Child Allies For me, the life and death of Gary Wilensky took place over one year, the same period my own mind became the most dangerous it has ever been. At some point both our stories nearly overlapped, though not entirely and certainly not neatly. It began inside his car. Mixtapes in the armrest, Red Vines candy on the dashboard, roller skates and Marx Brothers glasses in the trunk. The internal clutter of Gary Wilensky’s sedan purposely defied the pristine expectations outside it. Here was a place to remove the good girl costume, if only for an hour or two. In his car, girls could be sticky-fingered and snort when they laughed. They weren’t chastised for being too loud or shamed for hog-chewing gum. His was a sanctioned area for childish impulse and indulgence. It’d been a while since I’d listened to my instincts or felt the spike of confidence that comes with having those instincts validated. You like that? Open it. Maybe I am making more of it than it was: a drive between Manhattan and Queens for a tennis lesson, but for a brief time, those rides offered a break from trying so hard. We’d showboat in his car, roll the windows down and request Grey Poupon from taxis waiting for the light. Gary never told us to stop. He wasn’t opposed to confrontation, double-honking, and cursing at drivers who got in his way. His tiny explosions were startling, and then, after a beat, hilarious. He wasn’t trying to set an example. He was one of us. At a time when the world was still divided between adults and kids, this seemed significant enough to devise a new category for men like Gary. I
called them child allies, and I watched for more. You could spot them all around, if you knew the markers. They used winks and elbow nudges to establish a private communication, reminding you, after letting you sip their drink or steer the driver’s wheel, not to get them in trouble. Their pockets were stuffed with tokens, little oddball gifts that didn’t require verbal conditions like please and thank you. You’d never hear them call you kid to your face, or refer to themselves as adults because they didn’t believe in labels. They never shushed you or told you to be patient or revoked a promise because of your attitude. That was the most important condition of a child ally: He or she could never say no. Gary never did, though now there are other terms to better explain his behavior. Grooming is one. Another is deceptive trust development—a series of manipulation tactics used in the pre-abuse stages of grooming to gain a child’s allegiance, secrecy, and compliance. Stalkers establish private time with a child separate from other adults—at a restaurant, in their car—to engage a child in her interests, offering tiny bribes that translate into secrets shared and squirreled away, so that a child feels a sense of obligation to the adult. She might protect him or believe she owes him something, and eventually become dependent on his attention. “I definitely remember him giving us money to buy candy,” Emma, now a mother herself, recalls when she and I speak for the first time in years. “Was that part of the fee?” I tell her it wasn’t, and she pauses for a moment. “Yeah, it’s weird. But you know, your parents trust this guy, so whatever he does is fine.” Gary lured with cheap sugary snacks—hiding gummies in the side panels of the car, handing us five-dollar bills for bodega sweeps while he idled outside. But it was his figurative treats that reeled me in—the implied freedom to curse, binge, and act out without punishment. We didn’t have to hide anything from him. “He’d always listen,” one of the high school students he coached at Brearley told the New York Post in 1993. She claimed he would call her on the phone to discuss her personal life‚ her friends, her boyfriends, any problems at school. “They are very good at talking to children,” says Dr. Eric Hickey, a criminal psychologist who specializes in sex crimes and profiling predators.
“They talk at their level. They’re almost one of the kids themselves, and their potential victims think they’re a wonderful person who understands them.” Hickey classifies Gary as a hebephile—someone attracted to pubescent children, rather than prepubescents, and who craves attachment and closeness to his potential victims. And for a while, at least, it seemed Gary was satiated by those fleeting suggestions of intimacy—creeping up to the line without crossing it. “They’re looking to see how each child responds,” says Hickey. “It gives them a little thrill.” Jane was a preteen at an all-girls private school when Gary was her coach. Her mother had taken lessons with Gary, and then signed her up for his junior program. Now a nonprofit coordinator based in Brooklyn, she sits across from me at a bar in Fort Greene, breaking off pieces of her grilled cheese. “I don’t remember much,” she says of the two years she took lessons with Gary. She does recall his humor, and one night when she was alone in his car. She was in the passenger seat, age twelve, when they pulled up to her apartment building. “I remember him commenting to me ‘You’re turning into an attractive young woman,’” she says. His statement had made her blush. “I had started taking lessons with him during an awkward phase, so when he said this I felt, like, complimented. To have an adult say I was becoming attractive felt somewhat good.” At the camps where Gary taught, he developed a reputation for picking favorites—establishing a hierarchy with prizes and a weekly T-shirt giveaway for the girl of his choosing. As much as it motivated young tennis players, it also elevated Gary’s influence. “He literally walked on water,” a former camper recalls. “If he said hello to you, it made your day.” Kate, a camper turned student, compares the competition born from those prizes to beauty pageants. “If you won one of those shirts or hats, he’d parade you around the courts,” she says. “How bad it must have made the other kids feel.” At the same time, it drove her to play harder. “You wanted to do well so he would be proud of you,” says Kate, now a television producer. “I had never before felt like that about a coach.”
We are sitting in Starbucks in Union Square. It’s been one week since the first blizzard of the season. A protest at the park across the street is just wrapping up. A young woman shuffles toward the register with a sign that reads ENOUGH IS ENOUGH tucked under her arm, like a handbag. Kate is small-boned and a fellow short girl. When she twists her hair with two hands, I see the ding of a tiny diamond in one ear. She was eight or nine when she first met Gary at camp. Like other former campers, she remembers his costumes—the clown nose, the tutu, and the roller skates— but it was his perceived vulnerability that hooked her and balanced out their age difference. As much as she craved his attention, he seemed to need hers as well. “It never felt inappropriate in a romantic way,” she says. “It just felt like an older friend who shared a lot with you.” It’s the first time I’ve heard someone speak of him this way. I’d seen a similar side of Gary, and it also drew me closer to him. I wanted to help him; it made me feel good that he thought I could. I ask Kate if she thinks this was a tactic he used on certain girls, if he could detect that need in us, the same way he sensed his costumes would appeal to other students. “Maybe,” she says. After camp, Kate continued playing with Gary in the city. Twice he took her to dinner, just the two of them. She was ten, he was fifty-six. On a Sunday evening, Gary picked her up from home and took her to Fuddruckers, the restaurant in his building. “As soon as I got in the car, it hit me that I was alone,” Kate says. She remembers him reaching across her body to strap on her seat belt. “Like this.” She swings an arm down to her opposite hip. “I remember being sort of, like, maybe this is weird, maybe I shouldn’t have come.” Before our meeting, Kate called up her mother to ask her why she felt comfortable sending her off to dinner with Gary. “You guys liked each other,” her mom said, and she was right. At dinner, Gary showed Kate a magic trick using two forks and a quarter. Later on, his mood changed. “I have a memory of him talking about his love life and some girl—how it hadn’t worked out,” she says. The conversation had made her uncomfortable, less with him and more with her own lack of experience. “I remember sitting there thinking, ‘I’m not equipped to give him the advice he needs,’” she says. “I felt like I didn’t have the tools to tell him
what he needed to hear.” Still, this was the side of Gary she connected with, even at age ten. “I think the loneliness spoke to me the most, and something about feeling special,” she says. Another former student who played with Gary as a teenager, Sam, recalls driving in his car, not knowing the exact location they were headed. Of course they were going to play tennis, but it didn’t matter where. There was an understanding that he would take each of us to the place we were supposed to be and return us to our parents when we were done. And that is what he did, always while sprinkling sugar. “I remember that, and he always came up with funny nicknames for people,” Sam says. “And those shirts, the caricature of him is what he looks like in my mind.” But she also recalls how on occasion, Gary’s mood would change. “He had a streak when he got angry with you—maybe because it didn’t happen very often, but when it did happen, it was, like, yikes,” she says. It reminds me of something Emma had mentioned when we caught up on the phone. “Not long before everything fell apart, he was coaching me so I’d get on the tennis team and he was really, really hard on me. He was so hard on me that he made me cry at a lesson,” Emma said. “Do you remember that?” I do, but that comes later.
