Despite all of my rationalizations, I knew, clearly and acutely and immediately, that there was no way I was going on a retreat with this man. Absolutely not.
“That sounds great,” I told him. “But I’ll have to get back to you.”
The disappointment in his voice on hearing my answer was evident.
He began to pressure me. When would I know? I didn’t have to go for the whole time. If I didn’t go for the whole time, would that make the trip more feasible? He would drive. Would that make it easier? It was a wonderful place, a wonderful house, I would be missing out if I said no. It was a great opportunity that he’d been able to reserve the house. It was in high demand, especially in summer. What luck that he could get it for us. He went on and on, trying to talk me into going, trying every possible angle to make me say yes.
A war began inside of me.
It was fine that he’d invited me, right? No, it was weird that he had, wasn’t it? He was a priest, so I had nothing to worry about, right? No, it was odd for a professor to invite a student to go away with him, even if he was a priest. I should be more adult about this, shouldn’t I? I was acting like a child, feeling strange about going on a retreat with someone old enough to be my father, even my grandfather. He didn’t mean anything untoward. Of course not! He was celibate! He was a respected professor! Any unease that I felt was my problem. I was the one making this invitation weird and strange and off. He was just being nice. I should be grateful and let it go at that.
“I’m really not sure I can go,” I lied. “But I’ll do my best to try to make it work.”
We ended the call. He would phone several more times before he left, asking about the trip. He would write to me, too, explaining the same things that he had when we’d talked. It reminded me of his maneuverings about my schedule. But while initially I’d found his interest in my classes flattering, now, for the first time, I moved straight into outright avoidance of him. I became evasive, I resisted his pleas and arguments as to why I needed to do something with him, go somewhere with him. I knew with total certainty from the first moment he suggested going away that I would never say yes, that there was no argument or concession in the world that would change my mind or make it feasible that I would go.
I did not consent. No way.
But I kept my non-consent to myself.
I was still too afraid to express my resistance openly. I was afraid I would hurt his feelings. I was also afraid that my saying no, unequivocally and without hesitation, would convey to him that I thought his invitation stemmed from ulterior motives. The possibility that he might realize I was thinking this shamed me.
And I felt so ashamed.
I felt many kinds of ashamed. Shame that a professor had thought to invite me to go away for a week. (What had I done to plant this desire in him? Was it the way I smiled? The way I carried myself at school?) Shame about what this might mean. (Had I led him on somehow? Had I said something that made him think I was hitting on him?) Shame that it might be because of the outfits I wore to school. (Had it been my boots? Or was it my short skirts? My tight jeans?). Shame that I even wondered whether he’d taken my outfits the wrong way. (How could I be that arrogant, to think I was so attractive that he couldn’t help noticing me this way?) Shame that I was having thoughts that disrespected his vow of celibacy. (A priest would never cross that line, right? Or think about one of his students in a sexual way?) Shame that whatever it was that made him invite me to go away, just the two of us, was all my fault. (Obviously I had led him on, like sometimes I led on the boys I dated. And I was guilty of leading people on occasionally. I could be a shameless flirt, so maybe I was flirting with him and didn’t even realize it?)
My answer to him came only in the form of time running out on the trip. The deadline of his departure approached, then it arrived, and still he hadn’t been able to persuade me to go. Every time he asked me about the retreat house, I hemmed and hawed and said, “Maybe, maybe, maybe?” None of his concessions—to make the trip shorter, to drive, to offer to take two cars instead of going together, to help me think about my dissertation proposal—had gotten a straight yes. Only more avoidance. As a last resort, exasperated with me, he suggested I could invite another friend if I wanted. But nothing worked, not even this. “Maybe?” I told him. The reality settled in that I really was not going because it had come time for him to leave and I still hadn’t told him one way or the other if I could make it. My no came from inaction, from halfhearted excuses, from lies of indecision. My no was indirect in that it was expressed by my failure to make the trip work on my end. By my doing nothing to make it happen.
He went alone.
I breathed a sigh of relief once the possibility of going was off my plate. I’d successfully avoided doing something there was no way I was going to do, and I’d done it without actually having to say no outright, as if my professor were an annoying friend or, worse, an annoying guy who was trying to date me. I hadn’t exactly been subtle or skilled in my excuses and avoidance tactics, but at least the decision was behind me. I could now enjoy the rest of the summer in my new apartment.
But then he called from the retreat house to tell me I could still change my mind and get in the car, drive out there, and meet him. He called again to tell me what I was missing by not doing this, how wonderful it was to be there, how much I would love it if I joined him at the house. How much we could accomplish, how we could cook meals, how we could take walks.
My relief evaporated. The desperation in his voice was unmistakable. And as his calls mounted, it became evident that even though the departure date for the retreat had come and gone, even though he was actually on the retreat right now, he still thought there was a chance he could convince me I should go. He would continue to offer me the chance until the opportunity had passed and he returned from the trip. But then a new opportunity to go on another retreat arose immediately following, and the back-and-forth about my going started all over again.
This would become a pattern.
