Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked (6 page)

… if your little boy, who you’re so impressed with for aping a white Englishman, steals anything else from me and I have to see it in print when I deserved to be given a level playing field to write my novel, not pumped for his amusement, there will be hell to pay.

I’m livid—and rightfully so

I was not put on earth to feed James Lasdun’s children. I hope you can understand that.

Later that day Nasreen sets her sights on Paula Kurwen, the editor to whom Janice had introduced her. For the moment Paula’s offense is merely that she “was an elegant middle-class post–Nazi era Jewess living in America. In other words, she was privileged.” Nevertheless, she, too, is implicated: “You all play a part in unleashing the fury.”

A minute or so later, with this “fury” now apparently reaching for terms strong enough to account for its own escalating intensity, Nasreen brings on one of those words that scorch everything they come near. The word is “rape.” It isn’t the first time she has used it, but it is the first time she has used it in connection with me, and even though she uses it figuratively rather than literally, I feel immediately the disfiguring potency of its touch, as if I have been splashed with acid:

I say if I can’t write my book and get emotionally and verbally raped by James Lasdun, a Jew disguising himself as an English-American, well then, the Holocaust Industry Books should all be banned as should the films.

It is one thing to be abused in private: you experience it almost as an internal event, not so different from listening to the more punitive voices in your own head. But to have other people, people you know and care about, brought into the drama, whether as witnesses or collateral victims or both, is another matter. It confers a different order of reality on the abuse: fuller and more objective. This strange, awful thing really is happening to you, and people are witnessing it.

Along with the accusations of theft, Janice had also received details of my supposed (but entirely fictitious) affair with Nasreen’s former classmate Elaine, complete with descriptions of various kinky sexual practices that Nasreen claimed to have heard I went in for (she had an uncanny way with that transparent and yet curiously effective device of rumor, the unattributed source: “I’m told he…” “I hear he…” “Everyone knows he…”).

Regardless of whether Janice believed a word of these emails (and she assured me she didn’t), my impulse was to deny them indignantly. But even as I was forming the words I felt the futility of doing so. Intrinsic to the very nature of Nasreen’s denunciations and insinuations was, as I began to understand, an iron law whereby the more I denied them, the more substance they would acquire, and the more plausible they would begin to seem. Their very wildness was a part of their peculiar power. On the basis of there being no smoke without fire (so I imagined Janice, and then Paula, and then, as things got worse, all sorts of other people, thinking), surely something as black and billowing as these emails must indicate that I was guilty of
something
, and that even if I wasn’t unscrupulous or weird or fucked up in the precise way Nasreen claimed, I probably was in some other, related way. For the first time in my life I began to consider the word “honor” as something more than an antique formula, and the word “reputation” as something other than an index of value in the literary marketplace.

*   *   *

But the “psychotic jaywalker.”

Something bizarre happened to me when I first arrived in New York, in 1986. I was walking down a quiet street in the West Village when I heard a woman’s voice calling “Sir, sir, excuse me, sir” from a window at the top of a narrow town house. The door to her apartment was stuck, she said, and she was trapped inside. Would I come up and help her get it open? She sounded pleasant enough, laughing a little at her own helplessness, but I’d heard too many horror stories about New York not to be suspicious, and my instinct was to keep moving. Still, I hesitated, and a moment later I was gloomily climbing the dark stairway to her floor, certain I was being set up to be mugged.

Outside her apartment I tried opening the door with the handle, but I couldn’t get it to engage with the opening mechanism. I pushed the door, but that didn’t work either. “Try taking a run at it,” the woman called from the other side. The imagined mugging gave way, in my mind, to something worse: I was going to be framed for breaking and entering or whatever they called it here, blackmailed, sent home in disgrace … Resigning myself, I went to the end of the narrow hallway and ran full tilt at the door, hurling myself against it as hard as I could. It flew open, revealing a cluttered, brick-walled studio, with a bed in the corner and the woman—dark-haired, well dressed, attractive—looking at me, startled. She thanked me profusely. There was no mugger, no blackmail camera, nothing untoward at all.

But as I stood in the doorway, the situation seemed to take on a new, unexpected complexion, in which I myself was the source of menace. I was a man who had just broken open the door to a strange woman’s apartment, and this large fact somehow overshadowed, even seemed to obliterate, the perfectly innocent explanation behind it. The woman appeared suddenly nervous. She did ask if she could offer me a cup of coffee, but I felt she was doing so only out of politeness and that to accept, even just to linger there talking to her (both of which I found myself wanting to do), would have been to take advantage of the situation in an underhand way. I declined politely and left, reflecting on how the desire to appear scrupulously honorable (itself based entirely on the fact that I had found her attractive and wanted her to find
me
attractive) had required me to do precisely the thing that would guarantee no further contact between us.

There was something else too that lingered with me: an atmospheric quality that, like the equivocal mood of certain dreams, continually drew my mind toward it but then, every time I came close to identifying what it was, seemed to evaporate.

For months I tried to write a story about the episode, but I couldn’t figure out how to make it work as fiction. Twenty years later, however, just before I set off for Provence with my family, I found myself thinking of it again and a new approach occurred to me.

