Dear Digby (11 page)

I stopped reading. I threw The Watcher’s letter down and stalked over to the coffee maker. I fixed myself a large white coffee with the horrible fake cream powder and sat down again. Then I got up and held the letter in front of Page’s face. “Read this.”

She read it, then set it aside as if it were soaked in cat pee. “You should have called the police right away about this guy—didn’t I tell you that when he first wrote to you about peering at you through the windows? Now he’s on your doorstep.”

She looked up at me. “You look terrible. Are you okay, Willis?”

I was
not
okay. But I sighed back to my desk and set the letter aside for the moment and plucked another envelope from the pile.

Dear Willis,

You haven’t been publishing our suggestions. No fair. We gave you our support when you needed it. You need your consciousness raised. Come out with us on a “run”—or are you too chicken? Meet us Wednesday night at seven, at Cleopatra’s Needle. Don’t forget to RSVP. (And don’t forget to wear running shoes!)

Your friends at W.I.T.C.H

I turned the envelope and looked at the W.I.T.C.H. symbol stamped at the back.

Page had a lunch date. After she’d gone, I picked up the phone. I called the
Daily Mirror
and asked for the city desk. I told the guy who answered about Iris Moss and the hypnorapist of Brookheart. He asked a lot of questions. I heard computer blips in the background.

“An
orderly,”
I said. “Isn’t that interesting? What is an orderly doing giving out medication in the first place?”

“Who can confirm all this?” the editor asked.

I gave Iris’s name. “She resides at Brookheart.”

The guy laughed.
“C’mon,
Ms. Digby. You mean to say she’s one of the crazy people?
She
gave you the story?”

“Now who would be in a better position to know about patient abuse than a patient?”

After I hung up, I sat for a while, staring at the pile of letters. I looked over at my rabbit ears. They’d grown dusty in recent days. I blew the dust off. I looked at them fondly for a while. I put them on.

Dear Dino,

Wise up. You write a letter to the editor at a magazine or newspaper, you relinquish your rights to it. You were
lucky
enough to get published in SIS. Look at it that way, scrotum-head.

Yrs,

WJD

Dear W.I.T.C.H.,

Okay, I’d like to go on a “run” with you. I will be there at Cleopatra’s Needle in the Park, Wednesday night at seven. I’ll be the one wearing rabbit ears.

In struggle,

Sister Digby

Then I pulled out the threatening letter. It was signed, as usual, The Watcher. I edited the letter, taking out the more blatant personal references—my address, etc.—leaving basically the fact of the threat: that this guy had my home address and was spying on me.

My hands were shaking. On yellow copy paper I roughed out an answer.

Dear Watcher,

I want my readers to know that you’ve written to me before. Many times, in fact. Always your letters have referred to the fact that you are watching me. Watching me from the office building where you work, through your telescope. Watching me on the street, at the lunch counter, the pharmacy, when I have no idea I’m being observed. How many times have you asked me to write back to you at your post office box, to be your friend? Well, here I am. I’m writing back now, publicly, because I would like other women to witness
you,
to witness the kind of cheap, threatening bully you really are. Men who make obscene phone calls. Men who write anonymous threats to women, men who follow women on the street—you’re all the same. I will not be your friend. Nor will I be afraid of you. I’m going to call the police, and I’m also going to give you fair warning. If you keep on violating my right to privacy, don’t count on me to be a scared, defenseless victim. If you try to threaten me physically in any way: the victim, pal, I promise you, will be you.

Sincerely,

Willis J. Digby

Letters Editor

I put my answer to the W.I.T.C.H. letter in the regular mail slot and put the note to Dino and the one to The Watcher in the big red
DEADLINE COPY
basket. All copy for the magazine was supposed to be approved by the SIS collective editorial board—but my letters often slipped by without group review. Over the years trust had developed for my odd selection process and for the fact that I was a maverick. Too much trouble to argue with.

