Toward the end of it, he went everywhere with his arms folded tightly in front of him, as though he were naked in the snow. He bit down hard on things then, whatever was available—the drapes, a coffee cup, the corner of his desk—and yet there came over him, too, during this time, a kind of wild and gurgling courage he had never had before. Once, he ran with teeth clenched through a crowded train station, as though he were a quarterback going downfield, lashing out at people with his elbows, bulling along with his shoulders. One man said, "What do you think you're doing?" And Stern hollered back, "I didn't see you. You're insignificant-looking." When a cop stopped him for running through a stop sign, Stern heard himself saying, "Is this your idea of a crime? With what's going on in this country—rape and everything?" It was a perspiring, released kind of feeling he had when he was at his most desperate, and it gave him courage one day to seize a girl in his building who had seemed unapproachable. Tall and blond, with horn-rimmed glasses, she had a tight-skirted, whiplike body and spoke with a shrill, slightly hysterical British accent. Stern saw her in elevators for the most part, talking to a girl friend, a book on some declining civilization always pressed against her high, intellectual bosom. The word "problem" seemed to crop up in her every sentence.
"That's one of my problems."
"The man undoubtedly has a sexual problem."
Stern thought she was maddeningly intellectual and wanted to be with her in her small, book-lined apartment, kissing her hair as she discussed declining civilizations, spending long hours working out sick, tangled sexual problems.
One day outside the building, he took her arm and said, "This is crazy, but I don't know any other way to do it. I've seen you a lot in the elevator, and I'm in pretty bad trouble now, and I wonder if you'd mind my just walking along awhile with you."
"I have to meet someone," she said.
"I'm in pretty bad shape," Stern said, holding on to her arm. "I've got a whole bunch of problems and I have to just tell them to someone."
"Yes," she said, freeing herself with a shrill little laugh. "But I don't like men's hands on me."
At the tail end of it, with courage forming along the bottom of him like vegetable shoots, it pleased him to make detailed and shocking phone calls to his mother and sister.