Love Creeps (3 page)

She was bad at writing notes, and on top of that, she had stalker's block. She felt she had exhausted all the obvious statements. She was amazed that her own stalker was able to come up with fresh ideas all the time.

So, out of frustration, she began copying her stalker's notes and sending them to Mr. Dupont. She sent the ones that said things like, “I watch you all the time. Even when I'm somewhere else, I watch you in my mind,” and, “To my little pooky bear. I pook you.” What did that mean? She didn't know. All she knew was that she couldn't have thought of it herself.

Eventually, she got tired of even the transcribing process, and decided to save time by simply covering up her stalker's signature with Wite-Out and signing “Your fan” over it, before sending the notes on to Mr. Dupont.

Riding the elevator up to the courts, Alan looked at his new racquetball partner and broke the silence with, “Nice locket.”

“Thanks.”

“What's inside?”

“It's personal.”

They played for the first time. Lynn's stalking victim won. Not a bad player, Alan thought, for a Frenchman.

After their game, Alan suggested to Roland Dupont that they go to the juice bar for a smoothie. Roland hesitated, then accepted the invitation. They ordered their drinks, Banana Lipgloss and Blueberry Beach Sand, and sat at a table.

Alan complimented Roland on his game. The Frenchman returned the compliment.

They engaged in some small talk. It turned out Roland had only recently moved to the neighborhood.

“How do you like it?” Alan said.

Roland fingered his locket and looked at Alan without answering right away. “I don't think I like it very much, actually.”

“Really? Why not?”

“It's the people,” he said. “The people are creepy here. Much more than where I lived uptown.”

Alan's heart was beating fast at how easy it was. The progress was rapid. “Creepy how?”

“There's a woman, for example, who's been following me.”

“Oh. Do you know her?”

“No.”

“Why do you think she's following you?”

“I have no idea. I guess she's just a stalker, or something. And she's been sending me notes. Stupid, weird notes.” He produced an exhausted chuckle.

Roland Dupont spoke well for a Frenchman. This annoyed Alan. “What do the notes say?”

“In one note she calls me a teddy bear, or pooky bear, or something like that. I can't really remember.”

Alan was silent. Was Lynn using his wording? Or was “pooky bear” very typical, universal wording among stalkers? Alan was perplexed. “What else does she say in her notes?” he asked.

“Oh, let me think …” Roland stared down at the table while tapping it with his fingers. “She wrote something like, ‘Seeing you makes me happy every morning.' And she follows me. And she'll sit across from me during lunch when I'm with a client.”

“A client? What do you do?”

“I'm a lawyer. And you?”

“Accountant.”

Roland nodded. After a moment of silence, he said, “You know, in France, stalking doesn't even exist. There isn't a word for it in French. I was trying to tell my family on the phone that this woman is a stalker, and I realized a French translation of the word does not exist.”

“That's probably because in France stalking is such a normal part of everyday life that they don't need a special word for it. They probably call it living.” Alan chuckled.

Roland seemed taken aback. “It's really horrible to be stalked. It's one of the worst crimes.”

Now Alan was taken aback. “Really? I don't mean to belittle your experience, but it strikes me as one of the mildest crimes.”

“How can you think that?”

Alan stirred his smoothie, stared at Roland's locket meaningfully. “I mean, I'm sure at some point in your life you must have been very interested in someone, unrequitedly, and engaged in similar behavior vis-à-vis this person.”

“You mean stalking someone?”

“If you want to call it that, sure.”

“No. Have you?”

“Naturally. Who hasn't?”

“Well, you're very open-minded,” Roland said, “very forgiving, I guess. Of yourself. But then again, I doubt you've seriously stalked anyone.”

“Your doubt is unfounded.”

Had Roland been the type who ever laughed, he would have laughed. He rarely found anything amusing, and even when he did, such as now, he never felt comfortable laughing. Even a smile looked odd on him, as if the particular facial muscles that created his smile were nonexistent, and he had to resort to using a combination of surrounding muscles, such as the muscles of his neck, forehead, eyes, nose, and ears to produce one. It came out differently each time.

