by Mark Sampson
“When I —” I jarred. “When I — what?” I blinked at her. “Simone, what the fuck are you talking about?”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” replied my thirteen-year-old stepdaughter. Then she looked at me like I was a complete idiot. “Philip, this is what everybody’s talking about.”
I blinked at her again. “No,” I said, shaking my head slowly. “No, that’s … that’s not right.”
She gaped at me with both bemusement and a deep concern over my well-being. “Are you trying to make a joke or something?”
“Simone …”
“Come with me,” she said. “No, come with me.”
She led me by the wrist upstairs and into her bedroom. On her nightstand sat her pink iPad, and she brought it over as we settled onto the edge of her bed. She set the thing up on our thighs and quickly found the YouTube clip of my TV appearance on Monday.
“Simone, I can’t even bear to —”
“Would you just,” she said. “Would you just.”
So I watched the clip. I watched it for the very first time. At the beginning I merely harrumphed over the strand of comb-over standing at attention off my skull. Why hadn’t that producer, Lori, I thought, done something about it before we went live?
But then I heard those words. Those fateful, awful words.
“Well, Cheryl, I would love nothing more than to penetrate you with these ideas, but I worry you wouldn’t enjoy it enough.”
“And here are the comments,” Simone said, sweeping down to them.
And then, for the first time, I read some of them. I mean, I really read them. All of the anger and obloquy, the conversations lapping and overlapping with one another. I read a bunch of them for the first time.
When I finished, I raised my hands. I raised my hands, reader, and then I buried my face into them.
I stayed like that for a long, long time.
“Are you crying?” Simone asked after a while.
“No,” I moaned from behind my hands. And then, without lowering them, said, “Simone, I would really like to be alone right now.”
“This is my room.”
Then I did look at her, through my spreading fingers. “Right enough,” I said, putting my hands down. She moved the iPad out of the way, and I stood up. I stood up and walked out to the hallway. I walked there, reader, but by the time I reached the stairs leading to my third-floor office, I wasn’t walking anymore.
By the time I got to those stairs, I was running.
Don’t say it, dear reader. You don’t have to speak a word.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: How is this, this ignoble and implausibly delayed anagnorisis, even possible? How could all this have really happened? How could I have gone six days without knowing what people were really so upset about? Am I trying to pull a fast one? Do I think you’re all fools?
I don’t know what to tell you.
This is what I’ll tell you.
The situation requires some context, and I will provide it using an analogy. The analogy involves that Globe and Mail reporter, Roberta Rosenbaum. I mentioned to you that she and I had dated briefly in the late 1990s, but I never said how our romance came to fizzle out. It involved one of the biggest movies to be released in the summer of 1999: The Sixth Sense. We went to see it a couple of weeks after it arrived in theatres, and scuttlebutt had it that there was some wild twist, some earth-shattering surprise we should expect at the end of that film. As we settled into our seats, munching on popcorn and Twizzler sticks, with the rest of the anxious audience all around us, we wondered what this purported shocker might be. Well. I don’t think it’s bragging to say that I had the movie’s conceit figured out after the very first scene. I mean, come on. I looked around the darkened theatre to see if anyone else had deduced it. But, it seemed, no one else had. So while the rest of the audience — including Roberta — lapped it up, I sat there, arms folded over my chest, tutting and huffing at each elision and near miss designed to mask the true nature of Bruce Willis’s character. I thought, What? During the entire course of these events, does he not take a shit? Does he not go for pints with his buddies? Come on!
After the movie let out and we were walking back to the subway, Roberta went on and on — and on — about how brilliant she thought the ending’s twist was. “I mean, I was just shocked!” she said. “Were you shocked?” No! I frothed. I told her I had figured out the gag after the first scene and found the movie to be the most transparent and manipulative drivel I’d ever sat through. I couldn’t believe it had played people for saps. When she got defensive I tore a strip off her, mocking her gullibility and lack of observational skills. “And you’re supposed to be a journalist,” I said. Well. That pretty much spelt the end of us. Roberta, perhaps already doubting my reservoirs of tact, decided that this was a haughtiness too far. Within days, she was letting me know that we’d be better off as “just friends.”
But now I get it. Life is full of elisions and near-misses. I could now understand, sort of, what Bruce Willis’s character was going through. Like a ghost, you sometimes wander through life trying to do the right thing — or at least the thing that you’ve always done — by rote, and then just get crushed by a sudden realization, a new, harsh reality that was always there — it was always there — and yet you couldn’t see it. I thought of my interactions with Sebastian, with dean Tom Howardson, with Phillip at Stout, with — oh gawd — Roberta when she finally got me on the phone. Life is full of elisions and near-misses.
But what about you, dear reader? Do you believe any of this? Or do you think I’ve pulled a fast one, played you for a sap, pushed the boundaries of narrative credibility? If so, then go back and reread these pages. Go on. And if you still feel that way, then can I ask: Why are you still here? Why didn’t you throw this book across the room long ago?
I hurried to my desk to write a hasty email.
