by Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl (retail) (epub)
HIM: Jesus.
ME: Well no, but really.
HIM: I get the rationalization process there, but just—it’s one of those things that I regret you had to go through that process let alone— [His voice trails off.]
ME: I remember after it happened, Amber saying—she was really upset—saying, Jeannie, that was rape, and I said, No, it wasn’t. And then Jake finding out. And then the masculinity, the impulse toward violence, coming out. Jake saying, I’m going to kick his ass. That was another question I wanted to ask you: With Jake—you were never a bro-y guy. Do you think that living in that house with Jake—I remember posters of women in bikinis. I definitely remember Maxims and Playboys.
HIM: Jake and his uncle had their whole little bro-fantasy thing going on.
ME: Did that influence you?
HIM: I don’t—I mean, yes, it’s probably fair to say that it would have. I don’t feel like I was ever that guy. But, I mean, I may not be in the most objective position on that.
ME: Well, you said that what had happened changed the sort of narrative you could tell about yourself. You used to think of yourself as one of the good guys. Who were the bad guys, would you say? Who would you envision?
HIM: Semiserious answer: [name of high school football player].
ME: I completely forgot about him. Oh man, yeah, yeah, okay. What about him? Why?
HIM: He had this casual indifference toward the idea of learning about anything. He just—he was everything I didn’t want to be in high school. And he was also more popular. Not to drag up twenty-year-old high school drama. I really couldn’t stand that guy.
ME: Yeah, I completely forgot about him. So he was one of the bad guys.
HIM: He actually seems like he’s grown up to be—he’s actually a teacher in Sandusky now or something. For whatever that’s worth.
ME: There were some great teachers. But then there was my newspaper advisor. You knew something had happened between him and me, but you didn’t know what.
HIM: I never got a straight answer out of anybody. There was gossip that something had happened.
ME: I remember your dad—and this is a weird thing to remember—but there was something involving a mini-fridge. Your dad wouldn’t return a mini-fridge to my advisor, or he wouldn’t loan a mini-fridge to him. Your dad told me, I don’t like him anymore. And that meant so much to me—because there were some teachers who seemed to be on my advisor’s side. I’d see them laughing with him in the hallways. So, you didn’t know about my advisor. We never talked about him. The fact that we didn’t—the fact that you didn’t know what had happened. I’m surprised I didn’t confide in you. Recently that made me question my understanding of our friendship, which I really didn’t want to question. Though I didn’t confide in a lot of people I cared about. And I mean, of course the assault made me question our friendship. But also: the fact that the assault happened surrounding the one-year anniversary of my dad’s death. You knew I was upset about my dad. And it was the first time I’d been drunk. I was definitely vulnerable, and—
HIM: And I preyed on that vulnerability.
ME: Yeah.
HIM: I don’t think I fully appreciated at the time the extent to which you were having trouble dealing with your dad’s death. I don’t recall a calculation that I made, that like: This is my plan and I’m going to—she is in this vulnerable state and this is my opportunity to take advantage. Not to say that that would have been beyond me. But I don’t recall having that train of thought. But yeah, it’s just—it just makes me feel that much worse—about the timing of it. Not—I don’t know how to say it. There is just no polite way to talk about some of this. I don’t know. It’s one of those details that I don’t think I appreciated at the time. But looking at it, in retrospect, from your perspective, it’s just more heartbreaking.
ME: We would talk on the phone for hours after he died, and you remembered that fact. You knew, had to have known, I was devastated about my dad’s death. So—what was our friendship? Were we? Did you think of us as friends?
HIM: Yeah, I thought of us as really close friends and also—there’s no nice way to put it: I was in love with you as a person, the idea I had constructed of you. Which probably makes it worse, not better.
ME: What was the idea of me?
HIM: Just, we never had the relationship. I never had an intimate knowledge of your inner personality.
ME: My inner personality?
HIM: It’s tough to be in love with somebody you’re not—people don’t generally throw that word around. And it’s not generally with people they talk on the phone with an hour at a time. [Server brings us drinks.]
TRYING TO TORTURE YOURSELF MUCH?
It’s nine thirty in the morning, and Mark and I are at a café in his neighborhood. I decide against recording the conversation. Last night he seemed a little tense, which I appreciated. If the rape were easy for him to talk about, I’d be hurt. But I want him to loosen up a bit. Recording the conversation gets in the way of that. Also, some part of me wants to pretend we’re two friends simply catching up.
I give him some old photos, and he smiles, looking at them. One is of him, Amber, my first boyfriend, and me dressed for homecoming. Another is of him and Amber at homecoming. And the last one is of him, his dad, and his brother clumped together on their family room couch.
I feel bad, I tell him, that I haven’t seen your parents in so long.
I think they’d be really happy to hear from you, he says. I don’t think my mom would hold it against you anymore.
Anymore? I ask.
It’s been such a long time, he says.
I wonder if Mark registers how odd that’d be—for me to visit his parents and pretend that the rape hadn’t happened, hadn’t been the reason I stopped talking to them. I don’t tell him that, though. And I don’t press him on whether or not his mom indeed held my silence against me.
