“She’s at one of her dyke meetings tonight. Don’t worry, we won’t be disturbed,” he said, taking off his glasses, the seducer again. So much taller than her. Jayanti nodded, looked at where the phone was. It was in its usual place, on the serviceable wooden table outside her bedroom, the same table as in everyone’s dorm. It couldn’t have been more than twenty feet away.
Her cell phone battery was dead; she’d been intending to rush home and take care of it. The charger was there too, on the table. She stood rigid, hoping for a chance to grab at help. But Dave was watching too closely. Jauntily, he walked to the phone, pulled the cord out of the wall. Pocketed the charger after winding it up.
When he smiled at her, his features reminded her of Rob Lowe’s, Brad Pitt’s. Glinty blue eyes, cleft chin, dimples. Rumpled, shining hair. Taut arms. Every white cocky American actor, whose cockiness secured their sex appeal.
“So tense. Has Becca got her lesbian hooks into you?” he asked. “You two do a lot of licky-licky?” he whispered. “I’d love to see that.”
He grabbed and held her too tightly. His arms were muscular, nearly bare in the cheap white T-shirt, the kind that ordinary businessmen, including some south Indians, wore as underwear. Jayanti struggled to lift his heavy arms off her before he pushed her down into a sitting position on the wood straight-backed chair in the living room and someone else, someone who must have been waiting inside the room, stood behind her and pulled a dank cloth, possibly an unwashed pillowcase, tight around her head, making seeing and breathing both finite and infinitely meaningful. Jayanti stilled, praying that she wouldn’t suffocate. By then, Dave had released his grip from her shoulders and throat, and she tried to stand up.
But someone, not Dave, perhaps the person who had put the cloth over her eyes, sat down on her then, sudden and hard, astride her hips, right on her lap, and pressed his crotch into her. There was cloth jammed into her mouth. She couldn’t utter a sound. The cloth, tight between her lips, looser over her nose and face, blacked out the room.
Two big hands pushed down on her upper arm—the humeral head, she remembered, right out of the glenoid fossa of the scapula, the Netter drawing she’d seen in the Biology 501 anatomy textbook. Those hands shoved hard enough to make her nauseous from pain, lifting the round ball out of the shoulder joint, detaching it from its moorings and pushing it back so she was completely immobile. She was dizzy; she tried to kick with her feet but couldn’t lift them. She retched but couldn’t vomit for the gag in her mouth. She tasted bile, dimly aware that her right arm was now a strange thing, hanging loosely at her side. She was a right-handed painter, she thought, trying to say the words. They had to stop. She’d do what they said. They had to understand. She needed that arm.
The word “aspiration,” came into her mind. Not just the hope of doing something, of being an artist, keeping both her arms, but also what happened if bile from your mouth came down into the trachea. She saw the diagram of an aspirating lung, so vivid now, the clear image from a textbook. Aspiration. Pale pink alveoli smeared with detritus. The way Dave had smeared her. She willed herself to let the wetness pool inside her mouth, to not swallow. To hold steady, breathe as she could.
In the few minutes’ respite created by Dave, or someone, turning on Becca’s full-throated stereo system, Jayanti forced herself to think instead of giving up. Soon the hallway would be busy with traffic, her neighbors coming back from dinner, going out to meetings or movies. She tried to think of something she could kick or move with her left hand, something heavy enough to make a loud crash, to get someone outside to come knock on the door.
There were at least three strangers in her room, one man who had been sitting on her and was now standing up, rubbing what felt like his smooth, naked penis against her good arm, another whose steps she could hear moving across the room to turn up the stereo knob even louder, and possibly a third still lurking by the damaged arm. The pain was nothing like she’d ever felt. The gag had loosened by now, she was able to spit out and clear her mouth. “My arm,” she shouted. “Arm!” Their laughter. She must have passed out.
