Love Creeps: A Novel Read online

  The homeless man said to Roland, “They’re still behind you. You’re not alone.”

  To Lynn, he said, “You’re being followed as well. Join a dating service, a choir. Take a break, an antidepressant. Get hold of yourself.”

  And to Alan, “Forget about her. Get a pet, a hobby, a makeover, dignity. Explore the world and gain perspective.”

  Roland felt guilty immediately. He regretted the things he had said to Alan and was surprised that Alan continued meeting with him for their racquetball games.’ When Roland tried to apologize, Alan didn’t accept the apology and was not willing to forgive him.

  Alan was smart enough to know that he was in an advantageous position. He would continue to sulk mildly, until he came up with a way to profit from Roland’s guilt.

  Alan liked hating Roland. In fact, he had wanted to hate him from the beginning, but it had been hard at first, Roland being nice, most of the time.

  In an attempt to rekindle a semblance of friendliness between them, Roland brought up an old topic. “You know, it’s a shame that we never came up with a plan to get back at Lynn. She toyed with us. We’ll toy with her.” Roland looked affectionately at Alan and managed the approximation of a smile, using his neck and eye muscles. “Whatever it is we’ll do to her will be a lot of fun for us, I’m sure,” he said. “So let’s give it some thought, okay?”

  Sitting on his beloved armless white easy chair at home, Alan did give it some thought. And he did come up with a plan. An excellent plan, for someone who hadn’t gone to Harvard, he gloated.

  Taking advantage of Roland’s still-existing feelings of guilt, he told him the plan, and quickly pronounced it as the only way Roland could ever make up for the awful way he had treated him.

  Resentfully, Roland said, “That’s not the kind of plan I had in mind.”

  Firmly, Alan said, “I know it’s not.”

  “Listen,” Roland said, “you annoyed me so much when you pretended you couldn’t see the differences between us, that I ended up saying those stupidities that made me feel remorseful. If it now amuses you to take advantage of that by forcing me to do this thing which you know will be a nightmare for me, fine. I will make this huge sacrifice for you. But then I’ll be done with you.”

  Roland Dupont strolled into Lynn’s gallery, casually dropping a button. He planted himself in front of Lynn and her assistant, who were standing in front of a blank wall, discussing it. They were stunned by Mr. Dupont’s arrival.

  “I need to speak with you. I have a proposition to make,” he said to Lynn. “I propose that you spend a weekend with Alan, the gentleman who fancies you, and in return I will spend a weekend with you.”

  Lynn had no idea what he was talking about. She didn’t know who “Alan” was. She knew lots of Alans, and it didn’t occur to her that her stalker and stalkee could know each other. But regardless, she was already shocked by the repulsiveness of the offer.

  “Who’s Alan?” she asked.

  “The gentleman who fancies you.”

  “Could you be a little more specific?”

  “There are lots of gentlemen who fancy her,” Patricia said.

  “Alan is the gentleman you might have noticed walking behind you on occasion,” Roland said. “He sent you a naked picture of himself, which you then kindly passed on to me. Am I jogging your memory? He sent you dozens of notes signed ‘Alan,’ which you covered in Wite-Out. You sent me the underwear he bought for you. You sent me the bonsai tree he gave you. And the flowers, and the cookies. It’s always good to economize. Passion doesn’t need to be expensive, nor does it need to use up mental energy or creativity.”

  Lynn was getting the sneaking suspicion she had picked a nutcase to stalk. “You know my stalker?” she asked.

  “Yes. Your stalker, Alan, is my racquetball partner.”

  They stared at each other.

  “So where are you from, anyway?” Roland asked. “If we’re going to spend a weekend together, I’d like to know a little about you.”

  “Long Island,” she said, and added nothing.

  “So, are you interested in my weekend offer? Sex will not be expected, on either weekend, from any of the parties.”

  Since she didn’t answer right away, he added, “I know that half of the deal is repulsive to you, but just think of the other half—the weekend with me.”