Reporters, Survivors, Old Flames In 1993, Michael Stone, a reporter for New York magazine known for his coverage of the Preppy Killer case and the Central Park Jogger, wrote a story about an Upper East Side girls’ tennis coach called “Break Point: A Tennis Coach’s Fatal Obsession.” Of the hundreds of articles published on Gary Wilensky that year, Stone’s profile stands out as the most comprehensive and thoroughly reported. It is also the only official record of my personal reflections on Gary at age fourteen. My mother had heard, through a chain of private school parents, that Stone was looking to speak with Gary’s students for the story. We talked on the phone, off the record, which my mother decided was preferable to having my name in print. “Even the ride to the court would be a laugh, with games and music in the car.” “Some of his young students sensed his unhappiness, and he told one that he’d watched all these girls grow up in front of him, passing him by, and that he wanted his own child.” “He seemed preoccupied and snapped without provocation.” These are the traces of what I told him the night he interviewed me. My mother, who had listened to our conversation, penciled brackets around the lines in the article to remember what I had said. The faint gray lines are proof that I was part of this story, and that I wasn’t. Now Michael Stone is an author. One of his books was cowritten with the artist Eric Fischl. My mother kept a book of Fischl’s artwork on our coffee table. I used to pull it on my lap and flip to the picture of a naked woman
lying in bed, with one foot resting on her thigh, exposing the triangle of darkness at her center. In the painting, the light through the blinds zebrastreaks her body as she gazes at a boy, whose hand has slipped into the fold of her purse. Bad Boy: My Life On and Off the Canvas, it’s called. I call up Michael Stone to ask him questions about Gary Wilensky, two decades after he called me to do the same. “As I recall, my editor called me as soon as the news had occurred and wanted it for the next week,” he says. “I played [tennis] but not professionally, but I knew a lot of people in the New York tennis scene, so it wasn’t hard for me to network.” Gary, he learned, was a large figure on the scene. “I’d never heard of him, but a lot of friends and people I played with, pros, clubs I played at, certainly knew of him,” Stone says. “His reputation, as I recall, was pretty good. No one suspected he was leading this dark life. He kept it pretty well hidden.” What was the larger context of this story? Why did it matter? I ask, but not like that. More like a stumbling, twisted request for direction. A helpme-figure-out-why-this-still-matters-to-me statement that ends with a verbal uptick suggestive of a question mark. He notes the intense competition among New York private school students at the time, and how that intensity translated to their social lives, where access and privilege were more instantly rewarded and less likely supervised. The phenomenon of teenage girls becoming tennis stars added another layer of pressure and exposure. “How you tie that all together I don’t know.” Before we hang up, Stone offers a suggestion. “I don’t know how much of this is a memoir and how much is crime reporting,” he says. “But if it’s even partly the latter, you’ve got to talk to her.” Her. The Daughter. The victim of Gary’s attack. The first time I reached out to the Daughter, early on in my investigation, I sent a long email that said very little. She wasn’t sure what I wanted. Neither was I. I just wanted to talk, I suppose. I can’t bring myself to pull up that email or the second one, which was sent a couple years later—more succinct but still expectant, filled with the ignorant sentiment of someone who believes her experience in any way compares to the experience of a
trauma survivor. Maybe the emails weren’t that bad, but my lack of consideration before I sent them was. Of course, she would want to talk about what happened, I thought, because I wanted to talk about what happened. It wasn’t until she politely turned down my request to speak to her that I realized the extent of my privilege. What’s most insufferable about privilege—whether white, wealthy, physically able, or free from the trauma of abuse—is the denial of its existence. The assumption that we are all the same. That some small emotional bruise you once had is comparable to the jagged head wound another endured, the memory of its stages—watery, crusted and matted, clean and indented but never entirely gone. While each individual’s experience is unique, post-traumatic stress disorder is common among victims of stalking, with some citing the impulse to go into hiding and the enduring fear that their predator will resurface. Stalking victims also frequently report depression, nightmares, anxiety, and flashbacks. And most of those victims—four out of five, according to statistics—are women. The majority of stalkers are male, and many are triggered to act on their impulses when faced with real or perceived rejection by a female. There is a quotation from Gavin de Becker, author of The Gift of Fear: And Other Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence, that surfaces repeatedly in victim-related Internet communities. “Stalking is how some men raise the stakes when women don’t play along. It is a crime of power, control, and intimidation very similar to date rape.” Today such Internet communities are providing outlets for survivors to share their stories. There are support groups, treatment methods, and mounting psychological research on the impact of stalking on victims. But in 1993, little was known about stalking behavior in general. It wasn’t until 1998 that The Psychology of Stalking, the first summary of scientific research on the topic, was published, and even within those pages, victim accounts were scant. What is as true now as it was back then is that we look to survivors of trauma for personal insight into ourselves. We read their books, watch their network interviews, and try to isolate what it takes to overcome the unthinkable. To survive—not simply within a traumatic circ*mstance, but all circ*mstances. We turn them into superheroes in order to believe that
we, too, can fight death, when in fact those who’ve survived trauma may be more in touch with their own mortality. But this is all a generalization. No matter how many studies I cite, I can’t know what the Daughter endured, and it isn’t my right to know. She wants to be left alone, a classmate told a newspaper when she returned to school in late April of 1993, captured flash-eyed in a baseball cap. But they wouldn’t leave her alone, not for weeks until new stories came along. And perhaps she was finally given the space she deserved, until I emerged years later, wanting something, too many things. Insight, approval, transference of experience, a survival story that would teach me a profound lesson in overcoming my own hurdles. But survival is earned, not passed down from hand to hand like so many other things. “Turns out, I’m not a very good reporter,” I tell Michael, my old college boyfriend the poet, who was with me when I remembered Gary Wilensky. Now Michael and I are middle-aged. We sit across from each other in the backyard of a coffee shop. He is a college professor with a wife and child. There are ten blocks of Brooklyn between our two homes. His downstairs neighbors complain about all the footsteps his family makes. I remember one night in my own apartment, in bed with a different boyfriend, while two friends from out of town slept in the living room. There was a feeling of fullness, like the apartment would burst with the affection I felt for all the people inside it. All of them together because of me. This must be what it’s like to have your own family, I thought. I didn’t think about Gary. How he wanted a family of his own, too, and believed he could have it. As if it were something you could strangle into submission. Maybe it was. Not family, but the decision to have one. An idea floating past you that you either choose to grab or let move away, believing at some point, when you’re ready, it will circle back again. When it doesn’t, what happens to you then? “Is that what you’re doing? Reporting?” Michael asks, his wide blue eyes still the same eyes I remember, but his face, once gaunt, has filled in around them. He has become substantial, like a grown-up, I think, and wonder if he thinks the same of me or if men think about this differently. If they think, she’s gained weight. “I don’t know. I’m looking for answers. I thought maybe the Daughter would want to speak with me, but I understand why she doesn’t. It was
stupid for me to assume.” “You should try her again,” he says, but I won’t. “I’m not even certain what I’d ask. What is it I’m looking for?” I met Michael when he was a senior in college and I was a freshman, at a Halloween party where he dressed like the Mad Hatter, but with his necklength dyed-blond hair and his skeletal paleness, he just looked like Beck, who crooned “Debra” through someone’s bedroom speakers. The rest of our college encounters were equally worthy of eye rolls. We took a film class together and went to the library to watch Persona. He lay on institutional carpeting in the dark AV room, and I rested my head on his chest, listening to his insides shoot air bubbles, pump fluids, rise and fall. The proximity of love, of finding out what love would be, was so perfectly placed in that moment. I could still make out the shape of it without feeling the flattening weight of a thing with dimensions. Just the outline, suddenly visible enough to believe it was coming. A moment to have and never have again. Now Michael speaks of his marriage and how it came to be. They lived in different states and had limited job mobility. But he decided to make it work early on, without even mapping out a plan, because he loved her, and soon he discovered she loved him back. “You just have to decide what you want and you can have it,” he says. He was always generous, always a collaborator, always driving toward the shared story, not turning around to find the one he had missed. “You’re so good at relationships. I think I’m bad at them,” I say, because I assume this is what people think when a woman is single and childless in her mid- to late thirties. But also because I think it’s true. “No,” he says, “you’re just good at being alone.” I wonder if this is something you can be good at. Maybe it’s like being good at discount shopping or finding a parking spot, the kind of thing you tell yourself you’re good at so you’ll find the reward in commonplace things. Or maybe it’s like being good at finding a vein, or sleeping in, or holding your liquor, or not letting other people’s feelings affect your decisions—things that are only good in the moment and ultimately harmful. “Maybe it’s not my right to tell her story. I wasn’t Gary’s victim.” “But you’re not telling her story,” he says. “You’re telling your own.” “And Gary’s,” I remind him. “Piper,” he says, his voice rattling with some throat-trapped fluid, “this is your story. Don’t forget that.”
1993
Man: Movie Character In January, an American president is sworn in, a Serbian village is attacked, Monica Seles beats Steffi Graf, a deranged fan plots revenge. There are protests in Turkey, a civil war in Sri Lanka, an art exhibition in outer space, a slight dip in homicides in New York City. Elvis is on a stamp; Michael Jackson is at the Super Bowl. Two movies about Amy Fisher are broadcast at the exact same time on different channels. There is a song called “I Will Always Love You,” a song called “Deeper and Deeper,” a song called “I’d Die Without You.” Astronomers believe 97 percent of the universe is dark matter. A group of sixth graders at an all-girls school in Manhattan are collecting Absolut Vodka ads. A group of Ku Klux Klan members in Florida are protesting Martin Luther King Jr. Day. A movie star has died, a ballet dancer has died, a jazz trumpeter has died, a Supreme Court justice has died. A poet stands at a podium overlooking the country and speaks of a “piercing need.” Late in the month, Gary Wilensky drives thirty miles north of Manhattan to White Plains to accept an award. The USTA’s Eastern Tennis Association has named him the coach of the year. His colleagues from two decades on the tennis circuit are at the event. Arthur Ashe, the first African-American man to win a Grand Slam singles title, is being inducted into the Hall of Fame. It’s one of his final appearances before he succumbs to AIDS the following week. There is dinner at the ceremony. Trophies are handed out at a podium. But Gary is immune to the celebration. Scrawny and slunk in his oversize suit, a shadow of gray stubble around his jaw, he seems funereal.
“What’s the matter, Gary?” Those who know him are concerned. What can he say? He says this: His father’s health is declining. He’s worried about him. And all that shuttling back and forth from Manhattan to Long Island to care for him is exhausting. This isn’t entirely a lie. Irving Wilensky, now in his eighties, isn’t in the best health. So much time has passed since their picture was taken on the tennis court of the Catskills resort. Dressed in white tennis shorts and a velour V-neck, Gary had a crown of wavy brown hair and bulbous muscles above his knees. His father, who drove upstate to see Gary, the big-shot tennis director, in action, was still a sharp dresser in dark glasses and a mock turtleneck. The two men were flanked by a few name-brand tennis stars and a storied Catskills entrepreneur who had recruited Gary. When the camera flashed, Irving stuck one hand in his pocket and smiled with the sturdiness of a man who’d just completed his job. Irving Wilensky, who will die in a year’s time, is still, in January of 1993, a proud father. Of course he’s heard Gary speak of regrets—that he couldn’t make his marriage work, that he was too involved with his career, that he never settled down and had a family, that he was lonely. But Irving believes his son has other reasons to feel good about his life. He’s become a shrewd businessman who earns a healthy living playing a sport he loves. And through his work, he’s made a difference in so many kids’ lives. That’s something. Still, there are some things Irving doesn’t know. Inside a studio apartment, twenty-nine flights above the street, Gary Wilensky is making Valentine cards for his students. He sits cross-legged on the hardwood floor listening to one of his soft rock mixtapes—“Favorites.” Laid out before him are index cards, a red ink pad, and stamps shaped like bears—each one holding a heart with a message: HANDLE WITH TLC. BE MINE. LUV YOU LOTS. There is a Mickey and Minnie stamp surrounded by fluttering hearts, and one Gary had custom made—the cartoon version of himself. There is more work to be done. He writes letters. Three in total. When he is finished, he pulls out his tape recorder and reads them aloud to himself as two spindles roll round and round. HAVE YOU SEEN ONE OF THOSE FILMS WHERE SOME GUY IS TRYING TO EXPLAIN SOMETHING THAT THE AUDIENCE KNOWS TO BE TRUE BUT ALL THE SCREEN CHARACTERS HAVE A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE AND WON’T BELIEVE OR UNDERSTAND THE TRUTH UNTIL THE END OF THE MOVIE?