When she came to her first thought was of Karen, the blond with pursed lips and conservative clothes who lived down the hall, a girl who circulated home-baked cookies every weekend but had actually taken Jayanti aside once and told her that she was the laughingstock of their dorm for how loudly she moaned and cried out during Alok’s energetic lovemaking. “Everyone can hear how much you like to have sex,” Karen said. “But in this country, we try to honor people’s privacy. It’s not like the black hole of Calcutta or someplace like that where everyone lives practically on top of each other, you know? This ain’t no slum-dog millionaire,” Karen said, giggling. “We’re all just cool. You want to try to have more dignity. I’m just trying to help you.”
The gag, the cloth slipped free at last and Jayanti screamed and screamed, to no response. When the cloth was taken off her completely and she could see the room again, only Dave stood naked over her. No other men. Her right arm was useless, and her pants and underwear had been pulled down. Crying, she used her good arm to try to put them back on. Dave stopped her with a vicious squeeze, turned her around, and quickly raped her from behind.
He finished with a grunt. Technically, she’d been a virgin. Alok had made her come without breaking her hymen. It was irrelevant now. The minute she’d cheated on the test, that was when she’d lost virginity, she thought. She’d closed her eyes when Dave ripped into her, opened them again when he stepped away, gathering her strength. She wanted to scream but couldn’t. The stereo bedlam silenced her. Metallica. Master of Puppets. Dave stood back, singing and playing air guitar; she didn’t look at him but sensed that he was cleaning himself, perhaps getting dressed.
She used the energy of not screaming to compose herself, to dare to look around. She confirmed the phone was still disconnected. Two cups were undisturbed on the table, as if she’d invited Dave for tea the same way she invited nearly everyone she met. Suddenly he was on her again, rubbing her breast and laughing when she kicked at him. He held her down for another quick, revolting kiss on top of her head, right on the exposed scalp of her part, before finally letting her go. “Good girl,” he told her. “I’ll feed you a lot more of my horse cock unless you shut your mouth”—a line, Jayanti surmised, from porn Dave might have watched when he was in high school. The minute he left, Jayanti got up and staggered to the door, careful not to move her right arm. Using her good hand, she locked it. Then she lay down on the floor for what felt like hours, wishing it were dark. Later that night the door opened again and Jayanti felt her heart jump, but it was Becca, immediately upset and outraged, swearing more than asking Jayanti any questions.
“Hospital,” Jayanti whispered urgently. She said it more than once but Becca wouldn’t stop saying “Who did this? What the fuck is this?” as she turned on lights and bustled around their living room, turning off the stereo, picking up traces—strewn pillows, a bloody chair, the empty pillowcase—of what she quickly understood was rape. She turned back to Jayanti, face pallid, lips drawn and angry, throwing a clean blanket over her and saying, “Don’t move, the police have to document, just stay where you are, sweetie, they have to do the kit.” But Jayanti managed to pull herself up, walk, reconnect the phone with her good hand, feeling less dead, somehow, having done this. Then she sank down on the sofa, depleted. Becca, weeping, called 911.
In the emergency room, all around Jayanti there were people with open, bleeding gashes on their arms and legs, and as Jayanti looked around she was struck by a peculiar belief in her own luck. “At least I’m alive,” she said to Becca, remembering many news stories in India where rape victim’s bodies had been found in a condition that didn’t even allow the women to be identified.
“We’re going to get those bastards, count on it,” Becca said. They’d come back from the X-ray and sat in a tiny room with a curtain, waiting for a doctor to “reduce” Jayanti’s shoulder. A different, motherly nurse w
as seeing to them now, and Jayanti was glad. Reminded of her own mother, she resolved never to tell her what Dave had done. The new nurse brought her a long, narrow, pinkish-orange Popsicle. Jayanti chewed at the end silently while Becca talked, liking how it numbed her tongue and mouth but hating it, at the same time, for how much it looked like a man’s penis.
“The arm is broken, I think,” Jayanti said. “Not just a dislocation. My fingers feel numb. I’m scared, Becca. My grip—I can move them, but my grip isn’t right.” The series of etchings she’d been working on, fine, detailed work of animals inspired by some of the earliest cave paintings in the world, the ones drawn with a single line starting in the animal’s mouth and winding out in convoluted, brain-like sworls, out to the tail—how would she do those etchings now, how would she hold the scalpel, incise the copper plates? How would she have the confidence to make permanent marks?
