“Molly, I swear to you this was unavoidable. Please don’t let your feelings of bitterness ruin the little time we have to spend together.”
Who could say no to such a plea?
Tessa assured me she would have shot him—“Right between the eyes, my dear, just as the fat bastard came down the ramp at the airport.” I had told her that Conrad was large in response to her request for a physical description, mentioning also his blue eyes, his mass of red hair. “I’ve never been able to get it on with a man who had a big gut,” she said reflectively. Esthetic considerations were very important to Tessa. Spending considerable effort upon the cultivation of her own body, she expected those she admitted into her bed to do the same, suggesting diets and regimens of yoga and track-running for those who fell short of her standards. “At least I always send them away in perfect condition,” she’d brag. Never would she own up to the possibility that this was her way of attempting to take care of a man. Ever since I’d known her, she had quite vehemently eschewed the nurturing role of the female.
I remember something she said to me during one of the days I spent waiting for Conrad in her house. I realize now it was one of those statements people make from time to time in order to demonstrate that they are capable of an almost brutal frankness. Delivered more for the benefit of the speaker than the listener, they belong in the category of what Felicia once called false confessions.
In this case, Tessa thought it only fair to tell me that since she never allowed any man to hurt her, she always felt somewhat at a loss to identify with women like me, tending to feel impatience rather than sympathy—although I was not to think she couldn’t be fond of someone so different from herself. Wasn’t our long friendship proof of that?
I said politely that I understood.
I was very conscious of not being an amusing guest for Tessa, particularly after my stay with her was extended. I was another complication in her already complicated life—a presence on the couch perhaps inhibiting the degree of abandonment in the adjoining bedroom.
Or maybe I felt that way because I was such bad company for myself, existing in a more and more anxious state of suspension from which I could only be released by Conrad’s arrival. Just as I had lost the sense of one season passing into another, I knew I would go back to New York without having truly seen California—taking with me only a blur of redwood trees and gingerbreaded houses, the first names of strangers whose faces I would instantly forget, Tessa’s hand heavy with silver rings upon the steering wheel of her Volkswagen as we drove to another gathering, where I would invariably be introduced as “my old school friend from the East,” as if she felt it necessary to explain me.
She had made a date with her stockbroker for the Friday night I was originally supposed to have spent with Conrad. Considerately, but with implicit half-heartedness, she invited me to join them. He was making reservations at one of the most expensive restaurants in Sausalito, but why should he mind taking two women to dinner? Perhaps a male friend of his could be dredged up—although most of them were married and considerably duller than he was. I knew she was relieved when I told her I really felt like being alone.
I remember her elaborate preparations for the evening—every element in the gestalt she was constructing carefully chosen—the scent she put in her bathwater, the precise coloration of her lips, the decision not to give in to his conservatism by shaving her armpits, the silk shirt that showed the rounded outlines of her breasts, the mauve velvet jacket worn unbuttoned as a frame for the discreet bas-relief of her nipples. Only her short fine blonde hair displeased her by lying too flat upon her skull. “Men like big hair,” she said ruefully, squinting at herself in the mirror. She had the inspiration of wearing a purple hat at the last minute, but thought better of it. She smoked a joint and then kissed me good-bye. “You won’t mind if I’m not back until tomorrow morning. It might be easier to stay at Roger’s.” I assured her that this was my choice and I wasn’t going to feel deserted by her, however late she stayed out.
“Don’t brood, Molly,” she said sternly. “Fuck Conrad anyway.”
“Right,” I said. And then she was gone. I heard the Volkswagen start up outside.
I switched on the television and watched the news for a few minutes, the white cat staring at me, keeping her distance at the other end of the couch. I opened a can of catfood for her and emptied it into a dish. I had a sudden urge to talk to Matthew, whom I had left with my mother. I put in a call to her, but she told me he was in bed fast asleep. I’d forgotten it was ten o’clock in New York. “He’s in particularly good humor,” she told me proudly, “although he certainly is obstinate about taking his baths. Are you having good weather, dear?” “Lovely,” I said. It would have been foolish to ask her to wake him. I said I’d call back in the morning. I’d somehow counted on speaking to him, though. “Mom!” he would have shouted.
I had an odd, empty feeling sitting there in Tessa’s living room—as if I were no more than the person who had arrived on Wednesday with a suitcase and was now alone and undefined. I could not even know myself as Matthew’s mother—could not go into his room to stand silently by his bed listening to him breathe, touch him as I straightened the covers. It was like the moment in the taxi when I’d looked out the window and seen the tree. Dead, I thought—a word which Matthew’s mother would never have allowed herself to think.
The phone rang once and briefly I was Tessa’s house guest. Then I turned off all the lights except one—a small lamp in the kitchen—and went to bed.
IT IS AROUND four or five o’clock in the morning, when the white cat wakes her. It has taken it into its head to become active, rattling the furniture in Tessa’s room, scudding through papers, thudding down in Molly’s dream with sounds that make her think of someone walking heavily upon a rug. She opens her eyes unwillingly upon the dense brownish light in the room—the lamp shining in from the kitchen yellowing the darkness. Now it seems that the cat must be moving around in there.
