“How do you know it’s a woman?” he asked.
“It’s the kind of thing a woman would do,” she said, as if she knew. If not wholly convinced — he trusted Carolyn in such matters — Curt leaned toward Rosemary Byrd as the caller, and though she was not there to know or defend herself, offered his forgiveness. The calls harder on her than on them. The mystery of the other troubled him more.
Twice in four days he noticed him (or thought he did) standing across the street about a block away. The first time was near the Forty-second Street library — Curt spending his holiday mornings in research — and might have been a coincidence. When he looked again, wanting to say hello, he wasn’t there. The second time, miles away in Brooklyn, he was out with his daughter taking a walk. It began to snow. Parks turned to go back and saw him (or thought he did), in an Air Force bomber jacket, his back to him, at the next corner. He brought Jacqueline up and, after a brief fight with his wife, who wanted to go for a walk herself, rushed back to see if it had been the student. Obsessed, he ran five blocks in the direction instinct suggested — the wind blistering his face — but found nothing like the figure he had seen. Had he hallucinated his presence? He was embarrassed to mention it to Carolyn, who would see it as an enormous presumption to think some twenty-year-old boy had nothing better to do than follow Curtis Parks. Who was Curtis Parks that anyone should want to follow him? He kept his secret to himself.
Four days later he saw him again. As before, his watcher was across the street and a block behind. He continued in the direction he was walking, as if nothing were wrong, en route to the Frick. The block before, he abruptly turned the corner and ducked into a phone booth. The phone unluckily was out of order, the receiver torn loose from the box. Waiting, the noise of his breathing in his ears, he pretended to make a call. Someone had written on the wall in lipstick, “If your present brand doesn’t satisfy, try my ass,” and left a phone number. Underneath in pencil was scrawled, “Bomb Paris,” and under that, “Bomb All Whores and Commies.” To the left, lower down, “Kill for Peace.” He didn’t have long to wait. Someone, wild-haired, came steaming around the corner, his head bobbing. The figure seemed to move on a diagonal as if bent to one side, as if leaning away from some force that would pull it down. As he went by, Curt, head averted, talked into the dead phone, exhilarated at the discovery, frightened. “Operator,” he said, mouthing the words, “the crazy kid is following me.”
That night at midnight his phone rang and when Carolyn answered no one was there.
THREE
MY FATHER taking me by the hand to the drugstore. I am wearing short pants, an oversize kid. Scared of what was next. Thinking it was an injection of some kind — for rabies or for cancer — or something worse. The old man pushes me through the door. “Give the boy a dozen Trojans,” he says to the druggist, squeezing my arm — one side of the man’s face scar tissue — “and if any of them leak, Spenser, we know where they came from.” The druggist guffaws. “How’s your daughter?” my father asks him. “A beauty,” the druggist says. “Good as new. Works like a charm.” I don’t understand but my father seems pleased with the answer and leads me, his arm around my shoulder, to the back of the drugstore, where a girl dressed in white is lying on a couch, the wall behind her lined with Tampax boxes.
“Gee, I’m glad you’re back,” the girl says. I look around to see if she’s talking to my father or the druggist. No one else is there. “I saved you a dance,” she says, twitching her index finger at me like it was some kind of snake. I say I don’t like to dance. I know you’re supposed to but I just don’t enjoy it.
She has a black wedding band on her middle finger, which means (I remember reading somewhere) that her husband died before the marriage was consummated. I move my weight from one foot to the other. She is rubbing her hand along her leg, which makes me nervous.
“Have you seen my father?” I ask her. “I don’t want to lose him.”
“Oh, I thought you were the father,” she says. “You look to me, honey, like a father.”
I say no, I am the son.
She beckons to me. Embarrassed, I turn away, look for my father in the closet.
“Don’t be afraid,” she whispers. “Take your medicine like a man.”
I have the feeling, I can’t get over it, that the old man’s watching me from somewhere.
When I get to the couch, wanting my medicine, there is someone else with the girl, another man. “I’ll be through in a minute,” she says. “Don’t go anywhere.” Like slicing cheese, I cut his head off.
She is waiting for me, her arms out, leering — her face scourged like her father’s. I plunge my knife between her legs.
June 27
I slept last night with the lights on. It does no good. The dreams get worse.
Went with R. to the movies. About this war hero who goes out of his mind over a little girl. She was crying at the end, though pretended not. Turning her head so I wouldn’t see. I asked her if she liked it. She said it was fake. Which makes it true to life, I told her. Everything’s fake. Madman doesn’t kill little girl. Is killed by mistake. You read about things like that in the papers every day. I defended the movie until she backed down. It makes her feel superior to give in.
Later she said she wondered why I don’t touch her. I put my hand on her head and she jumped. I think she knows, though other times not. Is she playing with me? When I close my eyes I see Parks on top of her. A bird flies out from between them. It is my mirror image. The bird.
Some guy went berserk on Times Square at three in the afternoon. I missed seeing it by an hour. Wounding six people with a sawed-off shotgun before shooting himself in the mouth. It was on the radio; they didn’t even give his name. What did he think he was doing?
PHONE CALL ABUSE
SHOWS SHARP RISE
OFFENSIVE PHONE CALLS TO FAMILIES
OF THE DEATHS OF SOLDIERS
I started to follow a girl in the park; I only wanted to look at her, her breasts like the nose cones of missiles. A cop on horseback was eyeing me.
At dinner he said to my mother, “When is your son going to get himself a job? I won’t have him around the house like this. At his age I was supporting a mother, a sister, and two brothers.” Then he knocked over his chair and left the table. When my mother said, “Something’s bothering him,” I laughed until I couldn’t stand it anymore.
“Don’t laugh,” she said to me, laughing herself. “He worries about you. Don’t you know how much he worries about you?”
June 28
I dreamed him in the white mask coming at me with a knife. I ducked and he went out the window. The mask flying off, leaving him without a face. He hangs from the sill.
I’ve been reclassified 1-A.
I stayed in my room all day. He said he wanted to talk to me, banged on my door, but I didn’t come out.
June 30
Headline in the News:
HINT BREAK IN
CRIPPLE KILLINGS
SEX MANIAC CLAIMS THIRD WHILE
GIRL NINE WATCHES IN CLOSET
All three victims women with slight physical defects. The killer does some strange sexual thing to them — it never says what — then mutilates the body. (Why don’t they say what he does?)
GIS FLUSH ENEMY FORCE
Went with Rosemary to the zoo. She called and asked if I wanted to go. More and more she’s like Phyllis. The way Phyllis was. Staring at the animals as if she were looking in the mirror. The male elephant trying to mount the female, who kept moving her ass away. Though I said I wanted to go, I couldn’t get her to move away. I stood with my back to the cage. The elephant’s piston like a giant rolling pin. Is that what she wants?