The Question Authority

by Rachel Cline

  “Is your husband home?” I ask.

  “No,” she says. “Sit down. Do you want coffee?”

  I nod.

  The living room is large and full of stuff: books, a substantial cache of records, magazines, piles of paper. As my eyes adjust I see that in better light it must be a pleasant room— well-used brown leather couch, rust-colored velvet armchair, rush-seated rocker, Native American rug. It looks a bit like Rasmussen’s old living room on Willow Street, but more refined, or maybe just cleaner: the magazines are stacked neatly, as are the piles of paper. Beth comes back in and sits down in the velvet chair, putting down our coffee cups side by side— mine in front of my perch on the couch. She scans the room as though looking for something. “I have some things here that I bet you’d get a kick out of,” she says. “From when we were kids.”

  “Really?” I sound so false, but I haven’t actually figured out what I’m here to say.

  “There’s this clay sculpture of an owl that you made. Do you remember it?”

  I shake my head.

  “You were a wise old owl back then,” she says.

  “Wiseass, more like.”

  She smiles but isn’t buying it. I see that she’s fidgeting, and that she’s not wearing any of her jewelry. Hail ticks against the windows as we sit in awkward silence. Just as she is about to stand up, announcing “Anyway—” I blurt:

  “Listen, I figured it out. About you and Bob.”

  Her head zips around like a falcon’s spotting prey, but she stays seated, obviously weighing whether I can possibly mean what she thinks I do. “You what?”

  “Pictures on Facebook.”

  She tilts her head, mentally reviewing her online photos. “How?”

  “Exit stage left, for one thing.”

  She nods and then smiles ruefully. “I mean, not that it’s a secret, exactly. The statute of limitations is up. But we just try and keep the past separate from the present as much as we can.”

  “And use a false name.”

  “That’s something else. I mean, you’re right, but Winslow is because of my son.” She shifts in her seat, recrosses her legs, thinks. Then she looks at me. “Do you want to see his picture?”

  She gets up without waiting for my answer and unshelves a photo album from across the room. I see her hesitate and then grab a second volume before returning to her chair. She leafs through the first binder until she finds what she’s looking for, a school portrait of a young teenaged boy with curly hair and braces on his teeth. He’s wearing a black T-shirt with something printed on it but I can’t tell what. He has her smile. He looks motherless. I don’t know why I think that, but I do. I’ve always read a lot into photographs.

  “How recent?” I ask.

  “Last year. My ex sends them to my lawyer so he doesn’t have to deal with me asking.” She fidgets with the other pages of the album, letting them slip from her fingers one by one.

  “Are you in touch at all?”

  She shakes her head.

  “But he must remember . . . ?”

  “I think so, too,” she says. “But the deal was no contact.”

  “Does he think you’re dead?”

  “I don’t know what they told him. Maybe.”

  I close the album and set it aside on the coffee table. I do feel sorry for her, but I am not done with the Rasmussen questions.

  “Is it okay if—I want to know more about you and Resmussen. How long . . . ?”

  She shakes her head as though to clear it, then takes her long hair in one hand and starts to twist it. She talks without looking at me.

  “We met again in ninety-eight. It was like finding out someone I thought was dead was still alive. I mean, I’d never forgotten him, but I didn’t think I’d ever see him again.”

  “Who found who?”

  “Blind date. Well not exactly blind—set up by a friend who knew us both from Whores and Perverts Anonymous . . .”

  It takes me a second to realize she means their twelve-step program. “And you were still into him?”

  “It wasn’t like that. It was more like finding a lost part of myself. Like he connected the dots for me between who I am and who I used to be . . . know what I mean?”

  I do. Because it’s what I wanted her to do for me, and in some ways, it’s what she has done. I don’t really want to know the details of her life with Rasmussen, I just want to know I didn’t imagine it. I needed to view the body.

  “At least now I understand why you were so weird about the case.”

  “I wasn’t weird; I was keeping you guessing. That’s my job.”

  “Which doesn’t erase the fact that your husband’s a predator.”

