The Comedown

  That night she was supposed to sleep on a cot in her parents’ hotel room a few blocks from the St. Josephine campus, but she didn’t bother to stop by and they didn’t bother to check up on her. St. Josephine was built on a hill that rolled down to a small, man-made lake, on the eastern shore of which stood Allenton. She and her friends paddled a rowboat across the lake, Sandy’s little brother at the helm shouting in his pubescent voice: “Land ho! Land hoooo!” They landed at the Allenton dock, received by a bunch of horny sixteen-year-olds in navy blazers who knew Sandy’s little brother. Jocelyn brushed one of their cheeks with her hand and gave his forehead a kiss. That made everyone cheer. His eyes big underneath her protective hand, he said, “I can get cocaine if you want. I know a guy on campus.”

  “You do that,” Jocelyn said.

  The blazer boys scattered off somewhere and Jocelyn and her friends ran across campus, which rumor had it was more religious than St. Josephine and very strict. They ran silently, doe-like, communicating through muted giggles. They hid for twenty minutes behind the senior boys’ dorm while Sandy’s little brother went inside and negotiated with whomever was upstairs, then he came back down and told them they should wait for the signal and he was going to go hang out with his friends because he didn’t want to watch his sister being kissed. It had begun to rain, or at least to mist, and their hair had flattened, their dresses clung to their bodies. Eventually a big-headed guy with perfectly parted hair leaned out the window and waved them up. They snuck in the back door, which was being held open by someone named Corey. His skin was brown and he had hair that was buzzed short and curly, and his smile seemed to be for Jocelyn alone. She followed Corey upstairs, close at his heels, watched the bend and pull of his capable legs ahead of her. The dorm was older than theirs, oak everywhere, stern portraits of high-collared, patrician men hanging from the walls. Behind Jocelyn, her friends laughed and asked inane questions about how many dicks were in this building and why it smelled like old gym socks. Her drunk made the halls dizzyingly bright, made Corey’s shoulders seem broader than they probably were. She thought of how many people she’d met in her life who looked like him, and the answer was few to none. Who looked like him? Their mailman at their old house in Beacon Hill, who sometimes made small talk with her dad while he signed for packages. She watched Corey’s calves beneath his Allenton slacks, the way his waist swiveled as he moved, the smile he threw back at her as they climbed the stairs. He led them into a room where a bunch of guys were standing, as many as there were girls. They cracked their necks, adjusted their blazer cuffs. An auburn-haired one unbuttoned the first two buttons of his shirt. There was a thunderclap outside, then the hard staccato of rain.

  “There are six of you and six of us,” the big-headed one observed unhelpfully. The auburn-haired one punched him in the shoulder and said, “Shut up, man!” Jocelyn threw her head back in laughter, and the other girls followed suit. Then Sandy leaned forward and stage-whispered to Jocelyn, “Your party, your pick.”

  Jocelyn scanned the assembled. She picked Corey. There was a hum of approval from everyone in the room, surprised approval. One of the girls said, “Jungle fever, huh?” Jocelyn smiled coquettishly and ignored her, eyes locked with Corey’s. He offered her his hand and she took it. They left the room, everyone cheering, and began ascending a flight of stairs.

  “I can’t believe we haven’t gotten caught yet,” she said.

  Instead of shushing her as she expected, he laughed loudly, heartily. “Graduation day is the one day a year the administration turns a blind eye and we get to—um—sow our wild oats, as I bet the rector would say.”

  She laughed, too. “He knows what a shitty deal lifelong virginity is.”

  He grabbed her hand and they ran up flights of stairs until they were at the top of the building. His room was the first on the left—his roommate had cleared out, mercifully. They stood in the center of the room kissing, his hands around her still-damp shoulders, their nose-breathing loud. She was embarrassed about the lifelong virginity joke because she was a virgin herself. Now she thought maybe he’d expect her not to be. She brought her hands to his chin and kissed him harder, and he picked her up like in the movies and deposited her on his bed. Standing there above her, he had the ready-to-pounce electricity of every teenaged boy she’d ever met, but the cut of his jaw and tone in his arms suggested he knew something about being an adult. He took off his shirt.

  “I’m a virgin,” she sputtered.

  He laughed good-naturedly. “Well, then do I have permission to take your virginity?”

  She thought the question was strange, but she had nothing to compare it to. She used to want to give it up to someone special, someone she was going to marry, but in the past year she’d gotten antsy as other girls shared their stories and had started to think that anyone would do. She nodded and slid out of her dress and they started. It was more painful than she thought it would be, but she smiled through the pain and kissed him and put her hands on top of his head. He asked if this or that felt okay, if she was happy, if she was comfortable. The questions sobered her, forcing her to think about what was happening as it happened. None of her friends were going this far, probably. She wasn’t on birth control. She had a sick feeling that confirmed she was taking an unnecessary risk: if her mother found out, she’d be dead. Pregnant and dead. And it’d be Corey’s baby.

