But before I could Julian was already on his feet, pushing me toward the door and then against it. He turned me roughly around and pulled my dress up around my waist, pinning me there with his body weight and one hand, unzipping his pants and fumbling with my underwear with the other.
“Get off of me!” I screamed, or I might have whimpered, maybe I didn’t even say it, I can’t remember. I thought, just for a second, about allowing what was about to happen, to happen. So that it might be over with, so that he might be gentle, so that I could close my eyes and remove the part of myself that mattered to another part of the room so that he could do what he wanted and I could be gone.
But I couldn’t. I couldn’t do that. Whatever hell was right in front of me, leaving my body would bring me no closer to home. The only way out was in, or was it through? The only way was impossible; the only way was necessary. So I gathered up all that impossibility and necessity into the center of myself, where a small girl was also weeping. And with a big inhale and every muscle in my body, with the herculean strength that allows mothers to lift cars off their pinned children, I slammed my body backward into Julian’s.
He was weaker than I thought. He stumbled backward, lost his balance, and fell onto the floor. As soon I was above him I started kicking him, over and over, in my stilettos. Then I stomped on his groin. He howled, curled into the fetal position. “You’re a monster!” I said. I was probably crying. “A monster!” Probably I said some other stuff too. I kicked him one last time, then I ran to the door.
But I couldn’t open the door at first, because he’d bolted the door (he’d bolted the door?). I unbolted it and burst out into the hallway, slamming the door behind me. I was drenched in sweat. My hands were shaking and the only thought I had, only it wasn’t a thought, it was an instinct, was that I needed to hit something. No, I needed to hit him. I was trembling so badly I wasn’t sure I could keep my balance, but I took off running down the hall. Eventually I had to stop and take off my stilettos. Then, stilettos in hand, I kept running.
I was all the way to the elevators when I realized I’d left my purse in Julian’s hotel room.
“Fuck!” I said, and slammed a palm into the closed metal doors. My dress was hanging off one shoulder, my feet blistered from the heels. I limped back to Julian’s room with all the power I could muster, my adrenaline still spiked like crazy. The adrenaline decided the safest way for me to get my purse back was to make it a public affair.
“HEY ASSHOLE!” I said, pounding on the door. “I NEED MY PURSE!” God willing one of the neighbors would wake up and come out into the hall to serve as witness.
There was no peep from Julian. I kept at it. “HELLLLLOOOO!” I bellowed. “I KNOW YOU’RE IN THERE! GIVE ME MY PURSE!” What I wanted to say was: give me my purse so I can call the police and file a sexual assault report, but I figured that wouldn’t get me very far. “LET ME IN! IT’S THE LEAST YOU CAN DO!”
Finally I heard a deadbolt turn. Julian stood there, still in his trousers and shirt, my purse dangling in his hand. “Hi there,” he said, still eerily calm. “Here you go.”
I looked at him, mouth agape, until I realized what he was up to.
“You should get some sleep,” he said. And it was the way he said this—the absolute lack of culpability it implied, the sense that he hadn’t done anything wrong—that caused the wild animal that lived in me to push the door open a little wider, and then push Julian back into his room with all my might. “I should get some sleep?!” this wild animal screamed. “Sleep?! You think I can sleep now?! After this?!”
Julian said nothing, just continued to look at me unflappably. I snatched my purse out of his hand, turned, and started running back toward the elevator. I was still shaking all over, for what else can a body do when trying to make sense of the utterly nonsensical.
I was so overtaken by my wild animal fury that I almost didn’t see Wolf Prana in the doorway of his own hotel room. He had his phone out, facing me. He also had a black eye and a puffy lip.
He looked at me and smirked.
“What are you looking at?!” I said, or maybe screamed, I can’t remember. Then I faked like I was coming after him. I shouted profanity. He flinched, as I knew he would, but kept his phone up the whole time.
