Bear Witness (Out of Line collection)

by Mary Gaitskill

  Sexy G was plainly very taken, but he was smart enough to divide his eye contact between them as he described his business triumphs (he owned a custom-made furniture store in Pittsburgh) and expanded on his opinion of hate-crime laws. Moira thought: He probably imagines she’s flirting, but she’s just being polite and looking forward to the bacon-wrapped dates; she likes the attention, but he’s too old for her.

  “I’m not a racist,” he said, “but—”

  “That’s what everybody says,” replied Ana, and her voice was touched by snottiness. “I’m not a racist but.”

  “Wow,” said Moira, “this looks great!” The spread was laid before them: bacon dates, a salmon BLT, and a hellish mass of eggs and hot peppers.

  “Yeah,” said G, recovering himself. He picked up his napkin and actually tucked it into his shirt before continuing the conversation: “I know what you’re saying, Ana. But I’m not one of those, okay?”

  As Moira went to hell with her eggs, her attention left the conversation and wandered around the room. Visually she could have been at some upscale joint in her past, twenty or even thirty years ago: dark, heavy wood framing big windows slightly blurred with poorly wiped soap; an older lady next to them putting on her glasses to read the menu; right in front of Moira, an older man expanding himself before a young woman; a burst of distorted laughter from somewhere out of sight; the hoary bar and the intrepid figure behind it; the people slumped before it; the mute television, glowing and frenetic, above it; the nodding heads; the politician on the screen. Except this guy would not have been on the screen twenty years ago. Moira cooled her hot mouth with her sweet green cocktail, and a song shot through her head, the singer’s voice high, boundaryless, and exultant: It goes on and on and on and on.

  “Kavanaugh,” said Sexy G. “What do you ladies think about him?”

  “Horrible,” said Ana, pursing her dainty lips. “Entitled, crass, basically a rapist.”

  “I don’t agree,” said Moira.

  “Really?” said G.

  “Why?” asked Ana.

  “Because for one thing, whatever it was that happened, he was seventeen. Would you want to be judged by something messed up you did when you were that age? Because I know I wouldn’t.”

  Ana made a face that said “how irrelevant”; G looked simply taken aback.

  “Also, I don’t think they were really trying to rape her.”

  “What’s your evidence for that?” asked G. He was actually looking at her for the first time, his pocked, hairy jaw powerfully inclined toward her, his flesh-sunk brown eyes piercing and animal.

  “Look, there were two of them and one of her, and both of them were stronger. If they’d wanted to rape her, they would’ve. She wouldn’t have been able to ‘slip away.’”

  G looked at her intensely. Ana put down a forkful of food and looked at the table intensely. Moira glanced up at the TV. There was that woman, going at Kavanaugh. Kamali, or whatever her name was. “She’s like that teacher in school you just wanted to slap,” Eddie had said, and she was. “I’m sorry,” said Moira. “It’s just my opinion.” She paused. “We don’t have to get in a fistfight, do we?”

  It was four years later that he turned up in my special ed class. I’d finally gotten accreditation to teach that, ironically because of my experience with kids like Mark. I say “ironic” because when I saw Mark, I didn’t know him. The school was in another town and I didn’t know his family had moved there, and “Mark Carter” is such a common name that it didn’t occur to me that it was him. I also didn’t recognize him because he was very different even taking the years into account. He was still big, but the aura of baby softness was gone. At thirteen, he already had facial hair, and there was something unpredictable in his body, something dark and muddy. His tough act had hardened, like a mask that grows into the skin. He still looked down, but somehow, even so, his eyes were all over every girl in the room, restless and hopeless, just hopeless. I took one look at him and didn’t like him; he was obvious trouble—him and this big blond lout named Tyrone who he immediately paired up with. My God those boys were ugly together, real bullies, though obviously Tyrone was much worse.