With a metallic click the lamp goes out.
“Tessa!” she calls.
Everything has become still.
Her body stiffens. She forces herself to sit up. “Tessa!”
Someone is in the kitchen treading slowly across the floor, one foot following another with deliberation. The figure of a man appears in the doorway to the living room, as if the darkness has gathered and formed itself into a shadow, as if her mind has made it take on this shape. So this is it, she thinks. And she wonders what she feels beneath the surprising calm that is like ice in her. If there is no terror, does she feel indifference? Will she die with that question?
She asks him who he is. “What are you doing here?” she says.
“Don’t make any noise and you won’t get hurt. You stay there and do what I tell you.”
He advances upon her, stands over her—a tall, heavy-set man wearing some sort of a jacket that bunches at the waist. Black, she thinks, because of his voice and the shape of his hair; maybe a little younger than she is. She cannot see his face at all. It is too dark without the lamp. He puts his hands on her shoulders and pushes her down flat. He pulls the covers away.
She is doing what he wants. She is lying there in silence, waiting, flat out. He can see that she is obedient, but he keeps warning her, senselessly, not to make a sound.
“Don’t hurt me,” she says.
“Don’t make a sound, don’t make a sound, don’t move.”
Her legs are trembling because of his fear. What would he do if she were to make a sound? Would his hands close around her throat? Is there a knife hidden beneath his jacket?
“I’m very frightened.” She hears her own voice, low and curiously matter-of-fact.
He pulls her legs down, dangling over the side of the couch, and bends over her. “Woman, I’ve been wanting you for a long time.”
It is almost funny—the punch line of a ludic
rously bad joke.
“That’s impossible,” she points out. “I only got here three days ago.” He rolls her nightgown up above her waist. “You don’t even know who I am,” she says.
He puts his penis inside her anyway—a rather small one. There are two weak jerks and fluid runs down between her thighs. “I can’t do nothin’,” he says disgustedly, pulling out and wiping himself on the sheet. “You got any dope here?”
“No,” she whispers.
“Don’t make a sound. Don’t make a sound now.”
She is lying just as he left her, legs still dangling down. Standing up, zipping himself, he moves back into the darkness of Tessa’s room, walking softly across the rug, disappearing through the open window into the night.
It takes her a while to realize that her belly is very cold and that her life will go on and on. On and on.
I STILL THINK of him sometimes—the premature ejaculator, climbing the back fences of the Mission District, going in and out of windows so skillfully. At least he’d gotten that much down to a science. I manage to think of him as a victim of society.
I couldn’t even describe him well to the police. There isn’t much you can say about a phantom. They went off anyway and got a suspect, had him standing with his hands raised up against a wall on Fair Oaks Street, drove me there with a coat over my nightgown. He was a middle-aged black man, short, thin, with a beard, a long raincoat. We looked at each other in acute humiliation. “Is that the one?” they asked. “No,” I said. They nodded to him and he dropped his hands. They left him standing there without apologies.
I remember feeling that I, too, was some kind of a suspect. I didn’t look much like the victim of a rape. There wasn’t a mark on me. They had me fill out a questionnaire. Age, marital status, and occupation of victim. Description of rapist and incident. What were you wearing at the time of the rape? they asked. Was there actual penetration? There was, I said. The fluid they found at the hospital confirmed it.
The worst part of the whole thing was its nothingness. If there is a shade of difference between something and nothing, it was as close to being nothing as you could get.
The police brought me back that morning and I waited for Tessa, still somewhere in Sausalito with her stockbroker. I locked all the windows, turned on all the lights—the lamp in the kitchen going on with the same click I’d heard before, reminding me of something I’d learned. A fact to be kept from now on in the back of my mind. That without your even knowing it, someone can get into where you are.
I sat down in the kitchen and listened for footsteps, the morning California light shining on everything, on a row of copper pots, on Tessa’s plants. The intricate shadow of a giant coleus moved gently upon a window shade. The cat came in and out, flicking at an empty cigarette pack with its paw, pecking at some dry food left in its dish.
There was some stuff spilled on the floor—coffee beans, rice. He had opened some jars looking for dope. Perhaps that was all he’d really wanted, despite what he’d felt obliged to say. I’d just happened to be there. Or he could have been coming after Tessa.
I waited until it was eight A.M. New York time and made a long distance call. Roberta answered. “I’d like to speak to Conrad,” I said.
“Oh, who is this?”
I took a breath and said, “I’d like to speak to him, if you don’t mind.”
I heard her put the receiver down and she moved away from the phone. I could almost see her walking back to the bedroom. She was shouting something at him. “She wouldn’t give her name! She wouldn’t give her name!”
“Why didn’t you give your name?” he said when he got on the phone.
“Because I wanted to speak to you.”
“It’s her house, Molly.”
“I wanted to tell you about something that happened. Someone broke in here last night and raped me.”
I heard nothing at all from him. She must have been there in the same room. Finally, he said, “Are you all right?”
“I’m okay,” I said. “I just feel peculiar. I’m still frightened.”
“You sound all right,” he said.
“Yes, I’m all right.”
