That she somehow already knew struck me as no more or less shocking than the thing he had done. I gathered that I was newly arrived to where my mother was, in this world of downstairs men at night, where I supposed all women lived. I didn’t like it, but she wasn’t surprised to find me here, so what choice did I have but to be here too? Jed Lane’s name was on my father’s business cards and frosted on the executive glass in his skyscraper door.
I nodded.
Mom exhaled hard. “Okay. Tell me everything.”
Her hand on her coffee mug was as white as the ceramic as I talked.
“That’s all?”
“That’s all.”
“He tried nothing more?”
“Nothing.”
She ran her finger around the top of her mug while she thought. I had no idea where she would come down, where her intention would drop. Finally, she said, “Oh, man, this would create a big stink.”
Around town, she meant. I didn’t disagree. Everyone knew the Lanes; at least, everyone who mattered to my parents did. “It’s okay,” I said. The gossip would have been horrible. Already my memory of what he’d done felt intrusive and embarrassing. I watched Mom calculating. My father came down, said, “Good morning, Say-see,” which is what I had called myself when I was small. “You’re up early. How’d you sleep?”
I looked to Mom. She was still unsure. Dad unfolded the papers, poured OJ, headed back out for something else.
“Is it okay if I tell your father?”
“Yes,” I said.
She nodded. “Later.”
I agreed. The Lanes would be with us all day. We’d drive to the country club for lunch on the patio, overlooking the greens. I’d offer to take his children to the pool. The trick would be to get into the water without being seen in my swimsuit, to stay submerged until he left for another Scotch and soda.
At some point Mom talked to Dad. I wasn’t there when she did. It was decided that nothing should be done about Jed Lane’s little bit of droit du seigneur, and the less said, the better. We’d just not have them stay the night anymore. And no more lunches downtown. This stuff happens. It’s infuriating, said Dad, but it does.
So that was that.
I turned it over and over. I was proud to have passed muster. I’d met an upheaval with nonchalance (my father’s daughter). I’d escaped my home without disturbing the honored guests (my mother’s daughter). In the churn of my thoughts I had the sense of both ascending and descending, as in the cartoon of two escalators crossing and the principals, heading in opposite directions, meeting in the middle. That July, that August, I was both rising to an adult comprehension of the fallibility of appearances and sinking toward an awareness of the ugly contortions of discretion. Maturity: people lie, or at least deny, and you must too. Maturity: this means you can do things you are not supposed to do.
It seemed fitting that it all went down on a staircase at night. Staircases are for lovers and getaway artists, the in-between of floors and ages. I replayed the scene in my head and tried to imagine what I should have done. Mr. Lane had never been interesting to me as a person—just an adult man, opaque and mustachioed, whose jokes I did not understand and whose desires were not my concern, so he was not a character worth wasting time on. When I imagined alternate outcomes of that night, I never animated him. I imagined myself bigger, bolder, cleverer. In my mind I’d humiliate him, or punch out his gleaming teeth, or trip him down the stairs so his flask spilled all over our floor. In my mind I wasn’t a girl in a nightgown, so I could do these things.
I understood my parents’ silence to be protective. They were right: the story of what happened would have attached to me, the high school sophomore out of bed in the small hours.
Even there—do I write the story of what happened or the story of what he did?
Trying again: the story of what he did would have attached to me, the high school sophomore out of bed in the small hours, like a cursed baton he’d passed to me on the stairs while my parents and his wife and his children and my brother slept.
Why invite all of that? I imagined my family’s concern and understood it, and I took it in stride.
But this is not the whole of what I’m afraid of writing about. It is the easier part, the bit that came first, when I was vulnerable.
Jed Lane smash-mouthed a lot of girls. His hands went up and down the backs of daughters at holiday balls, his shoulders blocked doorways all over. We young women worked this out in our twenties, as we met one another either for the first time or finally in a position to talk. We sighed and shook our heads and laughed a bit. The man was a fender bender, a rite of passage. Eventually, his marriage fell apart. He left town.
