Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked (19 page)

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All this time I was trying to preserve some semblance of functionality in the other parts of my life. There was the editing of our Provence book to deal with. There were the details of our ignominious “surrender” agreement on the apartment to finalize. There was my vegetable garden to keep up and a clan of obstinately ingenious groundhogs to keep out.

In some activities I could hold the thought of Nasreen at bay more easily than in others, or at least I was less disabled by it. But as the months passed it seemed to determine the way I experienced just about everything I did. Her inexplicable fixation on our apartment, for instance, seemed to converge with the owner’s efforts to drive us out, to the point where her physical appearance began to substitute itself in my mind for that of the owner, whom I had never seen. Likewise with the groundhogs. Defiantly present in my garden every morning despite the skirting of galvanized mesh I’d buried to a depth of two feet underground and the barbed wire coils I attached to the fence, these creatures became the embodiment of the successive waves of new malice Nasreen kept coming up with. Or they were the emails themselves, sitting in my inbox with that same air of triumphant cunning …

The further her occupation of my mind extended, the harder it was to concentrate on anything else. Reading became problematic. Books that required any active effort of engagement were out of the question. At the same time, books that required only passive submission to a well-oiled mechanism of suspense became addictive. Mysteries, crime novels, psychological thrillers were all I read that year. The genres of Ahriman, you could say: narratives of disintegration and ruin, of what Robert Lowell called “the downward glide and bias of existing,” the reading of which was itself a mimicry of the processes of collapse they dramatized. The very opposite of D. H. Lawrence and George Eliot and Tolstoy and all the other life-affirming, upward-aspiring writers whose books at one time had been the only literary company I cared to keep.

Often in these suspense novels I would find echoes of my own predicament: similar structures of anguish; events that strikingly resembled those in my own drama; sometimes entire plotlines. One book in particular seemed to articulate my circumstances during this phase with the same dreamlike, redistributive accuracy as
Gawain
had in that earlier phase. This was Patricia Highsmith’s
Strangers on a Train
. I had seen the Hitchcock film but never read the book until now. The train in question turns out to be on its way, as mine had been, to Santa Fe. As evening falls, Guy Haines, a high-minded young man, sits in his Pullman trying to read Plato. He is distracted, however, by anxieties concerning his impending meeting with his estranged wife, Miriam, a manipulative, unfaithful woman from whom he is hoping to obtain a divorce so that he can marry his true soulmate, the lovely Anne. His career is at stake as well as his personal happiness. He is an aspiring architect (a hybrid, you could say, of me and my father) with a high sense of the nobility of this profession, in which the virtuousness of the socially committed intellectual is combined with the prestige of the artist. His prospects are bright on both fronts, home and career, but for the sake of both he needs to purge from his life the error of judgment represented by the tawdry, tacky Miriam. Miriam had agreed to the divorce, but from her last communication Guy has reason to be worried that she isn’t, after all, going to let him go.

As he broods on this, while still trying to read his Plato, a young man sits down opposite him. He has an “interesting face,” Guy notices, his skin “smooth as a girl’s.” There is something seedy about him, though also something beguilingly open and friendly. This is Charles Anthony Bruno, the first of Highsmith’s great studies in the psychopathic mind. He smiles at Guy, who at once retreats into his book. A moment later, however, racked by a renewed spasm of anxiety over Miriam, Guy accidentally touches Bruno’s outstretched foot with his own.

In D. H. Lawrence, accidental physical contact of this kind will often (as in the story “You Touched Me”) provide the spark that awakens lovers to their transfiguring passions for each other. In Highsmith, the touch sets off a similarly intense involvement, but of a deathward orientation, its eroticism purely disintegrative, like the hectic colors of fall.

The two start talking: Guy reservedly at first, Bruno with a gushing candor that disarms Guy and fascinates him despite the dubious things Bruno reveals about himself, the most notable of which is an obsessive resentment of his father, whom he would very much like to kill.

