Consent

by Donna Freitas

  There are several mental snapshots from that visit that have stayed with me, though. Seeing his face peering at me through the window of my front door. Seeing him standing in the middle of my living room. Seeing him sitting in the blond wooden chair in my kitchen, his expression pleased.

  After he left, I had my first flicker of doubt, a slight disquiet that nagged at me.

  It reminded me of the moment at the theater when the man was naked onstage, and I’d felt paralyzed with awkwardness and discomfort. But that was different from what I felt now. My professor couldn’t control the plot of the play or the actors within it. Yet today, this time, he’d made a decision to come over to my house, which struck me as forward. The unease it provoked was faint, like a single bead on a necklace. I barely felt its tug.

  It was easy for him to justify his visit. It made total sense that he would be in my neighborhood, which was Georgetown’s neighborhood—Georgetown, a Jesuit school full of Jesuit priest-professors. As a Catholic priest and a professor himself, he would surely have reason to be there on occasion. Georgetown was a place where he had plenty of his own affiliations. He was an alum, like me.

  But it wasn’t until much later that it occurred to me that I had never given him my address, or directions to my somewhat hidden apartment. That he must have looked up my home address in my personal files at graduate school, to which he had full access since he was my professor and also, at the time, an administrator of a department; that he would have had to write down my address on a piece of paper and go scouring the neighborhood to find it. This was the nineties, well before GPS and Google Maps.

  Now, decades later, I wonder what he was thinking as he made his way to my apartment that first time, if he’d woken up that morning and made it his purpose to visit me at home, or if he’d even planned this excursion in advance. I wonder if he thought much at all about what he was doing, or if it really was a spontaneous decision on his part, as he’d told me. Back then, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to wonder if he was lying.

  If I had to guess the truth today, knowing what I know, I would say that he likely planned his visit, maybe even days ahead. He needed my address, and for that he had to go into my records. This required him to stop in the main office of the graduate school. This looking up of my records would become a habit of his. I would guess, too, that when he set out for Georgetown that morning, if he did indeed visit the library, or some other priests on campus, he did it only as a way of justifying his presence near my house. Maybe it was also a way to justify the letters he began to send me there.

  I had two places where I collected the mail. One was in my department at school, where I received correspondence about my program, and the other was at my apartment.

  I went to school pretty much every single day. I was full time, so I was often in class, plus I needed to attend the lectures of the professor for whom I was a TA, and on Fridays I ran discussion sections with my students. I was always around, and I often liked to sit in the little room where people went to get coffee and tea, or to read between classes, or sometimes to eat their bag lunches at the round table near the windows. It was called the Etc. Room and had a sign on the door naming it as such. I was a regular presence there, like many of my fellow students. I loved being at school because I loved everything about getting my PhD.

  That spring, I did not have a class with this professor, though I would still swing by to see him occasionally. His office was on a different floor than my department, in a different wing of the building. I had to go there on purpose; I was never just walking down his hallway. We didn’t see each other regularly anymore as we had in the fall, so when he began leaving things in my TA mailbox—that first story about the URI basketball team, then other newspaper articles that he thought I might like to read and short notes asking if I would stop by his office, followed by requests that we make time for coffee, or maybe another play—at first it seemed like a nice thing for him to do. He was making sure to stay in touch. I appreciated his effort to maintain his concern for my studies and my place in his program. I was flattered, too. I was, and I need to admit that. His attention made me feel special, though not special in a way that a boy I liked might make me feel special. Special as an aspiring intellectual, as an aspiring PhD, as an aspiring professor, like himself.

  But when the first letter from him arrived at my home address, I thought: Huh.

  I picked it up from the floor of my apartment with the rest of the mail, a letter addressed to me in a long rectangular envelope. I knew his handwriting by then because of the notes he’d been leaving in my TA mailbox and from his comments on my papers the previous semester. Plus, I recognized the return address. He’d used his abbey stationery, which had the abbey’s address printed in the top left-hand corner. I don’t remember the contents of the letter, just its arrival. It was the first of several he would send to me at that particular apartment, and the first of many more he would later send to my apartment on Georgetown’s campus, once I began working in Residence Life there later on in the summer.

  I never gave him any of my home addresses. Not the apartment I shared with my roommate, not the one I’d soon have at Georgetown, not the house where my family lived in Rhode Island. But he sent letters to all of those places. Eventually I would have three mailboxes, and he would send things to every one of them. Notes. Cards. Invitations. Articles. Sometimes, there would be a letter from him waiting for me in all three places on the very same afternoon. To this day, no single person has ever sent me that much mail. Not a friend, a boyfriend, a lover, a husband. But early on, I still thought of his letters as nice gestures.

  Even today, as I recount these stories about the correspondence he began with me and that surprise visit to my house, I am still full of doubt about everything that happened. Am I making too big a deal over it? Is it really innocent after all? It’s not as though he showed up in my apartment that day and grew violent, or tried to have sex with me, or even gave me the kind of line that a man who was hitting on me might at a bar. There was no “Hey, honey” or even a “You look beautiful today” or any other comment that might be considered out of place. He was perfectly cordial, perfectly gentlemanly, perfectly nice. He made the visit seem like one of my visits to his office—it was just that this time, he’d shown up where I happened to live.