When I got back to my room I took the longest shower of my life. I curled up in a ball beneath the rain spigot and wept. When I got out, I popped a Klonopin, and went to bed praying I would wake up and realize that none of this had ever happened. Through the drawn blinds I saw that it was nearly dawn.
I still remember many of the stories in the book of Greek myths my mother gave me. Zeus turning Io into a cow, Daphne’s dad turning her into a tree, Philomela’s tongue getting lopped off by the king who lured her into the woods. But the one I remember most is the one about Cassandra. As the story goes, the god Apollo fell in love with Cassandra; he wanted to bed her; she said no. Instead of killing her, or turning her into an animal, Apollo did something even worse. He said: fine, leave, do as you like. Run away or hide or rue the day you met me. But no matter how far you run or how deep you hide or how loud you scream, it’s too late, your life is over: I’ve cursed you. Wait and see. When you speak the truth it will be heard as a lie, when you state facts they will be laughed off as heresy. Say what you will about the world, say what you will about me, but you’re done for, you’re doomed, no one will ever believe you. And you will go mad from this. Wait and see.
* * *
—
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the last few hours and minutes of my, if not innocence exactly, then my obliviousness. When I woke up at noon, the first thing I did was reach for my phone, a reflex, and turn it off of airplane mode, which I’d done before bed so I could avoid being awakened by early morning emails chirping in my inbox. My home screen started flooding with messages, streaming them so fast my phone couldn’t keep up. They whirred in quick succession, direct messages from Twitter and notifications to @caseyprepublic, an account I rarely used but kept around because it seemed like a professsional necessity, about five hundred Facebook notifications and the same number of emails, a text from Lindsey saying HON WHAT’S GOING ON?, a text from Annie that said Are you ok?!?!?! Even Jack had texted: Call Lindsey were worried!
Most alarmingly, there was a voicemail from my mother (which I ignored) and a text from Celeste: Call me. Right away.
It started to dawn on me, slowly at first, and then all at once, like what happened to the Red Sea after Moses was done with its parting and it came crashing down, that my life as I knew it was over. I didn’t know why, exactly. I hadn’t looked at the Internet yet. But there was a psychic supernovic flash of knowing. In the near dark distance, something was waiting for me. Something’s wide jaws were opening.
My body started doing the strangest things. I watched these strange things from a distance, with curious detachment. I saw myself jump out of bed, start walking around the room, drop my phone, pick it up again, drop it again, kick it, pick it back up. I saw myself go into the bathroom and come back out right away because I didn’t remember why I’d gone in there in the first place. I walked around some more, dropped my phone again, tried to unlock the home screen but my hands were shaking too much, dropped to my knees. It was odd watching myself behave in this way; I was no more familiar to myself than a character in a movie. I saw myself clutch at my throat and tap my chest with my hands and look up toward the ceiling like a drowning person breaching the surface for a second. On some level I knew that was me, but I was neither in, nor of, my body. No. I was far away.
Humans, I would later learn, are the only mammals to have panic attacks. Something faulty in the wiring, or maybe faulty in the way we’ve set up our civilization, that we come to think we are dying when we are not really dying. Though the truth is that we are dying every moment, every day; becoming too conscious of this fact is the commonest source of our und
oing.
Anyway, there I was, in a real bad way, unable to get my act together and certain that my act was about to collapse upon me, when my phone began to ring. Celeste’s personal ring, which she had personally chosen. Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King.” Years of working for her had conditioned in me a response that nothing could stop, not even death or the threat of it. So I sat up, tried to slow my breath, finally got one deep breath in with a shudder, exhaled, and in the voice, as best I could, of a normal, collected, functional working woman, I answered the phone.
“Hi Celeste, sorry I missed your text.” I didn’t even bother trying to explain myself. “What’s up?”
“What’s up?” she said, her voice as tightly coiled as I’d ever heard it, coiled like a snake about to strike. “What’s—up?”
Then she hung up.
I pulled the phone away from my ear and looked at it, dumbfounded. A text from Celeste rolled in. Just a link.
