Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked by James Lasdun Read Free Book Online Page B

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