Give Me Everything You Have

Part I: Nasreen

A young man on a journey comes across a corpse at the edge of a village. On inquiring why the corpse has not been buried, he is told that the dead man was in debt and that his creditors are refusing permission for the burial to take place until the debts have been paid. The young man, though not rich, immediately pays the debts and the burial goes forward.

That night the dead man comes to thank him. As a token of his gratitude he offers to accompany the young man on his travels and give him the benefit of the supernatural powers death has conferred on him. His only condition is that everything they gain on their adventures be divided equally between them. The young man agrees and the two set off together. All goes well for a year, with treasure after treasure falling into their hands and each of them taking an equal share.

Then one day they meet a woman, young and attractive. And now all of a sudden the men are confronted by an apparently insurmountable problem: how to divide the woman in two.

I read this folktale at university, where it made a strong impression on me. For many years I kept it in mind as a possible basis for a story, but I could never think of a way to use it and after a while it began to fade from me. I forgot which book I’d read it in, I forgot the details of the adventures the two men have together before they meet the woman, and then I even forgot how they solved the problem of dividing the woman between them.

It was after the attacks on the World Trade Center that I came across the story again. I was trying to track down an aside on Islam in my old Penguin edition of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques when I saw a passage I must have marked when I first read the book, thirty years ago. It was the story I had forgotten: a version of what is apparently a universal folktale motif, known as “The Grateful Corpse.” It didn’t, as it turned out, contain any details of the two men’s adventures before they meet the woman, so on that score my memory hadn’t, after all, failed me. But it did resolve the question of how to divide the woman in two. It turns out she is bewitched: half woman, half demon. The dead man is interested only in her diabolic aspect and accepts this for his share, leaving a sane and companionable human being for the hero to marry.

In the fall of 2003 I taught a fiction workshop in the graduate writing program at a place I’ll call Morgan College, in New York City. I live upstate, but my wife and I once lived in Greenwich Village, and we’d held on to our rent-stabilized one-bedroom apartment, sharing it with a subtenant from Baltimore who used it only on weekends. The arrangement made it possible for me to take jobs like this in the city.

Among the students in my class was a woman I’ll call Nasreen. She was in her thirties, quiet and reserved. Her work didn’t come up for discussion until a few weeks into the semester and I didn’t notice much about her before then, except that she sat at the back of the room rather than at the large table that I and most of the students sat around-shy perhaps, or aloof, or a bit of both.

When her turn came, she handed in the opening chapter of a novel. It was set in Tehran in the seventies, during the last days of the Shah, and followed the lives of several members of a well-off family close to the Shah’s inner circle. The ambition-to tell a story with history and politics in it as well as a large-scale family drama-was quickly apparent. Even more so was the quality of the writing. There are seldom more than a couple of students in any workshop who seem natural writers, and they aren’t hard to spot. It was evident to me, after a few paragraphs, that Nasreen was one of them. Her language was clear and vigorous, with a distinct fiery expressiveness in the more dramatic passages that made it a positive pleasure to read. I was extremely impressed.

Although I have taught on and off for twenty years, I’ve never actually taken a creative-writing class myself, never had my material “workshopped,” as the term goes. When I try to imagine what it might be like, it seems to me that it must be a powerful and unsettling experience: a miniature version of the whole process of bringing out a book, with the editing, publishing, reviewing, and sales all jumbled up and compressed into a single tumultuous half hour. There you sit, listening to a roomful of people appraising something born in the innermost regions of your psyche and brought forth by efforts that probably stretched you to the limits of your abilities. These ten or fifteen pages are who you are as a writer, for now-fully exposed-and the discussion is going to have a highly charged impact on you. Whatever the general verdict, the chances are you’re going to come out feeling overwhelmed, whether by euphoria or by despair.

The class’s response to Nasreen’s chapter was favorable, though perhaps not as warmly so as I’d expected. I spoke last, as I usually do, and it’s possible that this slight lack of warmth made me more emphatically enthusiastic than I might have been otherwise. I don’t remember what I said, but I do remember a shift in the atmosphere as I spoke: an air of faintly sardonic attentiveness settling on the students as they sat listening to my words of praise. I didn’t interpret this as envy so much as the reluctant registering of the thought that the class, which had seemed to be of fairly uniform ability till now, was after all going to have a star, and that this was going to be Nasreen. Not necessarily a calamitous thought, but one that had to be adjusted to in some way.

Nasreen herself appeared pleased with the way things went, though contrary to my general hypothesis, she didn’t seem overwhelmed, and she certainly didn’t effuse in the way some students do after a positive response. I suspected she was confident in her abilities, no doubt glad to have had them recognized, but too much her own critic to be all that affected by other people’s views. And this too, this unflustered reaction of hers, seemed to me the mark of a real writer.

She turned in two more chapters that semester. Both reaffirmed my sense of her talent, though they also made it apparent that she had set herself a difficult challenge with her large cast of characters and her decision to accompany the action with dense historical analysis. The shifts in point of view were coming a little too thick and fast for comfort, and she hadn’t found a way of incorporating the history into the story, so that lumps of it sat here and there like undigested portions of an encyclopedia.

As her thesis advisor, I met with her a few times during office hours toward the end of that term, and we talked about these and other matters. Though she still gave the impression of keeping a part of herself averted, she was a little more forthcoming in private than she was in the classroom. She revealed a self-deprecating sense of humor, laughing at her folly-as she claimed to see it-in embarking on this large enterprise. And in her quiet way she also seemed curious about me: asking how I’d become a writer, what I was working on now, who my favorite novelists were.