Instead, I tell him that I’ve tried to think of terrible things I’ve done to people.
I slept with a man who had a girlfriend, I tell Mark. I’d never met her. But I knew he was dating someone. And I slept with him anyway. He lived in London but whenever he visited New York I’d drop everything to see him. I’ve felt bad about it for a long time now.
And on the other side of that, he says, I never told you my feelings because you were dating someone. I was trying to respect that. I regret never telling you that I liked you.
Does he believe that had he shared his feelings, we would be together now?
Does what could have been remain alive in his mind?
But I don’t ask him.
For the next five hours, we reminisce about high school, mostly. We discuss politics. We discuss our jobs. We discuss books we’ve both read.
I still have my copy of Franny and Zooey, he says. I see it every day. My bookshelf is right by my bed.
He says that my first book is on his coffee table.
Trying to torture yourself much? I ask him, and we both laugh.
Mark then reminds me that he’ll never forget my crying.
When I think about that night, he says, I think about how what happened was already in my mind before I carried you into my room.
He said the same thing last night, and I still don’t know how to respond. I look at my watch. I can’t look at Mark. I know the rape will always stalk the outskirts of our conversations.
I should head to the airport, I tell him.
We both walk outside. While waiting for my cab, we talk about how strange this all is.
I’ll leave out identifying details, I tell him. But anyone who knew us, they’d be able to figure it out.
That’s okay, he says.
Really? I ask him.
Yeah. Also, I don’t mean to tell you how to do your project, but don’t go too easy on me. I know you want it to be nuanced, but I don’t really deserve that. There’s no excuse for what I did.
He looks like he might cry. My cab pulls up, and I surprise myself
by hugging him.
I call Leigh-Anne from the airport.
Mark said he sort of knew that if he could get me into the basement, it would be to his advantage.
Wow, she says. I didn’t think he’d admit that. How do you feel?
Numb. I don’t know. I hugged him. I don’t know why I hugged him.
It’s okay, she says.
Something he said this morning has been bothering me. I told him that one of the worst things I’ve ever done is sleep with a guy who had a girlfriend. And Mark told me that on the reverse side of that, he didn’t tell me his feelings for me when we were teenagers because he was trying to respect that I was dating someone.
But you didn’t sexually assault somebody, Leigh-Anne tells me. You had consensual sex. That’s very different.
Thank you for talking me through all of this.
Of course, she says.
As the plane lifts into the sky, I think: Our secrets make us human.
Knock off the sentimentality, I tell myself.
Window seats always make me sentimental. I put on my headphones and start transcribing.
. . .
ME: Going back to Jake. Jake knew what had happened, but he never followed up with me. But you said he went down to the basement to make sure you weren’t breaking things.
HIM: That was basically as far as it went. I was never—Jake and I had a very adversarial relationship. We had known one another since kindergarten. And for most of that time, we hated each other. Or at least I hated him.
ME: Really?
HIM: He used to bully me when we were in second grade.
ME: Jake was a bully?
HIM: Yeah, he was an asshole. He always has been an asshole. He is an asshole today.
ME: He is?
HIM: I mean, I haven’t talked to him in a decade, but— [His voice trails off.]
ME: I hadn’t known that whole backstory. I didn’t know he ever bullied you.
HIM: I mean, we’re bringing up ancient history now. But yeah, suffice to say I hated Jake’s guts for most of my childhood. And then we sort of reconciled as teenagers. And then, I don’t know. It was the best of several bad options, to live with him and his uncle.
ME: I only met his uncle—that was the first time, I think, and I remember he showed me a Playboy, an issue from the sixties or seventies, and he made some comment about how back then women didn’t wax, and I thought, Is he trying to show some progressive belief about women’s body hair? Because if that’s the case, women’s facial hair, now that would be progressive.
HIM: I like a woman with a mustache. [We laugh.]
ME: I was trying to run through the different people who were there that night. Amber and Jake and Garrett. I think Garrett tried to get me to stop drinking.
HIM: Sounds like the kind of thing he might have done.
ME: Garrett always seemed like a really decent, really good guy. I heard he’s a scientist.
HIM: I think he worked for NASA for a while. I think he’s out in Arizona or something.
ME: This must have been five or six years ago, but he was visiting New York when I lived there, and he wanted to meet up. But I didn’t, or couldn’t. I think I wasn’t feeling well, adjusting to new meds or something. I’ve regretted that. Because I did think of him as a good friend. And then we fell out of touch, which was my fault. And recently, I’ve been thinking about Daniel.
HIM: We were good—well, our parents were good friends. And so we would hang out when our parents would hang out. We were never that close. But I like Daniel.
ME: He got married.
HIM: Yeah, he lives in the suburbs.
ME: This would have been in college—I don’t think you were there—but I visited his house. Maybe it’s the same one. It was in the suburbs. He was married by that point. Or engaged. A bunch of us went. And I remember we were all sleeping on his living room floor. Were you there?
HIM: I don’t think so.