“You've actually been a stalker?” Roland asked.

“I wouldn't call it that, no, but you probably would.”

Alan didn't want this man to call him a stalker. It was racist, or something. Hate language. The nice word was “admirer.” Calling him a stalker was like calling someone who refuses to risk his life “a coward,” instead of “smart.” Or like calling a promiscuous woman a slut instead or liberated or sensual.

“When were you a stalker?” Roland asked.

“If you don't mind, please call it ‘admirer.'”

“Okay, when were you that?”

“Not long ago.”

“But now you've quit?”

“Of course not. I'm not flighty. I still admire the person.”

Roland suddenly looked alarmed. “It's not me, is it?”

Alan burst out laughing. “No! It's a woman. I'm not gay. Are you?”

“No!”

They stared at each other in silence.

“I pity her,” Roland said. “You don't know how unpleasant it is to be stalked.”

“I pity the poor woman who's stalking you. You don't know how unpleasant it is to have one's efforts be despised. Do you find her at all attractive?”

“She's not fat, if that's what you're asking.”

“No … that wasn't what I was asking.”

“She looks good,” said Roland, “but I could never be interested in a woman who pursues me. And I think you should stop stalking your woman.”

“Easier said than done. Anyway, I don't see how it's your business.”

“I'm sorry. I guess I've just become sensitive about this issue.” Roland got up, placed his unfinished smoothie in the trash. He then cordially took leave of Alan, until next time. No, the neighborhood was not treating him well.

As Roland walked out of the snack area, he discreetly took a paper clip out of his shorts' pocket and dropped it on the floor. Yes, he had some of his own eccentric habits, but he was decorously ashamed of them and would never dream of going around parading them. He was proper and continent and did not appreciate the absence of these qualities in others.

Indeed, Roland Dupont had never had a high tolerance for weirdos.

Alan was unusual in plenty of ways Roland did not even suspect. For example, almost every day, Alan walked down the seventeen flights of stairs in the stairwell of his building, stopping at each floor to make sure all the stairwell doors were shut. It usually took him about four minutes.

Patricia didn't enjoy playing the bully, but she couldn't stand Lynn's reproachful glances if she let up on pressuring Lynn to stalk.

“Have you been taking care of yourself lately? Have you been stalking?” Patricia said.

Lynn was pleased with Patricia's pushiness. The extra lessons were paying off. “Yes, I have done more stalking.”

“What stalking have you done?”

“I followed him.”

“You better have done more than that,” Patricia said.

Lynn lowered her eyes. She understood that Patricia was tough not because she was a mean person, but because she cared, and because she knew how important it was that Lynn take her stalking seriously in order to regain her desire.

“I did do a little more,” Lynn said.

“What was it?”

“Notes and such.”

“Notes? What did they say?”

“The same things any stalker's notes would say.”

“What do you mean by that?” Patricia asked, squinting suspiciously under her bushy eyebrows and not letting go, just as Lynn had taught her.

“What do you think I mean?” Lynn squinted back, mockingly.

Patricia did not enjoy being parodied, especially when she was only following orders she didn't want to be following in the first place and that were not part of her job description. In a gesture that was unexpected to the both of them, she grabbed a nearby flexible metal rod that was used to hang paintings, and whipped it against the top of her desk. It made a shattering sound. Lynn's eyes opened wide, thrilled.

“What did your notes say?” Patricia asked.

“Oh, uh, one of them said, ‘To my little pooky bear. I pook you.'”

Patricia frowned. “That's what your stalker wrote you.”

“Yes, I thought it was a good one. So I used it.”

“You copied your stalker?”

“Yes,” Lynn murmured melodramatically, turning her face away suddenly, her hair fanning out in the process.

“It's a crime to plagiarize. It's illegal,” Patricia said.

