Shutterbabe

by Deborah Copaken Kogan

  To celebrate, we took advantage of the Pearl Continental’s private sauna for our one last taste of civilization and cleanliness. We sat there together, quiet and calm, watching the steam envelop each other’s bodies. I breathed in the heavy damp air, trying to purify my lungs from the previous night’s debauchery, all the while staring at Pascal’s lean, muscular torso, simultaneously cursing and savoring its perfection, its power.

  Tomorrow I will see a war, I thought. I wonder what that means?

  After the sauna, Pascal and I went back to our room, made love and fell asleep. Just before dinner, he decided to take a shower, and that’s when everything went downhill. While he was off scrubbing himself, the phone rang. I knew I wasn’t supposed to answer it, but I was worried that it might have been Haq’s people trying to reach us with further instructions for our trip inside. The phone rang again. I didn’t know what to do. I yelled to Pascal, but he couldn’t hear me, and then the phone rang a third time and I decided I had to pick it up. “Hello?” I said into the receiver.

  “Uh, bonjour.” The voice was female, melodious. “Qui êtes-vous?”—“Who are you?”—she asked. It was the voice that I remembered so distinctly from the dinner party at Pascal’s apartment in Paris.

  “Oh, I’m, uh, a friend of Pascal’s. Uh, a journalist. We were just going over some notes together, you know, contact names and such. . . .” I stumbled over my words, uncomfortable with lying. I’m a bad liar.

  Pascal emerged from the shower, one towel slung around his waist, another with which he massaged the water out of his wet, black hair. He saw me on the phone. His face visibly reddened.

  “Who’s that?” he barked. “Who’s on the phone?”

  My hands started to shake. I struggled to breathe. “Uh, it’s Élodie.” Then, with the receiver pressed into my palm lest she should hear, I whispered to Pascal, “I told her we were just going over some notes. That I’m just a journalist friend—”

  He yanked the phone from me, turned on his ever-so-charming demeanor and continued the lie where I left off. “Salut, ma biche! No, she’s just a colleague. Yes, yes, you have met her. Right, at our dinner party. Yes, Chip’s girlfriend. The American girl. Sure, I’ll say hi. I miss you, too, my darling.” He told her he’d be going inside the next day, that she shouldn’t expect a phone call from him for another few weeks, maybe even a month or so. Though his voice was calm, even fluffy while speaking to Élodie, as I stood there by the side of the bed his eyes stabbed me with their daggers. “Right, then. Yes, I promise to call as soon as I’m out. Yes, I’ll be careful. Okay, I love you, too. Bye.”

  Pascal hung up the phone. Then he slammed the receiver down onto the cradle over and over and over. Slam! “What the fuck were you thinking!” Slam! “Didn’t I tell you never, ever, ever to pick up the phone!” Slam! Slam! “Putain! What the fuck were you thinking!” Slam! Slam! Slam! Suddenly, instead of slamming the receiver into the phone, he was now bashing it into my head. Slam! Slam! Slam! Slam! “Idiot! Qu’est-ce que tu pensais?” I began to cry, and not just from the physical pain. Pascal threw the phone down on the floor, then, rethinking the matter, picked it up and hurled it at my stomach, the force hurling me onto the bed. I couldn’t breathe. As I lay there, he yanked my jeans off, screaming like a lunatic, and then I was underneath him, naked from the waist down, hyperventilating.

  Not this again, I thought. Please, God, not this again.

  “You don’t want to do that,” I said, and maybe the words snapped him out of his tempest, or maybe he thought too much of himself to follow through, or whatever it was, I’ll never know; Hurricane Pascal stopped blowing, and I was left lying on the bed, my body badly battered but inviolate.

  There’d been a time I was not so lucky.

  AIDAN INTRODUCED HIMSELF to me on the eve of my graduation from Harvard. We were at a party, both slightly drunk, flirting a bit. He seemed perfectly nice, if pompous in that way Harvard boys can get, but I was so exhausted by the pregraduation festivities, I wasn’t really in the mood to take it any further. Nevertheless, he had a car, and I was far from my room and on crutches. Earlier that day I had taken mushrooms with a few of my roommates and had convinced myself I could fly—if only I could build up enough speed and throw my arms out just so—in the middle of the Boston Common. Which, of course, I couldn’t.

