I am formidable, but I remember how I was paralyzed by that voice, a voice belonging to a man who couldn’t even touch me, whose face I never saw. Whenever I hear people ask, “Why didn’t she fight? Why didn’t she say something?” I know they’ve never felt that kind of fear. It is humbling, and it is revelatory, and while I would not wish it on anyone, I do wish that those who have never felt it would have the humility and the compassion to keep their fucking mouths shut.
ONE DAY, A FEW WEEKS AFTER THE INCIDENT, I WAS COMING home through the alley, and I saw a man crouched against the wall of the Taft. I was about to go in through the back door when he spoke—either to no one or to me. He mumbled something that I couldn’t be sure I heard correctly. What I thought I heard were the words “I want to fuck you,” the refrain of the peeping Tom in the alley, in what I thought was his voice. The man was positioned beneath my window.
He was young, under twenty, I thought, white or Latino, in a hoodie. I didn’t get a very good look at him and would not have known his face even minutes later. I bolted from the alley and went straight to Matt’s apartment, which was on my block. I didn’t return to the Taft until after Maka came home.
I DIDN’T CALL THE POLICE. I WASN’T AT ALL SURE THAT I’D heard him correctly, and the chances were too high that he was just a random drunk. Still, I told myself it was him, and even now, when I picture the man harassing me from the alley, I picture him as young and sad, sitting outside with nothing better to do. This second encounter freaked me out, of course, but I think it helped me more than it scared me, being able to attach that voice to a human body.
The pepper spray took a month to ship—would not recommend HomeSecurityStore.com—and by the time it arrived, I had moved past the worst of the terror. I threw the pepper spray away not too long ago. It had expired, and I never had to use it.
THERE’S A LITTLE PARABLE EMBEDDED IN THE MALTESE FALCON about a man who runs away from his life after a near miss with death in the form of a beam falling from a high building. As Sam Spade tells Brigid O’Shaughnessy, “He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him see the works.” He builds a new life for himself, but Spade can’t help but notice that it’s essentially the same as the old one. “He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.”
I think about this passage a lot. It’s such a perfect, succinct description of the way we process our brushes with danger and, if we are lucky, move on with our lives. I didn’t move out of the Taft, as I thought I might during the first days after the incident. I stayed there and went back to my routine, hanging out on the couch with my pants off, relying on the closed curtain to protect me from dirty men in the alley. But one thing I can tell you about being a woman: we don’t forget about the beams. Because the beams never really stop falling.
About one in five women are raped or sexually assaulted at some point in their lives. (I know this number seems high to a lot of folks, but consider that most women you know would never tell you if they were raped. I have a lot of close female friends, and I think 20 percent might be a low estimate.) I have been lucky; I have never been assaulted. But all women have to think about the specter of sexual violence, even if we often let ourselves believe it’s farther away than it is. We have to watch for the shadow of a beam falling because those beams are falling on somebody every hour of every damn day.
IN JUNE 2016, LESS THAN THREE MONTHS AFTER MATT AND I bought our house, I moderated an event with fellow crime writers Ivy Pochoda and Alafair Burke at Book Soup on the Sunset Strip. It was a seven P.M. event, and the plan was to get drinks beforehand and dinner afterward, so I decided to play responsibly and take an Uber to West Hollywood.
The driver was a guy named Brian. He was in his late twenties or early thirties, close to my age. He was very friendly and talkative right off the bat. I learned that he was living on the Westside and going to school for psychotherapy, that he had recently moved back home to LA after a relationship had fallen apart in another state. He had grown up in the Pacific Palisades, and it turned out that his brother had gone to my high school—I learned his full name this way.
He was so forthcoming, and it was still sunny out, and he had his arm in a sling. I wasn’t even thinking about this at the time, but I’m guessing all of these factors helped put me at ease. We had about a half hour together in traffic, and I was happy to engage in the conversation. I was also in a buoyant mood. I was on my way to a bar to meet Alafair and Ivy for drinks, and Michael Connelly—a man I admire greatly and had at that point met only in passing—was joining us. When the driver asked questions, I was eager to answer them. I told him I was a novelist and that I was doing this bookstore event, and I definitely could not help myself and name-dropped Connelly. I also mentioned my husband, just in the course of conversation, and Brian asked the normal questions: how long we’d been together, how long we’d been married, things like that.
