Other people

by Sol Stein

  "I'll go," I said, but in a second. Bill had crossed the line and was saying to the nurse, "She's not telling the truth. She was raped."

  The nurse looked at Bill and then at me.

  Into the silence Bill said inanely, "It wasn't me."

  "Step back behind the white line," said the nurse.

  "Why didn't you say so?" asked the nurse.

  "I don't know," I said.

  "Alleged rape," the nurse said slowly, out loud, as she wrote the words on the form.

  "Go to the second floor east waiting room. Give this to the nurse. Next."

  I took Bill's arm. "Thank you," I said.

  "He has to wait down here," the nurse yelled at us.

  Upstairs, the nurse on duty had a blank expression when she took the slip.

  "When did this happen?"

  "This evening."

  "Have a seat over there. I'm going off duty in a minute. Another nurse will come out for you."

  The wait seemed endless. Then I was ushered into a cubicle, told to remove my clothes from the waist down, to get on the examination table, put my feet in the stirrups. I did as I was instructed.

  The doctor was a resident. My age. I felt hideous in that awkward position. He glanced at my cunt without a flicker. Then at my face. Then at the paper on his clipboard.

  "What happened?" he said. He sounded as if he was in a hurry.

  I showed him my wrists. The pink striations were less now than when I had shown them to Bill.

  "Your hands were tied?"

  "Behind my back."

  I showed my left cheek. "From a slap," I said. "A hard slap."

  The doctor handed his clipboard to the nurse.

  "We'll do an internal," he said.

  "I took a bath," I said.

  "You what?"

  "I felt awful. I had to take a bath. I douched several times."

  "Jesus!" the doctor said. "We couldn't get a specimen that'll do the police any good."

  "What are you doing?" I asked.

  "Combing your pubic hairs to see if we find any of his."

  He came away with three or four.

  "These look like yours."

  "If you pulled them out, they're mine."

  "I didn't mean to pull any. The loose ones are probably yours, too." He put them on a piece of waxy-looking paper, folded the paper over, and gave it to the nurse. "I'm sorry," he said, "but I'm going to pull one on purpose now, for comparison."

  When he had plucked the hair and put it into a second piece of waxy paper, he said, "What about inside? Are you hurt?"

  "It aches a bit, too."

  "I'll take a look."

  It was embarrassing.

  "No evidence of trauma," he told the nurse, who wrote it down. To me he said, "Did you resist?"

  "I didn't want him to do it."

  "Did you resist, though?"

  "I tried to get away but he grabbed me at the door. I tried to talk him out of it. And other things."

  "What other things?"

  I looked at the nurse, ready to write.

  "Nothing," I said, pulling my feet from the stirrups and getting off the table.

  "What are you doing?" asked the doctor.

  "Dressing."

  "Here," he said, giving me a card on which he penned something. "This is your case number. The pohce will need it."

  In the car with Bill I said, "The doctor was just about your age. He was awful."

  "I'm sorry," said Bill, putting his arm around me.

  His arm felt mechanical, as if it didn't belong to him, just an arm he put there because he was supposed to.

  "I don't think he found what he was looking for."

  "What was he looking for?"

  "Semen and pubic hair," I said. "Doesn't it disgust you?"

  "What do you mean?" said Bill, taking his arm away.

  "Doesn't it change your attitude?"

  "About what?"

  "About me?"

  Bill was shrugging his shoulders, groping for words.

  "It does, doesn't it?"

  "It's like anything. You have to kind of absorb it, right?"

  "I didn't do anything. It was done to me."

  "I know."

  "It wasn't as if I went to bed with someone else, don't you understand?"

  Bill, his hands folded helplessly in his lap, seemed to find conversation impossible. He looked like I feel when stomach acids back up into my throat. Finally, he said, "Where do you want to go?"

  "The police station on Wicker Avenue."

  When we arrived. Bill accompanied me inside. I told the desk sergeant I wanted to see a police matron.

  "What for?"

  "I want to report a crime."

  "What kind of crime?" asked the desk sergeant.

  "Rape." Does one ever get used to the word when it's about yourself?

  "One flight up, turn left at the head of the stairs, door marked 'Detectives.' " A ticket taker saying "next."

  "I'll wait down here," said Bill.

  "You won't go away, will you?"

  "I'll be here."

  In the room marked "Detectives," as soon as I said the word again, the detective, a very freckled man of forty, pulled a form out of the drawer and said "Sit tight" as he went to get a police matron. The matron was older than the detective. Why is it, I thought, in a police station nobody says hello to you, nobody shakes your hand?

  The matron said something to the detective that I couldn't hear and the detective nodded. They led the way into a private room and shut the door. The detective offered me a cigarette. I shook my head. The matron sat at the side of the table.

  "All right," said the detective. "When did the alleged offense take place?"

  I told him.

  "Where?"

  I told him.

  "Can you describe the alleged assailant?"

  "I know who he is."

  The detective looked up at me, then at the matron. "Before you give us the name, I have to make you aware that if you accuse someone, you could be subject to a suit for false arrest."

  "Even if he's guilty?"

  "Well, not too many allegations of rape draw convictions, miss."

