Love Creeps

by Amanda Filipacchi

  He bought the rat. The love affair began immediately. It was torrid. That evening, they watched TV together, the rat lying spread-eagle, flat like a pancake, on Alan’s stomach. Alan was stroking its back while the rat practically purred with contentment and fell asleep. When it woke up, Alan fed it chocolate pound cake, and they checked the stairwell doors together.

  Alan took a bath with the rat. Then he combed it and talked to it and named it Pancake. The rat’s small abrupt movements were slightly annoying, and Alan thought Pancake would look more intelligent if only he didn’t move so jerkily. That was really the pet’s only flaw: bad body language.

  Alan held Pancake on his chest, his hand over the rat’s back, his fingers around the rat’s face, to hold it in place and prevent it from making those movements that made Pancake look as though he had Parkinson’s disease. Alan stared into the rat’s eyes and said, “What do you think? Should I kill them? Should I?” He stared deeper into the little black eyes that reminded Alan of periods.

  Lynn called Charlie Santi and asked him to bring over all his new work.

  “You mean all that stuff you called crap?” he asked.

  “I didn’t say it was crap, I just didn’t … But yeah, bring it over, would you?”

  A half hour later, Lynn was staring at Charlie’s work. “Oh, Charlie.”

  “What?” he said, coldly.

  Her hand was over her heart as she kept staring at the little shape that was either strangling or hugging the other in the midst of all the white. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  He waited for her to elaborate.

  But all she said was, again, “I’m so sorry.”

  “That’s what you said the last time I was here.”

  “I was sick. These are magnificent. Your best work yet, by far. You’re now my best artist. I hope I haven’t lost you.”

  After a long moment, he said, “I guess not. But I don’t want to go through that nightmare again.”

  “Me neither.”

  “I felt like I had lost you.”

  “You haven’t,” she said, hugging him. She noticed Patricia giving her a little smile and raising one eyebrow.

  The following day, thanks to the rat’s company, Alan felt slightly better and was able to eat. He skipped work again, and by the end of the afternoon, he felt strong enough to get started on a little stalking of Lynn and Roland: the couple.

  Alan intended to quit stalking soon. He knew it wasn’t healthy for him. He would stop it, cold turkey. He already had an idea of how he would do it. But before reforming, he wanted to sink into the most gross behavior he could manage.

  “Traitors!” he shouted at them, when Roland picked Lynn up at her gallery after work.

  Carrying a small white basket, he followed them down the street. He didn’t even try to make the stalking good. “You stink, you pretentious asshole. And you, Lynn, you’re ugly! And what is this crap about you trying to want him! And about you stalking him insincerely! You sicko! You are both fucked-up sickos!”

  They walked more briskly. Roland dropped a button on the sly. He and Lynn gave change to Ray. Alan did, too. The redheaded, ex-psychologist, homeless man scrutinized them and tried to repress his curiosity. He restrained himself from throwing the change at their backs.

  He heard Alan scream at the two others, “And look what I have here!” He saw Alan take a squirming animal out of his basket, and say, “It’s a rat!”

  Pancake was on a leash and halter, so there was no risk of his running into the gutter to join the other rats. “He wants to kiss you, Lynn! Won’t you give him a little kiss? I know you like kissing vermin.” As was often the case with people who intended soon to quit something cold turkey, Alan was binging on his addiction.

  Roland suddenly stopped in front of a fabric shop and said, “I need to go in here for a second.”

  “Why?” Lynn asked.

  “I’m out of buttons.”

  Alan did not follow them into the store. Roland picked out some buttons and paid for them.

  Lynn examined the buttons and couldn’t think which of his clothes they would suit. Some were red, some yellow, some were suede, some were tiger’s eye, and some were covered in fabric. They were all small. “What are these buttons for?” she asked.

  “For nothing. I just need them.”

  “Do you collect them?”

  “No, I lose them. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

  “Why does something have to be wrong with you? Everybody loses buttons.”

  “But not as many as I do.”

