Lost and Wanted

by Nell Freudenberger

  “What did you say?”

  Charlie shrugged. “I said okay. And he was actually very polite and nice, at least while we were walking. He said he shouldn’t have said those things to me—of course it was confusing for me—even if he felt them. He said my thesis was the best one he’d advised in years, and he really wanted to continue. He promised he wouldn’t talk about his feelings, or even touch me anymore.”

  “He touches you?”

  “Well, not—you know. But yeah. His hand on my arm or my back all the time, once on my thigh. He promised not to do it anymore, as long as I don’t drop the tutorial. He said he’d never forgive himself if I quit—and that he didn’t want to give me an incomplete.”

  “An incomplete—Charlie, that’s a threat!”

  “Well, I mean, I have thought about it.”

  “You can’t quit your thesis—no matter what. You’d graduate without honors, and you wouldn’t be able to apply for the Henry—or any other fellowship. What did you say to him?”

  I didn’t mean it as any kind of reproach, but Charlie was defensive.

  “I said, okay—I mean, what am I supposed to say? I don’t want an incomplete either. It’s not like I was taken in.”

  “Of course not.”

  Charlie hesitated. “I mean, I’m sure he doesn’t think it’s the best.”

  I started to argue—or did I only think of arguing? I didn’t really believe that she would sacrifice her thesis and her honors designation in order to be free of him.

  “So then he says, ‘So see you Thursday?’ And I wasn’t sure but I said I would, just to get rid of him, you know. And then I came in. Louise downstairs was having trouble with her stroller, and the kids were running around, and so I held the door for her, and maybe it didn’t close all the way.”

  “Oh god, Charlie—what happened?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “Nothing like that. I was sitting on the couch, reading. He just came in and—” I was sitting next to her on the bed, and Charlie turned and demonstrated, putting her palms on the wall behind me, trapping me in the half circle of her arms.

  “What did you do?”

  Charlie took her arms away, releasing me. She leaned back limply against the wall behind the bed.

  “I mean, did you scream?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Louise would’ve heard you.”

  “I know.”

  “She would’ve come up.”

  “Yeah, but I would’ve been so embarrassed.”

  “That he was attacking you?”

  “He didn’t do anything.”

  “He pinned you to the couch!”

  Charlie put her head down on her knees for a moment. I rubbed her back uselessly. I thought she was crying—we cried all the time at that point in our lives, over boys, midterm exams, the incomprehensible preoccupations of our parents—but when Charlie looked up, her eyes were dry.

  “He didn’t touch me. He didn’t even say anything. He just stayed there looking at me.”

  “Ugh, Charlie. If I’d just come straight—”

  She shrugged, tired of speculating. “That girl warned me—Trisha. I didn’t listen.”

  “You shouldn’t have to be warned.”

  Charlie got up suddenly. “Just come with me to look.”

  I didn’t know what she meant, but I followed her to my bedroom in the front of the apartment. I reached for the light, but she shook her head.

  “Leave it off. Can you see him?”

  “Pope?”

  “He was walking up and down the block.”

  “In front of the house?”

  She shook her head. “No, over on Mount Auburn. Is he still there?”

  I looked out to the main street, where people were passing under the streetlamps. Students with backpacks, but also people unconnected to the university, hurrying home after work. It was hard to distinguish faces.

  “I don’t see him.”

  Charlie turned on the light, looking visibly relieved. My room wasn’t exactly a model of tidiness either. Papers, problem sets, empty cups, and diskettes littered my small desk. My bed was covered with clothing, and the wooden seat in the bay window was serving as a home for anything I didn’t know what to do with, including the telescope my parents had given me as a gift, before I left home. It made me feel guilty to think of the money they’d spent on it, now that I had access to the much more sophisticated instruments at the Center for Astrophysics. Charlie moved it unceremoniously to the floor and sat down.

  “Jesus, Charlie—we have to call the police.”

  “The police?”

  “At least the Harvard police.”

  “And tell them that the Elmer Blakely Professor of Comparative Literature is walking down Mount Auburn Street? Was walking down Mount Auburn, but has now gone home to his wife of fifteen years for dinner?”

  “Tell them what happened.”

  “Do you know who Elmer Blakely was?”

  “A writer?”

  “I bet that’s what he called himself. Class of ’02. Taught eighteenth-century poetry here, then went on to Illinois. A noted anti-suffragist.”

  “Anti–women’s suffrage?”

  “He published a book of essays—all by women, except for his introduction. Why the vote is too big a responsibility for women because of their ‘natural’ responsibilities; why ‘stay-at-home’ voters would make bad government; how states with male suffrage actually made better laws protecting women than the equal-suffrage states.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  Charlie gave me a rueful smile. “Pope told me. Or at least he said Blakely was a fraud—that’s the word he used—and so I was curious. I went to the library and found the book. It was incredibly weird, reading those essays.”

  “Weird how?”

  “Weird like looking at your own twat in the mirror.”

  I laughed, but Charlie was serious:

  “So ugly.”

  “But Pope didn’t argue when they gave him the chair in Blakely’s name,” I said.

  “Of course not.”

