“Nothing to worry about,” the doctor reassured me on the phone. Her name was Dr. Denny Bright. “This happens all the time at the end of the first trimester,” she said, “but if you want me to check you I will.”
By the time I got to her office, the blood was serious, and by the time Terence got out of the last show at eleven, I was in the hospital. I had miscarried and I was slightly sedated. But not enough.
“Please get the fuck out of here,” I said clearly, calmly, when I saw him and I could speak.
For weeks after that, we lay next to each other in the midgets’ big bed, not touching. After a while I drifted back downtown to my old apartment. Terence was offered a mini-series that shot in Liverpool and Luxor called So What, Sun Ra?, or something like that. His role was a narc, a really fine part—he got to wear a trenchcoat and have a tic.
We said good-bye on the phone. Our conversation didn’t last long. It turned out that there really wasn’t much else to say.
Seven
DEAR LETTERS EDITOR,
You send me that smart-ass answer in the mail, then I seen here you printed my letter in your column and dragged my butt over the coals in public. You gotta lot of nerves, Digby. When I say I don like something IT MEANS WATCH OUT BELOW. I’M SAYIN IT NOW—THIS I DON’T LIKE. Your in for it now sister.
Sincerely,
Dino Pedrelli
Dear Willis,
Keep up the good work! I think you are great! Here’s a pair of socks I knitted for you (one size fits all!) sorry about the dropt stitches! Could you take a photo of your feet wearing them and send to me by return mail?
Yours,
Lulu Lagerfelt
P.S. Glad you told those pigs off!
I noticed I had some mail from The Watcher, another faithful correspondent. The Watcher sent me vaguely threatening notes, which were also vaguely poetic. The first one I’d gotten months earlier, right after Terence had gone off to his miniseries.
Dear Willis Digby,
Although the lamp is out, I can see fairly clearly in the reflected light from other buildings: pigeons, scaffolding, a window washer’s pail and sponge touched by a ray. Then suddenly it’s darker—and I can see you. I pull the telescope over. You’re working late tonight, like me. Working late, your head bowed over a pile of papers. Every once in a while you look up, murmur something to yourself, then sink back into a little chasm of shadow. You’re lovely, Willis, I can see it clearly—even when you pull your hair severely back and wear strange things on your head. Even when you wear men’s clothing. You were wearing clothes like that the morning I first saw you. I passed by your building and you were on the street talking to the mailman, who was standing there with all those overflowing mail sacks for SIS. You were laughing; you said: “I’m Willis Digby, what kind of bribe would it take to get you to stop bringing this stuff?”
You have a bright face, meant to be happy. But something has hurt you. I can tell as I watch you. Sometimes you stare at the wall, you twirl your hair, you look inexpressibly sad. I wish I knew what has hurt you. Maybe I do. Maybe you need to talk to someone like me. Someone who watches over you.
The Watcher
I looked out the SIS windows at the surrounding buildings—nothing but office towers. One to one hundred floors. Attorneys, magazines, public relations, holding companies. He could be in any one of them. I felt so vulnerable, so “un-taken care of” I almost began to enjoy knowing he was out there. A mad guardian angel. He wrote a lot. Same type of letter.
I met a famous “Advice to the Lovelorn” columnist. She was seated next to me at a luncheon for women journalists, and I immediately began picking her brains about letters. She was plucky and staunch, a small, pretty, no-nonsense woman in her late fifties, with the immobile mandible of the face-lifted. She said she got a thousand letters a day (her column appeared daily in newspapers all over the country), which put things more in perspective for me, though the solace didn’t last long. She also said that crazy letters were obvious and that she disregarded them. She said you could always tell the real psychos by the handwriting. She said that it was usually large, sloping, half off the page, or small, frenzied, and misshapen. The Watcher certainly fit the bill here—his tiny fevered script with all its blots and crossings-out looked like an exploded ant farm. “In all these years I’ve never had any personal dealings with any of my correspondents, honey” then added, her voice dropping, “it’s never a good idea.”