As I’d assumed, the family in her novel was based on her own family, who had fled Iran for the States at the time of the 1979 revolution, when she was a child. I remembered following those events myself: the Ayatollah’s thunderous speeches from exile, the toppling of the Shah and his SAVAK security apparatus, the massive street demonstrations, the first intimations of what a radical Islamic regime was going to look like as the decrees went out concerning books, alcohol, dress. I was twenty, and this was the first revolution I had been old enough to pay serious attention to. London, where I was living, was full of Iranian exiles and refugees, among them some family friends who had taken my parents around the monuments of Isfahan and Persepolis a few years earlier. The trip had made a strong impression on my father, an architect, and, as always happened when something caught his imagination, a vibrant link had established itself between the subject and our entire household. Photos appeared on the shelves: stone lions, blue domes, latticed archways standing against desert skies. Books on Mughal architecture lay open on the side tables. A small fragment of a column that my father had pillaged and smuggled home was set up in a lit niche in our living room. Since then, even though I hadn’t been on the trip, I have felt an interest-or, more accurately, a kind of latent, hereditary entitlement to be interested-in Persian culture.

All of which is to say that as Nasreen talked about her family, memories stirred in me, and in a minor way I felt a connection to her as a person.

Her appearance conveyed, over time, the same undemonstrative confidence as her manner in class. She wore jeans that looked expensively soft and faded, and a brown, waist-length jacket, at once military and feminine in its cut, that emphasized her aura of self-containment. Her dark hair was usually pinned up-neatly, but with a few strands falling loose. Her face, fine-boned, with delicately interlocking features, had the same sallow olive complexion as my own. The line of her brown eyes had the slight upward curve at the outer corners that puts one-or anyway me-in mind of the scimitar-like flourishes of Arabic script.

During one of our conversations she mentioned a fiancé. I was struck by this: not the fact itself so much as the word. Though not exactly old-fashioned, it suggested a very different order of relationship from the casual hookup that I assumed (based on their writing) to be the norm among the students. It also accorded with my sense of her as a writer. There was something novelistic in the attitude to life it evoked: a suggestion of build, coherence, strong emotion maximized by strong formal design. In short, I approved.

She was graduating that summer, and since I wasn’t going to be teaching then, I didn’t expect to see or hear from her again. To the extent that I thought of her after our final meeting, it was as someone gone into a sunlit future of artistic and personal fulfillment.

Two years passed, during which I heard nothing from Nasreen. And then, in December 2005, she emailed to say she had completed a draft of her novel and to ask if I would read it.

I’d just finished teaching at Morgan College for the year and had arranged things so that I wouldn’t have to teach again until the following fall. Much as I’d admired Nasreen’s work, I didn’t want to spend time reading or thinking about any student’s or former student’s writing during this period, and, as politely as I could, I declined her request. I did, however, feel confident enough to offer to recommend her to my agent-I’ll call her Janice Schwartz-who was looking for clients and who I thought might be interested in Nasreen’s work.

Nasreen thanked me politely for the offer, saying that she already had some tentative interest from other agents, as well as one or two editors, and asking my advice on how to proceed, in terms of showing the book around.

An amicable email correspondence developed over the next few weeks. At that time I wasn’t yet keeping copies of every email Nasreen sent, but I did save some of them. For quite a while they remain unremarkable. She asks how I think she should handle this or that nibble of interest from this or that agent or editor. She mentions a boring administrative job she has taken at a college in the city. She recommends a CD by a Persian-American musician friend of hers. She debates whether or not to take me up on my offer to put her in touch with my agent. The emails are chatty and, given Nasreen’s quietness in class, surprisingly exuberant in style. The ones I sent back are a little terser, though friendly, with plenty of encouragement about the book and some minor attempts at humor: “my commiserations about having to get an office job. With luck you’ll soon be able to buy the office.”

On January 13, 2006, she grumbles about an agent who has passed on the book and forwards me the rejection letter, saying she has now decided that she would like to send the book to my own agent, Janice, and concluding: “sorry to bother you with my neuroses and personal literary troubles. I hope you are well and that we can share a cup of coffee after all this works out (or doesn’t work out) or something.” I commiserate further, suggest one or two things to say in her letter to Janice, and agree that it would be nice to meet for coffee sometime. On January 20 she asks why I am no longer teaching and offers me “exorbitant sums of money to be my advisor again.” Joking, I assume, or maybe only half joking, since she adds: “would you be interested?” I thank her but explain that I simply don’t have the time.

As winter progresses, her notes become steadily warmer, more gossipy and inquisitive; full of questions about me, my past, my writing habits, and my family, along with ruefully amused gripes about prevaricating agents, the tedium of her job, and so on. She asks what I’m writing and I tell her I’m doing a screen adaptation of my wife’s uncompleted novel. Again she asks me to work with her on the book; again I decline. Sometimes she drops in a more personal disclosure, alluding, for instance, to the fact that she has broken off her engagement. All she offers by way of explanation is “I can’t marry A-,” the effect of which is to add a note of stoical sacrifice to the cluster of other sentiments she had prompted in me by her use of the word “fiancé.”

My own emails back, while still brief, grew more friendly and unguarded as the weeks passed. Not being her “professor,” or anyone else’s, at that period, I had been happily discarding the rather formal, aloof persona in which I tend to armor myself for my forays into the academic world. Consequently I had begun to experience a shift in my feelings about Nasreen, from the slightly harassed sense of obligation I’d started off with to a more human, straightforward feeling of affection.

In the secluded life I lead-near Woodstock, New York, but out in the country-I don’t often meet new people, much less anyone I’m likely to have enough in common with for a real friendship to develop. On the rare occasions when such a person does appear in my life, I tend to be eagerly friendly. Jim Morrison’s line I need a brand-new friend is often in my mind, and as my correspondence with Nasreen continued, I began to think of her as something like that: a brand-new friend. That she was younger than me, a woman, and Iranian were all things that gave the prospect of this friendship a certain appealing novelty (most of my friends are middle-aged Western men like myself), but the main thing (given that any relationship between us was likely to be of a purely epistolary nature) was that she was a fellow writer whose work I genuinely admired and who seemed to enjoy being in communication with me. I assumed she felt something similar about me.

