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A small gift: a short story that appears in my 2021 collection The Necessary Havoc of Love.

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He was standing outside the arena as they pulled up, a little man with bad hair.

“That’s him,” Janis Trevor said, pointing out the car window. “I phoned Dad. He says legally they can bar him from coming inside, but they can’t keep him off the public sidewalk.”

“Unimpressive specimen,” Dieter said. “A troll, I think, degraded from more mythic times. Or Rumplestiltskin, something like that. These creatures still exist, you know. They’ve just gone to live in basement flats.”

Janis smiled at the self-referential pair of plush dice hanging from Dieter’s rear-view mirror. Dieter taught cultural studies at the university, while she was a film school drop-out. That’s probably what made her approach to life more ground-level. Concrete—or maybe just cold. Janis played hockey, signing up, winter and summer, for the women’s house league at her local arena.

“He follows us to the pub after the game,” she said. “The manager won’t ban him. All he does is sit and watch, and the manager says that if they started banning men who watched women, they’d go out of business.”

You’d all leave, he said.

The manager was right. Janis and her friends courted attention, shouting over the piped-in music, hooting at the wrestling broadcasts on overhead screens, letting out absent-minded cheers when the Toronto Maple Leafs scored on TV—although it was really their own games that thrilled them. They bitched every week about missing passes, about cheap goals and the Singing Ref, who hummed non-stop as he skated. They shared insights into their jobs, men and hair colour, meanwhile passing around newspaper clippings about other women in the league: the immunologist who made a discovery no one understood, even after reading the article twice; the goalie who was sent down for assaulting a security guard; the former winger (broken tailbone) who’d attended a celebrity wedding.

“We don’t feel particularly safe leaving the pub alone any more,” she told Dieter. “We usually leave in pairs.”

“I think maybe this we that doesn’t feel safe is a collective reaction,” he replied. “I think you aren’t bothered at all.”

It was true. Janis felt she could take on most men, with her height and strength, and the stalker looked pocket-sized and lonely outside the arena. As she wrestled her equipment out of Dieter’s car, the little man stood in no particular place with his head hung down. Yet as she strode past him, the man looked up and caught her glance, and Janis was startled at first by the hunger in his dog-brown eyes, and scared by the need, his self-pity.

Later, she wondered if this was the moment he chose her: her window to gawk up at, her steps to hound, her life to dishevel, her fear to exploit and intensify; the moment when everything changed and nothing changed, since she wouldn’t let him alter her behaviour, despite what the police advised. Vary your routines, they told her, and Janis refused, meaning that changes that she would probably would have made didn’t happen. Life froze. She was frozen.

Even hockey players didn’t want that.

The problem was that she found Dieter too good looking. He had blue eyes and nut-brown hair and skin that tanned deeply. What especially fascinated Janis was the firm sculpting of his face, the healthy male skin that folded into such smart nostrils and ears, that moulded his long upper lip into two sharply raised ridges running down from his nose to his mouth, that outlined his rather thin lips and dimpled his fleshy chin, a bristly-whiskered chin that she liked to take lightly between her teeth, just as she did the thick rubbery head of his unreliable penis. Unreliable in bed with Janis; unreliable because of its perky availability to other women. His availability.

One time, before they started dating, Janis had seen Dieter in a dark and crowded after-hours club standing with a woman in a corner, both of them using or very drunk. The woman was stroking his crotch and he liked it. Normally, Janis would have turned away, hoping that she’d never see either of them again. But she was buzzed too, and they wanted to be watched. They were displaying themselves, advertising their abilities, and Janis felt drunkenly tender toward them: they’d gone to all the work of mounting a show and she was their only audience. She knew who Dieter was, the young professor who’d written a couple of books, afterwards making his sound-bite opinions accessible to both the hippest TV shows and women’s magazines. Friends laughed at him a little.

“He wants to be the male Camille Paglia,” someone said.

“No, more serious. The male Susan Sontag.”

The woman was leaning full against him now, her hand between their shifting, slipping bodies. A small woman against a tall man. She came up to the open top button of his shirt and nuzzled his chest distractedly. Her elbow was working, pushing Dieter into the black-painted corner, and he turned his head from me in profile, eyes toward the lit club bar. Once or twice he raised his arm and brushed his hand down the woman’s spine. Once or twice he glanced down at her, maybe at himself. Janis felt the bass thump of music in her molars, heard laughter from passing mouths, repositioned herself as people came between her and Dieter, their eyes searching mirrors for someone they’d lost. Gradually, Dieter rose up on the balls of his feet, turning his face in her direction, eyes closing. He stretched his head back, his neck becoming a pale streak, mouth opening like a choirboy’s. Gulping at fame, she thought.

