Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked (3 page)

Nasreen seemed to enjoy these little bulletins from my life and often wrote back about them with an astringent insight that I appreciated. About my stonework, for instance, a project that had begun to obsess me, she joked that I was building myself a “fortress”—an image that struck me as peculiarly accurate. (It was also, in its quick, confident transformation of my flat walkways into a solid building, characteristic of the verve and directness I admired in her writing.)

But her response to the news of my impending train trip was a little different. That it fell into the category of flirtation was nothing new in itself, and no doubt it was meant no more seriously than any of its predecessors, but the actual content seemed a significant escalation of the terms: an attempt to insert herself into my mind in an unambiguously erotic light. She was proposing to smuggle herself into my roomette for the journey, and wanted to know when my train was leaving. I didn’t respond, but at this point I began to realize that something more explicitly discouraging than a mere tactful silence was going to be required of me.

Around this time, my wife and I (but I don’t like that Buckingham Palace phrase: I’ll call her K——, which is the initial of her real name, though not the name she uses); K—— and I sent out a proposal for a book we wanted to write. Years earlier, before we had children, we had written a book called
Walking and Eating in Tuscany and Umbria
. It had been a modest success, and now, with our kids aged seven and eleven, we’d decided it would be interesting to do another one,
en famille
, this time in Provence. I began my cross country train journey on June 8 and flew back from L.A. ten days later. Soon after my return, a publisher made an offer for our book. The advance would allow us to live in Provence for four months, long enough to cover all the more promising-looking corners of the region, and we accepted. Our plan was to leave early the following year.

I mentioned this to Nasreen in my next email and made a point of emphasizing the family aspect of it all. She didn’t respond directly, but a week later she sent me an email in which she described a short story that a former member of her workshop—I’ll call her Elaine—had just sent her, about an American woman who seduces an Arab man. The email had the slight incoherence of something written under great emotional pressure, and culminated in an assertion that Elaine’s story was a thinly disguised account of a real affair; that the American woman in it was Elaine herself and the Arab man was, of all people, me. In effect Nasreen appeared to be reproaching me for rejecting her as a lover and accusing me of favoritism by having bestowed my attentions on another student.

The bizarreness of this scenario—bizarre to me at least: I’m not used to being regarded as some kind of pasha surrounded by desirous women—disturbed me almost as much as the accusation itself. I’d made it clear, or thought I had, that I was happily married and not interested in having an affair, but apparently it needed to be spelled out. I hated having to do this: it seemed a retreat from the living connection of a real relationship with another human being into the safe, deadening geometry of convention.

On June 30 I wrote back:

I don’t really know what any of this is about—I haven’t read [Elaine’s] story and for the record haven’t ever had an affair with a student or ex student and am not about to start now. I like your writing and want to help, but I don’t want to be a figment in anyone’s private fantasies, or at least I don’t particularly want to know about it if I am. I guess it’s possible that I’ve been taking your emails in a less serious spirit than they were intended—in which case apologies. Anyway, I do think you’re very talented, which is why I tried to get Janice to take you on. I’m sorry she didn’t, but I still have high hopes for your book, and I think you should concentrate on getting it done as quickly as possible.

Her initial reaction was to remain curiously insistent, and a couple of days later I felt compelled to send a follow-up:

I don’t know what to tell you Nasreen. I guess on the rare occasions when I like someone’s writing I tend to feel an affinity with them, an openness to friendship. Forgive me if this has read differently to you; that certainly wasn’t my intention. I’m sorry things have come to this and I don’t want to upset you, but I really am extremely happily married and I don’t particularly want to go on having this correspondence any more if it’s going to be like this.