  But Mark was still reachable. It was subtle but clear to me, the way he would sit up and look serious when I spoke on certain subjects—especially animals or adventure stories. I don’t remember why, but once I told them a true story about a mentally ill man who went to live with bears in the Yukon. He was so accepted by the bears that he was able to crawl around among them and be near their cubs, but of course, the story ended badly; the poor man was eaten by a rogue bear while his terrified girlfriend tried to fight the thing off with a frying pan. When I asked them what they thought of the story, Tyrone said, “He was stupid.” I said something like, “Not stupid, mentally ill. And also willing to go all the way for what he believed in, and he believed in these beautiful animals. And his girlfriend was willing to go all the way too, for someone she loved.” Tyrone slumped on his tailbone and smirked, but Mark sat straight and looked at me, listening. He didn’t even notice when Tyrone tried to catch his eye.

  Because of moments like that, I would make an effort with him. His essays were terrible, incoherent, written in broken, violent penmanship that hardly followed the lines on the paper. And he drew in the margins, typical kinds of drawings mostly, of superheroes and huge, muscled men lifting weights—except that his drawings were so neat and precise, hard to put together with the poor penmanship. There was this one paper where they had to write about a special person in their lives. They were supposed to describe why that person was special. He wrote about five people, wrote some mixed-up sentences about all of them: his father (“he is fun and he is strong, he hit them when the came on the door”); Tyrone (“Tyron is cool, hes tongue has acid in it”); someone else so vaguely drawn that I couldn’t make out who she was; and a dog of his that seemed to have met a bad end. He ended with a beautiful, careful drawing of a dog’s face and, in bold, clumsy three-dimensional letters, the words White Fang. It was heartbreaking.

  And so I tried. More than once I took him aside and gave him the chance to revise an especially bad essay so he wouldn’t fail. I gave him a special assignment that involved drawing, like a comic book. He did all right with that, but he felt persecuted by it. He didn’t seem to understand that I was actually giving him breaks. The “special person” essay was the last time I tried. His revision was so poor that I couldn’t accept it. When I handed it back to him he snatched it and swung away from me, making this sound like an animal and cursing out loud as he walked away.

  So I stopped doing that. I made smiley faces by his drawings and passed him with a D whenever possible. Maybe I should’ve failed him, but he was already two years behind. It’s hard to be sure of your instincts with boys that age, and he was especially hard.

  “No, ma’am,” said Sexy G. “I’d be scared to fight you—you might be packing!”

  They laughed—Moira and Sexy laughed—and changed the subject. The lunch ended on a basically good note, and Moira made up with Ana on the way back home. Sort of.

  “I still don’t understand why you don’t think they tried to rape her,” said Ana. “I don’t know why you wouldn’t just believe her.”

  “Look,” said Moira, “it’s not that I think they were totally innocent. They were drunk boys. What I think is, to them she was a nerd, a pretty girl-nerd with glasses. So they, you know . . . messed with her like they’d mess with a guy-nerd in the locker room.”

  “Humiliated her? Bullied her?”

  “Yeah, you could say—”

  “Nice.”

  “No, it’s not nice. But it’s not rape.”

  Moira looked out the window at the beat-up sign for Ms. Poochie’s, its rust-eaten shape still cool even with half the paint coming off, just up there on its weathered pole not giving a fuck. The nightclub it announced had burned down long ago, but they’d still not taken the sign down.

  “They didn’t rape her,
even she doesn’t say they actually did,” said Moira. “And they could’ve, if they were serious.”

  They drove in silence. Moira was nearly forty when she met Eddie at Poochie’s, and he must’ve been fifty: she walked in the door and, with that simple action, tore a jagged hole in ordinary life, a big rip down the center of the dull, painful page, and out of that ripped place spilled dancing, trays of sparkling drinks, soulful music, vulgarity in the bathroom (women sitting on sinks to relieve themselves while other women made up their eyes, laughing and talking), the disco ball throwing crazy, broken light over every blurred body and fuzzy face. She almost forty and he likely fifty, but they were like teenagers walking out in the parking lot, headed for his car, he holding her hand so she wouldn’t stumble on the high heels she hadn’t worn since she was maybe twenty-five.