How strange to catch yourself thinking that.

When he came back down, Dieter lifted the woman gently aside and walked quickly toward the Men’s. Janis didn’t know who the woman was, a small dark-haired woman. She looked dazed.

A month or so later, a friend introduced Janis to Dieter at a dinner party. Hosts with a new west end house, a baby, an architectural practice, and an ambitious menu involving lamb inside pastry, the smell of cinnamon and heat. There was the usual pre-dinner conversation in the kitchen about who had got what gig, who had left whom, some mild teasing of Dieter for an opinion piece he had published about surveillance cameras on Main Street, everybody being watched these days, the democratization of celebrity.

“Gulping at fame,” Janis said, already slightly whacked and giving him a knowing smile.

“Dieter Hagen, Janis Trevor.”

“I spell it wrong,” she told him. “I-s, not i-c-e.”

Janis felt far from icy. Dieter was so good looking she batted her big brown eyes, deciding that someone had to go out with the people from the last party who made it on top of the coats on the bed, the ones who emerged together from the bathroom, the pair behind the steamed-up windows in the rocking parked car.

“Janis is a screenwriter,” their host said.

“He means that I write the Saturday morning cartoons. Cute little bears. Raccoons.”

“She’s being modest. That’s her day job. One of her scripts was produced…”

“A long time ago,” she said. “By former friends.”

<p.”An indie screened at several festivals.”

“To no discernible effect.”

“I hate to interrupt this Canadian argument,” Dieter said. “One downmanship, I think. The problem is”—he smiled at her sweetly—“I grew up in what was East Berlin, our noses pressed against the glass. Pinned there like pig noses,” he said, demonstrating. “I’m afraid it is impossible to be more ill-used than we are. I am simply unable to permit this. You must allow yourself to be much more successful than me or my self-image will feel threatened. I will lose my chippiness, and then where will I be?”

Janis appropriated the chair next to Dieter at dinner, gracefully spilled red wine on his hand, and accepted a ride home in his skittish European car. When he pulled up, she invited him in, shed more than her coat and mittens a few feet inside the front door and had sex on what wasn’t even their first date.

It wasn’t out of character, she had to admit. Much more unusual was the way that Dieter seemed to get her. They shared cultural markers, neither of them liking to admit they’d passed thirty, both increasingly cynical about cynicism, both admitting to pangs of absurd sentimentality about used furniture.

Still, Janis wasn’t expecting much when Dieter took her number and was surprised when he phoned to ask if they could have lunch, dinner, sustenance. It turned out they cooked well together, loved renting classic Hollywood movies and were hooked on telling bedtime stories about their childhoods, his deprived and traumatic, hers set in the plushest neighbourhoods of Mexico and Ottawa.

Soon Dieter started looking for meaning in her Saturday morning cartoons, where there was none. Janis began alternately shaking her head and nodding while he rehashed departmental in-fighting at the university, nodding off before shaking herself back awake, yet slowly understanding that every scene he staged at work was part of an invisible screenplay he was writing. He was developing himself as the hero of a script that would arc toward a splash job south of the border—a script, Janis couldn’t help noticing, that had no role for her.

Query: What can come of a relationship that begins with the woman not trusting the man?

Query: Is there any other kind?

No one really noticed when the stalker first appeared in the arena. They had two rinks, and overlooking one of them was a heated lounge behind Plexiglas. Players walked through it to get to the dressing rooms, while a mingling of friends and rink rats parked themselves on stools to scrutinize the games. There was always a crowd, and one silent man following a game or two or three was likely to go unnoticed. Of course he was. There wasn’t ipso facto something weird watching women play hockey.

Then Yoni came back off her arthroscopic knee surgery and saw him.

“How long has that guy been here?”

“That guy? Dunno, he’s been around.”

Pulling a few of the regulars aside, Yoni spoke about the time outside the courthouse when she’d run into a woman from her other league, the one in north Toronto. This was a butch winger, small and fast, her short hair dyed blue, one ear pierced and ringed along the rim like a spiral-bound notebook. Blue was a recording engineer who could tolerate the behaviour of even the most celebrated musicians. But she told Yoni that she’d been forced to get a restraining order against a stalker with a fetish for women hockey players.

