Afternoon of a Faun

by Afternoon of a Faun (retail) (epub)

  “Probably not.”

  She gave a curt nod.

  “He will fight you though,” I said. “He’ll fight you as hard as he can.”

  “So what’s new?”

  “Well . . . as long as you think it’s . . . worth it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m just saying, in his mind, he’s fighting for his life. It’s you or him, basically. One of you ends up terminally discredited. Lying rapist or lying Nazi. That’s unfortunately the logic of the situation. And it could be you, Julia. He’ll show every publisher in London that letter from Gerald Woolley, along with the stuff about Hanna Reitsch. His father’ll make sure they all get copies, along with injunctions and writs and all the rest of it.”

  She looked at me with sudden intense dislike.

  “Now you’re trying to threaten me!”

  “What?”

  “You don’t believe a single word I’ve said, do you?”

  “I do!”

  “Then you don’t care!”

  “The point is no one can prove it either way. That’s the nature of these things. And without proof he’ll always be able to raise the possibility that you’re making it up. Especially given the circumstances.”

  “The circumstances?”

  There was a brief pause, in which both of us seemed to reel a little at the suggestion that had slipped out of me.

  “You mean, my going to his room voluntarily?”

  I made an attempt to backtrack, though I didn’t feel entirely in command of myself at that moment.

  “Well, it’s a factor. I mean, the world being what it is . . .”

  She tilted her head, seeming to reappraise me.

  “You don’t believe it was rape, do you, even if everything I say is true?”

  “I do,” I protested, trying to sound like myself. “Of course I do.”

  “You don’t. Not real rape. Not in a way deserving of real consequences. You think I should just shut up about it, don’t you?”

  “Not at all,” I said with a weird, glib feeling, as if I’d become my own communications director. “But I don’t think it’s going to be easy to find a publisher, with those documents doing the rounds. They’re pretty incriminating.”

  “I’ll publish it myself in that case!”

  “You’d self-publish?”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, that’s your prerogative . . .”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Nothing . . .”

  “You think he’d try to stop me doing that, too?”

  “I imagine so. If he can find a way.”

  Her fury seemed to falter; she looked vulnerable again, uncomprehending.

  “I’m not even allowed to self-publish? Christ almighty! Christ almighty!”

  I had a feeling I should leave. I didn’t appear to be in control of what I was saying, or even thinking. I seemed to see myself in front of some grim-visaged campus committee, trying to account for this weird surging impulse to act as Marco’s surrogate. I stood up.

  “What are you doing? You’re not leaving, are you?”

  “I should get going.”

  She stared, blinking, with a peculiar, unseeing look as I went over to the door and reclaimed my jacket.

  “What if I can prove it?” she said, with an abrupt wild jerk of her head. “What if I happen to have proof that what I’m telling you is true? Because it so happens I do. Cast iron proof!”

  I should have told her I didn’t need proof—that I already believed her. But I didn’t, couldn’t. Perhaps it was the still tenuous nature of that belief—it hadn’t quite solidified into an irreversible conviction. Or perhaps it was just the timing of her offer. I have a professional resistance to last-minute twists, surprise endings, and this sudden offer to supply one offended my sense of literary propriety. I looked down without answering, and began buttoning my jacket.

  “I’d have put it in the memoir,” she went on, speaking rapidly, “except I knew it would be too controversial. Too explosive. Do you want me to tell you what it is?”

  “It’s up to you,” I said.

  “Do you know what people like Marco have in common?”

  I continued buttoning my jacket.

  “Form,” she said, her voice high and breathy. “It’s never just a one-off. There’s always a history. And Marco’s no exception. I happen to know that, for a fact.”

  I looked up, curious in spite of myself.

  “Did he ever tell you why he moved to America?” she asked.

  “No . . .”

  “Well, I’ll tell you.”

  She paused theatrically.

  “He was banished.”

  “Banished?”

  “Yes.”

  Her face, like her voice, had changed—acquired a defiant brightness.

