An actress moves into my apartment building. I don’t think it’s permanent—her name is never added to the slot next to the buzzer—but it’s an extended stay. She’s famous enough that I recognized her face as someone I had seen on a screen once, but not famous enough that I could remember her name or the title of the film. However, I did remember the screen: Lincoln Square. I saw the movie my freshman year of high school with my entire family, a few months before my father died of a heroin overdose. He was asleep for most of the film. He snored and my mother tapped, then shoved, then hit him until he woke up. So it’s no reflection on the quality of the actress’s talent that I can’t remember her performance. My father’s was better, that’s all.
She is light-dark-skinned, the actress, I think of Indian descent, but also French. She is eight years older than I am and looks at least a few years younger than I do. (Who can judge these things, really, but I choose to, so I shall, I will, I do.) Her eyes are honey-colored and almond-shaped, flecked with sunshine. Her hair is black and long and wavy, tangled, casual curls. She is casual in the summer, in long, flowy skirts and oversized straw hats, and in the fall she wears tiny moto jackets and tight black jeans and in the winter she wears long tailored wool coats from European designers. Always she is wearing great shoes.
The actress lives in an apartment on the top floor, one of the newly renovated ones, with a balcony and a view of the river and the city beyond. The permanent resident there is her lover, a German man with blond hair and thick sideburns and handsome lines etched into his face, a thousand stories to tell, all living in his skin. They hold hands in public, in the elevator, on the sidewalk, at the café second closest to our house, but never on the subway platform, because that’s when they check their phones.
I’m basically obsessed with her. I recognize that “obsessed” is a word that’s overused, but what would you call this:
Every day I look in the mailroom to see if she’s gotten any packages and where they’re from. From that I’ve noticed the following:
She’s a shopper. She shops a lot. I would have pictured her twirling around in front of a mirror in a fancy boutique owned by a friend, giggling and drinking champagne, but she’s just like the rest of us: not wanting to deal.
Sometimes there are packages from her film agency. At some point during her stay I believe she switched agencies.
Three packages hand-decorated by a child have arrived from Los Angeles. All of them are beach scenes, palm trees, the ocean, all the shades of blue available used to color in the waves. She was addressed as “Mrs.” on those packages.
Also I have a Google alert on her name and I check her IMDb page frequently. And I follow her on Twitter, where she has only several thousand fans, and her tweets suggest she is not in charge of her account, some marketing firm is instead, which just tweets links to the latest news about her, which I already know. Still, I don’t unfollow, because what if I miss something?
And I have trailed her on the street a few times. It was always by chance, at least initially: we both happened to exit the building at the same time and then ended up walking in the same direction, but then I kept going longer than I needed to, missing a turnoff to the subway or the bridge or the ferry, just to see where she’d land. Once she went to the juice place. There were a few trips to the café. One time I think she was just on a power walk, she kept going and going. That was the time I was thirty minutes late to work.
I mean this is either obsession in a basic way or maybe just a high level of interest.
But what about this:
I casually mention to my coworker Nina, who is twenty-six years old, that the actress has moved into my building, and she says, “Isn’t she old?” and I get mad at Nina, even though I never tell her, and I don’t talk to her for two days, until she finally notices I’m barely answering her questions and she asks me if I’m mad at her and I say, “No, why would you think that?” And then she brings me back a cookie at lunch and I silently forgive her.
Is that some kind of love or something?
Or this:
I have figured out where she gets her fabulous shoes from studying her packages and I buy a pair that are the same as a pair she has, but obviously I buy them in a different color, hers are brown and mine are black, and they are very expensive and I swallow when I click to purchase but I am sure it will be worth it, and then I wear them every day for a couple of weeks, sometimes just when I’m exiting and entering the building, and then I switch them when I get to work so I’m not wearing the same thing every day, and I do this in hopes that someday she will be wearing them too, and that also we’ll be on the elevator at the same moment—all of this, clearly, pushing the boundaries of timing. But in fact it works, within three weeks of my buying the shoes, on a Friday, there she is, there I am, with our patent leather loafers, me riding up to the fifth floor, her riding up to the eleventh, and I point and say, “Look,” and she looks, and I say, “Great minds think alike,” and she nods, and nods some more, and then she says, “I almost got the black but I feel I have too much black already.” She tilts her head, imagining her closet, I suppose. “Yes, too much black.” And then it’s my floor and I get off because I can’t follow her all the way home. That would be too much. But I felt like more of a conversation was warranted than what we had. I mean: we had the same shoes.
Is it some kind of crush?
Or this: