Reunion at Red Paint Bay

by George Harrar

  “After.”

  “After?”

  “Her rape, her move from town, the loss of her baby. After everything.”

  “Did you marry Jean thinking that you could heal her?”

  Heal her—a therapist’s way of thinking, and a woman’s way. “I married Jean thinking that I loved her.”

  “And your love wasn’t enough to make her whole again?”

  “Love’s never enough.” Paul says. “Love doesn’t stop pain. Love doesn’t stop hate. They say love and hate are two sides of the same coin, but that’s wrong. Love and hate are on the same side of the coin, all mixed up together. Nothing separates love and hate.”

  “Are you saying you ended up loving and hating Jean?”

  Of course he’s saying that. Does he really need to state the obvious? Why do therapists always make you do that, as if there’s no truth without words? He says, “Do you think all men are capable of rape?” Another incendiary question, blurted out. It must be considered his hallmark now. Perhaps that’s how she refers to him with Simon—my patient who blurts things out.

  He meets her eyes. They’re dark green, a stirred-up sea. “I think there is the potential for violence in all people,” she says, “male or female, and sometimes it expresses itself as rape.”

  “And before it expresses itself you can’t tell who’s capable of it, right? Any average ordinary guy—like an uncle or cousin or a husband, even a mild-mannered man like me, for instance—could rape, under certain circumstances.” She looks up at him, sensing he has more to say. “And I did.”

  “You raped someone?”

  “Jean.”

  “You raped your wife?”

  The surprise in her voice surprises him. “Being married doesn’t give a man license for sex on demand, does it?”

  “No, but normally—”

  “There was no normally in our marriage. Jean did everything she could to avoid sex with me.”

  “From the beginning of your marriage?”

  “From the beginning through the middle to the end.”

  “I see.”

  He rises a bit from his seat. “Could you stop saying that? You don’t see, so please stop saying it.”

  She hesitates, then, “I was going to say that normally—”

  He doesn’t care what she was going to say. “A year after we married,” he says, “on our anniversary night, I decided I’d waited long enough. So I crawled on top of Jean in bed, my weight holding her down, and I spread her legs and I …” He can’t say the word. Surely she knows what he means. “That’s how I did it, maybe twice a year, no more. She didn’t even fight me after the first. But each time I had sex with my wife I felt like I was raping her. Raping her,” he says louder.

  Amy leans over her desk toward him. “Mr. Chambers?”

  “Raping her!” he shouts.

  She picks up her notepad and raps it one sharp time on the desk—“Stop!” It’s so surprising, this outburst of energy from her, that he obeys. She says, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to end our session early today.”

  “You’re afraid?”

  “It’s just a figure of speech. I have—”

  “—other pressing business?”

  “… a family matter to attend to.”

  She gets up from her seat, and he does, too, a little too fast. He steadies himself with a hand on her desk. “That’s a coincidence,” he says, “because I have a family matter to attend to as well.”

  She tugs down on her blouse, a protective little gesture. “You didn’t mention having family in the area,” she says in a calmer voice, feeling back on safe ground, talking about families.

  Paul shakes his head. “I don’t. You do.”

  She takes a step around the desk, and he meets her there, within arm’s reach, just bare space between them. She slides sideways, and he mirrors her move, as if in a dance, perfect harmony. He can’t remember the last time he danced—in middle school, perhaps, some forced affair where the boys are prodded across the room toward a wall of girls a head taller, girls who giggle with their friends and shake their heads, No, of course not, No, how could he even ask?

  “I need you to step away, Mr. Chambers.” How would she deal with a patient who won’t obey her command? She must have some other weapon of persuasion besides merely telling him in a stern voice to step away. “Are you hearing me?”

  He smiles—there it is again, inappropriate without fail. He just can’t help himself. He cups his ear, mockingly. “I hear you loud and clear. Do you hear me, I want to—”

  “You need to move away from me right now or I’m going to call the police to remove you from my office.”

  Such an illogical statement. If he wouldn’t move out of her way so she could leave, why would he let her call the police? He wouldn’t expect such lazy thinking from her. To make the situation perfectly clear: “And if I stop you from making the call?”

  “It’s not going to come to that. You’re going to get out of my way.”

  “I understand that’s what you think, but if I don’t, then what?” What tricks does she have up her sleeve? Mace, a hidden gun? Perhaps a silent alarm, activated already by the press of a button on her desk? Maybe in New York, but not here in Red Paint, a friendly town, like the sign says. A village almost.

  “If I call out, people will come very quickly, I assure you.”

  “In a perfect world, yes, people would come running from all directions to see what the matter is. But sometimes a woman screams and nobody comes.”

  She makes the connection quickly. “I’m sorry if that’s what happened to your wife, but this session has to end right now.”

  “So, to recap,” he says, “a grieving man comes to your office seeking help about his wife who was raped just a few miles from here. You accuse him of watching this rape and doing nothing.”

  “I didn’t say that, I—”

  “Couldn’t you have intervened, Mr. Chambers?” he says, mimicking her probing, rhetorical voice. “Couldn’t you have pulled the rapist off, Mr. Chambers? Couldn’t you have acted like a man, Mr. Chambers?”