I threw another couple of letters (one from my favorite U.F.O. spotter), with instructions to the printer, in the same deadline basket. I’d made Xerox copies of everything. I shoved these in my bag and went out whistling. As I rounded the corner of 43rd and Lex, I felt a very purposeful tap on my shoulder, and I nearly lost consciousness.

I
T WAS TERENCE.

I took an involuntary step toward him, in relief, then pulled back.

“When did
you
get back?”

He was looking at me strangely. “About a month ago.”

I looked away. “A
month?
”

“Willis?” His face was concerned. “Why are you wearing those rabbit ears?”

We went to a little café on Lex and sat across from each other at a tiny wobbly table. “Shades of the midgets,” I joked, but he only looked sad.

The waiter brought wine, and I drank some quickly. I was feeling, even with the rabbit ears safely tucked away in my bag, not exactly normal. I forced myself to look at him. He looked away, which gave me a chance to see that he was starring, as always, in his own show: trim, tan, clean-shaven.

“You look great.”

He smiled and looked at me finally. “So do you. Except for the rabbit ears.”

“When I get the weirdest letters, they act as an antenna. They help sort out transmissions for me … ha ha.”

He frowned.

I sat forward. I needed to talk to somebody.

“I’ve been getting some very
strange
letters lately.”

He snorted. “So what else is new at SIS’s Crackpot Desk?”

“But listen to this: I’ve started answering the letters!”

He raised an eyebrow, sipped and listened to my story. How I’d let a tidal wave of this stuff pound over me, how one day I picked up a pen and wrote back, got SIS to agree to publish the odd letters and my even odder responses. Even as I spoke I had a sense of aspects of the story whirring and clicking into place, overpolished, apochryphal. I lifted my glass, inviting a toast.

“I’m on my way to becoming the liberated woman’s Dear Abby—okay, no, it’s sleazier. I’m like a late night talk show host, a Joe Pine, who insults people who call in.”

Terence touched my glass but looked skeptical.

“It’s a
great
idea,” I said. “It makes me feel one hundred percent better. It’s just that I have to be … careful.”

“Damn right. You start writing back to some of those bananas and …”

Just then a fan came up—a determined woman from Queens who had seen him in
Large Dead Cops,
or something like that; I didn’t catch it all. I had grown used to this kind of interruption. It was profoundly humbling, really, being with someone famous, or someone somewhat famous. I kept forgetting that Terence was a figure in the imaginings of other people. Once at dinner in an intimate restaurant, a menu, wielded like a placard, sliced between our heads (bent passionately close over the low candle) and a voice that sounded like Selma Diamond yodeling on speed split the air around us. The woman plunked herself down at our table.

“Sign right here,” she commanded Terence. I stared, struggling to understand why this was happening. She looked back at me and winked. “Gotta quarter?”

Now I sat and smiled benignly as Terence signed and wrote special greetings to grandchildren and bowling partners. I drank some more wine.

I thought back to the first time Terence and I went out to a “public” do, an opening night of some sort. We got out of the car holding hands, and a young man with a camera asked for a shot of Terence “alone.” I smiled over at Terence as if to say, “What brass!” Terence gave me a gimlet eye, then a quick nod that meant “move it, Myrtle.”

I, Myrtle, moved it. Now I could see him kindly trying to hurry the woman along—turning down (astonishingly) an invitation to appear at her bowling league banquet.

Still, our mood was kind of lost.

I ordered some more wine. “I suppose you’re aware that we’re still husband and wife?” I asked, with the terrible coyness a second glass always lends.

“What do we do about it?” He looked grief-stricken suddenly. He cupped one hand over his left eye, squinting at me as if I were a high-intensity bulb. He sighed, collapsing into himself: a beaten man. It was diverting, but I remained unmoved. I recognized these gestures from a film he wished he’d never made (and I wished I’d never seen) called
Condo Bondage,
or something like that. He had terrible unconscious throwbacks (in moments of stress) to the physical movements of his character in that flick. Something like LSD flashbacks.

I pushed ahead.

“We divorce, right?”

He shrugged. “Right, I guess.”

I was getting depressed. “You wanna sue me or should I sue you?”

