by Ali Benjamin
Zo gets up reluctantly, follows him into their bedroom. She keeps her eye on the TV as long as she can.
“Okay, thanks for holding,” Ethan says into the phone. “What are the options?”
“Well, it’s short notice,” says Ananya, “but our first option is actually tomorrow morning.” There’s a strange echo on the phone, and Ethan assumes it’s the connection, until he realizes that Ananya, too, has the TV on, that even as she’s talking to him, she’s also watching the man say, I have sent more women law clerks to the Supreme Court than any other federal judge in the country.
“They can see us tomorrow,” Ethan tells Zo. She nods.
“Tomorrow works,” he tells Ananya. “What time?”
“The appointment itself begins at nine a.m.,” Ananya explains. “But there’s significant paperwork that you’re going to need to complete—behavioral questionnaires and other assessments. Most people fill out this paperwork well in advance, but you won’t have that option. So we’ll ask you to arrive thirty minutes early to complete those. We provide lunch and snacks, and depending on how the day goes, you’d likely finish between three and four p.m.”
“Wait, it’s all day?”
Remember Evie’s reading is 2morrow
Boston’s nearly three hours away without traffic. If he takes this appointment, he’ll miss Evie entirely. He’s still not sure if he’s going to do what Randy’s asking, but he’s not ready to shut down the possibility. Not yet, not until he has a better idea. “Tomorrow morning is too soon,” he tells Ananya. “What’s the next option?”
“Saturday,” Ananya says. “Ten-fifteen in the morning.”
“Yeah,” he tells Ananya. “Saturday works better.” But Zo stares at him like he’s out of his mind, like he just announced that Saturday’s the day Hypatia’s going to transform into a three-headed dragon with purple scales.
“No,” Zo insists. “Not Saturday. Let’s do it tomorrow.”
“I can’t,” he tells Zo.
“Why?”
Why indeed? Because I might have to blackmail the person who was once Hollywood’s most bankable star, that’s why. “I have to work.”
“Your Dr. Ash thing? Ethan, you don’t even care about that project.”
He asks Ananya to hold on, they’re discussing it. Then he puts on his best Voice of Reason tone. “Zo, tomorrow’s appointment is too early. We’d have to leave tonight, which would mean getting a hotel. And what about Hypatia?”
“So we’ll get a hotel,” Zo says. “And Maddy can take care of Hypatia.”
“Zo, hotels are expensive. And think about it: Alex would have to miss a whole school day. Saturday’s better.”
“Saturday’s the rally, Ethan.”
The goddamned stupid rally. The shaking of the handmade signs, the shouting at the few passing cars, as if this is how people make up their minds about anything, ever. Well, I didn’t know what I thought about the issue before, but then some ladies in pink hats yelled at me as I drove around the village green in downtown Starkfield, and that cleared everything right up!
“Skip the rally,” he tells her.
Zo glowers at him.
“I’m serious,” he says. “Skip it. Let others rally.”
And then he says: “This is for Alex, Zo.”
And then: “You won’t do this for Alex? For our daughter?”
In his living room, the man says, I have not questioned that she might have been sexually assaulted at some point in her life by someone, someplace. But as to me, I’ve never done this; never done this to her or to anyone else.
“Sir?” Ananya’s voice comes through his phone. Ethan apologizes, reassures her they’re working it out.
“Some of the protesters will come to this rally because of me,” says Zo. “To support me. Jackie thinks we’re going to draw a big crowd, because of what happened to me.”
“It’s a bullshit rally then,” Ethan says. “And it’s based on a bullshit lie.”
It’s as if he’s lobbed a stone into still water. He watches the shock of the impact, then the ripples moving one at a time through his wife, one at a time: from understanding to decision to steely resolve. “Tomorrow,” Zo says.
“I told you,” he says. “I can’t.”