Still, at a certain point I realized I was being flirted with. Not, I felt, with any serious underlying intent: more in deference to some sort of vague convention she seemed to adhere to, concerning the correct tone for a correspondence between a youngish woman and an older man whose support she considers worth securing. (“Older man”… the first time I’ve used that phrase about myself. Among the other effects of my encounter with Nasreen is the fact that I no longer think of myself as young.) That this convention, as I perceived it, should be somewhat old-fashioned seemed in keeping with the rest of her character. There was something of another era in the way she presented herself in this first phase of emails; even of another culture. And in fact when, much later, I came across an account of all the precise gradations of flirtatiousness and coquettishness once recognized in Persian society, each with its own word-eshveh, kereshmeh, naz-I wondered if I hadn’t been at the receiving end of some late, anachronistic flowering of that ancient tradition.

In one email, for instance, she wrote that a classmate of hers in the workshop I’d taught-I’ll call him Glen-had told her that he and some of the other students had thought that she and I were having an affair. This didn’t seem plausible, and I assumed she was either making it up or else massively exaggerating some remark made by Glen as a joke. Either way, the intent seemed to be to introduce, under cover of mildly salacious gossip, a notion that I might (so I imagine her thinking) find amusing, perhaps titillating, perhaps even tempting.

I don’t mind being flirted with-in fact I quite like it-and although I made no conscious effort to encourage this development, I didn’t feel any pressing need to discourage it either. To the comment about Glen I responded: “That’s funny about Glen. He’s obviously a born writer,” which seemed to me a way of maintaining the pleasantly lighthearted tone of our correspondence while tactfully keeping my distance.

A couple of weeks later she remembers, or purports to remember, my having “snapped” at her once in class-a reproach that I also sense to be mildly flirtatious, inviting me, as it does, to sweeten the alleged sting. Again, in my reply, I see myself trying to keep the playful tone alive without actually rising to the bait: “Snapped at you, huh?” I say. “That really is a little hard to believe. Are you sure I didn’t just push you to declare an opinion on something? (I remember you being rather reticent.)” I then add, sententiously though, in the light of the catastrophe that later unfolded, with odd clairvoyance: “As George Eliot said, the last thing we learn in life is our effect on other people.”

In March, after several near misses with other agents and editors, she finally sent the manuscript to my agent, Janice. I felt there was a good chance that Janice would want to sign her up. Aside from the quality of the material, everything about Nasreen’s profile-age, gender, nationality-seemed to me to make her an eminently marketable prospect. Still, I didn’t want to raise her hopes, and I was careful not to sound too confident.

Janice happened to be traveling at this time and was slow getting to the book. The delay, along with the fact that I was the one responsible for this introduction, made me feel under more of an obligation than I had before. Reversing my earlier position, I offered to read the first section of the novel myself, so as to be able to be more specific in my recommendation to Janice. I was planning to be in New York for a couple of days in late April, and we arranged that Nasreen would give me the pages when I came down. A date and time were set for the handover, and a café in the Village selected for the location. As the day for this meeting approached, it took on a vaguely fateful character, at least in my mind, what with the somehow momentous question of how Janice was going to respond to the book hanging over it, not to mention the cumulative effect of Nasreen’s emails, which were now coming rather frequently, so that I was beginning to feel a little saturated by her, or by the thought of her.

Among these recent emails was one containing a strange photograph of herself, taken in her twenties. It was just of her face, and it was exposed in such a way that almost nothing showed except the curving lines of her eyes and mouth and a few wisps of hair, making her look like a ghost. I wasn’t sure whether sending me this fell into the category of flirting or was just a normal thing for people a decade younger than myself to do, people who had instantly embraced all the conveniences of Internet communication, as she had (she was always sending attachments and links), instead of being daunted by them, as I was. Whatever the case, the incandescent face of that photograph had supplanted what remained of my somewhat hazy memory of her actual appearance, and when I arrived at the café for our meeting it took me a few seconds to realize that the dark-haired woman in her mid-thirties wearing sensible office clothes and talking with a harried expression on her cell phone by the counter was in fact Nasreen. She closed the phone, and after a slightly awkward greeting, we went to sit at the back of the café, by a window opening onto a stone courtyard.

The meeting, which lasted about half an hour, had a muffled, muted quality-oddly so, given the buildup. Despite her extravagant loquaciousness as an emailer, Nasreen was even quieter in person than I remembered her. Not that she wasn’t perfectly pleasant, but there was something canceled or hidden, somehow, about her bearing; a strange irreality in her presence across from me at our lacquered pine table, as if she were absent in all but the most literal, mechanical sense.

Our conversation was friendly enough but desultory. She spoke caustically about her family, some in New York, some in California, giving an impression that her artistic ambitions and unsettled life had cast her in the role of black sheep-not shunned exactly, but clearly not approved of. There was money, she implied, but not much of it flowing in her direction. Picking up on this rueful note, I mentioned a problem of my own that had just arisen, concerning our apartment. Our subtenant, the woman from Baltimore, had called the day before to say she was buying a studio and no longer needed to share with us. This was a blow, as it had been extremely hard to find a tenant whose needs dovetailed as conveniently with ours as hers did, and I seriously doubted whether we would be able to find anyone else. Even if we did, there was a danger that the management company that had recently bought the building and installed an office inside would notice the new face, put two and two together, and realize we were subletting against the rules of our lease. We couldn’t afford to keep the place unless we shared it, so we were looking at the prospect of losing our foothold in New York.

All of this had been weighing on me since our tenant’s call, and it was what came naturally to mind as something to talk about in response to Nasreen’s comments about her own financial troubles. Nasreen listened politely, but I had the impression that she wasn’t taking much of it in.

We finished our coffees and left the café. Outside, we walked in the same direction for a couple of blocks. Nasreen lit a cigarette and smoked it beside me, silent except for the light clopping of her heels on the sidewalk. She seemed frail, I thought; possibly a little stressed. At the corner where our ways parted she gave me the manuscript, and, with a quick kiss on the cheek, we said goodbye.