MY INSATIABLE NEED OF A FAMILY AND THE ILLUSIONS AND FANTASIES THAT I LIVED THROUGH A FAMILY I LOVED TO BE WITH AND ADMIRED MORE WITH TIME AND WISHED I COULD BE A PART OF . . . BUT TOO WELL ALWAYS UNDERSTANDING THE FICTION OF IT ALL . . . TAKING THE SWEET BUT ONLY FLEETING SPORADIC MOMENTS . . . AND THE INEVITABLE CRASH LANDING OF REALITY WHEN “GOODBYE UNTIL NEXT TIME” WOULD ARRIVE. I WISHED THAT ALL THE TIME I SPENT WITH ALL OF YOU WOULD NEVER END . . . AND WHEN THAT SAD TIME FOR ME ARRIVED, BE IT THE LONG RIDE HOME ALONE OR THE LONELY CAB RIDE TO MY APARTMENT AFTER THANKSGIVING . . . OBSESSION? MAYBE SO . . . DANGEROUS? CERTAINLY IF I LAID ON A SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD’S MIND . . . GUILTY BY CONNOTATIONAL PARENTAL LAW. I LOST CONTROL AND I AM SORRY . . . I KNOW I HAD NO RIGHT TO PUT [THE DAUGHTER] THROUGH ANY OF THAT . . . BUT PLEASE BELIEVE ME THAT I NEVER MEANT TO HARM [HER] . . . EXCEPT FOR YOU . . . I PROBABLY LOVE AND GENUINELY CARE ABOUT [HER] MORE THAN ANYONE ELSE SHE KNOWS . . . I JUST COULDN’T HANDLE THOSE FEELINGS CORRECTLY BECAUSE OF MY BACKGROUND AND I AM CURRENTLY TRYING SO HARD TO MAKE UP FOR THE DAMAGE I’VE DONE BY TAKING YOUR ADVICE, AND HOPEFULLY LEARNING HOW TO DEAL WITH MY PROBLEMS SO THAT I NEVER ENDANGER THE WELFARE OF A CHILD AGAIN. YOU DON’T OWE ME ANY COURTESIES AFTER WHAT I HAVE DONE . . . BUT I’M ASKING ANYWAY . . . PLEASE LET ME KNOW ON OCCASION HOW [SHE] IS DOING . . . COLLEGE ACCEPTANCES . . . TENNIS TOURNAMENTS . . . RESULTS . . . HEALTH . . . STATE OF MIND . . . KNOWING I HAVE NO POSITIVE VALUE IN [HER] LIFE IS UNBEARABLE PUNISHMENT . . . AND IF SHE SHOULD EVER SPEAK A WORD, A PHRASE, A SENTENCE THAT PERTAINS TO ME POSITIVELY . . . PLEASE LET ME KNOW . . . FOR THAT WOULD BE A WONDER DRUG FOR MY CONSCIENCE. PLEASE ACCEPT MY APOLOGY FOR EVERYTHING WRONG I’VE DONE . . . I PRAY EVERY NIGHT TO A GOD I WANT TO BELIEVE IN FOR HER HEALTH, PEACE, AND HAPPINESS . . . I LOVED YOU ALL AND I’M JUST A LONELY MAN WHO LOST HIS WAY . . . AND MAYBE I’LL SOMEDAY BE FORGIVEN AT THE END OF THE MOVIE. When he has recorded it all, he stops the tape, folds the letters, and writes out the Mother’s name and address on the front of the envelopes. He slips them each in the mailbox and waits. Maybe what he has written will lead to a reconciliation. If not, he has spoken his truth, groveled, and unloaded. It’s all there. His apology: He lost control and is sorry. The explanation: He’s just a lonely man who lost his way. His defense: He’s not a villain, but a character who’s misunderstood. His promise: He’s seeking treatment. His plea: Open the door a crack and let him back in. His warning: Dangerous?
This is his testimony. The paper on which it is written is for the Mother, but the tape recording is for his own use. A goodbye to his moviegoing audience, all the mothers and their daughters. A blueprint of his own fractured mind, to be studied after he’s gone. From the letters, Dr. Eric Hickey, a criminal psychologist who profiles child predators, will later surmise that Gary Wilensky was “delusional but not insane.” “If he was a psychopath he would not write the letters,” he’ll explain. “He registered right from wrong, but was in denial of the harm he’d caused. This rejection he experienced when he was fired wrecked him and ended his fantasy world. He needed to fix it. When you get to that delusional place, you’ll do anything to protect your own delusion.” Whether or not Gary believes he is in the wrong, he knows enough to concede to it, to declaw himself with a sympathetic explanation and a promise to change. Yet he can’t help revealing that he hasn’t. As much as he tries to reframe his passion for the Daughter as fatherly, his desperation to hear from her (“a word, a phrase, a sentence that pertains to me”) shows his lack of control. If a part of him recognizes this, if he hesitates before he includes such a request, he is overridden by another impulse to feed his own obsession. He imagines the ending, the moment he’s validated, wherein his behavior, and the confusion surrounding it, suddenly make sense—it is coming soon. “Maybe I’ll be forgiven at the end of the movie,” Gary says into a voice recorder. He speaks in monotone. All of his playful inflections and audible winks, the tinny nasal pitch, that hint of a Long Island accent, have been replaced by an unrecognizable voice. A man in a mask. Dangerous? Maybe so.
Girl: X-Rated When the boy in the window flicks his bedroom light on and off, it means pay attention. My own bedroom window is maybe sixty feet from his—too far to make out precise facial features, but close enough, hypothetically, to toss a rope of tied-together bedsheets through his window. He must be a teenager, because he lives with his parents. They spend most of their time in a kitchen, two windows to the left. They are squat and old, and he is taller than them, with a mop of brown hair, thick thighs, and a big nose. It’s the protrusions that stand out the most from this distance. He’s watching my parents, too. I know because his lights always flicker after they’ve fallen asleep. In the den, David Letterman talks to my snoring dad on the sofa. In my room, it’s the boy’s show: He wears a yellow T-shirt with no pants, and uses one hand to caress himself while the other brushes his hair. He acts like he doesn’t see me watching, but this is just part one of his act. He puts down the hairbrush and picks up a blow-dryer on the bureau. Then he puts down the blow-dryer, walks to the window holding himself with one hand. He waves with the other. His is the only penis I’ve ever seen, and it appears to be half an arm’s length, rubbery and the color of a blood orange. He is instructional in the way he touches himself—as if he’s teaching a group of students the techniques of a sport. It’s all about form, control, consistency. I used to watch him from my window seat in the dark so I wouldn’t be seen, but eventually he’d wave to remind me I was there. If I ignore him, he switches his lights on and off and won’t let up. Besides, I want to look, not so much anymore at the thing he’s showing off, but at his face, which from
this distance is just the general idea of a face. A face before it’s been properly wired to a brain, an outline of what a face will be before the painter fills in the defining features, a Mr. Potato Head fitted with only a nose and a wig cap. I have seen this boy’s most intimate body part countless times. I know the layout of his bedroom, where his parents eat dinner, the fogged glass of his bathroom window, the one room in his apartment where the lights are always off, but I’ve never seen him blink. If I squint one eye, I could crush him between two fingers. He is like a tiny rubber doll with all his parts. It’s strange how at a certain distance, people become objects. “He’s a pervert,” my mother had said the first time we spotted him, months earlier. But first she had covered her mouth with her hand, because the whole thing was hysterical. I was having a sleepover with two other girls from school when he made himself known. One girl spotted him first: He was brushing his hair, naked from the waist down. We thought we were spying on him until he walked to the window and waved his arm like a windshield wiper. We screamed and flopped on my bed, then dropped to the floor as if we were under attack and got to our knees to make sure he was still there. He waved again. When my mother heard our squealing and came into my room, we pointed to the window. I loved her for laughing, like she was one of us girls. And then she closed the curtain for the night. When the first girl fell asleep, the rest of us decided to rub Vaseline on a phone cord and place it on her neck. “The penis is attacking you!” we chanted until she woke up. It was hilarious. Euphoric. But it’s different now, on these nights alone with him. It isn’t funny at all, but instead generates an urgent, disgusting, rage-inducing, oily sensation. Is there a word for a fantasy you don’t enjoy, a waking dream that you didn’t have, but rather it had you? There is this teased-up version of me who wears a short denim skirt and has a nest of wild, curly hair and a gum-smacking painted-on mouth that spews the word f*ck into his face as he presses this other me against the brick wall in the alleyway between our buildings. I hate them both. I want to drop an air conditioner on their heads and flatten them out. I want to make him feel as monstrous as I do. It’s an act of revenge, I think, no more than that, when I flick my own lights. I’ve stuffed a hot pink satin bra from my sister’s drawer with balledup tissues and tightened the leather strings on my suede hot pants. The tape
deck plays recorded air until the first chords of “Break On Through (To the Other Side)” chase a bouncing ball into my room. Now I’m the ball, erratic and buoyant, a slippery hot pink target that shoots up to the bed and back down to the floor, flying, dropping, shooting up again. I am Jim Morrison dancing around a fire pit. I’m Jim Morrison’s Wiccan reporter girlfriend in the scene in the movie where they chase each other around a candlelit room covered in their own blood. When the song is over, I drop to the ground, still pulsing. Heavy on the knotted blue carpet, tissues unpacked from my bra in one hand. For a moment, my heart is the only organ in my body, and it’s lodged in my ear canal. But soon it sags back down to my chest, and my brain takes over. What did I just do? Something I couldn’t control, something I won’t be able to back up. Across the alleyway, the boy flicks his lights fast and furious. A silent applause.