  “Yes. He was caught with a fifteen-year-old girl. That’s statutory rape. Her mother found them in bed and told him he had a week to leave England, for good, or she’d go to the police. So now you know.”

  She waited for me to react.

  “Huh,” was all I could think of to say. The story sounded absurd. I felt a sort of cringing awkwardness on her behalf, and a strong urge to get out.

  “It was the mother who told me. I’d tell you her name, but she asked me not to, out of consideration for her daughter. There’s a lot of stigma for women who admit to being victims of sexual abuse, as I’m sure you know. It’s true though. Perhaps I ought to have put it in the memoir after all. I could have used pseudonyms. What do you think? I still can, of course . . .”

  “That’s your call,” I said, probably rather coldly. “If you think it’ll help you, then you should certainly put it in.”

  She flinched. She must have caught the skepticism in my tone. The brightness fell from her face like a mask. She looked dazed.

  “It was good seeing you, Julia,” I said. “I’m sorry if . . .”

  “Must you really go?”

  “I should, yes.”

  We managed a pro forma kiss on the cheek. It was still raining outside. I was cold, hungry, exhausted. Even before I crossed the river the whole encounter was acquiring a spectral quality, as if I’d dreamed or imagined it. I made a deliberate attempt to fix its key features in memory: I had a feeling I was going to need to recall them at some point. Some effort of concentration was required. It was never a neutral matter to be back in London, and I found it hard to focus on other things as I inched home across the city. I liked to think of it as a changeless place, stalled forever in the same drizzle and gloom I’d left it in decades earlier. But of course there was always some new development: flashy new buildings like the ones coming in and out of view from the Docklands train—Gherkin, Cheese­grater, Walkie-Talkie; new ticketing rigmaroles to figure out on the tube, new announcements on the platforms in new kinds of voices, the trains themselves smashing out of the tunnel mouths at newly aggressive speeds as if charged with the task of obliterating all memory of the newly interminable wait preceding their arrival. Contrary to what I’d always maintained, the city I’d abandoned seemed suddenly more anarchic, vivid, tumultuous than the one I’d moved to. And by some odd alchemy of transference, that wildness seemed to spread back into the images of Julia and Marco I’d formed when I lived there—Londoners to their fingertips at that critical juncture in their lives—and I had a vertiginous feeling of being caught up in a more turbulent drama than I’d fully grasped, with larger protagonists, gripped by stronger forces.

  The phone rang early the next morning. I was awake, just, but still groggy from the night before. I dragged myself into my mother’s study, which we’d stripped almost bare, and picked up the flimsy plastic receiver with its coiled white cord that twisted itself back into the same tight knots each time, however often one unraveled it.

  “I’m so glad I caught you. Listen . . .”

  It was Julia. She spoke with a nervous fluency, as if she’d been rehearsing her words.

  “I shouldn’t h
ave said that nonsense about the fifteen-year-old girl. I made it up. It was stupid of me and I’m sorry. Not that I think you believed me. You didn’t, did you?”

  I tried to be diplomatic:

  “The part about Marco being banished was a little hard to believe . . .”

  “I know. Banished! What a ridiculous idea! I don’t know why I came out with it. Well, I do. It’s one of those stories you make up when you’re really furious with someone. I’ve been cooking it up in my head for ages, imagining telling it to the police, or a judge, or another newspaper editor. It helps me deal with the absolute hatred I feel toward Marco for trying to shut me up. Sometimes I get so lost in the fantasy, I believe it myself. Anyway, when you told me he’d try to stop me from self-publishing I was so upset and angry I just blurted it out. I wanted you to take my side. But I didn’t realize how completely mad it would sound till I said it out loud. I’ve been up all night tormenting myself for being such an idiot.”

  “Ah, I’m sorry to hear it . . .”

  “Everything else I told you was true. That I can promise you.”

  “Right.”

  “I felt you believed what I was saying, up until then . . .”

  “Yes.”

  “And you still do . . . right? I mean, nothing’s different there . . .”

  “Of course,” I said.

  There was a longish pause in which the brevity of my answer seemed pointedly emphasized. I braced myself for a more concerted interrogation. But she just gave a soft, surprised laugh.