The Watcher had a whole lot to say to me about me. He knew nothing about me, I decided, but his speculations were often startlingly perceptive. At the worst of my “what a lousy year it’s been” depression, he wrote an oddly insightful letter about children. Did my sadness have anything to do with children? Or childhood? He could see that I looked down, he could see I needed someone to talk to. There was “a child dying” in my face, he said. I showed this letter to Page, who said, “Willis, look at me. Is there a cat dying in my face?”
I was tempted to answer him, to detail my sorrows in a letter to a total stranger (and voyeur at that!), but I resisted the impulse, I wasn’t that crazy. Still, I caught myself throwing my hair back a little self-consciously when I walked through the columns of sunlight that poured through the great naked SIS windows. It was like appearing in a film—was it possible that I tried to imagine sometimes what the camera was seeing, what the camera wanted to see? Think about it. When was the last time someone watched your every move with tireless, loving eyes? You were a child, and the tender, concerned gaze belonged to the watchful totemic beings you learned to call mother and father. You know, the ones who eventually got distracted and looked away?
Dear Digby,
I saw you at Padgett’s Deli. You have the most wonderful way of looking involved when you’re actually daydreaming. A quotation mark of concentration appears between your brows, and you chew (very delicately) on one side of your lip. When it was your turn to order, the guy behind the counter had to say, “Miss? Miss?” three times before you came to. But you covered it beautifully. “It’s the cole slaw,” you said in a clear tone. “It looks particularly fine today.”
Dear Digby,
This afternoon you were in the lobby of the SIS building waiting for the elevator. Nobody was around, the elevator was taking forever. Then a black guy with a ghetto blaster took up position in the lobby doorway—he was parked like a sound truck, 200 decibels of “Heartbreak Hotel.” You looked guilty for a split second, checked to be sure you were alone, then launched into a really funky Elvis imitation for the lobby mirrors. You rolled your hips, twisted down to the floor, held an invisible mike to your sneering lips. You stomped and wailed and wept and shook your hair, and when the elevator arrived (with that curmudgeonly elevator operator), you stopped cold, instantly. You adjusted your collar haughtily before boarding the lift. I heard you say, “What took you so long?” out of the corner of your mouth.
WJD,
You were wearing a brilliant yellow silk scarf this morning. It was so bright it reminded me of the yellow cotton dress that a Salinger character named Charlotte wore, the dress that left a stain on Seymour’s hand. Do you know the one?
Of course I did. I knew the yellow mark on Seymour’s hand and his famous remark about it. How he described himself as a person who was paranoid in reverse: He suspected other people of plotting to make him happy. That happened to be one of my favorite passages in literature. It seemed the Watcher and I had somehow evolved similar literary taste, or at least he liked some of the same Great Moments, in Richard II and Issa and Emily Dickinson. He was eerily close to seeing through me, into my Bide-a-Wee heart.
So why couldn’t I see him? Which lurker-in-the-shadows was he? The guy in the knit cap and sunglasses in the deli? The pale, apologetic gent in the three-piece suit at the bus stop? A cabbie? A cook? Who? I focused on certain faces—would he have a mustache like that? An overbite? A Stones T-shirt or Mojo root? Dredlocks? I became self-conscious in the subway, in the coffee line.
He called himself an “artist-seer.”
“Artist-schmartist. The guy’s a voyeur,” Page wailed, outraged, sifting through his missives. “Bear this in mind, Willis. He’s no better than your average Peeping Tom, he just talks posh.”
Dear Digby,
I’ve given you my P.O. Box Number, my Heart File. Why don’t you write to me? Please, please, write to me.
I’d sent out a few unconventional responses to letters in my time, but I couldn’t bring myself to connect here. I did not write back. Still, I looked for his letters. They got more intense, even critical.
