The Fact of a Body

by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

  In September 1990, Ricky Langley, the reformed prisoner, receives parole.

  * * *

  When the defense experts look back on this time, they’re impressed by how much he learned during his Georgia prison term. When the prosecutors do, they sneer at it. One year and five months after being released from Georgia, he murdered Jeremy. So how much can you say he learned? An inmate in Georgia, after all, recalls him saying that his mistake there was leaving the girl alive. Next time, he would make sure she was dead. But that’s not fair, the defense experts point out. Surely the inmate has his own reasons for saying this. And besides, child molesters are targeted in prison. Ricky may have had to try to appear threatening to be safe.

  Like so much else, these years before the murder come down to what it always comes down to with Ricky: What do you see in him? Do you believe that he’s trying? Is his the story of a man who tries over and over again to get treatment, trying to change and take his changed self back into the world and live a new life, who tries and tries but is ultimately undone by the bulwark fact of who he is? Or is his the story of a man who leaves treatment over and over again, who never really tries but always runs? In the trial transcripts, the prosecutors and the defense psychiatric witnesses battle over this:

  Prosecutor: So while he was on probation [in 1984] and ordered to Lake Charles Mental Health, he leaves the state and stops his health treatment, is that right?

  Defense psychiatrist: That’s correct.

  Q: He chose to do that, didn’t he?

  A: Yes, he did that.

  Q: He chose to do that, didn’t he?

  A: As much as it was his choice, yes, he chose to do that.

  Q: Are you trying to say he didn’t have the ability to choose?

  And:

  Prosecutor: So he didn’t go to Indianapolis and [try to] see anybody [himself]?

  Defense psychiatrist: No.

  Q: Georgia?

  A: He did not see anyone.

  Q: He did not seek any kind of treatment whatsoever?

  A: No.

  Q: But he knew and had an insight into his behavior, that’s what you said.

  A: He had some insight into his behavior, yes.

  Q: He understood that he was supposed to do it, didn’t he, Doctor?

  A: I believe he understood that.

  Q: And he chose not to?

  A: That’s correct.

  Q: Was he seeing anybody during the week before Jeremy Guillory’s death?

  A: No.

  Q: So he knows enough to go to the doctor when he has bronchitis, but when he starts struggling with his sexual feelings towards Jeremy, it doesn’t clue him in that maybe he needs help?

  A: I think he knew he needed help. I think there’s a real different situation, between going for bronchitis and going for your mental health. I’m sorry, I wish it wasn’t, but it is.

  Q: Why? Why is that different?

  The man at the center of this trial, endlessly discussed and debated, endlessly documented and dissected in what will turn out to be nearly thirty thousand pages of documents, will remain an enigma in this way. What you see in Ricky may depend more on who you are than on who he is.

  But released from prison in Georgia in 1990, clear and free except for needing to check in with his parole officer, his whole life suddenly seemingly opening up before him, Ricky faces a choice. He’s been dreaming of the Calcasieu River, yes. But all these years of therapy have made Ricky interested in his past, and in the history of his family. In the questions of where he came from and how he became who he is. There’s no record from these years of his saying that his dead brother, Oscar, has visited him or that he has heard Oscar’s voice; it’s not like that. It’s more, now, the historian’s interest, the genealogist’s interest, and a personal interest. Through his prison stays he’s carried copies of Oscar’s and Vicky Lynn’s birth certificates, secreted out of Bessie’s truck in Hecker. While he was imprisoned at Valdosta, he wrote to the coroner in Red Rock, Arizona, the site of the crash that led to Bessie’s hospitalization and his birth. His letter received no response the first time—not even a note telling him whether he’d addressed his request correctly—but in prison he had nothing but time, so he went to the prison library and he looked up addresses and forms and he tried again. Eventually, copies of Oscar’s and Vicky Lynn’s death certificates arrived by mail. Over the years to come, he’ll amass others this way: those of his parents’ parents and their parents, census records and news articles and death certificates. He’ll become so thoroughly the historian of his family that twenty-five years later, when I am digging into this story at the genealogical society just a few miles from where Ricky was born and a few miles from where Jeremy Guillory died, I’ll happen upon a book about the history of the Langley family, self-published by a Louisiana hobbyist. In the book’s acknowledgments section will be this: A very special thank you to Ricky Langley, who was instrumental in obtaining and providing the majority of obituaries used in this book. To Ricky I wish all the best.