  He groaned and shuddered, and then there was a wetness between her legs that wasn’t her own. He collapsed onto her, sighing, his arms around her. “Shit,” he said. Then, as if remembering she was still there: “You were good. That was incredibly good.” He rolled off her. She was almost completely sober now as she stared at the ceiling. He turned to her, propping himself on his side.

  “Did you like that?” he asked.

  She nodded. She was thinking, but none of her thoughts made sense. “What are you?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like what, um, what’re your parents?”

  He sighed a little and folded his hands over his chest. “My mom’s white, Jewish, and my dad’s black. That’s the usual combination—black dad, white mom.”

  The usual combination. She had no idea what he was talking about. It was still wet between her legs. She felt herself on the verge of extreme anxiety. “So you’re on scholarship?”

  His face darkened. “No. My dad’s a business consultant in New York and my mom’s an artist. She came from money.”

  “I don’t usually hang out with blacks,” she said. “I’m not racist or anything. I’m just saying I’ve never kissed a black person. I never thought I would, I guess, until tonight.”

  She figured this information would have little to no effect on him, reportage of the truth that it was. But he was silent a while, staring at the ceiling, breathing tensely. “Thanks for taking a chance on me,” he said.

  “You’re, um, you’re a really good kisser,” she said. He said nothing in response.

  Now something cavernous had opened between them, something deep and awful. What was it, even? She rushed to close it: “You went to Allenton. I bet no one even sees you as black.”

  He sat up, his face in his hands. “Holy shit.”

  Sitting up was something to do, something mildly distracting, so she did it, too. She put her hand on his shoulder and he flinched away.

  “Was that, like, weird for you?” he said. “You basically wanna say it’s so weird fucking a colored, don’t you?”

  Her breath caught hard in her throat. “What?”

  “Are you gonna say I raped you?” He was looking at her with his eyes narrowed. “Dumb bitch.”

  She reached for her dress and put it back on in silence. Crying, she left.

  * * *

  The real reason she’d hung that photo above her bed was to purge all memories of that day, which had quickly shrunk to something hard, painful, and malignant tucked away deep in her brain. If the photo stayed in her room, so did everything else associated with it:
Corey, the sex, etc. A month later, she wasn’t pregnant, she didn’t have any warts, she wasn’t peeing blood. She was, for the most part, the same person she’d always been.

  That fall, she had gone to Northwestern, where she’d dedicated herself to liberal causes. She marched in a protest to get the university to divest from the apartheid government of South Africa. She joined the Environmental Club and planted trees around the campus perimeter. She was the big sister to Lucia Milagros, a soft-faced girl from Chicago’s South Loop who had a sick mother. Jocelyn told Lucia that if she stayed in school and kept on learning, everything would get better. Lucia nodded obediently and gave Jocelyn big, desperate hugs after every tutoring session.

  From the muddle of memories and impressions that had been her precollegiate life, she felt her worldview beginning to take shape. Helping others was good work—better work than doing things exclusively for yourself. There was potential for goodness in everyone, even criminals, and extensive time spent with any member of a maligned population could reveal this. She volunteered at a local women’s shelter. She answered phones at a rape crisis center. She reassured every aggrieved caller that she believed her, that she shouldn’t blame herself for what had just happened, that the biggest task ahead of her was to heal.

  She and the other volunteers who worked at the rape crisis center had a weekly meeting to process difficult calls. Many of the women who worked there had been sexually assaulted themselves, and some of them shared their stories during meetings, talked about unsympathetic parents who didn’t believe they’d been raped by their boyfriends or husbands, about friends both male and female who told them to just “forget about it,” about policemen who said they were asking for it. During one of these meetings, Jocelyn found herself overcome with awful memories. She stood up and said, “I was sexually assaulted my senior year of high school. At the time, I didn’t think of it that way, but now I’m realizing that’s what it was.”

  Her stomach churned uncertainly, but maybe this was just her body’s process of acknowledging what had taken place. The other women around her leaned toward her, kind-eyed, compassionate. “It happened at a party,” she had said, and could say nothing else. She sat down. Her face was hot in her hands. She could feel another woman’s arm across her shoulders, pulling her in for a side hug. The head volunteer was announcing something about a potluck; soon, the discussion was brought to a close.

  If asked, she would have said, “It happened at a party. He was a popular guy and he kissed well.” But something in her head objected to this. It throbbed and rattled horribly. She thought she’d left it in her room, stuck to the wall along with the photo from her graduation party. He’d admitted to it, hadn’t he? Why would he say something like that otherwise? He’d admitted to it and he’d been dagger-like. She was drunk. Maybe he was, too. She saw flashes of his face. She thought of herself at the center of the photo in her bedroom: tallest, happiest, prettiest, tipsy and powerful and young.

