Stalker

Years after being stalked by her East Village neighbor, Diana Spechler reconsiders "The Great Gatsby," now 100 years old, through a feminist lens.

This year marks 100 years since The Great Gatsby entered the world and Greg Olear has released a new edition of it that includes this essay by

Diana Spechler

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Like Daisy Buchanan, I once had a stalker. Like Daisy’s stalker, mine was a fabulist. He would reminisce about his escapades with “Leo,” his romantic relationship with Jennifer Love Hewitt, the time he punched Toby Maguire when they lived together in Hollywood. He declared himself the best actor of our generation, claiming that Adrien Brody with his family connections had stolen his role in The Pianist.

Like The Great Gatsby, my story begins in the run-up to a financial crash, not long before we acquired the vocabulary: Freddy Mac. Fannie Mae. Mortgage-backed securities. Like Daisy, I was in my 20s and living in New York. I was paying $1,000 a month for a single-room occupancy in the East Village. The landlord had illegally chopped all the two-bedrooms into “studios,” and to this day, I’ve never seen a smaller apartment. My bathroom was the size of a phone booth. My bed was raised almost to the ceiling and every time I climbed the ladder, the metal loft swayed like the legs of a foal. Beneath the loft, I’d stuffed a mini fridge, a hot plate, and a love seat I’d found on a sidewalk. In the summer of 2007, though the landlord threatened to fine us, we all wedged air conditioners into our windows, and every afternoon, when the circuit overloaded and the power blew, we’d congregate on the roof.

That’s where I met Mark one day. He was sitting on a cinder block and holding a bottle of bourbon by its neck, though I never saw him drink from it. He said he was an actor and screenwriter. When I looked him up later, I learned that over a decade earlier, he’d been in a couple of Indie movies I liked. In one, he’d played a convincing pedophile. I couldn’t find evidence of any work since, but the Internet wasn’t as thorough back then.

Like Daisy Buchanan, I was in my 20s and living in New York. I was paying $1,000 a month for a single-room occupancy in the East Village. The landlord had illegally chopped all the two-bedrooms into “studios,” and to this day, I’ve never seen a smaller apartment. My bathroom was the size of a phone booth. My bed was raised almost to the ceiling and every time I climbed the ladder, the metal loft swayed like the legs of a foal. Beneath the loft, I’d stuffed a mini fridge, a hot plate, and a love seat I’d found on a sidewalk.

Mark was extremely skinny. Although he claimed to be 29, he had a child’s body and an old man’s head, blond hair combed over a bald spot. His eyes were the most intense blue I’d ever seen, probably colored contacts. Weeks later I’d try on his glasses and learn they were non-prescription. He said he was starving himself to embody a character he was writing, a Jewish man imprisoned in a concentration camp. This affectation set off an alarm, but in my 20s, I was expert at ignoring alarms tripped by men.

*

I’m in the perhaps idealistic camp that sees in The Great Gatsby a critique of misogyny. It’s set in 1922, when feminism was still in its shaky first wave, when even wealthy white women were trapped, when the average American woman was married by 21. Although the 19th Amendment, just two years old, had granted (some) women the right to vote, it would be another 15 years before they could petition for divorce on the basis of cruelty. It would be 68 years before the passage of a single anti-stalking law. The women of The Great Gatsby are quiet resisters. Jordan Baker is an athlete of celebrity status. Myrtle chooses running into oncoming traffic over staying in the cage of her marriage. Daisy, pulling strings behind a facade of breeziness, renders her unfaithful husband, in his narcissistic way, as determined to have her as Gatsby is.

It’s possible, as many theorize, that the tragedies that befall the novel’s men spotlight the demonic ways of women. But calling the novel misogynistic is like calling it a celebration of wealth. It’s clear that Fitzgerald had no love for Tom, his most garishly misogynistic character.

The most famous work of stalking fiction in the canon, The Great Gatsby offers us a screed against entitlement. And stalking is a glaring expression of entitlement, a manifestation of belief in one’s right to another person.

*

Mark’s apartment was one floor below mine with a dirty dream catcher on the door. Sometimes we’d drink together in the bar next to our building, an actual dive called Blue and Gold, nothing like the “dives” of today’s cities—clean spaces styled in homage to grime. He was easy to talk to, pleasingly weird. I was going through a breakup from a stand-up comedian and appreciated the distraction of a new friend. Listening to Mark’s stories, I let myself suspend disbelief, the way one does at the theater. I was often drawn to liars, to the possibility of magic, a man pulling endless scarves from his hand with nothing up his sleeve. Once we played Stuck in a Moment by U2 on the jukebox and danced. This was our Jazz Age, I guess. Not until later did it dawn on me that his whiskey tumbler always stayed full. Not until later did I pick apart the odd, abstract things he said, like, We have so much in common and I’m at the end of my rope and I'm the wooden boy in Geppetto’s workshop finally coming to life. Not until later did my friend Kate tell me, alarmed, “I know him! My friend used to live in your building and he stalked her until she had to move!”