First he’d shown up at the rink, then he’d appeared outside work, on the subway, beneath her lover’s window. In the beginning, she’d laughed about her low-rent stalker, a man with so few brains he was stalking a dyke. Then he started talking to her and she didn’t find him so amusing any more. She wouldn’t tell Yoni what he said, but gave her a copy of the eight-by-ten photo she’d recently snapped and made into a flyer. Warning: Pervert.

Not long afterwards, Blue had disappeared from the west end league. The stalker no longer haunted the recreation area outside the arena. Blue came back, the stalker didn’t. She wouldn’t say what had happened and cried when someone tried to press her.

Yoni remembered the face on the flyer very well.

“He must have been in jail,” she said. “We should be careful. He might be violent.”

Janis figured she could handle the violence. Physically, she was pretty tough herself.

Hockey night. Janis’s favourite part of the game is the opening face-off. She has this one tic, that she has to play the first shift, skating out to her position on defence with the game about to start. Up ahead, her racehorse of a centre paws the ice with her stick. Two wingers stand on either side. Behind them, she looks across at her other dee, her defensive partner.

Tonight, she’s paired with Tripod, the one who leans on her stick. Janis nods and look behind her, sensing waves of intensity roll up the ice, aggression steam off their brooding goalie as she crouches like a spider in her net. Nothing has happened yet. There is no history. There is only now…

…when Ref drops the puck and their centre wins the face-off, taking it over the blue line. Watch! Other guys’ winger steals the puck. Theirs gets it back. Left wing carries it into the opposing zone, having a look—passing it back.

Tripod shoots!

Weak shot.

Their dee flips the puck to her winger, who carries it into the neutral zone. All three of their forwards join in a rush. Look out! Passing…passing.

Winger’s coming down Janis’s side. That puck’s hers.

Got it! She whacks it up the boards.

Where’s her winger? Damn, damn, out of position.

Watch: their centre’s got the puck.

She shoots!

Thank Christ! Puck gets caught in the goalie’s pads. Whistle.

It’s time to change up. Her legs feel loose, her arms are warm. Clumping down on the bench, Janis keeps her eye on the game.

The new shift circles up for the face off. Ref drops the puck. Sticks jerk, teeth grit…

They all lean forward, living in the present. Living in the body, not the mind. Forget about words. Words are no defence here. Your body is all the defence you need, purified by sweat and ice. That’s hockey. She loves it. You are—she is—wholly alive.

Dieter first spotted the stalker outside her apartment one evening after a summer league game.

“Isn’t that the little man from your arena?”

He was standing beneath a streetlight, gazing up at Janis’s second-story window.

“Why don’t I go down there right now and get him to fuck out of here?” Dieter said. “You don’t want this to start.”

Janis felt the bang of aroused male protectiveness. Dieter’s lips and eyes had gone slitty, his raised chin was blunt. He didn’t often let you see it, but underneath his academic archness, Dieter had a thug thing going. It was the legacy of the former Eastern Bloc, Janis felt. They’d trained him up as a competitive swimmer until the Berlin Wall went down. He was finishing high school at the time and never swam competitively afterwards, but years of brutal pre-dawn training had toughened him up.

It was a thrilling part of him, Ur-male, although sometimes as Janis watched Dieter swim his lengths up and down the university pool, he also struck her as a shark. She’s read how sharks had cartilaginous skeletons, not bone. Dieter uncoiled through the water, oily, flexible and smooth. Cleaving the water, back and forth, a plough, a blade, a fin. He never acknowledged the swimmers in the other lanes, but no one ever beat him across, not once.

As Dieter scowled out the window, Janis remembered how they said you had to be a shark to succeed these days. It hadn’t occurred to her before that the cartilage was as important as teeth. Maybe Dieter would land his splash job south of the border, after all.

“Don’t stalkers want attention?” she asked. “Aren’t you supposed to ignore them? You’re not supposed to give them what they want.”

“Yes, you should be good at that,” Dieter said, jerking the curtains closed. “Look, I think you should let me do this. It’s a feeling I have. You don’t want these people to develop habits. Let him go somewhere else.”

“You mean bug someone else.”

He stopped to think. “This would be an experience you could use in your writing? You are garnering?” he asked.

