Fresh Complaint
Page 24
“The texts prove there was flirting,” the prosecutor said. “They prove intention. So does the video of him buying the condoms. But we don’t have any proof of what happened in the room.”
Prakrti looked down at her hands. A fleck of green ice cream had dried on the outside of her thumb. She scraped it off.
When the man had got on top of her, she’d been flummoxed by a wave of tenderness and protectiveness toward her own body. The man’s breath smelled sharp and sweetish from alcohol. He was heavier than she expected. When Prakrti had entered the hotel room and seen the man standing in his socks, he’d looked old and hollow-cheeked. Now she had her eyes closed. She was worried it was going to hurt. She didn’t care about losing her virginity but she wanted to give away as little of herself as possible. Only what would serve the legal distinction but nothing else, no outward approval and certainly no affection.
He was between her legs now, pressing. She felt a pinch.
And she pushed him away. Sat up.
Was the pinching she had felt not penetration? She would know if that had happened, wouldn’t she?
“Obviously, if someone’s buying condoms, he’s doing it for a reason,” she told the town prosecutor. “How can I prove that there was penetration?”
“It’s harder because of the passage of time. But not impossible. How long did you have sex?”
“I don’t know. A minute?”
“You had sex for one minute.”
“Maybe less.”
“Did he climax? I’m sorry. I have to ask. The defense will ask and we have to be prepared.”
“I don’t know. I’ve never been—this was my first time.”
“And you’re sure it was his penis? Not his finger?”
Prakrti thought back. “His hands were on my head. He was holding my head. Both hands.”
“What would really help me is if we had a fresh-complaint witness,” the prosecutor said. “Somebody you told right after it happened, who could corroborate your story. Is there anybody you told?”
Prakrti hadn’t told anyone. She didn’t want anyone to know.
“This asshole says there was no sex. So it would help your case, a lot, if you had told somebody closer to the time of the assault. Go home. Think about it. Try to remember if there was anybody you might have talked to. Even texted or e-mailed. I’ll be in touch.”
* * *
Matthew’s flight over the ocean keeps pace with the sun. His plane arrives in New York at roughly the same time of day, give or take an hour or two, as it departed London. Emerging from the terminal, he’s assaulted by the sunlight. He feels that the November day should be winding down, softening his reentry, but instead the sun is at its zenith. The loading zone is crowded with buses and taxis.
He gives the driver the address of his hotel. There is no possibility of his returning home. Tracy has agreed to bring the children to see him later this afternoon. When Matthew invited her to stay for dinner, hoping to reunite them as a family and to see where this might lead, Tracy was noncommittal. But she didn’t rule it out.
Just being back, with the Manhattan skyline in view, fills Matthew with a sense of optimism. For months he’s been powerless, safe from arrest but in limbo, like an Assange or a Polanski. Now he can act.
The news that Matthew was wanted for questioning arrived in August, while he was giving a series of lectures in Europe. The Dover police had got a copy of his passport from the hotel where he stayed, which he’d shown upon checking in. From that they tracked him to his mother’s address. After finishing his lectures, he’d come to Dorset to visit Ruth and Jim, and the letter was waiting for him.
In the six months between his visit to the college and the arrival of the letter, Matthew had nearly forgotten about the girl. He’d regaled a few of his male friends with the story, describing the girl’s bizarre come-on and her eventual change of heart. “What did you expect, you idiot?” one friend said. But he also asked, enviously, “Nineteen? What is that even like?”
In truth, Matthew can’t remember. Thinking back to that night, the thing he remembers most clearly is the way the girl’s stomach quivered when he heaved himself on top of her. It had felt as if a small animal, a gerbil or a hamster, were being crushed between them, and trying to wriggle free. A fearful or excited quivering, unique to her. All the rest has faded.
After Matthew received the letter from the police, another friend, a lawyer, advised him to hire “local counsel,” meaning a lawyer from Dover, or Kent County, who would know the prosecutor and the judge there. “Try to get a woman, too, if you can,” the friend said. “That could help if you end up going before a jury.”
Matthew had hired a woman named Simone Del Rio. During their first phone call, after he’d given his version of events, she said, “This happened last January?”
“Yes.”
“Why do you think she waited so long?”
“I have no idea. I told you. She’s bonkers.”
“The delay’s good. That helps us. Let me talk to the prosecutor and see what I can find out.”
The next day, she got back to him. “This will come as a surprise, but the alleged victim here, at the time of the encounter, was only sixteen.”
“She couldn’t be. She was a freshman at college. She said she was nineteen.”
“I’m sure she did. Apparently she was lying about that, too. She’s in high school. Turned seventeen last May.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Matthew said, when he’d absorbed this news. “We didn’t have sex.”