He talked about his injury, which he’d gotten doing something athletic, I don’t remember what. He said he loved to surf and hike, and he asked me what I did for exercise. I told him that I didn’t really exercise, that my husband and I were both pretty inactive, sedentary people. Then he asked how often we had sex, and because I’d categorized him as friendly and harmless and was in the rhythm of talking and answering questions, I just flat-out told him. It took me a few more seconds to process what had happened, and by then he was asking me how many times a week I orgasmed.
At that point, I stopped talking. I fired up my Google Maps to check how far we were from my destination and was mortified when the app started shouting out directions—I didn’t want the driver to realize I was counting the minutes left in the ride. He tried to engage me a couple more times, even offering that he was studying to be a therapist and that I could just let him know if he crossed any lines. I didn’t say another word to him.
I ended up having a good time in West Hollywood, but as soon as I got home and told my husband what had happened, the fear and anger came back to me, and I broke down and cried. I gave Brian a two-star Uber rating—I guess I was scared that he’d come for me if he saw that he’d gotten one star—and then filed a complaint with Uber, detailing what had happened. I thought at first that there was a chance the conversation had started out innocently and had taken an inappropriate turn and that Brian might be offended and horrified that I had reported him when he thought we were friends. It took me a while longer to understand that he’d known exactly what he was doing. There was no mystery there once I had figured him out. I was a woman alone, happily married, happy in her career, on my way to hang out with renowned authors. It must have been clear to him that the thought of his dick hadn’t once crossed my mind. He’d had this brief window when I was in his power, and he had used the opportunity to put me in my place.
That night, after my husband went to sleep, I sat on our couch downstairs, and I looked out the window of our new house. Our living-room curtains were raised, as they often are, and I could see the street, dark while I sat inside, bathed in light. I started thinking about whether someone outside could see me and how close he could get without my noticing. Brian knew where I lived.
WRITING ABOUT WAR
– Jacqueline Winspear –
IT WAS A SATURDAY MORNING, THE DAY WE WENT INTO THE town some two miles away to do the shopping. The “town” in question was more like a village, but because the city/town/village/hamlet designation in England is based upon the size of the church, and our community had a very large ancient church, it was known as a town.
My father worked on Saturdays, and we had no car, plus you couldn’t get those big Silver Cross prams onto a bus in those days, so my mother pushed the pram with my baby brother tucked inside and me, four years of age, walking beside her. Not only would we do the grocery shopping, but my mother also returned library books for the elderly people on our street—which was most of the people on the street—and chose new books based upon thei
r reading preferences. And, of course, there were other errands to run before we began the long walk home.
My mother and father were London people who had moved to rural Kent to get away from the World War II bomb sites that would not be cleared for decades. In fact, the last bomb sites were dealt with when construction began for the 2012 London Olympics. And frankly, as newlyweds in 1949, Mum and Dad couldn’t find a place to live because housing was at a premium. Tens of thousands of people had been made homeless due to years of bombing, and it would take many years to provide decent accommodation for those who had lost so much. So families lived together, and newlyweds moved in with a set of in-laws, which my mother didn’t take to at all. And if truth were told, she had to leave London to get away from the memories.
On that day, more than fifteen years after the war ended, we were walking toward the grocery store when I needed to use the WC, so we turned up the lane by the side of the post office toward the “public conveniences.” Then the fire siren sounded. With a partial force of volunteer firemen, the town siren was used to summon them to the fire station, and it was the same siren used to warn of an air raid during the war. The second that siren began its wail from a low cry to a full-blown crescendo, my mother grabbed my brother from the pram, took me in her arms, and cowered in a doorway. I remember seeing the animal-like fear in her eyes as she looked up, scanning the sky above, yet people on the street went about their day, not noticing a young woman paralyzed with fear while grasping her children to her.