But later that summer, when I was fifteen and Jed Lane was still a part of the firmament, I went to a party and took a boy’s penis out of his pants.
I had been invited to the party by Steph, a local girl I knew from tennis. She was a few years older, with a driver’s license and a little cabriolet I coveted, and because our parents were friends she was the perfect person in the perfect vehicle to take me to what was essentially the first teenage party I ever attended. My sense of such events was largely formed by the canon of John Hughes, which, even if it hadn’t enchanted me—and it did; I was nine when Sixteen Candles came out and ten when The Breakfast Club appeared—was visited upon me by peers who could not see an academically capable but naive redhead and not invoke Molly Ringwald. (I was also haunted by some eponymous doppelgänger named Lacey Underall, from Caddyshack, but Caddyshack was rated R so my parents hadn’t let me see it.) I tried to learn from Molly Ringwald to feel stymied but not hopeless, to pout my lips and wait to be discovered for the perfection of my quirkiness and the dignity with which I bore my awkward self. In particular, other kids always asked if I could apply lipstick by securing the tube between my breasts. This was not an option that summer, but I didn’t mind the question. I’d gamely try, with a borrowed lipstick, and drop the thing down the bottom of my shirt to the ground.
At the party there were newly graduated seniors from St. Paul’s. There was beer. The former offered me the latter. I was astonished at the ease of it.
Also, oddly, I was infuriated. I felt apart from the other kids, as though they were in the coming-of-age movie and I was stuck in this real world where your father’s best friend grabs you in your own home, and then the waters close over the event and nothing is there. I did not understand what I had come up against in Jed Lane—was that desire, or drunkenness, or some sort of insanity? I had started to feel ashamed of the way I must have looked. Of my light blue nightgown. Though I knew it was crazy, I worried that the kids at this party would see me that way too—compromised, caught out barefoot on the floor. As though he’d seen something in me before I could discover and contain it. I had new experience, but I felt newly skinless. Did these things happen to anyone else? Did they happen to everyone else? How could I ask these other kids without revealing something I’d been forbidden to share?
Worse, I was now worried about someday realizing that I wanted to have sex. I was frightened that if that desire appeared in me, it would confirm Jed Lane’s ugly wager and make him right about me. Back in the springtime at school, when I had kissed Shep, my torso would begin a kind of humming that I liked to return to in memory. Was that what Jed Lane knew? Now I wanted to want nothing, ever, from a man.
I chatted away, drinking beer. Steph was a responsible soul, and I could trust her not to get too drunk to take me home.
Once I was tipsy I was seated on a card table, legs swinging, and at some point the recently graduated roommate of our host appeared in front of me. They had both started at St. Paul’s as third formers, so by the time they were eighteen they had lived together for four years, and couldn’t seem to quit each other even after graduation. The boy before me was visiting from the South and he would return there for college. We’d never had a conversation before, but observing him, I’d always found him charming and a bit goofy. The c
onceit was that he was unaware of his classic good looks and his pedigree. Given the list of his names, you’d never have guessed in which order they might appear, much less what to call him. (The truth was a nickname fit for a dog.) He was funny—I had known this—but I had not known that he thought I was funny, too.
I gave him a hard time about the girlfriend he’d dated at school. I still cannot picture one without the other: leggy young people in matched stride down a paneled hall, him smiling at her feathered wall of blond hair.
“That’s over now,” he said. “She’s cool with it. Long distance is no good.”
I nodded as though I had some knowledge of this.
“I always thought you were cute,” he added, and I was dumb enough, or surprised enough, to consider it a non sequitur.
“You did?”
“Oh, totally. We all did.”
I thought, Then why everything (the fart with a face)? Then why nothing? My mind was sodden with beer and hope.
“But then you were with Shep,” he said.
Almost a year when nobody even talked to me. “I wasn’t, really.”
