Consent

by Donna Freitas

I doubted everything about my decision to bring the subject up. Maybe it was my fault that things had grown awkward. Maybe it was inappropriate to talk about a boyfriend with a celibate Catholic priest. It’s not like I had much experience befriending priests from the parish where I’d grown up, not enough that I would tell them about my love life. Though it was also true that I’d enjoyed eating with the Jesuits at their on-campus residence with my fellow Georgetown students, and I could imagine bringing up the topic of a new boyfriend at their dinner table and having them quiz me jovially about him. But this had never actually happened, and it wouldn’t have occurred to me to tell a Jesuit about my boyfriend.

  I stared at my professor as he rambled on, fingers gripped around the handle of his mug, his overly sweet voice filling the abbey basement like too much sugar, the perpetual hunch in his shoulders curving him forward, always forward, always toward me, closer. I plastered a smile on my face. I stopped drinking my tea, eating the cookies. Eventually, I left the abbey and drove home.

  I had a secret.

  He was my secret.

  “Where were you all afternoon?” Christopher asked, later that night.

  He’d come over to my apartment to stay with me. I was busying myself with anything and everything I could get my hands on. Doing the dirty dishes, cleaning surfaces, arranging books on my shelves.

  “I went shopping,” I told him.

  “You didn’t get anything?”

  “No.”

  Christopher laughed—a good-natured, happy laugh. “That’s not like you.”

  I tried to laugh in reply. “Sure it is. I can go shopping and not buy anything!”

  Now I was lying to my boyfriend about my whereabouts. Some of the things my professor did I couldn’t hide. If someone went to look at the mail on my windowsill, for example, they would notice it was all from one person. The phone calls to my apartment would come at all hours, including when Christopher was over or when other friends were visiting. The invitations were largely invisible, unless I accepted them and went somewhere, which I was no longer doing—at least not much. But before this I had not actively hid what I was doing, where I was going. I had not told outright lies to people I cared about—I’d only told lies of omission.

  But my afternoon of tea and cookies with my professor felt sordid.

  Like I had done something wrong.

  Like I was the one who had crossed a line.

  So I didn’t tell Christopher where I’d been. I found that I couldn’t. I was too ashamed.

  The wall I’d been building between my professor and everything else in my life grew taller, wider, more opaque. My brain worked tirelessly at this construction job, like a contractor facing a deadline.

  “Are you hungry?” I asked him, opening the fridge.

  “Always,” Christopher said.

  It wasn’t long after my visit to the abbey that my professor sent me that dull yellow manila envelope with his article inside it, demanded that I read it, informed me that we would discuss it when he returned from his trip. Informed me that it was imperative we do this.

  Carrying the weight of two people is exhausting.

  Being two people is exhausting. Having two brains.

  That August, while he was away, I tried to pretend he didn’t exist. But the energy I would get from my new job at Georgetown, all the dynamic people I was meeting because of it, all the busy distractions of the work and the schedule, all the fun my boyfriend offered, that Christopher and Dan offered because they lived together, would drain away the moment I spied that manila envelope on my coffee table. I would have to start all over again, from scratch, erasing its existence, his existence, from my brain and the life I was living, or trying to live.

  I’ve tried to abolish my memories of him, especially the strongest ones, like the ones from the day I finally read that article. They are the most vivid of snapshots, the color overly saturated and bright, glaring images that are fire resistant, indestructible.

  The light was yellow, nearly orange at the edges, the humidity smudging the air.

  The coffee table was rectangular, long, nearly the length of the couch, the color of milky coffee, smooth with faint fake lines across it, to make it seem like real wood.

  The envelope was jagged in places, from having been through the mail. It was set on the top-left corner of the table, about three inches from the edge on two sides. It was facedown so I didn’t have to see my address in his handwriting, my name written by him, the address of his abbey, the place where I’d recently failed to fix things.

  The television was at an angle, in the corner by the wall of windows, just beyond the coffee table. I had the furniture set as close to those windows as I could get it, because I loved those windows, the sky beyond them, the warm breezes they invited, all that sunlight. I would sit on the couch, feet propped on the edge of the table, turned toward the windows and the television, angling myself away—always away—from the envelope.

  In hindsight, it would have been so easy to throw that envelope away without opening it. I’d done this already with so many other things he’d sent me. But he would know if I did it this time. He would find out that I had because he was so obsessed with this one particular thing, and I would get in trouble once it became clear it had gone into the garbage. I guess because the article inside was a confession of love, he needed me to read it, wanted to gauge my reaction to it, was desperate to know what I would say to him in response.

  I remember so clearly how my heart sank and sped, how I heard the blood rushing in my ears, how I had my bare feet propped on the edge of the coffee table, my back curved into the cushions on the couch, the article propped on my knees, my bare thighs, as I turned one page after the other. I remember so clearly the phone ringing later on, how loud it was in my apartment, how I dreaded answering it, and how, though it was not him as I’d feared, it was my father introducing a new form of dread into my life—into our lives.

  “Your mother has cancer.”