“It’s all right, Mummy,” I said, tugging her sleeve to get her attention. “There’s no bombs; it’s all right. It’s only the firemen.”
You see, though young, I knew instinctively what was ailing her—that the siren had dragged her back through the years to a time when people were told to “Keep Calm and Carry On” despite seeing death and destruction every single day for years on end. And I knew this because she had told me her stories as if I were an adult and not a child. But in that moment, when I reminded my mother that we were safe, that it was only the fire siren, it was not an intellectual knowing that I experienced, an observation I could put into words and explain at such an age. It was something I knew because I felt it—and even at such an age, I’d already witnessed something of war’s lingering demons clinging to another person I loved.
I’VE OFTEN WONDERED WHETHER MY MOTHER TOLD HER STORIES time and again as a sort of exorcism, replaying images of being sent away from home as an evacuee or being bombed out of a house—a story I heard time and again because, as she was being carried away by a policeman, she ignored his warning to keep her dust-filled eyes closed and opened them only to see the neighbor’s little girl—who had been playing hopscotch on the street—bloodied and dead, her body torn to shreds. Though my mother worked on the local farm in the early years of my childhood, I was her closest companion, and perhaps she forgot that I was so young when she told these stories—certainly there was never any baby talk in our house. I remember bringing home my reading book from school and my mother rolling her eyes at the page where I had to read about the duck going “Quack, quack, quack.” If she’d had her way, I’d have been on Anna Karenina by age seven.
The truth is that it wasn’t until I began writing my series featuring Maisie Dobbs, the former World War I nurse who becomes a private investigator, that I began to wonder if I, too, was not delving into war as a kind of exorcism, perhaps using story as an emotional connection to those who had been through war, weaving together truth, fact, and fiction to explore what happens to people at such a time. But it was later, following the 2014 publication of my World War I stand-alone novel, that I realized I was perhaps a bit more transparent than I’d imagined. Maureen Corrigan, book reviewer for NPR’s Fresh Air, broadcast a tenth-anniversary retrospective of the Maisie Dobbs series, ending her review with “Winspear has returned—via a good new stand-alone, nonmystery novel called The Care and Management of Lies—to the wartime period that clearly continues to haunt her.”
Haunted? I thought. Me?
And it occurred to me that she could be right.
AS THE DAYS AND MONTHS PASSED, THE QUESTION OF MY haunting began to bother me more and more, and I wondered about other writers who gravitate toward war as a theme. I wanted to know what it was about war that drew them in and how they felt not only about their own stories of conflict but about the research they’d delved into to create a wartime world. I suppose I wanted to know if we were all haunted in our way.
In his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, former war correspondent Chris Hedges writes, “[War] is peddled by mythmakers—historians, war correspondents, filmmakers, novelists, and the state—all of whom endow it with qualities it often does possess: excitement, exoticism, power, chances to rise above our small stations in life, and a bizarre and fantastic universe that has a grotesque and dark beauty.” If that is not the basis for a stunning work of nonfiction, an award-winning film, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalism, and, yes, bestselling fiction, I don’t know what is. But I know that as a child, I would listen to family stories of war and be transfixed. Later, as I entered my teen years, I became passionate about ending war. At age twelve, when my friends had posters of pop stars, I was pinning Vietnam photojournalism to my bedroom wall. I remember one image in particular, of an American soldier with a white dove perched on his hand. At the time I was too young and naive to realize that these things were staged, but it caught at my heart and brought me to tears.
Many writers who have experienced war have used the creative act of writing to explore how people are engaged in and impacted by conflict, while others have been inspired by bearing witness to those who have suffered through war. Rhys Bowen, author of two bestselling novels set in World War II and a new World War I novel, The Victory Garden, shared something of a wartime experience that arguably informs her interest and engagement with the subject. “I think that the Second World War has always been part of my subconscious,” said Bowen. “I was born toward the end of it; don’t remember details, except I was taken to a back-garden shelter when bombs were falling and had an absolute panic attack. But growing up in the postwar years, one was so conscious of great things that had been achieved, soldiers coming home weary but triumphant, and great sufferings endured.”
