In 1993, Michael Stone, a reporter for New York magazine known for his coverage of the Preppy Killer case and the Central Park Jogger, wrote a story about an Upper East Side girls’ tennis coach called “Break Point: A Tennis Coach’s Fatal Obsession.” Of the hundreds of articles published on Gary Wilensky that year, Stone’s profile stands out as the most comprehensive and thoroughly reported. It is also the only official record of my personal reflections on Gary at age fourteen. My mother had heard, through a chain of private school parents, that Stone was looking to speak with Gary’s students for the story.
We talked on the phone, off the record, which my mother decided was preferable to having my name in print.
“Even the ride to the court would be a laugh, with games and music in the car.”
“Some of his young students sensed his unhappiness, and he told one that he’d watched all these girls grow up in front of him, passing him by, and that he wanted his own child.”
“He seemed preoccupied and snapped without provocation.”
These are the traces of what I told him the night he interviewed me. My mother, who had listened to our conversation, penciled brackets around the lines in the article to remember what I had said. The faint gray lines are proof that I was part of this story, and that I wasn’t.
Now Michael Stone is an author. One of his books was cowritten with the artist Eric Fischl. My mother kept a book of Fischl’s artwork on our coffee table. I used to pull it on my lap and flip to the picture of a naked woman lying in bed, with one foot resting on her thigh, exposing the triangle of darkness at her center. In the painting, the light through the blinds zebra-streaks her body as she gazes at a boy, whose hand has slipped into the fold of her purse. Bad Boy: My Life On and Off the Canvas, it’s called.
I call up Michael Stone to ask him questions about Gary Wilensky, two decades after he called me to do the same.
“As I recall, my editor called me as soon as the news had occurred and wanted it for the next week,” he says. “I played [tennis] but not professionally, but I knew a lot of people in the New York tennis scene, so it wasn’t hard for me to network.”
Gary, he learned, was a large figure on the scene. “I’d never heard of him, but a lot of friends and people I played with, pros, clubs I played at, certainly knew of him,” Stone says. “His reputation, as I recall, was pretty good. No one suspected he was leading this dark life. He kept it pretty well hidden.”
What was the larger context of this story? Why did it matter? I ask, but not like that. More like a stumbling, twisted request for direction. A help-me-figure-out-why-this-still-matters-to-me statement that ends with a verbal uptick suggestive of a question mark.
He notes the intense competition among New York private school students at the time, and how that intensity translated to their social lives, where access and privilege were more instantly rewarded and less likely supervised. The phenomenon of teenage girls becoming tennis stars added another layer of pressure and exposure.
“How you tie that all together I don’t know.”
Before we hang up, Stone offers a suggestion.
“I don’t know how much of this is a memoir and how much is crime reporting,” he says. “But if it’s even partly the latter, you’ve got to talk to her.”
Her. The Daughter. The victim of Gary’s attack.
The first time I reached out to the Daughter, early on in my investigation, I sent a long email that said very little. She wasn’t sure what I wanted. Neither was I. I just wanted to talk, I suppose. I can’t bring myself to pull up that email or the second one, which was sent a couple years later—more succinct but still expectant, filled with the ignorant sentiment of someone who believes her experience in any way compares to the experience of a trauma survivor. Maybe the emails weren’t that bad, but my lack of consideration before I sent them was. Of course, she would want to talk about what happened, I thought, because I wanted to talk about what happened.
It wasn’t until she politely turned down my request to speak to her that I realized the extent of my privilege.
What’s most insufferable about privilege—whether white, wealthy, physically able, or free from the trauma of abuse—is the denial of its existence. The assumption that we are all the same. That some small emotional bruise you once had is comparable to the jagged head wound another endured, the memory of its stages—watery, crusted and matted, clean and indented but never entirely gone.
While each individual’s experience is unique, post-traumatic stress disorder is common among victims of stalking, with some citing the impulse to go into hiding and the enduring fear that their predator will resurface. Stalking victims also frequently report depression, nightmares, anxiety, and flashbacks. And most of those victims—four out of five, according to statistics—are women.
The majority of stalkers are male, and many are triggered to act on their impulses when faced with real or perceived rejection by a female.
There is a quotation from Gavin de Becker, author of The Gift of Fear: And Other Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence, that surfaces repeatedly in victim-related Internet communities. “Stalking is how some men raise the stakes when women don’t play along. It is a crime of power, control, and intimidation very similar to date rape.”
