Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked (2 page)

On January 13, 2006, she grumbles about an agent who has passed on the book and forwards me the rejection letter, saying she has now decided that she would like to send the book to my own agent, Janice, and concluding: “sorry to bother you with my neuroses and personal literary troubles. I hope you are well and that we can share a cup of coffee after all this works out (or doesn’t work out) or something.” I commiserate further, suggest one or two things to say in her letter to Janice, and agree that it would be nice to meet for coffee sometime. On January 20 she asks why I am no longer teaching and offers me “exorbitant sums of money to be my advisor again.” Joking, I assume, or maybe only half joking, since she adds: “would you be interested?” I thank her but explain that I simply don’t have the time.

As winter progresses, her notes become steadily warmer, more gossipy and inquisitive; full of questions about me, my past, my writing habits, and my family, along with ruefully amused gripes about prevaricating agents, the tedium of her job, and so on. She asks what I’m writing and I tell her I’m doing a screen adaptation of my wife’s uncompleted novel. Again she asks me to work with her on the book; again I decline. Sometimes she drops in a more personal disclosure, alluding, for instance, to the fact that she has broken off her engagement. All she offers by way of explanation is “I can’t marry A—,” the effect of which is to add a note of stoical sacrifice to the cluster of other sentiments she had prompted in me by her use of the word “fiancé.”

My own emails back, while still brief, grew more friendly and unguarded as the weeks passed. Not being her “professor,” or anyone else’s, at that period, I had been happily discarding the rather formal, aloof persona in which I tend to armor myself for my forays into the academic world. Consequently I had begun to experience a shift in my feelings about Nasreen, from the slightly harassed sense of obligation I’d started off with to a more human, straightforward feeling of affection.

In the secluded life I lead—near Woodstock, New York, but out in the country—I don’t often meet new people, much less anyone I’m likely to have enough in common with for a real friendship to develop. On the rare occasions when such a person does appear in my life, I tend to be eagerly friendly. Jim Morrison’s line
I need a brand-new friend
is often in my mind, and as my correspondence with Nasreen continued, I began to think of her as something like that: a brand-new friend. That she was younger than me, a woman, and Iranian were all things that gave the prospect of this friendship a certain appealing novelty (most of my friends are middle-aged Western men like myself), but the main thing (given that any relationship between us was likely to be of a purely epistolary nature) was that she was a fellow writer whose work I genuinely admired and who seemed to enjoy being in communication with me. I assumed she felt something similar about me.

Still, at a certain point I realized I was being flirted with. Not, I felt, with any serious underlying intent: more in deference to some sort of vague convention she seemed to adhere to, concerning the correct tone for a correspondence between a youngish woman and an older man whose support she considers worth securing. (“Older man” … the first time I’ve used that phrase about myself. Among the other effects of my encounter with Nasreen is the fact that I no longer think of myself as young.) That this convention, as I perceived it, should be somewhat old-fashioned seemed in keeping with the rest of her character. There was something of another era in the way she presented herself in this first phase of emails; even of another culture. And in fact when, much later, I came across an account of all the precise gradations of flirtatiousness and coquettishness once recognized in Persian society, each with its own word—
eshveh
,
kereshmeh
,
naz
—I wondered if I hadn’t been at the receiving end of some late, anachronistic flowering of that ancient tradition.

In one email, for instance, she wrote that a classmate of hers in the workshop I’d taught—I’ll call him Glen—had told her that he and some of the other students had thought that she and I were having an affair. This didn’t seem plausible, and I assumed she was either making it up or else massively exaggerating some remark made by Glen as a joke. Either way, the intent seemed to be to introduce, under cover of mildly salacious gossip, a notion that I might (so I imagine her thinking) find amusing, perhaps titillating, perhaps even tempting.

I don’t mind being flirted with—in fact I quite like it—and although I made no conscious effort to encourage this development, I didn’t feel any pressing need to discourage it either. To the comment about Glen I responded: “That’s funny about Glen. He’s obviously a born writer,” which seemed to me a way of maintaining the pleasantly lighthearted tone of our correspondence while tactfully keeping my distance.