It might have been those calls from the retreat house that struck the first real blow at my knees, crippling me from there on out. Those calls made it clear that there would be no end to his need. That his requests would never stop. That there was no number of excuses or avoidance tactics that would reach him. That he simply could not be reached in this way. If it wasn’t this retreat, it would be the next one, which he planned to go on only a couple of weeks later, or the next one after that. Or it would be an event at the theater, or a museum, or the Kennedy Center, or a dinner, or a coffee, or a visit to my house, or the possibility that I could still sign up for one of his fall courses, because didn’t I realize it was only summer and the semester hadn’t even started yet? There was plenty of time for me to change my mind, for me to fix this failing on my part, for me to fix all the things I’d begun to fail at, a list that grew longer by the day, because by now he was contacting me by the day. According to him, I soon learned, there would always be time for me to say yes. That yes was the only answer he was willing to hear.
Most people would have understood my behavior for what it was—the politest, most appropriate manner I could find to say no to an elder, a professor, a priest, without actually saying no to him. Most people with social and relationship skills, someone with the capacity to pay attention to the signals and feelings of someone else, would have gotten the picture and realized I was declining their attention in the nicest way I could manage. Then again, most people wouldn’t have been so persistent, so insistent, really, so unable to hear or perceive that my excuses were really nos, that my avoiding answering was really a “Sorry, but no, no thank you.” Most people would have been willing to see my behavior for what it was. But what do you do when someone is unwilling? When they refuse to see? I still don’t know. I wish I did.
I want to talk about my inability to say no.
When we talk about consent, especially with high school and college students, we make it seem like it is as simple a
s uttering the word no or yes. We encourage young adults to speak these words enthusiastically. Determinedly. With resolve. That is actually the word we call on when we teach about it—enthusiasm. Enthusiastic yeses as the mark of consent, and firm nos the mark of its absence.
When I consider these words in my situation, yes and no, it just makes me laugh and think, Are you kidding? How in the world does a student give a firm no to a professor? To someone so far her senior? To someone who could determine her future? To someone on whom her future depends? How in the world does a young woman give a decided no to a Catholic priest?
For me to give someone a firm and enthusiastic yes or no is to presume the person I am saying yes or no to is my equal, or at least someone I feel equal to saying yes or no to, as though they are a partner, a friend, someone with whom I am on the same footing. It presumes I am in possession of some power in the situation. It presumes that the other person sees me as an equal, or something like a peer, and is waiting to see if they are going to get a yes or no before proceeding with whatever they’d like to happen next. It presumes the other person can see me at all, or cares to; that they have respect for me as though we are both the same.
For me to have given this professor a firm no, for me to have said no outright, would have sounded like a scolding. It would have involved me acting as though my professor were just another boy my age who was hitting on me and I was rejecting him. The young woman student I was could not wrap her brain around the notion that a professor was hitting on her, never mind rise to a place where she would treat him like he might be just another guy making a move on her at a bar. Not only was there too much at stake, but a student’s regard for a professor doesn’t simply vanish if his behavior makes her uneasy or seems off in some way.
Using the word no was too tall an order in my situation. The only thing that seemed feasible was for me to go along with just about everything this professor suggested as best I could, and to demur and put off situations when I didn’t want to comply with his wishes. While my very early yeses to him may have indeed been enthusiastic, because early on I was enthusiastic about this professor, eventually they grew fainter and fainter until they were less like yeses and more like tolerance of whatever he needed at the time. Or, they became a putting off of my no, a deferring as long as I could, so that the issue passed and an actual no was never necessary.
But saying no, really saying it firmly, was out of the question for a long, long time—until his behavior grew so intolerable and so out of control and so obsessive and unyielding that I no longer cared about my future or what might happen if I offended him. Until I was so desperate and broken that I didn’t want a future anymore at all.
The power dynamics between the old and the young, between a big man and a small woman, between someone famous and important in your profession and you, when you are just starting out, between someone whom everyone loves and admires and you, who are still a nobody, between someone you aspire to become and the person you are now can seem insurmountable. To name their behavior as unacceptable, to do so explicitly and forcefully, may seem impossible. You know that to name it outright will more likely destroy you and your future than his.
And that has been the pattern in our culture, hasn’t it? The woman pays the price with her future, and the man keeps his present and his future as though he did nothing wrong. That is the deal we strike when we come forward, isn’t it?
So you don’t name it. You say nothing. You just stay still and hope that nothing too terrible happens. That whatever does happen, you’ll learn to live with the consequences somehow. And most of all and above everything, you hope and pray that no one else will ever find out.
Everything with him happened so fast after that.
In one semester, his attention had gone from a kind invitation to take me to the theater to inviting me to go away with him, just him, the two of us alone. In January, I had been happy to spend time with him, in February, happy to have him leaving me notes and newspaper clippings, but by March, the sheer amount of attention he began to heap on me happened too fast for me to get my bearings. I was just suddenly in it, buried in it. I don’t even know what the tipping point was, if it was as simple as him peering through the window of my front door that day at my Georgetown apartment, having arrived uninvited, or the maneuverings about my schedule, or the obsession with the retreat house, or if it was all of these things together. But the dread inside me, the revulsion I had for him, grew until it became monstrous. He became monstrous. And like that of any poor soul in a terrible, ugly fairy tale, my life became about learning to trick the monster.