  “You need to calm—”

  “A grieving husband gets a bit angry and raises his voice,” Paul says, raising his voice in time with the words. “He confides to you that he felt like a rapist every time he had sex with his wife. Your response is to end the session right now and call the police? I thought the goal of your profession was to help people in pain, Ms. Howe. Or do you only treat the calm and compliant sorts, the easy patients, the women?”

  “I’m not debating this with you.” She starts toward the phone.

  Of course she wouldn’t get into a debate with her client. But she might, for a moment, want to consider the unusual circumstances in which she finds herself. “You should think twice about calling the police,” he says. “It could cause more trouble, and your husband wouldn’t like that.” Her face turns pale, and he wonders what the physiology of this reaction is, how fear works so quickly through the bloodstream. He’s said the magic words—your husband. It’s no longer just about her. Imagine if he’d said your son. She can’t bring herself to ask the question What about my husband?, because that would mean she’s engaging in this little scene he has created. He will continue on his own. “I’m sure you want to know what your husband has to do with this, so I’ll tell you. If the police come, you’ll tell your side of the story and I’ll tell mine, which includes the identity of the man who raped my wife. Do you want to take a guess?”

  “I don’t know what you’re trying to do here, but—”

  “Aren’t you a little curious about your husband, the rapist?” Husband, rapist. It must be the first time she has heard these words together. How shocking they must sound. “And once you’re a rapist, you can’t not be a rapist. It’s a law, Aristotle’s law of the excluded middle. Maybe you’re familiar with it?”

  She does not answer.

  “No? I sense you’d be very comfortable with Aristotle. Either-or, t
his-that, right-wrong. No middle ground. So which is your husband, rapist or not rapist?”

  She reaches for the phone, but he covers it with his right hand. She takes a quick breath and chokes on it, coughs for a few moments. Then, “I’ll give you five seconds to remove yourself from my office. Five seconds.”

  It amuses him that she feels in the position to offer an ultimatum. He raises his left hand, spreads his fingers and counts down for her, bending his little finger first. “Of course you’re curious. A smart woman like yourself, the healer of the community.” Then his ring finger. “… who learns that the man she’s been married to for sixteen years raped a girl.” The middle finger. “… and got away with it.” The index finger. “… and hasn’t paid for his sin at all.” Now the thumb curls over the rest, making a fist. “Five seconds,” he says. “That’s all it took to tell the story of your husband’s life. Sometimes there’s only one fact you need to know about a person, isn’t that true? Now you know that one fact about your husband.” She looks at him, then away, as if he’s some scary dog—a German shepherd or Doberman pinscher—that gets aggressive when challenged eye to eye. He never realized he had it in himself to appear so frightening.

  “Deep down you know your husband is one of those ordinary men quite capable of rape. He wouldn’t drag anyone off the sidewalk into the bushes, nothing crude like that, but he did lure a girl onto the dock by the Bayswater Inn, and he raped her. Raped her,” Paul says in a louder voice. “Raped her!” he shouts, then tilts his ear to the ceiling. “You’d think somebody would come running, like you said. How long will it take? I could yell even louder. Or maybe you want to try?” She scans the room, looking for a possible exit. The window, not a viable option, closed tight against the July heat. How would she get there, shove it up, and jump through without his calmly walking behind her and hauling her back inside, his hands wrapped around her waist? Besides, consider how hard the fall would be, ten feet down into the asphalt parking lot, a tangle of limbs twisted in unnatural directions. No, she has to stay and listen. “Then he couldn’t even let her alone afterward. Your husband called the girl and told her she better keep quiet because he’d spread it all over town that she had sex with him, and that would ruin her reputation more than his.”

  “I don’t believe you.” Still a calm voice. An admirable coolness considering the situation she now finds herself in.

  “There’s what you believe,” Paul says, “and what really happened. You can always take your pick.” He removes his hand from the phone.

  She grabs the receiver and punches in the numbers 911.

  That’s okay, he’s said enough. He’ll go gently now. He has another appointment to keep anyway.

  The postcard said: “What lies do you tell yourself about yourself? Come to the dock below the Bayswater Inn at 5:15 p.m. Thursday, alone. Faithfully yours …” It was leaning against the phone on his desk when he came back from lunch Monday morning. On the front was a giant moose and the caption IT’S BIGGER IN MAINE. On the message side there wasn’t any stamp, meaning it had been hand-delivered by the sender himself, or maybe by some kid paid a few bucks to do it.

  He would not tell Amy. This time he’d go alone.

  It was an uncommonly clear day on Red Paint Bay, the kind of late afternoon where you could see across the choppy stretch of water to the cabins on the opposite shore. It looked closer than a half-mile, so close that he had tried to swim to it the night after graduation. He came down to the dock at midnight, stripped to his boxers, and jumped in. A few hundred yards out he stopped to tread water for a moment and realized that for all his effort, the lights on the other side didn’t appear any nearer. He flipped over and did the backstroke to shore, staring up into the endless sky above him.