A couple of weeks later she remembers, or purports to remember, my having “snapped” at her once in class—a reproach that I also sense to be mildly flirtatious, inviting me, as it does, to sweeten the alleged sting. Again, in my reply, I see myself trying to keep the playful tone alive without actually rising to the bait: “Snapped at you, huh?” I say. “That really is a little hard to believe. Are you sure I didn’t just push you to declare an opinion on something? (I remember you being rather reticent.)” I then add, sententiously though, in the light of the catastrophe that later unfolded, with odd clairvoyance: “As George Eliot said, the last thing we learn in life is our effect on other people.”

*   *   *

In March, after several near misses with other agents and editors, she finally sent the manuscript to my agent, Janice. I felt there was a good chance that Janice would want to sign her up. Aside from the quality of the material, everything about Nasreen’s profile—age, gender, nationality—seemed to me to make her an eminently marketable prospect. Still, I didn’t want to raise her hopes, and I was careful not to sound too confident.

Janice happened to be traveling at this time and was slow getting to the book. The delay, along with the fact that I was the one responsible for this introduction, made me feel under more of an obligation than I had before. Reversing my earlier position, I offered to read the first section of the novel myself, so as to be able to be more specific in my recommendation to Janice. I was planning to be in New York for a couple of days in late April, and we arranged that Nasreen would give me the pages when I came down. A date and time were set for the handover, and a café in the Village selected for the location. As the day for this meeting approached, it took on a vaguely fateful character, at least in my mind, what with the somehow momentous question of how Janice was going to respond to the book hanging over it, not to mention the cumulative effect of Nasreen’s emails, which were now coming rather frequently, so that I was beginning to feel a little saturated by her, or by the thought of her.

Among these recent emails was one containing a strange photograph of herself, taken in her twenties. It was just of her face, and it was exposed in such a way that almost nothing showed except the curving lines of her eyes and mouth and a few wisps of hair, making her look like a ghost. I wasn’t sure whether sending me this fell into the category of flirting or was just a normal thing for people a decade younger than myself to do, people who had instantly embraced all the conveniences of Internet communication, as she had (she was always sending attachments and links), instead of being daunted by them, as I was. Whatever the case, the incandescent face of that photograph had supplanted what remained of my somewhat hazy memory of her actual appearance, and when I arrived at the café for our meeting it took me a few seconds to realize that the dark-haired woman in her mid-thirties wearing sensible office clothes and talking with a harried expression on her cell phone by the counter was in fact Nasreen. She closed the phone, and after a slightly awkward greeting, we went to sit at the back of the café, by a window opening onto a stone courtyard.

The meeting, which lasted about half an hour, had a muffled, muted quality—oddly so, given the buildup. Despite her extravagant loquaciousness as an emailer, Nasreen was even quieter in person than I remembered her. Not that she wasn’t perfectly pleasant, but there was something canceled or hidden, somehow, about her bearing; a strange irreality in her presence across from me at our lacquered pine table, as if she were absent in all but the most literal, mechanical sense.

Our conversation was friendly enough but desultory. She spoke caustically about her family, some in New York, some in California, giving an impression that her artistic ambitions and unsettled life had cast her in the role of black sheep—not shunned exactly, but clearly not approved of. There was money, she implied, but not much of it flowing in her direction. Picking up on this rueful note, I mentioned a problem of my own that had just arisen, concerning our apartment. Our subtenant, the woman from Baltimore, had called the day before to say she was buying a studio and no longer needed to share with us. This was a blow, as it had been extremely hard to find a tenant whose needs dovetailed as conveniently with ours as hers did, and I seriously doubted whether we would be able to find anyone else. Even if we did, there was a danger that the management company that had recently bought the building and installed an office inside would notice the new face, put two and two together, and realize we were subletting against the rules of our lease. We couldn’t afford to keep the place unless we shared it, so we were looking at the prospect of losing our foothold in New York.