They stand like that, face-to-face. When Zo speaks again, it doesn’t even seem like her voice. It’s not the voice of the woman he married, not the woman he once made love to inside a tent on the floor of L.L.Bean’s twenty-four-hour store in Freeport, some last-minute escape from the city some summer weekend during their Brooklyn days. It’s not the voice of the woman who’d once read Moby-Dick aloud in bed, a few chapters a night for months, except her voice always lulled him to sleep so fast he couldn’t keep track of the characters or plot. It’s not the voice of the woman who’d laughed her way through his proposal on the Brooklyn Bridge, then again through their tiny wedding ceremony in the nearby River Café. (This was back when the River Café felt like a secret of sorts, still in the middle of nowhere, back before anyone knew the acronym DUMBO, Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass, the final word added, as Jerry Seinfeld observed, because nobody wanted a neighborhood called DUMB. It was before the Jehovah’s Witnesses sold their Watchtower Building, before Etsy and West Elm moved to town, before Times Square had morphed into Disneyland, before the High Line and Citi Bike and the Second Avenue Subway, before he and Zo had moved up to Starkfield expecting only peaceful, bucolic days ahead, not understanding that the city they’d known and the life they’d once lived there would, like the towers that appear in every wedding photograph, the ones that stood proud across the river as they exchanged their vows, crumble to ash, and if they ever looked back, if they ever tried to see fully what they’d lost, they’d fall to the same fate as Lot’s wife: nothing would remain of them but pillars of salt). No, it isn’t Zo’s voice at all, not really, but the voice of whatever fury’s taken up permanent residence inside of her.
“So don’t come, Ethan,” the fury’s voice says.
And with that, Zo pulls his phone from his hand. “Yes, this is Alex’s mother,” she says, turning her back to him. “I’ll take tomorrow’s appointment. Can you please give me the details?”
In the living room, the man on the screen issues his final words of the testimony: I swear to God.
#America2018, Act 3
It’s a morality play, this whole thing. But something is wrong, very wrong, with the script. There are only two acts, and these acts have nothing to do with each other. They are played on the same stage, in succession, but together they make no sense. They are puzzle pieces that don’t fit, they are apples and an iguana eating granola while riding an orange Vespa.
There must be a third act. That’s the only explanation. There will be some dramatic denouement, some closing monologue, some grand finale that bridges the two parts, weaves them together into a coherent narrative. “Oh,” the audience members will say when the curtain rises again. “Oh, now I get it. Brilliant, the way it all comes together in the end.”
The third act is coming any minute, it must be, because otherwise, what is the way out of this situation? You can’t just present these two opposite stories with no resolution.
The audience waits. And waits. They begin to shift in their seats, look down at the programs in their hands. Someone coughs politely. The curtain does not rise again. After a while, the house lights come on. The audience members glance around at one another. That’s it? Really?
They stand, begin to exit—a few at first, and then more, and then everyone. They shuffle outside, blink, look around at the street traffic, at the world both changed and unchanged.
They wander home, bewildered.
* * *
—
Even when the testimony is over, even when the punditry about the testimony ends,
even when the TV goes off, the women don’t leave. They pour more coffee. They arrange themselves in a circle on the floor. They strategize. They pull out their poster board, their markers, their weapons of choice.
“So it’s decided,” Jackie says. “We’ll keep getting the word out on social media about what happened to Zo. We’ll say that the best way they can honor her is to join in Saturday’s rally.”
Elastic Waist fills in letters on her poster: Believe women, believe Zo.
Silent no more says Meat Cleaver’s.
“Be prepared: we’re going to get pushback,” Jackie warns. “But that’s a good sign. Controversy means people are paying attention.”
By now, Ethan’s fed up. He’s fed up with the women, for having been here all day, as if they weren’t here two nights ago, as if they won’t be back again next week, and the week after that, ad infinitum, as if nobody needs to work for a living, as if he doesn’t.
He’s fed up with Zo, too, for insisting that her thing is more important than his thing, even if she doesn’t know what his thing is, shouldn’t she trust him when he says he’s got a thing? He’s fed up with the way his wife treats him: like he’s a has-been, disposable, like it doesn’t matter if he’s at his daughter’s appointment. His own daughter! As if he hasn’t over the past year and a half become the main parent-on-duty, the one it’s just assumed will take care of the breakfasts and the morning routine and the endless driving and the homework help and the bedtime routine, only to start again the next day. He’s fed up with Zo for her absences, for not finishing that Lionel Trilling documentary, for her ceaseless buying. All those stupid purchases, some of which are now waiting in his car—yes, he’s definitely going to return them, he’s not going to keep throwing good money after bad, not when they need every penny right now, not when their house is an unfinished construction zone with no end in sight.