I had some anxiety about reading the manuscript. What if, despite the great promise of the drafts I’d seen two years earlier, she had somehow botched things? I know from experience how easy it is to lose the thread of a narrative. One wrong turn and you can end up spending months or even years in a wilderness of futile and wasted effort. Or what if I simply didn’t like it as much as I had? What would I say? How might she take it? These manuscripts are a dense embodiment of their creators’ deepest drives and ambitions. Large forces circulate around them. They come into your hands, as a reader, charged with volatile potentialities of trust and suspicion, hope and fear, friendship and eternal enmity. This too I know from experience, and I opened the padded envelope with a familiar sense of foreboding.

I needn’t have worried. The writing was as good as I remembered it: strong sentences confidently evoking the epic setting of Tehran on the brink of revolution, a sharply drawn cast of characters with an interestingly unbalanced heroine at the center, and a story line of love tangles and political power struggles that seemed to be plunging swiftly forward under its own effortless momentum. I had criticisms, mainly about the essayistic passages, which still felt extraneous to the narrative, but this seemed something a good editor could easily remedy, and in general I felt entirely vindicated in my earlier enthusiasm.

I emailed Nasreen, detailing my responses and attaching a copy of an email I’d sent Janice, reiterating my support.

As far as I understood, the rest of the novel existed only in very rough draft, and I do remember being concerned that, since even this first section needed another pass, Janice might feel it was too early to commit herself as the agent. My own view was that the forcefulness of the writing, evident from the first page, was sufficient guarantee that a good book was going to emerge sooner or later. For me, at that time, the definition of a writer was very simply, as some critic put it, someone who has “an interesting way with words.” Do the sentences engage you? Cast a spell over you? Make you want to read on? If so, that’s enough, regardless of the story itself. If not, no amount of socially, politically, or otherwise “relevant” material is going to make a difference. I don’t feel so sure of this anymore (I don’t feel so sure of anything anymore), but even at the time I was aware that not everyone shared this rather cavalier way of judging a piece of writing. And I could certainly imagine that from the point of view of an agent debating whether or not to take on a first novel-the hardest kind of book to sell-an “interesting way with words” might not be quite enough of an incentive.

Janice was impressed enough to invite Nasreen in for a meeting. By all accounts the meeting was pleasant and positive, but in the end, as I’d feared, she decided the book was still too far from completion to take on for the moment. She did, however, recommend Nasreen to a friend of hers-I’ll call her Paula Kurwen-who worked as a freelance editor. I’d never met Paula, but I knew she had a good reputation. She liked the manuscript enough to feel able to help shape it, and very soon Nasreen sent me an enthusiastic email saying that the two of them were working productively together. It wasn’t quite the same as being taken on by an agent, but it was probably the best outcome that could be hoped for at this stage in the book’s development. At any rate it was certainly a step in the right direction, and I was glad to have been able to play a part.

In June I had to do some traveling-to London and back, then on to Los Angeles. As I had some time in between the two journeys, I decided to make the trip to L.A. by train, on one of the double-decker Amtrak Superliners that begin in Chicago and cross the country in leisurely, old-fashioned style, with glass-walled observation cars, dining compartments, and private “roomettes.” The journey takes three days from Chicago, and I planned to break it up for an extra night in New Mexico. In the uneventful life I lead, this expedition constituted major news, and I mentioned it in an email to Nasreen, along with the other, more humdrum highlights of that spring, such as the escape of our pet cockatiel and my project to cover the walkways in my vegetable garden with stone.

Nasreen seemed to enjoy these little bulletins from my life and often wrote back about them with an astringent insight that I appreciated. About my stonework, for instance, a project that had begun to obsess me, she joked that I was building myself a “fortress”-an image that struck me as peculiarly accurate. (It was also, in its quick, confident transformation of my flat walkways into a solid building, characteristic of the verve and directness I admired in her writing.)

But her response to the news of my impending train trip was a little different. That it fell into the category of flirtation was nothing new in itself, and no doubt it was meant no more seriously than any of its predecessors, but the actual content seemed a significant escalation of the terms: an attempt to insert herself into my mind in an unambiguously erotic light. She was proposing to smuggle herself into my roomette for the journey, and wanted to know when my train was leaving. I didn’t respond, but at this point I began to realize that something more explicitly discouraging than a mere tactful silence was going to be required of me.

Around this time, my wife and I (but I don’t like that Buckingham Palace phrase: I’ll call her K-, which is the initial of her real name, though not the name she uses); K- and I sent out a proposal for a book we wanted to write. Years earlier, before we had children, we had written a book called Walking and Eating in Tuscany and Umbria. It had been a modest success, and now, with our kids aged seven and eleven, we’d decided it would be interesting to do another one, en famille, this time in Provence. I began my cross country train journey on June 8 and flew back from L.A. ten days later. Soon after my return, a publisher made an offer for our book. The advance would allow us to live in Provence for four months, long enough to cover all the more promising-looking corners of the region, and we accepted. Our plan was to leave early the following year.

I mentioned this to Nasreen in my next email and made a point of emphasizing the family aspect of it all. She didn’t respond directly, but a week later she sent me an email in which she described a short story that a former member of her workshop-I’ll call her Elaine-had just sent her, about an American woman who seduces an Arab man. The email had the slight incoherence of something written under great emotional pressure, and culminated in an assertion that Elaine’s story was a thinly disguised account of a real affair; that the American woman in it was Elaine herself and the Arab man was, of all people, me. In effect Nasreen appeared to be reproaching me for rejecting her as a lover and accusing me of favoritism by having bestowed my attentions on another student.

The bizarreness of this scenario-bizarre to me at least: I’m not used to being regarded as some kind of pasha surrounded by desirous women-disturbed me almost as much as the accusation itself. I’d made it clear, or thought I had, that I was happily married and not interested in having an affair, but apparently it needed to be spelled out. I hated having to do this: it seemed a retreat from the living connection of a real relationship with another human being into the safe, deadening geometry of convention.