Janis was flattered that Dieter took her screenwriting seriously. Hardly anyone did any more. She was also sick of the way he’d taken to complaining about her so-called elusiveness. They’d only been seeing each other for six months, and the way she saw it, he alternately picked at her for being elusive and hit on other women at parties. Didn’t he see the connection?

Not that Janis knew what came first, the elusiveness or the flirting. She wasn’t really sure about anything any more. Once upon a time, she was certain about things: love, work, karma. Once upon a time, she was going to be famous. That’s why she quit film school, started writing full-time and shacked up with a director. The path to glory seemed well-mapped. You wrote a screenplay, your boyfriend shot it, you took it to the festivals. There, of course, you would win awards and sign distribution deals, after which they’d throw money at you so you could do it again bigger.

But you were dead if you sat through other films long enough—if your glazed-over eyes cracked open far enough—for a small thought to niggle into the brain. What made you think you had anything new to add, much less a novel way of saying it? If you didn’t, then fame itself must be your goal. You were just an attention-seeker, a frantic kid pumping her hand up in class. Pick me, me, me.

Janis found the whole business increasingly shabby, a piddling amoral substitute for artistic immortality. Not that she felt immortality existed—at least in non-theological terms. Jane Austen wrote a mere two hundred years ago, Shakespeare only a couple of centuries before that. Even ancient Aristophanes staged his plays a scant pair of millennia in the past. All this was just a drop in the bucket compared to the cave painters in pre-historic France, not to mention dinosaurs. In fact, if you wanted the future to rattle your bones admiringly, why not lie down in a mud bank, breathe your last and fossilize? That way, if scientists dug you up in a million years, you might contribute something concrete to the sum of human insight.

In her experience, those pursuing the artistic professions found it hard not to think in these terms, especially as the rejections piled up. Janis, people started to say, haven’t we seen this before? Or, if they absolutely lo-oved your work, if they couldn’t wait to work on something with you, they nevertheless stopped answering your e-mails. Even if they signed a contract, even if you did the work from the first draft through the hundredth, even if they paid you for doing all that work, you knew the movie wouldn’t be made until lightning struck a burrowing spaniel at high noon on a cloudless day. All of which tended to deflate your self-confidence—a confidence that had already been somewhat compromised by marrying a director who left you after four months.

Four months! Janis found it beyond embarrassing. It limned humiliation. Especially after her ex-husband’s career took off and he moved south, leaving her to skate in circles, stale-dated at 26 years old.
Ironic, wasn’t it, that she was the one to develop a stalker.

“The democratization of celebrity,” Janis murmured.

“You can make that old article of mine into a screenplay?” Dieter asked, perking up.

“You should probably do your male thing and scare him off,” she said. “What do I know?”

Dieter smiled and swam towards the door, his inner shark teeth flashing. Janis felt outstanding heat for him: how lovely to make someone so happy.

“Hey,” she said, as he reached for the doorknob. “Remind me why you like me.”

“This again, Janis,” he said, scarcely glancing back before leaving. His footsteps thudded down the stairs, leaving Janis to pull open the window, letting in a green peal of summer air.

“You!” Dieter called, emerging from the block. “I know who you are!”

Dieter never saw the stalker again. The little man started following Janis, but only when Dieter wasn’t around. She decided later that he had probably wrung all recognition he needed out of Dieter. I know who you are! It must have felt reassuring to hear that. An affirmation. Fame seemed to have eluded her grasp, but Janis wouldn’t have minded a little reassurance herself.

“I still can’t figure out why you like me,” she told Dieter later.

“I don’t like you, I love you,” he said. But that didn’t explain anything so much as offer an excuse.

Janis figured Dieter was right about one thing: If she was going to be stalked, she might as well use it as research. Over the next few months, she began to collect fetish stories, planning to write a new screenplay. One friend who worked at high-end shoe store said they had a terrible time with foot fetishists. Sometimes fetishists would try to hide in the staff washroom at closing time so they could emerge after hours to commune privately with the merchandise. Another friend who volunteered for a crisis hotline took calls from a man who was battling a fetish involving women physicians with English accents. He liked them to take his blood pressure.

Janis could almost see putting an English accent together with a nice tight blood pressure cuff. Canadian bondage. And feet weren’t incomprehensible. In fact, she could understand feet better than the usual male obsession with breasts. Looking around the locker room after a game, she saw droopy boobs and asymmetrical pairs of left-big, right-deprived and little nubbins like her own, and realized that if a man were intent on getting a woman’s bra off, he was probably courting disappointment.