I’d resigned myself to the ending of this friendship, but a week later Nasreen sent a lucid, gracious email, from which the following statements merit quoting, if only for their relevance to what came later:

… I’m not used to having men lend me support, help or friendship without any sort of amorous or sexual intentions. I didn’t really think that’s where you were taking this very benign relationship of ours. And in a sense I do love you and am in love with you—but mainly because you’ve given me hope that there are some “normal” men out there …

I’m sorry if I got screwy on you. Please laugh. I have to, or I’ll be so embarrassed (I am: trying to rationalize it as all writers are insane) …

I’m also glad you’re so respectful of your wife and family that you made me shut up. It was good therapy …

For a couple of months following this, our correspondence resumes its breezy, amicable tone. Nasreen sends progress reports on her work with Paula, which appears to be going well. She adopts a puppy and sends pictures. She jokes about her awful new boss. She debates whether to escape the nightmare of Bush’s America and live abroad. She also starts writing about other men she is interested in—“I think I’ve found my next prey … He’s a very handsome writer … He may have a girlfriend but that’s no matter…”—reassigning me, so it appears, from “prey” to something more like confidant.

In August she mentions being at a party where my father was being discussed. My father had designed several well-known public buildings in England, and had been knighted for his work. This connection of mine to a “Sir” amused Nasreen no end. She took to calling me “Sir James” in some of her emails, sometimes varying it with “St. James,” or plain “Sir.” The comedies of being English, of being a faithful (“saintly”) husband, and of being a teacher (that ridiculous object of schoolgirl crushes) were all compressed into these designations, and through them I could sense, again, a mind akin to my own, someone for whom words were a source of primal delight. Much more than me, in fact, she was someone whom words “stuck to” in odd ways, becoming an elemental part of the reality she inhabited. Often she wrote things in her emails that appeared almost nonsensical until, days later, I would suddenly grasp what was being alluded to by the puzzling word or phrase. An example: several months after our meeting in New York, she ended an email: “I’m s’nice, aren’t I?” The abbreviation seemed just throwaway odd, but later I happened to pass the café where we’d met (I hadn’t known its name, only the location) and I saw that it was called ’sNice—my first indication that Nasreen had been less “absent” on this occasion than I had thought. More significant perhaps, that word “fortress,” which had touched such a nerve in me, turned out (and this is a measure of my comparative carelessness with words, even my own) to be a sly recycling of something I myself had written, namely this phrase in a novel of mine,
The Horned Man
(later emails confirmed she had read it closely), where my protagonist talks about his unsatisfactory love life: “I had come to realize that I no longer wanted a ‘lover’ or a ‘girlfriend,’ that I wanted a
wife
. I wanted something durable about me—a fortress and a sanctuary.”

My point here is partly to illustrate my continued feeling of affinity with Nasreen, my sense of being on her wavelength, sometimes uncannily so; but also to introduce the idea of a certain porousness in her sense of who she actually was. Harmlessly manifested here, but foreshadowing a more troubling, and then threatening, amorphousness of identity that began emerging not long after.

Staying, for a moment, with this particular line of development, the next discernible phase came on September 20, in an email in which Nasreen included, in its entirety, a private email to her from another former classmate, attacking various other students in their workshop. We all know, of course, that email is not a strictly private form of communication, but even so, and even though Nasreen acknowledged something dubious about copying the email (“it may be unethical of me to show you this”), I sensed, for the first time, a lack of scruple that I hadn’t previously suspected. Obviously my own use of Nasreen’s emails in this narrative lays me open to the charge of hypocrisy here. I don’t believe I’m guilty of that, but rather than explain or justify myself at this point, I must simply ask for the reader’s patience. This is a complicated story and we are still only in the preamble.

Later that same day, as if sensing my misgivings, Nasreen emailed again: “I hope you know that I don’t share your emails/thoughts with anyone.” Somehow this assurance had the opposite of its intended effect. I didn’t think I’d sent anything I’d be embarrassed about other people reading, but it bothered me that the very concept of “sharing” or not sharing my emails with other people should exist in her mind, and it had a distinctly cooling effect on my desire to communicate with her.