  Aidan offered to drive me and my sprained ankle home. My apartment was on his way, he said, and besides, he’d heard about my photography thesis and really wanted to see it.

  The thesis was called “Shooting Back,” and it was a series of photos of men who had accosted me in various red-light districts up and down the Eastern seaboard. New York’s Forty-second Street. Boston’s Combat Zone. South Philly. The whole project evolved as a sort of radical form of self-therapy after I’d fallen victim to a number of armed robberies (two) and assaults (four). It was the equivalent of an acrophobe tackling Mount Everest, or an agoraphobe facing down the mall at Christmas: I was a bad-guy-o-phobe, hanging out in the belly of the beast.

  I’d troll the seedy streets outside the strip clubs and the porno shops and wait for the inevitable comment, which ran the gamut from “Hey, baby, wanna get it on?” to “Suck my dick, bitch.” To every proposition I would quickly and confidently reply, “No, thank you, but I would like to shoot your photo.” This retort and the presence of my camera changed the entire dynamic of the encounter. My clunky old Nikkormat became my weapon, turning hunter into prey, and as I held my wide-angle 28-millimeter lens mere inches from these men’s faces, distorting their images, I felt the universe tipping for a moment in my favor.

  BOSTON, 1987

  NEW YORK, 1987

  NEW YORK, 1987

  Aidan parked his car and helped me down the stairs to my basement apartment. Then he followed me into my bedroom, where I had gone to fetch the thesis. The photos were enclosed within a heavy, black sixteen-by-twenty-inch cloth-covered cardboard box, which, because of my crutches, was too unwieldy for me to carry into the living room. I handed the box to Aidan. “Let’s take this into the other room,” I said, but he ignored me. Instead, he laid the prints down on my bed, flipping through each of the thirty photos one by one, emitting a “Wow” or a “Cool” at regular intervals while I made a point of yawning loudly.

  When he finally reached the last photo in the series—a flasher, happily exposing his penis to my camera—Aidan turned to me and said, “I bet you liked it when that guy did that.” I wasn’t sure I had heard him correctly, but when I said “What?” and he repeated it, this time louder and more suggestively, with a knowing smirk and jumping eyebrows, I didn’t even have time to ask him if he was joking or out of his mind before he’d thrown me onto the bed.

  He started kissing me. I kissed him back, more out of drunken inertia and resignation than anything else. He tasted like gin. I was desperate for sleep. The kisses grew more aggressive, sloppy, like being bit instead of kissed, and when I felt the hardness of his groin rubbing forcefully, almost angrily against my thigh, I pulled away, said I was tired, thanked him for the ride home, suggested he leave. That’s when everything got weird. Frustrated by my change of heart and by a couple of unyielding buttons, he ripped open my blouse. Then he held my arms up behind me, stared at my exposed chest. “Please,” I said, “I don’t want to do this. Let’s not do this. I’m really tired.” He laughed. My sprained ankle was throbbing, and I distinctly remember the crutches standing there, propped up against the far corner of the room, next to my camera, taunting me with their inaccessibility. Then there was this irrational thought: My roommate’s mother is sound asleep in the next room, and if I yell, I might wake her. I thought of kicking him in the balls, but couldn’t figure out how to do it with the bum ankle and my good leg pinned underneath him.

  BOSTON, 1987

  My body went numb at the moment of penetration, froze. As Aidan pounded away I tried pretending that my torso was s
omebody else’s torso altogether, tried to step outside myself and watch with detached disinterest from above. So this is it, I thought. This is the ugly realm beyond the borders of consensus, what all the politics, the no-means-no’s, the campus date-rape crisis centers are all about. It was the day before graduation, and I had to go put myself in the embarrassing position of becoming just another statistical cliché.

  Rape. Even the word sounded aggressive, like an onomatopoeia. Rape, rape, rape, rape, rape, rape, rape. I held on to my tears, let them build up behind my eyes until I felt they would explode. I did not want to give Aidan the satisfaction of seeing a single one.