While Becca ran to get the nurse, Jayanti sat looking at herself like a stranger in a tall mirror across from where she sat. Her face was drawn and pale, her lips orange, hair thick and wild. Like an actress in some Hindi movie about rape, but unlike that actress, Jayanti had no one to avenge her. Jayanti was an only child, no brothers, father passed, mother in India.
Jayanti was supposed to bring her mother to the U.S., to prosper here. She’d wasted time. Wasted her chance.
She began sobbing quietly, shutting her eyes, just as Becca returned, without the nurse, shouting imperiously for a doctor, pain medicine, X-rays, a lawyer, the fucking police.
“There are only two guys who would do just about anything Dave Sheffield wanted, and believe me, they’re going to pay too,” Becca muttered.
She could hear Becca continuing to promise her justice after the nurses and doctors came to hover over her, injecting her with morphine while they made her arm feel almost right. But Becca wasn’t there when Jayanti woke up and was ready to go home. Her roommate was already knocking on doors. Organizing.
That night, once she was safe in bed, with women she didn’t know sitting on the floor of her living room, talking, Jayanti listened, passive, until she finally fell asleep. Over only a few days, she watched Becca evolve a full, effective campaign. The two boys Becca suspected of helping Dave were on the basketball team with him. A fury of calls to Becca’s sisters in her various informal sisterhoods—“Take Back the Night” committee, queer womyn’s painting collectives, Asian American and Latina Women’s International Rights Association, the Rotary Club—led to the suspected boys being followed day and night by volunteers. Vague sexual bragging by the boys was overheard, reported to the police immediately. The police had inventoried the dorm room, but surfaces had all been wiped. The only fluids were Jayanti’s own. The perpetrators had worn gloves, exercised care. Dave hadn’t ejaculated when he raped her.
Two weeks later, the police knocked on her door. When Jayanti opened it, she noticed, almost as if it were a dream, that the small picture of the god Ganesh which she had taped onto the dry-erase board was covered in shaving cream. “A prank,” the police officer said. She looked away from it, saying a short efficient prayer very softly, under her breath, part of her wondering if the police had finally come to arrest her. She had cheated on an exam, after all. But Jayanti learned that one of her neighbors, a quiet black girl, had called the police about a fourth boy coming out of Jayanti and Becca’s room that night, a boy she recognized from the college’s Daily News front page. He had just joined the basketball team that year. Like Jayanti, he was on a scholarship. He didn’t want any trouble. He not only confessed, but also named Dave and two of his fraternity brothers. He’d told them to stop, but they wouldn’t, he claimed. “Gang rape, a fucking lawsuit,” Becca insisted, excited, puzzled but eventually accepting of the curious, exotic fact that nothing could make Jayanti press the case. Nothing could make her talk to reporters.
“Thank God you got justice without having to testify in court,” Becca would say afterward, sometimes during the rare moments when Jayanti had momentarily forgotten. Months later, when Jayanti learned that the college administration was going to take action against the men, despite the campus movement and the rallies led by sorority sisters who supported the men, she refused to talk to Becca at all, unless Becca promised never to mention the rape again.
None of it really mattered. Jayanti was sure that she would still lose her scholarship, and spent every day thereafter head down, wondering if she would have to kill herself when the decision came. Wondering if there were an easy way to make a suicide look accidental. Thinking about a plastic bag over her head. Drawing it closed the way the rapists could’ve done.
It took nearly another year for final decisions, during which a special committee involved in Dave’s and the other boys’ hearings thoroughly reviewed Jayanti’s entire case, determining that her half-done problem sets showed effort that was clearly her own, and that she hadn’t cheated in any other course.
It took another year for Jayanti to stop waking up each day convinced that it would be her last as she knew it. She didn’t lose the scholarship. She was pardoned for the cheating, in large part due to the rape, she thought, sickened by how Dave had saved her. The fissure that had opened in her life had closed before destroying her whole life, but the evil eye had claimed its mark on her. She would never be unmarked again. Never be free of its disapproving glare.
