Consent

by Donna Freitas

  On those days I believed that pear to be on par with his article, sure he’d meant it as a romantic gesture, certain he believed it to be the ultimate of literary, romantic overtures, and that I would appreciate its theological symbolism, that I would grasp its intellectual cleverness, and perhaps fall for him because of it. Yet on others I would laugh at myself for having these suspicions, convince myself I was crazy to think such things, to assume them. It was just a pear, after all.

  A shift occurred on the night that my cover story had fallen apart.

  I’d gone from a state of pretending to not know the truth, of beating it back, to knowing the ugly truth and having to live with it. Having to carry it around with me constantly. It was so heavy it was breaking my back. I was dragging myself from one place to the next, dragging myself through all of my duties, my responsibilities, the work required for my classes. I was becoming a zombie, driving to and from Rhode Island to help my father, to help with my grandmother, to be with my sick mother, who seemed to grow only sicker each time I saw her. On the outside I wore my typical smile, made sure everyone around me believed I was all right, but on the inside, like the pear, I was rotting.

  I began to submit to his attention.

  There’s no other word for it. I submitted. I accepted it as my reality. I accepted that there was no other reality for me to accept.

  I endured his phone calls, and he called me everywhere: my apartment at Georgetown, my family home. I endured the onslaught of his letters, his growing relationship with my mother. I came to expect his presence in the hallways and stairwells and occasionally outside my apartment door. I let the constancy of his invitations, his need, his ever-escalating desperation to see me, spend time with me, crash over me like a giant wave. I just stood there, silently, unmoving, while it did. I did my best to keep breathing through the constant nausea, the despair, the exhaustion. I did my best not to drown.

  I submitted to the reality that the attention would not stop, that I could not stop it, that it was not within my power to make it stop. I accepted that I could not change this. I believed I had no options, that no one would believe me if I told them what was going on. Or that the only thing they would be willing to believe was that I was crazy to suspect this man of wrongdoing, this beloved priest-professor of a man. They would see only the innocent side of his actions, because there was always an innocent side to see. They would dismiss my feelings of desperation, of rage, of fear and disgust, as overreactions.

  Unless.

  Unless he attacked me.

  I began to pray that he would try. I wanted him to try to rape me.

  I know how horrible that sounds, how utterly vile.

  But I need to explain why. His behavior was so complex; he never stepped over a line. It was always just this side of excusable, technically. What’s a few letters? They’re not hurting anyone. What’s wrong with a professor looking out the window of his office? Absolutely nothing. How can you accuse a professor of being in the hallway and the stairwell of the building where he teaches? You can’t. What’s a pear, a few books, a few coffees in the abbey where he lives with his fellow monks? Not much to go on. What’s one article about a famous author and priest written by a similarly renowned author and priest? It’s fulfilling one’s obligations as a professor at a university. How about his calls and letters to my Catholic mother with cancer? A kindness, proof of his generosity.

  The only argument that would ever withstand scrutiny, I reasoned, was the one that would include violence against my person. If he got violent, if he left marks and bruises on my body, if I had to push him off me, if I had to just as violently react to fend him off, only then could I tell someone what was going on. Only then would I have proof, real proof, indisputable proof. The kind you could tell the police about. The kind of thing that would allow you to say, “That man attacked me. That man tried to rape me.”

  This sort of behavior is the clear kind, the kind that leaves behind no doubts, no lingering suspicion of innocence. The kind that crosses a line, firmly and obviously, a line that other people do not dispute.

  I never got so far in my reasoning that I hoped he would succeed. In my mind, he would never succeed, because I would not allow him to. I was confident I could physically overpower him. He seemed so weak. Perhaps I was deceiving myself, but this was my belief.

  There’s more. And this “more” provokes an even greater degree of shame in me than what I’ve already admitted. There was a part of me that wanted, needed him to step clear across the boundaries of that vow of celibacy. I needed him to do it for me.

  I wanted him to try to hurt me, to attack me, so I could finally believe myself. About what I was going through, what was happening to me, what I was enduring, what my life had become. I couldn’t stop doubting myself and my own experiences of his attention. I not only felt tortured by his behavior, but I tortured myself on top of it. I couldn’t allow myself to trust in myself, even as I swam in a sea of despair. To trust myself required me to overthrow all of the trust I’d grown up to have in the authority figures that populated my life. It required me to overthrow the trust I had in my beloved professors and the kindly priests trekking daily to my family’s house to give my mother communion. It required me to overthrow the trust I had, that we all had, in the vow of celibacy that a priest makes not only to the Catholic Church, but to God. It required me to be willing to put myself between him and that vow, between him and God, and accuse him of breaking the most holy of promises.

  To break through that amount of trust, a lifetime of it, a world of it, an entire church built on it, was too much. It was too heavy. I couldn’t do it on my own.

  I simply did not have that amount of trust in myself. How could I, at that young an age, have the trust, the certainty, the righteousness in myself and my own experiences, feelings, and suspicions, necessary to topple that much authority? The trust that universities expect us to have in our professors? That the Church expected of its Catholics?