Today such Internet communities are providing outlets for survivors to share their stories. There are support groups, treatment methods, and mounting psychological research on the impact of stalking on victims. But in 1993, little was known about stalking behavior in general. It wasn’t until 1998 that The Psychology of Stalking, the first summary of scientific research on the topic, was published, and even within those pages, victim accounts were scant.
What is as true now as it was back then is that we look to survivors of trauma for personal insight into ourselves. We read their books, watch their network interviews, and try to isolate what it takes to overcome the unthinkable. To survive—not simply within a traumatic circumstance, but all circumstances. We turn them into superheroes in order to believe that we, too, can fight death, when in fact those who’ve survived trauma may be more in touch with their own mortality. But this is all a generalization. No matter how many studies I cite, I can’t know what the Daughter endured, and it isn’t my right to know.
She wants to be left alone, a classmate told a newspaper when she returned to school in late April of 1993, captured flash-eyed in a baseball cap. But they wouldn’t leave her alone, not for weeks until new stories came along. And perhaps she was finally given the space she deserved, until I emerged years later, wanting something, too many things. Insight, approval, transference of experience, a survival story that would teach me a profound lesson in overcoming my own hurdles. But survival is earned, not passed down from hand to hand like so many other things.
“Turns out, I’m not a very good reporter,” I tell Michael, my old college boyfriend the poet, who was with me when I remembered Gary Wilensky.
Now Michael and I are middle-aged. We sit across from each other in the backyard of a coffee shop. He is a college professor with a wife and child. There are ten blocks of Brooklyn between our two homes. His downstairs neighbors complain about all the footsteps his family makes.
I remember one night in my own apartment, in bed with a different boyfriend, while two friends from out of town slept in the living room. There was a feeling of fullness, like the apartment would burst with the affection I felt for all the people inside it. All of them together because of me. This must be what it’s like to have your own family, I thought. I didn’t think about Gary. How he wanted a family of his own, too, and believed he could have it. As if it were something you could strangle into submission. Maybe it was. Not family, but the decision to have one. An idea floating past you that you either choose to grab or let move away, believing at some point, when you’re ready, it will circle back again. When it doesn’t, what happens to you then?
“Is that what you’re doing? Reporting?” Michael asks, his wide blue eyes still the same eyes I remember, but his face, once gaunt, has filled in around them. He has become substantial, like a grown-up, I think, and wonder if he thinks the same of me or if men think about this differently. If they think, she’s gained weight.
“I don’t know. I’m looking for answers. I thought maybe the Daughter would want to speak with me, but I understand why she doesn’t. It was stupid for me to assume.”
“You should try her again,” he says, but I won’t.
“I’m not even certain what I’d ask. What is it I’m looking for?”
I met Michael when he was a senior in college and I was a freshman, at a Halloween party where he dressed like the Mad Hatter, but with his neck-length dyed-blond hair and his skeletal paleness, he just looked like Beck, who crooned “Debra” through someone’s bedroom speakers. The rest of our college encounters were equally worthy of eye rolls. We took a film class together and went to the library to watch Persona. He lay on institutional carpeting in the dark AV room, and I rested my head on his chest, listening to his insides shoot air bubbles, pump fluids, rise and fall. The proximity of love, of finding out what love would be, was so perfectly placed in that moment. I could still make out the shape of it without feeling the flattening weight of a thing with dimensions. Just the outline, suddenly visible enough to believe it was coming. A moment to have and never have again.
Now Michael speaks of his marriage and how it came to be. They lived in different states and had limited job mobility. But he decided to make it work early on, without even mapping out a plan, because he loved her, and soon he discovered she loved him back. “You just have to decide what you want and you can have it,” he says.
He was always generous, always a collaborator, always driving toward the shared story, not turning around to find the one he had missed.
“You’re so good at relationships. I think I’m bad at them,” I say, because I assume this is what people think when a woman is single and childless in her mid- to late thirties. But also because I think it’s true.
“No,” he says, “you’re just good at being alone.”
I wonder if this is something you can be good at. Maybe it’s like being good at discount shopping or finding a parking spot, the kind of thing you tell yourself you’re good at so you’ll find the reward in commonplace things. Or maybe it’s like being good at finding a vein, or sleeping in, or holding your liquor, or not letting other people’s feelings affect your decisions—things that are only good in the moment and ultimately harmful.
“Maybe it’s not my right to tell her story. I wasn’t Gary’s victim.”
“But you’re not telling her story,” he says. “You’re telling your own.”
“And Gary’s,” I remind him.
“Piper,” he says, his voice rattling with some throat-trapped fluid, “this is your story. Don’t forget that.”