“You don’t have to feel this way,” Mark said to me one night at Blue and Gold, hanging his head, taking my hand.

I hadn’t been crying. Or complaining.

“Remember that hiker who got trapped by a boulder? Then cut off his own arm to escape?”

I did remember. I’d been living in Montana, where everyone had condemned the man for entering the canyon alone. He’d gotten what he deserved, they agreed.

“I did that, too,” Mark said. “I did that with my emotions.”

I wanted to laugh, but Mark never laughed. He was never lighthearted. He was never kidding.

When we got home that night, he walked me the extra flight of stairs to my door, and I realized I’d locked my keys inside.

“Don’t worry,” he said, sprinting away.

Mark was extremely skinny. Although he claimed to be 29, he had a child’s body and an old man’s head, blond hair combed over a bald spot. His eyes were the most intense blue I’d ever seen, probably colored contacts. Weeks later I’d try on his glasses and learn they were non-prescription. He said he was starving himself to embody a character he was writing, a Jewish man imprisoned in a concentration camp. This affectation set off an alarm, but in my 20s, I was expert at ignoring alarms tripped by men.

I waited, listening to the screams from one floor above of the girl who always screamed. She screamed and screamed, night after night, her dog, whom she wasn’t permitted to have, barking commiseration. When I heard the click of the knob, I stood. My door opened and there was Mark, a man I hardly knew, letting me into my home. He had run upstairs and across the roof, climbed down the fire escape, and in through my window—all in under a minute. I felt something strange and cold spread inside me.

“In this building,” he said, “the windows don’t lock.”

The next day, he texted me, I love you.

*

During the time I knew Mark, I never thought of Gatsby, but I thought of Mark years later upon rereading the novel:

“What was the use of doing great things if I could have a better time telling her what I was going to do?”

Mark once told me that no matter how famous he got, he’d always live in our building. He said, “I just want to stay humble.”

*

Come March of 2008, Wall Street teetered. Bear Stearns collapsed. I was working in a tequila bar that filled with sad bankers at happy hour. I briefly dated a man who traded futures. I had no idea what that meant, but it appealed to me on a primal level. He smelled of fancy soap.

Ever since Mark had climbed through my window, I’d been peering down the stairwell every time I left the building, making sure he wasn’t lurking in the hallway before I’d sprint out to the street.

The passage of time had brought him no closer to accepting my lack of interest. Every day, as if I subscribed, I received a vitriolic letter under my door.

You’re the worst bitch I’ve ever met.

I hope you die.

Succubus.

One night, he texted me while I was in the middle of a shift: I just swallowed a bottle of pills. It’s your fault. Goodbye.

I called 911.

Then I called Mark. “Where are you?” I asked, heart slamming.

“What do you care? Just do me one favor. Tomorrow, don’t let them put my face on the cover of People.”

*

The next day, he texted me, I’ve met some cruel people in my life, but no one as cruel as you.

*

You are a horrible person, said the letters.

I’m sorry, said the letters.

I’m just trying to exorcise you. It’s just that I love you. I hate you, you bitch you bitch you bitch you bitch. I wouldn’t wish you on my worst enemy. I hate you fucking hate you hate you hate you hate you hate.

I’m in the perhaps idealistic camp that sees in The Great Gatsby a critique of misogyny…The women of The Great Gatsby are quiet resisters. Jordan Baker is an athlete of celebrity status. Myrtle chooses running into oncoming traffic over staying in the cage of her marriage. Daisy, pulling strings behind a facade of breeziness, renders her unfaithful husband, in his narcissistic way, as determined to have her as Gatsby is.

I grew scared of the sound of paper sliding over the threshold. I would hear it in my head. I was scared of his insults. They all felt true. I was scared to wake in the middle of the night to his breath on my face, his unnaturally blue eyes. My phone buzzed and buzzed, constant as construction.

Say what you will about Gatsby, but he’s polite. Who knows what would have happened had he lived to see that Daisy no longer wanted him, but during his short time on Earth, he never makes his obsession her problem.

*

Fed up with unrequited letters and texts, Mark banged on my door and screamed obscenities. Inside, I covered my ears and waited. The neighbors hurrying by must have wondered, Who are these crazy people? Why do their lives so disappoint them that they need to create their own theater? Zuccotti Park was still a few years off, but America saw what was happening on Wall Street and we understood what it meant for us. We were in a “new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about…”. We re-learned that the cause of death was desire. The American Dream, the English teachers call it when they teach The Great Gatsby. Greed, we were snarling at the bankers, as if we were above it. What is greed, really? Just desire without an end.