He thinks of that punk rocker last night, calling Zo a fecking cunt. Sure, maybe he should have punched the guy right then and there, in the lasagna line, as No-Balls McCuttle walked around tut-tutting about sharing and community. But Punk Rock was trying to be nice, to make her feel better, could Zo not see that? Are we all the enemy now?
Ethan’s tired of being treated like some sort of enemy. Especially right here, in his own home. And meanwhile, not one of these women has asked what seems like a pretty essential question: What if the story about Zo isn’t true? How would anyone know? Before he can stop himself, he’s asking that question out loud, right now, in front of all them witches: What if it’s not true?
The women all turn to stare at him.
It’s like he’s cast some sort of spell, petrificus totalis, frozen all those women in place. (Yeah, who’s the witch now?)
Ethan can see by the women’s faces that they think he’s talking about the hearing, that he’s asking what if the accusations against the Supreme Court nominee aren’t true. He doesn’t want to clarify what he’s really saying, doesn’t want to do that to Zo, so he takes a deep breath. “I’m just playing…” He pauses. A few weeks ago, in an argument about who-knows-what, he’d used the phrase devil’s advocate, and Zo flipped out. Thedevilhasplentyofadvocatesalreadythankyouverymuch.
He tries again, his voice measured. “I’m just asking. What if someone told a story that wasn’t true, or was only half-true? How would anyone know?” He’s talking about everything but the Supreme Court thing, actually: about Zo and Randy and Bränd and Evie, and maybe something else, too, some bigger principle: critical thinking, asking questions, nuance. All those things that he once thought mattered but which nobody seems to have patience for now that everything’s so highly charged.
“He did it,” says the painter. She’s still talking about the nominee, and she’s no longer crying. Instead she looks like she’s ready to come after Ethan with an actual meat cleaver.
“I’m talking more generally,” Ethan says. “I’m asking: Are we always supposed to take one side’s word, and not the other? Does that seem like the best idea?”
Zo’s voice. Hard and icy. “That’s pretty much what we’ve been doing for most of human history, Ethan.”
It’s meant to shut him up, but now that he’s started asking questions, he’s got a few others. “And anyway, what are we supposed to do with people who made mistakes in the past? Do we just throw them to the wolves? No matter how long ago it happened, or what the context was, or who they are today?” By now, Ethan’s not even sure who he’s talking about—Randy? Evie? Himself?—but suddenly the question feels urgent. “Don’t we want people to be able to change? To grow? To learn more and then do better?”
Zo tilts her head to the side slightly. Watching him. Guarded. Like she’s waiting to see what he’ll do next.
There is a long pause, then Elastic Waistband stands. “SO. I THINK I’M HEADING HOME.” He can’t tell if she’s leaving because she hasn’t heard the conversation, or because she has. But something shifts. The spell is broken, and the other witches begin to gather their belongings. A few of them look around awkwardly at the mess they’re leaving behind, like they’re not sure what, exactly, they should do. Should they leave Zo alone with both a giant mess and her shitty husband? Not to mention that rude twentysomething who’s still seated at the table, her phone blipping and whirring away? Or should they just get the heck out so whatever is about to happen can happen?
They move together, as a group, toward the door. Zo says nothing at all. Just stares at Ethan.
As Ethan closes the door behind the last of the witches, his phone dings: a text from Maddy, Oooh, she writes from the table. You’ve done it now. When he glances over at her, she makes a subtle tsk-tsk motion with her fingers.
Zo’s eyes still on him.
Ethan tries again. “Look, Zo. I’m really not trying to be an asshole here. But the world is complicated. It’s filled with context. You know this, I know you do.”
“Is there something you need to tell me, Ethan?” Her voice cold.