  She winces at my choice of words. “Don’t be so simplistic. It doesn’t suit you.”

  “But he is, right?”

  “I didn’t fix him, no. But I will be divorcing him, if that’s any consolation.”

  She opens the second photo album and flips through a few pages. “Look, I found this the other night—this picture . . .” And she hands the book to me, turning it right side up as she does.

  “Look at how beautiful!” she says.

  It’s an enlarged black-and-white photograph of a young girl, seemingly naked, with her long hair covering her left eye, her left shoulder, and most of her childlike left breast. I have seen it before, and many times since in my mind’s eye. It’s the picture of Tamsin that has always meant “Rasmussen the Rapist” to me. The blurry background is the Academy darkroom. Examining it closely, I now recognize my own adolescent attempts at documentary photography clipped to the clothesline behind the girl in the foreground: the telephone nook in afternoon light; the cat Anna, her coat ruffled with static electricity; my mother, in her sealskin coat, lipstick gleaming. Why, I wonder, are my pictures there? I’ve never remembered that before. And so I look again at Tamsin, aka Christmas, the girl in the picture, trapped in a mesh of light and shadow, and wrapped also, partly, in the mask of her own long hair. And I see that she’s not Tamsin at all. She’s me.

  “I never let him do that!” I say, as though the picture itself has just said the words, “He raped you.” But flashes of memory have already started up a counterargument—him pulling my shirt over my head, the hot lamplight on my shoulder, how alien and brilliant I felt when he first looked at me through the camera. . . . I look at the child in the photo—she has no idea how vulnerable she is. Now I remember everything—that instant of joy, followed by immediate shame and the impulse to deny and erase. It went no further than the photographs, but afterward I felt that I had lost everything: my strength, my shell. That was why I pushed Beth away then, so she wouldn’t find out how weak I was. I’m looking straight at her, wanting her to understand why I was so mean to her almost as much as I want her to disappear completely.

  “But you’re not a victim,” she says. “Are you? You don’t seem like a victim to me.”

  Victim? No. But I hear a gasp come out of my chest that sounds almost like retching—a physical reaction I can’t control. The tears that come with it seem to be for everything at once: my mother, my cat, my photographer’s eye, my shining youth. . . . When Beth tries to put her hand on my arm, I swat it away with all my might.

  “I’m sorry, Nora,” she says.

  “What for?”

  “I don’t know. Disappointing you?”

  “You didn’t,” I say, between sobs. I shake my head as I try to breathe normally, wiping my eyes with my wrists. “You just lived your life,” I say finally. “It didn’t turn out the way it was supposed to. No one’s does.”

  After I have had a glass of water and washed my face in the kitchen sink (I have no interest in entering their shared bathroom), she accompanies me downstairs in the elevator. It’s still sleeting, but Beth has called a car service and given them my address. She has also wrapped the old photo between two pieces of cardboard and put it into a manila envelope. I want to look at it again. I also want to destroy it. As the elevator door slides o
pen in the lobby, I can see that she expects me to say something to her that will make it okay to part this way, but I can’t, and neither can she, so I step into the lobby and she places her finger on the button that makes the door close faster.

  The car service smells like coconut air freshener, so I open the window a bit and ride home with my eyes closed and my face occasionally stung by sleet.

  39

  Bob

  PHOENIX, ARIZONA

  Hello, I’m Bob, an addict and a pervert. I can call myself a pervert but I don’t really believe I’m a pedophile because that’s an old guy who bribes little girls with candy, or a priest who tells the altar boy that God will punish him if he tells, and a pervert is an outlaw, a badass. They write songs about him, right? So if I sit down next to some young thing on the bus, and watch her flick her hair for the idiot across the aisle, and see the curve in her leg that doesn’t yet completely resemble a woman’s leg, and smell the sweat she isn’t yet old enough to recognize as an odor, I am participating in a tradition as American as “Sweet Little Sixteen” and as old as “Darling, Clementine.”

  Unfortunately, when my memory of the girl and her sweat fades she becomes all the other girls, and the hatred they have for me is stuck inside me like a meal I’ll never digest. I can argue my way out of it just like the rest of you but we all know what we did. What we do.

