Love Creeps: A Novel Read online

  “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.

  “We were just talking about you,” Mark said.

  “Sorry I haven’t been in touch,” Judy said, “but life has accelerated. I’ll get to the point. Go and get yourself hit by a truck. All three of you. But you, especially, Lynn. I highly recommend it. It clears the head like nothing else. It will help you regain your desire for things, lots of things. Forget all the other tricks, the addictions and all that. This is much more effective. Foolproof. If your lack of desire ever drives you to the verge of suicide, first try walking in front of moving traffic.”

  Mark said, “You’re not, by any chance, trying to eliminate your competition, are you?”

  “No! I’m absolutely serious.”

  “Hmm. You do seem well,” he said.

  “Yes, you do,” Patricia said.

  “I am well. It was a very violent blow, but evenly distributed over the length of my entire body, and therefore it was more traumatizing to my soul than to any one part of me. Now I have an incredible zest for life. There are all sorts of things I want to do, vacations I want to go on, people I want to meet. That’s why I thought of you, Lynn. I feel the opposite of you. Getting hit by that truck was the best thing that ever happened to me. But I’m aware that the benefits might wear off. The euphoria, the divine perspective might fade, so one day I may have to do it again to refresh my zeal.”

  She paused, and they all watched her. “Well, I just stopped by to tell you that. Lynn, your walls are still empty, so think about it.”

  She kissed all three of them and left.

  Mark left shortly after that, and as soon as he was gone, Patricia said, “As I was saying, it’s a crime to plagiarize. Do you know that certain authors have committed suicide because people found out they were plagiarizers? They killed themselves out of shame. Have you done anything else, other than follow him and send him notes?”

  “I sent some lingerie.”

  “What? He’s a man! Stalking will never treat you well if you treat it with mockery.”

  “I didn’t do it with mockery. I enclosed a note that said I could wear this lingerie for him. It was the lingerie my stalker sent me.”

  “Lord! That is worse than derivative. You’ll get nowhere fast this way.”

  “I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.”

  “Tell me you’ll come up with your own ideas.”

  “I’ll come up with my own ideas.”

  Lynn did try to come up with her own ideas, but in the meantime she simply continued following Roland down the street. And she, in turn, was often followed by Alan.

  Ray, the homeless ex-therapist, continued observing them. People sometimes interested him, like this chain of stalking, but he had been disillusioned by so-called intriguing people. And they had cost him one year of his freedom. While trying to pierce a mystery of human motivation, he had overstepped the bounds of lawfulness and had ended up serving a one-year prison sentence for coercion in the second degree—a class-A misdemeanor—and getting his therapy license permanently revoked.

  The incident had begun innocently enough when one of his patients had informed him that a female acquaintance had told him not to bother pursuing her romantically, because she was not interested in dating him.

  “Do you have any idea why she didn’t want to date you?” Ray had asked.

  “No. And I don’t care.”

  “You don’t care? But it would be useful to know, for future reference, like the next time you meet a woman you want to date.”

  “But I didn’t want to date her.”

  “Then why did you ask her out?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Then why did she tell you not to pursue her romantically?”

  “Beats me.”

  Ray leaned forward in his seat and spoke very clearly. “What did you say to that woman that made her think you might want to date her?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What do you mean, nothing? She just said that, out of the blue? She rejected you preemptively?”

  “Yes. It hadn’t even entered my mind to date her.”

  “It would be good for you to know why she said that. I think you sho
uld call her up when you get home and ask her.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “Well, I do. It’s important that you do this. We can’t make much progress if you don’t.”

  That night, Ray called up his patient and asked him if he had called the woman yet. The patient said no. So Ray called him back an hour later and asked him if he had called her yet. The patient said no. This went on a few more times, a few more days, until finally Ray managed to get the woman’s phone number from the patient and called her up himself and asked her why she had told the patient not to bother pursuing her romantically. There was a long silence. The woman said, “Who are you?”

  “That’s not important,” Ray said.

  “You’re a friend of his? Why didn’t he call me himself?”

  “He didn’t want to, but I think it’s important that he know why you said that.”