  Alan stalked the couple again the next day, after work. Roland begged him to stop, and promised he’d go out with him to help him meet women. But Alan wanted Lynn. The couple decided to endure the stalking. They didn’t think Alan was dangerous, and they felt sorry for him.

  Alan was frustrated by their newfound indifference to his stalking. After what they had done to him, they could at least do him the courtesy of acting annoyed. He toned down his stalking to make them nervous. When neither subtle nor obvious stalking was unsettling them, Alan shut himself up in his apartment and didn’t go to work or eat for days. He sat facing his window hour after hour. Sometimes he held Pancake on his lap. Finally, one afternoon, weak from not having eaten, and yet not hungry, he put on his boots and went to a meeting of Stalkaholics Anonymous.

  Most of Lynn’s fifteen artists came back to her. A couple of them even cried from joy that she wanted them. She only lost two, who were by then committed to other galleries, but even they were disappointed that their ties were severed.

  Opening Lynn’s mail one morning, Patricia saw that Lynn had not lost time in using her rejection method to prevent the future loss of her desire.

  Patricia popped her head in Lynn’s office and said, “You just received your rejection from the Over Seventies Club in southern Florida.”

  Six

  During the next seven months, something extraordinary happened. With the help of Stalkaholics Anonymous in conjunction with the emotional support he was getting from Pancake, Alan began to believe that perhaps he could turn his life around, improve it drastically.

  The beginning of Alan’s transformation happened on the subway one day, when he was thinking about an article he had read that morning entitled “Looking for Alternatives to the Rat Race.” He had recently realized that he was not, at this point in his life, interested in climbing the corporate ladder and making lots of money. He wanted to be happy, sane, and not stalk. But happiness could be expensive. Not to mention sanity. He had therefore followed the article’s advice and checked out the Web site FrugalLifestyle.com, but had been turned off by the method called Alternative Acquisition Methods, or Dumpster Diving, which translated as rummaging through garbage.

  Nevertheless, he would seek out fullness in his life, even if that meant decreasing his chances for a promotion. He would do things that were enriching. Perhaps he would even try to demand three-day weekends. He wanted to balance work and personal life.

  He was standing in the middle of the subway car, holding on to the pole, letting his body sway gently to the movements of his train of thoughts. Feeling uplifted, his eyes naturally lifted, and happened to land upon an advertisement for NYU’s continuing education program. The timing could not have been more perfect for either Alan or the advertisers. Alan got off at the next stop and took the subway to NYU and got their course catalog. He then got catalogs at Parsons, the New School, and the YWCA. And then he got more catalogs from bins on the street for the Learning Annex and the Seminar Center. He went home and stretched out on his couch with Pancake and his catalogs.

  He was immediately drawn to classes like, How to Get Anyone to Return Your Phone Call, and Create Your Ideal Life, and The Confidence Course.

  But he was also extremely attracted to a section in the NYU catalog entitled “Fire Safety and Security in Buildings,” and particularly to the class called Disaster Management for High-rise Office and Residential Buildings. He dwelled on
its description: “This intensive workshop surveys the appropriate and necessary procedures to minimize injury and avoid loss of life in the event of major fires and explosions, bomb threats, terrorist actions and hostage situations, earthquakes, toxic accidents, and nuclear attacks.”

  Building safety and getting his phone calls returned were not his only interests. There was a third. He envied artistic people and had a great desire to explore his artistic side, which, as far as he knew, did not exist. He just wanted to poke it gently and see if it moved. He didn’t want to take an art class that was too difficult and would highlight his incompetence. He was therefore delighted to find a fair number of classes that would probably not put too much pressure on him: Tin Decorating, How to Create a Tabletop Fountain Garden, Puppetry, and Potpourri for Beginners, to name but a few.

