Consent

by Donna Freitas

I swing wildly between these two interpretations, depending on the day, the hour, what novel I’m reading, or the particular news update I’ve seen. I think, probably, the truth is somewhere in the middle.

  This is a man who entered the priesthood at a very young age, far too young, who committed to celibacy likely before he could fully comprehend what celibacy meant, what it required, how it would shape his future life and relationships, how it would forbid him certain types of relationships. He joined the priesthood during an era when the Catholic Church was in denial about the sexual desires of its priests, when the Church was still burying the issues that accompanied a life of celibacy. The Catholic Church refused to deal with the complications of this vow, the wicked crimes now attached to it. Instead it became masterful at denial, at burial, at looking the other way when its priests raped children. It sacrificed the lives of so many children to save the lives and reputations of its priests and the institution. So, in many ways, this professor was, is, simply another problematic priest from that pre-sex-scandal era of the Catholic Church, among so many others just like him, among the thousands of others just like him. He’s just the one who happens to be mine.

  Then again, maybe he always knew more than I’ve assumed about what priests were doing and getting away with. Maybe his friends in the priesthood were all in on it together, completely self-aware about the wrongness of their behavior, laughing when they got home over their cocktails and dinner served by kindly, unsuspecting Catholic ladies doing their duty and taking care of these heroic, celibate Catholic men. Or maybe he had no idea at all, and he was bumbling about like a drunk, vision blurry, a slave to his desires, desires he was hiding from his fellow priests, hiding from himself even, desires that he simply did not know how to control or stop, desires he knew were highly problematic given his vows. (And he did know, I will remind myself here, at least eventually, because he wrote about their forbidden nature in that article he sent me.) Maybe at night he suffered a terrible turmoil about having feelings he could not restrain, feelings he’d never known before, feelings he couldn’t stop no matter how hard he tried.

  Or maybe I’m giving him too much credit again. Maybe I’m giving myself too much credit, too, and I was not his first love. Maybe I was his second, his third, his tenth. Maybe he did to twenty other young women, girls, the very same thing he did to me, and the Catholic Church buried his actions with them as it did his actions with me. I don’t think I will ever know the answer to any of these questions, and as with so many other things, I simply have to accept this.

  One evening, at happy hour, one of my closest friends asked me his name.

  I turned to her, mouth half-open, ready to utter the answer.

  But then, I didn’t.

  “Almost no one knows it,” I said. “Not even my husband.”

  It’s not that I don’t trust you, or that I wouldn’t tell you, I stammered. But I…I…I just…can’t.

  I said this, then sat there, at the bar, sipping my drink and trying to understand why I couldn’t tell her. Why, really, couldn’t I? Why not? What was the big deal? It’s been forever since all of that happened.

  And this friend is a person I trust completely, have always trusted, with whom I have shared some of the most intimate moments a life can force on us. Not long ago, I stood by her while her husband took his last breaths in a hospital room, watched with her as the monitors ticked each of the final beats of his heart, as they got slower and slower until they stopped and he was gone. So, intimacy is not a problem between us. We have plenty of it.

  “I wouldn’t google him if you didn’t want me to,” she offered.

  “I know you wouldn’t,” I said, and meant this, because I knew she meant it.

  Her question forced me to try to understand why I couldn’t speak his name, why I never do, not to anyone, ever. I am afraid that somehow—even with promises not to look him up—knowing his name will allow friends and loved ones to find out who he is, that it is inevitable they will find out, and then, from that day forward, his face, his image, will be an overlay across my face, my body, like film or plastic wrap, I will be trapped beneath him, he will be suffocating me for the rest of my relationships with these other people. The possibility tortures me.

  “I couldn’t bear it if, when we got together, you associated me with what you saw of him,” I told her finally, the best explanation I could manage. “I don’t want you ever to associate me with him.”

  This is another of the ways I have banished him from my life, or tried to, another method of splitting myself, of maintaining the person I am now, who has done her best to wash herself of this man’s filth, even though I know this is not technically possible. Even though I know that, in a single moment, the world will tilt, and I will be the girl I was back then, as raw and bruised as when he was still in my life, still refusing to go away.

  A few months ago, I was walking with this same friend through Brooklyn, and I told her that I was considering writing this man a letter. I told her about the dread I felt when I’d googled him, the strange fear that he would die before I could say what I wanted to say. It’s not that I’ve never thought about what I might say to him, I told her, I just never thought I would actually ever say it, and lately I kind of wanted to.

  Before, it had always seemed too dangerous, too much like a bad idea to contact him. It was never a real consideration, the thought of writing him, because I was so afraid he would write me back, that he would find me again, that he would take any contact as an invitation to be in my life once more. That like an addict of alcohol or drugs, he would again become addicted to me, because he really was like an addict of me, as disgusting as that is to admit.

  But as the source of my dread about his possible death came to light, I realized something else, I told my friend as we passed through Fort Greene, which is this:

  I am no longer afraid.

  I am no longer afraid of him contacting me, or writing to me, or emailing me, or even showing up at my door like he used to, unannounced. If he showed up at my door today, I think I would laugh in his face. I think I would laugh because it would be a pathetic act on his part. Until recently, seeing him again would have undone me, but I don’t think it would now. His power is gone in that respect. It’s true that he will always have power over me because what happened still lives in my brain, and because of the way he affected my professional life and current reality. But I now know that the power of his physical presence lies in the past and not in my present. Anything he did today would roll off me, I think.

  “You know what you could do,” my friend said. “You know what you should do…”

  “What?” I asked. I could tell she liked the idea of whatever it was.