When I broke precedent and answered weird correspondents in the column, he was miffed. I spent my time coming up with smart comments for others, but not a crumb for him? Also, I’d lost an “innocent quality.” One day he looked at me in late afternoon sun and my profile struck him as “sharp, desperate, predatory.” (This gave rise to Page’s coining of the expression, “Digby’s SDP Profile.” The SDP Profile had nothing to do with my emotions, she said, but rather an overdeveloped chin. Can I help it, I asked her, if I have my father’s Four-Star jaw?)
Today his letter looked sealed in haste, angry. The handwriting was even more constipated than usual.
Dear Digby,
Ah, the “folly of being comforted” (as the poet says) by what appears before the eyes. I had thought you were kind. That day I saw you, in the sunlight, laughing with the mailman, I thought I’d seen a dreamer—I loved the touching hesitancy in your manner. You seemed hopeful, ingenuous. Now I see you are—what? A frightening mixture of fear and cynicism. I know about the actor. I read a scandal sheet the other day that linked your name with his. Is that the tragedy one sees in your eyes? The loss of a media huckster? How could you? I know some other things about you too. I know now, for instance, that you live at 871 East 17th Street, Apartment 7W. I know you leave for work every day around 9:15 A.M., and I see your lights go out at night. You stay up late, Digby, you must have trouble sleeping. I see you reading, then I see you throw the book down, pace, talk to yourself. Something is driving you crazy. Isn’t something bothering you, something from the past? Sometimes you hold yourself and cry, you really sob. Your bedroom faces east—you get the first light. Sometimes you’re still up then. The sun comes up and you look out the window at the red sky and you watch the sun come up. I watch your face turn gold, like a carved image on a sarcophagus—you look dead. You’re dead inside, aren’t you, Willis Digby?
I stopped reading. I threw The Watcher’s letter down and stalked over to the coffee maker. I fixed myself a large white coffee with the horrible fake cream powder and sat down again. Then I got up and held the letter in front of Page’s face. “Read this.”
She read it, then set it aside as if it were soaked in cat pee. “You should have called the police right away about this guy—didn’t I tell you that when he first wrote to you about peering at you through the windows? Now he’s on your doorstep.”
She looked up at me. “You look terrible. Are you okay, Willis?”
I was not okay. But I sighed back to my desk and set the letter aside for the moment and plucked another envelope from the pile.
Dear Willis,
You haven’t been publishing our suggestions. No fair. We gave you our support when you needed it. You need your consciousness raised. Come out with us on a “run”—or are you too chicken? Meet us Wednesday night at seven, at Cleopatra’s Needle. Don’t forget to RSVP. (And don’t forget to wear running shoes!)
Your friends at W.I.T.C.H
I turned the envelope and looked at the W.I.T.C.H. symbol stamped at the back.
Page had a lunch date. After she’d gone, I picked up the phone. I called the Daily Mirror and asked for the city desk. I told the guy who answered about Iris Moss and the hypnorapist of Brookheart. He asked a lot of questions. I heard computer blips in the background.
“An orderly,” I said. “Isn’t that interesting? What is an orderly doing giving out medication in the first place?”
“Who can confirm all this?” the editor asked.
I gave Iris’s name. “She resides at Brookheart.”
The guy laughed. “C’mon, Ms. Digby. You mean to say she’s one of the crazy people? She gave you the story?”
“Now who would be in a better position to know about patient abuse than a patient?”
After I hung up, I sat for a while, staring at the pile of letters. I looked over at my rabbit ears. They’d grown dusty in recent days. I blew the dust off. I looked at them fondly for a while. I put them on.
Dear Dino,
Wise up. You write a letter to the editor at a magazine or newspaper, you relinquish your rights to it. You were lucky enough to get published in SIS. Look at it that way, scrotum-head.
Yrs,
WJD
Dear W.I.T.C.H.,
Okay, I’d like to go on a “run” with you. I will be there at Cleopatra’s Needle in the Park, Wednesday night at seven. I’ll be the one wearing rabbit ears.
In struggle,
Sister Digby
Then I pulled out the threatening letter. It was signed, as usual, The Watcher. I edited the letter, taking out the more blatant personal references—my address, etc.—leaving basically the fact of the threat: that this guy had my home address and was spying on me.