At nine o’clock that morning, the morning after Julian North assaulted me, prime time for news-dropping and feed-scrolling and the attendees at ABF sitting down at their laptops with a fresh cup of coffee, Wolf Prana tweeted to his thirty thousand followers the video he had taken the previous night of Julian and me facing off in his hotel doorway with the caption, NORTH’S WHORE FREAKS HOTEL FLOOR #abf #juliannorth #northstar #betterthanfiction #whathappensinvegas #bitchesbecray #northgate.
There was sound on the video, but I couldn’t bear to listen. Julian was in his shirt and trousers in the doorway, looking normal and pleasant. I was standing in my bare feet in the hallway, dress askew, yelling at him furiously until all at once I shoved him back, yelled something again, and then tore off down the hallway and toward the camera like a crazed demon. You could just make out the word “MOTHERFUCKER!”on my lips before the video cut off. This was retweeted fifty times, and was eventually picked up by one of those popular sites dedicated to aggregating noteworthy stuff from the annals of the Internet on an hourly basis, and proceeded to go viral. One million views by noon and counting.
The next tweet from Wolf, at 9:02 A.M., was a ps Julian’s wife dyin of cancer #northgate, to which he added an emoji of a dead smiley face and a smiley face covered in a surgical mask.
From a public relations perspective, I had to hand it to Wolf. Every PR girl, every journalist, every conspiracy theorist—hell, every advertiser worth her salt, knows that it’s not what happens that’s important, but the story you make from it. With a few well-timed words, Wolf had managed to turn a situation into a story, a disaster into a joke, a trauma into a meme. I’d seen it happen a million times before to women on the Internet: slut-shaming, fat-shaming, fashion-shaming, naked-photo-shaming, sex-tape-leaking, and the like. But even though such shaming, trolling, dragging, whatever you want to call it, was common, I could only care about it the way I cared about orphans in Romania: which is to say, distantly. It was something that happened to other women, other people, and, though unfortunate, had nothing to do with me.
I just…started laughing.
Or I guess it wasn’t really a laugh. It was just a breathy sound escaping from my mouth, a half step away from hyperventilation, abetted by violent shaking.
I don’t know how long I stayed like that, but I think it was a while.
Eventually, with the same twisted-up sick feeling that made me rubberneck at car crashes on the highway, I tapped the notifications tab on Twitter and started skimming through the comments from members of the hive mind brave enough to tag me.
@wolfprana @caseyprepublic who is this whore hope she rots in hell #northgate
@caseyprepublic DIE BITCH better you than his wife #northgate
@wolfprana @caseyprepublic lost all respect for #juliannorth after this #northgate
@wolfprana i don’t think #juliannorth would cheat this woman is clearly crazy!!!
And so on. The general consensus, guided by Wolf, was that I was Julian’s scorned mistress. Wolf had also tweeted a link to the People’s Republic website, where my smiling head shot suggested that I enjoyed “reading, reality shows, and having fun wherever I am!”
You can imagine the field day people had with this. Dumb bitch, idiot, witch, slut, whore, crazy, sleaze, psycho, homewrecker, too skinny, too fat, nice tits, shitty rack, sinner, backstabber, demon, she-demon, devil, she-devil, jezebel, monster. Not to mention the death threats and suggestions that I put my head in an oven or drown or hang myself or take a gun and shoot myself—this one still makes me cringe—in the you-know-what. A whole subnation of citizens, who previously knew nothing about me, now wished more than anything that I would die. It’s hard to orient to something that disorienting, wrap your head around that unwrappableness. If I could have felt anything I might have cried again, but the part of me that was capable of human emotion had silently excused herself.
It’s hardly surprising, but the percentage of people who were outraged by Julian’s alleged philandering, while not unsubstantial, was far smaller than the percentage of people outraged by me. I chalk that up to the fact that people thought—just as I once had—that Julian North was an amazing person. A genius. A public intellectual and American treasure. It didn’t seem fathomable that he might have a mistress. Julian North wouldn’t do that sort of thing, they said. It didn’t make sense. He loved his wife. They’d been together for twenty years; look how devoted he’d been. Even if he had had an affair with me, I must have tricked him into it. Seduced him. Some women were like that, they said. You had to be careful around them. Born manipulators.
