Little Stalker Read online

  When I left my apartment, on Lafayette, across from the Public Theater, and walked toward the N/R, I saw one of those dirty street book-selling people standing in front of a long table of paperbacks.

  I couldn’t help but stop for one second and scan the covers for my own. I moved slowly from one end of the table to the other, seeing covers with all kinds of legs on them—legs crossed at the knee, at the ankle, in black stockings, in high-heeled boots— but not my cover’s legs with their slender ankles and athletic knees, chiseled and airbrushed and tanned like no other’s.

  Then I saw it in a cardboard box on the sidewalk he hadn’t even bothered to unpack. I picked it up. “How much is this?” I asked the book bum.

  “Three dollars,” he said. “You want it?” He grabbed a wrinkled plastic bag out of a bigger bag.

  My first impulse was to rescue it and bring it home, but then I thought better of it. “No. But I could sign it for you and then you could get more for it.” I smiled at him generously.

  “You wrote this?” he asked, taking it from me.

  “Yes, I did.”

  “How do I know it’s you?” He looked down at my legs to see if they matched the cover.

  “My picture’s on the back,” I said.

  “Alright.” He turned the book over and scrutinized the tiny photo. He seemed very unappreciative and I was starting to regret the whole thing but I felt it was too late to walk away. I pulled a pen out of my purse and signed my name on the title page. He watched me suspiciously. “Alright, we’ll see if that works,” was all he said.

  Shockingly, the Ziegfeld wasn’t that full. I had gotten there very early so I could sit in the fourth row, first seat on the left side of the left aisle, but even when the previews started the place hadn’t filled up. I turned in my seat and surveyed the audience. If I had come with someone like Derek Hassler, I would have probably been forced to sit in the center, toward the back, and I glanced in that direction, thinking maybe he had changed his mind and come.

  My other thought was that the new Arthur Weeman movie was the obvious place for me to meet my future husband. It almost seemed like the only place I could meet him. The only people who went to the new Arthur Weeman opening night at the Ziegfeld were true Arthur Weeman fans. And the ones there alone were even bigger and better fans. But his biggest and best fans were the ones like me who not only went alone, and not only went to the Ziegfeld, but went to the first showing on the first day, which is what I would have done if it hadn’t been for Derek Hassler forcing me to wait until the eight o’clock. But maybe he had done me a favor and maybe the reason I had never met my future husband at an Arthur Weeman movie before was because what kind of man went to the movies at ten a.m. on a weekday? Not a good kind.

  The lights went down and I turned back around to face the screen. There were only two heads in the whole theater obstructing my view, a man and woman sitting in the third row, middle aisle. The woman had little side braids like Laura Ingalls Wilder, and I thought maybe I would try that, although I would probably end up looking more like Pocahontas than Laura Ingalls due to my thick, raincoat-black hair. She took off her shoes and put her feet up on the seat in front of her. I hated when people did that. Her feet were bare even though it was almost Thanksgiving, and her toes looked terrible, spread out and bulbous. The man she was with didn’t seem to mind, but I considered moving so I wouldn’t have to watch the movie through the skyline of her toes. But then the music started and my heart quickened. Nothing could ruin this. This was my New Year’s Eve. This was my ball dropping. This was my favorite holiday.

  And there was Arthur Weeman on the screen, wearing red satin boxer shorts and jumping around a punching bag with his dukes up. His legs were incredibly puny and covered in bruises. Already it was funny and I let out a strange lone laugh. He was coaching someone, saying, “You have to be tough, come on you gotta be tougher than that. Try to think like a lesbian,” and then we saw that it was a six-year-old girl he was boxing with. The camera closed in on his face. He was a year older, and the skin under his eyes was vast and white, like tiny down comforters. Every year his signature silver egg-shaped glasses looked even bigger on him. The little girl in her big boxing gloves accidentally stepped on his toe and he hopped around in pain, holding his foot and eventually falling to the mat. And then, what always happened happened, tears started pouring down my face. The funnier the movie got, the more I cried. I cried because I was in the presence of genius.