Girl: Candy Man On weekends, the entrance to the Popover Café on Amsterdam Avenue is jammed with people listening for their names. You have to weave through the narrow spaces between bodies to reach the hostess stand. I’d done that once before, on another day, in other company, but the wait for a table was too long. Gary, did you make a reservation? Gary? Gary? The outside of this restaurant, with its checked window curtains, is modeled after a homey coffee shop in a small country town. On the inside, it’s a sleek red-and-black bistro with the hallmarks of every other popular brunch spot in the city. A book-sized reservation list, servers forearming platters of cream-sauced eggs, a waiting area crammed with pointy elbows, pricked ears, and darting eyes. A stagnant rage is reserved for those already seated, and a fresh hell-fire fury for each person who approaches the hostess stand. Some tall lady with her hands on her hips stands between Gary and me, intentionally taking up space. I watch him talk with the hostess through the triangle in her arm. She is showing him a clipboard, and he’s nodding. His smile is the shape of a croissant. The room smells of sweet, flaky dough. A hundred conversations braided together sound like one, a breathless monologue spoken by an alien in his alien language. No way we’re getting a table. Gary looks over at Emma and me, chucks his chin up, and signals with two fingers to follow him. He’s got it all figured out. We follow, believing we’re being shown the bathrooms or maybe a back exit. But the hostess places three menus at a four-top and Gary pulls out a
chair. He seems pleased as he settles in, but unforthcoming. If he explained his magic tricks, then they wouldn’t be magic. A waiter comes by and places a puffed pastry the size of a knuckled fist on each of our plates. In a ramekin on the table is a smooth, creamy scoop of strawberry butter. We dig it out with tiny knives and smother the steaming hollow insides of our popovers. Gary holds his pastry in one hand, but doesn’t crack it open yet. Instead he watches, nodding, as I cram my mouth full of sweet, crusty bread. He wants to know what I think. Is it as good as he promised? Willy Wonka, I think when I look at him. With an arm slung loosely around the back of his chair, he sinks into his seat sideways. His long legs, crossed at the ankle, extend beyond our table, creating a booby trap for waiters to trip over. We talk about movies. Gary loves movies and so do I. “Gary, tell us the ending of The Crying Game!” Nope, he can’t do that. It’s a secret. “Come on, please?” Later. “Gary, I saw Alive.” “The cannibal movie?” “Yeah, it’s a true story.” “Did you see the part when they eat their friends?” “Yeah. It wasn’t as scary as I thought it’d be.” “Anyone see Body of Evidence?” Gary’s eyebrows rise mischievously. It’s a Madonna movie so it’s supposed to be sexy. In October, her book, Sex, came out. The books came wrapped so you couldn’t look inside. But there was a display copy in a music store by my house. I paged through the black-and-white photos, waiting for someone to scold me, but nobody did. There was a picture of her nude on a highway. A blond Marilyn Monroe wig on her head and a black strip of hair between her legs. In another photo, Vanilla Ice pressed into the side of her breast with his thumb. His diamond watch hung loose on his wrist. Body of Evidence. It had the sound of a grown-up movie, like Final Analysis. Double Impact. Basic Instinct. Fatal Attraction. Always a combination of words that imply both legal proceedings and shadowy bedroom scenes. In the trailer for the movie, Madonna crawls over a courtroom table. Adult sex is so serious in the movies, catalyzed by murder or a grueling life-or-death trial. The men are always strong, battle-hungry,
defiant in the courtroom—their only weakness the sight of an untrustworthy woman in a negligee. The act itself, the woman always on top of the man, turns heroes into hostages. “I want to see Groundhog Day,” I say. “What about Falling Down?” I saw it with my parents. It wasn’t like other Michael Douglas movies. There was no sex. Only guns. He played a man on a rampage through Los Angeles, enacting his own brand of justice. An antihero, my mother had called him when, in the end, we learn his violence was all an attempt to get to his daughter’s birthday party. The hero-hero was a cop with my father’s mustache, who was about to retire when he heard of an armed vigilante. Gary knows the actor who played the cop. He’s played tennis with him before. Great guy. After Gary pays the bill, Emma and I are ready to get back in the car and head home, but he has one quick errand to run. We groan, we protest, but we’re going anyway. “Didn’t I take you to the Popover Café?” Yes. “Didn’t I manage to get us a table?” Yes. “Now it’s you girls’ turn. Come on, that’s how it works.” The windows of the shop where Gary takes us are covered by black curtains. If there’s a sign above the door, I don’t notice it. Inside, it’s a bakery, a glass-cased museum of chocolate figurines, glistening braided bread, pastel-glazed cakes and cookies. It cracks open older memories of other bakeries, walking into a kaleidoscope of unknown flavors and having to choose just one thing, the decision informed not by experience, but pure magnetism. What colors do you most want to taste? What reminds you most of your favorite things? Everyone knows Gary. He is talking to the lady behind the bakery counter. She wears her hair in a head scarf ironically, and has dark brown lipstick and an iron-on baby tee. The way Gary is leaning down with his elbows on the display case, paying attention to her, bothers me. She tosses her head back and laughs at whatever he’s saying. Why the hell did he bring us in here? Emma is standing at the display case on the other end of the shop. “Look.” She points to a selection of chocolates. “Penises,” she hisses. Right
in front of us is a row of pointy chocolate statues mounted on two small hills. We look at each other and cover our mouths to catch the noises. I point to a row below the chocolates: challah bread in the shape of vagin*s. On closer inspection, all of the pastries behind the glass are shaped like genitalia or nude statuettes or couples naked and intertwined, bulging chocolate veins. Emma’s face is pink. I’m covering my mouth so it doesn’t explode. Gary is at the door holding a cake box. He’s ready to go. “What’s so funny?” he asks. “Nothing,” I say. I’m trying to read his expression to see if he recognizes the mistake he’s made, going to a bakery like this instead of a normal one. We are standing in front of the display case so he doesn’t see what’s inside it. And now we are following him out the door. “Something’s funny,” he says. “What is it?” But he’s smiling, like he knows. When I get home, I don’t tell my mother what I saw. Gary was testing our maturity. It was a privilege to enter an adult space without being chased away, to not have to listen from another room while they cackled, to join them in their conspiracy. I was not about to lose that privilege by acting like what I saw was a big deal. And it confirmed what I already believed: The realm of adults, when they’re not around children, is more perverse than they let on. I’ve seen the newsstands’ plastic-wrapped magazines tucked inside their slots. Their names in fluorescent bubble writing—Juggs, Bazooms, Screw— as cartoonish as candy wrappers. I’ve passed Chippendales on First Avenue, and learned that although it bears the name of two Disney characters, it is not a place for children. I’ve seen a woman in a licorice bikini on a birthday card in the adult rack of the stationery store, before being shooed away by the store clerk. And now this, a whole bakery of sex. This is the secret adults don’t want us to know: They are just children with sex. It is not at all like the movies where they move slowly in the shadows between satin sheets. When we are not around, they gorge on candy and comics and dirty jokes, just as we do, only more so. There is nothing mature about their desires. Their mouths are rimmed in chocolate. They writhe in whipped cream. They f*ck like Willy Wonka. And Gary let me see. He didn’t shoo me away. He wanted me to know their composure—their rules and manners—are all lies. They tell us no, and
they do worse. They even eat sex. A Valentine from Gary Wilensky sits on top of our mail pile. It’s mine, so I take it into my room and study it for secret messages. Some kind of code, a private joke, an authentication that suggests this index card was designed specifically for me. But it’s just a bunch of red stamps for little kids—teddy bears and Mickey Mouse. Gary’s face is a red stamp, too. On the other side of the card, there’s a telephone number for his tennis-tip hotline. And his address. And my address. And that’s all.
Girl: Storm On a Saturday afternoon, the snow starts falling in clumps. From the living room window, we watch umbrellas turn inside out. The sky is the same color as the street: charcoal burned white. “They’re saying it could be the worst storm we’ve had in a century,” Mom says. “Nah,” says Dad. “They’re just trying to goose you up.” “They” are the weather forecasters who talk over each other on two TVs —one in the library, the other in the kitchen. Cyclone . . . The coast of Florida . . . Winds approximately . . . Hurricane . . . Snowfall up to . . . Emergency supplies wait on the coffee table. Long candlesticks, two flashlights, Trivial Pursuit. A brick of meat loaf roasts in the oven. Water bubbles on a burner. The sky cracks in half. A blue bolt aims at a skyscraper but misses. The dog whimpers and flattens into a black-and-white puddle on the floor. This is not her night. When the room shudders with blue light, it reminds me of watching through a window at someone else watching TV. How lonely it feels from the outside. My bedroom window rattles. The wind sounds like a giant insect rubbing its legs together. When I press my palm against the cold glass, it presses back. All the lights are on in the building across the alleyway. Everyone is home together, waiting out the storm or watching it. Even the boy across the way is with his parents, huddled at a round table in his yellow-lit kitchen. He sits with his father, while his mother darts in and out of view, fussing about.
We eat dinner with the newscasters. Gusts seventy to a hundred miles an hour . . . Evacuation plan. When my father speaks, my mother shushes him and turns up the volume. He waves her off. “I want to hear this,” she explains. After dinner she asks “Who wants Tasti D-Lite?” and all is forgiven. A frozen low-calorie dessert shop has opened on Lexington Avenue and now our freezer is packed with plastic tubs of an off-white chalklike substance. The flavor choices are eggnog, pumpkin spice, or cheesecake, but they all taste like frostbitten vanilla. A piece of paper attached by a magnet to the fridge reads Thin tastes better, the motto of a well-known Manhattan diet doctor my parents went to a few years back. Each week after they visited his office, they returned home with a new audiotape of motivational one-liners recorded in a man’s thick Queens accent. Now they spray butter-flavored liquid on their toast and squirt fat-free blue cheese on their salad. They spoon cold white shavings into their bowls and call it dessert. Life is what happens when you’re making plans reads another piece of paper buoyed by a magnetic pig in a chef’s hat. The words are written in black felt-tip and traced over a second time, as if a mistake has been corrected. After dinner, Dad is laid out on the sofa intermittently snoring and waking up to flip the channel. I am beside him on a love seat, dressed in my mother’s silk pajama suit, waiting for that moment we were promised, when the lights quit, the refrigerator stops humming, the TV goes dark, and the only people in the whole world are us. Mom pads to the doorway in her slippers to say she’s going to bed. My father snorts alive, gives a drowsy good night, and goes back to sleep. “I love you,” she says to me, which means be careful or goodbye or, in this case, good night. “Mom?” I ask. “What does it feel like to love something?” She is tired. This is not the kind of question someone should field right after she announces she’s going to bed. But she is up for the challenge, rattling off a bunch of adjectives I’ve heard before to describe a mother’s love. Still, that’s not what I want. I want evidence that love isn’t just a word we substitute for other words, but a sensation. She nods, taking a moment to find a comparison I can grasp.