  “It’s amazing they haven’t changed the name.”

  “Not really. They still have Agassiz Theatre, too—Louis Agassiz was a big creationist. And also into polygenism.”

  “What is that?”

  “All races have different origins, different purposes, so slavery’s okay.”

  “They should rename it.”

  “The theater?”

  “And the chair.”

  “They’d have to rename a lot of shit.”

  I remembered this conversation the spring after Charlie died, when I read that Harvard Law School was changing its crest in response to student protests. The original design came from the coat of arms of one of the school’s initial benefactors, a brutal Antiguan slaveowner. Within a week of that decision, the college also did away with the designation “Master” for the heads of its residential houses. They kept Mather House, named for another of the university’s slave-owning patrons, as well as Agassiz House, Agassiz Theatre, and the Louis Agassiz Museum of Comparative Zoology.

  Peering out the window of my college bedroom that night, I didn’t know any of those facts. I was just processing new information about the school I’d been so proud to attend, of which I’d been so anxious to prove myself worthy. It was one of those moments when I knew Charlie was giving me a chance to catch up.

  “So what do you want to do?”

  “Right now?”

  “About this—Pope. I mean, he broke into our house and threatened you.”

  “The doors were open, so technically he didn’t break in. And he didn’t say a word, at least after he came inside.”

  “But with his body?”

  “He didn’t touch me.”
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  “He trapped you on the couch.”

  “And I just sat there.”

  “Well, I mean, he’s a man.”

  “An old man.”

  “He’s not that old.”

  Charlie opened her eyes wide and shook her head. I could tell she wanted me to stop talking, but I couldn’t let it go.

  “How long did it last?”

  “A minute or two.” She hesitated. “Or longer?”

  “So what now? If we’re not going to call the police.”

  I was sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall. Charlie was still on the window seat, her long body folded in three parts, her chin resting on her knees. Her eyes were very bright.

  “Let’s go somewhere,” she said.

  13.

  We arranged to borrow Charlie’s friend Brian’s old VW Jetta, and first thing the next morning we set out for Aunt Penny’s house in Gloucester. Penny was Carl’s sister, and Charlie’s favorite aunt. During the week, she shared an apartment with another teacher near the high school in Roslindale, where she taught history, but Gloucester was her real home. Charlie kept a key to the house on her ring, and said we were welcome whether or not Penny was going to be there. But when Charlie called that night, it turned out that Penny was staying in the city for the weekend; she encouraged Charlie to use the house.

  Charlie drove at her breakneck, Boston pace, even once we were outside the city. In the car we alternated between Automatic for the People and 3 Years, 5 Months and 2 Days in the Life Of…and didn’t talk about Pope. We didn’t talk about how the university might have made it easier for students to report unwanted sexual advances from other students or faculty. We didn’t talk about what Trisha might have meant, when she said Charlie was Pope’s type, and we certainly didn’t talk about whether Charlie was going to tell her parents what had happened. I don’t think it ever occurred to either of us that she would.

  Maybe today black girls and brown girls and white girls, lesbians and bisexual and trans people sit in their dorm rooms talking about privilege and adjacency and intersectionality. It’s just that it wasn’t like that then. Talking about it would have violated every unspoken rule of our friendship, which was like that game, popular in the nineties, in which you removed rectangular blocks from the base of a tower, adding them to the top. Charlie had the theater, I had the lab; Charlie had her social club, I played intramural soccer; Charlie had a “summer place” in Gloucester, I had a work-study job; Charlie was black, I was white. When that last binary came up, we dismissed it with a kind of eye roll. It was uncool, sort of embarrassing and outdated, to make a big deal about it.

  Instead, on the way up, Charlie asked me about Neel.

  “You have to call him,” Charlie said.

  “And say what?”

  “Invite him up.”

  “You mean another weekend?”

  “Tonight,” Charlie said. “As soon as we get there. He could take the commuter line to Gloucester.”

  “Isn’t that a little—”

  “Yeah,” Charlie said. “It’s ballsy.”

  “Not this weekend, though. You need to recover.”

  “Oh, spare me the therapy session—it was no big deal.”

  I didn’t think that; I didn’t think Charlie thought it either, but there was a tone I recognized, just a little louder and more flippant than the situation warranted: a warning to back off.

  “If there were a bunch of people, maybe.”

  Charlie sighed. “I don’t want a bunch of people.”

  “Neither do I!”

  She looked at me sideways, one hand resting only very casually on the wheel. “But you want him.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes,” Charlie said. “You do.”

  * * *

  —

  I left a message with Neel’s roommate with the phone number at the house, and then Charlie and I went to the grocery store. When we got back it was noon; the sun was pale and very far away, and the gulls called frantically to each other. The air was surprisingly cold and you could smell the ocean. We ran from the car to the house without our coats, bringing in the bags; when we got inside, we pushed Aunt Penny’s plaid draft-catchers against the gap at the bottom of the door and blew on our hands to warm them.

  “We’ll have a fire tonight,” Charlie said, as we brought the groceries into the kitchen. “And hot toddies—ooh, look!” She indicated the phone, where a red light was flashing. Neel had left a very brief message, letting me know when I should call to reach him.