  The movie was about a punch-drunk boxer named Icharus Miller, a has-been with amnesia, and it was perhaps his greatest. Especially the scene where he finally gets to go on a date with a nurse he has been in love with for years and, much to the woman’s horror, his prosthetic wax ear (his real ear was bitten off by another child boxing student) melts down the side of his face in the hot sun at the Central Park Zoo.

  In one scene he fashions a second ear from a piece of prosciutto.

  In one scene his dead father comes back to him and they box in his bedroom until his father knocks him out.

  And in another scene Icharus sits in bed, weeping. It was hysterically funny and heart-wrenchingly sad and he was braver, more vulnerable and funnier than he had ever been.

  When it ended I applauded, something I only did at Arthur Weeman movies, and so did maybe three other people. I noticed that the man in the third row, sitting next to the girl with the annoying feet, clapped.

  I sat there for a minute unable to move. Then I felt a tap on my shoulder.

  I turned around, thinking whoever this was he could be my future husband. I was very surprised to see that it was my father.

  “Hi, Toots,” he said. “I’ve been sitting behind you the whole time.”

  “Please don’t call me ‘Toots,’ ” I said.

  “I don’t see what’s wrong with Toots.”

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “You know, I was actually hoping to run into you,” he said. “I remembered how we used to always catch the new Arthur Weeman flick the day it opened and I’d take you out of school and cancel my morning patients, and we’d have lunch at the Carnegie. I tried to come to the first show but I kept getting swamped. I can’t believe I actually found you here. You haven’t been here since this morning have you?”

  It was true—it was the one thing we did together. An image came to my mind of us sitting at a table, next to framed photos of celebrities I had never heard of, the big brown paper bag of popcorn my father had brought from home to save money, sitting on the chair next to me.

  “What’d you think of the movie? I was disappointed. It wasn’t very good.”

  “I thought it was great,” I said.

  “Really? I thought it was pretty sophomoric stuff. I missed the first third but that didn’t seem to matter.”

  “How can you call the greatest filmmaker of all times sophomoric? The whole world happens to disagree with you on this one.” I made a sweeping gesture around the almost completely empty movie theater.

  “If I were him I wouldn’t have called it Swan Song. The press is going to get a kick out of that one.”

  “That’s precisely why he called it that,” I said. “He wants the press to have a field day. He doesn’t care.”

  “How’s your writing coming?” my father asked. “Are you making progress? Are you in touch at all with your editor?”

  “No,” I said. I couldn’t believe he had the nerve to bring up my editor. “She’s still recovering.”

  “From what?”

  “From the conversation she had with you seven years ago at my book party.”

  “What? Why?”

  And then I told him why I, Toots, was so angry at him. “Because you said bad things about my book at my book party.”

  He was completely shocked by my accusation. “What? I didn’t say anything bad about your book.”

  “You told my editor that I wouldn’t be a real writer until I wrote in the third person. She told me you said that.”
r />   “I just said that when you stop writing in the first person your work will finally cease to be autobiographical. And when you learn to write in the third person you will have grown as a writer.”

  “But, Dad,” I said. “That doesn’t make any sense. There are great autobiographical novels that are written in the third person and great completely fictional books that are written in the first person.” My father was an idiot. I knew what I had said was true but I suddenly couldn’t think of a single book I had ever read.

  “That may be the case,” my father said, “but all I said was that your book was an hors d’oeuvre.”

  “What?”

  “I said your book was an hors d’oeuvre.”

  “Dad, it’s not nice to say that something I worked on for five years is an hors d’oeuvre.”

  “I disagree,” my father said. “It just says that the main course is yet to come. That this book is nothing compared to what’s to come. I’m enormously proud of what’s to come.”

  I couldn’t fight him anymore. He didn’t respect me. He didn’t think I was a real writer. I imagined my book on a Ritz cracker served with a dollop of crème fraîche and a tiny fold of salmon. If you went to your local library and looked up my book in the Dewey decimal system, the librarian would bring it to you on the end of a toothpick, served on a large tray with a cocktail napkin.