It’s true some pairs were stunning. When she saw some real mamas, Janis almost congealed in envy. But on a percentage basis, there were many more attractive feet on display, fine-boned and tidy. She enjoyed looking at her own feet, narrow as the rest of her, the nails cut square and painted mauve, the skin tinted with the permanent tan she kept forgetting didn’t come from her Mexican stepmother but was the legacy of the wicked birth mother who had abandoned her when she left Janis’s father; the Hydra, the Fury, the fount of all Janis’s problems, problems both real and (being a writer) elaborately imagined.

Establishing shot in Janis’s projected film: a pedicured female foot caressing a black hockey skate. Put it on the poster; a clean image, yet sensual—at least once you woke up to feet.

But women hockey players? Janis couldn’t see the attraction, or perceive any commonality between Blue and herself. Unless, of course, he had picked up a boy vibe from both of them. Sometimes Janis liked dressing as a boy, especially right after her divorce, playing an eighteen-year-old kid with downy cheeks eating out in neighbourhoods where no one knew her. If you had big eyes and a nothing nose, a pretty mouth (she allowed herself one vanity), if you cut your hair short and didn’t have hips, you could wear a shirt tucked into your jeans and venture as far as the men’s room stalls, the fun coming when you ran across acquaintances who glanced at you once, twice, three times, trying to figure out if it was really you and just how kinky you were. Janis had a boyfriend once who enjoyed playing that game, especially if she borrowed his Y-fronts. Dieter was standard-issue male in comparison; he got off on tart clothes. But maybe the stalker leeched onto women whom he perceived as strong and somewhat ambiguous, if that’s what Janis had turned into.

Not that she was going to ask him. She was still holding to the theory that you shouldn’t give stalkers what they wanted, and as the little man began to shadow her, sporadically at first, she tried not to give any sign that she noticed him, eyes straight ahead when she walked past him on the way to work, reading her book if he appeared in the same subway car (how?) when she was on her way home. Janis knew exactly where he was standing or sitting, but he didn’t do anything overt—no one else appeared to notice him—and she thought that either she’d get used to him or he would give up and drift away.
Then he started speaking.

“Hi, Janis,” he lisped behind her, just inside the subway station one morning. She knew it was him, even though she hadn’t heard him speak before. His palate sounded thick; he had some sort of spitty impediment. She was startled into turning, but he was already running away, a jacketed back flinging through the turnstile, down the escalator, his big sneakered feet tripping him up on the bottom tread.
A week or so later, he started singing behind her in the grocery store.

“Little bears/Sing their song/Little children sing along…” It was the theme song from one of the Saturday morning cartoons Janis wrote. A glutinous voice; she found it awful. The song was also a bad choice for someone with a thick lisp. She had a sudden fear: Was he spitting on the back of her head? Janis threw her groceries on top of the onions and ran outside, calling Dieter the moment she got home.

“Maybe the time comes to go to the police,” Dieter said.

“How does he know this stuff about me? It makes me feel invaded, that someone I’ve never met can know these things. Especially when it’s so embarrassing. The Beddy Bears.”

“He must have picked your name up at the rink. It’s hardly presidential security; I’m sure he could sneak back in. The rest he just Googled.”

“I’ll get Yoni to ask that woman to call me,” Janis said. “Blue, the one he bothered before. She managed to get rid of him.”

Blue told Yoni that she couldn’t help. She was sorry, she couldn’t go back there. It had been too traumatic, and besides, she hadn’t handled it very well. Maybe Janis should move to a different city? The police wouldn’t help.

They went to the police station when Janis received the first letter after work one day. It showed up in the locked mailbox on the ground floor of her apartment block, mixed in with the bills. No stamp, no sign of how it got there. He hadn’t been around for a few days, so she wasn’t thinking of him and opened the envelope absent-mindedly as she walked upstairs. The single page was covered in tiny computer-generated script, top to bottom, edge to edge, exactly like the letters they got at work calling the Beddy Bears incestuous pawns of the United Nations. Her stomach cramped. She knew it was from him and could only bear to scan the page.

dearist janis…watching u play my warrier princess…little size nine skateys…mens shoulder pads size small or maybe womans medium…taking her bam!!!! into the boards…making me such a happy happy racoon…mvp most valuable player in the O world (the hole world)…puck on your stick on your sticky sticky stick..best of all the D…watching u…yr BIGGEST FAN

It was the first love letter Janis had ever received and it made her want to vomit.