Full of self-deprecating charm, he persuades Guy to dine with him in his roomette (though the word doesn’t appear to have entered the Amtrak lexicon yet), where, as they get drunk together, he begins questioning Guy about his private life. In no time he has wheedled the whole story of Miriam out of Guy and begun insinuatingly probing into Guy’s feelings about her infidelities, the other men, the possible hold-up of the divorce, subtly but firmly bringing to the surface of Guy’s mind all his suppressed rage and hatred. What he is after is an admission that Guy would like to kill Miriam, just as he, Bruno, would like to kill his father. At one point as he talks he seems to Guy “to be growing indefinite at the edges, as if by some process of deliquescence.” He too, it appears, is some kind of borderline, a dark angel eager to draw out and feed on the darkness in others. Dimly, Guy recognizes the signs: “He seemed only a voice and a spirit now, the spirit of evil,” and yet for all his repugnance he can’t quite shrug off his fascination. Finally Bruno comes out with his famous proposition, a variation on the Green Knight’s: “‘I kill your wife and you kill my father! We meet on the train, see, and nobody knows we know each other. Perfect alibis! Catch?’”

Only now, confronted a little too nakedly with his own fantasy, does Guy tear himself away from Bruno’s sickly sweet force field, violently rejecting the proposition. But a connection has been opened, a powerful linkage underpinned by a half-conscious sexual attraction between them and by the disclosure (if only to himself) of Guy’s murderous impulses.

The two part in Santa Fe with no agreement and no intention, on Guy’s side, of ever seeing Bruno again. But before long Bruno, cheerfully infatuated with Guy and obsessed with cementing their alliance, decides to carry out his side of the proposal anyway. Tracking down Miriam, he follows her to an amusement park, where he approaches her in the darkness and strangles her. On the practical level this rids Guy of a threat to his future happiness. But on the more occult plane, the murder has the effect of merging Bruno and Miriam together, concentrating their respective capacities for evil into a single, composite figure whose ability to harm Guy is now immeasurably magnified.

Guy, hearing of the murder, hopes that it has nothing to do with Bruno but knows in his heart that it does. Should he tell the police? Of course he should. But how is he to explain Bruno’s fiendish proposal without the risk of incriminating himself? An unblemished reputation, needless to say, is crucial to both his marriage and his chosen career. The police appear to believe the murder was an act of random violence, so why not let sleeping dogs lie? His sin at this point is purely one of omission. Nobody asked, so why should he tell? And what is there to tell anyway? Not only had he not entered into any kind of agreement with Bruno, but he had also explicitly denied to Bruno having ever had any desire to kill Miriam. So what if Bruno had divined that this was less than the truth? One is answerable for one’s actions in this life, and possibly also for one’s words, but not, surely, for the desires and fantasies that pass through one’s mind unbidden, unarticulated, and unacted on.

Well, apparently one is answerable for these too, at least to the Brunos and Nasreens of this world. Having killed Miriam, Bruno, who has a genius for rationalizing matters to suit his own fancies, now considers he is owed a murder by Guy, but Guy understandably declines.

And so the stalking begins: Bruno phoning at odd hours, leaving messages with Guy’s mother, his colleagues, his clients; Bruno appearing at Guy’s office, outside his apartment, in the woods next to the house (the fortress) Guy is building for himself and Anne. Bruno sending emails, or rather letters, every two or three days: “either a gush of brotherly love or a threat to haunt Guy all his life, ruin his career…”

One morning (and here the story melts into my own in a scene I still find unbearable to think of) Guy gets a call from a man who is about to hire him for an important job:

“‘Mr. Haines … we’ve received a most peculiar letter concerning you…’”

Listening to the letter—identical to Nasreen’s in spirit if not its literal content (allegations that Guy had a role in Miriam’s death)—Guy grasps, for the first time, the extent of the malignancy that has attached itself to him:

“It would only be a matter of time until Bruno informed the next client, and then the next…”