  “I talked about it with my little twelve-year-old cousin,” said Ana. “She watched it on TV, and she said it scared her. She said, ‘These guys are supposed to protect us, and they’re letting him in? It’s like the cops who shoot black people for nothing, only higher up.’”

  “I’m sorry,” said Moira. And she was sorry. Ana and her aunt had skin like white people’s and so Moira forgot: they were Puerto Rican. They were light, but maybe some of their family weren’t; naturally they would feel it more when the police were quick to gun down somebody dark. Besides, the way Ana had repeated the innocent girl’s words touched Moira and disturbed her. She did not even know why she’d spoken out at lunch. Well, but she did know; she was trying to get Sexy G’s attention. “Look,” she said, “I think the guy’s a jerk. I don’t like the way he’s handled himself in all of this. But I’m just—”

  “If you applied at T.J. Maxx and you acted like that at the interview, they wouldn’t hire you.”

  “Fair enough,” said Moira. “You’re right about that.” She just wanted to end it.

  Moira talked about it after dinner with Eddie and his friend Rod, who dropped by for a beer. They were sitting on the back porch; Rod made a point of appreciating the lilac bushes she’d planted since he’d last come to visit, also the small vegetable garden she’d begun. He also appreciated the funny way she told them about the Kavanaugh confrontation—both he and Eddie got a laugh out of the whole thing. “You old hound dog,” said Eddie, “you must’ve shocked that silly little bitch out of her mind. And I’d bet money the guy agrees with you. He’s just trying to get in the young lady’s pants.”

  In the moment she smiled and said, “Absolutely!” But when Rod was gone, she said, “Don’t call me that in front of people. It sounds disrespectful.” She didn’t say, “And don’t call Ana a silly bitch—why are you calling her that?” But she thought it.

  Eddie put his arms around her from behind and said, “You know I mean it as a term of affection, pure affection. He knows it too.” And he kissed her on the head and she forgot about it.

  Because the location of Eddie’s job unexpectedly changed over the weekend, they agreed that, for next week, she would drop him at work and take the car, picking up Ana at her place. That way, Moira wouldn’t be beholden at least. Which was probably good considering that the first case up was a rape case.

  The victim was a sixty-three-year-old woman. She lived alone in an apartment above a heating and cooling parts store that had previously been owned by her deceased father. Early one evening a man came into her apartment and raped her. She tried to hide in the bathroom, but he broke down the door and dragged her out. He was wearing a neoprene dog mask that covered his entire head, and he did not speak. Hoping he was there to rob her, she told him that her purse was in the living room. Instead, he forced her to put on crotchless panties and a lacy bra and then raped her, repeatedly. Perhaps because she was terrified she did not realize that she knew him. He actually worked in the heating and cooling parts store; he had worked for her father for years. He had left town for unclear reasons and then come back and, looking to work for her father again, had been hired at the same shop.

  There were images that were projected onto a screen. There was an image of her shattered bathroom door; it seemed to have been made of something like cardboard. There was an image of the flimsy coverlet on her bed; you could see the stuffing coming out of it. They’d taken pictures of it so the jurors could see the blood on it. They’d also taken pictures of the woman’s private body, which was torn and also bloody.

  “My God,” said the woman next to Moira.

  My sister used to criticize me all the time, for lots of things but mostly for being an “enabler” and a “martyr” and a “fool” for teaching dumb kids at local schools when if I tried, I could’ve done better. When I was young she mocked me for always being “good” and “too nice.” She accused me of having secret motives. She said I did it to make Mother and Daddy love me more. It was the family dynamic, I guess.

  I remember her talking about a story in the paper about a white teacher at Porterfield Community College who’d befriended a former black student who had mental health issues. He helped the ex-student find a job, loaned him money; he even bought him clothes for the interview. When the guy got a job and then lost it, his former teacher helped him again, going so far as to buy him a computer. But even with all the help, the student’s life took a bad turn, and he must’ve blamed his teacher because he bought a gun and shot the man to death.