  Her dad had encouraged her to continue with the French she’d so loved studying in high school, so she stuck with it in college. She met Steve Millheim in a Flaubert class she took during the winter of her freshman year. He was a physics major but he was good-looking, more interesting than the sloppy-drunk packs of frat boys who hounded her at parties. His French was almost perfect, and he wrote a poem about her called “corps et âme,” which he had slipped into her backpack after a class one day. They went on one date, then another. They saw a student theater production of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia and ended up back in her bedroom, her roommate out for the night with her boyfriend. He started taking off her bra and she told him she was a virgin. He said he’d be gentle and she said that was fine. She put in the diaphragm she’d bought at the student health center. After that, they were officially boyfriend and girlfriend. She saw him first thing in the morning and last thing at night. He came out of his shell a little, joked around more, spent a few more nights a week with the other juniors getting sloppy at Nevin’s.

  When she flew home to Boston for Christmas break, her father picked her up from the airport and said he was so sorry, but he was going to be in board meetings until Christmas.

  “But you and Mom will have some time to catch up,” he reassured her.

  She nodded, her head against the window. She told him she was looking forward to it.

  So she and her mother sat in the living room watching Hill Street Blues reruns. Jocelyn ate chocolate pudding that she could tell her mother disapproved of even if it was sugar-free, her mother sitting in the captain’s chair adjacent to the couch, wrapped in a Coach bathrobe, her blue eyes—unlined by crow’s-feet, wide as a child’s—turned impatiently toward the TV. She drank from a tumbler of bourbon with two loaf-shaped ice cubes that rattled softly whenever she took a sip. Jocelyn thought she and her mother had always been at their best on practical matters: food, the arrangement of furniture in a room, which events and rehearsals for events they needed to attend and when. But now that she lived over a thousand miles from her mother’s home, they had nothing to talk about.

  “You seem different,” her mother said without looking from the TV.

  “Well, I’m in college, Mom.”

  “Mm. So you are. I never understood why you had to go so far away.”

  Jocelyn swallowed another spoonful of pudding and shrugged. “I just liked the look of Northwestern.”

  “Yes, but you got into Brown, too. You could’ve been closer to your father and me.”

  “I didn’t like it,” she said. Which was kind of true. Really she’d just wanted to leave the East Coast—had felt this way since she was a child, when adults began to ask her what she wanted to be when she grew up. Not you. The only adult she wanted to be like was her dad, and he’d always encouraged her to travel, broaden her horizons.

  “Well, what matters is that you’re happy,” her mother said, although Jocelyn knew this didn’t especially matter to her mother at all. “You should be able to get your degree in a place that makes you happy.”

  Jocelyn nodded, and the noise of the TV dominated the room. She was getting used to it when her mother spoke again.

  “But you really do seem different,” she said.

  “I don’t think so.”

  Her mother hugged her elbows as if she were cold. “More timid.”

  Jocelyn licked the chocolate from her lips. “I have no idea why you’d think that.”

  Her mother shrugged. “A mother knows.”

  Jocelyn failed in her attempt to suppress a squeaking laugh. Her mother’s eyes narrowed. “Do you find my caring for you funny?”

  “No,” Jocelyn said. “I absolutely don’t.”

  “Is there a reason you’re laughing, then?”

  “No. I don’t know. I was nervous, I guess.”

  “Well, if I didn’t know better, I’d think this Steven Millheim you keep talking about isn’t the first boy you’ve been with.”

  Jocelyn’s core temperature shot up. How was this happening? How the hell did she know?

  “Mom, I wouldn’t lie to you.”

  “Yes you would. Every child lies to their parents.” She smiled punishingly.

  “I was raped,” she said, or heard herself say. “By a boy at Allenton. The day of my graduation party.”

  Her mother froze. “What?”

  “I didn’t want to tell you.”

  Her mother closed her eyes and shook her head, then rubbed the bridge of her nose. “What was his name?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Surely you do.”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “Just try to.”

  “Corey,” she said.

  Her mother’s eyes widened. “I know who you’re talking about,” she said, and then turned back to the TV.

  That night as Jocelyn lay half-asleep in her childhood bedroom, she thought of a call she’d received at the rape crisis center during one of her volunteer shifts, a call she probably should’ve brought up at one of the
debriefing meetings. The woman on the other end of the line was sobbing, and in order to speak at all she had to shout through her sobs. “They won’t listen! They! Won’t! Listen! They! Won’t! Listen!” Jocelyn, tiny-voiced, kept asking her to explain who “they” were, and what it was they wouldn’t listen to, but the woman hung up on her. Jocelyn turned over on her side in the dark and brought her knees to her chest. She hadn’t needed any clarification. She’d known exactly what the woman meant. No one believed her, and everyone believed Jocelyn.

  Straight ahead of her the open bedroom door let in a long square of light glowing turquoise blue in her sleep-limned vision. And in that light was a man’s silhouette. The man had his arms crossed and stood with his shoulders slightly hunched, sullen, leaning against the doorframe for support. Seeing that she’d seen him, he righted his posture, began walking toward her, arms swinging, the same loping walk she’d admired from behind as Corey climbed the stairs in his Allenton dorm. She held her breath.

  She turned her bedside lamp on. Her father stood in her doorframe, tie loosened, coat over his arm.

  “Did I startle you?” he asked.

  She shook her head, then looked at her clock. It was a little past one in the morning. “Why are you here?”