“Dieter,” she wailed into the telephone.

At the police station, after Dieter ID’ed him from a photo, the police said the stalker was a sick puppy and found an officer downtown who had dealt with him before. The officer, McCutcheon, was keen to take their information but reluctant to give any out. He said the stalker had no record of violence and appeared to know the extent of the law, refraining as he did from issuing threats, trespass, and so on. Janis could call 911 any time she felt intimidated. But the policeman wouldn’t tell her what Blue had done to get rid of him. If he hadn’t been in jail, where had he been?

“What I would advise,” the policeman said, “is changing your routines. I hesitate to suggest it, but you might start by giving up hockey, just for a while.”

“I’m not going to let him do that to me.”

“Move in with friends.” McCutcheon gave Dieter a quick glance.

“I’ve told her she should stay with me. I can drive her to work, that sort of thing. He doesn’t appear when I’m around. Not after I spoke.”

“You might want to consider it,” McCutcheon said.

“You aren’t going to do anything, are you?” Janis answered, getting up. “This is useless. Blue was right.”
Not entirely useless. It was more research, she told Dieter as they left the station. “Observe how times have changed. I believe that fine officer just told us to live in sin.”

“Look, so you stay for a while. It’s a convenience, not some sort of commitment.” His voice broke on the word. “A commitment,” he repeated. “As it were.”

“He isn’t really a stalker, Dieter,” Janis told him. “He’s an actor I hired so you’d ask me to move in with you. All over the city, women are being stalked by actors. It’s the only way we can ever get a foot in our boyfriends’ doors. Wait till you see what we do to extract the commitment.”

Heading for the car, it occurred to Janis that men were programmed, imprinted with the genetic need to issue standardized warnings like the ones they ran at the front of rented movies. ‘Unauthorized reproduction, exhibition or distribution of copyrighted motion pictures can result in severe criminal and civil penalties.’ You’re really nice, but I’m not looking for a relationship. This isn’t a relationship, we’re just seeing each other. There’s a difference between a relationship and a committed relationship.

She turned on Dieter. “Who asked for a commitment? Why do men always presume we want to land them like bloody fish? What makes any of you think you’re worth it?”

Three women having a smoke outside a nearby office building giggled into their cupped hands. Dieter blushed and looked austere, striding ahead of Janis until they reached the car. As he opened the door, he said, “So now I’m the asshole and you feel better.”

“Better than what?” she asked, slumping into her seat. “Better than whom, better than when? My life wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. I was supposed to prevail. Isn’t that a lovely word? I liked that word. Now I can’t even remember how to spell it.”

“What’s going on here, Janis? You say the other women in your league don’t see him so often any more. I have to ask: if he doesn’t hardly come to the pub, if they won’t let him into the rink, if he doesn’t bother you when I’m around, why can’t you just change a few more things and avoid him completely? What is the need here? What’s the need for all this trouble?”

The next afternoon, the stalker whispered, “You didn’t have to go to the police. I won’t let that Nazi hurt you.”

The following day: “It’s okay, Janis. I’m watching out for you.”

“Hi, little Janis,” he started to lisp. “Poor little Janis, poor little girl.” When she was a full head taller.

The next letter was pages long, a horribly-detailed filmography that included all the scripts she ever had optioned along with the particulars of each 11-minute cartoon episode she’d been semi-responsible for. dearist janis, all for you.

How had he done it? The IMDb website didn’t begin to list it all. Worse, Janis felt as if he’d prepared her c.v. as a way of suggesting that she get a new job. He thought that the Saturday morning cartoons were beneath her? She didn’t understand why everyone wanted her to change her life. Nor did she know what to do.
“You’ve got to detach from this,” Dieter said. “Convince yourself it has nothing to do with you. And it doesn’t, Janis. See how he writes ‘dearist.’ I-s-t. Like optometrist, nutritionist. These are people who perform a function. He’s asking you to perform a function, and if you refuse to do it, he’ll look for someone else.”

“Dieter, he just can’t spell. Some people can’t spell. I can’t spell.”

“Sometimes I’m wrong,” he said. “But not always.”

The stalker, outside the arena: “It’s too bad you don’t go to Mexico any more. I could make an airplane ticket if you wanted.”