ME: He woke me up, to see if I wanted to have sex with him. And I said, You’re married. Or: You’re engaged. His wife or fiancée was in the other room.
HIM: Your wife is six feet away from us.
ME: Yeah, and I don’t remember if I left then. I was so upset. I’m almost sure that this happened later in college, after the assault. And I remember thinking, Male friendships. Are they possible? They feel impossible.
HIM: Like, What are we even doing?
ME: Yeah. Carlos, though, he was always a good guy.
HIM: Yeah, Carlos was. Still is. Aside from you now, he’s the only person from high school I’m still in touch with.
ME: I could be wrong here, but I sensed that Carlos may have felt pressure to be extra good—because of race. His father was black and his mother was—Puerto Rican?
HIM: Yeah. Puerto Rican.
ME: How much do you think that race factors into this narrative? The narrative of what happened between us?
HIM: In what way?
ME: You mentioned that you used to steal things, little things, to see what you could get away with. And I’m wondering if you—maybe not consciously—thought you were above—
HIM: I definitely thought I was above every single rule ever made.
ME: Why?
HIM: Part of it was me just being oppositionally defiant, in general. Part of it was me being a teenager, seeing what rules he could actually break. A lot of it was ego-trip stuff, which I think is not uncommon with gifted children. It’s just, you think you’re smarter than everybody else and the rules don’t apply to you. I don’t feel like I’m that unique in that regard.
ME: Do you think that colored what happened with us?
BUT I JUST ENDED UP FEELING NUMB
Chris picks me up at the Baltimore airport. I tell him that I hugged Mark.
That’s okay, Chris says. I feel like the natural instinct is to hug somebody you were friends with for years.
Yeah, I say. I wanted to demonstrate that I do forgive him. It felt right to do, or I thought it did, anyway. But I just ended up feeling numb afterward. Oh, and he said that he thought his parents would be happy to hear from me. But why would I contact his parents? He doesn’t want them to find out. Does he think I can compartmentalize like that?
Him suggesting that, Chris says, that you talk to his family as if everything is okay, it confirms something.
What’s that?
That it’s easier for the guilty person to move on, or at least to pretend it didn’t happen. It’s harder for the innocent person.
At home, after dinner with Chris, I return to the recording.
. . .
HIM: Probably. Not that I thought I was entitled to do that. That being my general mode, I’m sure, had an influence.
ME: On the phone you mentioned: I knew what I was doing was wrong while I was doing it and I did it anyway. What got you to that point? I’ve asked you this before, I think, but: Why didn’t you stop? Can you try to answer that?
HIM: Not the easiest question to answer. I wish I could tie it up in a little bow for you. Though in general I don’t believe in tying things up in bows.
ME: It’s a hard question.
HIM: Why did you rape me when you knew you probably shouldn’t?
ME: Okay, so this interests me: you use the word. And I know that the word fits the definition. And we’ve talked about this: how it’s helpful that such actions do fit the definition. Because at the time the reason—not the only reason—but one reason I didn’t report it was, I didn’t believe it qualified as rape.
HIM: And I had never really considered it rape until you made that point. I’m also not going to intentionally sugarcoat it. The word fits the crime.
ME: Earlier this week, I was visiting my friend Nina, whose ex-boyfriend blackmailed her into rape. For several years she didn’t think it qualified as rape. She didn’t push him away. But he had a video of them having sex, from when they were dating, and he threatened to send it to her parents if she didn’t have sex with him again. An
d she comes from a very traditional Indian family. Her parents believed she was still a virgin. So she ended up blaming herself: for lying to her parents about being a virgin, for the video existing, for not pushing him away, for cheating on this guy when they were together. That’s why he was mad. When I first met her, we were roommates in the psych ward, and she told me what her ex had done, how he’d threatened to send the tape to her parents, and I told her, He blackmailed you into sex. That’s rape. And the way she talked about it—I thought the rape had just happened. Turns out it had happened three years prior. I told her that I probably would handle that situation differently now. Instead of immediately saying, That’s rape, I might try to help her arrive at that conclusion. But she said she was glad I’d called it rape. No one who knew about it—except for maybe her sister—had labeled it rape. I guess what I’m trying to say is: I don’t want my use of the word to be disrespectful to women whose experiences with rape are more serious than my experience with you. Of course, when I told that to Nina, she laughed and said I was being ridiculous. [We laugh.] She said that of course she didn’t find it offensive or disrespectful.
HIM: Sounds right.
ONLY BECAUSE HE OWES THAT TO ME
Nina calls, coincidentally, while I’m transcribing my description of her situation.
I am so sorry, she says. I had a friend’s bachelorette party in New Orleans.
Sorry for what? I say.
I didn’t call you after your trip to see Mark.
I didn’t expect you to call right away, I tell her. And it’s only been a couple of days since I visited.
But I’ve been thinking of you. Tell me: How was it?
I summarize the visit and then ask Nina how she’s doing.
No, she says. We are talking about you. I want to hear more about the visit. How did you feel after the second day seeing him?