My hands were shaking. On yellow copy paper I roughed out an answer.
Dear Watcher,
I want my readers to know that you’ve written to me before. Many times, in fact. Always your letters have referred to the fact that you are watching me. Watching me from the office building where you work, through your telescope. Watching me on the street, at the lunch counter, the pharmacy, when I have no idea I’m being observed. How many times have you asked me to write back to you at your post office box, to be your friend? Well, here I am. I’m writing back now, publicly, because I would like other women to witness you, to witness the kind of cheap, threatening bully you really are. Men who make obscene phone calls. Men who write anonymous threats to women, men who follow women on the street—you’re all the same. I will not be your friend. Nor will I be afraid of you. I’m going to call the police, and I’m also going to give you fair warning. If you keep on violating my right to privacy, don’t count on me to be a scared, defenseless victim. If you try to threaten me physically in any way: the victim, pal, I promise you, will be you.
Sincerely,
Willis J. Digby
Letters Editor
I put my answer to the W.I.T.C.H. letter in the regular mail slot and put the note to Dino and the one to The Watcher in the big red DEADLINE COPY basket. All copy for the magazine was supposed to be approved by the SIS collective editorial board—but my letters often slipped by without group review. Over the years trust had developed for my odd selection process and for the fact that I was a maverick. Too much trouble to argue with.
I threw another couple of letters (one from my favorite U.F.O. spotter), with instructions to the printer, in the same deadline basket. I’d made Xerox copies of everything. I shoved these in my bag and went out whistling. As I rounded the corner of 43rd and Lex, I felt a very purposeful tap on my shoulder, and I nearly lost consciousness.
Eight
IT WAS TERENCE.
I took an involuntary step toward him, in relief, then pulled back.
“When did you get back?”
He was looking at me strangely. “About a month ago.”
I looked away. “A month?”
“Willis?” His face was concerned. “Why are you wearing those rabbit ears?”
We went to a little café on Lex and sat across from each other at a tiny wobbly table. “Shades of the midgets,” I joked, but he only looked sad.
The waiter brought wine, and I drank some quickly. I was feeling, even with the rabbit ears safely tucked away in my bag, not exactly normal. I forced myself to look at him. He looked away, which gave me a chance to see that he was starring, as always, in his
own show: trim, tan, clean-shaven.
“You look great.”
He smiled and looked at me finally. “So do you. Except for the rabbit ears.”
“When I get the weirdest letters, they act as an antenna. They help sort out transmissions for me … ha ha.”
He frowned.
I sat forward. I needed to talk to somebody.
“I’ve been getting some very strange letters lately.”
He snorted. “So what else is new at SIS’s Crackpot Desk?”
“But listen to this: I’ve started answering the letters!”
He raised an eyebrow, sipped and listened to my story. How I’d let a tidal wave of this stuff pound over me, how one day I picked up a pen and wrote back, got SIS to agree to publish the odd letters and my even odder responses. Even as I spoke I had a sense of aspects of the story whirring and clicking into place, overpolished, apochryphal. I lifted my glass, inviting a toast.
“I’m on my way to becoming the liberated woman’s Dear Abby—okay, no, it’s sleazier. I’m like a late night talk show host, a Joe Pine, who insults people who call in.”
Terence touched my glass but looked skeptical.
“It’s a great idea,” I said. “It makes me feel one hundred percent better. It’s just that I have to be … careful.”
“Damn right. You start writing back to some of those bananas and …”
Just then a fan came up—a determined woman from Queens who had seen him in Large Dead Cops, or something like that; I didn’t catch it all. I had grown used to this kind of interruption. It was profoundly humbling, really, being with someone famous, or someone somewhat famous. I kept forgetting that Terence was a figure in the imaginings of other people. Once at dinner in an intimate restaurant, a menu, wielded like a placard, sliced between our heads (bent passionately close over the low candle) and a voice that sounded like Selma Diamond yodeling on speed split the air around us. The woman plunked herself down at our table.
Dear Digby Page 8