At that moment a man entered the gallery. The two women fell silent, watching Mark Bricks, who was one of Lynn's rival gallery owners. He was in his late twenties. His gallery was three blocks away.

They all smiled at each other, said hello pleasantly.

He looked at the walls. “Ah. Still not feeling well?” he said to Lynn.

“No.” Lynn felt embarrassed about her naked walls, but she would have felt even more embarrassed had they been clad in works she didn't like. It was known throughout the art world that Lynn was going through a crisis. Her walls had been blank for two months.

“That's a shame,” Mark said. “Judy's not well either. You heard about her accident?”

“Yes, it's terrible. My problem seems trivial by comparison,” Lynn said.

“Not at all. What's more, Judy's doing better, and you're not. Isn't there anything that can get you out of this funk? I want my competition back! I hope to see your walls with a little meat on them before long,” he said, sweetly. “What about your family. Can't they help?”

“My family?” Lynn asked, puzzled.

“Well, I don't know, loved ones? Can't they give you advice? What do your parents do in life?”

People from the art world often asked Lynn what her parents did. “My mother's a cop, and my father's a collector,” she always said, as she did now, to Mark.

“Oh yeah? What kind of art?” he asked.

What constituted art was subjective. “He's fond of objets trouvés.”

Lynn's father was a garbage collector. Her mother was a police officer and had first met her father one night when they were both on duty. They had made eye contact, and it was love at first sight. Her mother had just stepped out of a patrol car that had gotten called about a ground-floor apartment's shattered window. At the same moment, a charming man jumped out of a garbage truck, grabbed a trash bag from the sidewalk, and flung it into the back of the truck. He had spotted this pretty cop who was watching him. He felt shy, and he felt dirty, which he was. They just stared at each other, wondering who would speak first. Lynn's father did. “Hi. Any idea who mighta broke the window?”

“Beats us,” she said. “Me and my partner were wondering if any of that trash was used to break it.”

Since the only trash around was sealed in plastic bags, the charming garbage collector knelt next to a bag of trash. “Let's see if there are any shards of glass stuck in the plastic, which could indicate this bag was swung at the window in order to break it.”

They both knew the bag of trash could not have broken the window. It was full of soft things. But it didn't matter; they needed it to keep talking.

When Lynn was young, her parents were coarse and jovial. They liked to go bowling. They liked motorcycles. And trailers. And they had a dartboard. They were full of mockery toward a dandified relative of theirs who was interested in art and dressed in an elegant manner that they found stuck-up. They scoffed at refinement.

Lynn loved her parents' scorn of pretentiousness, but she also loved the pretentiousness they scorned. She derided the haughty with them, but secretly started accumulating elegant clothes. And she discreetly wore them. When her parents began making little comments like, “Those shoes you're wearing, aren't they a bit la-di-da?” she'd exclaim, “NO-O-O!” with disgust. And she'd turn away, her feet prickling with shame.

But it happened again. Not more than a week later, her mother noticed that Lynn was dressing rather well. She said, “Isn't that a little ladylike, that style?”

Lynn said it was not ladylike in the least, but that was a lie, and she knew it. She was a closet ladylike-clothes wearer. She loved flipping through fashion magazines and followed their more conservative styles.

After college, Lynn got a master's in art history at Columbia. She then spent a year working as a researcher for Christie's in Contemporary Art sales, and spent two years working her way from a sales position at Luhring Augustine gallery to its director. There, she established such good contacts with important collectors that several of them agreed to back her when she moved to open her own gallery.

The first time Lynn's parents visited her gallery, they looked at the paintings hanging on the walls and said, “Like father, like daughter.” It took Lynn a moment to realize they were implying she was a garbage collector, too. She wondered from whom she had gotten her good taste. Certainly not them. Maybe taste skipped a generation, like insanity.

Just as Mark Bricks was about to leave the gallery, Judy walked in wearing a red pantsuit.

“I was worried about you,” Lynn said, hugging her gently.