He shrugged, and drank his beer. “You excited to go back?”
“I think so.”
“You think so?”
“Yeah.”
“Come on. SPS is great. SPS is terrific. You have to be excited to be a fifth former. You’re an upperformer now.” He sounded wistful.
“Are you sad to be leaving?”
He finished his beer. “Aw, yeah. You’ll see. You’re going to go back and totally love it now.”
“If you say so.”
“I say so.”
I’d have liked to hear more. I would gather details about precisely which good things awaited me back at school, as though his voice could deliver them to me. But I was aware that my longing for safety was the wrong note to sound beneath the banter of our exchange. This was a party, I told myself. Be cool. Stop caring. God, I was so tired of caring. I wanted the chatter and the froth. I wanted this tall boy to keep talking. I wanted to just drift a bit, and have it be fine.
He smiled, bent down, and kissed me. I was aware that the other kids had left the room. I didn’t want the kiss, which surprised me, so I put my hands on his chest, feeling his shirt against my palms, and pushed him gently upright. He unfolded without protest.
“What’s up?”
“Just, hang on,” I said. I wasn’t sure. No desire appeared, no simple appetite. I did not dare look at his face to work this out together, to share something of myself with him, or ask for something of him in return. I had the odd urge to tell him about Jed Lane. I was secure in my seat on the card table, my feet hanging down, hands firmly pressing his torso. I needed time. I hooked my fingers on his belt and rested them there.
“Oh,” he said, like a child. “Oh.”
I looked up. His eyes were wide. This sudden tilt of power from him to me rushed at me like the beer, like the awareness that we were alone in the basement now. I realized he was frozen. He moved my hands to his buckle. I undid his belt. It was black leather, with a silver buckle, and I liked the way the strap slid free—it felt purposeful, like I was untacking a horse. I still did not have a plan. He rubbed his hands on my shoulders and brushed one palm over my hair, awkwardly, as if he’d never touched a girl before, which I knew could not be further from the truth. He was pawing me to keep me going. It irritated me. I wanted to stay out ahead of his desire, rather than respond. For once, I wanted to be completely in the lead, as unpredictable to others as others seemed to me. I shook my head to toss his hand off my hair, and then opened his jeans, found the slit of his boxer shorts, and took out his already erect penis.
I looked for the first time.
This?
This.
I could not believe this man, this college freshman, would consent to stand in front of me, exposed as he was, letting me hold him, behold him, as I was. How convinced must he have been of my intentions? How certain of his own pleasure? I thought of him with near condescension, the entitlement of another man in his underwear in my dark house throwing a long shadow. What was this force that led men to break down like this?
I rubbed him for a bit, like I was warming up the arm of a child who had played too long in the snow. He adjusted my hands and modified my stroke. I did this for a while. He made encouraging noises. The train was stalling, though, and I was beginning to feel embarrassed by what was going on. I wondered if Steph might leave without me in her cool little car. I wondered what time it was.
There existed retreat, or advance. The former seemed to me to invite self-consciousness and shame. The latter showed clarity, even mastery. My old self was on one side and my new self—the fifth former, the girl on the stairs—was on the other. I lowered my head to his penis and took the end of it in my mouth. The noises he made were shocking. I did not feel my body respond, and he did not try to move me. His hands went limp on my shoulders. Periodically he squeezed the rails of my collarbone and leaned his weight toward me. My hair screened my face and my bizarre act. That’s what it was to me: bizarre. I was taking the dimensions of some vector of power, poling to the bottom to see what was down there. It was surprisingly physical, salty, silly.
I didn’t anticipate his coming, and it wasn’t pleasant. I swallowed hard and hopped down off the card table. He was gazing at me with a lopsided smile, faintly confused, but quiet.
“Wow, Lacy,” he said. “Thanks.”
I was embarrassed for his sincerity. Angry that he thought that I had meant to do something for him, that this had been about him at all.
