Age of Consent

by Marti Leimbach

  She saw at once that he was in a kind of trance, watching her, his bandaged head rolled back, his mouth open. She wasn’t sure what was going on—it was difficult to work out his expression under all those bandages. She could see the look of concentration, how his mouth opened and closed in vague little gasps like a caught fish. For a second she wondered if he was in pain, wondered if he’d suffered some kind of seizure, but then she glanced south to what he was doing with his good hand, how it was moving under the bedsheets. Even with the injured arm in traction and the pelvis aligned in a rigid splint to keep him from aggravating the fracture there, even though he was using only a single eye to stare at her breasts, he was able to masturbate, sending the sheet springing up with every pump.

  “Oh my God,” she said.

  “Baby…”

  She wanted him to stop, to stop right now. But it was too late; she saw his hand suddenly freeze, his face grimace, the muscles in his arm relax and be still. What he’d done, what he’d done right there in front of her, that act, reminded her of an awful trip to the monkey house at the National Zoo. Like those animals, Craig seemed untroubled by his body’s demands, whatever those demands might be. Now she was going to have to say something, but she didn’t know what. She waited for him to call her over but he said nothing. And so she turned to one side, lowering her shoulders in an attempt to cover herself as she placed her breasts once more into the bra, tugging her blouse around her and fastening the buttons down the front.

  She had crossed a line; they had crossed a line. And now there was a sudden emptying of hope. It was as though the dream of a burgeoning love had been punctured by some nasty doppelgänger dream, a raw, evil version of their relationship that now substituted for what she’d been wishing for, what she’d been imagining the past many weeks.

  She straightened her clothes, combed her hair behind her ears with her fingers, then wiped her palms on her skirt. She still felt exposed. She remembered with relief that she’d brought a jacket. She thought surely he would say something to her, as she was standing next to the bed, inches from him. But his head was tipped away.

  She wasn’t sure how to behave in such circumstances. She felt the way she did after stopping at a gas station and buying a Hershey bar and a Snickers, then eating them both all at once so quickly that she didn’t even enjoy it. After such an event, she wanted to pretend nothing had happened, or that it did not count or did not matter. But such trickery was impossible with someone else involved. She thought she would say something to him now, but did not know what to say. She stared at the floor. It felt such a burden to look up. Finally she picked her handbag off the floor and whispered, “Good night.”

  She thought he’d at least say good night back to her, but he did not. He said nothing. She wondered if he expected her to just shuttle out, dismissed from the room. Surely nobody could be that cold. She stared at him, and now she realized that he was not moving. The awful fear floated toward her: Perhaps because of the excitement and strain on his heart, he had died.

  A little gasp sprang from her, and a sudden, overwhelming horror. She cried out. Her legs wobbled, unable to balance her. She collapsed forward onto the bed, the handbag dropping to the floor, its contents spilling. A lipstick flew across the linoleum like a hockey puck; her hands sprang to break her fall, one on the mattress, the other on the hard frame of his pelvic brace. Her mind could not hold the cascade of thoughts and feelings that flooded into her, that seemed to swirl around her. He was dead; she was falling. The awfulness of it was overwhelming until she finally felt him shudder and cry out and tell her to get the hell off him. Get the hell off him now!

  “What?” She sprang back. She might have dropped onto the floor but the chair caught her. “I thought you were—”

  “Asleep!” he said. “I was asleep!”

  She could see his face creased with anger, smell the yeasty heat of his drying wounds, the sharp scent of Betadine and dressings. He was alive all right—how could she have imagined otherwise?

  He did not speak again, not to ask what time it was, nor to tell her, as he normally did before she left each night, to hold the plastic cup and straw for him to sip water. She stayed in the chair just as she had fallen, her legs splayed, one of her shoes missing, her jacket flopping unbuttoned around her. She saw now that her hairbrush had slid under the bed, and that all the items from her handbag littered the floor: tissues, the pink paper casing of a tampon, pens, lipstick, coins. She was going to have to crawl under the bed and fetch all these things, and she hoped that she would not run her stockings in the process. It was late. She did not have to look at the clock to know that. And it seemed such an awful lot of trouble right now to get down on that floor. She envied Craig, who dropped so easily back to sleep while she waited, stunned and floating, in the aftermath of an encounter she fought to believe was not humiliating. Humiliating for her.

  She heard through the hospital window the faint blare of an ambulance and focused on that noise as it increased, louder and louder. She could worry about anything, she realized now, how she looked in a certain light, whether or not certain people would catch her doing the wrong thing, or what was being said or not being said about her. Meanwhile, there were ambulances emptying themselves of those who had real troubles, who could not breathe or move, who could be dying. She should look outward, she told herself, and think of them. She should focus on what is important. What did she need off the floor, what did she need right now? Her wallet and car keys, that’s all. Would it be so awful to leave the other things? Was she obligated to mop up life’s every little mess? She scooped her keys into her palm, fished out her wallet with her toe. She would go now; he was asleep and so what was the point of waiting for him to talk to her, to care for her, to tell her something that would make what they had done feel good? She got up from the chair. He did not move. She adjusted her clothes, ran her fingers through her hair. He slept with his mouth open; she could see his pale pink tongue. She wished he would wake and smile at her, and hold her hand. Never mind, she’d go home now. That was all. She’d collect the rest of her things tomorrow.

