We Are Here Page 3

  An hour later it would be like it never happened, however. Kristina did not study on things. She hit you between the eyes with the full payload, all at once. When that was spent, the storm was over—at least for now.

  Two days ago she’d asked if I’d do her a favor, though, and I’d agreed because I felt I was letting her down in other ways. That meant a change was coming. If you’re with a strong woman (and they’re all strong, whatever they may have been told to the contrary; women have backbone men can only dream of), then once you’ve given ground you’ll never be off the back foot again.

  I was on the way to do that favor now.

  Chapter 3

  The café was on Greenwich Avenue. I deliberately walked the last forty yards on the opposite side of the street, and when I spotted them at one of the rickety tables outside I slowed down to take a look.

  Kristina was wearing a skirt and jacket I hadn’t seen before. It was probably only the second or third time in our entire acquaintance, in fact, that I’d seen her in anything except head-to-toe black. Opposite her sat a trim woman in her midthirties, attractive in the way that owes less to bone structure than to upkeep and confidence. Her hair was sleek and blond and impregnable, cut in a style that announces that the wearer will have valuable intelligence on the relative merits of local schools. I couldn’t tell much else from a distance save that, judging from her clothes and bearing, the woman could probably afford an apartment more or less wherever she wanted.

  I crossed the street. I was introduced to Catherine Warren and shook hands. We chatted about the weather and reprised background I already knew, like how the two women had met at a weekly reading group held at Swift’s, an independent bookstore in what we’re supposed to call Nolita these days but is just a boutique wedge between SoHo and Little Italy. We agreed that Swift’s was a swell little store and deserved our fervent support, and I elected not to mention my impression that the staff there always watched me as if they suspected I was about steal one of their hand-made gift cards, holocaust memoirs, or chunky anthologies of short stories about growing up poor but wise in Brooklyn.

  When these subjects ran out of steam—and the wizened old gay couple from the next table had shuffled away up the street, bickering all the while—I put my cigarettes on the table. Now that you can barely smoke anywhere in the city, this is an effective shorthand for “I’m not going to be here forever, so let’s get to it.”

  “Kristina said there was something you might want advice about.”

  The woman nodded, looking diffident.

  “And she explained to you I’m not a cop, right? Or private detective?”

  Kristina rolled her eyes. “She did,” Catherine said. “She said you’re a waiter.”

  “That’s true,” I agreed affably. “So, what’s up?”

  She looked at the table for a while, then raised her eyes like someone being forced to make a confession.

  “I think,” she said, “that I’m being stalked.”

  I’m not sure what I’d been expecting. Problems with a neighbor. Vague suspicions about her husband. A younger sister with an unsuitable boyfriend.

  “That’s not good. How long has it being going on?”

  “On and off, nearly ten years.”

  “Whoa,” Kristina said. “Have you reported this? Haven’t the police—”

  “I’ve never told anyone,” Catherine said quickly. “Apart from Mark. My husband,” she added. “It hasn’t been happening all that time or I would have. That’s what’s strange about it. Part of what’s strange.”

  “Tell me,” I said. “From the start.”

  “Well, I can’t remember the day, not like, the actual date. It was around the time I met Mark, or a month or two before. We’ve been married nine years.”

  “What does your husband do?”

  “He’s with Dunbar & Scott?” She delivered this as though I should have heard of the company and been impressed. I had not, though I doubted her husband was familiar with the Adriatico either.

  “So how come you don’t remember when it started? I would have thought that would be somewhat memorable.”

  Kristina shot me a warning look across the table.

  “Of course. But …” Catherine raised her shoulders in a pantomime shrug. “Where do you draw the line? If you walk the city at night—or even during the day—once in a while you’re going to get spooked. There’s all these people around you all the time and you don’t have a clue who any of them are, right? People at bus stops. In parks. In delis or diners or outside bars or reading magazines between the stacks at Barnes & Noble. Runaways. People hanging around … or heading down the same street as you are. Sometimes you wonder if they’re genuinely on their way somewhere, or if they’re walking with you in mind. Or women do, anyway. Maybe you’re not aware of it.”

  I could have observed that the vast majority of random street violence happens to men, but I let it lie. “I know what you’re talking about.”

  “So. There’d been that kind of stuff, but I put it down to urban living. But then I’d been out for a drink with girlfriends this one time, and afterward I took the subway home. Back then I had an apartment on Perry, on loan from my aunt.”

  “Good deal,” I said. Perry is a leafy enclave of brownstones in the heart of the West Village, and somewhere I have no expectation of living in this lifetime. This time Kristina gave me a covert kick under the table. I moved my leg out of reach. “And so?”

  “I got out at 14th and Eighth and walked. After a while I realized I could hear footsteps. But when I stopped, I couldn’t anymore. I know once you start listening to things they sound strange even if they’re really not, but there was just … there was something weird about it.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Got home. That’s the idea, right? Get inside, lock the doors, and if you can’t see a psycho on the sidewalk holding a machete, you forget about it. Which I did.”

  “But it happened again?”

