Reunion at Red Paint Bay

by George Harrar

  “Davey’s waving me to come out,” Simon said. “Can we finish this later?”

  “Later as in never?”

  He laughed a little. “I just mean a little later. It’s been a rough day.”

  ———

  After the pasta and bread sticks, after the green salad and organic mini carrots stewed in brown sugar, after watching two hours of a Twilight Zone marathon (Davey’s choice) on television together sitting on the couch, the boy lying alternately against one and the other as if they were pillows, they sent him off to bed, and Amy said, “Is this later enough?”

  Simon looked at his watch—10:05, the time they usually went up to bed themselves to read for a while. That wouldn’t happen tonight. “Sure, let’s talk.”

  “I started to tell you, I had trouble with a patient today.”

  “You should get some kind of security device in there,” he said, “connect to the police station. I think they can do that.”

  “This man made an accusation, Simon. About you.”

  “What accusation?”

  “About your graduation night on the dock by the inn. He said you forced a girl to have sex.”

  She was being uncommonly delicate, Simon thought. Paul would have said rape over and over again.

  “Do you know what he’s talking about?”

  Simon wondered how much to say, what to include, what to leave out. There were so many ways to tell a story. “The guy you’ve been seeing,” he began, “your patient, Paul Walker, he—”

  “Paul Walker? He said his name was Paul Chambers.”

  “I think Chambers is his middle name. I guess he was using it to hide who he was. He married the girl I took to graduation, Jean Crane. I didn’t really know her that well. She sat next to me in Spanish. She was pretty and smart, and since I’d just broken up with Ginnie, my steady girlfriend, I asked her to graduation. The party was at the Bayswater Inn. We ducked out a few times during the night to take a drink, me more than her, I guess. Then we went down to the bay, and things got carried away.” He remembered stumbling across the sand and looking up at the moon hanging in the black sky. He remembered the hip flask concealed under his tuxedo jacket and the Chopin vodka—the finest Polish mash—that burned down his throat, like swallowing fire. He remembered twirling around, his brain spinning, the world spinning all around him.

  “You had sex?” She said this in a somewhat surprised voice, as if even that was disappointing to her.

  “Yes, we had sex. I could tell she was upset,” he said, “after, I mean. She got her cousin, Holly Green, to drive her home. I called her the next couple of days, but she wouldn’t come to the phone. Finally I went to her house and she told me that I had forced myself on her.”

  “Oh, Simon.” He had never heard her say his name like this, with such a depth of disappointment. “I can’t believe you’re telling me this.”

  “I’d prefer not to, trust me.”

  “You’re saying you didn’t force her?”

  “Of course I didn’t.” He heard himself answer quickly and matter-of-factly. He could have let the statement stand on its own, no elaboration. What compelled him to add, “At least I don’t think so”?

  “You don’t think so?”

  “I had a lot to drink, and I wasn’t used to it. I’d never had more than a few beers before, and this was vodka. We drank and were rolling around on the dock, and like I said, things got carried away.”

  “Did she say no to you?”

  “She said yes, no, yes, no … and she was laughing. At least I thought it was laughing. I guess she was actually crying.”

  “There’s a big difference between laughing and crying, Simon.”

  “No, there really isn’t, not when you’re drunk.”

  Amy leaned back on the sofa as if she was going to sink into it, then bounced forward again, on the edge of the seat. “Wait a minute, the rapist from prison.”

  “David? What about him?”

  “Is that why you hired him, he’s like a kindred spirit?”

  The suggestion seemed bizarre to Simon. “That had nothing to do with hiring him. I haven’t thought about Jean for years.”

  Amy looked at him in amazement. “I imagine she thought of you quite a lot.”

  “What are you trying to do, deliberately make me feel bad?”

  “I’m trying to make you feel something. You tell this story like it happened to your old roommate Ray or somebody else you knew long ago.”

  “It did happen to someone else long ago, me as a high school senior.”

  “That’s still you, Simon. You don’t erase yourself at every stage of life. Human personalities develop in layers, one on top of the other. Scratch one layer, you can see what’s below.”

  “Like a palimpsest.”

  “What?”

  “A palimpsest. It’s a parchment that’s been overwritten through the centuries, and you can still see parts of the underlying documents. If you’re going to use the image, you should know the word for it.”

  “I don’t need the word. My patients get what I mean.”

  “Well despite your palimpsest theory of human personality, I am different today, and I wouldn’t get myself in the same situation I did twenty-five years ago.”

  Amy shook her head dismissively.

  “What?”

  “ ‘Get myself in that same situation.’ You make it sound like the circumstances happened to you.”

  “What do you want me to say, that I got drunk and raped my graduation date?”

  “If that’s what you did.”

  “I told you, I don’t know exactly what happened. I only know what I thought I was doing at the time, which wasn’t rape.”

  “Did you ask her if she wanted to have sex?”

  “Of course. It’s not like I just suddenly jumped on her.”

  “You asked her if she wanted to have sex with you that night?”

  Simon nodded.

  “Graduation night, on the dock, right before you had sex with her, you asked her if she wanted to and she said yes?”