“You know how you feel about the dog?” she says, answering one impossible question with another. The dog has a black mask over her eyes and a long white nose. The underside of her body is white as well, and there are brown speckles on her raw pink belly skin. The way I feel about her makes my teeth mash as if I were flattening bits of her for digestion. I want to pop her with my incisors to make the feeling go away. Recognizing this urge, she keeps her distance. My mother is the dog’s favorite. She reinforces this fact by following my mother out of the room. When my parents fight, it’s about the dog. She is untrainable and leaves puddles around the apartment when everyone is away. Each one blames the other for her accidents. Someone didn’t walk her enough; someone was too lenient with punishment. My mother hired an animal therapist who said the dog understands what’s right and wrong, but suffers from anxiety. The fear of being bad when she’s left alone. At a loss, my mother has been known to lock the guilty party in the hallway outside my bedroom in the hopes that solitary confinement is rehabilitative. She’ll close my door and warn me that under no circ*mstances . . . On those nights, the dog will shove the black tip of her nose in the space underneath my doorway. A paw pokes through, searching with its hooks for an escape route to dig. I wait for the footsteps in other rooms to subside before opening the door to let her in. When I do, she moves into the room slowly, guiltily, planting herself down on the carpet and tucking her limbs under her body, nose to tail, forming a tight circle of shame. I pound the mattress, pleading with her to come up on the bed, to be bad, to understand that they’re wrong, not her. But she won’t budge. She wants to make it clear: She is waiting for someone else, someone more important than me, to forgive her. But tonight she isn’t looking for forgiveness. She was good today, and free to follow my mother into the master bedroom. She flattens out beside my mother’s bed and rests her head on one paw, raising it each time a heavy snowflake smacks the glass. Now her concern is the world exploding outside. Mom is above her, asleep with a People magazine in an A-frame on her chest. On the cover is a picture of David Koresh with the headline “The
Evil Messiah.” He looks like Jim Morrison. I pull the magazine off her body and take it into my room. On another Saturday night around this time, I was at a suite in the Regency Hotel. A boy who liked Bianca was living there temporarily, though we didn’t ask why. A renovation, a divorce, something to do with money and sadness. We brought a six-pack of Rolling Rock and placed it on the coffee table alongside a plastic bag of weed and a plate with a few stale fries half covered by a silver room-service top. As the boy licked a rolled joint, he closed his eyes and his long eyelashes jigsawed together underneath a twisted backward baseball cap. I pictured his tongue on top of mine, and then I pictured holding him while he wept about his sadness into my shoulder. He pulled Bianca into a bedroom and took the joint with him. I sat on a chair in the living room facing a muted episode of Saturday Night Live and waited until it was time to go home. “So?” my mother asked later that night, eating a Mallomar in her nightgown at the kitchen table. “Meet any nice boys?” Then a few days later, when the phone rang, my mother answered it in the kitchen and called my name. “A boy,” she mouthed, trying to restrain a smile. She pitched herself on a stool at the kitchen island and pretended to flip through a catalog, fooling no one. It was the boy with the lashes. His voice was deeper than I remembered. My mouth became a dried-up scab and my tongue a Band-Aid that peeled off it each time I spoke. He said he lost my number and it wasn’t easy finding it again. He asked me what I was doing. I told him nothing. He said he wanted to see The Crying Game, even though he knew the ending. I said I wanted to see it, too. I took my mother’s diet soda from her hand and she got herself another one. “Well, why don’t we see it together?” he said and then he made a joke about how we could take along my short friend and buy her a ticket to Aladdin. This is how long it took for me to recognize his mistake. “I’m the short friend,” I said. “No, you’re not,” he insisted, and I wished he was right. When he asked about the color of my hair, the other line beeped. I clicked the receiver and pushed the swinging kitchen door again to stand in the dog’s hallway. My mother yelled something about me ripping the phone cord. It was Bianca on the other line. When I told her
what was happening, I held the receiver with my neck so I was free to dig my nails into my wrist. “He thinks I’m you,” I said, heaving quick Lamaze breaths to simulate laughter. When I clicked back to the boy, he’d been replaced by the flatline alarm of a dial tone. I let it flatline a little longer so I could say a fake goodbye, and unknotted the phone cord, placing the receiver in the cradle with immense concentration. I wanted to stay a little longer inside that moment and not the next one, when I had to turn around to face my mother. “So who was that?” she asked, her mouth still delighted. Worse than knowing you’re unlovable is believing, momentarily, that you are not. In the old apartment, I would watch from the bedroom doorway when my sister’s boyfriends came over to pick her up. They’d stand in their overcoats, shaking my mother’s hand. Then they’d take my sister’s hand, and her silver bracelets chimed as she walked out the door. Fairy dust. When my parents are asleep, I can sit on my bathroom sink and smoke a cigarette out the window. The storm is still alive. It coughs snow in my face through the open window. I pull on a Dunhill, hard enough that it burns. Bianca says I smoke too loud. Maybe so. I wish I was an easier person to love. A lemony light flickers from a window in the building across the alleyway. Maybe it’s been flickering for a while, and I hadn’t noticed. Through the white scrim, I think I see the boy walking toward the window, though it’s hard to tell if he’s exposed. His whole body looks like a shadow, a black piece of paper cut out in the shape of a boy. There is his torso and his big oval head, tilted slightly. And there is his hand, all five fingers, flat on the glass. The cloud of weather between us is soft and twinkling. I place my hand on the glass, too, and leave it there for a moment.
Man: Storm On a Saturday night in March, a cyclone banged on Gary Wilensky’s window and lit up his studio apartment in a spastic blue light. Snow spitballed in every direction, and thunder gave way to an achy, wind-borne moaning. Other families in other apartments huddled together behind windows, and those who lived alone watched them through a white veil. The next day, ice clinked against window glass. The airports were closed. Ten inches of snow piled up in Central Park. Governor Mario Cuomo declared a state of emergency. Newscasters prattled on about the Storm of the Century and the Great Blizzard of ’93. All the shovels came out and the digging began. Now it is Monday, and Gary Wilensky is getting himself a gun. Not a real gun, but a movie prop. Still, the one he rents from a shop that services set designers is a real .38 caliber revolver. It’s just been modified to fire blanks. The pistol is heavy in your hand, like a trophy. Like that silver little Smith & Wesson Michael Douglas finds at his feet in Falling Down, a film that’s spent the past two weeks in the number one box office spot. Douglas’s character—an unemployed engineer with a flattop and Eisenhower glasses—blazes a warpath through the streets of Los Angeles, amassing an arsenal and taking out his frustrations over losing his job and family on anyone who interferes with his mission to attend his daughter’s birthday party. “I’m the bad guy?” he asks the cop who catches up with him at the end of the movie. “How’d that happen?” On Thursday, when the snow has turned to cliffs of packed yellow ice all along the sidewalks, Gary makes his way to his therapist’s appointment.
He’d begun treatment shortly after he was fired by the Mother. Maybe he thought if he got help, he could wipe clean his past and all would be forgiven. It had worked once before, but that was long ago. Anyway, he’s of another mind-set now. Today, in his therapist’s office, he has news: He’s done with treatment. He’s going to try something else. A few days later, Gary has changed his mind. He needs a real gun. So he drives an hour east to Farmingdale, Long Island. While it’s gotten harder to purchase a gun in the city, between stringent permit requirements and the prior year’s ban on assault rifles, there are still loopholes to the law if you drive out of Mayor Dinkins’s purview in any one direction. There’s talk of the Brady Bill being signed into law, mandating federal background checks, but that doesn’t concern Gary. He’ll be long gone by the time it’s passed. Right now, what matters is directly in front of him—the Long Island Expressway and the choices that lay ahead. Remingtons, Colts, Smith & Wessons. And real ammo. No blanks. He is a different man than he was only two months ago at the awards ceremony. If his mood was leaden then, now it is jet-fueled. And if he passes exit 37 on the right and sees the exit sign for Roslyn, there’s a version of Gary Wilensky who might blaze out the window, over the loose, shimmying trees and back into his old high school gym, where “Long Tall Sally” would clatter as he twirled and twirled his dance partner, all sweaty-palmed and buzzing, pulling her close to his chest and tilting her over the dance floor. American Outdoor Sports is an emporium of weapons: pump action, single shot, bolt action, semis, slugs, choke tubes—even fixed blade knives and spear points. But it’s the Cobray 9mm semiautomatic carbine that hooks him. In February, the New York Times Magazine had a feature on street guns and the benefits of a 9mm semi, which is lighter than a revolver and easier to handle. But the standout feature of a weapon like this particular Cobray is the way it looks. It’s long, T-shaped, and bulky—a little bit Scarface, a little bit RoboCop. They call them “ugly guns” on the street because of how absurdly large they are compared to pistols. It looks just like the “ugly gun” Michael Douglas whips out in Falling Down, when he demands the manager of the burger chain serve him breakfast during lunch hours. “Ever heard the expression ‘the customer is always right’?”