On June 30 I wrote back:

I don’t really know what any of this is about-I haven’t read [Elaine’s] story and for the record haven’t ever had an affair with a student or ex student and am not about to start now. I like your writing and want to help, but I don’t want to be a figment in anyone’s private fantasies, or at least I don’t particularly want to know about it if I am. I guess it’s possible that I’ve been taking your emails in a less serious spirit than they were intended-in which case apologies. Anyway, I do think you’re very talented, which is why I tried to get Janice to take you on. I’m sorry she didn’t, but I still have high hopes for your book, and I think you should concentrate on getting it done as quickly as possible.

Her initial reaction was to remain curiously insistent, and a couple of days later I felt compelled to send a follow-up:

I don’t know what to tell you Nasreen. I guess on the rare occasions when I like someone’s writing I tend to feel an affinity with them, an openness to friendship. Forgive me if this has read differently to you; that certainly wasn’t my intention. I’m sorry things have come to this and I don’t want to upset you, but I really am extremely happily married and I don’t particularly want to go on having this correspondence any more if it’s going to be like this.

I’d resigned myself to the ending of this friendship, but a week later Nasreen sent a lucid, gracious email, from which the following statements merit quoting, if only for their relevance to what came later:

… I’m not used to having men lend me support, help or friendship without any sort of amorous or sexual intentions. I didn’t really think that’s where you were taking this very benign relationship of ours. And in a sense I do love you and am in love with you-but mainly because you’ve given me hope that there are some “normal” men out there…

I’m sorry if I got screwy on you. Please laugh. I have to, or I’ll be so embarrassed (I am: trying to rationalize it as all writers are insane)…

I’m also glad you’re so respectful of your wife and family that you made me shut up. It was good therapy…

For a couple of months following this, our correspondence resumes its breezy, amicable tone. Nasreen sends progress reports on her work with Paula, which appears to be going well. She adopts a puppy and sends pictures. She jokes about her awful new boss. She debates whether to escape the nightmare of Bush’s America and live abroad. She also starts writing about other men she is interested in-“I think I’ve found my next prey… He’s a very handsome writer… He may have a girlfriend but that’s no matter…”-reassigning me, so it appears, from “prey” to something more like confidant.

In August she mentions being at a party where my father was being discussed. My father had designed several well-known public buildings in England, and had been knighted for his work. This connection of mine to a “Sir” amused Nasreen no end. She took to calling me “Sir James” in some of her emails, sometimes varying it with “St. James,” or plain “Sir.” The comedies of being English, of being a faithful (“saintly”) husband, and of being a teacher (that ridiculous object of schoolgirl crushes) were all compressed into these designations, and through them I could sense, again, a mind akin to my own, someone for whom words were a source of primal delight. Much more than me, in fact, she was someone whom words “stuck to” in odd ways, becoming an elemental part of the reality she inhabited. Often she wrote things in her emails that appeared almost nonsensical until, days later, I would suddenly grasp what was being alluded to by the puzzling word or phrase. An example: several months after our meeting in New York, she ended an email: “I’m s’nice, aren’t I?” The abbreviation seemed just throwaway odd, but later I happened to pass the café where we’d met (I hadn’t known its name, only the location) and I saw that it was called ’sNice-my first indication that Nasreen had been less “absent” on this occasion than I had thought. More significant perhaps, that word “fortress,” which had touched such a nerve in me, turned out (and this is a measure of my comparative carelessness with words, even my own) to be a sly recycling of something I myself had written, namely this phrase in a novel of mine, The Horned Man (later emails confirmed she had read it closely), where my protagonist talks about his unsatisfactory love life: “I had come to realize that I no longer wanted a ‘lover’ or a ‘girlfriend,’ that I wanted a wife. I wanted something durable about me-a fortress and a sanctuary.”

My point here is partly to illustrate my continued feeling of affinity with Nasreen, my sense of being on her wavelength, sometimes uncannily so; but also to introduce the idea of a certain porousness in her sense of who she actually was. Harmlessly manifested here, but foreshadowing a more troubling, and then threatening, amorphousness of identity that began emerging not long after.

Staying, for a moment, with this particular line of development, the next discernible phase came on September 20, in an email in which Nasreen included, in its entirety, a private email to her from another former classmate, attacking various other students in their workshop. We all know, of course, that email is not a strictly private form of communication, but even so, and even though Nasreen acknowledged something dubious about copying the email (“it may be unethical of me to show you this”), I sensed, for the first time, a lack of scruple that I hadn’t previously suspected. Obviously my own use of Nasreen’s emails in this narrative lays me open to the charge of hypocrisy here. I don’t believe I’m guilty of that, but rather than explain or justify myself at this point, I must simply ask for the reader’s patience. This is a complicated story and we are still only in the preamble.

Later that same day, as if sensing my misgivings, Nasreen emailed again: “I hope you know that I don’t share your emails/thoughts with anyone.” Somehow this assurance had the opposite of its intended effect. I didn’t think I’d sent anything I’d be embarrassed about other people reading, but it bothered me that the very concept of “sharing” or not sharing my emails with other people should exist in her mind, and it had a distinctly cooling effect on my desire to communicate with her.

Around this time, Nasreen began dropping allusions to Rilke in some of her emails, especially to his figure of the Angel, from the Duino Elegies, with whom she seemed to identify. I remembered this Angel, from my own reading of Rilke, as a force of violently transformative power, invoked by mortals at their peril. Intrigued that Nasreen should see herself in such a figure, I’d reread Heidegger’s essay on Rilke, What Are Poets For?, vaguely remembering that he discusses the Angel there, which he does, at some length. “The Angel of the Elegies,” he writes, “is that being who assures the recognition of a higher order of reality in the invisible…” Given the tone of her later emails, I imagine it was this aspect, this godlike gift for revelation, that Nasreen had in mind in adopting the Angel as one her many private personae. But what struck me most, rereading the essay, was another aspect, touched on only in passing by Heidegger, but curiously apposite: “This being,” goes this other description (and it was one I was to recall many times in the months and years that followed), for whom borderlines and differences… hardly exist any longer…

Even before these melting and merging tendencies of Nasreen’s began manifesting themselves, my emails to her had been growing shorter and more guarded. The reason for this was partly the overwhelming quantity of emails Nasreen was now sending me-often several a day-and partly a resurgence of that once flattering but now merely disconcerting flirtatiousness.