Around this time, Nasreen began dropping allusions to Rilke in some of her emails, especially to his figure of the Angel, from the
Duino Elegies
, with whom she seemed to identify. I remembered this Angel, from my own reading of Rilke, as a force of violently transformative power, invoked by mortals at their peril. Intrigued that Nasreen should see herself in such a figure, I’d reread Heidegger’s essay on Rilke,
What Are Poets For?
, vaguely remembering that he discusses the Angel there, which he does, at some length. “The Angel of the
Elegies
,” he writes, “is that being who assures the recognition of a higher order of reality in the invisible…” Given the tone of her later emails, I imagine it was this aspect, this godlike gift for revelation, that Nasreen had in mind in adopting the Angel as one her many private personae. But what struck me most, rereading the essay, was another aspect, touched on only in passing by Heidegger, but curiously apposite: “This being,” goes this other description (and it was one I was to recall many times in the months and years that followed),
for whom borderlines and differences … hardly exist any longer …

Even before these melting and merging tendencies of Nasreen’s began manifesting themselves, my emails to her had been growing shorter and more guarded. The reason for this was partly the overwhelming quantity of emails Nasreen was now sending me—often several a day—and partly a resurgence of that once flattering but now merely disconcerting flirtatiousness.

Again, this flirtatiousness was expressed playfully at first, under the sign of its own acknowledged futility. But over the weeks it grew more insistent, as if my rejection had given it license to evolve in a kind of negative space, feeding off its own extravagance, as in certain kinds of love poetry where the emotion grows fantastical in proportion to the strength of the resistance it meets. September 7: “You don’t love me at all anymore do you, James?” September 19: “Just a sip of water from the Zamzam well that overfloweth despite the disappearance of the Son of Thunder” (in addition to “Sir” I was now the “Son of Thunder” and sometimes “Mr Thunder”). September 20: “James, you should marry me and I’ll support all of the Lasduns…”

I began to feel that I was becoming more a source of frustration for Nasreen than anything else, and that since I couldn’t be what she wanted me to be, I should withdraw altogether. On the other hand, a part of me still clung to the idea of her as a fascinating new friend, not, after all, any crazier than some of my other writer friends, and one who seemed to find me useful as a sounding board for her own evolving vocabulary of symbols and metaphors. Having formally severed (from my end at least) any erotic current between us, I was ready to assume the role of one of those avuncular, rather eunuchy types who crop up now and then in literature: a critic-mentor figure enlisted by some gifted younger writer he’s had the good or bad luck to cross paths with. (I’d have found it unimaginable to be anything other than the “gifted younger writer” myself in any such relationship before this period: another instance of Nasreen’s aging impact on me.) Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the well-meaning minor-league littérateur approached for guidance by Emily Dickinson, must have been somewhere in my mind, both as designated literary advisor (“Will you be my preceptor, Mr. Higginson?” the poet famously wrote) and as the possible object of the erotic/mystic infatuation in Dickinson’s unsent “Master Letters”: “I want to see you more—Sir—than all I wish for in this world…”

But I’m overstating my feeling of avuncularity here. The truth is, I saw us on a more equal footing than that: two writers, at different stages of our careers, but involved in similar struggles. And just as Nasreen felt free to interrogate me about my life and writing, so I felt free to ask her the kinds of questions I would have asked any other writer friend (or non-writer friend for that matter) who’d had firsthand experience of things that interested me.

To this end I asked two questions on subjects that were very much on my mind at that time. The first was a general one about what it was like for someone from the Muslim world to be in New York in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Nasreen answered this in the slightly manic style she sometimes adopted, full of high-speed lists and esoteric references—Razorfish, Dr. Dave, Dharma Priestesses—none of it very illuminating. The second was about veils. Veils, burkas, yashmaks, niqabs, and chadors had been a source of imagery for me since my first book of poems in 1987. Nasreen was clearly interested in the phenomenon of being a woman from an Islamic culture, and it seemed to me natural enough to ask her if she’d had any direct experience with veils. But it was a mistake.