In the fall, the government offered bail-outs not to the homeless or unemployed, but to the bankers surfing the crest of a wave that we had been told couldn’t crash. Mark would go silent sometimes. I’d enjoy days, even weeks of nothing before he’d suck me back down the hole. He would catch a glimpse of me in the stairwell or on the street and revert to text messages. Letters. Calling. Knocking. Pounding. Screaming.

I never trusted silence. I always knew what was coming—which was exactly what the analysts were saying now that the market had crashed. One night I got home to find that my door no longer looked like my door. It was dented as if it had been beaten with a hammer. In black permanent marker, someone had drawn a body-sized cross.

*

A man I’d been friends with since college asked, “Do you want someone to push him down the stairs? You know, like an accident?”

Other men I was friends with banged on his door, yelling, threatening, but Mark wouldn’t come out.

At the precinct, a police officer said I could have Mark arrested on Aggravated Harassment charges. I was shocked, not by “Aggravated Harassment,” a term that I’d never heard but that sounded spot-on, but because the decision was mine to make: Click those cold, metal cuffs around Mark’s skinny wrists.

Terror squeezed my body. I accused myself of overreacting. Who was I to involve authorities in the life of someone so small?

*

I got a text from Mark that said, I sold my screenplay for four million dollars!

Then a follow-up a few minutes later: Sorry, I sent that to all my friends. I didn’t mean to include you.

*

One last word and then I’ll disappear. You are without one doubt the most horrible girl I have and probably ever will meet.

*

Bitch.

*

I always had to remind myself that insults belonged to those who spoke them. I always had to remind myself that Mark did not live inside me.

But he did live nearby. And that seemed to be the trouble. Proximity can strengthen delusion. It can make a “dream” seem real—the green light at the end of the dock.

I knew in my gut that were I no longer visible, Mark would leave me alone. Ghosts don’t follow people; they remain in the building they’re haunting.

You don’t have to flinch every time you see me, he wrote. I have no intention of ever bothering you again.

Once, inexplicably, he texted, I might have to go to the police about you.

I loved my snail-shell apartment where, as my stand-up comedian ex had pointed out, if someone tripped, there wasn’t room to fall all the way down. I loved the neighborhood—the all-night Ukrainian diner that had been there since the ‘50s, the jog through Alphabet City to the river, the neon PSYCHIC signs behind glass. But Mark had been stalking me for a year and he wasn’t slowing down. Maybe I no longer needed to elbow through masses of NYU students. Maybe I’d outgrown my apartment and the screaming girl above me.

So to Mark, the man who loved and hated me most, I surrendered the entire East Village.

*

New Year’s Day, 2009, I moved across town.

Though I still had no room for furniture, I had windows that locked and unlocked and opened to pigeons and sunlight.

Not until later did it dawn on me that Mark’s whiskey tumbler always stayed full. Not until later did I pick apart the odd, abstract things he said, like, We have so much in common and I’m at the end of my rope and I'm the wooden boy in Geppetto’s workshop finally coming to life. Not until later did my friend Kate tell me, alarmed, “I know him! My friend used to live in your building and he stalked her until she had to move!”

In that apartment, I turned thirty, an age that promised, according to Nick Carraway, “a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.” In that apartment, I called a therapist in Midtown who offered a sliding scale. In that apartment, I woke up one day and read that the recession had ended—not that we’d recovered, but that recovery could begin.

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The first time I sat surrounded by pillows in the therapist’s office, all I could do was cry. I tried to recall the last time I’d sunk into a couch. Couches were suburban; they were big and they asked you to rest.

For a while, my stomach churned each time my phone buzzed, but I never heard from Mark again.

*

In the early days of Covid, I was telling a friend about my stalker, by then a story over a decade old. When I mentioned that Mark was an actor, he Googled him.

“He died,” my friend said.

“No, he didn’t,” I said.

It seemed impossible that this man I’d been unable to shake no longer existed. He had been my personal Dr. T.J. Eckleburg, looming and constant, larger than life. I did my own Google search and there was his face, those disturbing blue eyes, the serious creases across his forehead. His birth date in the obituary proved what I’d suspected: When we met, he’d shaved five years off his age.

He’d died a week after the shut-downs began. Although he’d been only 47, his death was attributed to “natural causes.” I couldn’t find much else about it.

Death is consistently surprising, even though it’s the least surprising thing a person can do.

I always found The Great Gatsby’s ending superfluous. Doesn’t the novel accomplish what it sets out to accomplish without delivering Gatsby’s corpse in a swimming pool?

But this is how I feel in general: No one should die. It’s too final. Too sad. I want the party to go on forever.

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This essay, which appears in a new edition of The Great Gatsby, was also reprinted in Diana Spechler’s newsletter,

Dispatches From The Road

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