Again, this flirtatiousness was expressed playfully at first, under the sign of its own acknowledged futility. But over the weeks it grew more insistent, as if my rejection had given it license to evolve in a kind of negative space, feeding off its own extravagance, as in certain kinds of love poetry where the emotion grows fantastical in proportion to the strength of the resistance it meets. September 7: “You don’t love me at all anymore do you, James?” September 19: “Just a sip of water from the Zamzam well that overfloweth despite the disappearance of the Son of Thunder” (in addition to “Sir” I was now the “Son of Thunder” and sometimes “Mr Thunder”). September 20: “James, you should marry me and I’ll support all of the Lasduns…”

I began to feel that I was becoming more a source of frustration for Nasreen than anything else, and that since I couldn’t be what she wanted me to be, I should withdraw altogether. On the other hand, a part of me still clung to the idea of her as a fascinating new friend, not, after all, any crazier than some of my other writer friends, and one who seemed to find me useful as a sounding board for her own evolving vocabulary of symbols and metaphors. Having formally severed (from my end at least) any erotic current between us, I was ready to assume the role of one of those avuncular, rather eunuchy types who crop up now and then in literature: a critic-mentor figure enlisted by some gifted younger writer he’s had the good or bad luck to cross paths with. (I’d have found it unimaginable to be anything other than the “gifted younger writer” myself in any such relationship before this period: another instance of Nasreen’s aging impact on me.) Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the well-meaning minor-league littérateur approached for guidance by Emily Dickinson, must have been somewhere in my mind, both as designated literary advisor (“Will you be my preceptor, Mr. Higginson?” the poet famously wrote) and as the possible object of the erotic/mystic infatuation in Dickinson’s unsent “Master Letters”: “I want to see you more-Sir-than all I wish for in this world…”

But I’m overstating my feeling of avuncularity here. The truth is, I saw us on a more equal footing than that: two writers, at different stages of our careers, but involved in similar struggles. And just as Nasreen felt free to interrogate me about my life and writing, so I felt free to ask her the kinds of questions I would have asked any other writer friend (or non-writer friend for that matter) who’d had firsthand experience of things that interested me.

To this end I asked two questions on subjects that were very much on my mind at that time. The first was a general one about what it was like for someone from the Muslim world to be in New York in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Nasreen answered this in the slightly manic style she sometimes adopted, full of high-speed lists and esoteric references-Razorfish, Dr. Dave, Dharma Priestesses-none of it very illuminating. The second was about veils. Veils, burkas, yashmaks, niqabs, and chadors had been a source of imagery for me since my first book of poems in 1987. Nasreen was clearly interested in the phenomenon of being a woman from an Islamic culture, and it seemed to me natural enough to ask her if she’d had any direct experience with veils. But it was a mistake.

“Would you like to see me in a veil, sir?” she wrote back. A deluge of fraught, breathless veil-related emails followed, indicating a belief (or at least a decision to believe) that my question was a sexual innuendo (evidently a welcome one) and culminating, on October 11, in this: “… i spent nearly an hour in a lingerie shop contemplating veils today, James…”

By then I had exasperatedly told her to forget about veils, and with this last email I had to acknowledge that this correspondence of ours was becoming problematic. I didn’t know what to do. I thought gloomily of the various college lawyers and deans of student affairs whose excruciating lectures to new faculty on how to conduct oneself with students so as to avoid a sexual harassment suit had been such a strange and surprising feature of my first years teaching in the States. (The paranoid extremes of self-monitoring that all this had prompted in me, along with the loathsome falsifications of consciousness it seemed to entail, had provided some of the content of my novel The Horned Man.) Not that Nasreen-mid-thirties, and two years out of graduate school-could exactly be considered my “student,” but even so, as I read this latest email I seemed to see those dismal figures wagging their fingers and murmuring We warned you…

I was in a jittery, distracted state during those weeks, brought on not by Nasreen but by a new development concerning our apartment. The owner of the management company that had recently bought our building had called up out of the blue to inform us that she’d found a note from the previous owner saying we lived upstate and that the apartment was no longer our primary residence. I’d made a blustering attempt to deny this, and the woman had countered, unexpectedly, by offering to buy us out of our lease. It wasn’t a very large offer, and underneath it was a clear threat to start eviction proceedings if we didn’t accept. But all the same it was a surprise to have money dangled in front of us like that: an unforeseen twist that complicated my unhappiness at possibly losing the apartment with a little sordid glitter of avarice. A lawyer told us we might be able to get substantially more than the owner was offering if we played our cards right, but also warned that if we held out for too much she might opt for settling the matter in Housing Court, in which case we would probably lose and end up with nothing. I’d begun to negotiate, very quickly finding myself in the grip of tumultuous feelings: greedy fantasies of an enormous payout, fear of being outmaneuvered, anxiety over the loss of my lifeline to the city.

In the midst of all this, Nasreen’s insistent, unstoppably amorous communications, often a dozen or more a day now, had begun to feel oppressive. I answered fewer and fewer of them, responding with just a line or two to those that I did. She noticed, of course, though if she was hurt (which of course she was), she had the grace to blame herself for overwhelming me, and limited her reproaches to the occasional semi-humorous aside (“why do you deny me???”), even as she kept up the barrage. On October 21, in reply to a question about whether I was ill and if so whether this was why I hadn’t written for so long, I said: “No, but I can’t keep up with all these emails you’re sending.” This was my way of asking her to leave me alone for a while, but it had no effect on the torrent of emails, which continued unabated as the fall of 2006 drew to an end: a serial monologue about her love life, her Brooklyn apartment, various intrigues at work, and the stress of finishing her novel.