  “I am.”

  “She’d like to mull it over,” Patricia said. “Wouldn’t you, Lynn?”

  “Yes,” Lynn said.

  They exchanged business cards, and her stalkee left, dropping a paper clip.

  “I’m not sure my stalking therapy is working,” Lynn said to Patricia. “My degree of revulsion is … phenomenal.”

  “You do look pale. But he’s not so bad, Lynn,” Patricia said. “He’s pretty good-looking, and he could be intelligent. You never know, he might turn out to be the man of your dreams.”

  “No one is ever going to be the man of my dreams unless he utters my secret name,” Lynn said.

  “What secret name? You mean like Rumpelstiltskin?”

  “I guess so.”

  “So what is it?”

  “I can’t tell anyone. That’s part of the rules.”

  “What rules?”

  “They’re from my childhood,” Lynn said, her head in her hands.

  “I’m not surprised, it does sound rather childish.”

  “It’s not childish, it’s romantic.”

  “And what if no one ever utters your secret name?”

  “Then I’ll have boyfriends, maybe even a life partner or a husband, but not a man of my dreams.”

  “How sad.”

  “It may be sad, but that’s the way it is.”

  “Your stalkers are still there,” Ray the homeless man whispered to Roland, who was passing.

  After accepting Lynn’s coins, Ray tried to exercise his influence on her. “Do volunteer work, make new friends, learn an instrument, catch up on your reading.”

  He took Alan’s money as well, and said, “Drink eight glasses of water a day. Wear sunblock. Endanger your life to gain perspective.”

  Lynn thought about the offer. Hoping that spending a few days with a man might revive her desire more effectively than following him down the street, she finally agreed to the deal, as long as she could do the weekend with Roland before the one with Alan. She wanted to get ready for maximum revulsion. The men accepted the order.

  Lynn decided to go to Bloomingdale’s to buy some cologne for Roland, cologne that she hoped would make her desire him.

  In the perfume department, she approached a man behind a counter and asked him for the most widely proven men’s cologne. He reached for a bottle. It annoyed her immeasurably that he didn’t ask her what she meant by “widely proven.” Clearly, he just wanted to sell her anything.

  She sniffed the top of the open bottle. “And this will do what I want it to?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, looking in the other direction, clearly bored.

  “How do you know what I want it to do?” she asked.

  “It doesn’t matter what you want it to do, specifically. It makes all your dreams come true. And his, too.”

  “What if mine and his are not the same? What if they are mutually exclusive?”

  “Then it finds a way to make them coexist without problems.”

  “Can I get my money back if it doesn’t work?”

  “If you haven’t opened the package and you still have the receipt, yes.”

  “How can I test it out if I don’t open the fucking package?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “How can I know if this perfume will make my dreams and his coexist without problems if I don’t open the package?”

  “You must have faith. If you open the package and it doesn’t work, that means you didn’t have faith, and your money’s gone. But if you have faith, it will work.”

  Lynn felt a momentary twinge of desire. It was the desire to kill the sales assistant, so it
didn’t count.

  Instead, she bought the cologne and walked home, hating the world and observing herself hating it. She always found it curious to be in a truly bad mood, a mood in which she got angry at her pocket, at the carpet, at the peephole, for all sorts of uninteresting reasons.

  Four

  In the car ride to the inn, Saturday morning, Lynn sat on the right edge of the passenger seat, as far from Roland as she could. She pressed herself against the door and looked out the window, disgusted and silent.

  “You’re not acting like a stalker,” he said.

  “I’m gathering my strength,” she replied, not taking her eyes off the scenery while trying to want him.

  “Boy, if you’re so un-perky with me, I wonder what you’ll be like during your weekend with your own stalker.”

  She became a shade paler. “Please let’s not talk about him.”

