Chapter 9 Fort Constitution
Fort Constitution
“That,” said William, “was the Rabbit.”
They were driving—somewhere, Sam didn’t know where. William navigated through Portsmouth as if he had a destination in mind.
He’d said very little since he’d returned to the Marriott lobby, limping like Captain Ahab, to confer with two of New Hampshire’s
finest. Sam had sat nearby on a couch, eavesdropping-not-eavesdropping; William’s voice had grown so low with fury, it was
hard to hear him. At one point, Sam had heard him growl, Yes, it’s all on record, which you’d know if you looked! Jesus Christ, I know she has to murder me in my sleep before you
people take action, but at least do your basic job. Now he was grim-faced and less voluble than usual but calm. If this was William enraged, Sam could take it.
She’d been checking out his car as he drove—it was like seeing a man’s house for the first time; it told you so much. William’s
car was the luxe but unflashy small SUV people drove when they had money but didn’t want to show off. It had a bike rack on
the back, a Thule container on top, and a bumper sticker that read Honk if you’re letting the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Inside, it smelled of his cologne, and the interior was clean, no crumpled fast-food wrappers or crumbs, just William’s seersucker
suits hanging from the dry-cleaning hook and a carton of breakfast bars on the back seat. Tour life, male version.
He stopped at a light and turned to Sam. He was wearing aviators, like every boy she’d gone to college with. “Thank you for coming to see me.”
“Thanks for having me. I hope it’s okay that it was the Darlings instead of a book event.”
“Very okay, if a little below your pay grade. But I apologize for the drama.”
“It’s not your fault,” said Sam. “I saw that woman before, at your Boston reading. She had curly blond hair then.”
“She has many different looks,” said William. “She keeps the wig industry in business. She’s been stalking me for years.”
“Seriously?”
“Dead serious. She comes to most of my readings. Tails me on the road. I strongly suspect she’s been to my house.”
“That’s horrible!” said Sam. “Can’t anyone do anything about it?” But she knew the answer. She’d grown up watching Lifetime
Movie Network.
“No. It’s all on record, I’ve reported every incident. But she has to threaten or cause me bodily harm before I can get even
a restraining order. And she’s too smart for that.”
“Who is she, do you know? What does she want?”
William turned onto a road paralleling the ocean. “What does any stalker want? As a beautiful woman, as an author, you must
have been through this. You know.”
Sam nodded. For each book, she’d had readers send uncomfortably personal emails that, when she responded to say thanks, grew
in length and intimacy. She’d learned to let her replies dwindle and wink out. But one recent gentleman had been persistent,
flooding her in-box with commentary on her writing, analysis of the sexy passages, imaginings of what Sam had been thinking
when she wrote them, descriptions of what they made him do. When she blocked his email, he’d popped up on social media, leaving
paragraph-long comments on her posts and DMing photos of himself, naked, with her books. When she reported him, he started
texting and calling—and Sam did not give out her number.
The pièce de résistance was when he mailed a nude sketch of Sam to her apartment, with a note saying he could be there in 4.
52 hours if the traffic wasn’t bad. Sam never posted her address or identifying information of her home.
She reported the incidents to the police, who of course could do nothing, and changed her locks.
“I did have a stalker,” Sam said. “But he faded away.”
“That’s a mercy,” said William. “And I’m sorry you had to go through it, though not surprised. I’ve come to think of it as
a professional side effect: We invite readers into our imaginations in the most intimate way, invoke their strongest feelings . . .
and then, when they close the cover of the book, it’s all over. The most fragile ones can’t handle it. They’ve formed what
they think is a relationship.”
“Like the celebrity stalkers who confuse the actor with the role,” said Sam.
“Exactly. It could be considered a compliment, if it weren’t such an annoyance.”
“As long as that’s all this woman is,” Sam said.
William drove into a parking lot, passing one of the wooden National Parks signs Sam loved: Fort Constitution. “So far, yes. And it’s been years, so I don’t think she’s going to escalate. In fact, she might be getting better. She used
to send emails . . . ”
Oh! thought Sam. She felt a small shock, as though she’d shuffled across the carpet and touched a light switch. She’d totally
forgotten until now about the message she’d gotten via her website a few nights ago, from somebody named bibliogirl081569:
STAY THE F*CK AWAY FROM WILLIAM CORWYN. IF YOU KNOW WHAT’S GOOD FOR YOU.
At the time, Sam had been startled, then annoyed, then bemused.
Whoever bibliogirl081569 was, she didn’t know it took a lot more than that to scare a writer.
Sam had received far more profane emails from aggrieved readers.
