THE STALKER BY JEFF SHEAR When I stepped into the subway car, I exchanged glances with a woman wearing a Crayola green faux fur jacket tossed like a cape over her shoulders. As the train bumped from station to station, she adjusted her jacket to keep from slipping off her broad shoulders. The fake fur might have looked like a large green rug sample on another woman but not on her. It might have been pricey, not quite pricey enough for Bergdorf ’s window but Bloomingdales for sure. She wore it with panache. It was she that gave it style, not the other way around. How does that happen, style? Some people just have it, that “look.” Did it come from the way she carried herself, which was a kind of limp almost swooning grace, even as we jounced to a stop at 34th Street? Or was it that languor in her gaze, as her eyes roamed around the noisy train and then stopped on mine? Or maybe it was her gall that did it, the way she turned her back when she saw me staring at her as we pulled into the 42nd Street station, and I lost my balance. Or maybe it wasn’t style I was looking at. Maybe it was that glance we first shared. Maybe I was intrigued by the feeling that brought over me? For a moment, the wet wool smell of the train car distracted me. She was in her late twenties. Her hair was short and well-cut rising to a graceful pompadour that swooned and then dissolved behind her right ear. Big jewelry is in; I read that in Vogue. She wore a lanyard necklace of pewter chips that fell nearly to her waist where it was anchored by a buckle-sized emerald pendant. She touched it, and that’s when I saw her blood-red nails. I took notice of her left hand. Slim fingers. No wedding ring. She glanced at me. And when she turned away, she leaned against the car’s handrail, a wraith wrapped in a green fur carpet. Really, I don’t follow people around, I wouldn’t stalk anyone, but I followed her off the Number One train at 79thStreet. She had glanced back at me as she stepped off the car. Was it an invitation, I saw or was she ensuring herself I wasn’t a stalker? I was careful to be the last passenger off the train car because I didn’t want to frighten her. I kept my distance as I followed. In the early spring twilight, she walked briskly toward Amsterdam Avenue and
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