  And then, I wanted to be wrong about everything. I wanted my doubts to be right. I wanted this with all of my heart.

  This man was going to have to be the one who broke through all those barriers. He was going to have to do the heavy lifting for me. He was going to have to throw all that trust off because I didn’t have the strength to do it myself. He was going to have to take his prestige as a professor, as the head of my concentration, as an important academic, as my mentor, and climb all of those walls to get to me on the other side. He was going to have to be the one to take his vow of celibacy, the vow that marked him as a Catholic priest, and smash it to the ground.

  What a pathetic feminist I was. What a weak little girl. What low self-esteem I must have had to be unable to take care of myself, to believe in myself. How Catholic and obedient of me. How polite. How utterly stupid and naïve. I failed myself for so long. I fail myself even now as I confess these things. Aren’t the things we feel most ashamed of always confessions of a sort?

  The pear began to stink. It sank lower and lower into its rot, like an old man growing shorter with age. I finally threw it out.

  When he asked me if I’d eaten the pear, I lied and said yes, it was delicious.

  16

  I agreed to drive him home from the airport.

  It was mid-November, only a few weeks before I finally told, though at the time, I still didn’t know I was going to tell. It was a calculated decision to pick him up and take him to the abbey where he lived.

  “Don-na,” he was constantly saying in that soft voice of his, every time I picked up the phone, “you’re being a bad friend.” He was perpetually disappointed in me, angry at me, desperate with the need to see me, talk to me, spend time with me, pressuring me, pestering me, admonishing me. I could picture him, too, even if I couldn’t see him when he was scolding me, eyes wide, facial expression open, innocent, vulnerable, his hands pressed together, fingertips touching as though in prayer, the black shirt of a priest stark behind them; everything about
his body and posture perfectly humble, perfectly at peace, confident he was exactly right to let me know of his displeasure.

  By now, my response was always no, a no that grew louder and louder. As soon as I heard his voice on the other end of the line, I began my effort to end the call, to reject his proposals for outings, for getting together, for any conversation whatsoever. It was a seesaw existence, a series of yeses (answering phones, greeting him in hallways, submitting to his presence) followed by immediate nos (getting off the phone, inventing a reason to leave, averting my eyes), a constant and sickening tipping from one way to the other, back and forth, my legs tired from the need to be pushing upward, then immediately absorbing that downward swing. His maneuverings ceased to chill me. I grew used to the clever ways he found new avenues into my life and my world.

  But the airport favor felt like a quick fix to the ever-present onslaught of invitations, and his growing frustration that he could no longer get a yes from me. It seemed a good bet as my one, rare appeasement because it was so concrete, so finite. He would arrive on a plane, I would be at the curb waiting, and I would drive him straight home. It would be fast and easy.

  At the time, I also thought: This will make him stop. Stop saying I’m a bad friend, stop saying I never do anything with him anymore, that I don’t have time for him anymore. This will prove to him that I’m not a bad person, a bad student. I was always in search of the magic fix that would make things okay again. I couldn’t let go of the possibility that there existed some way to remedy all that was going wrong, and I hung on to this chance like it was the edge of a cliff and I was dangling over the side, certain death beneath me. Maybe the airport trip would be the answer, I reasoned.

  As soon as I said yes, he suggested we go for coffee, that we stop for dinner on the way to his abbey, that we do anything, really, to prolong our time together. With each additional request I said no, and no again. I had papers to write, RAs who needed me, books to read, studying to do, a mother to call. All the old, now-tired excuses fell from my mouth once, twice, a third time, and then a fourth. I didn’t care that I was repeating myself. He continued to push that this airport pickup become more than just an airport pickup, and I continued to dodge his maneuverings.

  I began to regret my yes almost as much as I regretted having saddled myself with this favor, with having to spend any time alone with him at all. I dreaded it but consoled myself that it should be fairly painless. I could probably make it from the airport to his abbey in twenty minutes without traffic.

  The evening of the pickup I got in my car to drive to the airport. I remember it was dark, it was nearly winter, so the sun was gone by 5 p.m. His flight was on time; he got in the passenger side. He suggested we stop somewhere for a bite to eat, and once again I demurred. Was I sure I couldn’t? Yes, I was sure. I have no idea what we talked about on the ride, probably something about his trip. I vaguely recall that he was animated. Mostly, I concentrated on getting this favor done, on getting to his abbey as fast as I could without a speeding ticket, so that I could get him out of my car again.

  I kept both hands on the wheel, facing forward, trying to make myself smaller and smaller. His presence, his being, seemed so large in that confined space, it seemed to expand, with all of his robes and his coat on top. He was unconcerned with taking up room, whereas I had become very concerned with taking up as little room as possible. The miles between the airport and the abbey dwindled. I was almost there, we’d almost made it. Soon he would be walking away from my car and I would be driving back to Georgetown, breathing a sigh of relief.

  He continued to insist that I call him by his first name.

  I continued to insist on not doing this.