  “Not for two, three weeks. Then one night I was walking back after dark, taking the same route from the same subway, and … yes, it happened again.”

  “What, exactly? I’m cloudy on what was actually taking place here.”

  “I knew I was being followed. Isn’t that enough?”

  “Of course,” I said. “But in terms of—”

  “I turned to look a couple of times, didn’t see anyone, but I had this really strong sense that someone I knew well was close by, watching me, trying to get closer. At one point I even thought I heard someone softly say my name. Then, as I was turning into my street, I caught a glimpse of someone on the corner of Bleecker.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Average height, slim build. He was only there for a second, and it was dark. I couldn’t see his face.”

  “Any idea who he might have been?”

  It seemed to me that she hesitated. “No.”

  “No guy across the hall who was always there to say good morning? No one at work who could have misunderstood the colleague/potential boyfriend boundary?”

  “I don’t think so. Though I suppose you never know the effect you have on other people.”

  “And this has been going on for ten years?”

  She glanced at me irritably. “Of course not. I met Mark soon after, and we just clicked, and within a month I was effectively living at his place in Murray Hill. The feeling of being followed stopped when I moved there. And I forgot about it. I got married. Our daughters were born; they’re six and four now. We moved to Chelsea five years ago. Everything was great. Is great.”

  “Until?”

  She exhaled in one short, sharp breath. “We live on 18th. It’s nice, quiet, close to the school, and you got all the restaurants and stuff on Eighth Avenue—though it’s not exactly knee-deep in culture, right? Hence I’ve been going to the reading group at Swift’s, which is how I met …” She gestured across the table.

  “Kristina,” I said.

  �
��Exactly. Until a few weeks ago I was taking a cab home. Now it’s warmer, so I walk. I go via the market on Seventh—Mark’s addicted to their shrimp salad, so there’s domestic brownie points to be earned right there. But the last two, three times I’ve turned onto my street … someone’s been back at the corner.”

  “Eighth is busy, especially in the evening.”

  She spoke sharply. “Right. Which means people tend to keep moving. Going where they’re headed. Not standing on the corner, looking down my street.”

  “You’ve never got a good look at his face?”

  “No.”

  “So what makes you believe it’s the same person?”

  “I just feel it is. You … wouldn’t understand.”

  “Maybe not.” There are women who believe they have recourse to intuitive powers beyond the understanding of male kind, and what they “feel” supersedes information available to the more conventional senses. This can be irritating, especially if you happen to be one of the dullard male robots who apparently can’t see past the end of his own unspeakable genitals. In my own woman’s case, I had reason to know such a belief could be justified, however, and so I didn’t call Catherine on it. “And it’s never been more than that? This impression of being followed?”

  “No. Though two weeks ago I was drawing the curtains in the girls’ room and I saw someone on the sidewalk below. I know he was looking up at the window. But Ella started fussing and I had to deal with her and the next time I got a chance to look … he’d gone.”

  She trailed off, looking at me defiantly. I didn’t know what to say, and so I didn’t say anything, which is generally my policy.

  “I knew this was going to sound ridiculous,” she muttered. “I’m sorry to have wasted your time.”

  “You said you’d mentioned this to your husband?”

  “I get the impression he thinks the same as you.”

  “Which is?”

  “I’m a woman, being silly.”

  I was taken aback. “I don’t think that, Catherine. The question is what you can do about—”

  “Assuming any of it is actually happening, right? That it’s not an attack of the vapors or some other charmingly feminine malaise?”

  “I’m just trying to be practical.”

  “Absolutely. Men are good at that.” She pushed her chair back decisively. “My friend’s looking after Ella and Isabella. She’s going to need to leave soon.”

  “So, John—what should she do?” Kristina’s voice was clipped. She was pissed at me, and not hiding it.

  I shrugged. I’d been intending to follow that up with something more helpful, but wasn’t given the chance.

  “Thank you for your time, John,” Catherine said.

  After telling the waitress to put the drinks on her account, she gave Kristina a peck on the cheek.

  “See you tomorrow night,” she said. “Nice to meet you,” she added to me. I’ve heard more convincing lies.

  As the two of them headed out to the sidewalk together, I got out my wallet and covertly put a five-dollar bill on the table.

  Chapter 4

  When Catherine had disappeared up the street, Kristina turned to me. She had a look in her eye that I’ve seen her use on men in the bar, optimistic drunkards who’ve mistaken professional courtesy for a ticket to bed. The look works. The guys always elect to buy their next drink someplace else. Often in a different city altogether.

  “What?” I asked, though I knew.

  She kept glowering at me.

  “I just don’t get it,” I said. “All she has is a vague impression of maybe being followed. So she got spooked walking home on a few occasions a very long time apart—there’s not a woman in the city who couldn’t say the same. And a few guys.”

  “That doesn’t mean she’s—”

  “I’d be more convinced without the big gap, to be honest. I don’t know much about stalkers, but my impression is they tend to stick to the job at hand—not get distracted for a couple of presidential terms. What’d he do, set an alarm to remind himself to act crazy again after a decade-long vacation in normality?”

