I grabbed my coat and keys, waited for the elevator, pounding the call button to hurry it along, fidgeted during the descent, and then ran past Ernesto, out into the plaza, around to Houston Street, and up the sidewalk in the direction of Broadway, but there was no sign anywhere of a man in a ski mask. I knew how easily he could have ducked into a building, even perhaps the Angelika Film Center, or continued on the sidewalk after having removed the mask so that I would not easily be able to identify him. I tried to think what else he had been wearing but could not be more specific to myself than to say, ‘the man was wearing a black coat and black pants and perhaps black leather shoes or boots, he had black gloves and a black ski mask.’
I ran up Mercer to Bleecker, along to Broadway, down to Prince, staring at every man I met, and there was no one who seemed to fit. Sensing that the boundary between my territory of sanity and the perforation state of insanity was well within sight, that I might in fact be dancing perilously close to the border, I walked back along Prince to Wooster and home. Ernesto gazed up at me as I entered.
‘You okay, Professor?’
An amiable guy, Ernesto, and there was a vacant chair next to him, which I indicated with a nod of the head, ‘May I?’
‘Sure, please, sit down.’
‘I think someone’s following me.’
‘I got that feeling all the time.’
‘No, I mean someone is actually following me. A man stopped me on Park Avenue earlier today and told me he saw someone watching me from outside on the street while I was in a store, and then, there’s this guy in a ski mask who stands out on the sidewalk on Houston at night and he just looks up at my apartment. I know he’s staring at me, because tonight I waved at him and he shook his head and ran away. And—’ I hesitated, wondering if I should tell the doorman about the contents of the boxes I had received, and then decided it might be better to keep that to myself. ‘—And other things have been happening as well.’
‘That sounds pretty heavy, Professor.’
‘Please call me Jeremy.’
‘Whatever you say, boss.’
‘And please don’t call me boss.’
‘Okay, Jeremy,’ he smiled, and gave me his hand to shake, as if we were meeting for the first time.
‘You think I’m crazy? I worry I might be going a little crazy.’
‘Nah, man, that sounds like some serious shit. I mean, I feel like someone’s following me but that’s just because my ex, I broke up with her cause she really was crazy, and I know she’s following me around, but you, what you got, that sounds like, I don’t know, for real?’
‘Yes, I’m afraid it is for real.’
‘You get on the wrong side of the mob or something?’
‘Nothing like that. Nothing — criminal.’
‘I don’t know what to tell you then. Maybe go to the police?’
We both looked at each other and the laughter was instantaneous.
‘Let me ask you this, without saying anything to any of the other guys who work here, I wonder if you would do me a favor?’
‘Sure, anything.’
‘If someone delivers a package for me again, would you mind taking a picture of him, but try to do it so he doesn’t notice. Take a picture as he’s leaving, or just as he’s outside, passing by the windows.’
‘Yeah, I can do that for you.’
‘Thank you, Ernesto, and Happy Thanksgiving to you and your sister.’
I fished a fifty from my wallet and put it in the doorman’s hand. Though he tried to protest, I waved in dismissal and took the stairs back up to the third floor, knowing at the same time that the satisfaction I got from giving him fifty dollars was a cheap kind of pleasure, and really it should have been double that since fifty does not buy what it once did, especially not in New York, and I made a mental note to be sure I gave him more at Christmas, for when have I ever given enough to anyone, except perhaps Meredith, and even to her I owe more than I will ever be able to repay because I left, I see now, when she undoubtedly needed me most. It is not enough in one’s adolescence to see a father or mother only twice or three times a year, to be robbed of their annoying and nagging presence or their consolation or protection or supervision after having spent all one’s life in the expectation of such care and frustration, and now there is nothing I can give my Meredith, who has everything, except the solace and aggravation of my presence, and of course these words, this text, which may end up being all I can leave her.
~ ~ ~
I went out early on Thanksgiving morning to avoid the crush, knowing there would be crowds despite the forecast of high winds, but I had the taxi go up 10th Avenue and drop me at Amsterdam and 62nd so I could walk past Lincoln Center, which brought back so many fond memories of taking Meredith to the ballet and opera when she was little, and then across Broadway as I made my way to the side entrance of the Century Building so I wouldn’t have to fight the crowds and cops on Central Park West. But then, just as I crossed Broadway, I noticed the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, which I hadn’t been to for more than a decade, the last thing I saw there was either Von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark or Raúl Ruiz’s strange but wonderful Time Regained with its stagey moving scenery and Marcello Mazzarella vamping as an oddly voyeuristic Marcel, a peeping-tom pervert spying on the lives of his friends, and so I stopped to see what was playing, half thinking that if the party at Meredith and Peter’s got too boring I might duck out early and catch a matinee.
I was looking at the posters when I noticed him, as though he had come up behind me. It was the young guy in his late twenties from the café on Saturday, the guy I had spoken with when Rachel did not show up, the one who described himself as a ‘corporate shill’ and wondered whether Rachel was pretty, and there he was, also at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, also looking at the posters, though now I can no longer remember what was showing, perhaps some Italian film indebted to Fellini or an American independent that thought it was radical to shoot in black and white, either one of which might have caught my eye, but what I do remember is turning to the young man and saying, ‘Happy Thanksgiving,’ and he turned to me, seemed surprised, and said, ‘Coincidence! We meet again,’ in a cheery tone that made me think it really was just a coincidence, of the kind that so often seemed to happen to me in New York before I left for Oxford but which, in the months since my return, had thus far been a rarity, or seemed so, perhaps because after even a month in Oxford it becomes impossible to go anywhere without seeing faces one recognizes, either colleagues or students, or simply townspeople and scholars in other disciplines, the habitués of Bodleian and Taylorian library reading rooms, daylight dwellers of the Turf and the King’s Arms and the Bear, although this is the phenomenon of a small city of 150,000 people. When coincidental meetings happen in New York, by contrast, they necessarily carry more symbolic weight, it seems as though something astonishing has occurred, particularly when you meet the same stranger several times in different parts of the city; it feels almost as though fate or God, for those who believe, must be trying to send a message, to say ‘this is a person you should know, you should pay attention, the two of you have been thrown together for better or ill and there is a reason you continue to meet, do not imagine there is any such thing as total coincidence.’ I remember once, the year before I left for Oxford, going to an exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art, a show of Bloomsbury painters, and on the train up to New Haven there was a woman reading Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, and though I expected to see her in the gallery itself she was not there. A few days later I saw her again, on the subway, again reading Strachey, and then a third time a few days after that. She was perhaps a decade older than me and on the third encounter I went up to her and said that by chance we’d been on the same trains three times in a week, each time I’d seen her reading Strachey, and it seemed like more than coincidence, because I had been reading Roger Fry and John Maynard Keynes in recent weeks. The woman looked at me with horror.