  “All right. Well, good-bye.”

  She hung up, and for a moment the bareness of my mother’s office confused itself in my mind with the bareness of Julia’s apartment, so that I seemed to be back there, seeing the dazed expression on her face again as I left. I stared down at the phone, wondering why I’d withheld the reassuring phrases she clearly wanted to hear. Was it that I felt I’d been put through one hoop too many? Possibly. Nobody likes being jerked around. I certainly sensed I’d become entitled to that feeling, if it should prove in some way useful. Calling me up to admit to the lie hadn’t exactly canceled out the lie—in a way it seemed to have made things even murkier. The word “tainted” came into my mind. Julia’s entire testimony, I told myself, had become “tainted.” It was a powerful formula, I realized. It allowed me to detach myself from her version of events without committing myself to the position of outright disbelief. Why I should find this desirable, I couldn’t have said precisely, and yet I did. It seemed to offer obscure advantages.

  9

  I FLEW BACK to the States two days later. I’d missed a couple of classes and scheduled a makeup for a Monday in October. On the drive home from the airport I called Marco to ask if I could stay an extra night.

  “Of course. In fact why don’t you come on the Sunday? I’m having some people over to watch the debate. It’s going to be a blast. Disguster’s last stand!”

  He sounded like his old self again: cheerful and expansive. I thanked him, accepting the invitation.

  “And don’t forget you and I have some celebrating to do. We’ll go out after your class. My treat again.”

  I began to protest, but he insisted.

  “I owe you! You’ve been an incredible friend. I wouldn’t have got through this without your support.”

  I was debating, as we continued chatting, whether to mention my visit to Julia. I didn’t want to risk spoiling his mood. On the other hand, I was going to have to tell him eventually, and it might seem odd that I hadn’t done it now.

  The traffic was slow on the thruway—weekenders heading upstate for the foliage. Fall had arrived, making its usual splashy entrance of pinks and magentas, as if it wanted you to think some season of vigorous growth was coming in, rather than just the prelude to winter.

  “See you Sunday then,” Marco said. “Eightish, or come early if you can. Lots to catch up on!”

  “Marco, listen, I have to tell you something. I saw Julia in London. Your Julia.”

  There was a brief silence on his end.

  “Oh?”

  I explained how her invitation to tea had come about. “Obviously I could have made some excuse, but I have to admit I was curious . . . for your sake as well as mine.”

  I thought he might object to the last part, but he didn’t seem to.

  “Of course. What did she have to say?”

  I described the meeting. Marco listened with uncharacteristic restraint: not interrupting to dispute Julia’s version of events, not snorting incredulously as he usually did when he disagreed with something, not reacting at all to Julia’s candid admission that she’d only recently come to regard the episode in the hotel as an assault. The only sound he made was when I told him she was still determined to publish her memoir—self-publish if necessary—at which point a long, anguished groan escaped from him.

  “No . . . ! No, no, no . . . !”

  I was surprised at the strength of his reaction. Not that I expected him to be indifferent, but the self-publishing idea had seemed fairly unthreatening to me; a very minor setback in the context of his overall victory.

  “I told her you’d still try to stop her,” I said. “I’m pretty sure she isn’t going to do it. But even if she does, who’s going to see it? Nobody reads those vanity press things, do they?”

  “Oh, it’ll get read. She’ll put it online, start some kind of social media campaign or whatever . . .”

  I hadn’t considered that. All the same, I thought he was overreacting.

  “It would still be libel though, wouldn’t it?” I said. “I mean, you could still sue . . .”

  “Sue what? The Internet? Even if I could, she clearly doesn’t give a fuck. She obviously has nothing to lose.”

  The exuberance had drained out of his voice. Clearly I’d wrecked his mood.

  “I’m sorry . . .” I said feebly.

  “Ah, god! I am so tired of this! I am sick to death of it! She’s like something out of a zombie movie! Every time you shoot her down she bounces back up.”