“Look,” Del Rio said. “They haven’t even served you with a complaint. I told the prosecutor they have no right to ask you to appear for questioning when they haven’t done that. I also argued that no grand jury would indict for this conduct in this situation. Frankly, if you never come back to the U.S., you won’t have a problem.”
“I can’t. My wife’s American. My children live there. I do too. At least, I did.”
The rest of what Del Rio told him wasn’t so reassuring. The girl had deleted their texts from her phone, just as Matthew had. But the police had obtained a warrant to recover the texts from the phone company. “These things don’t go away,” Del Rio said. “They’re still on the server.”
The time-stamped videotape from the kiosk was another problem.
“Without being able to question you, their investigation is pretty much at a standstill. If it stays that way, I may be able to make this go away.”
“How long will that take?”
“No telling. But listen,” Del Rio said. “I can’t tell you to stay in Europe. You understand? I can’t advise you to do that.”
Matthew got the message. He stayed in England.
From that distance, he watched his life implode. Tracy sobbing into the phone, berating him, cursing him, then refusing to take his calls, and finally filing for a separation. In August, Jacob stopped speaking to him for three weeks. Hazel was the only one who continued to communicate with him the entire time, though she resented being the go-between. Now and then she sent him emojis of an angry red face. Or asked, “when r u coming home.”
These texts had come to Matthew’s UK mobile. While in England, he’d had his American phone turned off.
Now, in the taxi from the airport, he pulls his American phone from his bag and presses the power button. He’s eager to tell his kids that he’s back, and that he’ll see them soon.
* * *
Two weeks passed before the town prosecutor called Prakrti in again. After school she got into the car beside her mother to drive to the town hall.
Prakrti didn’t know what to tell the prosecutor. She hadn’t expected to need witnesses to testify on her behalf. She hadn’t anticipated—though she might have—that the man would be in Europe, safe from arrest and interrogation. Everything had conspired to stall the case and to stall her life as well.
Prakrti had considered asking Kylie to lie for her. But even if she swore Kylie to secrecy, Kylie would inevitabl
y tell at least one person, who in turn would tell someone else, and before long the news would be all over school.
Telling Durva was impossible, too. She was a terrible liar. If she were questioned before a grand jury, she would fall apart. Besides, Prakrti didn’t want Durva to know about what had happened. She had promised her parents not to say anything to her little sister.
As for her parents themselves, she wasn’t sure exactly what they knew. Too embarrassed to tell them herself, she’d let the town prosecutor do that. When her parents emerged from their meeting with him, Prakrti was shocked to see that her father had been crying. Her mother was gentle with her, solicitous. She advanced propositions she would never have come up with on her own and which must have come from the prosecutor. She asked if Prakrti wanted “to see someone.” She said she understood, and emphasized that Prakrti was a “victim,” and that what had happened wasn’t her fault.
In the following weeks and months, a silence descended on the matter. Under the guise of keeping things from Durva, her parents didn’t bring the subject up at home at all. The word rape was never uttered. They did what was required, cooperated with the police, communicated with the prosecutor, but that was it.
All this put Prakrti in a strange position. She was enraged at her parents for closing their eyes on an assault that, after all, hadn’t occurred.
She was no longer certain what had happened that night at the hotel. She knew the man was guilty. But she was unsure if she had the law on her side.
But there was no turning back. She’d gone too far.
Over ten months had passed. Diwali was approaching again, the date earlier this year because of the new moon. The family had no plans to go to India.
In front of the town hall, the trees, which had been in leaf when she first came in, were now bare, revealing the statue of George Washington on a horse that stood at the end of the colonnade. Her mother parked outside the police station but made no move to get out of the car. Prakrti turned to her. “Are you coming in?”
Her mother turned to look at her. Not with her newly softened or evasive expression but the hard, strict, disapproving face that had always been hers. Her hands were gripping the steering wheel so tightly her knuckles went white.
“You got yourself into this predicament, you can get yourself out,” her mother said. “You want to be in charge of your life? Go on, then. I’m finished. It’s hopeless. How can we find another husband for you now?”
It was the word another that Prakrti latched on to.
“Do they know? The Kumars?”
“Of course they know! Your father told them. He said it was his duty to do so. But I don’t believe that. He never wanted to go along with the wedding. He was happy to undermine me, as usual.”
Prakrti was silent, taking this in.
“I’m sure you’re thrilled by this news,” her mother said. “It’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”
It was, of course. But the emotion that surged through Prakrti was nothing as simple as happiness or relief. It felt more like remorse, for what she’d done to her parents, and to herself. She began to sob, turning her face to the car door.
Her mother made no move to comfort her. When she spoke again, her voice was full of bitter amusement. “So you loved the boy, after all? Is that it? You were just fooling your parents all this time?”
* * *
In his hand, the phone begins to vibrate wildly. Months of undelivered texts and voice mails, flooding in.