  In 1990, Ricky, carrying sheaves of the photocopied past around with him, makes a decision. He’ll go back to California. California is still where the happy stories come from, the stories Bessie told him when he was a boy. That June, he hitchhikes there, searching for the past he never knew.

  Eighteen

  Chicago, 1996

  For college, I invent a new life. I’ll pretend the past never happened. Chicago feels far away from the gray house, far enough to be free. The tall Gothic buildings of the University of Chicago look like my dreams of a college quadrangle: Ivy twists up the sides of stone archways and turrets, while at the buildings’ center is a clearing girdled by the gnarled roots of trees, perfect for lying back and reading on, and sheltered by a canopy of leaves. Campus legend has it that because ivy doesn’t grow naturally in Chicago, the Rockefeller family endowed a separate fund to keep it growing. Now, with the city of Chicago sparkling across the wide blue waters of Lake Michigan, and the green ivy climbing through the wind that rustles the tree leaves, the quad seems testament that you can be whoever you want to. Walking across it each day, I embrace my new role as diligent student. I never cut class. I sign up for the maximum number of classes allowed and I go to the sessions prepared, not because I have to but because I am in love with the ideas coming at me and I do the homework so soon after each class session that I do it over again before the next one. My grandfather dies in my first weeks there, and when my parents tell me I hang up the phone and don’t tell a soul. That life is gone. I don’t even look like the old me anymore, the girl in her loose, ripped clothing and Crayola hair. I have bought a wardrobe of tight skirts and tight sweaters and dyed my hair back to brown, going for something between a retro, safe can-do Mary Tyler Moore look and, with one pair of black vinyl pants, Uma Thurman’s character in Pulp Fiction, minus the syringe through the heart. What I am really going for is happy.

  And somebody notices. In the dining hall one day a boy approaches. He’s on the football team, he says. His brown hair falls over one eye, and now he looks at me from under it. His frat house is having a party. Do I want to be his date?

  He actually says that word, date. It is like a movie, a movie I have dreamt for myself, and when Friday comes I queue up a funk CD and dress while singing along. The theme is seventies, and I choose a low-waisted pair of tight flare pants and a turtleneck that skims my curves. I blow-dry my hair straight, then fit a plaid woolen newsboy cap onto it, turning the cap around so that it looks, I imagine, a little jauntily unexpected.

  The party is at one of the stone-and-brick frat houses on South University Avenue, houses I’ve walked by but never thought I’d go into. I don’t drink. It’s a point of pride with me. I don’t want to be like my father. And what else does a person do at frat parties? In the house, couples make out against door frames. People in bell-bottoms and long hippie wigs sprawl across the living room couches and on the floor. Something silver gleams from the corner—a keg, I recognize
, and only then do I realize that all this time when classmates have talked about kegs of beer, I’ve pictured them lugging around a wooden barrel.

  The boy has shown up wearing a ball cap and a flannel shirt open over a white T-shirt. Now he fills a red plastic cup, tilting it to cut down on the foam, then holds it out to me.

  “No, thanks.” I’m happy to be here but I’m still not going to drink.

  His face falls. He doesn’t look just disappointed, but confused, and I know instantly I’ve done the wrong thing. This is not what the movie teenager would do. He takes the cup in one long swallow, then fills another and downs that, and then he wanders off and when he comes back to check on me later I’m pretty sure he’s drunk and he can definitely tell I’m not and there doesn’t seem to be anything else to do but leave. “I’m not feeling so well,” I say. I have spent the hour sitting primly on a couch, trying to avoid other people’s elbows. “Maybe I’ll just go home.”

  “I’ll walk you.”

  This is as far as my memory gets, except for the memory of the trees, which stab out of the dark grass sea of the Esplanade and pierce the black sky. There is no light in my memory. There are no stars and there are no people. There is barely him, and the knowledge of later—of another boy’s hand on my arm, pulling me up, and his voice asking, “Are you OK? Are you OK?”