  “You were being snippy before she even got to that part.”

  “Possibly,” I admitted. “She’s not my type. You can’t dismiss every disagreement with a male as institutionalized sexism. And who has an account at a coffee shop, for Christ’s sake?”

  “Lots of people.”

  “Really?”

  “Around here, yes.”

  “Christ. Either way, you tip the waitress. Plus … her daughters’ names rhyme.”

  Kris cocked her head and stared at me ominously. “What?”

  I wasn’t sure what I was trying to say and didn’t want to keep trying to say it. “Let’s walk.”

  For a moment it seemed like she wasn’t going to follow, but eventually she did.

  After fifteen minutes of silence we wound up in the streets on the other side of Bleecker. Close, in fact, to where Catherine had been living in the late 1990s and where she claimed to have first sensed someone following her. I didn’t try to get Kris talking. I used to have two young sons. Still do have one, though I’ve seen him only once in the last three years, for reasons that are not entirely under my control. One of the few skills I’d started to develop before my marriage and family fell apart was the diffusion of unproductive conversations. Kids have far more focus and persistence than adults give them credit for, and may get a buzz out of the attention that conflict gains. Back them into a corner and they’ll go at you toe-to-toe, and so the trick is to stop banging that drum and try something else instead. It works with grown-ups too. I use the technique on myself, when the conversations in my head threaten to become repetitive or obsessed with events that I cannot go back and change.

  So rather than returning to Catherine Warren’s problem—about which I wasn’t sure more could be said—I wondered aloud how much the apartment she’d mentioned would cost to rent these days. After a very slow start, this led to discussing the area semi-seriously from a residential point of view, and back toward life in general, and finally to the fact that it was approaching time for us to get ready for work.

  “You’ll be changing your clothes, I take it.”

  Kristina’s skin is very pale, and when she flushes you notice it. “There’s no law that says I have to wear black jeans and a rock chick shirt all the time.”

  “I know that.” I didn’t mention I’d noticed she’d been drinking tea at the café , which she never does at home. She would reasonably have said there was no law against her drinking tea, either. “I just thought maybe I could help. With the changing process.”

  She was surprised into a reluctant laugh. “I’m not sure you deserve that honor.”

  “Perhaps. It’s just I’ve heard that skirts can be challenging. For those unaccustomed to their ways.”

  “Is that right?”

  “I’m just saying. If you need a hand when we get home, I’m there for you.” I left a beat. “Of course, if we were living here, we’d be home already.”

  She smiled and looked away. “It’s not so far,” she said. “I’ll race you.”

  We got slammed that evening, the restaurant packed out the entire night. This wasn’t enough to distract me from feeling like an ass over the discussion with Catherine Warren. So she’d rubbed me up the wrong way. It couldn’t have been easy to talk about her concerns, and I hadn’t provided a considerate audience.

  When I took a cigarette break midevening I called an old friend on the other side of the country. Bill Raines answered promptly.

  “Well, hey,” he said. “How’s tricks, pizza boy? Still keeping it thin and crispy?”

  “Always,” I said, leaning back against the wall to watch people ambling the sidewalk, looking for the cheapest way to feel like shit tomorrow. “How about you? Still lying through your teeth in pursuit of clients’ claims, however mercenary and indeed fictitious they may be?”

  “It’s how I roll. S’up in your
so-called life?”

  “Wanted to pick your brain.”

  “Shoot.”

  I gave him the bones of Catherine’s story. He listened without interrupting until I was done.

  “I don’t see you selling the movie rights,” he said. “As jeopardy goes, it’s kind of blah, right? Plus, what does she think you can do about it?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said, realizing that the more I thought about it, the less I understood why the meeting had even taken place. “Just hoping for some advice, I guess. I didn’t have any. So I’m trying you.”

  “I’m sure you haven’t forgotten everything you knew about the law, John. The cops need probable cause. The sense you’re being followed isn’t enough, and an attorney’s going to need a lot more for a restraining order—like knowing who the alleged perp is. You can’t get those things filed ‘To Whom It May Concern.’ ”

  “The cops won’t help in the meantime?”

  “I’m not saying that. These days they take this stuff pretty seriously. Thousands of people every year believe they’re receiving unwelcome attention, and most women who get murdered by ex-partners are stalked by them first. Your friend’s not going to get a ‘Hush, girlie; run along,’ but you’ll require actual evidence before they can do more than advise buying some Mace. Doesn’t sound like she has any.”

  “Nothing like.”

  “Sensing you’re not her biggest fan, either.”

  “Christ. Is it that obvious?”

  “You’ve always been a heart-on-the-sleeve kind of guy, John. Least, I assumed it was your heart, though it was kind of shriveled. Could have been an unusually large raisin.”

  I asked if he was intending to be in the city any day soon. “If I am,” he said. “I’ll warn you. Give you plenty time to get out of town. We done here?”

  “Always a pleasure, Bill.”

  “Liar.”

  As I slipped the phone back into my pocket I felt someone plucking at my sleeve. I turned to see Lydia looking up at me with anxious eyes.