  I tried visualizing how nice the water would feel when I could finally get to a shower. I tried visualizing anything other than what was happening between my legs. Ice cream, trees, a beach. But my mind kept crashing back into my body.

  I started to blame myself. It’s your fault, I thought. You should never have drunk. You should never have flirted. You should never have accepted the ride, showed him your photographs, taken the goddamned pictures in the first place. You should never have kissed him back, you idiot. You should never have been born a girl. Fuck you, Aidan, this is not fair.

  “Please,” I said, once again. “Please stop.”

  Aidan kept at it, pounding harder and faster. Rape rape rape rape rape rape rape . . . rape . . . a final whimper . . . rape.

  It was over. Aidan was passed out cold on the bed, lying in a small puddle of his own semen.

  I pictured my parents, sleeping in their hotel room, waiting eagerly for the first notes of “Pomp and Circumstance” to usher their eldest child into Harvard Yard, where her diploma and various academic prizes awaited her. How could I tell them about what had just happened to me?

  For the first time in my life, I felt a distinct role reversal, as if I now had to shield my mother and father from an ugliness I could barely pronounce. I tried to picture myself, dressed in my cap and gown with my diploma tucked under my arm, saying the words to them: Mom, Dad, I was raped. No, I thought. I’ll tell them later, after graduation. In a couple of weeks. Maybe in a couple of years. Or maybe never.

  My body had just been entered against its will. It didn’t seem fair that the man responsible for such an intrusion should be able to wreak any more havoc in my life. Like ruining my graduation day. Like permanently desecrating the psyches of the two people I loved most, the two people who’d always taught me to appreciate the beauty of sex, the two people who had, through the same penetrative act turned on its tender, loving, procreative head, made me.

  “Get up!” I shouted into Aidan’s ear. “Get up right now, you asshole!” Aidan lay there in a stupor with his arm around me, unmoving. After freeing myself, I took a long shower and spent the rest of the night on the floor of my bedroom, staring out the window, sitting in a shaft of moonlight, hugging my knees and rocking back and forth like an autistic child. Watching the sun rise. Watching the sky turn gray. Weeping as the raindrops collected on the windowpane.

  When Aidan finally woke up, he stumbled out of bed, said, “Fuck, it’s raining,” dressed, and wrote his name and phone number on a yellow Post-it note, which he stuck to the tiny gray screen of my Macintosh. “Give me a call sometime,” he said with a wink, sauntering out as if nothing unusual had happened. As if he’d not just put another tiny, irreparable crack in the lens through which I saw life.

  “GET OUT,” PASCAL SAID, his voice now controlled and calm. He adjusted the towel around his waist. “Get out of here right now.” He told me he would hold me personally responsible if Élodie left him.

  I was thinking, It takes two to tango, asshole, but I didn’t even dignify his threat with a reply. Instead, I put my jeans back on and packed my things silently and in great haste, throwing socks and underwear and pants and toothpaste and batteries and shoes and T-shirts and sweaters and film all together in the backpack in a jumbled mess. My Tampax box wouldn’t fit into the main compartment, so I shoved it in the side pocket, next to the bottle of rubbing alcohol. Pascal stood with his arms crossed and his back against the wall of our hotel room, staring at me and breathing through flared nostrils. “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “I’ll stay at Robert’s tonight,” I said. What a relief it was to finally have an out.

  “Yeah, go fuck him for a change,” said Pascal. “He looks like he needs it.”

  I stopped packing and stared back at him, incredulous. “Fuck you,” I said.

  As I walked out of the room, I turned to Pascal and told him that just because he’d beaten the crap out of me with a telephone receiver, just because I was furious at him, just because he was a cheater and a liar and an arrogant son of a bitch with a cold heart and a drawer full of ironed bandannas did not mean I would forgo my one and only chance to cover the war. We’d spent ten long days arranging our trip with the most reputable group of mujahideen, I said, and I refused to start over from scratch. Besides, I needed him to get inside, and he knew it. “It’s purely logistical,” I said. “Business.”

  “Right. Business,” he said. “Be here at nine A.M. tomorrow morning. And don’t be late.” Before I could shut the door, however, Pascal, looking suddenly remorseful, placed his hands on my cheeks and bent over to kiss the top of my head, in the exact spot he’d just bruised with the telephone receiver.