It all moved so fast. Pictures were circulated of Julian and his wife smiling together at various events. Someone dug up their wedding photos. Someone made a GIF of my screaming. After a few hours, when the initial outrage subsided, I became a punch line for jokes. Someone mashed up Wolf’s video with Patsy Cline’s version of “Crazy.” Someone else superimposed my face onto a Disney cartoon villain. That one got a lot of traffic.
Feminist Twitter, bless them, rose to my defense. There were a couple think pieces on Internet bullying and how living in a patriarchy pits women against each other. But the problem with feminist Twitter and feminist websites is that no one reads them but feminists themselves. The gavel of public opinion had made its ruling, siding with precedent. Julian’s reputation would be briefly called into question, then returned to what it had been before. And my reputation was done for.
For a split second, just a split, weaselly, terrifying second, a voice inside my head suggested I take a commenter’s advice and end it now, make it easier on everyone, make it easier on myself. Go to the edge and jump, the voice hissed. Better than them pushing you.
But no. No. I shook my head vigorously. I might be done for, but I would not be a tragedy. I fumbled with the phone, called Susan. She didn’t pick up. I called Lindsey, but it went straight to voicemail. I got to my feet, which felt like blocks of lead, stretched my arms above my head, and with a high-pitched grunt threw my phone with all my might. It landed against the wall with a heavy clunk that sounded so satisfying I threw it again. I put on running shoes and a sports bra and ninety-dollar yoga pants, and I stuck my key in my bra and headed straight for the hotel gym.
I remember thinking as my feet pounded the conveyor belt on the treadmill: I need to get this out of me. What this was, I didn’t have a word for, just the feeling of poison rushing through my blood. Unfortunately, the cortisol-fueled exertion made me miss the one stupid person in the hotel who happened to spot me through the gym’s windows and snap a photo. @caseyprepublic basic bitch working out w no remorse for ruining #juliannorth’s family
But I didn’t know any of this at the time. I had put my phone away and was letting the reptile part of my brain form a plan. I knew the scandal could go one of two ways: one, it could blow over by the end of the day if a replacement scandal was found; or two, I was dead in the water. I gritted my teeth and ran faster and told mys
elf I would not die in the water, all the while looking at the TV screens with their scrolling headlines of violence in other countries, and heavily made-up women laughing along with the audience in semicircles.
And in order not to die in the water, I was going to have to release my own version of events. I’d call Susan again and ask for the evidence of Wolf’s plagiarism. I’d write an open letter explaining why Wolf had released that video—he had it in for me—and how he purposely skewed the context of the video in order to get revenge for a legal and physical roughing up I’d ordered. (Or maybe I’d leave that part out.) Then I’d explain, detail by detail, how Julian had basically lured me back to his hotel room, acted like an old lecher, assaulted me, and denied it, just as countless old lechers had done before. A textbook case. Crystal clear. Straight out of central casting.
There, on the treadmill, this seemed like a reasonable enough plan. I had truth on my side. The truth would set me free.
When I stepped off the treadmill, seven miles had gone by in a quick blur. When I got back to the room, I ran for my phone. I called and left a voicemail for Susan this time in what I’m sure was a manic pitch, asking her to send screenshots of the date stamps from her poetry manuscript. Then I opened my laptop and drafted the open letter. I wanted something in hand, something to read from, when I called Celeste back. Celeste hated mess, and I was going to have to clean up every inch of this one before I talked to her again.
“Before you say anything—” I said as soon as she picked up the phone. I had arranged myself in the desk chair of the hotel room, opened the blinds that had previously shielded me from the blinding sun and synthetic view, and put my power blazer over my sweaty sports bra so that I might convince myself that I was a woman with agency and authority.
A Lady's Guide to Selling Out Page 23