  “You think it’s important?” she said. “Who are you, his therapist?”

  “Yes.”

  She laughed. “No, really, who are you?”

  “I am his therapist.”

  She snorted, still not believing him. “Listen, I don’t have time for this.”

  “Wait, can’t you just, please, answer the question?”

  “No. How’s that? No.” And she hung up.

  No? No? Why, no? He punched his pillow.

  “She’s a bitch,” Ray informed his patient.

  “Yeah, she might be.”

  “No, I’m telling you, she is. How can you not see it? I mean, that she would presumptuously tell you not to try to date her, for no reason! Why doesn’t that make you more mad? That’s not healthy.”

  “Well, it did annoy me a little bit.”

  “That’s my point. Why not more? That doesn’t make sense. It’s as though you’re hiding something, as though you perhaps know why she said that, know what you did to make her say that, and you just won’t tell me.”

  “Yes, you’ve already told me you think that, but it’s not true.”

  “Then why aren’t you more mad that she was so presumptuous? You don’t seem at all tormented by the mystery of it.”

  “No, I guess I’m not.”

  “Well, you’ve got to work on that.”

  This patient, who at first hadn’t cared why the woman told him not to pursue her romantically, was gradually transformed, thanks to Ray, into a neurotic wreck who ended up resorting to alcohol and drugs to endure the stresses of life caused by his therapist.

  As for the mystery of why the woman had told his patient not to bother pursuing her romantically, Ray pierced it. He found the woman, tied her to a chair at knifepoint, and forced her to answer the question. Her answer was: “He had asked me to dinner.” And for that banal answer, Ray served his one-year prison sentence. He had been disappointed before by patients, but this one took the cake. No matter how enticing patients seemed at first, they let him down. The human was a less interesting animal than he had thought. With little personality, no real character—the human was all just meat. Meat, meat, meat. And Ray had been fooled so many times. Now, when he saw nuts, he steered clear. He had become suspicious of strange behavior—he suspected it wasn’t as strange as it seemed.

  Ray was sorry about the damage he’d caused so many of his patients. By being a homeless person, he had chosen to condemn himself to the hell of human banality. It was like standing in a stream of disappointment, day after day. He had become desensitized to strangeness and would not let this weird stalking chain—comprised of the three nuts—reawaken his curiosity disorder. He was comfortable with his new identity as a blasé bum and determined not to be seduced again.

  Ray was relieved, in a way, that Patricia hadn’t answered his questions about Lynn. Asking questions was playing with fire. Patricia’s answers might have aggravated his curiosity disorder. He never again asked her any questions, nor did he accept money from her when she walked by.

  Lynn was trying to get ready for a lunch appointment with a collector. She couldn’t find her tweezers. She never left home or her gallery without plucking a couple of hairs first. This preparation was mental more than physical.

  She usually kept tweezers in her desk drawer, but they weren’t there; she had looked three times already. She searched on her desk, under her desk, around the light box, in the wastepaper basket, in the bathroom, all the while mumbling to Patricia that she couldn’t find her red tweezers. Patricia’s silence suddenly made an impression on her. Lynn looked at her assistant, who was staring back at her placidly. The tweezers were on Patricia’s nose, clamping it shut, pointing forward and up, like a strange beak.

  “I’ve been looking for those for the past ten minutes. You know I’m running late for lunch!”

  She marched toward her assistant, arm outstretched to grab her tweezers, but Patricia yanked them off her nose and hid them behind her back, shaking her head and saying, “No plucky before stalky. You haven’t stalked yet today. Stalk first, pluck later.”

  They should put an expiration date on those pita rolls. There was no question about that. Those supermarket people were in the wrong. And they lied to Alan. They told him the pita rolls were replaced every day, but they were not, Alan was sure of it. To prove it, he had secretly marked them when no one was looking, made a tiny X with a pen on the label on the back of the package. And five days later, they were still there.

  To soothe his nerves he added two six-packs of beer to his shopping cart and headed toward the checkout. The female cashier carded him. He thought she was just trying to flatter him, to make up for the lie about the pita rolls. He searched for his driver’s license but couldn’t find it.