Faced with imminent college discipline, Dave chose to leave for good, rather than risk getting expelled. The rumor was that he had transferred to a small, upscale liberal arts college, changed his name, changed his interests from pre-med to politics. Becca kept tabs on him, insisting that Dave and his rapist fraternity brothers remain on the agenda of the campus women United Against Rape.
“Imagine, someone like Dave in politics,” Becca repeated, her pudgy, kewpie-doll face screwed up with disgust. “He’ll never get far in the public eye, don’t worry. You don’t have to talk about what happened to you. We’ll be your voice. Me and my sisters in the struggle, my cousin who’s a civil rights lawyer. We’ll make sure the fucker won’t forget.”
Jayanti didn’t know how anyone could make Dave truly regret what he had done. But Becca made good on her other promises. She’d stuck with Jayanti through her physical recovery, her rehab for the injured arm, her make-up work for Biology, the extra credits Jayanti agreed to take. And here Jayanti was now, long after finishing school triumphantly, living in a clean and well-lit studio sublet thanks to Becca, hurrying forward in a new life she wasn’t convinced she ought to have.
As benefactors went, Becca was sterling. But there was still the acid in her mouth, though college was behind her and no one was trying to hurt her now. Jayanti couldn’t imagine trying to make Becca really understand.
Her mother had come from India to see her walk in the black gown, taken a thousand pictures, and beamed as proudly as other kids’ parents, never suspecting a thing. Well into her second year of graduate school in art, Jayanti was doing nothing but working, producing a few canvases that sold, and she had even made a handful of work friends.
The women assumed that Jayanti’s distant quality came from her being foreign, and they seemed to like her more because she never asked for anything from them. Jayanti was their sounding board for “bad relationships,” “casual sex,” “affairs with teachers,” and all the other topics that felt to Jayanti as distant as the headings of glossy illustrated flashcards. Young, single, city woman. Cards Jayanti was glad she’d never be required to memorize.
The men in her art school classes, both gay and not gay, often held barbecues on the roofs of their building, and this evening, in the middle of August, Jayanti had been to just such a barbecue. B: It was so stupid, she thought, hating herself the way she often did. She was raped four years ago. Four years the length of time Jayanti had been in the US. At the barbecue, a container of orange popsicles, exactly the color and shape as the one she’d had in the emergency room, had been sitting on the foldout metal table. The sight of them had made her nauseous en
ough to flee, to stand nearly an hour waiting for her train.
At home in her tiny, peaceful studio—a few blocks from where Becca lived with boisterous, womanist friends, all of whom left messages on Jayanti’s answering machine that she admitted were comforting to get, though she deleted them without listening all the way—Jayanti lost no time in setting up her work.
Soon after, the buzzer of the apartment must have gone off three, four times, before she heard it—just one long buzzer that went on into nowhere. Jayanti, shaking, forced herself to press the button in response. What if there were a fire, or delivery of art supplies? First there was nothing, then a cursing, angry male voice that sounded familiar.
Dave. Her mouth went dry. She held her cell phone in her hand for 911. A knock at her front door. Before she looked through the peephole, she texted Becca. “Might need help. Please come.” But the knock was single, courteous. The voice saying hello unlike the man she’d heard downstairs. Opening her door with the chain on, she saw that this stranger was tall, around her age, with blondish-reddish hair. The glasses, similar. The smile. Not Dave. But, still, her heart pounded harder. She couldn’t speak.
“Hey, there. Thanks for opening up. It’s Becca’s cousin, Jake,” the man said, his voice still kind. “Jake from Portland. I always crash here.” He stepped closer. “I thought Becca lived here. Do you know her? Are you—” He laughed, staring at Jayanti. “Hey, who are you? She owns this apartment. Do you belong to—?”
She shut the door before he finished his sentence. He knocked again but only once. She kept the chain on, double bolting it, then set her back against it, looking at her phone. Becca had texted back: “I’m on my way. Call the police if it can’t wait. I’m in Brooklyn, it’ll take me at least another hour to get to you. CALL 911.”
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