Her team mates: “This has gone on long enough. He’s getting to you. We’d better make our move. How about beating the crap out of him the next time he shows up? No, we’ve got to be more clever. We’ve got to ask Blue. Yoni, you’ve got to convince Blue to tell us how she got rid of him. Who else knows Blue? Who else plays in the other league?”

Blue, her voice wavering on the telephone: “So what he said to me was, ‘I’ll do anything you want. Just tell me what you want me to do.’ I was half insane by then. I didn’t really mean it. I said, ‘Why don’t you just die?’

“So I found him curled up on the doormat outside my apartment. He was curled up like a dog and he’d slit…it was his wrists. They kept him in Queen Street for a long time. I’m sorry he got out. It’s my fault. I mean, I looked at him bleeding, and I thought, Why don’t I just let him stay there? No one will ever know. When I got home, maybe he was already…I’m so sorry you ended up with him. It’s my fault. I’m sorry.”

***

Early winter now, the trees in her neighbourhood park inked black on the washed-out sky. The outdoor rink has been flooded, the ice pissy yellow near the gate and pitted throughout like bad skin. But it’s natural ice and the air is clean and her skates are newly sharpened. Janis is alone on the rink hissing circles around the perimeter, skating sibilant she slides and slides; lifting one leg, crossing over in the corners, cutting deeper and deeper circles into the ice. She’s been here—how long?—skating everlasting circles, damp inside her heavy coat, cheeks burning, nose freezing, thigh muscles frozen so hot they’re about to catch fire.
I will get through this.
I will get through this.
I will get through this.
How?

“Janis, it’s gone on far too long,” Dieter finally said. “You were never the sedated type, and now you’re wrecked. Anyhow, we’ve got to move.”

“You got that job in the States!”

Janis flared with hope: Dieter was giving her a way out of this. Some elbow room, the room to move. It was a truth self-evident that people had to move south to succeed. She was trapped in Toronto, circumscribed, encompassed. Dieter was giving her a new start through his new job in L.A. From what Janis heard, they played roller hockey there. She could take them. Maybe even get her fetish script produced.

“Thank you for mentioning it,” Dieter said. “No, I didn’t get the job. I won’t get a job like that. My qualifications aren’t good enough. You should see the hurricanes they hire. I’ll never be accepted there, and my new job is to accept that. This is my new word for the day: acceptance.”

Such a bitter downturn of his mouth, such ruefulness folding his forehead into crevices. He focused on the coffee table, the white rings iced into the wood, the slippery piles of magazines, the cold plain between wannabe and never-was.

“You can’t let them do that to you, Dieter,” Janis said, taking his hand. “You’re smarter than they are, and you’ve got to keep pushing. Don’t let them turn you into a failure.”

Dieter snatched back his hand, knocking the pile of magazines onto the floor. Most were gossip magazines: People, US. This was his latest project, charting the celebrity of humanitarian causes, noting when they emerged into mass consciousness, peaked, declined. Doctors Without Borders was hot. AIDS, fading.

“So what I do here is failure?” Dieter asked. “Your standards are so high, Janis. It’s your ex-husband, I think. But we can’t all be stars. It’s occurred to me lately that some of us have to live down here, on the earth. It’s not so bad, really. You should try it.”

The shiny covers at their feet were decorated with women born into boyish bodies like hers but enhanced in ways that Janis had never been good at or could not bear. Fashion, silicone, surgery, spas. Her ex-husband had often puzzled her by praising women with an airbrushed, wistful, vagued-out quality. They always look ready, he said, and she’d never understood for what.

Dieter let out a long breath. When Janis glanced up, she was surprised to see earnestness blast open his face.

“Maybe we should try it, hey?” he asked, taking her hand, experimentally bending back the fingers. “That’s what I’ve been thinking. Maybe this job of mine isn’t so bad. You don’t do badly. Really, the only concrete bad is the stalker. So maybe we get a bigger flat, make this famous commitment. He doesn’t bother you when I’m around. And if you quit hockey, just for a while, maybe he stops bothering you completely. He’s a fan of women players, and so—if you’re not?”

“Then he’s beaten me in the one way no one else has,” Janis said. “I’ve played through all my injuries. I’ve played through everything that’s ever gone wrong. It’s part of who I am.”

A decade of games. The stringent smell of the rink, the distilled cold, the refrigerated echoes of victory. She loved the hollow sound of the puck hitting the boards. Resonating voices, children’s laughter in the bleachers, metal doors slamming, whistles shrilling, a new game always underway.