Sold. Gary will be back in two weeks for a shotgun. In the meantime, there is more to buy. Disguises—a fake mustache, a pile of wigs. Copper red, medium brown, sandy blond, and one wig that’s grandma gray with tight little roller curls. Somewhere along the way he picks up a white rubber mask—the kind a horror-movie villain would wear to hide his charred and pulpy face. Even on its own, laid out on the floor, without a human face behind it, it is the boogeyman, shaking awake that dormant fear from childhood of the faceless man—who, up close, looks as if he’s standing far away, his expression unreadable. A masked man who wants something, but what? Downtown is where all the kink shops are, and Gary has a grocery list of items to buy, though get him in any shop and he’ll go off book, clearing out shelves and loading up baskets. He’s a salesclerk’s dream, blowing through thousands of dollars in a clip. He can’t stop. If he’s curious about something, if he wants to take an item home and try it out, he’ll buy it—full price. Forget what he buys in sex shops. It’s what you’d think, only the most expensive versions. Each silver link, each instrument of pain and restraint, will serve as visual symptoms of his disease. Is there a name for what he has? There is a boundlessness to his energy. He is flooded with new ideas, new items to scrawl on a pad, new supplies he needs to buy in order to quiet his mind. There is always more to buy. He can’t stay still: bouncing uptown, downtown, east toward the shore, and soon north toward the mountains. But there is also a certainty to his mission, an inevitability that lurches him forward. He makes lists, charts, preparations. He returns to his studio with fistfuls of shopping bags and turns to his list to check off more items. He is trying to stay organized. His mind veers. Despite attempts to categorize items in columns on the page, he can’t seem to stay on track. WHEELCHAIR is in the same column as LAMPS and SEXY NIGHTWEAR. SANITARY FOR GIRLS is in the same section as HAMMER and WINDOW BARS. RAZOR BLADES is circled with an arrow that points to BLOOD CATCHER. He writes NO TRESPASSING. He writes NIGHT TELESCOPE. He writes CARBON MONOXIDE. He writes KINKY and underlines it, adding six items beneath it. He starts a column just for food items, but forgets to fill it in. He puts a checkmark next to SLEEPING
BAG, writes BAG FOR HEAD, and then begins doodling cursive letters on the other side of the page. He starts a new section: MEDICAL SUPPLIES. He buys medical supplies. He’s found a place on East Seventy-Second Street where he can purchase a wheelchair. Also on the list, BEDPAN. Finally, there’s SpyWorld. Forty-Ninth and First Avenue, across the street from the bus stop. Gary knows the area well. In an unremarkable building just a few blocks north of the United Nations is a toy store full of expensive traps. SpyWorld’s owner claims to be a former wire expert for the NYPD, and through certain channels that haven’t been named, he has acquired the kind of military-grade spy gear you wouldn’t think existed outside of movies. These are not dime-store gadgets for peeping at your neighbor, but cutting-edge technology worthy of the store’s clientele: government agents, Interpol, billionaires, embittered spouses. There are long-range tracking devices, voice-altering machines, police scanners, pin-drop-sensitive security monitoring systems, a pair of $1,500 binoculars outfitted with microscopic microphones, a $1,200 parabolic laser device designed to pick up conversations from a mile away, a few $6,000 fax machine interceptors and scramblers, a set of $8,000 night vision goggles courtesy of unnamed sources in Russia. And here a James Bond section, with hidden microphones disguised in Rolexes, beer cans, and silver coins. Gary was once so giddy while shopping here, he posed for a picture. At the time, his hair was still dark. He wore a fluorescent blue windbreaker over a fluorescent blue pullover. A mustache ran straight across his face as if it’d been stuck there with adhesive glue. Maybe it was. Eyebrows arched, smile naughty, he stood before a wall taped with articles. The most visible one being a photographic spread of semiautomatic rifles. But that was another trip at another time. This time he’s prepared to spend five figures. Tracking devices, voice altering machines, an array of hypersensitive security monitoring equipment and a pair of night vision goggles—like the goggles Buffalo Bill wore in Silence of the Lambs, when the audience sees Clarice through his eyes, filtered through green light, feeling her way around his dungeon. “You don’t know what pain is,” he’d warned. Outside SpyWorld, the bus stops across the street. Five years ago, Gary visited that spot every morning, camera in hand, to film two boys, eleven
and twelve. But first he’d tuck in his hair and tighten the laces of his black leather mask, becoming the shadow of a man. Not the Gary Wilensky who dresses in tutus and laces up his roller skates, or the cartoon one on the Tshirts, but the one who covers his face in animal skin and presses his eye to a glass square closing in on two young faces, imprinting them onto thin plastic sheets of tape, and then sealing each tape in the trunk of his car until the day came when they were finally discovered. Now here he is years later, not a new man, as his court-ordered therapist was led to believe in 1988, but an old one with a new mask.
Girl: Breakup By now we have a rhythm. We speak in light flickers when the lights in other rooms have gone dim. Sometimes I flash my lights. More often, it’s him flashing his. Sometimes, though, his window is dark, his blinds are down, and all I can see is a nose poking through. He is watching, waiting. Other times he has hoisted the blinds way up and his room is lit in a theatrical spotlight. But tonight there’s something new. The bottom half of his window is covered up. There’s a large white sheet of paper pressed against the glass. And there is writing on it—big loopy letters and a tilted question mark with a hollowed-out dot. What is your name? Four words. Words. He has words. Now there is language, not just muted signals. And a public acknowledgment of what we’ve been doing, that it hasn’t been something acted out in a semiconscious dream state or something we can each pretend the other has misconstrued. Now there is no denying what we’ve been doing. It’s been written out and made official: What is your name? Something about his handwriting frightens me. It slants to the right and seems urgent. The bellies of his As are perversely elongated. The W is disproportionately large—a result of overeagerness, poor spatial judgment. And that tilted question mark with the emptied-out dot—that’s just silly. What is your name? What is your name? What does he want? What is it he needs from me? I feel drenched in ectoplasm or some kind of clear viscous glue that insects shoot out to trap a mate. I want to pull down my curtains, but they’re billowy and large and really not meant for practical purposes, rather to frame the window in scallops.
Pulling them down is like bringing a sailboat to shore—you really have to know what you’re doing, and there are a ton of ropes involved. But if I manage to pull down the curtains, it’s worse. I can’t acknowledge that I’ve seen his poster. He can’t know that I am a person who reads and feels things and reacts. We are only the outlines of bodies and the skin-colored approximations of faces. We are dollhouse characters for each other; that’s what we were supposed to be. I thought we had agreed this wasn’t actually happening. What is your name? When did such a simple question become so hard to answer? For three days I crawl on the floor to hide from the boy and his sign. I do my homework cross-legged on the carpet under a dimly lit halogen lamp. I will not respond. I have to respond. I could write my name. I could ask for his name. I could tell him to meet me in the alleyway, but I would never do that. But I could. When my mother walks into my room, she turns up the light to full blast. “Why is it so dark in here?” Another question I can’t answer. I point to the window. To the sign. She moves closer to it and squints her eyes, reading each word aloud. What. Is. Your. Name. It doesn’t register with her at first. The last time she had seen the boy was the first time we had both seen him, months ago. Then her whole posture changes. Her chest puffs out; her hands on her hips triangulate at the elbow so her body takes up more space. When she looks at me, her brow furrowed, I want to be see-through. “This is still going on?” she says. It’s not clear to either of us if she’s angry with me as she hoists the scalloped curtains down and clack, clack, clacks out of my room. A call is made in the kitchen with the door closed. “Hi . . . favor . . . daughter . . . going on.” I am a disgusting person with disgusting thoughts. A few hours later, she’s back in my room holding a poster-sized sheet of blue cardboard paper. Written across it in black marker and traced over a second time: You have been reported to the police. She tapes it to my window, and in the morning when the light comes through, all I can see are her big black backward letters and the vague outline of windows that all look the same. At breakfast, she tells me what else she has done. A friend of hers—a former cop who was a bouncer at one of the teen dances she used to organize—is taking care of it. When it’s dark again and the boy’s apartment
is drenched in yellow light, I watch from the bathroom window. There is a man sitting with his parents at the kitchen table. Then he is gone and the boy’s parents are in his bedroom. His mother points to the window. His father raises a fist and pushes the boy so hard he lands on the bed and bounces. Although he’s bigger than both his parents, he looks shrunken when he gets back up, his head hanging low, his arms slack at his side. His mother walks to the window and closes his blinds. Then the boy, with his head still hung, disappears.
Girl: Love Songs I know Gary’s secret. I’ve seen the playlists on the covers of his mixtapes, and I’ve been in the car alone with him when he let the radio knob ease from Z100 to 106.7 Lite FM. I’ve watched him as he waited for the light, resting his head back and closing his eyes to the pastel sound of Peter Cetera. And I felt it, too—that longing. This is private music, the kind you’re supposed to groan about when flipping through stations. You’re supposed to press the scan button as fast as you can to obliterate it from the air, and replace it with something younger, harder, more guarded, less earnest. There is nothing cool about a heartbroken man singing in falsetto or a woman harmonizing with him. It’s a weakness. I have it and so does Gary. “Next Time I Fall,” “Don’t Know Much,” “Somewhere Out There” (the theme from An American Tail), “All Out of Love.” “One More Night.” It’s a mistake to call these love songs. They are the musical architecture of tears, the slow-dripping sounds of losing someone. They are not about love, but about the agony of separation embedded in the code of love. They are about me and my mother. I discovered this when I was in third grade, racked with compulsive thoughts of her death. Whenever she would leave me, even to go to the grocery store, I would score my emotional state with one of those songs, not because it made me feel better or braver, but because those songs, as overwrought as they were, expressed exactly how it felt when we were apart.
