The stalker. Matilde is awake yet the fevered pulse of her body suggests sleep, the paralysis of sleep. A soft, urgent, quickening heartbeat. She’d felt it—his. She has kicked off the quilted-satin bedspread sometime during the night and is covered now only partly by a sheet damply clinging to her lower body leaving exposed her sweat-slick chest, her small girlish-hard breasts, painfully prominent collarbone, shoulders … Is she naked? Where’s her nightgown? She is not a woman who waits yet night is a time of waiting, sleep and bed and nakedness a time of waiting, inescapable. The .38-caliber revolver is inches away in the drawer of the bedside table and the drawer is ajar perhaps an inch. Because you have to be prepared not just to shoot but to kill. She’s naked, sweating in her bed listening to the myriad sounds of the nighttime city and to the closer, mysterious sounds of her aunt’s house and to the soft urgent quickening heartbeat she understands is her own and not another’s and yet she sees him, hears him. She knew he’d been stalking her for weeks, she even knew his name, Ramos, Hector Ramos, he’s the estranged husband of one of her battered women clients, a woman she’d arranged to be admitted to the Wayne County Women’s and Children’s Shelter and for this he is furious with her, he hates her, wishes her grief, death—oh, Matilde knows. Briefly Hector Ramos had been her client too, the previous year, but whatever was thrumming along his veins—alcohol, coke, manic juices—had been too much, too intense, he hadn’t been able to sit in the chair facing Matilde for more than three minutes without squirming and jumping up, and he hadn’t been able to speak coherently, his eyes glistening, his lips sparked with spittle, still less had he been in a mood to fill out forms for the county, produce identification, sign his name Hector Ramos except in a grandiose, unintelligible scrawl. He’s a short, lean-muscled man of thirty-one, unemployed carpenter, a single conviction aged nineteen (“assault”—for which he’d served a brief eighteen months in Michigan State Prison), with stark-staring black eyes, black oily-kinky hair. His forehead is deeply, tragically creased. That baffled, ravaged look, that look of ancient desperation Matilde sees in so many of her (male) clients, in so many men on the streets, Detroit’s citizens. Think I can’t read, eh?—think I don’t know words, eh?—throwing the forms down on Matilde’s desk. She sees him now, fierce, betrayed Hector Ramos, approaching her, something metallic and glinting in his right hand which is pressed low against his thigh. He’s wearing a simulated leather jacket like vinyl, trousers with a tear in one knee, high-top sneakers like the black street kids. Swift and silent as a snake, no yelled curse to warn her, a gleam of damp teeth, then he’s on her. They are in a crowded place, the outer foyer of the Wayne County Building and Ramos hasn’t passed through the metal detector, which is farther into the interior, nor has he been sighted by the pair of sheriff’s deputies who are on guard, Matilde Searle will not have seen him until he’s on her.
Terror of death. In the abstract, it’s absurd. Has not Matilde argued so, many times? Where there’s no consciousness there can be no pain, no sorrow, no humiliation, no loss, no regret, no terror. Where no consciousness, no memory. Where no memory, no humanity. You, no longer living, are not you. Yet, warding off the slashing, jabbing knife blade wielded by the madman, pain so swift, intense, unexpected it seems to be a phenomenon of the very place, the air, like deafening noise. And the woman’s cry, childlike, terrified—No! Don’t! Help me! I don’t want to die!
∗ ∗ ∗
Vital statistics. Nineteen years old, a sophomore at Michigan State, when she’d lost her virginity. Odd, archaic language: lost. Lost what, precisely? Later, her first intense, serious love affair, yes then she’d lost something more tangible, if undefinable: her heart? her independence? her control of, definition of, self? That first true loss, the furious bafflement of it. And never again quite so assured, confident. Never again quite so certain, Yes I know what I am doing, for God’s sake leave me alone.
What if: she has taken not one of the elevators that open out onto the front foyer, but the stairs at the rear of the building. Which she has done, occasionally: five flights down. Exiting then by the rear doors, guarded also by Wayne County Sheriff’s men, out onto Stockton. And so she’ll avoid him. For that day. How many days she’s been not seeing him. The lone figure in the periphery of her vision. Footsteps echoing hers to her car in the high-rise parking garage, slow angry smile as she drives past him she’s not seeing because she’s calm, resolute. Determined not to be intimidated, still less terrorized. Long before Hector Ramos there had been threats against Matilde Searle’s life, and there had been stalkers in her life, before even the term “stalker” came into general usage. Look, I’m a professional woman. I can take care of myself.
What if: she has taken not one of the elevators that open out onto the front foyer, but the stairs at the rear of the building. And so she would not be assaulted that day by a madman wielding a ten-inch carving knife newly purchased at Kmart. And so he would not step forward to intervene, even before he hears her screaming, and the screams and shouts of others around her. He, having legal business that day with the Child Protection Department, but otherwise infrequently in the county building, would not seize hold of Hector Ramos taking a knife-slash in the face, a stab in the forearm, wrestling the knife from Ramos before the sheriff’s deputies have even drawn their guns.
So human! So absurd!—to make of a purely random incident, an event of no greater significance than the the encounter of microbes, or molecules, or subatomic particles, an event charged with meaning.
So human! so absurd!—to make of a man’s desire for her anything more significant and more profound than a man’s desire for a woman, any woman. Because he’d intervened, and her blood was on him, in streaks on the front of his coat, and on his hands; her blood, and his own. Afterward insisting, Look, we’ve got to see each other, Matilde—you know that, don’t you? That’s your name, Matilde?
The heartbeat is her own, of course. Even when making love, grasping a lover’s shoulders, the small of the back, the buttocks, moving her body with his, her loins against his, the smooth heated skin, mouths sucking mouths, even then she had known which heartbeat is her own, which his. But it has been so long.
Fear of death?—not fear of death but fear of sudden helplessness, violence. A shattering of glass downstairs and the breaking-in of a door (it will be the rear, kitchen door: this, the door forced open two years ago by an unknown burglar or burglars who trashed Matilde’s kitchen, living room, study before taking away what could be carried of Matilde’s valuable possessions which, in fact, added up to very little) and the sound of rapid footsteps. How many times in the night before even the assault by Hector Ramos has she wakened dry-mouthed to hear sounds downstairs like a rough-rocking dark tide rising to drown her. How many times waking, her body quivering taut as a bow from which an arrow will fly. Then, she’d had no handgun in her bedside table. She had wanted no gun, no weapon. She would rise swiftly and lock the door of her room, and she would dial the emergency number 911 if the sounds persisted and if she was truly awake and not dreaming which in fact so often even before the assault by Hector Ramos, she was. And so there was no need, for there was no danger. For when the house had indeed been broken into, she hadn’t been home. (Though she’d left lights on, a radio turned up high.) And when Hector Ramos had so carelessly stalked her those several weeks, late September through October, into November, it was always in the vicinity of the Wayne County Clinic or in the high-rise garage in which she parked and she’d never been really alone, not really alone, as now, in her bed, upstairs in the elegant old crumbling brownstone at 289 Springwood she’d inherited from her aunt, she is.
Naked woman. She throws off the damp sheet that smells of her body though she’d showered and washed her hair before going to bed. Rises from bed, unsteady on her legs, she’s a thin-legged bird like a flamingo, or an ostrich. Corrective lenses required for driving, especially night driving. When depths flatten to the thickness of playing cards and even bright, primary colors are d
rained of their brilliance. She’s in excellent physical condition except for occasional migraine headaches, bouts of insomnia, irregular and painful menstrual periods. She drives forty miles to be examined by a (woman) gynecologist in Oakland County, north of the city. She has no internist in the city since the doctor she’d been seeing was shot to death in his office near Wayne State University by black youths demanding drugs and cash, a year ago last Christmas. No prescription drugs now, not even birth-control pills. There are other methods of contraception if contraception is required … She’s staring at something on the floor. She knows what it is, only the sweat-soaked nightgown she’d yanked off over her head and tossed away. She knows what it is, a puddle of cloth; still she stares.
Infinite regret. Infinite regress. There’s something about a naked woman, one of Matilde’s lovers whom she has not seen, nor spoken with, since 1981, once said. A naked woman in a man’s close proximity always appears so … unexpected somehow. Fleshy, overpowering. Too big. Even, he’d said thoughtfully, when you’re not.
How many years ago in another city before Matilde’s life was her own. In the grip of an obsession, sexual love making of her body a vessel of yearning, of hunger, This is not me! Not Matilde Searle, she’d driven slowly and methodically past the home of her (married, law professor) lover, at dusk, and at midnight, one mad, desperate, lonely time at dawn, not truly wishing to see the man (with whom, shortly, she would break) and still less wishing to be seen (for what shame to be seen! So exposed! Where her lover fantasized twenty-seven-year-old Matilde, mysterious, elusive, too young and too idealistic for him, to be so exposed!) but simply to be in physical proximity to him who at that time in her life had seemed to Matilde Searle the very center of her life, her life’s radiant core. Which is why we say I can’t live without you meaning your life gives life to me, who am otherwise an empty vessel, nameless.
Is she a feminist, yet thinks such thoughts?—but Matilde Searle does not think such thoughts, nor express such thoughts, no one of her acquaintance has ever heard such thoughts, certainly no one of her female clients whose lives, ensnarled with men who mistreat them, has ever heard such thoughts articulated by Matilde Searle. In her aloneness is her strength.
White bitch, scumbag cunt! Only after the bloody carving knife has been wrenched from him, when he’s been pounded to his knees by the man named Bowe, Bowie, does Hector Ramos begin to scream at Matilde Searle. Bitch! Cunt! I kill you!—she’s too surprised, too stunned to register what has happened, why she’s bleeding from cuts on her hands, a three-inch slash on her left forearm, why she’s staggering on the verge of fainting and strangers’ hands, arms are holding her up—suddenly such a commotion, an outcry, the sheriff’s deputies rushing with their guns drawn—why, what has happened, why has someone wanted to injure her? The man in the camel’s-hair coat splattered with blood—his own, hers—is holding Matilde up, supporting her head, strong fingers gripping the back of her head. Her handbag stuffed with wallet, wadded Kleenex, notebook, papers, comb, plastic drugstore compact has fallen to the dirty foyer floor, someone takes it up and passes it quickly to the man comforting Matilde, here, here’s the lady’s purse, watch out it don’t get stolen, and afterward Matilde will hear this murmured solicitude, a gray-haired black man’s voice, she’ll hear and be touched to the heart, Here’s the lady’s purse, watch out it don’t get stolen. Her assailant who had? hadn’t? intended to actually kill her is being handcuffed by the deputies, on his knees struggling with them shouting obscenities and lunging to escape, and his face is more youthful than Matilde recalls, it would be a handsome face except it’s distorted with rage and pain as the deputies clamp on the cuffs and, police-style, yank the man’s arms up behind his back so he’s screaming in agony, begging No! no! no!—To all this Matilde Searle is a witness but she isn’t capable of comprehending. She is calm enough, her pride won’t let her give in to hysteria or even tears in this public place and in any case it’s impossible for certain individuals—liberal, educated, idealists by temperament and training, their lives dedicated to “helping humanity”—to believe that anyone knowing them might wish them harm. Impossible!
The handgun. She has not practiced. Not once firing the gun though it’s fully loaded: six bullets in the oiled revolving chambers. She has not cashed in her coupon from the Liberty Gun Shop redeemable at the Crossroads Indoor Firing Range on North Dexter, in the suburb of Ferndale, which would give her a free hour’s session with a “licensed” firearms instructor. From time to time during the past several days and nights she has removed the gun from the bedside table drawer, she has weighed it in her hand ugly thing! ugly! with the air of one weighing a profound and inexpressible yearning. The .38-caliber Smith & Wesson is a dull metallic blue, cool to the touch. Its surface, presumably once smooth, is covered with minute scratches, tiny near-invisible figures like hieroglyphics. The gun has its secrets—how many times has it been fired, how many bullets flying into flesh, how many deaths. There’s a wholly objective statistical “life” of Matilde Searle’s handgun inaccessible to her. Because you must be prepared not just to shoot but to kill. She won’t be able to do it, when he comes for her. If he comes for her. He, or his brothers, cousins … there are so many of them, and time is on their side: any night, so many nights, she’s alone, she’s waiting. Better not to think of such possibilities. A gun heavy in your hands, you don’t think. Except it’s always heavier than you expect, which is a thought.
She has told no one about the gun, her shameful purchase, her purchase of shameful expediency. Not any brother or sister, not any of her friends who have so frequently expressed concern for her, worry that she continues to live in Mittelburg Park surrounded by encroaching “urban decay.” Not her colleague Mariana with whom she shares an office and who has a handgun of her own—a compact, snub-nosed .45-caliber automatic with a pretty mother-of-pearl handle. Not the man who intervened to save her life, the man whose name she doesn’t quite know, Bowe, Bowie … the man whose telephone calls she doesn’t return, the man of whom she is not going to think. She lifts the gun glancing up shy and bemused seeing her reflection in her aunt’s mahogany-framed mirror a few feet away—amid the faint, cloying fragrance of talcum, and a faint whiff of cedar and mothballs from the aunt’s capacious step-in cedar closet. Matilde Searle, a deadly weapon in her hands, barrel upright and slanted across her breasts. Is this me? Is this the person I’ve become? She has told no one, and will not.
Sucking. Lifting the gun, Matilde feels a sharp sensation of faintness rising from the pit of her belly. Frightening, and delicious. Upward-flowing like water, a dark undertow. It’s a familiar sensation but Matilde can’t recall it, then suddenly she remembers: this is the way she used to feel, many years ago, when a boy or a young man first touched her, when they first kissed, the remarkable sensation of another’s mouth on hers, another’s tongue prodding hers. So suddenly, the gesture of intimacy irrevocable. And Matilde, young, dazed in delight and revulsion, excitement, dread, relief—sucking on the kiss, a stranger’s tongue, as if there were no other nourishment she craved.
I can feel your heartbeat!—Jesus. In the front seat of the Volvo, awkward, the man’s arms around her, gripping her tight. They’d been treated for their wounds, stitched, bandaged in the emergency room of the Detroit Medical Center. And he was driving her, not home as he thought wisest, but back to her car in the parking garage—as Matilde said, she’d need her car, she was going back to work the next day. The man who’d intervened to save her life, the man whose name was Bowe, or Bowie, said, concerned, maybe you’d better not, you’re obviously upset, for Christ’s sake I’m upset and that maniac wasn’t trying to kill me. He was a lawyer, a litigator. And he was articulate, though shaken as Matilde was, and excited; a man she understood was accustomed to attentiveness, respect. You didn’t contradict this man if you wanted to live in peace with him, but Matilde was firm, Matilde insisted no, thank you very much, you’ve been very kind but no, I’m all right. Trying not to look at h
is face more than she needed to, the square patch of gauze beneath his left eye; trying not to meet his eyes. That locking of the eyes—no. There was already a palpable tension between them and Matilde put her hand on the passenger’s door to open it and she winced with pain, slashes in the palm of her hand that had seemed to be numb but now she winced with pain, and in the Volvo parked on Stockton Street at the rear of the county building she lost her composure at last, suddenly choking, crying, her stiff face crumpling like tissue paper. Don’t touch me! she might have cried but the man touched her. Put his arms around her. Matilde, it’s going to be OK, it’s over now—his breath coming quickly, he was sexually aroused Matilde could tell, adrenaline pumping his veins. Then, I can feel your heartbeat!—Jesus. And he held her, and Matilde clutched at him, she could not control her choked breathless crying which was a wild laughter too but when the man tried to kiss her Matilde wrenched away. No.
∗ ∗ ∗