  The football player has held me down. Getting up off the grass, shaking the earth-damp blades off my clothes and out of my hair, I understand that. He has not raped me; I understand that, too. I am still wearing my clothes. I was in peril but I don’t quite know how much. Though I am sober, my body has gone over to fright. I remember nothing.

  “Everyone knows his reputation,” the boy says. “But no one was sure how to tell you. You seemed so excited. So I thought I’d come along, just to make sure you were all right.”

  From that point on I am instead with the boy who came along, Ben. Ben is six feet six inches and at least in my memory does not slouch like so many of the overly tall, but wears his gallantry straight-backed. He has a rare condition known as Marfan syndrome. It has left him gangly, almost painfully thin. His thumb joints grow out from his palms at right angles, like those of Abraham Lincoln, who also had the syndrome. Lincoln, Ben tells me on one of the early nights when we are lying on his dorm bed or mine fully clothed, would have died within months even if he hadn’t been shot on that fateful day at Ford’s Theatre. The syndrome had attacked the musculature of his heart. I am struck immediately by this idea, that the future was seeded secretly into the present, the present seeded secretly into the past.

  Ben’s heart is safe—if I know anything about Ben I will always know this, that his heart is safe and big and beating—but the syndrome has made his sternum protrude into a point and he is self-conscious about it. Long before the Chicago weather turns so famously cold, he wears thick sweaters. It reminds me of how, even in summer, I have to lie under a blanket to be able to sleep. His skin is so elastic he can pinch his neck between two fingers and pull the skin there several inches away. It feels slightly waxy to the touch, like what I imagine the figures on display at Madame Tussauds to be. His height, his skin, the unusual prominence of his bones—all these put Ben always on display. It is not a costume or a disguise, the way my dyed hair and torn clothing was, the way my new streamlined clothing is, but for him it is an identity thrust upon him. Whereas I once kept trying to find a way to make the pain I feel inside show up on my skin so someone would notice, and now I pretend I don’t feel it at all, Ben has no choice but to wear openly that he doesn’t belong.

  That, I realize, has made him kind. He is quick to laugh, quicker even to make others laugh, and dating him I am suddenly at the center of dorm life. When our dorm organizes a fund-raiser, Ben comes up with the idea of selling milk shakes in the lobby at midnight to the students, who are so famous for studying long hours that rumor has it that’s why the cafeteria closes one night a week, to make the students go out. I, so in love with coffee that I briefly brew mine with caffeinated water, add the idea of using coffee ice cream and mixing in instant coffee granules. What we dream up is a tan sludge so gritty that drinking it is like drinking wet, sweetened sand, but when sales day comes around, the line of students in the lobby is long. At a school where students compete to say how little time studying leaves them for sleeping, and a good decade before Red Bull will become popular, drinkable highly caffeinated sludge is an undeniable hit. We use the first round of proceeds to buy more instant coffee, and advertise the next round of milk shakes as even stronger. That they’re gross only adds to the hard-core appeal.

  And I understand that. I will prove myself by drinking the gross thing, doing the hard thing. It will be years before I understand the value of softness. My body still hurts from the Lyme disease, and I am completely unprepared for the Chicago winter. Ben picks me up and carries me when my knees don’t work. When I am well enough to stand and turn, he takes me dancing. He turns out to be an excellent dancer, able to spin and dip and lift me. I live in a dream, a dream of being loved.

  But we are kids, me eighteen and him nineteen, and we are slow to realize what a threat looks like. Though I feel happy, I swear I do, since the night on the Esplanade I have somehow stopped eating. Before, in high school, I ate to hurt from the inside and then vomited for the relief of getting rid of what filled me. But now to have anything in my stomach is suddenly, inexplicably, scary. Only apples, nonfat yogurt, veggie burgers without the bun, and lettuce are safe. I haven’t told anyone in Chicago about what happened with my grandfather, and I am determined not to. That belongs to the New Jersey house. That belongs to the past. My grandfather is dead and I am in college and free. At night, Ben and I lie on his bed, and with a single fingertip he traces the emerging bone-curve of my hip over my jeans and up the knobs of my back to my neck, which seems longer now that my body is more sparing. Pleased with my new thinness, I am wearing a lot of black, I am trying to be the New Yorker I long to be. I seem sophisticated to this boy from Kansas. We have sex only once or twice across the months, but he doesn’t seem to mind. Neither of us knows yet that we are both gay. Neither of us knows yet how much we are a refuge for each other. He likes my turtlenecks and my fine-boned face and even my silence. “You’re like a ballerina,” he says.