In a casual way she often referred to herself as feeling “crazy” or “insane” or “paranoid” about one thing or another. I didn’t take this too seriously, but sometimes she did sound genuinely in pain and on one occasion I suggested she might want to get some professional help or advice. In reply she wrote: “James, they are very silly, the things I say. I’m half joking when I freak out. I’m glad I’m convincing, however.” This added to the general irritated mood gathering in me-nobody likes being jerked around-and when a couple of similarly distressed emails arrived in November I didn’t respond. And in fact I didn’t write again until she demanded to know, once more, whether I was sick and I emailed back, tersely, to say that I wasn’t.

There was an encouraging moment on November 18, when she wrote:

my work situation has made me nuts and you sort of became my lifeline during the day. I will stop and contact you when I finish the novel. Need to leave that job and you alone for a while.

The very reasonable tone of this seemed to suggest that my exasperation had finally got through to her, and that she understood. I was reassured, even felt cautiously confident that she would do as promised and that after a few weeks’ silence we would go back to our old, pleasant, unfrenetic correspondence.

But the next day the torrent resumed.

That winter, as K- and I started planning our trip to Provence, Nasreen’s emails entered a distinct new phase of development.

In terms of subject matter, the main new theme was a situation that had arisen at her job. As I understood it, she was claiming to have had a brief affair with a colleague that had ended with each of them accusing the other of sexual harassment and the college terminating both of their contracts with three months’ pay. In response, Nasreen had decided to launch a discrimination suit against the college, based on both gender and race. She hired a lawyer and began copying me (unasked) on her emails to him, sometimes with explanatory comments, sometimes not. In them the motifs of sex, gender, race, money, and Middle Eastern politics mingle in strange ways. There is also a new tone, a sort of exhibitionistic boisterousness, that seemed to me as odd and out of character as the brashly melodramatic nature of the subject matter itself. “This will be fun,” she enthuses to her lawyer. “Let’s call it legal performance art.” Again: “I want to fight. I want this to be a circus…” She calls the suit “a high-profile case, being that I’m Iranian… It involves sex, violence, and infringement of constitutional and employment rights… They’ve been treating me like a Guantanamo detainee…”

I didn’t like being sent this stuff any more than I’d liked it when she forwarded me the email of her old classmate. I didn’t like the careless flouting of basic codes of privacy. I didn’t like the self-intoxicated tone. Above all I didn’t like the galling sense of the discrepancy between the image I’d formed of Nasreen when I taught her-that gifted, reticent, subtly attractive person-and the character disclosing itself now. Had I misjudged her-projected some wishful image of my own making onto the enigmatic exterior she’d first presented (an image drawn, I suppose I must accept, from the corniest archetype of demure Middle Eastern womanhood as concocted in the Western male psyche)? If so, that made me a spectacularly lousy observer of human beings, a thought that in turn played directly into my insecurities concerning my aptitude for this profession of writer.

On the other hand, perhaps I hadn’t misjudged her. Perhaps she was simply changing, undergoing some kind of metamorphosis. In that case, was I implicated? Responsible? K-, who wasn’t very interested in Nasreen or her emails, had nevertheless made a point of advising me not to break off contact with her, or not too abruptly. I’d sensed she was right, and throughout that winter I continued to think of my silence as a temporary suspension of communication-to be resumed as soon as Nasreen gave me breathing space-rather than a complete cutoff. But with every new email that arrived I felt more antagonized, less inclined to write back. And so the silence deepened.

As I experienced it, this silence of mine was a sort of self-canceling argument between the impulse to respond and the growing sense of being imposed on. For Nasreen, however, I imagine (in retrospect) that the silence came across as something more controlled and monumental: the imperious silence of a man who no longer considers a woman worthy of his attention and has, as it were, pulled up the drawbridge.

This perception of me (if I am right about it) didn’t affect the rate of her emails, but was perhaps a factor in their darkening mood. She starts claiming that bad things are happening to her. The colleague accusing her of harassment at work has broken into her computer. Her boss is somehow conniving with him. Parts of her novel have been erased. I didn’t believe any of this and I didn’t really believe she believed it either. I suspected her of simulating a state of nervous anxiety in order to get me to react, and the strong sense that she was trying to manipulate me made me even less inclined to write back.

Pleas, reproaches, bits of ruefully lucid self-analysis, little lightning flickers of anger alternate in rapid succession as 2006 draws to an end. The harried feeling of being at the receiving end of increasingly unwanted attention still vied with some vague sense that I ought to respond in some way, and at this point I was still imagining that I would, as soon as there was enough space between one email and the next to get over my annoyance and generally overwhelmed feeling, but there never was, and moreover the content of them was increasingly of a nature that made me wary. “you love me james. i know you’re busy but this is more fun. tell me to stop and write my novel”… “your silence is scary, sir, but probably necessary”… “have fun in Provence. brother saw an article on you in Chronicle and i google-stalked you… again.”

As the new year began, preparations for our trip to France became more concerted. The logistics of pulling our two kids from school for four months, finding someone to look after our house, and setting up places to stay in all the regions we were proposing to cover for our book were complicated and time-consuming. Negotiations over our apartment were still grinding on, though it was becoming clear that we weren’t going to make the killing I’d fantasized, which, if nothing else, streamlined my feelings on that subject into more or less uncomplicated depression.

And all the while, present under each day like the murmur of some underground river, was the steady flow of Nasreen’s emails into my inbox. I didn’t answer them. I couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t either encourage further deluges or else sound too bluntly unfriendly. Still, it bothers me, this silence of mine. I can remember all the reasons for it. I can easily recall the feeling of being oppressed and disillusioned and even in some way taken advantage of. I can summon back exactly the sense of having not so much broken off contact as suspended it until things, as I vaguely put it to myself, “got back to normal.” I can state very confidently, knowing what I know now about Nasreen, that even if I hadn’t stopped responding when I did, I would have been forced to sooner or later and events would have unfolded in the same disastrous way as they did. And yet I can’t help feeling there was something hard about it; that if I were a person in a novel, it would show as a significant character flaw, a failure of empathy.