  I go back and forth, back and forth, as I examine each moment.

  But this is the thing about what I went through—the kind of harassment that, in my case, eventually grew to be stalking, and that was complicated by his being my professor: you begin to doubt your judgment about everything. Technically, each meeting between him and me, each effort on his part to insert himself into my life, could be considered innocent. During the first year of our relationship, I certainly gave him the benefit of the doubt, once I’d started to have any doubts. I assumed the best about him, presumed any nagging feeling was my own fault, that I was just imagining things, inventing the unease that came to reside inside me that spring, and never left me again.

  It is only when I force myself to look at everything as a whole that I realize how what he did must look to someone else, someone who is able to assess things from a safe distance, to see the whole story at once. Or when I begin to push beyond my original assumptions about his goodness and kindliness, his justifications that were always above reproach in my mind, to see the layers of planning on his part for something as simple as a visit to my house for tea, or the sending of a letter to my home address. That he would have already needed to cross the lines of propriety to find himself on my street, that he would have had to go digging into my file for personal information that was there only in case of an emergency, that he used his access as my professor and mentor to pry further and further into my life, that he used his vow of celibacy, too, his role as a Catholic priest, to mask what I now suspect were less than innocent intentions, probably from very early on. He used all of this like a key to enter my world, without any express invitation on my part—though
it’s also true that I did not resist. Not at first.

  When I stop excusing everything that he did, each individual event and decision as most likely innocent, when I allow myself to wonder if he knew exactly what he was doing the entire time, if deception had always been a part of his behavior toward me and with me, I’m able to see my reactions at the time more clearly. If I let myself believe for a moment that he lied to me from the beginning about why he was in my neighborhood that day—or outside my classroom, or standing in the stairwell the moment I arrived at school for a seminar. If I do all of this and then consider the possibility that the entire first semester of his correspondence with me, every letter and article and note, had been carefully calculated from the get-go in a collective effort to take a professor-student relationship in a very non-professorial direction, only then do I feel stupid and naïve to not have seen what was happening more immediately. I feel like an idiot to have been so passive in the face of all he was doing, to never have allowed myself to suspect that his intentions were anything other than appropriate.

  Either way I look at it, I end up concluding that what happened is all my fault. Either I was too complacent for too long, and too participatory, or I am making a big deal out of nothing, and still, he was and has been innocent all along. And either way, I am always the one who loses, and he is always the one who wins the game.

  6

  That spring, it was still easy to allow him to blend into everything else. He was like camouflage, fading into the background of my life, nearly hidden.

  I had a string of sort-of boyfriends during my first two semesters of graduate school. There was Max. There was Brad. There was even a boy from one of my classes, Owen.

  Max I’d met on campus. He was a PhD student in another department, and he reminded me of Tom Hanks because he was just as charming and funny. He and I would get together to take long walks, to enjoy long coffees, to wander Georgetown for hours, sometimes five or six. Max and I never kissed. I wasn’t sure what we were doing, exactly, but I could tell he liked me, a lot, and I could tell I liked him, too, more than a lot. Each time our long afternoon or evening was waning and one of us had to go, we would console ourselves by planning our next outing before we said goodbye. This went on for months, until one day I came home to a message on the answering machine.

  “Donna, there’s something I’ve needed to tell you.”

  His voice crackled through my kitchen after I’d pressed Play, the recording staticky.

  “I can’t get together this Friday like I told you”—there was a long pause—“because I have to fly home. For a party. An engagement party. I’m engaged and getting married. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before now. I’m sorry I’m telling you like this. Let’s talk when I get back,” he added.

  Then there was a click.

  Oh.

  Lightbulbs went on in my brain even as my heart was collapsing. So that’s why we never kissed. So that’s why we spent hours together during the day, the afternoon, the early evening, but never went to dinner or hung out late into the night. I carried around a sadness in me about Max for a long time, but the way I’d always dealt with heartbreak was to throw myself into dating other people, going out and having fun, and there was plenty of fun to be had. There were so many boys in the world, and I rarely had trouble finding reasons to like one of them.

  Plus, right around the tail end of Max, I met Brad at a friend’s party.

  He was handsome, he was a med student, he’d been a philosophy major in college, which I liked, of course, and he was tall with big, soft brown eyes, which I also liked, of course. I remember sitting with him in the backyard, twinkle lights strung above us, beers clutched in our hands. We hit it off right away, stood there talking by the keg. But what I most remember was the confession he made, maybe an hour into our conversation.

  “So my divorce was final today.” He’d dropped these words so casually.

  I laughed—I thought he was kidding. “What?”

  He went on to explain that he’d gotten married a couple of weeks after graduating from college and now, barely two years later, had already separated from his wife. I listened, curious about an experience that seemed so foreign and impossible to me in that moment of my own life, trying to focus mostly on the fact that I found Brad interesting and very good-looking.