“What I mean to say is that I can’t take any more of this tension,” Dieter said. “Listen, you’ve got to make an effort, or I’m sorry, I can’t stay. Wouldn’t it be better to be happy, Janis? Say, this is what has happened in our lives, and it’s fine, it’s a privilege, so let’s make the best of it. You settle down. You settle. I’m not so romantic, maybe. But am I so bad?”

Ref drops the puck. She needs to take the first clean shift, to be in position for the start of each new game: the clash of sticks, the slash of blades, the uncompromised moment when you can still accomplish anything, over and over and over.

The next time the stalker appeared outside the arena, Janis grabbed some of her friends and they grabbed their sticks. Outside, they found the little man roaming the snowy sidewalk on his usual route between nowhere and nowhere, lit by the halogen street lamps, looking up nervously when he saw that Janis was leading a half dozen pumped-up women toward him.

“Look,” she said, stopping a few feet away. “You’ve got to leave me alone.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m just a hockey fan,” he said, his dog-brown eyes darting past Janis to her team mates.

They jostled around, everyone trying to stare him down harshly. Janis took one step forward. They all stepped forward, forcing him to step back.

“I want you to leave me alone,” she said.

“I’m just a hockey fan. I never did nothing to no one.”

One of the women butted her stick on the sidewalk. They all butted their sticks, hitting the ground rhythmically as they walked towards him, forcing him to stumble back, his pendulous lower lip swinging, his uncoordinated feet tripping him—those huge clumsy sneakers!—until they had him pinned against a parked car.
“What are you going to do to me?” he cried. “What am I supposed to do? I don’t know what you want. I’m just a hockey fan. I never seen you before in my life.”

Some of the women shifted uneasily. But Janis wasn’t going to lose her nerve halfway through a game. She touched her stick to his breastbone and gave him her stepmother’s evil eye.

“I want you to go away. You’re going to lead a normal life. You’re never going to follow anyone again.”

“I never hurt no one. Please don’t hurt me. This scares me.” He spit out scares in wet terror, his eyes grown huge. Janis felt almost hysterical at the irony of running so hard from such a failure.

“I’m going to let you go now,” she said, lowering her stick. “You won’t come back. No more hijinks. You’re ordinary, and that’s how you’re going to act. You’re nothing special. You’re just…”

One of her friends touched Janis gently on her back.

“Go,” she said, and tapped him with her stick. The stalker scurried around the car, catching his jeans in the bumper of the pick-up truck parked behind it. Moaning, frantically jerking free, he scuttled like a panicked crab across the dark and snowy street.

“You’re crazy,” he yelled over his shoulder, nothing but a bent back running away.

“He’s a golem,” said Leah. “I knew they existed.”

They stood silent for a moment around Janis.

“You should probably still go live with your boyfriend,” Jackie told her. “We’ll hold your spot on the team until he’s gone for sure. But maybe you’d better give it a while.”

“Why not have a baby?” asked Leah, who had four herself. “So you miss a year.” She shrugged.

Her best ideas always came from other people. Janis couldn’t claim to be original, but sometimes she ended up being right. She decided to let go, not just of the stalker, but of the screenplay. Time to embrace a new creative project. So what if she spent nine months in development? What was nine months?

Endless, as it turned out. Enveloping, it seemed. Before three months had passed, Janis grew so preoccupied with her pregnancy that she could scarcely believe the stalker existed. At six months, she was shaking her head. Golems didn’t exist, even in basement flats. That whole episode had never really happened, not to her. Nor did she wholly believe in the pregnancy, in the baby, that this baby would really happen. Nine months gone, she asked herself: can this actually be happening?

It was. She sang to her overdue bulge, ankles swollen, voice thick with love and irony. Little bears sing this song. Little children sing along…

“You’re going to play in the Olympics,” Janis said. “Your mother will be very proud.”

“And your father once again outmanoeuvred,” said Dieter, kissing the top of her head.

Janis phoned her wicked birth mother. ‘Acceptance’ was Dieter’s word, but she was thinking of taking it for her own.

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This story was first published in Aethlon, the journal of sport literature, and subsequently in Toronto, accidents de parcour, edited by Linda Spalding.

It is now part of the story collection The Necessary Havoc of Love by Lesley Krueger, which is available here.

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