At the end of February 2007, I flew with my family to Marseille.

There is the fortress fantasy, to which I am certainly prone, but there is also the fantasy of motion, of being the knight errant (“Sir James”) who ventures forth on a quest, a journey, a mission, and this, at some level, was why we were in France.

I’m not sure if it counts as the full chivalric “venture” if you ride out accompanied by the entire population of your fortress; i.e., your family. It may be that all I had done was to set my fortress on wheels and roll it through the French countryside. But I was certainly occupied, physically and mentally, to the absolute limit of my capacity, and that, for the moment, appeared to be enough to satisfy this particular fantasy.

We were on the move almost constantly, driving around to get the lay of the land, then walking-ten, twelve, fifteen miles a day-in search of itineraries that met the very specific requirements of our book: unspoiled landscapes, navigable trails, good places to eat along the way. In between, we were poring over maps and old French hiking guides, while also trying to keep our children on top of their schoolwork. And every couple of weeks we moved house to another part of the enormous region, packing up and heading off into the unknown.

An unexpected bonus of this nomadic life was how little opportunity there was to sit in front of a computer screen. None of the gîtes we rented had Internet connections, so we had to wait to get our email till we found ourselves near a library or Internet café. This happened only rarely, and we were always in a hurry when it did. Without fail there would be twenty or thirty emails from Nasreen in my inbox. I didn’t answer any of them. Most I deleted without reading. Those I did read continued along the same lines as before: updates on this absurd-sounding lawsuit of hers, descriptions of her new job at a wine store, complaints about her landlord in Brooklyn. Innocuous stuff, except, again, for the sheer quantity of it, and for the habit of forwarding her correspondence with other people.

Concerning the latter, there was one possibly significant new development. She had placed an ad in the personals column of the London Review of Books (I had once told her a story about a friend of mine who did this-a jokey story, but I assume it was what gave her the idea), and among the emails she had now begun forwarding me was the intimate correspondence resulting from this ad. She had met, among other lonely hearts, an English academic who had left his wife and daughter after having an affair, and the two of them were exchanging long emails that appeared to be largely about the current political situation: the Iraq war, the Blair/Bush alliance. I read a few of them, but in themselves they didn’t seem all that remarkable (everyone, myself included, was obsessed with those subjects at that time), or not nearly as remarkable-or strange, or disturbing-as the fact that I was being forwarded them in the first place.

I tried to ignore this little undercurrent of weirdness as we made our way across Provence, but it wasn’t easy. It was becoming clear to me that Nasreen wasn’t going to conveniently fade away from my life just because I wanted her to (which by now I had to admit I did); that by some alchemy I didn’t understand and certainly didn’t want to believe I’d had any part in creating, I had become the object of an obsession.

We returned to the States in June 2007. The emails continued flooding in and I continued not answering them. The interesting writerly friendship I had thought I was embarking on had clearly been a figment of my imagination, and I felt mocked by my own naïveté. I did have a vague sense of being under an obligation to read the novel if and when Nasreen finished it, but I was beginning to doubt she ever would. Meanwhile the deadline for our own book was September, which gave us less than three months to convert the mass of notes we’d accumulated into serviceable guidebook prose, and turn the piles of torn, creased, sweat- and rain-blotched maps we’d annotated and redrawn en route into presentable topographic diagrams. At the same time there were numerous minor reentry crises to deal with-blown-over trees in the yard, damage done by a bear breaking into the house, groundhogs romping all over the vegetable garden.

All of which is to say that I was busy.

On July 19 Nasreen emailed a doubled photo of her face, cheek to cheek with itself, with the words: “I should be committed…” A week later she sent another photo: bare-shouldered, mouth open, head tilted forward with hair hanging down either side, curtaining off one eye, the other staring out with a dazed look. “i’m really scared and very blocked!”

I didn’t know what to make of these, but I felt, obscurely, that I was being warned that if I didn’t respond, some kind of craziness would ensue.

The next day a long email arrived: “the novel and where it stands,” ran the heading.

James, if you care, even, I’ve written a little status report… I’m still unsure why you dislike me so. I rather liked being your little pup.

Aggrieved tone aside, it was a sober and fairly coherent account of what she had been trying to do with her novel. If those photos with their odd captions had been oblique threats of craziness, this was perhaps the obverse, a sample of the return to sanity I could expect if I chose to respond. I didn’t like the carrot any more than the stick, but for all my strong desire-stronger than ever-not to be back in touch with her, I didn’t see how I could refuse to read the revisions she’d made to her novel, since I was so implicated, by now, in the book’s existence. She wasn’t actually asking me to read anything yet (and it wasn’t clear that she had anything new to read), but I sensed that she wanted me to offer, or at least to show myself willing to take an interest, and I was resigned to doing so.

That evening, as I was mulling over what to say to her, an email arrived, headed “a coward would not read this.” The text continued:

and you’re probably not reading it or you are because you are hoping to cull some material. well, fuck you… you’re unethical, an “irresponsible hippy.” And stop all your rationalizing about feeding the family and all that bullshit.

You had no integrity with me and you’re using a God given talent to say nothing. And I don’t want to hear about your family because your kids have a future of being thought of as Nazi Germans.

This was the first directly and unequivocally hostile email she’d sent. Later that evening came another:

when I needed help you disappeared. And wrote a fucking story in which I am obviously the psychopathic jaywalker.

I’ll come back to this “jaywalker” story later, along with the remark in the earlier email about my alleged desire to “cull” her emails for “material,” a theme that was to develop significantly over the next few weeks. But in the meantime, just to stay with the events of what turned out to be a momentous evening, twenty minutes later another email arrived that introduced what was perhaps the most disconcerting of the half-dozen-odd new themes ushered in during the tumultuous onset of this new phase. Was I disappointed, Nasreen asks, that she had

yelled and screamed a little about how fucking crazy Jews are these days? It’s fucking TRUE. Stupid and crazy. I can’t say that but hundreds of thousands of Arabs can die in silence? I don’t fucking think so, sir…