“On what grounds?”

“I could sue you for mental cruelty,” I said helpfully, trying to grease the wheels.

“Mental cruelty? … Mental cruelty? That’s interesting. I was actually thinking that I might sue
you
for mental cruelty.”

“That is interesting. Well, I could go with … what’s that archaic-sounding charge? ‘Refusal to cohabit’ or something like that? I was leaning in that direction too. You know the one, when one of the partners refuses to …”

“Yeah,” he said quickly. “I know. So what you’re saying is that there was physical incompatibility.”

“And spiritual.”

“Ah!” He finished his wine with a flourish. “Ah! Spiritual as well! Then I suppose that accounts for the rather large debit on your side of the ledger; I guess we could call it willful abandonment of your spouse.”

“Abandonment!” I whooped. The couple next to us looked over. “That’s rich! I abandoned
you?
You abandoned me every time we entered a room with a mirror.”

“Who left our
domicile,
huh? With forethought and malice? Who moved out on me? Back into her place downtown that she never gave up?”

“Who went to goddamn Egypt?” I squawked. The couple was staring unabashedly. “Did I go to Egypt? Did I see the pyramids? Nooooo,
you
were the one who got to boogey with Tut!”

Terence turned and smiled at the couple. They smiled back with a dreamy tenderness at him, gradually recognizing him from something—a TV drama, a play.

“Give ’em the teeth, Terence,” I said, hating myself.

He got up. I got up. He threw money on the table. I threw money on the table. Then I reconsidered and took back a dollar or two.

“Listen,” I said, “in New York all you have to do is file for separation and stay separated for a year and divorce is automatic: no fault.”

He turned up his jacket collar, put on his sunglasses, and growled, “No fault, my ass.” Then he looked at the floor. “Fine, let’s get it over with.”

“That’s what you said on our wedding day, do you remember?”

He shook his head sadly.

“I’ll file for separation,” I said.

We marched out. Bright sun. We said a terse good-bye on the curb—what else was there to say?

I
OPENED THE
New York
Mirror
and there it was—
Exclusive to the Mirror
—reports of sexual abuse of patients by staff at Brookheart State Hospital. It headlined low on the front page, but it was a long, well-researched article that meandered back through the first section.

Patient charges of sexual abuse were substantiated by secret staff sources, a part-time physician,
and
a reporter posing as a nurse.

One patient, quoted extensively throughout the article, maintained that the abuse had been going on for five years or longer. Another patient pointed out specifics of the violation:

I am aware of my physical attractiveness but I am no bimbo! When I first understood that I was being abused (I was drugged and seminal fluid was being pumped into my precious body against my will), I became so angry that I vowed that I would kill my tormentors if I ever lay eyes on them. It’s bad enough being crazy, without having to contend with seminal fluid.

The article went on to describe items recovered from patients as possible evidence of wrongdoing: a syringe filled with chloral hydrate allegedly used to sedate victims, S & M paraphernalia found in a male nurse’s file drawer, some photographs of Brookheart patients in pornographic poses taken from an administrator’s desk drawer by a patient.

The State District Attorney’s office is expected to announce an investigation of patient allegations and will begin to subpoena witnesses next week.

I put the paper down. I was working late. Outside the windows the lights were coming on at seventy stories and up. What a sight in the pink dusk!
What a world,
I thought. I laughed out loud and threw my rabbit ears up in the air.
What a world, Iris!
Then:
Way to go, Iris!

The last mailbag of the day leered at me from the shadows. I pulled it to me like a lover. I could stand anything now—Iris was an inspiration! I shook the bag upside down, and the postmarked shower fell.

I tore one open at random.

Dear Letters Editor,

I
love
your new format! I thought your comeback to the redneck sexist creep really put him in his place! And your answer to that psychotic Peeping Tom: bravo. I’ll bet no one’s ever published a letter like
that
before! Keep up the good work!

A Reader

There were fifty or so enthusiastic letters in the same vein—lots of them from women who had received weird communications: letters, phone calls, street assaults. Anonymous notes under the door.