  “I do think I might have scared her off, Marco,” I said. “I mean, she definitely got the message that you’d go on fighting to the bitter end.”

  “Thanks. But in all honesty I don’t think I could face another round. I’d rather just . . . throw in the towel I guess.”

  I’d intended to tell him the business about the fifteen-year-old girl, thinking he’d appreciate hearing that Julia had admitted fabricating at least one story. But I decided on balance it could wait.

  “Speak to your dad,” I said, as soothingly as I could. “I’m sure he’ll have some ideas.”

  He muttered some vague response, thanking me again for my support, and we said good-bye. The conversation left me feeling uneasy and dimly at fault. The whole situation seemed to have reached a point where it gave a duplicitous cast to everything that entered its orbit. I didn’t want to think about it. I turned on the radio. The election coverage was in full spate. There’d been fresh allegations about the Republican candidate’s treatment of women, this time on the set of his TV show. It was impossible, of course, not to relate this to Marco’s drama. He must have been thinking about it himself, given his interest in all the stories of sexual malfeasance floating around in the press. The candidate’s spokeswoman came on: these outlandish, unsubstantiated, and totally false claims . . . I thought of the formula I’d adopted for Julia’s account of what had happened in their hotel room: that useful word “tainted”. . . I was aware of something suspiciously convenient about it. I could see, a little too clearly now, how it allowed me to preserve my friendship with Marco without having to struggle with my conscience. I don’t claim to have a particularly fine conscience. “Well trained,” perhaps, in Julia’s acid phrase, but not especially active. I don’t dream at night about human betterment (mostly I dream about getting my hair back). But I’d have trouble accepting the hospitality of a man I believed to have committed rape. Easier to believe Julia’s story was “tainted,” or at least to
suspend judgment, and she’d handed me an excuse for doing just that.

  Three or four days passed—warm and dry—with the asters straggling a dusty blue along ditches, goldenrod turning ochre on patches of open ground. Caitlin was in talks with our old editor about the possibility of another travel book, this time in Northern Spain. I had work of my own to catch up on. We’d go our separate ways in the morning, reconvening on the terrace at mealtimes. I made a point of cooking things we never had when the children were around. Tempeh, whole wheat pasta, broccoli rabe—minor consolations of the empty nest.

  One evening, a flock of wild turkeys came out of the scrub in the meadow, crossing the lawn below us as we ate dinner. There were four or five adults, with a dozen-odd lighter-colored poults stepping cautiously in single file behind them like novices behind a group of black-shawled nuns. Caitlin gripped my hand as they passed, watching with the rapt look these visitations from the animal kingdom always produced. I remembered the smashed eggs we’d seen that spring, and my own role in that calamity. The hen must have had another brood, or perhaps these were the offspring of a different bird. Skirting the feeders without investigating the pools of spilled grain, they entered the colonnade of white birches at the edge of the meadow and disappeared into the forest beyond. They were of a size, already, to be safe from all but the larger, rarer predators that still prowled around in these woods: coyotes, the odd solitary bobcat. “We should catch one for Thanksgiving,” I said—an old joke that always made the kids squeal when they were little. Caitlin gave a tolerant smile, squeezing my hand.

  We talked about my meeting with Julia. Some faint but persistent qualm had been nagging at me—a sense of having missed or glossed over something. I trusted Caitlin’s reactions more than my own. Her instincts, unlike mine, had an intact purity about them. The life she’d made for herself since we moved to the country and had children had left her comparatively unmaddened by the toxins that seemed to have saturated public discourse on every subject these days. Crucially, she’d been preoccupied with other things during the years when our friends took en masse to social media, and she’d never acquired a taste for that neurotic activity. Also, though she was thoroughly American (Minnesota farmers on one side, Chicago professionals on the other), she was free of that paradoxical and—to my mind—quintessentially ­American combination: the love of scolding and the hatred of being scolded. If anything, she had it the other way around: she rarely set herself up in judgment of anyone, but she actively sought out people’s criticisms of herself, and listened to them avidly. I knew that whatever she might have to say about Marco and Julia would spring from a clean source.