  “What are you, a goddamn lawyer? I didn’t ask her at that exact moment. We talked about it beforehand.”

  “How much beforehand?”

  “I don’t know. A couple days, I guess. Sometime the week before.”

  “A week before? That night you didn’t ask her again?”

  “I asked her, as we were starting to do it.”

  “What did you say?”

  He couldn’t remember his words exactly, only the moment, on top of her. “I just said something about how we had talked about doing it and she wanted to.”

  “You were lying on top of her reminding her of what she said a week before?”

  “You’re twisting things up. It was perfectly reasonable at the time.”

  “The circumstances always seem reasonable to the male.”

  “Maybe they are reasonable. You ever consider that the guy may be reading the situation as it really is and it’s the girl who gets it wrong? She misleads and flirts and sends all kinds of conflicting signals that a kid with a lot of hormones raging in him would have a hard time figuring out?”

  Amy smiled in an unsmiling way. “The other side of rape.”

  “What?”

  “Your music-loving rapist—he stood in this house in this room and told me there’s always two sides to rape.”

  Simon hesitated, not knowing how far to go with this. But he never could back away from an argument. “Maybe there are.”

  “No, Simon, there are two people involved in rape, but there’s only one side—the victim’s. Catherine MacKinnon says—”

  “Who’s that?” Another name she expected him to know.

  “A feminist scholar. She says the real injury of rape is what the victim perceives, but in the law it’s the man’s perception of what the woman wants that determines whether she’s been forced to have sex or not.”

  “So the law’s all wrong? Maybe we should have a system where a w
oman can claim rape even if she says beforehand she wants to have sex, acts like she wants to at the time, does have sex, but then feels guilty about it afterward. If that’s the standard for rape, we better start building a lot more prisons.”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “It’s what your feminist scholar said. It’s all about what the woman thinks.”

  “It is her body.”

  “It’s his body, too.”

  “Hey, what’re you guys fighting about?”

  Amy jumped up from the sofa. On the stairs, slouching over the railing, there was their son, in gym shorts and T-shirt, his sleeping gear. “Davey, I thought you were going to bed.”

  “Casper threw up on my sheets again.”

  Simon stood up. “If you gave her her medicine every day like you’re supposed to maybe she’d stop doing it.”

  “That’s helpful,” Amy said, then turned to Davey. “Pull your sheets off and put them in the hallway. Then sleep in the guest room for tonight. The bed’s made up.”

  “I can’t sleep in there. It’s like a girl’s room.”

  “Then get new sheets from the linen closet and make your bed up yourself.”

  “But—”

  “Do as your mother says,” Simon said. “Sleep in the guest room or change your bed.”

  “What if …”

  “Do it!”

  Davey trudged back up the stairs, looking over his shoulder. Simon waited until he heard footsteps overhead in the hall.

  “So, what, you going to treat me now like David Rigero, the social outcast?”

  Amy thought for a moment, her head down. Couldn’t she even look at him? Her eyes slowly raised themselves, fixed on him. “Why did you hide this from me?”

  He held her gaze. “I didn’t hide anything. I told you, I haven’t thought about it for years.”

  “So you’re hiding it from yourself, too?”

  “Spare me the therapy, okay?”

  “Maybe that’s what you need, because I see this all the time. People wall off an unwanted experience in their mind. It’s like an abscess that keeps growing until it bursts unless you deal with it.”

  “I’m not walling off anything. I don’t need to dredge up something that happened in high school.”

  “Something you did.”

  “What?”

  “The something didn’t just happen—you did it, active voice.”

  “Fine, you want to parse words, here it is: I don’t need to dredge up an alleged rape that I didn’t do—active negative voice—a quarter century ago in order to make peace with myself or you or anyone else. Is that clear enough?”

  Amy bit her lip, and it reminded him of where Davey picked up the habit. “My patient, he said you told Jean afterward that she better not spread it around that she slept with you.”

  “And you believed him? You think I’d do that?”

  She didn’t answer right away. Finally, “I want to believe you.”

  “You shouldn’t have to want to.”

  “Don’t try to make this about me, Simon. I just went through a scary session with an unstable guy who accused my husband of one of the worst acts I can think of. So I’d like to know, did you call the girl who was accusing you of rape and tell her not to talk?”

  “I told you I called her because I was wondering what was going on. I finally got to talk to her for about one minute on her porch, and I tried to make her see that if this got out, everyone would know we had sex and that would be bad for both of us, maybe worse for her than me. I said I was sorry if she felt I forced her, because I honestly thought she wanted to do it.”

  “Apparently she didn’t, because twenty-five years later she killed herself.”

  “Killed herself?” Simon remembered the obit—unnatural causes. Why hadn’t he considered this before?

  “That’s what her husband says. An overdose of barbiturates.”

  “God, I thought we were just having sex, that she wanted to do it, too. I really did.”

  “How could you make such a serious mistake?”

  Simon remembered the sting of the vodka going down his throat and how intoxicating it was to lie out on the dock at nightfall with a pretty girl in a satiny dress, her shoulders smooth and bare. It was strange, the few things one could recall from any point in time, how they had to stand in for the whole event. “I didn’t want to graduate without ever having sex with a girl,” he said, “and this was my last chance, the last night. Maybe I got carried away.”

  Her face stiffened, whatever sympathy she had started out with now drained away from it. It scared him, how ghostly she looked. “You had sex with her because you didn’t want to graduate a virgin?”

  It sounded despicable to him, the way she said it. “Look, we had sex like millions of kids do, and I’m embarrassed to say it took all of about two minutes. She wasn’t yelling or hitting me or anything. The only way I knew something was wrong was when she ran up the hill afterward and got a ride home with Holly. She chose to make it into a horrible event for the rest of her life.”

  “That’s what men always do in date rape—blame the victim.”

  “I’m not blaming her. I’m just saying she chose to be devastated.”

  “Did she choose to be pregnant, too?”

  “What?”

  “You got her pregnant, Simon. That’s probably why her family left town, before she started showing.”

  He tried to comprehend this new information. “What happened to the baby?”

  “She lost it at birth.”

  He didn’t know what to feel—relief at not having a child he had never met or regret that some life of his, some part of himself, had died. And what must Jean have felt, having a child so young and losing it? “I’m sorry,” he said. It sounded odd to him to be apologizing to Amy, but it was too late to apologize to Jean. “I didn’t know any of this, obviously. She went away and I never heard from her. It didn’t occur to me that she could be pregnant.”

  “She was, and her husband came here to confront you. It’s not just a matter of strange postcards, Simon. He was getting pretty worked up in my office. I’m not sure what he might do.”

  “He got what he wanted scaring you. He’ll go away now.”

  “You sound sure of that.”

  He was as sure as he could be that Paul Walker would not be surfacing in their lives again. He took her hands in his just like he might any time, playfully, as if he had caught her and wouldn’t let go. “I don’t think we need to worry.”

  ———

  In their bed that night, after turning out the light, he curled himself behind her as always and reached his arm over her. He would not be the one to break the routine. She didn’t shake him off, and he let his body sink into her slowly, his muscles relaxing. After a moment she said, “Please don’t tonight.” He rolled away from her into the wide-open space of their king-size bed.

  In the middle of the night he woke and thought, It can’t be true. I didn’t cause another person to die.

  Yet it was true, or seemed to be. Of all things he could imagine doing in life, this had never occurred to him as a possibility. If Amy considered him so horrible as a rapist, what would she think of him as a murderer? But not murder, really. There was no premeditation. It was manslaughter at worst, or involuntary manslaughter; but not even that, just a terrible accident, a series of unfortunate events. He had even jumped in to try to save the man who had been stalking his family. Didn’t that count for something?

  Simon eased himself off the bed and listened for a moment. Amy was a light sleeper. Normally she would wake at any odd movement and ask if he was okay. She said nothing. He walked out of the room and down the hall in his boxers, feeling moist from the humid night air. The house was silent, nothing else stirring. He looked in on Davey, as he often did. In the dim light he could see the boy lying sideways across his narrow bed in a tangle of sheets. Casper was curled around his head. Nothing seemed changed, which felt odd to him, since everythin
g had changed. He, Simon Howe, the editor and publisher of Red Paint’s newspaper of record, had become the story himself. He imagined his mug shot, grainy black-and-white, nothing more than an accumulation of dots. He would appear disheveled, unshaven, despondent, the look of a guilty man. How many people would see him spread across the front page and say, “I’m not surprised. I knew he had it in him.” The Press Herald would surely give it page-one coverage in Portland, a former reporter gone wrong. A writer from New York or L.A. would descend on the town and poke around like it was a newly discovered historical site. He—or she, perhaps, the feminine touch right for this tale of rape and murder—would become a fixture at Red’s, overhearing bits of conversation, sliding her card across the counter for people to call her later and arrange a meeting at some out-of-the-way location. And they would talk, as Maine folk could once they got going, remembering stories of Simon as the talented but restless teenager, Simon as the young man who left for Portland to make his mark in journalism, Simon who ten years ago came back to buy his hometown paper, a curious move, the fallback position for a journalist who had never made it out of the state. It was obvious that he had hoped to go further. You could see it in his work. He wasn’t engaged in the town the way an editor should be. Standoffish, aloof. As for the incident on the dock twenty-five years ago, there had been rumors. The girl’s family left town quickly after graduation, and Simon was the last one to be with her in public. A few people put two and two together, figured something happened. Nobody said rape, though. Nobody went that far. But looking back …

  Casper stirred on the bed, stood up, stretched, and sank back in the opposite direction around Davey’s head. Simon turned away and tiptoed down the thickly carpeted stairs into the kitchen. If he drank tea it would be time to boil water, search through the box of odd herbal flavors, then sit with his hands cupped around the mug, breathing in the scent. All very calming. He hated tea, the thin taste of it, and the way it reminded him of being sick as a boy. Bland tea was his mother’s cure for any disturbance of the stomach. He opened the refrigerator and pulled out the organic milk that Amy bought as part of her futile effort to put at least some healthy ingredients into Davey’s body. Simon poured himself a glass to the very top.