  I noticed that the woman with the hideous feet from the third row was turned around in her seat, staring at us. I glanced at the man she was with who had gotten up and was about to walk up the aisle. I almost did a double take because he looked so much like Arthur Weeman. For an instant, I thought it was him, but this guy was young and of course Arthur Weeman would never show up at his own movie. The man smiled at me and continued up the aisle and his date just kept staring at me. Then she stood up and walked over to me.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “Are you Rebekah Kettle?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I loved your novel The Hard Part,” she said.

  “Thank you!” I said, searching my father’s face for a reaction to my great fame.

  “I loved it,” she said. “I read it in one day.”

  Everybody always made a point of telling me that they had read my book in one day—which in the past had really offended me but now I was used to it.

  “It took me five years to write,” I said, sounding a little too angry.

  “Oh,” she said. “I just meant . . . I mean, I really loved it. The whole older man thing. I’m a novelist too. My first novel is being published next fall. I hope it’s a fraction as good as yours.” She put out her hand and my father shook it.

  “I hope it’s better than a fraction of an hors d’oeuvre,” I said.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  I tried to figure out where I had seen her before. She was the kind of girl I had always envied, a kelly green-wearing natural redhead with pale white skin and mood-ring eyes that I assumed would change obediently to match her shoes and purse. Her lashes glowed as if they were somehow backlit. She had an innocent expression, wide-open eyes, and squirmy lips that slid all over the place like a child’s. Actually, what I figured out about her was her top lip was bigger than her bottom lip so when she smiled it had an upside-down effect of looking like a little girl doing a hand-stand.

  “Is this your boyfriend?”

  “Father,” I said, horrified.

  “Oh, it’s so nice to meet you,” she said, staring at my father who had risen when she approached as if we were at a fancy restaurant instead of a movie theater.

  “That’s not my boyfriend either,” she said, pointing to the empty seats that she and the man had occupied. “Actually, I think he just developed a little bit of a crush on you, Rebekah.” She sounded almost surprised by this. “He wanted to meet you but he’s on a deadline so he had to run out of here.”

  I had no idea what to say.

  “Isn’t that nice!” my father said.

  I really wasn’t interested, if he was friends with this crazy girl.

  “I was wondering if you would give me a blurb for my book,” she said to me. “It’s called Daddy, May I?”

  “Terrific!” my father said.

  “I’d love to send it to you. I was actually hoping you’d be here,” she said. “I had such a strong feeling I’d run into you, I almost brought it with me.”

  “What do you mean? Do I know you?” I asked.

  “I’m sorry, my name is Ivy Vohl. I’m the editor of the gossip pages at The New York Quille.”

  “Oh right, I’ve seen you on TV,” I said.

  “Yes, well, that goes with the job. I’m a talking head, a celebrity pundit. Admittedly the first one at the opening of an envelope. ”

  First one at the opening of a cliché, I thought. I still hadn’t gotten over the fact that she had referred to herself as a novelist, and now she was already on to pundit.

  “Oh yes, I’m familiar with your work,” my father said.

  I remembered that I had a friend whose roommate had gone on a date with her and she had taken off her clothes in the cab.

  “I’m sorry, how did you know I’d be here?”

  “You’re a Weemanologist, aren’t you?” she said. “You mentioned him in several interviews.”

  “What’s your book about?” my father asked.

  “It’s chick lit, like yours, Rebekah,” Ivy Vohl said. “I think you’ll like it. When I read your book I slept with it under my pillow for weeks.”

  “My book isn’t chick lit,” I said. “ ‘Chick lit’ is a derisive term invented by a frustrated magazine hack who probably wished like hell that she could write a novel, but knew she never could. That phrase brought female writers back two hundred years. If it continues, we’ll be forced to write under male pseudonyms again.”