  I rescued my first wife from her father when she was just fifteen and the stories she told me about that old bastard made me realize it could be done. Only then, once I’d done it, there was no going back. She put up with it—programmed, right? But I hated myself. So I thought if I had kids of my own I wouldn’t have those feelings about other people’s. You laugh because you thought the same thing. And it worked for a while, right? I saw how helpless they were and I was their defender. That was a job I knew I could do. There was an ice cream man who stopped near our house in Brooklyn. Sal. A fat fuck. I could have torn that guy in half when he looked at my Doria, in her summer dress with the sailboats on it.

  Sometimes I think every guy whose job keeps him near kids is one of us. Basketball coach, pediatrician, the guy who runs the batting cages, the mall cop . . . all torturing themselves, and giving in, and getting caught, but there’s no need to get caught. Even if someone forgives you—marries you, even—it’s never over. There’s no end, which is what we really want, what we’re all driving toward. Isn’t it? A way out? So here’s what else I know. There isn’t one. You think: I could just shoot myself. But what you don’t think is, what if I don’t die?

  I went to see my son this morning—a place some of you might know, the state hospital. They may call it a hospital but it smells like a prison. He’s there because he can’t take care of himself and hasn’t been able to since he was eighteen. He got into a good school, smart kid, then shot himself in the head. No tuition refund, by the way. Doesn’t matter. No one can afford to pay what it costs to keep someone alive who doesn’t want life.

  Archer didn’t recognize me; I’m an old guy now and in his head it’s still 1978. Of course he looks a lot like me, now, but I guess he’s not looking in the mirror much. His hair’s still red, what there is of it. And he has his mother’s black eyes. But his mother always looked right at me, even when she hated my guts, and my son doesn’t know how to do that. He looks at the ceiling, the corner up there, to his left. And sometimes he shakes his head no, and sometimes yes, and then back to no and he’ll keep at it until the giant black dude who’s guarding him makes him stop. The fact that he’s guarded by a giant tells me that he’s capable of serious damage to person and property but all I saw was the head-shaking thing. He’s not a vegetable. He says things. He says, I shouldn’t of done it, which I think means shot himself. And he says, They put me in jail for doing dirty things to girls, which isn’t true. He bites his nails like I do. I told him he didn’t do anything wrong. I told him his father was the one who should be in jail. And then he told me that he’d shot that guy, too. Blew his head right off. I shouldn’t of done it, he said.

  40

  Naomi

  My son looked right into my eyes when he shot me. My thought was, He has me dead to rights. His father wasn’t even there—he’d not spoken to Bob in months. Not since that spring when Tamsin showed up in Rutland and Archer realized for the first time what had been going on back at our house in Brooklyn—why he’d lost the happy life he’d so resented being taken from. He’d missed the corner candy store with the comic books, and the basketball game in the schoolyard at P.S. 8. He missed being in with the black dudes in a way other white kids weren’t. Vermont had nothing he wanted, he said. And then, one day, Christmas shows up and starts talking to him like a grownup, because he looked like one at seventeen, and the next thing you know he’s locked in his room all summer writing in notebooks and listening to music that sounds like screams and machines. We shouldn’t have let him go off to school that fall, but we did. I saw him last in his cinderblock dorm room. It was an empty, empty place.

  But he didn’t shoot his father, he shot me and then he shot himself—it’s best he remembers it the other way, though. If memory’s even what’s happening in my son’s brain, poor soul.

  I notice Bob can’t hardly say my name. That Archer would shoot me like that—would kill his mama that he loved most in the world—that’s the part his father’s got no words for: that the harm just goes on, like a stone in the quarry sending out ripples. I’d told Bob all about it from the get-go, but he knew it already, too. It’s an old refrain—Bob’s Swedish folk might’ve had the words a bit different than my Scots-Cherokee, but in the end we sing it all together, like a hymn. No one thinks that the worst will happen to them.