Dear Raj,
Please disregard the script I sent you yesterday. (I’m only now — duh! — getting caught up with everybody else.) Obviously I need to write a new one. I’ll get it to you in the next day or so.
Best,
Philip
To my relief, he wrote back right away.
Hey Sharpe,
No worries. I was wondering why you were still going on about that other stuff. I look forward to seeing what you come up with.
Monday, November 9
That’s it, reader. No more flashbacks. No more stalling. I had work to do.
I had work to do. It became paramount to get down onto paper a new script for Raj, what I now called my Proper Apology. I meant all last night to begin it. But the presence of that need was overwhelmed by the absence of something — someone — else. Grace. Oh God, the state I was in. I made several drunky attempts to reach her on her cellphone, but she was not answering, she was not answering, she was not answering. Each time her chipper little voicemail greeting — and not her voice — kicked in, it felt as if this very house, and, perhaps, our entire marriage, grew more permanently empty. I eventually declared defeat and crawled into bed on my hands and knees. It was still early — Simone hadn’t even retired for the night yet — and what I’d hoped for was a brief, refreshing blackout before starting work on my new script. But instead I awoke hours later, and feeling as if someone had broken into 4 Metcalfe Street and beaten me up in my sleep. My temples ached; my muscles throbbed; my stomach churned with nausea. But these maladies soon paled in comparison to the shame, my humiliating and disgraceful conduct from the previous day, the previous week, that came dredging back to my mind as I lay on my half of the marital bed. The ignominy of it all spread over me like a bloodstain. I decided to force myself vertical and get to work. It was 4:30 in the morning.
I went upstairs to my office, flopped down at the desk, and turned on my laptop. The bookshelves along the wall stood crammed with the weigh
t of Western thought. The little attic window facing the street still cupped the night’s darkness. Launching a fresh Word document, I lay my fingers on the keys, determined to unleash an unbridled mea culpa, a colourful cavalcade of penitence, onto that white phantom page. But did I? Of course not. What kind of moron tries to write something coherent at 4:30 in the morning? I sat staring at the cursor’s slow, steady heartbeat, its rhythmic blink. I stretched my shoulders. I pinched my nose. I leaned in. I leaned back. I twiddled my fingers.
I checked email. For once, there were no new messages; not a single ping from the Facebook. I felt almost jilted. Should I go back, I thought, and try to wade through what social media’s Greek chorus had been saying about me all week? Yes, yes, that seemed like the reasonable thing to do. I clicked on my DELETED folder and began trawling through the notifications I’d been batch-removing from my inbox. Oof ! How could I have been this reckless? The scandal’s entire trajectory, my public knouting, was laid out there in black and white. At first, the participants were focused on me, but then quickly shifted as they turned on each other. It was amazing how people who had roughly the same world view and specific agreements on what a shitbag I was could go hammer and tongs at each other over the most minute of points. “No, Raymond, I already KNOW the legal definition of assault YOU’RE the one who could use a dictionary okay,” howled someone. “Suzie, did you even read my comment above? Scroll back up and just READ it, okay?” howled someone else. The arguments got pretty heated; the comments grew increasingly lengthy, increasingly essay-like, as each contributor meticulously split the hairs of a previous split hair. As I worked my way through the days, a few commenters dropped links to news stories about my slip, and I clicked on them. These pointed to articles, columns really, written by frosty feminists (so many of them seemed to have their own columns now), their cross-looking thumbnail headshots parked above their words of wisdom. And what wisdom! Yes, yes, yes. These gals laid bare exactly why my dig at Cheryl Sneed had been indicative of larger issues in our culture, and why such a gaffe had been so unsettling, so vicious, so … exhausting. Yes, yes, yes. It was like I read these insights with a brain I hadn’t even possessed twenty-four hours earlier.
When I finished, I returned to my blank Word doc. Okay — here we go here we go here we go. I clenched my fingers into talons over the keys. I grit my teeth. I hummed. But still. Nothing came. Nothing came. Eventually, I glanced up at the computer’s clock. Wow. More than two hours had passed. I thought I should maybe go then and get Simone up for the day. But then I heard movement through the house below me.
“Hey, Philip?” Simone called from the landing. “Philip, are you there? Have you seen my math book?”
The morning rolled on. I brought the newspapers in from the porch while Simone poured us a couple bowls of cereal. These rituals seemed to exacerbate the absence we both no doubt felt in the house. At this point in the morning, Grace would have been passing judgment on Simone’s choice of wardrobe or asking about activities upcoming in the week; Naomi would have been filling the air with her playful three-year-old’s banter. Instead, the kitchen seemed stuffed with silence as Simone and I moved through our respective tasks. Each time her cellphone buzzed, I felt my heart strum like a guitar string. Was that your mother? I wanted to ask.
We ate together and I checked her homework. I must have looked like shit, reader, because when I finished Simone touched my hand and asked, “Are you okay?” I experienced a small spark of anger at her abbreviated politeness. It was that sort of thing that had helped keep me in the dark all week. Don’t say “Are you okay?” I thought. Say “Are you okay that you’ve now discovered you verbally assaulted a woman on national television?”
