Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked (7 page)

Lou’s grand processional journey from London to New Mexico takes her through a series of shatterings and disavowals: friendship, love, marriage, England, St. Mawr himself … These function as the principle of growth in her psyche:
she becomes steadily more capacious as a character with everything she relinquishes.

Here is a volume of my poetry from 1997 with a poem about a man who gives away all his possessions:

… each object’s

Hollowed-out void successively

More vivid in him than the thing itself,

As if renouncing merely gave

Density to having …

After passing out a few more samples further illustrating the point, I rest my case. And from the sympathetic looks directed at me from the jury, it seems to me I have proved not only that the ideas about surrender in my “psychotic jaywalker” story are not taken from Nasreen, but also that any ideas Nasreen may have believed she herself had on that subject are most likely (avid reader of my work as her emails show her to be) taken from
me
.

*   *   *

It’s a consoling fantasy, and it serves the function it evolved to fulfill: of enabling me to exonerate myself, over and over, in the arena of public opinion, which (as I imagined it in my increasingly harried state) was a vast space full of people with nothing better to do than examine me and watch me suffer.

But there is a private question that lingers:

Why, after being unable to write that story for twenty years, was I suddenly able to write it when I did?

Was it because I finally had a character—Nasreen’s—on whom to model the woman in the story, and thereby bring it to life? If so, what does that say about my perception of Nasreen, and what does this perception say about my interest in her?

I hadn’t been conscious of modeling the woman on her. There is no particular physical resemblance between them, no suggestion of anything Middle Eastern about the woman’s background, which, to the small extent that I describe it, is thoroughly American.

Her behavior, however, is another matter. For one thing, it now seems to me completely implausible. What real woman would do this: fake a broken door to lure men up to her apartment in the hope of a spontaneous fuck? I had been reading Maupassant’s stories around the time of writing, and I think I imagined this action of hers would come over as something like the hard-edged erotic avidity you find in his studies of Parisian men and women, with something amusingly worldly and raffish about it. But it doesn’t come over as anything like that. It comes over as the action of a woman who is either seriously disturbed, or else very obviously just a cipher in a fantasy of the writer who dreamed her up.

The notion of an attractive woman offering herself with no strings attached and no need for the effort or skills of seduction (no need, in fact, for any preliminaries at all) is, I imagine, a fairly standard component of male fantasy. It certainly is in mine. A voice calls to you from on high, from out of the blue, like some supernatural being who has read your mind, heard your prayer, the mumble of your everlasting need, which may be narrowly sexual or may have more to do with jolting yourself out of the settled patterns of your life, however pleasant that life might be, and all you have to do is acquiesce, surrender, and there you are, face-to-face with her, beside her bed …

It seems to me possible that I was motivated to write this story at least partly by the idea of imagining such a being, and that I was able to do this, finally, by combining my memory of the original woman with certain resonances from my first impressions of Nasreen, Nasreen’s first emails having come at me out of the blue (or at least out of a two-year silence) like the voice of the woman in the window, calling for help like her, and curiously similar to her in their amusedly courteous tone and language:
Sir, sir, excuse me, sir …

The fact that the young Englishman in my story is resistant to her charms, gallantly rescuing her from her ostensible plight while failing to acknowledge the underlying emotional plea, if anything further cements the connection, offering, as it does, an accurate representation both of my own irreproachably “correct” behavior with Nasreen and of the extent to which this depended on ignoring more complicated elements in the picture. He remains unaware of her designs on him, as he does of any desires of his own that might have led him up to her apartment in the first place. But both are known, of course, to his author, fabricator of this impeccably English mask, and of the fantastical femme fatale herself, who sends her curses after him as he vanishes out of her life: “Goddam Englishman…,” just as Nasreen was to do when I vanished out of her life a few months later.

So I stand guilty of appropriating some kind of echo or semblance of Nasreen’s “essence,” for literary purposes. Not a crime, perhaps, in the eyes of the ordinary world, but by my own standards definitely troubling, if only for its very strange consequence: that the hybridization seems to have doubled back from the purely fictional realm into the realm of reality, with Nasreen exhibiting symptoms of a disturbance as deep as that of the woman in my story, and doing so more vividly the more closely she identified with her. As she herself was to write a few months later: “i’m living your short story out and I’m scared.” This troubles and perplexes me quite a bit. It is as if in writing a character to some extent modeled on her, I am also guilty of modeling
her
, in turn, on the character: of causing her to develop her own version of the “psychotic” behavior of the woman at the window.

We are in the realm of the Gothic here: mind control, telepathic metamorphosis, whatever you want to call it. I don’t believe in such things; I’m embarrassed even to mention them, and I wouldn’t, were it not for the fact that this peculiar mechanism of reciprocity was to become a steadily more pronounced feature of the story as things got worse, and that, moreover, it began to work as much on me, after a while, as on Nasreen. So much so that, by a certain point, we were both, in effect, creating or re-creating each other in the image of our crassest fear, our most cravenly stereotyping fantasy: the Demon Woman, shall we say, and the Eternal Jew.