  Alan read the catalogs for so many hours that he began coming across classes that sounded even more intriguing—downright fascinating—and he was always disappointed when, on second glance, he’d realize he had misread the classes’ names, and that the school did not offer courses called Internship in Poverty, Be a Maggot to Money, How to Tempt Your Way to the Top, Decorative Yoga, and Intuitive Poisoning for Beginners. The schools did, however, offer pale versions of those classes, such as: Internship in Property Management, Be a Magnet to Money, How to Temp Your Way to the Top, Restorative Yoga, and Intuitive Positioning for Beginners (also Yoga). Reality is so dull, Alan thought. Any mistake in one’s perception of it is inevitably more interesting than the real thing, and lucky are those who remain uninformed of their error.

  When Alan’s bloodshot eyes finally made contact with How to Access the Goodness Within You, in the Seminar Center catalog, he was stunned. Goodness: what an idea. He suddenly felt that goodness was the way to go. What was more, the class met just one time and took place the very next day, which was perfect for Alan, who was eager to begin his transformative journey.

  Alan slept well that night and arrived early Saturday morning for class, held at the Hungarian Church, in a room containing a large table around which the students sat. He was the only man. He hoped the women appreciated how rare it was to find a man who had any interest in accessing the goodness within him, and therefore how special a man he was.

  The teacher arrived. She was middle-aged, heavyset, nunlike. Her gray hair was pulled back in a tight bun. He could easily picture her helping him access his inner goodness.

  She stood at the head of the table, and began: “I will show you how the knowledge, passion, and nurturing of the goddesses can help transform your life.”

  Alan didn’t really understand why the teacher was referring to goddesses. He glanced down at his school catalog, which he had brought along. His pupils constricted when he saw that he had misread the title of the class.

  He rose and began tiptoeing out.

  “Where are you going!” the teacher exclaimed.

  “I’m sorry, I thought this class was, How to Access the Goodness Within You, not the Goddess.” He chuckled sheepishly.

  “If you leave, you are doing a disservice to the women in this room. You are creating negative energy—the energy of withdrawal—which men love creating, and which is why we need classes like these. And you will certainly not have achieved your goal of accessing the goodness within you.”

  “But isn’t this a class for women?”

  “Look at your bulletin. It says, ‘A Workshop for Men and Women.’”

  Alan found it easier to sit back down than to create the energy of withdrawal.

  Everyone was then told that during this seminar they were to address each other by their first names, preceded by the words “Sister Goddess.”

  Alan thought they might make an exception in his case and call him “Brother God Alan.” But they didn’t. The teacher said that since gods, in our sexist world, were still considered more important and powerful than goddesses, it would be unfair toward the others if Alan got to be a god. He would therefore be Sister Goddess Alan. No special treatment.

  After embarking on a short lecture regarding the Greek goddesses, Sister Goddess Jane (the teacher) said, “Part of accepting who you are as a woman is your crotch. Those confident about their crotches are happy. By the end of this seminar, you all will be.”

  The students were then each given a lump of Play-Doh and ordered to make a sculpture of their vaginas, from a gynecologist’s perspective.

  Alan sat staring at his clump of pink clay, stunned. He tried to imagine what his vagina would have looked like had he had one. The other women began sculpting theirs right away, and Alan, wanting to fit in, began kneading. When he could no longer look natural kneading, he placed his lump of clay down on the table and, with a trembling finger, poked a hole in it and left it at that.

  He sat on his hands, to make it clear he was done. Sister Goddess Jane immediately told him he had to make his vagina more detailed.

  So he added a fish tail to the back of the ball of clay.

  The teacher loomed over him. “What is that creature?”

  “My vagina. If I had one,” Alan mumbled.

  “It’s very offensive!”

  Alan quickly collapsed the tail against the body and smoothed it out, which shrank the hole, which upset Sister Goddess Jane. She found it offensive that he had made the hole so small. She said it was a typical sign of men wanting to hurt women, of being excited by women’s pain. She added, “You probably wish there was no hole at all, right? Or just a pinprick of a hole, so that you could go in there and rip it open, and have it be tight, tight, because that’s all you really care about, your pleasure.” She walked away.