We climbed the stairs and found the others, and I gave nothing away. There was nothing to give. I folded up the experience like a receipt in my pocket—it might come in handy later, if I wanted to check the details, but the errand was done. I said nothing and switched to soda from beer. About an hour later, Steph and I left by the front door. My host, who had not been in the basement with us, hugged me goodbye. Just before I turned to head down the front walk, he patted my middle and said, “They’re still swimming in there.” It was some months before I realized what he’d meant.
Really, it would be so much easier to tell the story of what happened at St. Paul’s and not tell this.
In the early pages of Alice Sebold’s luminous and bold account of her rape while a student at Syracuse University, during which she was attacked by a stranger in a park at night and badly beaten, she writes wryly of the advantages she discovered when she arrived at the police station to have her testimony taken:
The cosmetics of rape are central to proving any case. So far, in appearance, I was two for two: I wore loose, unenticing clothes; I had clearly been beaten. Add this to my virginity, and you will begin to understand much of what matters inside the courtroom.
The title of Sebold’s memoir, Lucky, is taken from the line an officer spoke about how the last woman they’d found in the place where she was raped had been murdered and dismembered. It’s a bitter term—evidence of how the same words have different meanings to a victimized woman and a world inclined to deny trauma. Where the word pivots is where Alice Sebold goes unheard. They called her lucky, which foreclosed the possibility of their understanding the impact of what had been done to her. I unheard her too, but in a different way: for a long time, I envied that she’d been attacked by a stranger. I thought that was lucky. And that she’d been an absolute virgin—not only a stranger to intercourse, as I was, but a stranger to any body other than her own. Unimpeachably pure. And, above all, she’d been injured. I actually envied her this. Nobody, seeing what happened to her, would say, But you wanted this.
Of course, her story was not that simple, because the criminal justice system is set up, at least in theory, to assume innocence until guilt is proven. A defense attorney made hay of the fact that Sebold, traumatized and intimidated by her attacker, chose the wrong man in a lineup. The defense came after her for her uncertainty but largely left the issue of consent alone. She had already
won that one, welts glowing, hands down.
I could not earn my innocence with injury. Nor, I believed, could I earn it with—well, innocence. Because I was not wholly pure. Though to the best of my awareness that night at the party made nothing subsequent happen—nobody formed expectations of me as a result of it—still I held that I was guilty.
And in court I would have had lots of company arguing I wasn’t pure. The reason I hate to write what happened on that card table—what I did on that card table—is because it’s a defense attorney’s dream. Aha! Desire! As though my choice on one night cost me the benefit of the doubt forever. The blanket projection of proto-consent, cast across all the days and nights of my life.
I don’t owe anyone the telling of this. I never sued or took my abusers to court. Nor is it a matter of conscience. I did not want to write it because it should not matter, but of course it does, because a girl who is attacked will so often assume the fault lies with her. There is no escaping a primal culpability. I include the events of the summer I was fifteen in open defiance of this presumed vulnerability, and to force into view what is to me the chilling logic that a girl who has explored a boy’s body, or permitted her body to be explored in any way, is thereafter suspect as a victim.
In other words: it’s open season on her.
In other words: to believe in the perfect victim is to believe in no victim at all.
6
Fall 1990, Fifth Form
I returned to St. Paul’s for my fifth-form year in the first sharp nights of September, a long week before classes began. I’d been invited early to practice with the varsity soccer team and quickly made the squad. I was released from far-flung Warren House and the claustrophobic double I’d shared as a fourth former, but swapped it for a lonely perch: I’d been assigned to a single in Brewster House, on the quad, while most of the Kittredge girls were all together with a few other girls across campus, in Center. Linley from Colorado had elected not to come back at all. She did not elaborate. She just didn’t like it very much, she said, and her decision rattled me. I had considered people who came home from boarding school to have failed in some way, but Linley was fabulous. She had made a choice. It frightened me to think this choice was available to me too.
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