This consisted of telling the story in two parts: one from the man’s point of view, the other from the woman’s. The first part kept close to the facts as I recalled them. The second was of course purely speculative, and reflected a change in the way I had come to think about the woman herself, a change based on that dim sense I’d had of some mysterious further dimension to the encounter, which I had never satisfactorily accounted for. Unlike the simple, practical-minded damsel in distress I had made of her at the time (a projection, I suppose, of my own relative naïveté—I was twenty-eight), she is now a complicated figure: isolated, a bit reckless, and full of strong desires of her own. Her door has jammed once in the past, we discover. She called to a man for help and after he forced it open, the two of them, jarred out of their usual selves, ended up in her bed. Since then, she has taken to jamming the door deliberately when she feels like company, and watching at the window for men to lure up (though “lure” suggests something sinister, whereas all she wants is the warmth and connection of freely reciprocated desire). The Englishman she beckons up on the day the story takes place turns out to be younger and more innocent-looking than she had judged from his appearance on the street below her, and this unsettles her. His polite reserve makes her even more nervous, but she perseveres, offering him the usual cup of coffee. His refusal, followed by his abrupt disappearance, upsets her badly—this hasn’t happened before. Still, with the help of a stiff drink she recovers, and soon, having reset the catch in the door, she is back at her window, fondly remembering past encounters while gazing down at the street in preparation for the next.

There are no drugs in the story (only a glass of vodka), and no jaywalkers, psychotic or otherwise, but this is the story Nasreen refers to as my “psychotic jaywalker” story. I wrote it quickly and sent it off before we flew to Marseille. It was published in a British magazine while we were in Provence, and at some point was put in the magazine’s online archive, where Nasreen found it, presumably while “google-stalking” me.

In her many accusations of theft concerning this story, she never spelled out exactly what it was I was supposed to have stolen. But she did copy me on emails that she had begun sending out to other people (the public-defamation aspect of her campaign was widening now, and she wanted me to know about it) in which my various misdeeds are recounted, among them this alleged plagiarism. Even in these emails the details are a bit hazy, but they center on the idea of surrender. The clearest statement of them comes in an email she copied me on, to a former classmate—I’ll call her Sandy—in which Nasreen writes:

well, the piece James wrote and why it bothered me was there was a section and in that section he wrote, nearly verbatim, what i’d said to him—my ideas on surrender (I was linking sado-masochism with the image of the lady of justice, balancing scales…)

… this was my conversation about it and surrender (islam means surrender) … and not only did he co-opt it, he made the character out to be a psychotic jaywalker …

It is possible that Nasreen did send me an email talking about such things, and that it was among the many from that early, friendly phase that I didn’t keep. It’s also possible that her words resembled the passage she seems to be referring to in my story, where the woman reflects on her discovery of the inverse power of surrender. The passage in my story begins: “There were ways in which the world forced itself on you and you had no choice but to yield. But there were also ways of using your own weakness as a source of strength.”

A description of how the woman discovered this paradoxical strength follows, along with details of times in her past when she has used it, and then the passage concludes: “It wasn’t about willpower; it was about submission. That was the glory of it.”

Early on in this steadily deepening crisis, I began to find myself drifting occasionally into a courtroom fantasy in which I was defending myself against Nasreen’s various charges. On the subject of this alleged theft, I would picture myself taking the stand with a calm expression that nevertheless contained a glint of clenched anger. Strutting before me, thumbs hooked in his waistcoat as he grins and winks at the jury, Nasreen’s attorney reads out the passage I have quoted above and asks if the words and thoughts are entirely my own.

Yes, I reply.

He asks if I recall an email from Nasreen in which she discusses similar ideas about the secret power inherent in the gesture of surrender or, as I put it, “
submission
” (and he assumes a snide expression here, as if to imply that nobody is fooled by my substitution of a synonym for his client’s word).

I do not, I tell him.

With a sly grin he produces an email, dated sometime in 2006, and reads aloud a few sentences in which Nasreen does, indeed, appear to be articulating a similar idea. The jury members look at me askance.

Well, sir, the attorney says, I suppose you will now attempt to persuade the court that the resemblance, the remarkably
close
resemblance if I may say so, between these two passages is purely coincidental?

No, I say, it isn’t coincidental at all.

The attorney looks startled, though he contrives to give his shock a deliberately staged appearance.

Oh?

Both passages are borrowed, I tell him. From the same source.

Indeed?

He rolls his eyes a little in the direction of the jury: this fellow before us appears to be not only a scoundrel and a fraud but also the village idiot, and we must now prepare ourselves to be greatly amused.

Leaving aside your earlier statement, he continues, that these thoughts were entirely your own, and passing over the question of whether you have therefore just admitted to perjuring yourself, perhaps you would be good enough to tell us what this common
source
might be?

Certainly.

Reaching into my briefcase, I produce a battered paperback, and hand out photocopies of a page from the book’s introductory essay, drawing the jury’s attention to the following passage, concerning the importance of the gesture of renunciation to the author under discussion:

The closer you look at him, the more central the gesture seems, both to his life and his writing, and the more it appears to invert itself into a paradoxical tool for its opposite, taking possession.

The attorney frowns, pantomiming irritated bewilderment as to the relevance of this, but I read on, quoting another passage, highlighted in fluorescent yellow marker for the jury’s benefit, that describes how the act of renunciation becomes:

a means of leveraging one’s very powerlessness so as to exert power …

Darting a glance at the jury, the attorney gives his copy of the pages a dismissive shake.

Even suppose we accept some similarity in the general sentiments here, he says, why should we accept that this essay rather than my client’s email was the source of your words?

Because I
wrote
it, I tell him, icily.

I let the jury examine the book, a New York Review of Books edition of Italo Svevo’s novel
As a Man Grows Older
. On its cover are the words “Introduction by James Lasdun.” In the front matter is the publication date, 2001.

While they absorb the implications of this, I reach into my briefcase for more books and photocopies. Here is the Penguin Classics edition of D. H. Lawrence’s
St. Mawr
, published in 2006, with my introduction, from which I read my analysis of the heroine’s journey as yet another instance of the power of letting go: