Over My Live Body (8 page)

Somebody touches me, just brushes by and bumps my elbow; that’s what wakes me up in the middle of a reclining pose. I don’t know how long I’ve been asleep and the artists are smiling as they move their paint around with sable brushes. It’s wonderful, this certainty that your subject isn’t going to move very much. and after last night, I‘m still life. Oranges and peaches would be more likely to roll around than I am right now. I was barely able to sign in at the desk. I didn’t see a guard on duty on my way in; he or she was probably in the restroom, but I signed the book anyway. This is the only place I’ve ever had to do that, show an ID to the security guard
and
sign a ledger, and I didn’t object; it made me feel safe. Now I’m too tired to feel
any
thing. Except that touch.

I force myself to move around before lividity sets in. I go in the hall to use the phone and try reaching Sachi to tell her about what happened last night. Her outgoing voice mail greeting informs me, “
We
can’t come to the phone right now…” I picture them fused together like Siamese twins, maybe sharing a common nose ring by now. This isn’t the kind of news to break on an answering machine. I leave a message for her to call me later. I go back in the studio and walk from easel to easel, looking at all of the painting that was accomplished while I was in my comatose state. In some paintings I’m missing limbs; I’m faceless on others. The ones that are more complete startle me in their similarity. Very frequently, I look like a
zaftig
Rubens model on one canvas and one of Modigliani’s waifs on another, as if the artists are painting their version of what they’d like me to be or what they’d like to be themselves. Big boobs and snake hips are the most common distortions. I have to look down at myself for confirmation that the body depicted isn’t exactly the one I inhabit, but not today because in all these paintings, even the faceless, limbless ones, I look gaunt, like I haven’t eaten in a month, and on those canvases where I
do
have a face, that face doesn’t look very happy. My dirty blond hair
looks
unwashed, my eyes limned with dark shadows, my mouth tense and tight. I don’t have to gaze in a mirror to know these neophyte artists are painting
exactly
how I’m looking and feeling.

The instructor walks around the room, raving about one canvas, criticizing another. “There’s no sense of volume here.” She traces the work in front of her with a blunt fingernail. “She looks flat, one-dimensional. Like road kill.”

This work though illustrates more acumen than do most of the others. I
have
been run over. Repeatedly. The only thing I’m missing is tread marks.

When I get home, I’m dead tired but not too tired to notice that the concrete flower pot on the top stoop of the stairs is littered with cigarette butts and stems cut close to the soil are all that’s left of Mrs. Davidoff’s beloved chrysanthemums. I wonder if the same street person who smoked the Marlboros plucked the flowers. It’s bad enough when they piss on them. I decide that after I get some sleep, say about three days’ worth, I’ll go out and buy some new blooms to beautify the decaying entrance. It might get her off my case for a day or two. Maybe even longer if I promise to do the watering.

I fumble with the keys and drop them. My whole body is stiff from the pose I held for so long. Maybe not long enough. At least I got a nap out of it. I insert the key on the second try and totter up the stairs almost noiselessly, tiptoeing like a prowler who doesn’t belong here. I gasp when I reach the top of the stairs. Somebody dumped a heap of chrysanthemum blossoms at my doorstep in an arrangement that would make Martha Stewart lose her lunch. Yellow petals are scattered everywhere, and near them there’s a note written on a sheet of paper torn from a yellow legal pad. I crouch to pick it up and read it:

My hands shake as I quickly gather up the flowers—what there is of them—by their short stems and squeeze them in my fist. I thrust the note in my pocket and head down the stairs and out of the building and keep walking. I turn down West Tenth Street, clutching at the bundle of decapitated chrysanthemums, and walk faster until I see a blue-and-white, an
RMP
, pull out of a driveway and I know I’m close to my destination. I run the rest of the way until I’m safely inside and pull up breathlessly at the front desk, in front of a big red STOP sign. I hold out the flowers to the first police officer I see.

“For me?” he smiles quizzically.

“These were left for me,” I babble, “like this, on the floor in front of my doorstep, with this note…” I fish it out of my pocket with trembling fingers and thrust it in the smirking officer’s face. I look around the room for either of the officers who came to my place Friday night, a familiar face, someone familiar with my situation. “Could I speak to Officer Venison?”

This just prompts a bigger grin. I hear somebody somewhere behind the tall desk to my left say, “Didn’t know he was such a
dear
.” I feel my face turn cadmium red medium. “Vinson,” I correct myself. “Officer
Vinson
.” The officers continue to chuckle. Mixed in with their whispered giggles, I hear the names Bambi and Thumper. “Somebody’s stalking me,” I finally shout too loudly. “He left this pile of flowers at my doorstep. He left this note. It’s not the first note he’s left me. I want to file a complaint.”

A man in plain clothes signals me to one side. He reminds me of one of those hundreds-of-years-old men in the Caucasus who stay young by eating yogurt and probably could use some. He has a huge bushy gray mustache and a shaven head, but is by no means even a half century old. The job must have taken its toll. He looks very dour. I’m very grateful for dour. Dour is exactly what I came here for. “Let’s see the note,” he grumbles, and I hand it to him. He doesn’t move a facial muscle. “This isn’t overtly threatening,” he says solemnly, handing the note back to me. “Are you sure it isn’t from some boyfriend of yours just trying to be clever?”

Leaving flowers at my doorstep is very easily something Ivan would do, but he would leave four dozen red sweetheart roses mixed in with birds of paradise and white carnations, all with stems attached, something I could stick in a vase and add water to, thereby constantly reminding me of his existence. That’s more his style. Not that that would be any less threatening.

“These weren’t left by any boyfriend,” I insist. “These were left by the guy who’s been calling me and following me around, I’m sure of it. He left me another note Saturday, when I was working in the art studio over on West Eighth. Now he’s left this right at my front door.
Inside
. And defaced private property besides!”

“You have the other note?”

“Not with me,” I admit. “It’s in my apartment. I didn’t even go inside. I just took off and rushed here as soon as I saw this.” I feel weak-kneed. “I don’t even know if he got in my apartment. He could have been waiting for me in my apartment.”

“Was there any sign of forced entry?”

“I didn’t look. I just ran.”

“Well if, when you get around to looking, something looks fishy, don’t go inside, just go someplace else to call us. Okay now, you say this person’s been calling you
and
following you. For how long?”

I shrug. “I wasn’t aware of it until he started leaving messages. I was getting hang-up calls for…oh, I guess weeks, then he began talking. And leaving messages when no one was home.”

“What did he say?”

I babble what I can remember of the messages, watching the mustached cop’s face, waiting for a reaction. His lips pucker like he’s eaten something sour. “And yes,” I assure him, “I saved the messages.”

“Good thinking,” he says. It’s hard to tell what this cop is thinking.

Detective Quick was equally inscrutable last night.
Or was he
? I remember him losing it a couple of times, showing some emotion, and I wonder if I shouldn’t have just called him instead of coming here.
Contact your local precinct
is what he advised me to do, so here I am doing what I was told and getting the distinct feeling that this centuries-old yogurt cop
thinks I’m making an unnecessary stink over a well-intentioned if poorly packaged bouquet of dead flowers.

“What are you going to do about this?”

His mustache twitches like he’s anticipating a sneeze. “Fill out a sixty-one,” he says, signaling me to follow him. He leads the way up a flight of stairs, past stacks of filing cabinets, and stops in front of a door with a gold shield affixed to it, a magnification of the one dangling from a chain around his neck. He holds it open for me, slams it shut behind him, and ambles past me into a small office on the left. I follow him inside. He yanks a pink form out of a manila folder propped on top of the gun metal desk and barks questions at me, filling in the answers sloppily with a felt-tip pen. I cross and uncross my legs, fumbling through some of the answers, correcting myself a couple of times. The detective glares at me and reaches for a bottle of correction fluid. “I haven’t had much sleep,” I say. An apology.

“Things tend to get blown out of proportion when you’re over-tired,” he grumbles, block-printing the information I mixed up. A low blow.

I go through it all again, the account of every phone call that I can recall, the notes, the messages.

“This guy who’s allegedly following you,” he clears his throat. “Have you ever gotten a good look at him?”

I nod.

“Enough so you can describe him?”

“He’s big.”

“Well,
that’s
a start.”

I try to mimic cop talk. “Last seen wearing a dirty blue baseball cap, gray T-shirt…I think it was gray, and blue jeans. Indigo blue, you know, really dark. Blue eyes. Couldn’t see the color of his hair, it was covered by the baseball cap.”