  The green walls of the small room had not been painted for a long time. There were marks where the backs of chairs had scraped against the paint. A two-year-old calendar had not been removed. Near it, some flakes of faded paint had fallen from the wall.

  "Well, give us the name, miss."

  I looked at the freckled face that was anxious to get this bit of work out of the way.

  "Isn't rape a serious crime?"

  The detective flicked a look at the matron. "Oh yes, miss," he said, "it always goes with the major crime statistics. The problem, please understand, is that nobody reports an armed robbery that didn't take place. Or a murder. But a lot of the alleged rape cases that walk in here turn out to be, well, borderline seduction, or fantasy, or won't hold up because there are no witnesses, no proof, and nowhere to look for it."

  "I am not a rape case," I said. "I am a person reporting a crime."

  The detective moved his bottom on the chair, squirming. He seemed the type that always felt uncomfortable with women he didn't know.

  "Please spell his name."

  I spelled Harry Koslak. "He lives in the apartment above me. I think he owns an Esso station in the neighborhood. At least he seems to be the boss there."

  "Did he force his way into your apartment?"

  I thought Should I have a lawyer with me? I haven't been accused of anything. I'm filing a complaint, why do I feel trapped?

  The detective was waiting for an answer.

  "I let him in."

  The detective glanced at the matron again. Another one of those.

  "He came to borrow a cup of sugar."

  The detective started to smile, then stopped, a checked swing. "Do the neighbors in that building come around to borrow things often?"

  He wasn't writing answers now.

  "That wa
s the first time."

  "Didn't it strike you as strange that a man would come around for a cup of sugar?"

  "No. He said his wife was cooking something and had run out."

  "Okay. Tell me what happened. Keep to the facts. What you saw. What you said, what he said, what you and he did. No speculations."

  I told him, eliding a few of the details.

  "Did you go to the hospital?"

  "Yes."

  "What did they do?"

  "Can I talk to the matron about this?"

  "You're talking to both of us, miss."

  "I mean can I talk to her with you out of the room?"

  The freckled man lifted himself from the chair, closed the door behind him. The matron sat at the desk where the detective had been. She picked up the ball point pen he'd been using.

  "They combed for pubic hairs."

  "Semen test?" the matron asked,

  "No. I'd douched. Took a bath first, then douched four times."

  "Never do that!"

  "I didn't know. I hadn't had the experience before. Nobody warned me."

  "We'd better call him back in. He knows these forms better than I do. He'll see what I write anyway. Okay?"

  I nodded.

  "All right," the detective said, resuming his seat, and glancing at what the matron had written. "Is there any way you can identify the alleged assailant?"

  "I've seen him around. I've passed him on the stairs. I've been to the gas station."

  "Are you friendly?"

  "With him? No, first time we spoke was when he came for the sugar."

  "Can you identify anything about him that somebody wouldn't ordinarily see?"

  "He's got a tattoo."

  "What kind of tattoo?"

  "It says Mary. It's on his upper arm."

  "Anybody could see that."

  "He wears overalls going to and from work."

  "Well, you might have seen him in summertime with a short-sleeved shirt."

  "I didn't live in that house in the summertime."

  "Anything else?"

  I thought of the strange curve of his erect member, the point he had made about it.

  "No," I said.

  "If you saw nude photographs of six men, just the torsos, could you pick him out?"

  "I don't know."

  "You saw him naked didn't you?"

  "I wasn't making a study of him. I was scared."

  "Sure, sure. I understand. I just want to know if there's anything that will interest the D.A."

  "Is there?"

  "Truthfully, hardly anything."

  "There must be something that can be done!"

  "Keep cool, miss. We could pay a visit to this Mr. Koslak. See what he says. He'll deny it, of course. No reason for him not to."

  "He'd know I'd been to the police. He'll kill me unless you do something about him."

  "Like what?"

  "I suppose you can arrest him."

  "I don't think there's enough to go on here."

  "What am I supposed to do?"

  "You've done it, miss. You've filed a report. If it happens again — I see on this report — well, don't douche or anything, go straight to the hospital."

  "Is that the only kind of proof there is?"

  "You could scratch, get some skin under your fingernails."

  "He's strong, he could—"

  "Well, you shouldn't ever do anything that would endanger your safety."

  "You mean let him do it."

  The detective said nothing.

  "I know what you mean. Then I wouldn't be resisting, so it wouldn't be rape, would it? What the hell can you do?!"

  The matron came over and put her hand on my shoulder. It wasn't the hand of a sister. It was the hand of a policewoman.

  I found Bill downstairs, thumbing the pages of a beat-up police magazine.

  "Finished?" he asked.

  "Let's get out of here."

  I sat in Bill's car shivering.

  "Are you cold?" Bill asked.

  "No."

  "You look," he said, trying to keep his voice light, "like a machine about to self-destruct."

  I didn't respond. We sat in silence for a few minutes.

  My voice was a near whisper when I spoke. I could see Bill straining to hear and to understand.

  "It's like one of those nightmares, you go to one place and then another and another trying to get some official to understand what you're trying to say, and you just get shunted about, and nothing happens till you want to scream doesn't anyone believe me!"