  “That idiot deserved to die,” said my sister bitterly. “His behavior was stupid and insulting. He set himself up before this poor crazy kid as someone who could solve all his problems, who had all the answers. He acted like the black kid had no responsibility, like he, the big white guy, was the one who could make it happen. It makes total sense that a disturbed person would take that literally, that he would hold that dumbass responsible instead of himself.”

  She’s clever, my sister, and bossy. I could even almost agree with her about that story. But I wasn’t dealing with mentally ill adults. I worked with children. It was my job to help them. Yes, I went above and beyond with some of them. Bought them supplies, and a backpack once, mittens more than once, a scarf. I passed out healthy snacks in case they hadn’t had breakfast. I made mistakes sometimes, and it’s true; sometimes kids take advantage. Parents can get mad at you for helping. But I didn’t do that with Mark. I helped him but not out of bounds. Maybe not even as much as I should. Because I felt sorry for him, but I didn’t like him. That sounds terrible because he was just a kid. But kids are people. And some people you just don’t like.

  I didn’t help him get the job at the shop. I just didn’t stop it from happening either. It was pure chance I dropped in that day. When my father asked what kind of student he was, I told him the truth, that he was unruly and I thought troubled. But basically a good kid, I must’ve said that too. But I still don’t know why my father hired him. Except he thought I was a goody-goody too. If I said a boy was unruly, he probably thought it meant he was normal.

  The rapist’s fiancée testified before lunch. When she walked in, Moira and Ana turned and looked each other dead in the eye. She was an attractive woman of maybe thirty-five. She had good hair and long legs. She was wearing a businesslike dress and heels. Her manner was composed and demure. Their eyes said, Can you believe this guy has a normal girlfriend?

  The prosecutor asked how long she had known her boyfriend and how they met. Three years ago, at a party. He asked if she knew the woman her fiancé had raped; he asked if he had ever spoken about her. No and no. He asked if she knew where her fiancé was when the rape was committed. She thought he was visiting his friend Jack. He asked what she had found in her trash can on the evening after the rape. Novelty panties with something sticky on them. He asked her if her fiancé ever asked her to dress up in “novelty” lingerie. Yes. She answered as if she were just discovering, to her bewildered humiliation, that she was engaged to an old lady raper.

  Moira and Ana discreetly waved to Sexy G as they went to lunch at the coffee shop. They were sorry for the rapist’s girlfriend; they wondered
what he was like with her. They wondered how you would get over knowing that the man you planned to marry had forced an old woman to put on crotchless panties, raped her, then come home and deposited the evidence in your garbage pail where you would see it.

  “He probably wasn’t even thinking about her seeing it,” said Moira.

  “He must be really stupid,” said Ana.

  Moira sensed that Ana was relieved that she, Moira, wasn’t saying that maybe the retired teacher and the thug were just playing a little rough—a relief that segued easily into a conversation about Moira’s nieces and a frightening TV series that people were obsessed with.

  But while they ate their sandwiches and checked their phones, Moira was thinking about what Eddie would say. That yeah, maybe the girlfriend was pretty, but if she was late thirties, possibly even forty, her SMV (sexual market value) had plummeted and she had to take what she could get. The better question was why this guy was going after dried-up granny poon when he was obviously able to get something decent. Eddie wouldn’t speak so crudely to her, not most of the time. But she had heard him talk this talk to Rod, and she’d seen it on his computer, not that she was looking for it: Barely legal = best in show; thirty-forty = strictly beta; over forty = hit the wall. She’d pushed back a little (“What is this crap you’re looking at?”), even though, basically, she saw the reality in it. He’d said it wasn’t anything he took seriously, but that it was sort of interesting. “Real life is more complicated,” he said. “There’s love. Some of these guys don’t know about that, it seems like.” They sat quietly for a long moment, and Moira was aware of the rustling sounds from outside, the low dark smells, the deep sweetness of the lilac. It gave her a feeling of rightness, a sense that she was taking in and accepting what some women could not accept: the brutal instincts of life. Eddie reached from his chair to hers and took her hand; the feel of his hand, the same after all this time.