  But that pain—of facing the imminence of my mother’s death, the likelihood of it—was delayed because of the horror layered over it, numbing it. The article, its talk of love, of priests in love with women decades their junior, how lovely and wonderful such an occurrence was, how it was a gift from God, truly, to fulfill that love sexually, with kisses and embraces, roiled in my gut so strongly, so forcefully, that it took precedence over this other news my father had given me.

  It shames me to remember how my father’s call had produced a new energy in me, a new sense of purpose, a righteousness in my step, each of which would take me away, away, away from this professor and his stupid need for a discussion about his essay. By then I wore a cloak of shame everywhere I went—I still wear it, sometimes—invisible to the naked eye, but as evident to me as the high-heeled boots I clomped around in during the school year, the sound of their clack, clack, clack informing everyone around me of my approach.

  I made two calls after I hung up with my father.

  The first was to Christopher.

  “My mother has ovarian cancer. I need to go to Rhode Island. Like, right now.”

  “Give me thirty minutes,” Christopher said, the usual playfulness gone from his voice. “I’ll be right there.”

  The next was to him.

  I left a message at his abbey.

  “I won’t be around when you get back. I’m going home. My mother has ovarian cancer. She’s having surgery tomorrow. She might die,” I added, repeating my father’s words to me.

  I hung up.

  Within the span of five minutes I’d already practiced my new refrain twice.

  My mother has ovarian cancer. She might die.

  It was the grandfather of all excuses and I would pull it out, wield it in my defense against him, against the strain on my life because of him, so often in the coming months, so much it makes my entire body flush to remember.

  I began to hate myself.

  The worst part is that I thought—I really believed�
��that the fact of my mother’s cancer would be enough to end the issue, to close the conversation about the article for good with him, disarm his advances, because who advances on a young woman, vulnerable, grieving, watching cancer break her mother bit by bit? Who does a thing like that?

  He does. He did.

  Like I said at the very start, I thought I was saved. But I wasn’t saved, not at all. The worst was just beginning.

  Part Two

  10

  When I got home to Rhode Island it was dark. My mother was in the bedroom, wailing. My mother who never cried.

  The drive had been long and silent. Christopher and I couldn’t find much to say even over the eight hours we’d spent in the car. What could be said after receiving news of a possible death sentence for one’s mother the very next day?

  My father was sitting in the living room, collapsed into one of the squashy brown pleather chairs that had furnished our house for as long as I could remember. His elbows dug into the armrests, his hands covered his face as he listened to my mother sob.

  We barely said hello.

  “Go and see your mother” was all he said.

  I dreaded this, I was scared to confront her, to face the fact of her cancer. Her room was dark, my mother in a fetal position on the bed, a shadowy lump. When she heard me come in, she began saying, over and over, between wails, the same thing.

  “I thought I would see you get your PhD! I wanted to see you graduate and become a doctor!”

  I stood there listening, just inside the doorway, despairing about everything happening, about the fear and anguish so clear in my typically strong mother’s voice, my mother who was the rock in our family. It was unbearable to witness. I began to calculate in my mind what it would take for her to see me get my PhD. I wanted to give her this thing she kept crying about, I wanted to give it to her with everything in me.

  In all the horrors of this night, that the one thing my mother was mourning was the possibility of not seeing me get my PhD caught me off guard. She wasn’t wailing about seeing me get married or have children, but about watching me walk across a stage to receive my diploma, the moment I would become Professor Freitas. This touched my heart and broke it. It meant my mother had finally realized what made me tick, that she’d seen the thing I cherished most about myself and had chosen to cherish it, too. She wanted to share in my PhD because she knew it was the thing that would make me proudest of myself. It was the first time my mother revealed that she’d figured this thing out about her daughter, that she’d come to care as deeply about it as I did. This was the same woman who, like my father, had threatened to take me out of Georgetown a few years before because of my desire to study philosophy. She had come around completely. I was moved by this and I was also shattered.

  The chances of her seeing me do this one thing were minuscule. It would require a miracle, pretty much. I had at least four years remaining in graduate school. And then, only if things went flawlessly. My mother would have to survive fourth-stage ovarian cancer for me to give her this wish, and at the moment this seemed impossible.

  But I would do my best. I would try to make it happen. I would have to do everything perfectly, finish everything on time, even early, I would have to persuade my professors to help, and God would have to do his part and let my mother get through the next day. I didn’t have much faith in God, but my mother did, and more than God, I had faith in her. If she could survive this surgery, she would come around to be the rock she’d always been and fight this cancer like the formidable Italian lady she was.

  “Please stop saying that, Mom,” I told her when she wailed about my PhD again. I finally approached the bed, climbed onto it, and put my arms around her. “You never know what’s going to happen. That’s what you’ve always told me.”

  The day of my mother’s surgery was the longest day of my life, and probably the longest of my father’s, at least until that date. Her doctors made it crystal clear there was a good chance she wouldn’t survive, and that if she did, there was so much cancer the surgery might not do any good. My father and I left Christopher at the house, watching my confused grandmother, making sure she was taken care of, while we spent the day at the hospital. My grandmother was showing signs of Alzheimer’s by then, and my mother had been looking after her.