  BECAUSE SHE WOULDN’T MARRY HIM

  2008

  Bobbie cannot eat the club sandwich she is given for lunch. She cannot drink the coffee. She can drink water; she can play with the wedge of lemon in the glass. She does not want to think or to talk to anyone.

  She keeps watching for Dan. He is next in the line of witnesses for the prosecution. He is here in the building, somewhere. She isn’t sure whether she wants to see him or not. She is sure, however, that she doesn’t want to see anyone else.

  When she gets back into the courtroom, she searches her bag for some lip gloss or ChapStick or anything that can soothe her dry lips. She feels inside the bag, but instead of finding the lip gloss, she feels a stiff piece of paper. She looks down and there, in her handbag, beside her makeup and notebook and keys and papers, she sees a page from a yellow legal pad folded into thirds, waiting for her. Her name, written in strange, blocky handwriting, blazes on the front of it. She knows at once that the letter is from Craig and that he has disguised his handwriting.

  So nothing has changed for him. She feels a freezing in her chest, a sudden unsteadiness. Even now, he is able to do whatever he likes—in front of a judge and jury, in front of his own counsel. She believes the brazen manner with which he would write her a letter—at all, but especially here in court—is because he thinks he has done nothing wrong.

  She recalls freshly how he would invent his own moral world, deciding in his mind the rightness or wrongness of an act. He had rules. He had notions of conduct. He would watch pornography before having sex with her, for instance, making a point that she should not see it. She was too young for that, he’d explained. She was not old enough yet to “handle porn.” Watching alone, then calling her into the bedroom with him, made it okay because he wasn’t letting her see what he called “the ugly side of sex.” He was shielding her from that which he found unsavory.<
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  And so she would wait somewhere else. If his housemates were away she would stay in the kitchen while he watched a video, the curtains drawn, the only light coming from the TV screen. Sitting on a kitchen stool, waiting for him to call her, she might have been blowing bubbles in milk with a straw or dividing her M&M’s by color. Then she’d hear her name, put those things away, and walk like a zombie through the open door of the bedroom. Her eyes adjusted to the dim light and there it was: his arousal, abrupt and unconcealed. No matter how often she’d been exposed to him, naked and erect, the suddenness of seeing him on the bed, running his palm over his erection as though polishing a stone, the video still frozen on the screen, felt newly alarming.

  She thinks to herself now, He is still the same. And the notion that such a man has continued unstopped, continued through days and years and decades while she covered her face with her hands and saw none of it because it was so much easier to do nothing, makes her feel a different sort of shame. She might have prevented it happening to other girls. She might have stopped him dead.

  She imagines that the letter he has somehow slipped into her bag is supposed to prove to her that she was never entirely outside of his grasp, and that nobody can take away his freedom. He can reach inside any part of her he wishes. Hasn’t that always been the case? Not that he, specifically, over the years had been able to reach into her, to hurt her, but that his memory had done so. Hasn’t his mark upon her been as constant as though he’d been there all along, darkening the stain he made on her all those years ago?

  She wheels around and sees him there at the defense table, engaged in a conversation with Elstree. His broad face is crosshatched by an enormous frown line that runs the length of his forehead. He wears a pair of narrow black-framed eyeglasses with lenses that go from light to dark in different light conditions. Somehow in the last too-many years he’s managed to lose his eyebrows. She isn’t sure how a person can cause their eyebrows to suddenly disappear but she sees plainly where they used to be but are no longer. Maybe he burned them off smoking from short bongs. He’d once singed off all his eyelashes doing just that.

  She thinks she should rip up the note but considers that perhaps it could be used as evidence. She can’t decide whether to read it or to show it to Dreyer. Perhaps she will do neither, just throw the paper into the trash as though she had only noticed that it didn’t belong to her. She stares down at it as though it is a zoo animal that might come crashing through the cage bars, and tells herself that nothing he writes to her can touch her. The risk from such an action is for himself. He should be more careful.

  Despite herself, she opens the letter. It is only a single sentence, formed in the blocky letters that will make it impossible to identify as his. It reads, I married her because you would not let me marry you.

  Marry. When she was fourteen he’d made the promise to marry her one day. He stated this plainly, with confidence, as though it were inevitable. The thought used to terrify her, as though having sex with him meant that, eventually, she had to marry him. Refusal to marry him when she was doing all that with him would be a terrible reflection on her character. She felt bound to him, the same feeling she often had that obligated her to get into his car when he opened the door, and to say nothing as he drove her out somewhere private. The same sense of obligation that meant she let him assess her body, turning her in front of him like the mechanical ballerina in a music box, checking her hips and breasts and ass. To marry him was only a continuation of that same hold he’d had on her. One more step in a process she’d seemed helpless to end.