  But I don’t stop there. I skate past ballerina, into danger. When I go back to Tenafly for Thanksgiving, I don’t show the mark of the freshman fifteen like the other kids. I’ve lost thirty pounds since school started at the end of August. In the photograph my siblings and I pose for in front of the fireplace that will later become the Christmas card, I wear a smooth black mock turtleneck with short sleeves. My upper arms are the size of a wrist, my wrist the size of a child’s. My parents send me to my old pediatrician. In my memory he tells me I really must eat, but that I don’t have a serious problem. That seems curious now, even impossible. Who would tell an anorexic teenager that she didn’t have a serious problem? Looking back I imagine my parents standing at the side of a highway, their eyes wide and their mouths agape, watching a car wreck. My father still drinks too much. He is still depressed. My mother has found a voice in the courtroom, but she is still quieter at home. They still have two daughters to raise and a reputation in town to uphold and a law firm to run. And above all we are prisoners of the story we tell about ourselves, the story of the parents descended from poor immigrants who made it good and now have the Cadillacs and the beautiful, successful children and the most porch lights at Christmas. We are so determinedly fine it must be overwhelming for them to have a daughter who has suddenly shown up with the marks of all that is not fine so visibly on her. And a relief for all of us when I go back to school.

  A month or so before spring break, my dorm adviser knocks on my door and hands me a typewritten piece of paper sheathed in a white envelope. I have lost still more weight, and the college is demanding that I see a nutritionist. I have already gone begrudgingly to a few sessions with a therapist, though I do not think a therapist
will do me much good. I think a nutritionist will do me even less. The problem isn’t that I don’t understand that I need nutrients. The problem isn’t even, not anymore, that I think I look good. I have stopped taking off my clothes in front of Ben. Only alone in my dorm room do I strip naked in front of the mirror. I have always had prominent hip bones, but now they are bladed, so clearly only a thin layer of skin over bone that they nauseate me. My backside seems to have deflated. When I was in fifth grade I was asked to draw a portrait of myself in art class one day. The other kids crayoned golden loops for their hair, scribbled in the red of their shirts. I remember my amazement when I looked at their portraits. They all seemed to know what they looked like so easily. I had drawn the only thing I could: a black swirl that emanated from the center of the construction paper like one of the swirls that obscure the screen in the Hitchcock movie Vertigo. Caught in the swirl I’d drawn a gun, the electric chair, and hands that were reaching out for me, the stuff of my nightmares. That was the portrait of me I could imagine: what I thought and feared. What consumed me. My body was an unimaginable artifact swaddled in dark sweat clothes, something I tried hard to forget.

  But in college, standing alone in front of the mirror, I find it strangely easy to look at myself. I repulse myself, with my bones and the knobs up my back and the bruises that, if I sit on a hard chair for too long, spread across the bag of skin that used to be my ass. That repulsion is comforting. I don’t feel attractive, but I do feel safe.

  The room in the college health clinic where I meet with the nutritionist is small and windowless and determinedly beige. “People have noticed,” she says, that I seem to lose more weight after I go visit my family. She doesn’t specify who “people” are. She sits on a white vinyl chair with arms of washed blond wood, her manner as carefully uninflected as her surroundings. The week before, at the Chinese dry cleaner’s, the clerk had stopped me just as I’d reached to take my clothing off the rack. “Do you,” he’d said, and then smiled. I’d smiled back. We always exchanged wordless smiles whenever I came in, but now he looked nervous. “Do you,” he started again, “have the AIDS?” The next day in the cafeteria, I’d unfolded a note passed to me. I know you think you look good but … When I’d talked about signing up for a blood drive, a friend in the dorm had said, “You have to be a hundred pounds to give blood.” I’d bit back the automatic words that I was five feet nine, of course I weighed a hundred pounds. But that night, I’d stepped on a scale and found I didn’t. “Perhaps,” the nutritionist says, “there is somewhere else you could go for the upcoming break?”