  “Ouch,” I said, pulling away. “It hurts.” I was trying not to cry.

  “Oh, Deborah,” he said, now hugging me as if nothing had happened, wiping the tear that had fallen down my cheek despite my valiant efforts to keep it in. “I’m sorry the way things turned out. It’ll be good for us to spend a night apart.”

  He waited for a response, but I said nothing.

  “Tu sais que je t’aime”—“You do know I love you,” he said. “In my own way.”

  Love? I thought. Jesus fucking Christ. That’s the problem with the French. Even their language is deceptive. Je t’aime can mean either “I like you” or “I love you.” That’s a very wide chasm for one little phrase to straddle. “Sure,” I said, sticking with English, and not hugging him back.

  “Nine A.M.,” he said, as he watched me walk down the hallway. “Don’t be late.”

  I called over my shoulder. “I won’t.”

  To save money, I hitched a ride on a tonga to Robert’s house instead of taking a taxi, but the clip-clop vibration of the horse and cart, normally so soothing to me, only made my head hurt more. By the time I arrived, covered in a light coating of dust whipped up by the horse’s hooves, the two largest bumps on my head were throbbing.

  “You okay?” Robert said as he let me inside, with a look of sympathy implying he assumed otherwise. I’d called him from the lobby of the hotel to tell him I was coming, explaining that Pascal and I had had a tiff. He was kind enough not to ask me to elaborate.

  I looked around the living room, at the warm-toned rugs and couches, at the comfortably worn chairs, at the glowing electric heater in the corner. “I am now,” I said. I eyed the guitar propped up in the corner. “Please, Robert, play me something beautiful.”

  “Something beautiful, huh?” he said. He grabbed the guitar, started tuning it. “Let me see what I can do.”

  Robert has always been a genius with a guitar, and that evening he strummed a bit of Dylan, some Grateful Dead, and the dulcet notes and chords filled my head, calmed me. Beauty may not be truth, I thought, but it’s certainly a good salve. Especially with Robert around to administer it.

  Growing up in a house full of girls, I’d always dreamed of having an older brother like Robert. Someone to protect me, to adore me, to teach me the ropes of that alien species with their smelly socks and strange protrusions. My friend Sandy had two older brothers at home when we were growing up, and I used to go over to her house just to watch them, to study their habits like an anthropologist. I made mental notes. They collected beer cans and rea
d Mad magazines. They enjoyed torturing us with choke holds and noogies. They threw tennis balls at our butts and chased us willy-nilly through the neighborhood. They played The Who at ear-splitting decibels—“Pinball Wizard,” “Tommy Can You Hear Me”—and were always in a constant state of pinball motion themselves, tripping over furniture, their dirty socks half on, half off, their knees always scabbed and always bouncing, even while seated. They were fascinating yet terrifying; I could not figure them out. But I always knew that if any of the neighborhood bullies dared to drop frogs down our shorts or run us over with their bikes, if they called us names or made fun of our budding breasts, Sandy’s brothers would come running to our defense. I felt safe at her house, protected.

  That night, as Robert showed me how to play the chords for “The House of the Rising Sun” on the guitar, as he carefully taught me when to strum and when to pick the strings one by one, he gave me a small taste of how my long-lost brother might have acted, had I come to him with two bruises on my head and a heart filled with anger and confusion. “Oh, mother, tell your children,” we sang, loudly, as if our very lives depended upon it, “not to doooooooo what I have done . . .”

  That night, to keep things clear between us, I slept in my sleeping bag on Robert’s floor. “You can stay here for as long as you like,” he said. “Sparkle and Bill are leaving tomorrow, so you can have their room.”

  I told him that wouldn’t be necessary. “I’m going inside tomorrow,” I said. “But thanks anyway.”

  The next morning, I called Pascal at the hotel at 7 A.M. to make sure everything was still on. The clerk at the front desk looked up his extension. “Room 801? Yes, he checked out over an hour ago. Sorry.” I asked her if she was sure. She asked me if he had black hair, a green army parka, a red bandanna and nice teeth. I said yes. She said she was sure.