All of this had been weighing on me since our tenant’s call, and it was what came naturally to mind as something to talk about in response to Nasreen’s comments about her own financial troubles. Nasreen listened politely, but I had the impression that she wasn’t taking much of it in.

We finished our coffees and left the café. Outside, we walked in the same direction for a couple of blocks. Nasreen lit a cigarette and smoked it beside me, silent except for the light clopping of her heels on the sidewalk. She seemed frail, I thought; possibly a little stressed. At the corner where our ways parted she gave me the manuscript, and, with a quick kiss on the cheek, we said goodbye.

*   *   *

I had some anxiety about reading the manuscript. What if, despite the great promise of the drafts I’d seen two years earlier, she had somehow botched things? I know from experience how easy it is to lose the thread of a narrative. One wrong turn and you can end up spending months or even years in a wilderness of futile and wasted effort. Or what if I simply didn’t like it as much as I had? What would I say? How might she take it? These manuscripts are a dense embodiment of their creators’ deepest drives and ambitions. Large forces circulate around them. They come into your hands, as a reader, charged with volatile potentialities of trust and suspicion, hope and fear, friendship and eternal enmity. This too I know from experience, and I opened the padded envelope with a familiar sense of foreboding.

I needn’t have worried. The writing was as good as I remembered it: strong sentences confidently evoking the epic setting of Tehran on the brink of revolution, a sharply drawn cast of characters with an interestingly unbalanced heroine at the center, and a story line of love tangles and political power struggles that seemed to be plunging swiftly forward under its own effortless momentum. I had criticisms, mainly about the essayistic passages, which still felt extraneous to the narrative, but this seemed something a good editor could easily remedy, and in general I felt entirely vindicated in my earlier enthusiasm.

I emailed Nasreen, detailing my responses and attaching a copy of an email I’d sent Janice, reiterating my support.

As far as I understood, the rest of the novel existed only in very rough draft, and I do remember being concerned that, since even this first section needed another pass, Janice might feel it was too early to commit herself as the agent. My own view was that the forcefulness of the writing, evident from the first page, was sufficient guarantee that a good book was going to emerge sooner or later. For me, at that time, the definition of a writer was very simply, as some critic put it, someone who has “an interesting way with words.” Do the sentences engage you? Cast a spell over you? Make you want to read on? If so, that’s enough, regardless of the story itself. If not, no amount of socially, politically, or otherwise “relevant” material is going to make a difference. I don’t feel so sure of this anymore (I don’t feel so sure of anything anymore), but even at the time I was aware that not everyone shared this rather cavalier way of judging a piece of writing. And I could certainly imagine that from the point of view of an agent debating whether or not to take on a first novel—the hardest kind of book to sell—an “interesting way with words” might not be quite enough of an incentive.

Janice was impressed enough to invite Nasreen in for a meeting. By all accounts the meeting was pleasant and positive, but in the end, as I’d feared, she decided the book was still too far from completion to take on for the moment. She did, however, recommend Nasreen to a friend of hers—I’ll call her Paula Kurwen—who worked as a freelance editor. I’d never met Paula, but I knew she had a good reputation. She liked the manuscript enough to feel able to help shape it, and very soon Nasreen sent me an enthusiastic email saying that the two of them were working productively together. It wasn’t quite the same as being taken on by an agent, but it was probably the best outcome that could be hoped for at this stage in the book’s development. At any rate it was certainly a step in the right direction, and I was glad to have been able to play a part.

In June I had to do some traveling—to London and back, then on to Los Angeles. As I had some time in between the two journeys, I decided to make the trip to L.A. by train, on one of the double-decker Amtrak Superliners that begin in Chicago and cross the country in leisurely, old-fashioned style, with glass-walled observation cars, dining compartments, and private “roomettes.” The journey takes three days from Chicago, and I planned to break it up for an extra night in New Mexico. In the uneventful life I lead, this expedition constituted major news, and I mentioned it in an email to Nasreen, along with the other, more humdrum highlights of that spring, such as the escape of our pet cockatiel and my project to cover the walkways in my vegetable garden with stone.