MARTIN PARSONS, FOUNDER OF THE RESEARCH CENTRE FOR Evacuee and War Child Studies at the University of Reading, England, suggests that it takes three generations for an immediate experience of war to work its way through the family system—especially if the wartime experience was in childhood. I read his book War Child when it was first published. I remember getting to that part and sitting back to consider the fact that perhaps my mother’s experience of war was working itself through me and, in other ways, my brother, too. Many years before, I had read Ben Wicks’s searing book No Time to Wave Goodbye about the 1.5 million children evacuated during World War II from Britain’s cities into the countryside. I’d bought the book for my mother, but she couldn’t read past the first few pages—it brought back too many painful memories, so she cast it aside. But then there was my grandfather.
My first novel, Maisie Dobbs, was dedicated in part to my grandfather, a veteran of the Great War. In fact, I am named for “Jack” Winspear. But I was only two and a half years of age when I saw how war could injure a person from within—how “shell shock” can cause such distress decades after war has ended. Distress and demons. Granddad was still suffering from wounds sustained at the Battle of the Somme in 1916, one of the most devastating battles of that terrible conflict. He had already seen action at Ploegsteert Wood and Ypres—names that echo from history books today—and he came home shell-shocked, gassed, and with terrible leg wounds. He was a dear man around whom we had to be quiet and who was still removing shrapnel splinters from his legs when he died at age seventy-seven. My father’s childhood in an otherwise happy family home was marked by his father’s ill health as a result of the war.
The postwar winters were hard on my grandfather be
cause his poor lungs could barely cope with the damp and smog of London’s streets, and when his breathing became most labored, the doctor was called, and a special ambulance came to take him away to a sanatorium on the coast. The family would be plunged into economic hardship, so visiting was out of the question. Then, about a month later, he would come home and do his best to pick up the reins of his business again—my father and his brother having kept things going as best they could, working after school. Granddad would get the family on an even keel once more until the next time, and the next. And my father was raised in a quiet house because my grandfather could not stand loud noises—they brought back unwanted memories of the fighting. Shell shock in World War I was often associated with sound and percussion injury, and my grandfather’s wounding was no exception.
One day, when I was still a toddler and in my grandparents’ care because my parents were at work, I was told I could leave the table and play with my toys—I’d been fidgeting since finishing my lunchtime egg sandwich. I remember everything that followed so very clearly—and though it might seem strange that a child so young has a clear memory of events, I believe an almost fatal scalding accident when I was fifteen months old contributed to my extraordinarily long memory. I went to my toy box, a wooden trunk my father had made for me, and pulled out my favorite doll. Made of soft red wool, she had a face sculpted of some durable material, with sweet painted eyes, a snub little nose, and ruby-red lips, and I loved her.
I began running around the table, my energy effervescent, and I was squealing. Around and around the table I ran, waving my doll in the air. I can remember my grandmother telling me to slow down, and I remember seeing my grandfather become tense, his gray-blue eyes growing wider. Again, I ran around toward him, but this time he grabbed the doll from my hands and with his knife stabbed her time and again, a guttural cry coming from the very core of his body—it was the same terrible scream that was trained into men for that rush from the trench and over the parapet into battle, bayonets fixed. I just stood and watched. I did not cry, but I know I felt deeply sorry for him because I could see he was distressed in a way that I had no words to describe because I was only a child. I believe it was the first time I experienced compassion, though I would not know or understand that word for a good few years. My grandmother quickly put a bandage on the doll at the place where a livid knife tear in her forehead was bleeding white, fluffy filling. I was not wounded in the way that a child psychologist might imagine, but the scene remained with me, and I know that when I wrote these words in Birds of a Feather, it was my grandfather who inspired them: “That’s the trouble with war, it’s never over when it’s over, it lives on inside the living.” Indeed, the challenge of living with war’s memories has been at the heart of bestselling fiction and nonfiction crafted by many writers.
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