Matthew is looking at the haze over the East River, and the huge billboard ads for insurance companies and movies, when the texts flood in. Most are from Tracy or his children, but friends’ names fly past, too, and colleagues’. Each text contains its first line. A review of the past four months flitting by, the appeals, the fury, the lamentations, the rebukes, the misery. He shoves his phone back into his bag.
Into the Midtown Tunnel his phone continues to buzz, the fallout, unfrozen, raining down on him.
* * *
“I’m not coming in,” Prakrti said, in the doorway of the prosecutor’s office. “I’m dropping the charges.”
Her face was still wet with tears. Easily misunderstood.
“You don’t have to do this,” the prosecutor said. “We’ll get this bastard. I promise.”
Prakrti shook her head.
“Hear me out. I’ve been thinking about the case,” the prosecutor pressed on. “Even without a fresh-complaint witness, there’s a lot of leverage we have on this guy. His family is here in the States, which means he wants to come back.”
Prakrti didn’t appear to be listening. She was looking at the prosecutor with bright eyes as though she’d finally found what to say to make everything right. “I never told you, but I’m planning to go to law school after college. I’ve always wanted to be a lawyer. But now I know what kind. A public defender! Like you. You’re the only ones who do any good.”
* * *
The hotel, in the East Twenties, is one Matthew used to stay in years ago, when it had been popular with European publishers and journalists. Now it’s been renovated beyond recognition. Techno thumps in the dungeonlike lobby and pursues him even into the elevators, where it becomes the soundtrack for lurid videos playing on embedded screens. Instead of providing a haven from the city streets, the hotel wants to bring them in, their restlessness and need.
In his room, Matthew showers and puts on a fresh shirt. An hour later, he’s back in the lobby, amid the pounding music, waiting for Jacob and Hazel—and for Tracy—to arrive.
With a feeling of facing up to a dreaded task, he begins scrolling through his text messages, and deleting them, one by one. Some are from his sister, Priscilla, others from friends inviting him to parties months ago. There are payment reminders and lots of spam.
He opens a text that says:
Directly after that, another, from the same number.
For months Matthew has felt nothing but rage toward the girl. In his head, and out loud when alone, he has called her all kinds of names, using the worst, the most offensive, the most vitalizing language. These new messages don’t rekindle his hatred, however. It isn’t that he forgives her, either, or that he thinks she did him a favor. As he deletes the two texts, Matthew has the feeling that he is fingering a wound. Not compulsively, as he used to do, risking reopening or reinfection, but just to check if it’s healing.
These things don’t go away.
At the far end of the lobby, Jacob and Hazel appear. Following them, a few steps behind, is someone Matthew doesn’t recognize. A young woman in a maroon fleece, jeans, and running shoes.
Tracy isn’t coming. Now or ever. To convey this message, she has sent this babysitter in her place.
Jacob and Hazel haven’t seen him yet. They appear cowed by the sinister doormen and thumping music. They squint in the dim light.
Matthew stands up. His right hand, of its own accord, shoots straight into the air. He’s smiling with an intensity he’s forgotten himself capable of. Across the lobby, Jacob and Hazel turn and, recognizing their father, despite everything, come running toward him.
2017
Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments are due to the following editors: Peter Stitt, J. D. McClatchy, Bradford Morrow, Bill Buford, Cressida Leyshon, and Deborah Treisman.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the publications in which the following stories, in earlier versions, first appeared:
“Air Mail,” The Yale Review, October 1996.
“Baster,” The New Yorker, June 17, 1996.
“Early Music,” The New Yorker, October 10, 2005.
“Timeshare,” Conjunctions 28, Spring 1997.
“Find the Bad Guy,” The New Yorker, November 18, 2013.
“The Oracular Vulva,” The New Yorker, June 21, 1999.
“Capricious Gardens,” The Gettysburg Review, Winter 1989.
“Great Experiment,” The New Yorker, March 31, 2008.
ALSO BY JEFFREY EUGENIDES
My Mistress’s Sparrow Is Dead (editor)
Middlesex
The Virgin Suicides
A Note About the Author
Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit and attended Brown and Stanford Universities. He received the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Middlesex, which was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and France’s Prix Médicis. The Marriage Plot was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won both the Prix Fitzgerald and the Madame Figaro Literary Prize. In 2014, Eugenides was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Complainers
Air Mail
Baster
Early Music
Timeshare
Find the Bad Guy
The Oracular Vulva
Capricious Gardens
Great Experiment
Fresh Complaint
Acknowledgments
Also by Jeffrey Eugenides
A Note About the Author
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2017 by Jeffrey Eugenides
All rights reserved
First edition, 2017
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Eugenides, Jeffrey, author.
Title: Fresh complaint: stories / Jeffrey Eugenides.