  The waiting room was narrow, sunlight flooding over our backs from the windows along the wall behind us. Friends stopped by to see us during the morning, then around lunch, then in the afternoon. They brought food and company. Mostly, though, my father and I sat in silence as the hours stretched on and on. The morning turned to afternoon turned to early evening, and we grew desperate for news, any little bit of it. I went in search of the nurses to see if they could tell me anything about my mother’s condition. My father and I began to fear the worst, that the surgery must be going poorly for it to take so much time. We were approaching twelve hours. The nurses were kind, they listened, they did their best to get information for us even though I began to ask for updates at fifteen-minute intervals.

  I no longer sat in the waiting-room chairs. I couldn’t sit at all. I paced the hospital corridors, passing the nurses’ station again and again. We’d been there since 4 a.m.

  Well after five o’clock in the evening, approaching six, my mother’s doctor came out to see us.

  “Your mother made it through surgery,” he told us.

  My father is a stoic man who, like my mother, never cries. He is a pillar of reserve. He wept like he’d been holding in all the tears of his life until that moment. He and I sat there, hugging each other, as the doctor gave us the less than good news. They’d gotten a lot of the cancer out, but there was plenty left. They couldn’t touch it because it was all over her diaphragm; they couldn’t risk perforating this important muscle, because she would die. Her prognosis was about six months, maybe a year if she was lucky. Ovarian cancer is a virulent form of cancer. It had metastasized, and her chances of survival were slim. But they would try to fight it with chemo and radiation. It would be a long road ahead for my mother. For all of us.

  All throughout the conversation I asked him “what if” questions—about the cancer, about making it disappear, about what would happen if it did disappear. He was patient, but at one point, after yet another of my inquiries, he stopped, took a deep breath, and told me something I already knew, that everyone knows, that I’d heard a million times, but this was the first time its meaning truly sank into my academic brain.

  “There is no cure for cancer,” the surgeon said. “Your mother will always have cancer. And even if we get it all out now, it will come back. Ovarian cancer always does.”

  My father and I waited another hour before we were allowed to see her, just for a few minutes because she was exhausted and needed rest. She was barely awake but moaned a little when she saw us there. Her mouth was completely dry, her skin cracked and nearly bleeding, her lips white. We fed her ice chips from a little Dixie cup one of the nurses gave to us.

  On the drive home, my father and I were a little more talkative, a little more hopeful. Her prognosis wasn’t good, but we knew that my mother, who often drove us crazy with her constant activity and ideas and projects, would surely drive her cancer crazy, too, perhaps sending it into hiding. My mother was larger than life, always laughing and cooking sauces and pastas and Italian cookies from recipes she refused to write down. She talked too loudly, so that you could hear her from far away, so that you always knew she was there. She had more energy than all of us put together and taught her nursery-school students with a vibrancy few of their own parents could muster. She was a force. She would gather the strength of a hurricane to tear through the cancer that remained in her body.

  By the time my father and I pulled into the garage and walked in the door of the house, we realized we were starving and decided to order pizza.

  Poor Christopher was sitting on the ugly pleather couch, watching television, looking relieved to see us. My grandmother was sitting in one of the n
earby chairs, half-asleep. He jumped up and took the two stairs that led into the kitchen. We updated him on my mother’s condition. I’m sure he could tell that, despite her prognosis, some hope had sprouted within my father and me. The mood was decidedly different from the oppressive despair that filled the house the previous night and that morning before we’d left for the hospital.

  “How did it go today?” we asked him, referring to my grandmother.

  “Well,” Christopher said, “she kept asking who I was, and if something was the matter with Concetta. I kept telling her that Concetta was at the hospital having surgery, but then she’d forget and ask again. That, and your grandmother vacuumed the house about fifteen times.”

  Yeah, she does that, we explained to him, chuckling. When my father picked up the phone to order the pizza, this jogged my boyfriend’s memory about something else.

  He turned to me. “Oh, your professor called. Father L.?”

  I remember how my insides tightened on hearing this, my empty stomach aching, my throat constricting. I remember the darkness from the night outside contrasting with the bright lights of the kitchen. I remember how Christopher was standing on one side of the wooden cutting-board island and I on the other. “He called me here?”

  Christopher nodded.

  Everything was collapsing. My lungs, the muscles in my legs. I gripped the edge of the island, leaned into it to hold myself up. “What did he want?”

  “He was concerned about your mother and wanted to know how the surgery went. He wanted me to tell you he’s back from his trip and needs to talk to you. He wants you to call him right away.”

  “Okay.” I turned to my father. “How long until the pizza’s ready?” I asked, and the conversation shifted to other things.

  For the second time, I was panicked, truly panicked.

  The first was when I had opened that manila envelope on my coffee table and read his article. It was only the day before, but it felt like a year ago, given all I’d gone through during the twenty-four hours since. But his phone call to my family’s house in Rhode Island seemed to indicate a new level of decision, an escalation of his attention, of his desperation. When I’d left him that message at his abbey, I’d truly believed my mother’s cancer and surgery would buy me a lot of time with him, a lot of relief. Who would interfere with someone dealing with such terrible news? Who would bother someone when they were with their family, trying to cope with this awful new reality? Who wouldn’t give that person space?