Bruno, on the face of it, is harassing Guy for a very specific reason: to get him to kill his father. Whereas Nasreen—what did Nasreen want from me? Was there something I could have done or said that would have stopped her attacks once they began? Suppose I had handed over the keys to our apartment, or given her the money she occasionally demanded, or suppose I’d publicly confessed to being part of a Jewish conspiracy to steal her work and sell it to those other Iranian writers—would she have left me alone? I don’t think so; certainly not if Highsmith is a reliable guide. Goaded beyond endurance (and the book enters a realm of darkness here that the film evades), Guy finally surrenders to Bruno’s demands and kills Bruno’s father. All goes well, in the sense that he gets away with it, and for a while Bruno leaves him alone. But even though any further contact with Guy at this point would be insanely dangerous for both of them, Bruno can’t help himself. Because what he really wants—what he, like all such afflicted souls, fundamentally believes he is owed from Guy—is love; not the Lawrentian love that thrives on the separateness of the beloved, but the love that consumes him, dissolving him into the lover totally and for all eternity. Guy and Anne’s wedding day comes around, and as Guy walks up the aisle, there is Bruno, smiling. “Bruno was here with them, not an event, not a moment, but a condition, something that had always been and always would be.”

That was how I had come to see Nasreen by this time: not an event, not a moment, but a condition.

The surprise of the book is its unexpected compassion. Even at his most tormented, Guy continues to acknowledge something human and touching at the core of his tormentor: a vulnerability, even a kind of warped honesty, that sets him apart from other people and deserves its own kind of recognition, even its own kind of love. I can’t say I’ve felt any of those things for Nasreen since she became my enemy, but at odd moments I have sensed that this is a failing on my part, maybe the precise failing that laid me open to her siege in the first place, and that perhaps if I could summon such feelings, the great sense of injustice lodged inside her, whatever its source, would stand a chance of being salved. But then I think of how she reacted to Paula’s attempt at compassionate engagement, and I feel, once again, confronted by something unassuageable and beyond all understanding: a malice that has no real cause or motive but simply is.

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Early in the summer I arrived home one afternoon to find a message from Detective Bauer. I phoned him at the precinct.

“I got a call from the lady,” he said.

I tried to sound uncomplicatedly pleased: “That’s great!”

“I figured she’d get around to it, sooner or later.”

“You were right.”

The detective cleared his throat. “She was extremely angry. She used a lot of bad language. I don’t like that.”

I asked what she was angry about.

“She didn’t appreciate getting messages from her relatives to call the cops. That was a part of it.”

“What else?”

“Well, she certainly seems to believe you stole her work.”

I didn’t think I needed to remind the detective how crazy Nasreen’s conspiracy theories were.

“I guess she convinced herself,” I said.

There was a pause.

“Is it true you used to teach at Princeton?”

“Yes.”

“But not any longer?”

“Well, not at the moment.”

“She says you were fired for doing the same thing there. Taking students’ work and selling it to other writers. She told me this is a well-known fact.”

I had predicted a counterattack, but as always the sheer brazen outrageousness of Nasreen’s malice caught me off my guard. A reeling sensation took hold of me. I heard myself explaining to the detective that I had taught on a casual basis at Princeton for twenty years, usually just for a term or two at a time, often with several years between appointments. I assured him my relations with the faculty there were good, that I certainly hadn’t stolen or been accused of stealing students’ work, that there was no particular reason why I wasn’t teaching there at the moment, and that I would be more than happy for him to call the writing department to verify all this. But even as I spoke I felt, again, the strange thinness and feebleness of my words in the face of Nasreen’s. It wasn’t that the detective was telling me he believed her, necessarily, but he had apparently felt unable to dismiss out of hand the possibility that a black market in students’ stories was a part of the fabric of the creative-writing industry, with desperate authors buying up workshop submissions from unscrupulous instructors, and that I was a known dealer. He listened in silence while I spoke, and his response, when I had finished, was dismayingly noncommittal. I offered several times to give him the number of the Princeton writing department, but he ignored me: not, I felt, because he took my word, but because he had decided not to get any more deeply involved in this dubious affair.

The one thing that seemed to count unequivocally against Nasreen was her “bad language,” which upset the detective as much as her casual references to drug-taking had earlier. It amazed me that an American cop, even one as buttoned-up as Detective Bauer, could be upset by “bad language.” But he mentioned it disapprovingly several times, and as far as I could tell this unusual sense of decorum was the main reason why he had decided to continue regarding me as the victim, even if he was no longer sure I was guiltless.