8
The letters he sent piled up.
My summer was busy. I was in training for my new position. Working in Student Affairs is all-consuming, it’s often around-the-clock. Also, by now I was dating Christopher and I was really into him. We spent all of our time together when I wasn’t working. He made me laugh like no one else I’d ever known.
But he was so not my type. Christopher had a Southern drawl so strong sometimes I could barely understand him, and he drove everywhere in a giant red truck, gunning the engine. He was from Tennessee, and I made a million assumptions about his politics when we first met, all of which turned out to be wrong. He was a teacher, an excellent one, and I admired him for this from the beginning. He was also the hugest flirt, but when we met, I marked him boldly and clearly in my mind: Nope. Not gonna go there. Christopher worked hard to get me to give him a chance—and once I did, I fell in love, and soon it was me driving around the city with Christopher in that big red truck, sometimes taking long road trips to Tennessee to see his family.
Christopher also happened to be roommates with Dan, my closest friend at graduate school. Dan was a few years ahead of me in his PhD. He and I were fast friends, though he always felt more like a brother. The two of us would go out for drinks after classes, talk about what we were working on, about ideas and books we loved and our respective relationship dramas. He and Christopher played on a soccer team together and got along so well they’d decided to become roommates. That I’d ended up dating Christopher was totally unrelated to his friendship with Dan and was a serendipitous, convenient accident for all of us. I’d go to their soccer games, we’d hang out afterward at their place, go to dinner, the movies, play video games. Spending time with Christopher and Dan was the perfect antidote to the parts of my life that were growing increasingly worrisome.
Meanwhile, my professor wrote to me. He was going on trip after trip that summer. He was a sought-after speaker, a scholar who’d grown popular in certain circles for his wisdom. He wanted to make sure I knew all of these things, so he’d write to tell me about every single one of them. He signed his letters with his first name and only his first name.
Letters from him arrived at my new address, a mailbox in the Student Affairs office. I grew used to the steady stream of them. At first, I opened them, read them. They were always so benign, just updates on whatever he was doing, where he was traveling, conferences where he was speaking, interesting people he’d met. Maybe a copy of a talk he gave, or an article he thought I should read. I received them, saw what was inside, set them aside in a pile on the windowsill of my new office.
He called, too. Sometimes every day, if he wanted something from me. Sometimes more than once a day.
I tried not to think about it much. Tried to tell myself it was nice that he wanted to stay in touch. I was determined to see it that way. I had a lot going on that was good, so it was easy for me to be consumed with things other than him that summer, and I let them consume me. As the summer progressed, I pushed his invitations to go away to the retreat house into the back of my mind, until they began to seem far away, almost like they hadn’t happened. I loved the intensity of my Student Affairs job, my RA staff, the constant activity, my new colleagues, some of whom would become friends. My residents would be arriving soon, and my hall would open and be full of life.
His letters increased. Sometimes
there would be three in one day.
I would collect them in my purse with the rest of the mail and walk them across campus to my apartment. I no longer opened them immediately. Most of them I didn’t open at all. Instead, I’d add them to the pile on the windowsill in my office. The pile grew.
It’s difficult for me not to wonder what I might have done differently if he hadn’t been a priest. Would I have said something about his behavior sooner? Would I have been far less forgiving? Would I have justified and rationalized everything much less than I actually did?
Sometimes I think it’s the celibacy issue that tripped me up most, made it seem impossible to tell anyone anything. Even as I began to worry that his behavior was something other than a benign and selfless interest in my intellect, the vow of celibacy he’d taken muted all of these concerns.
This was the nineties, before news of the Catholic abuse scandal broke. No one knew, or no one was talking openly—not Catholic laypeople or regular people—about priests who were abusing children, who were assaulting people. Nobody knew the Catholic hierarchy was covering everything up, that it had an established MO for doing this. When I was in graduate school, priests were still sacred figures, untarnished role models who did only good in the community, who offered up their lives to take care of others. Priests were representatives of God, and you didn’t question this if you were Catholic. Likewise, you didn’t question them or their authority.
Catholicism, Catholic people, even Catholic stories, had filled my childhood. My father went to public school, but my mother went to Catholic school and regularly plied me with funny anecdotes about the nuns of her youth, how they measured her skirts, how they made her wear paper “doilies” on her head at daily mass if she forgot her hair covering. She spoke of years of learning Latin, of the saints who populated her days and with whom she populated my youth, placing mass cards and statues all over our house. My mother was also a Catholic schoolteacher. She had two best friends, one a nun, the other an ex-nun who had taken her vows young and then left, gotten married, and had a family. In the summers they sat on the beach together, these formidable, complicated Catholic ladies, and I played with the children of the ex-nun throughout my childhood. During the school year my life was filled with nuns and priests, too, especially my mother’s nun best friend, who came to the house, drank coffee, socialized with my mother, while I sat in the living room watching television or joined them at the kitchen table. I loved the sisters who taught at my mother’s school and who taught at mine, too.
Consent Page 9