Good Morning

You pose as an intellectual but you’re a corrupt thief.

Do you have to be the stereotype of a Jew, James? Oh, I see all the white male writers are doing it too …

I want your apartment because you owe it to me because you were miserable and you sucked my nectar and didn’t help me when you should have …

what is wrong with your people?

do any of you have any ideas of your own? after you kill all of “us” what will you do? everything you have is stolen … there will be nothing left to steal!

Subj: Fwd: Re: (more notes on your sadistic world)

To: [Sandy]

… I was begging for help. And fine, who the fuck am I? A former student, someone he could get a little “lift” from in the midst of his mid-life … Fine, but it hurts to see that he thinks me worthy of something to steal but not to support in any real way for it to be my own.

Subj: why do I bother forwarding this shit?

To: [her English academic]

James. He’s an innocent bystander. It’s almost as if he just walked past a window and I manipulatively called down for help. “Sir … Sir?”

Look, muslims are not like their Jewish counterparts, who quietly got gassed and then cashed in on it … my people are crazy motherfuckers and there will be hell to pay for what your people have done to them …

Subj: signs of the end of the world …

began with Janice’s limping.

why the fuck did you send me to her? was this supposed to be a joke on me? an inside jew-joke?

ha ha ha ha! So nice of you. And I’m a psychotic jaywalker because I believe in God and haven’t sold my soul to American cash?

you couldn’t have, without all the bullshit (incestuously paid-for) rave reviews you get, found me an agent to work with?

[…]

You steal.

You steal.

You steal.

Call it antisemitism, I call what you do arrogance and I call it disgusting.

Subj: I want my money back …

For the term you “taught me” and for the term you were my “advisor” but couldn’t even remember to bring me my work.

Subj: apologies …

I hope you don’t take anything I say seriously. I understand everyone is too chickenshit to help an insane woman. And no, I don’t expect you to pay me for what you stole. it happens all the time and why should you care about my nervous breakdowns? I never even fucked you …

Subj: a real, unpsychotic note

[…]

You are a kind man, James. I don’t think you’re the caricature of a white man but I’m hoping I’ve pissed you off. It brings color to the cheeks.

Mr. Horned God.

So tacky!

Subj: surrender …

you must be so perplexed.

i’m hoping my mean-streak doesn’t lend itself to calling your management company and telling them you rent the apartment out on weekends. I would. I hope I don’t. I really firmly believe that you need to absolve your guilt by giving me your keys.

[…]

(I hope I’m scaring you slightly. That would be exciting.)

I also believe you are on medication instead of dealing with why you and most Jewish people are sadistic. That is why your writing falls flat.

Subj: Harriet too … you fucked her too?

Is that right?

Well, I almost feel sorry for her because she obviously went from being a good writer to turning in nothing and you stole her writing too … in that story. You stole from everyone in our class.

[…]

I don’t feel that bad for her. She was another vicious, overly competitive Jewess …

I wish ill health and disaster …

for you and your family.

Baruch adonai,

Nasreen

jews in america

need to shut up. the crazy shit that comes out of your mouths spreads far and wide in a city filled with blacks, muslims and asians who’ve had it: This sort of projection doesn’t work and all of you pussies who sit around writing stupid shit and stealing from little girls are just as much to blame.

[…]

Go forward this to the anti-defamation league. They’re criminals too …

*   *   *

So the summer continued.

I was bewildered, stunned, appalled, but at this time I didn’t take the actual content of the emails very deeply to heart. I regarded the outburst as something entirely freakish: an eruption of irrational fury that, unpleasant as it was to witness, had nothing to do with me personally. It would end soon, I believed, either in silence or in a mortified apology (a genuine one that would unconditionally retract all the false accusations instead of reserving the right, as her occasional “conciliatory” emails always did, to continue calling me a thief if I failed to respond).

Sometime in the fall, Nasreen announced that she was going to move to California, where her family lived. The decision seemed to soften her tone. She appeared (though it’s hard to be certain) to be making fun of herself:

… I need to leave the East Coast where everyone is racist and crazy. Besides, I am unsafe here and the annoying trustfund hipsters raise my blood pressure.

Love,

Nasreen, the peace-seeking and relentless verbal terrorist.

There was even what appeared to be the beginnings of an explanation for her behavior:

I really hope you and Paula and Janice understand my bitter comments. I know you know what it’s like to be in character. I always have a hard time snapping out …

Being “in character,” presumably for her novel, wasn’t a very convincing explanation for her emails (there were no anti-Semites in her novel), but the fact that she seemed to think they needed to
be
explained seemed encouraging. It was December by now, and with the year winding down and Nasreen moving to the other side of the country, I was cautiously hopeful that the whole unpleasant episode might be coming to an end.