  “You could find every email address he has and ever has had,” she went on, “you could find his home address, his work address, every place that has his name associated with it, even the church where he preaches if he still preaches, his social media accounts, every location where he can possibly be contacted. And you could send him unmarked letters at every single one of them. Use different fonts, don’t put a return address. Give him a taste of his own medicine. Do to him what he did to you. Just once. So he knows what it feels like.”

  I laughed. It never occurred to me, likely never would have occurred to me, to do something like what my friend suggested. I liked contemplating the thought of doing it, even though I also knew it would be cruel. He is an old man and likely won’t be around much longer. I should have more sympathy for him, shouldn’t I? Let him go to his grave without a last communication from me?

  I don’t think I ever will write him, though I do think about it, though I still have things to say, though I would still like an apology, and likewise would like him to ask me if I would forgive him, because I would like him to acknowledge that he needs my forgiveness.

  I do not forgive him and I wouldn’t and I won’t.

  30

  There is a way in which this story has never been mine.


  For one, I didn’t want it.

  Who would? What person, what young woman, what young feminist, would want these ugly, unflattering experiences to be part of her past?

  I’ve spent decades burying this story, hiding it, covering it up as best as I can manage, much like the cover story I invented to keep my reality a secret from the people around me. I’ve put as much life, as much living and experience, as possible between me and that time. I’ve spent my energy putting distance between me and him.

  So, this story wasn’t mine because I didn’t want it to be.

  Because I refused it.

  But for another, this story was taken from me.

  It was taken away by my graduate school, by the administration there. It was officially stricken from the record, from any records. It was expunged. I was paid a small fee for my silence and my denial. I remember my lawyer explaining to me what it was.

  “They’re giving you a nuisance fee,” he said.

  Nuisance.

  That word has run through me for decades. I am, I was, a nuisance. Like a gnat that flies around someone’s face on a hot summer day. I was, I am, the equivalent of a gnat to my graduate institution, to the Catholic Church, a harmless bug to swat at, to squash. All that I lived because of that man, and I was the one deemed a nuisance.

  But the thing is, the story still exists.

  He, and they, gave me this story.

  The story is mine.

  I am the protagonist now, not them, not him.

  I am the story.

  Because I am still me, I am still here, and it happened to me, no matter how much I would love to deny it, and no matter how much my graduate school would love to deny it. All of these things happened to me, and I have them in me. I carry them in my heart.

  I am fusing them with the person I am now, a person who can study this story like a scientist, under a microscope of words and memories, turn it around, look underneath it, hypothesize about it, analyze it, offer it to others to study and think about and debate and judge.

  I am claiming it. I am naming it.

  One of the first things I learned in my feminist education was that for millennia, men have controlled women’s stories, they have written us into their stories by writing over us, writing over our voices until our voices could not be heard, until our voices did not matter. That men have believed, have known, that by controlling the story they could control us through the story; that they would always have us because of this, they would always have power over us, because the story would always be theirs.

  But feminism also taught me that even though men might have told the stories of women for millennia, even though men have assumed this right as though it was theirs all along, their right to be and become our voices for us, women can speak up and claim our stories for ourselves. We can take our stories back from them and rewrite them according to our actual experiences, what we actually think, what we’ve actually lived, from our perspective. We can stop being characters in the stories of men and become the protagonists in our own stories.

  The stories of women.

  This man forced this story on me decades ago. He wrote this story and I starred in it. He wrote this story for me, about me, without my permission. Then my graduate school wrote over it, rewrote it, chose to erase it, because they knew I was young and I was afraid and I was desperate and, because of this, I would let them erase me along with the story. They took the soft side of a pencil and rubbed it over my features, my outline, my being, until I ceased to exist. They wrote me out of my very own story.

  Or, at least, they tried.

  Acknowledgments

  This is not a book I ever imagined writing. Its existence depends upon the people in my life who were willing to listen when I was ready to speak, and to forgive my struggles to speak this part of my story. I will always be grateful for your patience, support, and belief in me—you know who you are. I live in gratitude to you every day. You are my friends, family, and loved ones.

  I want to say a special thanks to my editor, Judy Clain, and to everyone at Little, Brown for having so much faith in this book, and of course to Miriam Altshuler, my agent, who has been a mentor, a cheerleader, and a friend for so many years now, and to all my writer friends who read drafts. You have helped me make this book the best it can be.

  Lastly: there is one person in particular, who wondered if, after I wrote this memoir and had the people closest to me read it for various reasons, I still felt alone in it. And I realized as I pondered her question that for the first time in my life, the answer was no. I don’t think I feel alone anymore. I think I feel known. And that feels like a miracle. So, to the people I love and the people who love me who’ve spent their time reading this book to try to know me in this way—thank you, truly.

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  About the Author

  Donna Freitas writes both fiction and nonfiction. She is the author of Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America’s College Campuses, among other titles. She has written for several national newspapers and magazines about life on a college campus today, including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and the Washington Post. She has appeared on National Public Radio, the Today show, CNN, and many other news media outlets and has lectured about her research at more than two hundred colleges and universities. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

  Also by Donna Freitas

  Nonfiction

  Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America’s College Campuses

  The Happiness Effect: How Social Media Is Driving a Generation to Appear Perfect at Any Cost

  Consent on Campus: A Manifesto

  Fiction

  The Possibilities of Sainthood

  This Gorgeous Game

  The Survival Kit

  Gold Medal Summer

  The Tenderness of Thieves

  Unplugged

  Gold Medal Winter

  The Healer