The doctor called what I had separation anxiety. I call it mourning. It wasn’t the fear of losing my mother, it was the awareness that I had already lost a part of her—the part of her arm that balanced me, the part of her lap that fit my body like an armchair. “That hurts,” she began to say when I’d crawl onto her seat in the car. “You’re getting too big.” That was supposed to be a good thing, I understood that. But I also understood that with each new moment, two new versions of us shed two older versions. The more time passed, the further the distance between us and them, between the two of us now. I couldn’t crawl into the front seat with her anymore. That part of life was over, and every day we moved further away from it, until one or both of us would eventually disappear. So I began the grieving process in advance, to prepare for what the pain might consist of, the sickness it carried with it. It felt like melting—all the fluids in my body were draining out of me—and it sounded like Linda Ronstadt and Aaron Neville, like Peter Cetera and Cher, like Phil Collins and REO Speedwagon, like Lite FM. Even now, while we are inside Gary’s car, the opening keys of the synthesizer on “One More Night” bring me back to when I was most agonized, and in a way, most in touch with my own existence, with hers. My mother. My first love. The first person I couldn’t afford to lose. As the song drifts between our headrests, I wonder if Gary is thinking of his mother, too.
2014–2016
Mothers, Fathers, Others Gary’s mother, Edith Wilensky, could be the daughter of a Connecticut socialite. She could be the sister of a war hero who died in combat in 1948. She might be the daughter of a Russian Jew or a Polish Jew. Or not a Jew at all, but likely a Jew. She could be Edith Fox, or Edith Parks, or Edith Wolfe. Or Woolf. Or Wolf. Or Wulf. I’ve gathered leads to all these surnames, though I’m uncertain which one, if any, would have led me to her. In Edith’s day, a man was given a name. A woman was given a temporary tag to be traded in for the prize of a romantic commitment. Any vestige of her old self was bumped to the middle slot, and any middle name that once filled the slot vanished, as was expected of women’s middle names. Maiden names are only slightly less obsolete—they’re for password verifications and deep genealogy dives. Maiden names are designed like disappearing ink, dissolving a former identity as easily as a felt brush wipes a blackboard clean of a lesson plan. What happened in Edith Wilensky’s life before she took the name Wilensky and then after she removed it? The original surname given with the hope that it would one day be replaced, the married surname taken with the hope that it wouldn’t. But when a marriage fails, the assumed last name isn’t really hers anymore either. Maybe this is why Edith Wilensky changed her name after her divorce, or maybe she remarried. Either condition, combined with the years that have passed, has made her a challenge to locate. What I know for certain is that Edith was born in 1918 in Hartford, and took the last name Wilensky by the age of twenty-one. Her husband was a
Jewish salesman eight years her senior, named Irving Wilensky. They lived on Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn, home to a cross section of working-class Italian and Jewish immigrants. Irving pulled in around $130 a week hawking textiles for dresses, while his wife stayed at home and cared for their only son, Gary, born September 1, 1939. In that same year, in Queens, the 1939 World’s Fair was erected. The fair, with the theme World of Tomorrow, offered 44 million visitors a glimpse into the future—a promise of a bright new post-Depression era—never mind the barrel of a second world war. What mattered within the parameters of Flushing Meadows, which would later become home of the US Open, was the prospect of an automated highway system, dishwashing machines, mechanical pets, cigarette-smoking robots, and a historic dedication by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, marking the first televised broadcast of an American presidential speech. That same year, Irving announced the launch of Gary Junior, a firm manufacturing junior dresses for wholesale buyers, in the March 31 issue of Women’s Wear Daily. Quilted taffeta, nylon cord, gold leaves embossed on cotton swing skirts. Sketches of slender women with cinched waists and skirts that belled out over Barbie-slim legs, daintily shod in ink-drawn pumps, all accompanied ads for Gary Junior in the trade paper throughout the early 1950s. Irving, who was first and foremost a salesman, recognized early on that messaging mattered. He gave each pattern a name—“Thunder and Lightning,” for a rayon taffeta print. A striped chambray skirt and rope belt, he called “The Skirt That Sells on Sight.” In 1949, he placed a full-page ad that was prescient of a Mad Men era. The image was simply a giant hollow exclamation point. The large display text read “HEY.” In smaller print, potential buyers were invited to visit their showroom. Two weeks later, another full-page ad featured a giant question mark, with the words “AND WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?” The ads were aggressive and hard to ignore. It didn’t matter if buying dresses wasn’t your business, the message was for everyone reading the paper: Pay attention, remember the name, Gary Junior. It worked. The company, which had its offices on West Thirty-Fifth Street in Manhattan, continued to expand and won two major contracts totaling 30,000 dress orders less than two years later. There was enough brand recognition (and money spent to develop it) that by the early fifties,
when a fourteen-year-old Gary suffered from appendicitis, Women’s Wear Daily wished him a speedy recovery in their pages. By 1950, Irving, Edith, and Gary had moved to Hewlett Harbor, Long Island, a South Shore alcove encircled by placid shorelines. Developers at the turn of the century erected Gold Coast–style mansions for local magnates, and returned in the forties and fifties to build sleek single-family units for the upwardly mobile middle class. Advertised as the area’s most exclusive community, Hewlett Harbor became an instant suburban oasis for commuters to the city, with brand-new homes—sold prebuilt—averaging $35,000 complete with dropped living rooms, General Electric appliances, thermopile insulation, infrared and ultraviolet lamps, and built-in liquor cabinets. Irving’s wages also went toward a first-class cabin cruise to the West Indies for husband and wife aboard the SS Nieuw Amsterdam, a luxury ocean liner. But the following year, Gary Junior’s reputation took a hit when the Federal Trade Commission charged the company with mislabeling the wool count in their dresses. The complaint against Wilensky and his partner, Oscar Zinn, was eventually dismissed on the grounds of insufficient evidence, but a year of negative press took its toll. Irving sold his Hewlett Harbor home in 1952, and by 1954, Gary Junior had become Galy Junior, still a dress manufacturer but with a new, nonfamilial name. Soon Irving’s partner, Oscar, sold his stake in the company and joined a competing label. Edith and Irving were through as well. A teenage Gary Wilensky moved with his father to Roslyn’s newly built Silver Hill apartment complex, a multiunit efficiency that looked like a redbrick high-rise chopped down to the trunk. Roslyn was an idyllic hamlet trimmed by leafy tree branches, lined with a grassy park overlooking a pond, and cinched at the waist by a street-long village with a soda shop and a post office. The local news in 1955 centered around parking disputes and a protest by a group of students against what was described as “horror” content, prompted after a reading of The Blackboard Jungle in class. When they weren’t promoting “self-censorship” of books, students at Roslyn High waged a war, via pamphlet, against girls wearing too much makeup. Still, there was no censoring one of the most prominent and tragic headline news stories of the year. A recent graduate of Roslyn High was
brutally raped and murdered in Greenwich Village by a convicted sex offender who spotted her on the street and followed her home. Much coverage was devoted to the search for the suspect and his drawn-out trial, in which his lawyer claimed his sexual urges were “so overpowering that he became a wild man.” Meanwhile, Irving’s Galey Junior had sold $1 million worth of merchandise in a single season. Running a small company in high demand might have meant long days in Manhattan and nights commuting home to Roslyn, but Irving spent as much free time as he could with Gary, often on the tennis courts. He’d taught his son to play at age five and continued to practice with him regularly. There are questions that might be asked: Why didn’t Gary live primarily with his mother? How often did he see her? Where did she go? According to New York magazine, she moved to a home nearby, but that is the extent of what I know. A few of Gary’s high school acquaintances told the magazine that he reeled over his parents’ split and blamed his mother for leaving him. He told two classmates she was dead after suffering a long illness. Gary’s high school friend Neal Pilson can’t recall ever meeting Gary’s mother, which was odd, considering their tight-knit community. “I knew everyone else’s mother,” he says. “Come to think of it, I don’t even know where Gary lived.” It’s tempting to assume Gary’s relationship with his mother was fractured by his parent’s divorce. In one small scientific analysis, adult stalking behavior was linked to separation from a primary caretaker in early life. This perceived rejection, when coupled with other mental disturbances, might resonate in later life when the person is rejected again. Their obsessive and, in Gary’s case, violent behavior might be rooted in a unresolved desire to change the past, to recapture what was lost so long ago. But even if this was true of Gary, there isn’t enough background on his childhood to fully substantiate it. In 1957, a year after Gary graduated from high school, Irving Wilensky, then forty-nine, remarried; his new wife was a thirty-five-year-old woman with a daughter from her first marriage. They eventually moved to Port Washington, the next town over from Roslyn, while Gary moved south to attend the University of Alabama. Though the South was still entrenched in Jim Crow racism—only two years earlier the university accepted the first
black student, while still barring her from dormitories and dining halls—the school had made a surprising push for more Jewish East Coasters, reportedly trying to attract a competitive applicant pool. The school was cheap and easy to get into by East Coast standards. He joined Sigma Alpha Mu, a Jewish fraternity with a reputation for parties, alongside fellow New York–born pledge Bernie Madoff. But Gary didn’t stay in Alabama long enough to leave an impression on his frat brothers. (Nobody I spoke with remembered him.) After his freshman year, he transferred to Rider University in New Jersey before dropping out. The year was 1958, when Sophia Loren and Tab Hunter landed twenty miles from Roslyn in Long Beach to shoot That Kind of Woman, Sidney Lumet’s film about a sophisticated Manhattan mistress who falls for a young paratrooper. After a locally publicized call for young extras, over five thousand teenagers stampeded the seaside town. One of the six chosen for an extra role in the film was a seventeen-year-old boutique model from Roslyn named Judy. She left such an impression on casting directors, she was recruited to screen-test for Paramount. That was the girl Gary Wilensky would marry. (Judy did not respond to my request for an interview, so my research is largely limited to public records and reporting.) By the time they wed in 1969, Judy had put aside any Hollywood aspirations and was pursuing a law degree, while Gary taught tennis in midtown Manhattan. Their marriage lasted only six months. After their divorce, Judy got married again, this time to her law professor, and together they started a private practice representing musicians—Frank Sinatra, Luther Vandross, Don Henley, the Beach Boys, Michael Jackson. Their firm went on to win precedent-setting judgments on behalf of artists in binding record contracts. Gary never remarried. Irving Wilensky would tell reporters Gary’s marriage failed because he put tennis first. He wasn’t ready to start a family and wanted to focus on growing his career instead. But this could have been a father’s perspective on a son he only partially understood. In fact, another source had heard that it was Gary who wanted children. (His ex-wife never returned my repeated requests to speak with her.) In 1973, Gary looked like a seagull, with matchstick legs and his white Adidas parted in a V. As the cameras flashed, he dug a silver shovel in the Catskills dirt to cement the opening of the Concord Resort Hotel’s new