  When my roommate and I were walking home that night and I told her what he’d confessed, she said, “Oh, Donna, you do not want to be the first person he dates after a divorce. He’s divorced! At our age!”

  I didn’t listen to her and dated him anyway.

  Then sometime early that spring semester, I’d met Owen in one of my classes. Meeting someone I might date in a class had seemed impossible the previous fall, but then Owen showed up and suddenly all of that changed. He had spiky blond hair that he’d dyed a bright blue, or maybe it was purple—he changed the color about once a month. He wore jeans and a gas attendant shirt with someone else’s name on it. He stood out among the rest of the students for his style, his looks, his age (the same as mine). He was dynamic, he was funny, he had a voice that went up and down, slightly scratchy, theatrical. His words, the way he talked, would pull you in and hold you there—his eyes would pull you in, too.

  All this, and he turned out to be a professional juggler. Like for real. Like this was how he and his juggling partner made a living. He could swallow fire, he could balance a chair on his chin, he could wow a crowd with his humor and talent within about sixty seconds. I learned this maybe on the second day we had class together. We’d stayed after everyone else had left, chatting.

  “You want to come to a show next weekend?” he asked me.

  “Yes,” I said, without hesitation. I did want to.

  I went, I was mesmerized by him, and this was the beginning of many months of writing each other letters, of hanging out in much the same way I’d been hanging out with Max during the fall, an enticing game of will-they-or-won’t-they going on between us, a romantic courtship simmering beneath what we were calling a friendship. He taught me how to juggle, the perfect excuse for hours of hanging out and having fun together. I was on- and off-again with Brad, the divorcé–med student, whom my roommate had been right about—he definitely wasn’t ready to be dating anyone—so it was easy to justify the time I spent with Owen. Besides, that time was delicious, and I had no interest in forbidding myself the pleasure.

  Meanwhile, I met Xander, a boy with a tongue piercing, tall and handsome and seductive, soon followed by Christopher, short and young-looking and skinny, the person who would become my real boyfriend, the boyfriend who would stick around. All of these boys populated my first two semesters of graduate school.

  I loved dating, in general, and I was unremorseful about this, about how one boy led to the next, about how they sometimes (often) overlapped, about how the next boy would help me to get over the previous one.

  I still am unremorseful. And why shouldn’t I be? What was wrong with having fun like I was having fun? What was wrong with dating a lot of boys? With having a lot of sex? With enjoying myself like the boys around me were enjoying themselves? The stakes were low, we weren’t worried about too much of significance or anything that was overly serious at the time. I was exercising my voice, my power, letting my desires lead the way, all the things that the feminists I was reading in my classes had fought to allow women the freedom to exercise according to their will.

  But there is a part of me now, a part I can’t shake or darken enough so I no longer see it, that believes I was eventually punished for my behavior, for exploring beyond the boundaries young women were allowed, for wandering into what was typically the territory of young men; for the way I moved through life, sexual and sensuous and playful. It is one of those suspicions that cut me into two. One woman, proud of the freedom she felt and how she used that freedom. The other, sure that punishment is always lurking just around the corner for women like her.

  And my punishment happened to be him. He was
the man God sent, that the world sent, that the patriarchy sent to take the giddy light that burned inside of me and snuff it out.

  Every time I visited him in his office during that spring, he would ask if I was going to take another class with him. He would ask what I hoped to learn next, and then he would offer to teach whatever it was that interested me. Not only this. He offered to plan his teaching around my schedule. He kept asking me to give him my list of fall classes, so he could ensure that whatever he taught would not conflict with my required courses.

  What, exactly, did I want him to teach? And if he taught exactly that, would I promise to sign up for the class?

  Toward the beginning of that semester, back in January and February, I answered his questions directly. But around March, by April, I became evasive.

  “Yes, I’ll figure it out,” I would tell him on one day.

  “I keep meaning to get that information to you,” I’d tell him on another.

  I avoided promising him anything. I could tell this bothered him greatly, but still I couldn’t give him the answer he so desperately wanted. At the time, I wouldn’t have been able to articulate why I resisted, but I did it anyway. I felt terrible for giving him the runaround, for not just saying “Yes, I promise.” I worried that I was being mean, that I should be grateful for his willingness to put himself out for me, believing that any other student in my program would have been thrilled for a professor so determined to avail himself to her.

  But this hemming and hawing, my half answers that were really nonanswers, became a refrain from me to him from there on out. I couldn’t bring myself to give him what he wanted, but I couldn’t bring myself to say no to him either. Not outright. My non-consent was murky—a kind of half-assed non-consent. He was a leading scholar in my field, and it’s also true he taught many of the courses required for me to move forward in my program. I could sense he would be very upset if I said no to him, and I didn’t want him to get angry. Saying no, literally uttering “Sorry, but I’m not going to,” also just seemed a bad idea. Like I was dismissing him, or even scolding him, which was not something a student did with a professor. I would need him to complete my studies, so I had to tread carefully.