Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked Read online

  Janice happened to be traveling at this time and was slow getting to the book. The delay, along with the fact that I was the one responsible for this introduction, made me feel under more of an obligation than I had before. Reversing my earlier position, I offered to read the first section of the novel myself, so as to be able to be more specific in my recommendation to Janice. I was planning to be in New York for a couple of days in late April, and we arranged that Nasreen would give me the pages when I came down. A date and time were set for the handover, and a café in the Village selected for the location. As the day for this meeting approached, it took on a vaguely fateful character, at least in my mind, what with the somehow momentous question of how Janice was going to respond to the book hanging over it, not to mention the cumulative effect of Nasreen’s emails, which were now coming rather frequently, so that I was beginning to feel a little saturated by her, or by the thought of her.

  Among these recent emails was one containing a strange photograph of herself, taken in her twenties. It was just of her face, and it was exposed in such a way that almost nothing showed except the curving lines of her eyes and mouth and a few wisps of hair, making her look like a ghost. I wasn’t sure whether sending me this fell into the category of flirting or was just a normal thing for people a decade younger than myself to do, people who had instantly embraced all the conveniences of Internet communication, as she had (she was always sending attachments and links), instead of being daunted by them, as I was. Whatever the case, the incandescent face of that photograph had supplanted what remained of my somewhat hazy memory of her actual appearance, and when I arrived at the café for our meeting it took me a few seconds to realize that the dark-haired woman in her mid-thirties wearing sensible office clothes and talking with a harried expression on her cell phone by the counter was in fact Nasreen. She closed the phone, and after a slightly awkward greeting, we went to sit at the back of the café, by a window opening onto a stone courtyard.

  The meeting, which lasted about half an hour, had a muffled, muted quality—oddly so, given the buildup. Despite her extravagant loquaciousness as an emailer, Nasreen was even quieter in person than I remembered her. Not that she wasn’t perfectly pleasant, but there was something canceled or hidden, somehow, about her bearing; a strange irreality in her presence across from me at our lacquered pine table, as if she were absent in all but the most literal, mechanical sense.

  Our conversation was friendly enough but desultory. She spoke caustically about her family, some in New York, some in California, giving an impression that her artistic ambitions and unsettled life had cast her in the role of black sheep—not shunned exactly, but clearly not approved of. There was money, she implied, but not much of it flowing in her direction. Picking up on this rueful note, I mentioned a problem of my own that had just arisen, concerning our apartment. Our subtenant, the woman from Baltimore, had called the day before to say she was buying a studio and no longer needed to share with us. This was a blow, as it had been extremely hard to find a tenant whose needs dovetailed as conveniently with ours as hers did, and I seriously doubted whether we would be able to find anyone else. Even if we did, there was a danger that the management company that had recently bought the building and installed an office inside would notice the new face, put two and two together, and realize we were subletting against the rules of our lease. We couldn’t afford to keep the place unless we shared it, so we were looking at the prospect of losing our foothold in New York.

  All of this had been weighing on me since our tenant’s call, and it was what came naturally to mind as something to talk about in response to Nasreen’s comments about her own financial troubles. Nasreen listened politely, but I had the impression that she wasn’t taking much of it in.

  We finished our coffees and left the café. Outside, we walked in the same direction for a couple of blocks. Nasreen lit a cigarette and smoked it beside me, silent except for the light clopping of her heels on the sidewalk. She seemed frail, I thought; possibly a little stressed. At the corner where our ways parted she gave me the manuscript, and, with a quick kiss on the cheek, we said goodbye.

  * * *

  I had some anxiety about reading the manuscript. What if, despite the great promise of the drafts I’d seen two years earlier, she had somehow botched things? I know from experience how easy it is to lose the thread of a narrative. One wrong turn and you can end up spending months or even years in a wilderness of futile and wasted effort. Or what if I simply didn’t like it as much as I had? What would I say? How might she take it? These manuscripts are a dense embodiment of their creators’ deepest drives and ambitions. Large forces circulate around them. They come into your hands, as a reader, charged with volatile potentialities of trust and suspicion, hope and fear, friendship and eternal enmity. This too I know from experience, and I opened the padded envelope with a familiar sense of foreboding.

  I needn’t have worried. The writing was as good as I remembered it: strong sentences confidently evoking the epic setting of Tehran on the brink of revolution, a sharply drawn cast of characters with an interestingly unbalanced heroine at the center, and a story line of love tangles and political power struggles that seemed to be plunging swiftly forward under its own effortless momentum. I had criticisms, mainly about the essayistic passages, which still felt extraneous to the narrative, but this seemed something a good editor could easily remedy, and in general I felt entirely vindicated in my earlier enthusiasm.

  I emailed Nasreen, detailing my responses and attaching a copy of an email I’d sent Janice, reiterating my support.

  As far as I understood, the rest of the novel existed only in very rough draft, and I do remember being concerned that, since even this first section needed another pass, Janice might feel it was too early to commit herself as the agent. My own view was that the forcefulness of the writing, evident from the first page, was sufficient guarantee that a good book was going to emerge sooner or later. For me, at that time, the definition of a writer was very simply, as some critic put it, someone who has “an interesting way with words.” Do the sentences engage you? Cast a spell over you? Make you want to read on? If so, that’s enough, regardless of the story itself. If not, no amount of socially, politically, or otherwise “relevant” material is going to make a difference. I don’t feel so sure of this anymore (I don’t feel so sure of anything anymore), but even at the time I was aware that not everyone shared this rather cavalier way of judging a piece of writing. And I could certainly imagine that from the point of view of an agent debating whether or not to take on a first novel—the hardest kind of book to sell—an “interesting way with words” might not be quite enough of an incentive.

  Janice was impressed enough to invite Nasreen in for a meeting. By all accounts the meeting was pleasant and positive, but in the end, as I’d feared, she decided the book was still too far from completion to take on for the moment. She did, however, recommend Nasreen to a friend of hers—I’ll call her Paula Kurwen—who worked as a freelance editor. I’d never met Paula, but I knew she had a good reputation. She liked the manuscript enough to feel able to help shape it, and very soon Nasreen sent me an enthusiastic email saying that the two of them were working productively together. It wasn’t quite the same as being taken on by an agent, but it was probably the best outcome that could be hoped for at this stage in the book’s development. At any rate it was certainly a step in the right direction, and I was glad to have been able to play a part.

  In June I had to do some traveling—to London and back, then on to Los Angeles. As I had some time in between the two journeys, I decided to make the trip to L.A. by train, on one of the double-decker Amtrak Superliners that begin in Chicago and cross the country in leisurely, old-fashioned style, with glass-walled observation cars, dining compartments, and private “roomettes.” The journey takes three days from Chicago, and I planned to break it up for an extra night in New Mexico. In the uneventful life I lead, this expedition constituted major news
, and I mentioned it in an email to Nasreen, along with the other, more humdrum highlights of that spring, such as the escape of our pet cockatiel and my project to cover the walkways in my vegetable garden with stone.

  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 afte
r.

  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 …