collarbone. Sometimes, late at night, it itches. It is part of your legacy, yes, but so is this—the memory of you consuming me with your eyes.
It’s hard to say if my epilogue will please you. I didn’t really know you, after all. There are things I gathered later, after that day in December, things they printed in the papers and online—elaborate biographies I could only read in fits and starts. I didn’t get to know you in the real way, though, the right way, didn’t spend enough time with you before your death to gauge how you’d respond to the rest of my story.
I wrote a book. Glass Houses. Saleswise, it hasn’t done as well as Red-Blooded American Male. Personally, I think yours needed more editing, but the rush to get it out there before the media frenzy died down was tremendous. School shootings are so common these days; they couldn’t count on the fickle public to stay interested. The days of Columbine-level postmortems are over. It’s a solid story, with all the deep promise I first saw on that unseasonably warm night in late September when I first read about a nine-year-old girl killing a rabbit. It doesn’t have the polish I would have wanted for it. Who knows, though? Maybe exhaustive revision would have drained its raw intensity.
Would it please you to know I moved to the East Village? I teach at Columbia now. I’m still a little stunned they would hire me. Of course, the profile in Time didn’t hurt, the segment on 60 Minutes. America loves an underdog. The chair-wielding professor attacking her student-gone-psycho was too juicy a story to resist.
We’re so afraid in this country. So frightened. Every morning, as we get ready for work, we consider our fragile bodies—our breakable bones, our tissue-thin organs. We glance at the news and wonder, Will it be me today? We ride the subway and eye our fellow passengers, wondering which one is angry enough to snap. What chance do we have against all our homegrown rage? We’re furious. Scared. Paralyzed and hypnotized by the bloodshed.
Even though I almost died, my triumph serves as a balm to our wounds. We’re dying to believe the unarmed masses stand a chance.
I sip my gin and tonic, still watching my stranger watch his waitress. The city stirs, shaking off the workday, readying itself for night. Traffic rumbles. Taxis honk. A woman in a Yankees jersey leans out of the window across from me and studies the sky. Storm clouds skim the skyscrapers in the distance, but the night will be clear, maybe even balmy. The smell of coffee and singed garlic perfume the air, mingling with the fumes. My watchful café man catches his waitress’s eye. She looks away quickly. I can tell she enjoys it, though. The arch of her back, the sway of her hips, give her away. To be seen, to be savored, is a gift.
She won’t know how much she yearns for it until it’s gone.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JODY GEHRMAN has authored eleven novels and numerous plays for the stage and screen. Her young adult novel, Babe in Boyland, won the International Reading Association’s Teen Choice Award and was optioned by the Disney Channel. Jody’s plays have been produced or had staged readings in Ashland, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and L.A. Her full-length, Tribal Life in America, won the Ebell of Los Angeles Playwright’s Prize and received a staged reading at the historic Ebell Theater. She and her partner, David Wolf, won the New Generation Playwrights Award for their one-act, Jake Savage, Jungle P.I. She holds a master’s degree in Professional Writing from the University of Southern California and is a professor of Communications at Mendocino College in Northern California. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Sam
Kate
Sam
Kate
Sam
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Sam
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About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
WATCH ME. Copyright © 2018 by Jody Gehrman. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Cover design by James Iacobelli
Cover photographs: woman in cracked mirror © Illdiko Neer/Archangel Images; man © Eugene Sergeev/Alamy Stock Photo; woods © andreiuc88/Shutterstock.com
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-14402-7 (trade paperback)
ISBN 978-1-250-17850-3 (hardcover run on)
ISBN 978-1-250-14403-4 (ebook)
eISBN 9781250144034
Our ebooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by email at [email protected].
First Edition: January 2018