“Eyebrows?”

“Excuse me?”

“Did you see the color of his eyebrows? That would give an approximation of hair color at least.”

I shake my head. “He wore the cap low. I could barely see his eyes.”

“How many times you seen him?”

“Only once that I know of,“ I say. Yogurt cop stops writing and raises his eyebrows. “But he was seen later that same day, tailing me back to West Eighth Street.”

“By whom?”

I cough. “My ex-boyfriend.”

“
Ex-
boyfriend
.
You’re still on good terms?”

“Not exactly.”

“Good enough though for him to be telling you this information.”
Good enough for him to be leaving you flowers.

“
Bad enough
that I had to call the cops on him three nights ago.”

Yogurt cop’s mustache is really twitching now. “What’d
he
do?”

I pull the hem of my dress down over my knees and run it back and forth through my fingers. “Threaten me, sort of. He’d pushed me around before. I didn’t know what he was going to do.”

“Sounds like you got problems, sort of,” he says impassively, making a new notation on the form he’s working on. “You better give me the
ex
-boyfriend’s name and number in case we got to get in touch with him.”

“I’d really rather you didn’t.” I wet my lips. “He’s not involved with
this
.”

“He’s a material witness. He saw the guy you say has been following you. We might need to talk to him.”

Like when I’m dead
? I grip the sides of the chair as I tell yogurt cop Ivan’s name, rank, and cell phone number. “This note,” he pokes at the note clenched in my hand with his pen. “It’s not signed. Was the other?”

I shake my head. “No, it wasn’t. But it’s written the same way. On the same kind of paper too.”

“Hold on to this stuff. We may need it later.” He crosses his arms on the desk and looks at me with hungry hound-dog eyes. “This isn’t a whole lot to go on, Miss Price. The most we could get this guy on now, even if we knew who he is—which we
don’t
—is harassment in the second degree, which is a violation punishable by up to fifteen days in jail.” I wince, and my reaction isn’t lost on him. “Yeah, I know, but what you’ve got to have to get a tougher charge is proof of intent to harm, and you don’t have it. What you do have here is a complaint form,” he flutters it in my face, “and if this guy continues to harass you, you come in here and refer to the case number I’m going to give you and we fill out a follow-up and maybe we come up with more info and enough on him to get him out of your hair. You did the right thing coming here,” he reassures me. “There just isn’t a whole lot to go on.”

“Can’t I get a court order?”

“You don’t know who to cite as the person the court is supposed to protect you from,” he says. “You have to give them more to go on. Once the guy gets IDed, if it turns out he’s been in trouble before, we can get him on repeat offender status. Meanwhile, keep the notes, keep the tapes, and if you hear from him again,” he hands me a piece of paper with a row of digits written across it, “keep in touch. Ask to speak to me and refer to this number.”

“Just who do I ask for?”

He stands up to follow me out and pushes his chair back with a screech that makes my teeth hurt. “Rubenstein.”

Quick and Rubenstein. Makes me think of a Park Avenue law firm.

I walk back up West 10th, turning around every time I hear someone following me. Just past the laundromat, I hear
psst
!
psst
! I clench my fists.
Psst
! Some guy who thinks he’s a real cobra. I turn around tentatively, afraid I’ll see Curtis behind me, wary that Ivan has tracked me down. The only male I see is short and has a face riddled with pock marks.
Like snakeskin
. “Hey, I seen you come out of the police station,” he says. “You seen a woman named Constanza in there? She’s about my height, dark hair, built like
thi
s.” He exaggerates her endowments wildly with his hands, like some of the artists I’ve worked for do with their charcoal pencils.

“I didn’t see anyone in there,” I mumble as I back away. “Just police.”

“I’ll bet.” I see the sparkle of a gold tooth. “So, baby, what’d you get busted for?”

I walk faster. Busting loose is what I’m doing. Trying to get away from everything. The sight of yet another blue-and-white speeding southbound down Seventh Avenue, its siren screaming, makes me cringe.
What is it this time
? At least it quickly dispatches my pursuer in the other direction.

I look to my left down Waverly Place and instantly see Mrs. Davidoff.

She’s standing at the top of the stairs wearing a too-big-for-her blue floral house dress, her head bowed sadly over the empty flowerpot. She doesn’t see me.

I turn right.