  She wouldn’t let him buy the beer without ID.

  “But I’m thirty-four and look even older,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, it’s our policy.”

  “Okay, I’m flattered, I appreciate your attempt at making me feel better after the fiasco with the pita rolls, but please ring up this beer. I need it to help me get over the pita rolls. I need it more than flattery.”

  She still refused.

  “If you don’t ring up this beer I will be more pissed off than ever about the pita rolls, and you will have defeated your purpose.”

  She didn’t seem particularly knowledgeable about the pita-roll reference. Perhaps not everyone was in on it.

  “Okay, whatever. This supermarket sucks,” he said, paying for the rest of his merchandise.

  Just as he had promised, he walked home feeling more angry than ever. The disappearance of his driver’s license didn’t help, but he knew he was also irritated at himself over an entirely different issue.

  It was bad enough that the woman he loved and stalked loved and stalked another man, but that on top of it she was using his precious words to seduce her prey was tough on Alan. No matter how hard he tried to shrug it off, it came back, the torment. He came up with an idea he hoped would get her attention, perhaps even bring her to a halt in her pursuit of Roland.

  At home, he screwed his Polaroid camera onto a tripod, took off his clothes, pressed the timer button, and stood in front of the camera. The flash went off and the picture slid out. He waited for his nakedness to appear. It did. His entire body and face were very clear. He slipped the photo into an envelope, got dressed, and dropped it off at Lynn’s gallery.

  Later, Lynn opened the envelope, was assaulted by the sight of her naked stalker, and, refusing to remember that she had promised Patricia she would come up with her own ideas, she slipped the Polaroid into another envelope and addressed it to Mr. Dupont. She attached a little note to the picture.

  Roland Dupont, later, opened the envelope and was assaulted by the sight of his racquetball partner naked. He grimaced and read the note.

  Later, Alan waited for Roland at the racquetball courts. When Roland finally showed up, he thrust something into Alan’s hands and said, “Explain.”

  Alan stared at the naked photo of himself. The volleying racquetballs in nearby courts sounded like ex
plosives, blasting into his brain.

  Alan had not expected Lynn to send Roland that photo. After he’d mailed it to Lynn, he’d deeply regretted doing so when he realized Lynn might copy his idea and send Roland a nude photo of herself. He’d felt like a complete idiot and was beating himself up about it. He, Alan, was the one who deserved a naked photo of Lynn, not Roland. He’d tried to comfort himself with the thought that maybe Roland would at least let him see the nude photo of Lynn. Maybe Roland would even let Alan buy it from him, or at least make a Xerox of it.

  Alan had to think fast. He couldn’t let Roland know that their meeting as racquetball partners had been deliberate; otherwise, Alan was sure Roland would get paranoid, would want nothing more to do with Alan, would think Alan and Lynn were psychos who were probably in cahoots and purposely tormenting him. Alan was not ready for that to happen. He wanted to continue his acquaintanceship with Roland; he wanted to know him better and understand what Lynn saw in him.

  In order for this to happen, he had to act at least as shocked as Roland by this turn of events.

  “How do you explain it?” Alan shouted.

  “I got it from my stalker. I think it’s pretty self-explanatory. Read the fucking note.”

  Alan read, “Dear Mr. Dupont, Here is proof that I am a desirable person and that you should give me some thought. This is a photo of my stalker, which he sent me this morning. You see, I have one, too.”

  “Are you my stalker’s stalker?” Roland asked.

  “I am no one’s stalker. Apparently, the woman I admire may be the same woman who’s been admiring you.” Alan carefully changed his expression, trying to appear as though he were making a sudden realization. “Oh my God. She’s copying me! She’s sending you the same notes I sent her. I thought those notes you told me about sounded familiar, like when she called you ‘My pooky bear.’ I mean, that is not the universal language of stalkers, I don’t think.” Alan felt the need to discuss with Roland the strangeness of Lynn copying his stalking style.

  Roland said, “The notes she sent me are in my briefcase in the locker room. Let’s check.”