  He wasn’t sure this was a good idea. In fact, he figured it was probably a bad idea to come alone to the dock below the inn to meet the person sending him anonymous postcards, one of them calling him Rapist! He had been able in the beginning to make himself believe that the messages were meant for someone else or related to hiring David Rigero. But the obituary, the questions at the reunion, and maybe even the car nearly running him down that night swept away any pretense. The sender knew something, or thought he did, and had no doubt tracked him down to blackmail him. He wouldn’t pay, of course. Acceding to blackmail would be admitting guilt, and he was innocent, at least innocent enough.

  Simon heard movement behind him and turned. Crossing the beach was a man overdressed for the summer sun, in a sports jacket and tie, carrying his shoes. Simon tried to judge the stiff stride and exaggerated swing of the arms, but no name came to him to match the awkward gait. It seemed like a stranger stepping onto the dock, his heavy footsteps straining the planks. Simon suddenly felt trapped there, at the end of this narrow walkway. There was no escape but the water. Why had he let himself get into this position?

  The man stopped a few feet away and nodded. He had dark hair, thinning on top, and a small clipped mustache. Yellowish skin, narrow eyes, and ears that seemed more fitting for a larger head. A face that could be easily recalled if he needed to later on.

  Simon nodded back. “Sorry, but do I know you?”

  The man laughed oddly in a way Simon thought he should recognize. “You bumped into me once.”

  “Bumped into you?”

  “In the hallowed hallways of Red Paint High. My books went flying.”

  Simon pictured the likely scene in his head, sprinting down the narrow halls, late for class as usual, taking a corner and running over some kid, an underclassman who didn’t know enough to get out of the way at final bell. “That happened a lot, as I recall. You don’t hold it against me, do you?”

  “You stopped and helped me pick up my books.”

  Simon felt relieved, which surprised him, feeling any emotion at all over such a trivial incident. “Well, I’m glad to hear I didn’t just keep going.” He waited a moment, allowing the conversation to proceed, but it did not. “So …”

  The man pressed his mustache, as if making sure it was still stuck on. “I’m Paul. I was a year behind you at school.”

  “Paul,” Simon repeated. “I don’t remember any—wait, you mean Paulie, Paulie … Walker?”

  “I’m Paul now.”

  Simon searched the man in front of him for a hint of the skinny kid buried in his memory but couldn’t match the two images. “You delivered papers for the Register one year when I did, right?”

  “You have a good memory.”

  “I just flashed on you for a second—you wore a bandanna all the time, a red one, sometimes you pulled it over your face.”

  “That was me.”

  Of all people he knew on earth, Simon couldn’t think of a more unlikely person to be facing at this moment of his life. “So you’re the one who’s been sending me those odd postcards.” It was a bit disappointing that there wasn’t a more interesting person behind the mysterious correspondence. On the other hand, he felt safe finally knowing the identity of the sender, a former schoolmate, little Paulie Walker, almost a head shorter than him, not threatening at all.

  “That would seem obvious.”

  “Right, since you’re here.” Simon swept his hand in the air to create some movement to this situation. “Why?” He waited for the answer, some hint of blackmail.

  “As I told you, I want to repay you for teaching me a lesson.”

  “What lesson is that?”

  “How to keep a secret.”

  “A secret?”

  “What you haven’t even told your wife. Graduation night. You brought your date here. Jean Crane.”

  Simon felt his fingers tighten into fists. He felt his brain churning through recent events, forging the links. “Then you did marry Jean?”

  “Another logical deduction.”

  He didn’t like the condescending tone, or the way Paul kept staring at him, not looking away even for a moment, barely blinking. “I was sorry to read she died,” Simon said.

  “Jean
.”

  “Yes, Jean. She was a very nice girl.”

  “She was a very nice girl. How easy it is to slip into the past tense.”

  “I just thought, since she’s dead …”

  “We’ll all slip into the past tense one day,” Paul said. “She is, she was. He is, he was. Dead is such a nondescriptive word. Why don’t we just say, ‘She ceases to exist’? That’s all there is to it. You exist, then you cease to exist. Happens to everybody.”

  Simon understood now the references to mortality in the postcards. Paul had death on the brain, which wasn’t a comforting thought. “Look, it’s kind of hot out here for a philosophical discussion. If you want to go up to the inn, I’ll buy you a drink and we can talk things over. I have a half hour before I need to be home.”

  Paul laughed, an irritating little sound. “You’re willing to share thirty minutes of your remaining existence with me? That’s very generous. But I think we’ll just stay here and see how long this takes. Maybe only twenty.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  Paul set his shoes on the dock, squaring them next to each other, unnecessary precision it would seem. His socks were bunched up inside. He looked out over the water for a minute, then said, “How do you think the people of Red Paint will react when they know that the editor of their beloved Register got away with rape?”

  Simon noted the wording—when they know, not if. Paul intended to expose him. “I didn’t get away with anything.”

  Paul walked past Simon, brushing arms, a purposeful touch. Perhaps a provocation. He would not respond.

  “This is exactly where you did it to her, isn’t it?”

  “Why are you asking me? You seem to know everything.”

  “I don’t know how you could rape her.”