  She tried to distract herself by meditating. She closed her eyes and in her mind focused on a large black dot—a giant period. And she tried to want. She opened herself up to desire, to desiring Roland, specifically. She tried to like the sound of his voice as he spoke to her. She waited for him to do something appealing. It seemed hopeless. Tears ran down her cheeks. Not wanting to draw attention to them, she didn’t wipe them away. But soon Roland said, “Oh shit, what have I gotten myself into? A crying stalker.” He sighed. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing at all. Please don’t mind me.”

  “I’m sorry, but you can’t cry and say ‘please don’t mind me.’ It’s rude.”

  “I was just meditating, and sometimes when I meditate my eyes tear.”

  Suddenly, she opened her bag and said, “I got you a present.” She took out the cologne she had bought for him.

  “Oh no,” he groaned. “You’re not going to shower me with gifts during the whole weekend, are you?”

  “This is the only one I got.” She opened the bottle and sprayed some on him.

  A wave of nausea swept over her. “Pull over!” she screamed.

  He did. She stumbled out of the car but was not able to throw up. She took deep breaths of fresh air and tried to calm herself.

  Finally, she got back in the car. Roland had rolled down all the windows, for her sake. “I don’t think it smells so bad,” he said.

  He started dialing a number on his cell phone, telling Lynn, “I have to call the hotel manager and let him know we’re running late. He wanted the exact time we’d be arriving; otherwise, he said he might not be there to let us in.”

  Roland got the manager on the phone and told him they’d be there in an hour.

  Lynn pondered the fact that Patricia thought Roland could turn out to be the man of Lynn’s life. She smiled to herself when she recalled having told Patricia about her secret name.

  Lynn, herself, didn’t really believe the story, but she did find it romantic.

  When Lynn was about six years old, she was at the birthday party of a friend of hers, on Long Island, whose wealthy family had the luxury of hiring a fairy, Miss Tuttle, to entertain.

  “Are you real?” Lynn asked the fairy.

  “No. I’m a fairy. Fairies are not as real as people.”

  “I mean are you a real fairy?” Lynn said, impatiently. “Can you prove to me that you’re a real fairy?”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. You’re the fairy. You should know how to prove it.”

  “Okay, I’ll tell you something a real person would never tell you. Think of a secret name for yourself. This will be your real name. And one day, your Prince Charming will come along, and you will recognize him, because you’ll hear him say your secret, real name.”

  “What’s my secret real name?” Lynn asked.

  “You have to decide for yourself. And it must be a name you’ve never heard before, a name you make up. And you must never say it to anyone.”

  “Can it be beautiful?”

  “Yes.”

  Lynn thought about it for a while, and said, “Can it be Slittonia?”

  “No,” Miss Tuttle the fairy said, thinking it sounded vaguely pornographic. She didn’t want to be accused of having a bad influence.

  “Why not?”

  “Because you just said it to me. I told you that you could not say it to anyone. Including me. In fact, never say it out loud, even to yourself, not even in a whisper. Only in your mind.”

  So Lynn chose “Airiella,” in her mind.

  It was only when Lynn got older that she realized Miss Tuttle the fairy must have been down on men, down on love, and that she had given Lynn a secret message, which was: there is no Prince Charming; Prince Charmings are as unreal as fairies.

  For where, when, and how would Lynn come across a man who would, within her earshot, utter her secret name—a name she had made up when she was six?

  Lynn later learned that Miss Tuttle, the grim fairy, also worked in the neighboring town of Cross as a hairdresser.

  When Lynn and Roland entered the tiny lobby of the inn, no one was there. On the front desk were two keys, with a note that said, “For Roland Dupont and guest: In case I’m not back, you can go straight to your rooms.—Max the manager.”

  They went up. Lynn took the key to room six, and Roland the key to room seven. The door to room six did not have a number on it the way the other doors did, but since it was the only door between rooms five and seven, Lynn assumed it to be the right one.

  As she pressed her key against the keyhole, the door gently swung open on its own.

  Inside the room were two people having sex and talking about the weather. They did not notice Lynn right off, which was how she got to hear some of their talk.