  “Rebekah . . .” my father said.

  I looked up at the ceiling of the Ziegfeld, trying to calm myself by its splendor.

  “Sorry,” Ivy Vohl said. “I love chick lit. You have to admit it’s a big trend in publishing.”

  “Well, we have to go,” I said. I tugged on my father’s sleeve like a little girl.

  “You know all those items that ran about you in the Quille years ago? I wrote them,” Ivy said, as if she wanted to collect a debt, as if she was handing me an item-ized bill.

  “Thank you,” I said, in spite of myself. I remembered for a moment what it felt like to have an item in the Quille, the waiters at the café seeing it, my father’s patients, my friends, ex-friends, ex-boyfriends.

  “It was very nice to meet you,” my father said.

  “The pleasure was mine,” Ivy Vohl said, “but I didn’t get your name.”

  “Dr. Frederick Kettle,” he said.

  “Oh, a doctor! But wasn’t the character of the father in your novel a law professor?” she asked, accusingly, as if she had caught me in a lie.

  “That’s because it was a novel,” I said.

  “Wow. I consider myself to be somewhat of a Kettleologist, but I guess there’s a lot about you I don’t know. I know you went to the Gardener School because I had a friend who knew you there, and I know the building you live in on Lafayette, and you’re dating an editor at Maxim, aren’t you?”

  “No, actually I’m not,” I said. I suddenly felt very shaken up.

  “I’m not scaring you, am I? It must be weird to meet your fans. I had a torrid affair once with a famous director who said, ‘What is a fan? A fan is a stranger in love.’ I’ve always remembered that. Anyway, even though your book came out, what, seven years ago and you’ve sort of disappeared, I’d still love to have a piece of your fame on my book jacket.”

  I didn’t know what to say. If I had disappeared, then why did I have the misfortune to be here and to be seen by her? I wondered why I was even having this conversation. The way she talked about my fame, there didn’t seem to be enough of it for me to be just giving away pieces. My fame felt very far away, like it ha
d moved to L.A. without me, lost a lot of weight, gotten work done, and was now unrecognizable.

  “Are you a physician?” Ivy asked my father.

  “Yes, I am,” my father said. Then he took out his tattered brown leather wallet and handed her his business card. The back of the card said YOUR APPOINTMENT IS_____DAY,_____________ AT_________O’CLOCK.

  “I’m actually looking for a new doctor,” Ivy Vohl said.

  “Why don’t you call the office and Irmabelle will give you an appointment,” my father said.

  “Irmabelle—what a sexy name,” Ivy Vohl said. I couldn’t believe someone would say something like that to somebody’s father.

  My father blushed. Even in the red glow from the EXIT sign, I could see him blush.

  “Why do you think it is that most doctors have affairs with their nurses?”

  “Uh, I don’t know anything about that,” my father said.

  “Sorry, it’s just the journalist in me.”

  “Of course,” my father said, as if anything in the Quille was journalism.

  “So, what did you think of the movie? I wasn’t too impressed.”

  “I completely agree,” my father said.

  She had gone to the bathroom twice during the film and practically missed the whole thing. A true Arthur Weeman fan knows not to eat or drink anything for several hours before showtime.

  “I thought it was fantastic,” I said.

  Meanwhile, the place had completely emptied out of men, including the man who liked me, and it was Ivy Vohl’s voice I heard inside my head, and not Arthur Weeman’s.

  2.

  At 33, she meets her future husband, the great writer Hugh Nickelby

  Another good thing about breaking up with Derek Hassler was that I didn’t have to take him to the Hugh Nickelby book party and I knew how much he had been looking forward to it.

  On a date, a couple of weeks before, Derek had said that Hugh Nickelby was his favorite contemporary writer and Thank You for Not Writing was his favorite contemporary book. As a contemporary writer of a contemporary book myself, I couldn’t help but feel a little bit insulted. I was used to it, however, because people were constantly telling me that Thank You for Not Writing was their favorite book and quoting long passages of it to me.