But I just nodded.
She nodded back. “Okay. I have to go now.”
So we got up, and she went to the closet and put on her coat, and I helped her don her bookbag. She reached for the doorknob but then spun on her heels. “Oh shoot — I don’t have a lunch.”
I promptly dug my wallet out and slipped her three twenties. “Is that enough?” I asked.
Simone’s eyes bloomed at this offering, but — ever the miniature adult — she passed two of them back to me. “I’ll be fine,” she replied.
And then she was gone.
I turned back to the empty house, the empty day spread out before me, a wide and vague terrain of unlimited freedom. Wow, I thought, so this is what it feels like for Grace after she’s shooed us out the door. But I wasn’t creatively charged by all the unstructured time. In fact, I felt somewhat oppressed by it — like there was a looseness, a bagginess to the hours ahead that would stifle my return to the aberration up in my office, that blank Word document. There was nothing standing between me and my Proper Apology, and thus it felt as if everything stood between us.
I returned to the kitchen to read the newspapers. Now that I’d gotten a taste of what people had been saying about me all week, I was keen to catch any mention of my slip, a residual article about it from seven days on. I started with the Toronto Times, flipping through news stories of earthquakes and budget reports, ISIS executions and the unravelling Canadian economy. Had I missed the boat? Were all the printed palavers about Philip Sharpe’s behaviour already over?
But then I reached the op-ed section and saw my name — my name! — in the headline of one of the columns. Whose column? Come now, reader. Who do you think? Yes, it was her. Of course it was. Her column ran on Mondays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, a reliable deluge of down-home conservatism. I stared at her thumbnail headshot, thinking what I always thought whenever I saw her thumbnail headshot: Oh, wow, dear, you do not look like that anymore. I settled in to read the words below her incendiary headline.
Get over yourselves, ladies: Philip Sharpe did not threaten to “rape” me
By Cheryl Sneed
Here’s how you know our “culture wars” have jumped the shark: when feminists come racing to my defence.
I’ve waited a full week to write about what happened last Monday during my appearance on CBC-TV’s Power Today. I wanted to take full stock of what has been an explosive public reaction before I waded into the fray. For those of you living under a porch these last seven days, here’s what happened: Last Monday I was on that show to discuss the collapse of ODS Financial Group with University of Toronto professor and prominent left-wing intellectual Philip Sharpe, a man I’ve been having a low-level feud with for about 10 years now. Truth is, I’ve always had a grudging admiration for Philip — he’s a cunning thinker and seems to have the entire canon of Western thought at his fingertips at all times — and I knew that, with the ODS failure being such big news, our “discussion” would quickly turn into a “debate.”
And it did. Things got very heated very quickly, but for some reason Philip seemed frazzled and not at all himself. One thing led to another, and just before we went off the air, he made some comment (more nonsensical than horrific) about wanting to “penetrate” me with a bunch of the wishy-washy ideas he’d been spouting.
Naturally, the feminist media erupted into indignation. The usual clique of sensitivity queens began howling for his blood and pointing to his slip as further evidence of our so-called “rape culture.” The mandarins running U of T promptly sent out press releases throwing their star professor under the bus, and they set up a “safe space” for any students who had even heard about the incident. Parents demanded Philip be fired. Anyone who dared defend him or downplay his comment was promptly skewered on Facebook and Twitter. The public shaming industrial complex shifted into high gear.
Philip, to his credit, has not gone grovelling for forgiveness (unlike so many other men who have fallen victim to this kind of overblown witch hunt). He has stayed wisely silent, save for one ill-phrased “statement” to my colleague, journalist Roberta Rosenbaum — a comment I am convinced could not have possibly been on the record.
Well. Here’s what I think.
Why? Because in my day, that’s how you dealt with males who did stupid things. If a man made an off-colour joke at you, you chewed him out right away. If he said something inappropriate about your clothes, you gave it right back to him. If he tried to grab a boob in the photocopy room, you elbowed him in the ribs and told him to knock it off. Today’s young feminists don’t want to hear this, but men are hard-wired for high-risk behaviour, and it’s our job to correct them when they go out of bounds with us. It’s called having agency, a term that today’s feminists don’t even know the meaning of.
I guess what I find so infuriating about this situation is how predictable the fallout has been. It’s always the same young feminists who kick-start the fracas. These women, who have so many platforms now to spew their misguided beliefs, spend their whole day, their whole careers, snivelling about sexism and chasing the chimera of so-called “gender equality.” I guess this is what happens when we hand over our media and arts coverage to teenagers.
Philip Sharpe is by no means perfect, but he didn’t deserve the vitriol and ad hominem attacks he suffered last week. I don’t see eye to eye with Philip on many things, but I consider him a worthy adversary and someone who has earned our respect. His comment at me was inappropriate, but it wasn’t literal. It had no violent or sexual intention behind it.