  The woman was lying on her back, on a desk, and the man was standing between her legs, thrusting. The man saw Lynn first and stopped. He turned red quickly, batted his eyes, but apart from that, was frozen. Lynn backed out, stammering.

  The man pulled out of the woman and gushed with apologies. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry. Are you my new guests?”

  Roland had joined Lynn in the doorway, and they were both speechless as the man grabbed his shirt off the floor and wrapped it around his waist. The naked woman had gotten off the desk and was crouching behind it, hiding.

  “I’m really sorry,” the man said to Lynn and Roland, “this is so excruciatingly, exquisitely embarrassing. But the fact is, you made a mistake. The number on your key is six. This is room eight.”

  “Room eight? But it’s between five and seven! Where’s room six?” Lynn said.

  “Farther down the hall. The rooms aren’t in order. This is only an inn,” the man said.

  “Who are you?” Roland asked.

  “I’m Max, the manager. Why don’t you go to your rooms and make yourselves comfortable, and I’ll be with you after I wash up.”

  He found them in their rooms a few minutes later. “I’m glad you’re here. Finally, some interesting people to rescue me! I have not been blessed by the guests here recently. They’re so bourgeois.”

  Their eyes were focused on his codpiece. He took Lynn’s hand, kissed it, said, “Charmed,” and bowed low, his shirt ruffles sweeping the floor.

  Lynn scrutinized him. He seemed to be in his late twenties. He was taller than Roland. He had better posture, was better-looking, and had long hair—a thing Lynn liked on men. And yet, somehow, through dress, mannerisms, and conversation, he was not as appealing as Roland, who was not that appealing himself.

  “By the way, a Mr. Simon Peach called for you. He asked that you call him back,” Max said to Roland. He then turned around and walked out, saying, “If you need anything, just think my name. I have ESP.”

  Simon Peach was Alan’s code name. He had told Roland that the reason he’d be using a code name was that he wanted to reserve the right to call Roland at the inn as often as he liked without embarrassing himself in Lynn’s eyes or having her suspect he was obsessive, or at least more obsessive than had already been revealed by his daily stalking.

  Rol
and had promised Alan he’d call him as soon as they arrived at the hotel, but seeing Max naked had reminded Roland of Alan’s naked photo, and now he no longer felt like calling him. After settling into their rooms, he and Lynn agreed to go for a walk. He would call Alan later.

  Just as they were walking out their doors, a little man appeared saying he wanted to speak with them. They all three went into Roland’s room.

  “I’m Charles, the assistant manager, and I just wanted to apologize for what happened earlier when you unfortunately walked in on the manager having sex.”

  “Yeah, that was unfortunate,” Roland said.

  “It was no accident. It turns Max on tremendously to have people walk in on him. He absolutely relishes feeling embarrassed. He’s sort of an exhibitionist. When he gets caught, he turns very red, really enjoying the sensation. The whole thing is painstakingly orchestrated. He doesn’t allow himself to indulge in this favorite pleasure of his very often. It could be bad for business.”

  “Why are you telling us this?” Lynn asked.

  “Because that’s part of his pleasure, having it revealed to his guests, in case they hadn’t figured it out on their own.”

  “But isn’t he going to feel awkward dealing with us now?”

  “No, he would love it if he did feel awkward, but embarrassment fades very quickly in him. That’s why he treasures it so much. He experiences it so fleetingly.”

  “He’s jaded?” Lynn asked.

  “And calloused. And blasé,” the little man said. “He has often described to me the pleasure he gets from embarrassment. It’s a physical sensation, almost like being on drugs. As his face becomes red, he feels the blood shooting up, prickling the roots of his hair. He feels his pores opening. A warmth invades him. It’s a rush. His aches and pains go away momentarily. And he perceives himself as more attractive, both physically and personality-wise. He finds embarrassed people very, very charming. He envies them. He thinks that their embarrassment reveals a kind of purity and innocence and often even goodness.”