  41

  Nora

  It’s not quite three o’clock when I get back to my apartment. I put the envelope with the photo in it up high on my shelf in the library and then I go directly to bed, waking at dusk to the clang of the downstairs buzzer. I realize it’s been ringing for a while. I make my way up the hall and lift the intercom receiver. My voice is raspy when I say, “Hello?”

  “We have your cat, Miss Nora. Victor is coming up with him now.”

  I think I may be dreaming.

  “He was outside by the laundry. Eliza heard him.” Eliza is the super’s daughter. She’s eight.

  I put down the receiver, cross the kitchen, and open the outer elevator door, staring at the inner one as though I could pull the car upward and open it by telekinesis. I have not waited for anything or anyone with a heart so full since I can remember.

  When the elevator arrives, the cat saunters out and right past me, heading for food.

  “There he is!” says Victor, still in the elevator car, proud of his power to reunite us. His little girl is standing next to him, in her nightgown, smiling with profound delight. He has his hand on her shoulder and he looks as proud of her as she is of herself.

  “Thank you!” I say. “Thank you, Eliza!” I want to hug her almost as much as I want to reclaim Tin Man. But the elevator door is closing and I follow the cat, instead, falling to my knees to grab him under the forelegs. I want to hug him forever but he slips away, bleating and hovering in the corner where his dish sits, empty.

  I watch him consume an entire can of Paul Newman’s daughter’s cat food. I barely look away while he then cleans himself from stem to stern, yanking vigorously with his teeth on each hind toenail. I love him with my eyes for as long as that takes.

  Done cleaning, Tin Man saunters into the long hallway and heads straight for my bedroom, tail high, like a clockwork cat. I hear him land on my down comforter with a whomf and I follow him there. I push my nose into his belly fur—a maneuver he barely tolerates most times but he is now too bone-tired to resist. I breathe in the warm, powdery scent of his soft undercoat and it reminds me of the trace remnants of my mother’s perfume: how her sealskin coat smelled when it returned to the hall closet after a night at the theater or the opera; how she herself smelled when I buried my face in her neck
and kissed her goodnight; and even how her clothes smelled when I retrieved them from the hospital and there was no more life in them at all.

  I should sleep the sleep of the dead—the cat does—and at first I do too, but then I wake up again and it feels like morning but it isn’t. I’m not having nightmares; what wakes me is the feeling of having an appointment, of needing to be somewhere. It’s so keen that I eventually get out of bed to retrieve my laptop. There is nothing on my calendar. Maybe it’s someone’s birthday—someone I no longer celebrate? I run down the list of dead people and ex-boyfriends but it’s not that, either. Walking down the hall toward the kitchen, I find myself stopping at the doorway to the library. And then I know what the appointment is that I think I have.

  I retrieve the manila envelope from the shelf and take it with me to the kitchen. I pour a splash of scotch into a glass of milk and sit down at the breakfast nook. I slide the picture out so it’s sitting in front of me on the table, like a small meal, and I look.

  I look more closely at the girl this time: half-naked, half-showing herself to the camera. I look at the flare of light on her left shoulder and the murky shapes in the room behind her. I look at her shiny, abundant hair and her childish torso, through which her ribs show faintly. She has pronounced collarbones, as I still do. Her skin has not yet met acne, or even chicken pox (that came later that same year). Her ears are not yet pierced, her legs have never been shaved, she doesn’t own a brassiere. But I look at her face and it is my face. Not an early draft, but me just as I am this very moment: half-defiant, half-hidden, determined to observe and know, but not asking any questions I don’t really want to hear answered, either. I didn’t want him to fuck me, but I had wanted him to see me and exclaim my beauty—wanted it so badly I took off my clothes.

  But instead of feeling jubilant afterward, I had only felt defiled. I’d said no to his gropings, but then I’d given in to his smarmy power, after all. He turned off the lamp and put his camera away, and suddenly all I could think about was how I might erase this horrible mistake. That I had to cancel my participation in the summer trip was obvious. And I also had to extricate myself from my friendship with Beth—she would see through me, otherwise. I told her that we just took pictures, that nothing happened. But something did happen. As Tamsin said, we can’t unhappen it.