indoor courts. Gary’s smooth dolphin sonar could simultaneously signal the most important person in the room and the cameraman to converge wherever he might be standing. Shoulder to chest with Pancho Gonzales at a charity tournament. Knocking an elbow against Bobby Riggs after an exhibition match. Edging into a semicircle with John Dockery, Marty Glickman, and Red Holzman while wearing a sweater covered with fingersized tennis rackets. He could talk his way into any inner circle, and he would, if it meant a photo op. “Gary wasn’t a world-class player, but he had the ability to talk to people, which is sometimes more important than playing,” says Fredo Weiland, a tennis pro who worked at Midtown Tennis alongside Gary in the 1980s. He used the press to gain traction, just as Irving had done so many years before. In 1974, Gary posted a quarter-page ad in Women’s Wear Daily— the fashion trade paper where Irving’s business ventures played out in print —advertising his very own tennis gift shop. “Gary Wilensky Tennis Lover,” the ad read in three-dimensional Yellow Submarine font. Crouched above the headline, as if resting on a cloud of letters, was a photo of Gary in a butterfly color, his smile parenthesized by a long trail of mustache hair. “If You’re a Lover, Don’t Be a Stranger,” read the text beside his head. Dad must have been proud then. Gary’s Tennis Shop did little more than spread his name around the city before it closed, but he was never short on new ideas. “He was good with the gimmicks,” says Fredo. “He thought outside the box.” Gary was a champion performer, if not at tennis, then at public entertainment. He zigged and Zelig-ed his way through pop culture, modulating his act to suit each era. In the seventies, the age of mimes and stuntmen, he donned his roller skates and challenged a unicyclist to a well-advertised tennis tournament. In the eighties, he appeared on an episode of To Tell the Truth, a remake of the fifties game show that challenged B-list stars to pluck the actual rollerskating tennis pro from a series of imposters. And in the nineties he kicked off the decade’s obsession with televised true crime. “He was a showman,” says Erica Goodstone, his former student and friend. “Even his death was a show.” At his core, he was a salesman like his father. Always staying on trend, always modifying the merchandise to suit demand—and as was true of his
father, who manufactured textiles for juniors, Gary’s niche was also the junior circuit. “He had hundreds of students over his career and was a pro at many camps, at Central Park, and at numerous clubs,” Irving Wilensky told the New York Post in 1993, after his son had died. “He taught a lot of students who were five, six, and seven years old and followed them through their graduate years. He was one a father could be proud of. He did not seem like the kind of guy who would do something like this.” After Gary’s death, eighty-five-year-old Irving was interviewed by the Associated Press, the New York Times, the New York Daily News, and the Post. In a photo in Newsday, he is slouched in an armchair. His arms sag from the short sleeves of a thin button-down shirt. He has scruff on his chin and his mouth curdles as if he has tasted something rotten and is searching for the language to describe it. His eyes rest on a point below the camera’s lens. In his son’s final days, Irving claimed Gary called every day, sounding frustrated. He could tell something was wrong by the sound of Gary’s voice, but he didn’t know the extent of his son’s issues. “I am shocked,” he told the Post. “[He] never confided in me that anything was troubling him. I wish he had.” The only trace of Edith Wilensky in reports came from Irving himself. He’d broken the news of Gary’s death to her by telephone. “She took the news the way you’d expect a mother to,” said Irving. Edith, who by then had changed her last name to Wolf (or Wulf or Woolfe or Wolfe), attended Gary’s private funeral, a gathering of about thirty friends and family in Long Island. When contacted, one of Gary’s closest living relatives turned down my request for an interview, citing a wound still too damaging to revisit. “Gary’s final days caused a great deal of pain to [his father],” the relative wrote in a follow-up email, adding, “Gary was adored by his mother and father, and remained close to them all his life.” Irving Wilensky died in 1994, less than a year after his son. If she is alive today, Edith would be nearing a hundred, but the last time Gary’s relative saw or heard from her was in 1993 at Gary’s funeral.
Collectors, Photographers, Stalkers The scanner groans as it memorizes the contents of the folder my mother gave me. My living room floor is a patchwork of brittle newspapers, magazines, and stale papers, each one placed on glass and pixelated for posterity, or just to subdue the recurring fear that they will all be burned up in an electrical fire. The headlines read “Tennis Pro’s Dark Secret,” “Coach Would Kill to Keep Sex Slave,” “Stalker Hired Despite Warning.” The salacious coverage had flooded every newspaper in the country before washing over into Hard Copy–style news programs and the midsections of magazines. But it’s the clips with smaller headlines and shorter inch counts that contain the subtler clues to Gary’s past. In response to People’s feature story on Gary (“Stroke of Madness”), a Manhattan couple wrote a letter to the editor that the magazine published. They’d known him for ten years—their daughter was a former student. Gary had even cared for their dog when they went away on vacation. Reflecting on his kindness, they recounted how Gary called them crying when their dog was stolen under his watch. He offered to pay a stated ransom fee of $1,000 to ensure the pet’s safe return. This story is supposed to offer a counterpoint to the media’s villainous portrayal. “How could this kindly, sensitive man degenerate into dangerous madness?” the couple writes. “In judging Gary Wilensky, we know there was a very nice person, then something unfathomable happened.” The letter’s defense of Gary speaks to his evident ability to charm parents, or if nothing else their willingness to dismiss the severity of his
crime. But reading into the letter, knowing Gary’s conflation of violence and compassion for young girls, I find it reasonable to assume that the kidnapper of the girl’s dog was Gary himself. He was possibly intrigued by the emotional torture he could inflict on his student, and later guilt-ridden and remorseful, concocting a story of heroism to cover his own tracks. Another article, published in Newsday titled “It’s Just Not Their Kind of Problem,” calls out “parents of privilege” who have chosen to brush aside the Wilensky case as something of an inconvenience. In the piece, parents of students interviewed on the condition of anonymity reflect a lack of concern in the wake of his crime. “It’s not changing our lives,” one parent who sent her daughter to Wilensky told the paper. “There’s no change in terms of protecting the children.” A former student had a similar reaction. “We’re not dwelling on it.” “We don’t even want to think about it,” another student told the New York Times, again on the condition of anonymity. “We’re in no-comment mode,” an administrator at the Brearley School, where Gary coached the varsity team, told the same Times reporter. But farther upstate, hundreds of miles from the Upper East Side, a local paper published an op-ed from a concerned parent who’d sent his daughter to camp with Gary. She’d told her dad what a nice guy her coach was, and how he’d even invited her for pizza and movies in his cabin. “We put our youngest child in his care,” wrote the girl’s father, Richard Grossman, in the Syracuse Post-Standard. “He is every parent’s nightmare. And now he is ours.” “Was it your nightmare, too?” I had asked my mom after reading this article. “Is that why you kept the folder?” “I kept the folder because it was something that happened in our lives,” she’d said. “It’s like the photo albums we have in the house. They’re just memories.” But memories hold meaning, even those buried in a drawer for years. I want to know why these memories were forgotten, why they matter now, and whether the answer to both questions is the same. I flip an article from the Troy Record facedown on the scanner. The headline reads “Stalker Wanted a Family.” “Do you have kids?” the sex therapist who knew Gary Wilensky had asked me during our interview. When I told her I didn’t, she asked if I wanted them. I don’t know, I responded, I guess I was waiting for the
decision to be made for me. I’m still waiting, though at thirty-eight, not deciding has become a decision in itself. I had expected motherhood to develop inside me, the way puberty had— without my input, and within the same time frame as others my age. Uncomfortable initially, the alignment with other women experiencing the same stage of maturity at the same pace eased the awkwardness of transition. Motherhood seemed the final step to becoming a woman, and like all the others, mostly required time. But it’s not children that usher in maturity, it’s the ability to make decisions. “Are you a reporter?” someone else I interviewed had asked. Yes? No? For a decade I’ve been writing and editing women’s lifestyle content for major news outlets. Reporting was an aspect of the job, but what constitutes women’s lifestyle hovers between news and entertainment. At each publication, the criteria for women’s content have been carved into categories: food, fashion and beauty, relationships (though limited sex), health and diet, and parenting. Politics were filtered through the lens of fashion (what [insert first lady’s name] wore to the state dinner), entertainment through relationships (what we can learn about love from [insert celebrity divorce/romantic comedy/Oscar speech]), news through parenting (how to talk to your children about [insert headline-grabbing tragedy]). Service, I learned, was key to any women’s story. What she can take away from this story on [insert interview with cookbook author], how she can improve from reading about [insert hair trend/diet trend/fashion trend]. We can always be better. When a new generation of young women became the target audience, and the Internet provided more accurate measurements of interest, political action, feminism and intersectionality, body image, and cultural appropriation were shoehorned into the same categories. There were countless debates about whether a story about body shaming belongs in the section marked fashion, or whether campus assault could be filed under health. The labels were useless, outdated, but still slow to be replaced. As an editor, I could have fought or merely suggested a change. But there were more pressing priorities, and I still believed that such categories appealed to women, even if they didn’t appeal to me. Whoever invented them knew what it meant to be a woman more than I did. I believed this in the same way that I believed that women cared about gift guides, fashion week, and viral proposal videos; in the same way I made a nasal prolonged sound
when someone showed me their baby’s picture or their engagement ring or a story about a man who did something nice. I was covering up the fact that I didn’t feel anything. I was pretending to be a woman, in the way women are perceived, in the hopes that it would quiet the girl inside me who resisted. More scanned articles. Albany Times Union. The New York Post. Newsday. “Meanwhile, police searched Gary Wilensky’s one-bedroom Upper East Side apartment and found binoculars, p*rn videos and photographs of young girls.” This line appears in a Newsday article about cops searching Gary’s Manhattan apartment after his crime. I’ve read the article before but never noticed the line. Another article about the raid of his home also mentions these other photographs. He was following multiple girls before he died. I wonder if I am in his photo album, too.