At first he thinks she’s asking about Randy, that she knows somehow what’s happening at Bränd, what Ethan’s being asked to do. Like she’s read his mind, or his texts (and if she reads his texts, then how often? And how recently? Could she have read that flirty exchange with Maddy, all those spanking GIFs?). Then he realizes: no. She’s asking if he, Ethan, ever did what this Supreme Court nominee is accused of doing.
She’s asking if he’s ever assaulted someone.
“No! Christ, no! My God, Zo, are you serious?” And when she responds only by lifting her brows, he throws up his hands. “There has to be some way to discuss things with you, Zo. Don’t you see? If one side can’t even have a conversation about these issues without lobbing accusations, then of course the other side is going to dismiss the whole thing as a witch-hunt.”
“Witch-hunt.” A statement, not a question. “Ethan, witch-hunts involved powerful men accusing innocent women and girls of practicing dark magic, then summarily executing them. Perhaps you’d like to rethink your wording?”
It’s the way she’s talking to him, like he’s an idiot, like whatever words come out of his mouth—no matter what he says or how he says it—he will always be wrong, like he can never be right, shouldn’t even have a bloody opinion, because whatever it is, Zo’s just going to find the worst possible interpretation, distort his meaning beyond recognition.
Would he like to rethink his wording? Sure, how about fuck off, how’s that for better wording? Fuck off, Zo, for assuming the worst of him, instead of the best.
Fuck off, Zo, for refusing to see now what she once knew beyond doubt: that he’s actually not one of the bad guys.
Fuck off, Zo, for doing to him in his own home what Shreya’s trying to do to Alex at school: barring the gates of the “we.”
So that’s what he says. Out loud and to her face: “Fuck off, Zo.” He says
it under his breath, the same way the guy last night muttered fecking cunt. Even with his eyes on Zo, he can see Maddy, at the table, lift her head, surprised.
Zo is motionless as his words sink in. Then she brushes her hands together, as if she’s casting away invisible dirt. “You know what? I can’t do this now. I need to pack some bags and find a hotel for me and Alex.”
“You seriously think this is what the world needs from you?” he shouts. “You think that placing yourself at the center of a conversation about police overreach helps? You think that’s going to lead to equal justice equitably applied, or whatever it is you claim to want?”
Just for a second, Zo stops, startled. Ethan watches Zo consider what he’s just said: that maybe a middle-class white lady in a majority-white town, released almost immediately after her arrest, might not actually move this particular conversation as much as she hopes. He can see by her eyes that his meaning has sunk in, and for an instant, she looks shaken.
Good, he thinks. Maybe now we can finally talk, just Ethan and Zo, for real.
“Hon,” he says. He takes a step toward her. He’s ready to take her into his arms, start over. He reaches out toward her.
A mistake. Zo holds up her hands as if fending him off, and her face goes hard again. “No,” she says. “I can’t do this now. I’ll pick up Alex from school. She and I can head to Boston straight from Corbury. We’ll stay in a hotel tonight.”
As she disappears into the bedroom, he calls after her. “If you think I’m one of the bad guys, Zo, if you push me away like this, I promise you: you will have no one left.”
But before the words are out, she’s already gone.
* * *
—
The ones we’re taught to admire: Telemachus, who becomes a man only by telling his mom to STFU. His hero-dad, Odysseus, who loots women like property and spends years bedding goddesses, and somehow still manages to be celebrated through all time as the ultimate faithful husband. Aristotle for that whole superior-inferior thing, and more recent heroes too: Updike, that “magnificent narcissist,” and while we’re at it, his literary alter egos too: Rabbit Angstrom, Ben Fucking Turnbull, even poor dumb Sammy-of-the-A&P, all these boy-men who can’t recognize an honest-to-God human being when they see one, and whose blindness gets cloaked in dazzling prose (it’s stealthy, that prose, like a boa constrictor, it’ll steal your breath while you sleep). Nabokov, too: master of dizzying linguistic dips and loops. A person could almost forgive ol’ Vlad his Humbert Humbert if it hadn’t been for that one professor, the guy everyone said was such a fucking genius, who once stood in front of the classroom and declared, loftily, that never again shall a writer put a tween girl character in sunglasses without the reader envisioning Lolita.