“Well, I’m sorry to hear such a terrible thing has happened to you,” he said formally.
“Conrad,” I said, “you’re coming tomorrow, aren’t you?”
“Yes, of course,” he said in that same formal tone.
“Well, I’ll see you then,” I said and hung up.
Afterward I remembered that I hadn’t asked him what I’d meant to—hadn’t asked him to fly out right away, hadn’t told him I wanted him with me. As he would have said, there hadn’t been a context.
“If I’d been here when he came in, he’d have had his fucking head blown off.” It is Tessa speaking. Tough talk. Her hands shake as she lights a cigarette. She leads Molly into the bedroom and opens the drawer of a small chest on the right side of her bed. There is actually a gun in it. Molly stares at it respectfully. “I’ll never forgive myself,” Tessa says, “for not telling you about this.”
“Well, there wouldn’t have been time to get it.” There could have been, though. When she’d heard him in the kitchen, she could have run into Tessa’s room … Except that she wouldn’t have, even knowing that it was there in its drawer—a present to Tessa from someone she’d met in the IRA. She always kept it by her bedside. You never could tell, Tessa said—as if rape was something you had to take into account all the time. You kept a gun in the house the way you kept aspirin.
“Anyway I couldn’t have used it.” It is strange to think that Tessa could possibly reproach herself for not having provided her with a weapon. There is something decidedly bizarre about this conversation. Molly feels almost on the verge of laughter.
Tessa has taken the gun out and laid it down on the bed in the middle of the satin comforter—the way you’d put down your pocketbook, Molly thinks, or lay out a change of clothes. It’s like looking at one of Matthew’s toys—nothing of any real interest to a grownup.
“You mustn’t value yourself very much,” Tessa says.
Later in the day the house is full of people—first the super and a carpenter who come to put wooden pegs on the inside frames of all the windows, then some of Tessa’s friends, including the handsome but dull stockbroker. Wine and grass are passed around, and Molly is introduced as “my old school friend from the East who just got raped last night,” and it is not Molly but Tessa who gives the details of the story—very agitated and highstrung, brilliantly holding the center of the stage—leading guests to the window of entry, showing just where splinters of dry wood had broken away and how the enormous rolltop desk there had been noiselessly moved aside and what Tessa would have done in Molly’s place. Tessa is very sure of what she would have done, how she would have fought him off—which is what you do if you value yourself—“The guy could hardly get it on anyway. There’s nothing I hate worse than bad sex.”
She goes into Tessa’s room at one point during the party and closes the door. She sits on the edge of the bed, not wanting to lie down—even with all the people out there making it safe. Finally, she calls Malcolm.
He says a very surprising thing. “Come home immediately. I’ll meet you at the airport.”
Her eyes fill with tears. She is astonished.
I didn’t go back to New York. Maybe it would have made some difference if I had—maybe having made his offer, Malcolm needed me to accept it. I thought the way I’d lose him would be by needing him. Whatever he gave me had to be unexpected, gratuitous—there for the moment, to be picked up or not. It was a kind of understanding that we had, a balance. It would have been disturbed by the time he got to the airport. Still I held on to what he’d said—it was like sticking your hand into an empty pocket and finding something there.
There’s a loneliness in having had an extreme experience. It doesn�
��t necessarily put you in touch with other people. Just as they step back a little, you step back into yourself—because nobody else knows the moment when the lamp went out and what you might have thought, that there might have been almost a moment of acceptance if you’d been thinking hard about your life, what it was and what it was not—a wavering in which you might have screamed and ended the questioning for all time. Who could understand something like that from the outside?
Tessa made me sit up all night with her after the party. We drank coffee to keep ourselves awake, the gun out on the kitchen table. She was trying to decide whether or not to move in with the stockbroker for a while, thus possibly alienating the journalist. She admitted finally to being terrified. The worst thing about rape, she kept saying, was the thought of not being in control. I didn’t argue the point with her. I felt as though layers and layers of that amorphous cotton stuff they put inside quilts had been wrapped around me. In the morning I went to sleep for a while, and when I woke up that curiously insulated feeling was still with me. I reminded myself quite calmly that it was the great day of Conrad’s arrival.
He came on time that Sunday afternoon, driving up in a sporty two-seater that he’d rented at the airport, quite pleased with himself for not having missed his plane—which he’d boarded of course at the last minute; or taking the wrong turn coming off the bridge; or being distracted into having drinks with two women from Stanford, who’d shared their copy of Ramparts with him during the flight and invited him to visit their commune. Having told the necessary lies in the East and maneuvered his way through all the pitfalls and temptations of the journey, he presented himself to me, his well-shaped lips pressing down upon mine in a kiss that was quick and ceremonial—and perhaps not entirely appropriate to the occasion, if one imagines lovers reunited after various perils enfolded in each other’s arms. “See how punctual I can be,” said the boy in him, grinning. Later the social worker would briefly make his appearance to ask if I needed counseling. But right now it was the boy who held sway, charmingly overgrown and scruffy, exerting the force of his radiant personality for Tessa’s benefit as well as mine, wild hair springing in every direction, shirt buttons strained to the limit, hanging by threads.
Bad Connections Page 16