  I will stop you from hurting others, she thinks. The declaration rings with bravado and she knows it is unlikely. It helps her, however, to believe that there is rightness to her actions, just as it had helped him all those years ago to make declarations of love or marriage. Such promises served in Craig’s mind to legitimize everything he’d done—luring her, fixing her in place, convincing her to stay. She understood this in a way she could not have as a girl. He was convinced he loved her, and this fact, if it were a fact, made whatever he did acceptable to him. He could feel like a good guy because he offered marriage, as though that made up for it all.

  She looks at him now. In his version of their story, he has loved long and deeply. He has risked everything for this one dark passion. His girl, his Barbara. How can it be imaginable to him now, at this late date, that she loves him or ever had loved him? I married her because you would not let me marry you. She watches him at the defense table and he suddenly turns toward her, as though he’d known all along that she was watching him. He stares at her, smiling. The note is still in her hand. She wishes she hadn’t read it. He is so pleased, she thinks, that once again she has taken his bait.

  From the right, Dreyer approaches the stand and now obstructs her sightline. “You ready?” he says. “We’re going to fix everything up again.”

  He means the cross-examination with Elstree that went so wrong. He means that he is going to put her back on the stand and ask her to clarify why she said nothing, why she did not ask for help, and why she had not been seen. These are the essential questions upon which everything rests.

  If she is going to show him the letter, now is the time.

  “There is a letter,” she says.

  Dreyer waits for the hum of conversation to begin again before pushing Bobbie for an answer. “What letter?”

  Everything is in motion once more; the judge is arriving, they are being told to all rise.

  “Never mind,” she whispers.

  “Tell me.”

  She thinks of the letter in her bag. What is the point of showing it to anyone? Who would believe he’d written such a thing and stuck it in her bag? She’d only be accused of writing it herself. “A long time ago,” she tells him. “From Craig. But it doesn’t matter now.”

  Years ago, Craig had scrawled a similar note on a piece of hospital stationery in what looked like a child’s hand. She remembers how she’d come home from school and found the letter in the mailbox. That letter had served as the one in her bag did now, to unsettle her, to make her feel as though her life would forever be haunted by him.

  HOSPITAL LETTER

  1978

  All those weeks, head wound in so many bandages he couldn’t angle it to rest, face half covered, tubes everywhere, bruises and needles, and a permanent throb deep in his right hip that kept him up most nights. He’d never been so fucked up. His body was a painful storehouse of organs and bones; he couldn’t make it do anything more than fart. Finally he was feeling better and would they connect a phone in his room? Would they, hell! No phones were allowed in this particular room, this treatment room, they said, as though he was getting any decent treatment here.

  “That being on whose say-so?” he asked.

  “That being the rules,” one of the clan of nurses told him. They were all in cahoots, these nurses—tribal, sisterly. This one was into her forties, a give-up-on-looks kind of a woman who was getting fat and letting her hair go gray, which would be all right if at least she’d be kind and motherly, which she was not.

  “What the hell sort of rules stops you using a phone?” he said.

  The nurse shrugged and wrote something on his chart.

  “What are you writing there?”

  “Nil by mouth.”

  “Oh ha ha. You gonna starve me, too? Starve me in this phoneless prison? Watch me through the window like a goldfish in a bowl?”

  He wanted to tell the nurse how once he’d seen an actual, real goldfish sick in a tank with something called “swim bladder” disease. The fish swam pathetically upside down, making slow circles with its one working fin, and that he was like that fish now. On his back, unable to use all his limbs, floating through his days. But would she care? No, she wouldn’t care that he was sick like a fish. He’d been shut down, made to comply by virtue of his body that stank and itched under the bandages and didn’t do one damned thing he asked.

  “A phone is a bas
ic necessity,” he insisted. “You could allow me that much.”

  The nurse gave him a sideways glance. “You want me to wire it in myself?” she said. “With my phone wires and all my workman tools that I keep right here on my person?”

  She was wicked, he decided, another ugly one past her prime. She was looking at him with that superior look he hated so much. It didn’t seem right that an ugly woman could act so haughty. “Who you want to call anyway?” she said.

  “Who you want to call,” he said in a singsong voice, mocking her.

  When finally—at last—the arm was cut loose, he was at least allowed paper and pen, so he tried writing a letter. By then, he was desperate for some pot and had the feeling of a castaway scrawling a help message in his own blood and hoping the bottle is found before fresh water runs out. He needed Bobbie—needed her right now—to bring him weed or else he really would go crazy in the glaring desert of this hospital and all its nasty nurses, many of whom he would have found difficult to cope with straight even at the best of times, let alone when he couldn’t stand up to pee.

  Using his bent knee as a surface, he started the letter in messy left-handed scrawl, the best he could do with his right arm mummified. He hated the plaster cast that housed his broken arm, and lately he’d been hating the arm, too. It itched and stank and hurt and made him want to bash the plaster off and gnaw away the bone at the shoulder. His left arm was pretty useless, too. It was like a weak, emaciated twin that couldn’t even hold a pen at a useful angle. He did his best, pissed off at how long it took and how sore his hand was from the effort and from all the needle holes and bruises and gummy areas where tape had been ripped off and reapplied. His left hand was being abused here at the hospital. No wonder it didn’t write well.