  He wanted me to call him by his name so badly. He had been using it with me for nearly a year by now, ever since he wrote me that note on my last paper of the semester with an invitation to the theater. He’d signed it L. at the very end. He always said his first name when I picked up the phone, and it appeared on all of his letters. He pleaded with me to use it when I spoke to him.

  I refused to do it and would continue to refuse. I would never use his first name, not once, not in all the time I knew him.

  Father. Professor. Father-Professor.

  I put these titles between us constantly, the formality of them. I used them like a shield. I used them like bricks to build a wall, which he would constantly be tearing down. I used them as a reminder, most of all.

  Father this, and Father that, and Father, I can’t, I’m sorry, Father.

  Father was my greatest weapon. Each time I used it, I was forcing him to remember who he was, who he was to me, who he was to everyone, who he was to himself, to the Church. He was a priest, not a man. He would always be a priest and not a man, not like the boys I dated, never like them. The priests’ vow of celibacy transforms them into non-men, men who do not have romantic relationships, sexual relationships, men who do not shower inappropriate attention on their female students, men who do not follow their female students everywhere or call them constantly. This was what I believed at the time, and what I needed to be true.

  The other priest-professors I’d had at Georgetown and now in graduate school—I never called them Father. They were always and still are Professor to me or, in one instance, Dr. The academic title trumped the religious one, because I was always more interested in their intellectual authority than their Catholic authority. In many ways I could care less that these men were also priests. I was their student, and they were my teachers. Period. But not with him. With him I learned to say Father, even though for the first few months I’d called him Professor as with the others. Over the summer I’d made the shift.

  I would lay the word Father down between us.

  Then he would remove it again.

  He would peel it away from my hands, try to forbid it from rolling off my tongue. I would take a deep breath whenever I ran into him in the halls, readying to speak this greeting. Before I could say Father he would supply his first name in its place, reminding me that this was what he wanted me to call him.

  “’Bye, Father,” I would say moments later, as I hurried away.

  “We’re here, Father,” I said when I turned up the driveway of his abbey.

  I didn’t shut off the car, didn’t even put the car in park. I didn’t look at him, I stayed facing front, staring out the windshield into the darkness, hands gripping the wheel firmly, at ten o’clock and two o’clock, foot pressed hard on the brake. I remember feeling bundled up, a scarf wrapped around my neck, a bulky coat covering my body. My skin felt prickly in the heat.

  He didn’t move to get out. He just sat there, silently.

  Out of the corner of my eye I could see that he was watching me.

  I didn’t turn my head.

  “See you later, Father,” I tried again.

  I could hear him breathing.

  Everything seemed so dark, darker than usual. Dark in the car and dark in the driveway of the abbey, which didn’t have any lights on, not that I remember.

  I waited for him to leave. The engine of the car rumbled as it idled.

  What was going on? Why wasn’t he getting out?

  He inhaled deeply and leaned toward me.

  He planted a big, wet kiss on the side of my face.

  “Don-na,” he said, his lips still close to my skin. “I like you!”

  He said this with such force, such loudness, the downbeat heavy on the like, then he fumbled for the handle of the door, opened it, and ran away. He literally ran away, ran up to the abbey entrance, without looking back.

  I sat there, stunned, disgusted, repulsed, car engine still rumbling, hands still gripping the steering wheel at ten and two o’clock, foot still pressed hard on the brake, trying to figure out what just happened, what in the world he’d meant by it. He’d finally crossed the line into something physical, yet it was so minor, just a kiss on the cheek. It was almost worse that he did this than something more serious. It left room for doub
t to creep in, as it always did with him.

  What was I supposed to take away from that kiss? Was I supposed to understand it as romantic, as friendly? As fatherly or grandfatherly? I’d never received kisses from a teacher before, and certainly not from a priest. In all my years of growing up Catholic I’d never even hugged a priest, and it was rare that I hugged a teacher or a professor, maybe only at graduation.

  I like you, he’d said, in that lilting voice of his.

  It echoed around me in the car.

  I could still feel the wetness of his lips on my cheek, how he’d pressed his face there for a moment, the heat of his breath, the slickness of my skin after he pulled away, the sliminess of his saliva. He was like some middle-school boy with a crush who’d confessed his feelings and run off across the playground. I thought I might be sick. I made myself sick. I wanted to wash off what just happened, get it out of my hair like it was lice.

  I drove home.

  I moved through the world on autopilot.

  Going through the motions of living, of work, of graduate school, of hanging out with my boyfriend and friends, my senses dulled, not quite hearing people’s voices or seeing colors and shapes. I was numb. But on the outside I continued to act like nothing was wrong, that everything was peachy and perfect, except for the one glaring, decidedly unpeachy fact that my mother had cancer and might die.

  Registration for the spring semester came and went. I didn’t sign up for any of his courses, which meant that I was in trouble, academically. I needed to take his classes for my program and I wasn’t doing it. I was in trouble with him again, too, of course, because he wanted me there. Other students began to ask me questions about why. Why was I in their program but not in any of their courses? Was I switching concentrations? Was I thinking of dropping out?