And she’d been kind of charmed by bibliogirl081569’s delicately skewed sensibilities, sending a threat but not wanting to spell out the curse word.
Sam had filed the email in her Angry Randos file, spent an hour on William’s social media trying to spot bibliogirl081569 among his commenters, then given up.
It had to be somebody from the Boston event, because that was the only time Sam and William had been publicly together, but that could be one of a hundred women.
Someone with a crush and a violent way of expressing herself online. Now Sam thought: Probably the Rabbit.
Sam considered telling William, but why? He couldn’t do anything about it. And apparently she was all sound and fury, signifying
nothing. Sam didn’t want some irritating but harmless pest ruining the first chance she’d had at a viable relationship for
the first time in . . . ever. It was only an email. If it happened again, she’d tell William about bibliogirl081569—or Sam
would handle the Rabbit herself.
As William pulled into a leafy parking space near some picnic tables, Sam thought of something her mom, Jill, used to say,
during her stint as a realtor between husbands three and four: If a property has one thing wrong with it, buy it; more than that, run. William had the Rabbit—but that wasn’t his fault; anyone could attract a stalker. And Sam thought of another front seat,
long ago: She’d been driving, Hank riding shotgun, and she’d just picked him up from the motel after the owner called. He’d
passed out again, and he smelled like the bottom of a garbage can, cigar and vodka and blood—it was the first time she had
known addiction had a smell. She’d poked him awake in front of the emergency room, and Hank had come to and said blearily,
Well, I guess we better go in. He protested against Sam coming in with him because he didn’t want to expose her to the gashes on his wrists when they unwrapped
the towels—as if Sam hadn’t already seen them in the motel, as if her sneakers hadn’t made squelching noises in the carpet
soaked with Hank’s blood. She’d driven home by herself after leaving him at the hospital, which was the hardest thing she’d
ever done, and cleaned up and put on a red turtleneck and gone straight to a book club at Barnes the
other was on the move, stroking her nipple, then down her rib cage, then lifting her shirt.
“Your stalker,” said Sam. “Why do you call her the Rabbit? Is it because of her teeth?”
William’s hand stopped, a starburst of heat on Sam’s hip.
“Good Lord, no,” he said. “That would be cruel. It’s because I imagined a woman who looks like that doesn’t enjoy many lovers,
so I wished for her a good relationship with her rabbit.”
“She has a rabbit?” Sam said. Then she got it. “Oh. You mean her vibrator.”
“Yes, exactly!” said William, and Sam felt him laugh. “The best pet a girl can have.”
He rested his chin atop Sam’s head again, swaying them slightly.
“The world can be so unkind to ugly women,” he said. “But you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you, lovely Simone?”
He eased out from behind her, obscuring the darkening view.
“Watch out!” Sam said.
“I’m safe,” said William. “So are you. There’s plenty of room—see?”
Sam peeked at him standing on the very edge of the walkway, then squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head.
“That’s right,” William said. “Don’t look, if that’s easier.” He kissed her. “You’re safe with me, Simone. I swear it to you.”
Sam felt him kneeling. “But your knee,” she said—middle-aged hookup problems.
William chuckled against her stomach. “My knee’s fine.”
He paused, fingers inside Sam’s waistband. “Okay?” he said.
Sam opened her eyes. She could barely see him in the dusk, the glint of the last of the light off his glasses, his hair corkscrewing
in the wind. “Okay.”
William yanked Sam’s capris and boy shorts down in one fluid movement. “I always thought that should have some accompanying
sound.”
“Like—Zoop!” said Sam, shivering not from the breeze but the sudden exposure.
“Zoop, yes, very good!” said William, laughing. “Zoop,” he said, stroking Sam lightly, opening her up, his tongue following
where his fingers led. “Zzzooooooopppp,” he murmured, the consonants reverberating in a most pleasant way, and then he stopped
talking.
Sam leaned her head back against the fort, thanking God William had shaved his goatee and gripping his hair for dear life—this
was why she never dated bald guys. Although her first professional writing job out of college had been the Penthouse Forum
letters—Dear Penthouse, I never thought it would happen to me!—and she’d written about sex on boats, under waterfalls, and in treehouses, she’d never really enjoyed it outside. Nature
was too distracting. But with William, that turned out not to be true. Sam remembered something an older and very famous writer
had once said when they were both totally hammered in the ladies’ room at a festival party: Dearie, if you have a man who’s good with his tongue, nothing else matters. Sam found, as she writhed against the rough rock of the fort and scraped her skin against it and cried out again and again
and still William kept doing what he was doing, his hands pinning her in place, that this was absolutely true.