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By Root 409 0

such a character that he couldn’t treat her. I asked him if he thought she was serious about kidnapping me or was potentially dangerous in other ways. He said he couldn’t be sure, but that in her obsessive state of mind anything was possible, so I should be careful. I decided never to see her again, but was fascinated by her, though no longer in a sexual way, because she was wounded and likable and I felt compassion for her. Still, I realized I had to break the tie between us and I tried hard. For months she called, saying she wanted to see me, and I refused, trying to be evasive and kind at the same time. Then she began sending food and expensive presents to my apartment and imploring me to go to bed with her again. She would come to the apartment and pound on the door and I wouldn’t answer.

Six months later I decided to employ a new tactic. “Listen,” I told her gruffly when Maria called the next time, “I don’t want you ever to call me ever again. You’re making a mess out of your own life and you’re boring the hell out of me. I don’t want you in my life. I’ll never want you. I never want to see your face again.”

I felt bad saying this. She cried, screamed and pleaded with me: “Don’t say that, please don’t say that …”

She was calling from a telephone booth at a drugstore not far from my apartment. This I learned because one of my friends, who knew the story and had seen her before, happened to be in the store, heard her screaming at me and saw her smash her fists into the glass of the booth, breaking it and cutting her wrists until blood was dripping all over her. Then she went out into the fifteen-degree night and vanished. When he called to tell me what he’d seen, I had already called her home and spoken to her brother, who said her family knew all about her fixation on me but hadn’t been able to help her. He said Maria had seven locks on her bedroom door, had been spending more and more time in her room staring at my pictures without eating, and that other members of the family were intimidated by her.

Four hours later I called the house again, and her brother told me Maria had come home.

“How is she?” I asked.

He said she had arrived with her clothes covered with blood, and that she had smashed everything in the living room—pictures, the television set, chairs, glassware; then she had gone to her room, taken down all her Streetcar posters and set fire to them.

“What’s she doing now?” I asked.

“She’s down on the street staring at the ashes of the billboard.”

“Is she still bleeding?”

“Yeah.”

I was afraid she might have cut the arteries in her wrist, but he said he had bandaged her wounds and that she would be all right.

“Okay,” I said, “treat her as best as you can and let me know what happens.”

I didn’t see or hear from Maria for several months until I was walking down the street one day on my way home with a woman who had been staying with me. Maria came up to us and I realized she had been waiting for me outside my apartment. This was long before celebrities entertained thoughts that they might be shot by a stalker—it wasn’t in fashion yet—so I wasn’t worried when I saw her. She matched our stride step by step, then turned to me and said, “That bitch can’t take care of you. I’m the only person who knows how to …”

I said, “Maria, you’ll have to go away. Don’t come around here anymore. I mean it.”

Her step slowed then and she faded behind us as we walked into the apartment building. That was the last I saw of Maria, though she sent me a card wishing me well after I moved to Los Angeles.

When I was twenty-six, I had a casual affair with Lisa, a designer, who was half Filipino and half Swedish and lived around the corner from my apartment above Carnegie Hall. After I moved to California, she came by my old apartment occasionally and asked the elevator operator—a man from Barbados named Susho—if he ever saw me.

Susho, who had designs on Lisa, said, “Yes, but very infrequently. You know, it’s very sad about Mr. Brando.”

“What do you mean?”

Susho told her that I had cancer and now came to New York only