  Charlie wrote the number on a pad, and handed me the phone.

  “I can’t.”

  “C’mon,” she said. “It’ll be fun.”

  “No,” I said. “Honestly. It’s too obvious.”

  “What about that comet?” Charlie said.

  “What?”

  “Isn’t it streaking across the sky, or whatever, this weekend? You said we could see it from here.”

  “Swift-Tuttle. I thought so, but look out the window—it’s too cloudy.

  “It might clear up.”

  “It’s probably still too close to the sun.”

  “The sun’s not going to be out at night!”

  “I mean, too close in its orbit. I don’t think the conditions are ideal.”

  “But the conditions are ideal for you to get it on with Neel.”

  “Did you seriously just say, ‘Get it on’?”

  “You’re impossible,” Charlie said, glancing at the number on the pad. “And yeah, I sure did. I’m calling.”

  “You better not.”

  Charlie keyed in the number and held it over my head, out of reach.

  “Charlie!”

  Charlie widened her eyes and pointed at the receiver; it was ringing. She put the phone to her ear, and when she spoke, she sounded perfectly serious and slightly exasperated, as if she’d been interrupted in the middle of something important.

  “Yes, hi—I just got a call from this number.”

  In spite of the fact that Neel couldn’t see her, Charlie frowned—as if she really weren’t sure who was on the other end.

  “Oh hey, Neel,” she said. It sounded as if she were surprised, as if she hadn’t heard his name for months. It was the kind of thing Charlie pulled off better than anyone.

  “She is, but she went for a run on the beach. Yeah, I know—it’s like, arctic down there—she’s crazy. Anyway, I think she was going to ask if you wanted to come up to see—a comet or something? You guys would know better than I do.” Charlie winked at me. “The town is Gloucester. You can take the commuter line from North Station.”

  Neel said something, and Charlie started to laugh silently. She looked at me, straightening her face with effort, and then nodded gravely.

  “I definitely think you should bring it,” she said. “We have an attic bedroom with a very high window.”

  I listened in disbelief as she reassured Neel about his welcome—he was really coming—and gave specific directions about where we would pick him up outside the station. She managed to encourage him without sounding as if she cared much either way. When she hung up, she looked at me.

  “He wants to bring his telescope,” she said. “The two of you are going to stargaze.”

  “People confuse comets and meteoroids with stars—but they’re different. They’re just balls of ice and rock; they get close to the sun and then they heat up. Comets have more ammonia and gases than other space rocks, and that’s why they have the coma—sort of like a halo around a rock. The evaporating gas is what makes the glowing tail.”

  “Mmm,” said Charlie. “Fascinating. I told him he could set his instrument up in the attic room. Do you think you’re going to see it?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t. Because it’s way too cloudy.”

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nbsp; “Oh,” Charlie said. “That’s too bad. So what are you guys going to do up there?”

  * * *

  —

  Whether it was because Neel was coming, or just because we were away from school, the weekend seemed especially exciting. It was an adventure to stock the kitchen, an adventure to get firewood from the pile behind the house. Charlie had said she was going to make boeuf bourguignon, and she delivered; she cooked without a recipe, a skill she’d learned from watching cooking shows with her nanny while her parents were at work. Like me, my mother was indifferent to food—you ate, and then you moved on to more important business—but my father loved being in the kitchen. One of the first things he and Charlie had bonded over, when Charlie came home with me for spring break junior year, was a recipe for homemade chocolate truffles. In my father’s case, cooking was a kind of tinkering: the more complicated and esoteric the recipe, the better. For Charlie it was about pleasure, her own and other people’s, as generous as the smell of meat and oil and herbs saturating every room of the house.

  While she cooked, I explored. The house had wooden siding rather than shingles, and was painted brick red. A yellow tin star decorated the narrow front door. There was a living room with a low, beamed ceiling and a fireplace, furniture in dark green plush. There were lace curtains. From the living room, a steep, narrow staircase ascended to the second floor, past a photo wall with pictures of the family in Baltimore, where Carl and his younger sister had grown up. I recognized Carl in a group of young people, elegantly dressed and crowded at a zinc bar in front of a wall of felt pennants, and as a child on the sidewalk outside a church, holding the hand of a little girl who must’ve been Aunt Penny, in a full-skirted short dress and white gloves, carrying a bouquet. These would have been taken in Baltimore in the fifties and sixties.

  A more contemporary photograph showed Penny with her graduating seniors at the school in Roslindale. From Memorial Day until Labor Day weekend, she was always in Gloucester. Charlie and her brother had come to stay for most of every summer, while their parents worked in the city. There was a photo of the two of them playing on the beach with Penny, and another of the whole family, including Carl and Addie and the dogs—a pair of the small white terriers that the Boyces had always kept. There were school pictures of Charlie and William, and a snapshot of their parents, much younger, with their arms around each other, standing on a dock with boats in the background. Carl was grinning, perfectly relaxed, but Addie’s expression was more guarded, as if she had considered the photograph’s long life on her sister-in-law’s wall, and all of the people who might someday look at it. She was beautiful but impossible to read.