  He applied his fingers to the clay, trying to feel as cool as a gynecologist. In his mind, he told the chunk of clay to relax, to take a deep breath. He even placed a little Kleenex over the back part of it. The goddess came back and pointed to the Kleenex. “Sister Goddess Alan. What is that?”

  “It makes me feel more comfortable that way. It’s more … clinical, impersonal.”

  She snorted and let him be, for the moment.

  He made the hole big. Like a grotto. So big that having sex with it would be like having sex with air. But he had to be careful, for if he made it too big, Goddess Jane would say something. He knew she would say it was offensive. So he shrank it slightly, but still left it quite big.

  “Sister Goddess Alan?”

  “Yes, mistress,” he replied, meekly.

  “Goddess! Not mistress,” she said, looking shocked.

  “Sorry! I mean Goddess. Yes, Goddess. Sister Goddess Jane.”

  “You couldn’t leave it big, could you? You had to make it smaller. You just couldn’t make it a big vagina. You couldn’t bear the sight of a big vagina.”

  It sounded to Alan as if she had a Japanese accent when she uttered that word, “vagina.” Her teeth sliced the air like guillotines, coming down three times on “va-gi-na.”

  “No, I thought you wouldn’t like it too big,” Alan said.

  “Don’t you think mine is big?”

  “I’m sure yours is big. No! I don’t know,” Alan said, traumatized, enlarging the opening with his thumbs.

  Following the dictum that you should get right back on the horse from which you have just fallen, Alan immediately signed up for another class, making sure to read it correctly this time. He took Acupressure for Your Pet: Alternative Health Care for Your Dog or Cat. Or rat, he thought to himself. The course description was, “Acupressure consists of gentle massage techniques that can be used by any pet owner in the treatment of various illnesses and behavioral disturbances. Bring Your Pet to Class.”

  Alan and Pancake went to class and enjoyed it very much. They were popular among the traditional pet owners, except for one or two hysterical types.

  Through tremendous willpower, Alan succeeded in not thinking too much about Lynn. He attended Stalkaholics Anonymous regularly. People talked about their itch to stalk. He embraced Step One of their twelve-step recovery program, which was: “I
admit I am powerless over my stalking compulsion and my life has become unmanageable.” And he adopted their belief that “once an addict always an addict.” He knew he would probably have to attend those meetings for the rest of his life, just like the alcoholics.

  Alan’s new life went well. He wasn’t absent from work as much anymore.

  Alan tried to improve himself in certain ways. Pancake’s nervous body language had made Alan acutely aware of his own. He practiced moving in a calm and confident manner. He edited his movements, eliminating all the unnecessary gestures that cluttered his image.

  He also developed a personal philosophy of mental health. After spending hours trying to figure out the one thing that could be responsible for stalking tendencies, he concluded that it came down to a difficulty in letting go. Stalkers had trouble letting go of the person they were obsessed with.

  So he practiced letting go. He bought a rope, tied it to his bathroom’s doorknob, and pulled on the rope regularly, for many minutes at a time, until his muscles hurt and his face was red and the tendons in his neck were taut. Then he slowly let go of the rope, trying to appreciate the pleasures of letting go.

  He came to believe that stress-related health problems were caused by not letting go, by clenching one’s muscles, being afraid of releasing them. So he got massages and forced his muscles to unclench, to let go.

  Alan slowly changed. The change was internal, mostly, but sometimes internal things emanate.

  He took more classes. He made friends. Some were recovering stalkaholics, like himself. He went out with them and met more new people. Before he knew it, and to his astonishment, he believed he didn’t care about Lynn anymore.

  He met Jessica, a woman with a gun license, who became his girlfriend and moved in with him after three weeks. Alan marveled at how making just a few changes in one’s life, like taking a class, or getting massages to relax, could bring about a whole positive chain reaction. They were happy, the three of them. She and his rat got along well.

  Ray the homeless man noticed the change in Alan and whispered little reinforcing tidbits whenever he passed, such as, “I’m proud of you,” and “You’ve come a long way, baby,” and “Super new girlfriend.”