  "What would you like me to do?" asked Bill.

  "I didn't mean you. I meant the police, the authorities, somebody."

  "You're still shaking."

  "Would you do me a favor?"

  "Anything."

  "Call Dr. Koch. Call this number." I wrote it down on the back of a grocery receipt from my purse. "Tell him I'm coming down. You don't have to drive me. I'll take a cab."

  "I'll drive you." Bill slipped out of the driver's seat and called from a pay booth on the corner.

  "Dr. Koch wasn't very friendly."

  "Oh he's friendly. He probably just doesn't like to see people at this hour of the night. Did he say okay?"

  Bill nodded and turned the ignition on. He didn't tell me till later that Koch seemed very concerned until he asked who Bill was, and when Bill identified himself, it was then the coldness came into Koch's voice.

  When we arrived in front of Koch's apartment building, I didn't get out of the car immediately. "Thank you," I said, putting my hand on Bill's hand.

  "I'll wait for you," he said.

  "Oh it could be such a long time."

  "You won't get a cab to take you to Westchester. It'd cost a mint. Besides you won't find cabs cruising in this neighborhood that late. I'll wait. You don't need any more trouble."

  Koch answered the door wearing a grey, cable-stitched cardigan instead of his usual jacket or suit.

  "Come in, come in," he said, looking at my face for signs of distress.

  I followed him into his consulting room. Out of habit I headed for the couch until his voice stopped me. "No, no, please, sit here so we can talk."

  He gestured not to the chair beside his cluttered desk but to two armchairs at the other side of the room. The chairs were too close. I wished there were a coffee table between us.

  "I'm sorry to come so late," I said. "I'm keeping you up."

  "It's all right."

  "I needed to talk to you." I was used to talking to him as an unseen presence behind me, not a face in front of me like other people.

  I looked at my fingernails. I didn't know where to start.

  "I guess one always thinks of rape as happening to someone else," I said.

  "Yes," said Koch. "Like death."

  Suddenly I wished I hadn't come to him.

  "Take your time," he said.

  When I didn't say anything, he said, "Would you rather lie down? As usual?"

  Oh what a relief to be able to lie back on that couch with its familiar leathery smell, with my eyes closed. "I could sleep," I said.

  "Sleep if you wish."

  I thought I couldn't do that, fall asleep with the old man watching me. I was keeping him up. Yet, tired beyond belief and drifting, I tried not to think, to wash my mind of people and buildings and just see a horizon, the sky meeting the ocean, an infinite expanse of tranquil blue. Suddenly the blue of the ocean was dark and roiling with dangerous white-capped waves coming toward me.

  I must have screamed.

  I was sitting up on the couch, panting, sweat on my face.

  "Tell me," he said. "Lie back down."

  "I can't."

  "You're afraid."

  Oh I was, I was.

  "Afraid of what?"

  Though I felt drenched in sweat, my mouth was dry, parched.

  "What woke you?"

  "The water," I said, lying back down, exhausted.

  "What water?"

  "The
water you drown in."

  He was silent for a moment. I could hear his breathing. No, it was my breathing. My chest was heaving as if I'd been running.

  "Tell me about the water."

  And so I told him. "When I was very young, three or four. Mommy and Daddy took us — my parents, I mean, took my sisters and me — to Texas, to visit Uncle Jim in Texas. I remember the long, long train ride to St. Louis and then another train south. Texas seemed like a desert, with dry gulleys and small crevasses in the ground, and I had to hold Daddy's hand when we explored. I remember thunder very loud and then the rain came down, tons of water all at once. We were out walking far from my uncle's place, and suddenly we were drenched, and I remember Uncle Jim yelling at my father, and my father told my mother to carry me and he took my two sisters — they were bigger — and then there were like small rivers where minutes before there'd been just dry runnels, my mother stumbled, dropped me, then scooped me up and I wanted to be with my father, but he was up ahead with my sisters, and suddenly it was so bad we couldn't see him, I was frightened of my parents getting separated, and of all the rushing water. I was sure somebody was going to die, and I didn't want it to be me, or Daddy, or my mother and then just as suddenly as it had started, the rains stopped, and there was just the water rushing over the ground so fast, looking for places to run in, and we were trying to stay out of those places, and then, thank God, we saw up ahead Uncle Jim who had run to bring the pick-up truck, and he had already gotten my sisters aboard, and my father was running toward us to get my mother and me. Four people died in that area in the one flash flood, three of them from one family, but we were okay, wet and shivering and breathless when we got into the house, but okay. I couldn't get it straight in my head that the earth could suddenly turn into rivers."

  Dr. Koch said nothing. I could hear a clock ticking.

  "What are you thinking now?" he finally said.

  "If I am awake…"

  "Yes?"

  "If I am awake, I cannot drown."

  "To be asleep is dangerous to life."

  "Yes," I said.

  "Hence insomnia."

  I remembered my mother singing me to sleep that first night after the flood at Uncle Jim's house. I remembered desperately not wanting to go to sleep.

  "That is a terrible fright for a child," he said.

  "For anyone," I said. "My mother talked about it for years."

  "That didn't help. Yet think of when your insomnia came on badly."