Consent

by Donna Freitas

  “Come to bed,” Christopher said.

  I hesitated, then I changed the subject. “Do you and Dan have a game tomorrow night?”

  Only when he answered, only when he allowed the topic to turn to soccer, was I able to climb under the covers and join him.

  I began to concoct a story.

  A tall tale I would tell others to explain the ever-presence of this professor in my life. A story to excuse his behavior. To make it seem okay. I would not be caught off guard again, like I was that night with Christopher. My story would spill from me whenever people inquired about this man. Because they definitely began to inquire—people beyond my boyfriend.

  “Isn’t he wonderful, to be so invested in his students? In me?”

  I would say this, voice high-pitched, eyes wide and blinking, trying to act as though everything were fine. It was usually a friend or an RA who asked. On one occasion he showed up at the end of an RA meeting and waited by the guard desk just beyond the door to my apartment. One of the RAs noticed him as they headed out. Or sometimes one of my friends would wonder why a priest was calling on my home phone, asking to hang out with me. Or someone would get curious about the growing pile of unopened letters on the windowsill of my office. Who were they from? Why were there so many? Didn’t I ever open my mail?

  Despite my attempts to avoid talking about him, he became a regular source of making fun with Christopher, who continued to joke about this professor as the other boyfriend in my life, joking that would make me wince inside even though I always went along with it on the outside, laughing as hard as he did, working diligently to effect a casual, nonchalant demeanor every time Christopher said something about him. Eventually, when he found out the truth, he felt terrible for laughing, for all those remarks about my professor-boyfriend, for not knowing instinctively that something was terribly wrong and had been that way for a long time; for not realizing how much his joking had deepened my suffering and shame.

  “He’s a priest,” I learned to say at the outset, then would go on to use the title liberally, believing that conjuring this word immediately dispelled any untoward thoughts, that it would prevent people from wondering if something inappropriate was going on; as though this word, priest, would protect me the more I said it. “A priest who is also a professor. He treats his students as though they’re his children? I think he decides to help the ones he thinks have promising academic futures? Aren’t I lucky he picked me? That he chose me out of everyone else?”

  There was always a series of rhetorical questions in my story. I needed whomever I was speaking with to collude in my effort to cover up his behavior. I needed the person to affirm that yes, everything was okay, it was even more than okay, it was lucky. Just as in high school and my undergraduate years, my luck in finding wonderful teachers, professors, mentors, had continued. Continued and expanded. Whichever person had drawn this story from me held the subsequent job of helping smooth over the unease their question provoked; it was their turn to answer with nods and smiles, to participate in disarming this loaded situation on my behalf.

  “Donna, I got another letter from your professor,” my mother would inform me happily during one of my visits home to Rhode Island or over the phone.

  “Oh, how nice of him!” I would affirm, my excitement plain. I wanted my mother to continue to feel good about this correspondence, so I worked hard to ensure she knew I was okay with it. I think she truly believed the effort my professor made to be in touch with her was not only something he did out of his duty as a priest, but also because he saw her daughter as extra special, with a promising future as a professor. I helped her continue to believe this.

  I had a number of versions of the story I told people, but all of them contained certain features. The mention of my professor’s status as a Catholic priest. My describing his behavior as kindly and selfless and for my obvious benefit. My sincere gratitude for his attention and time, and for his investment in my future. My evident enthusiasm in tone and body language as I told the story.

  I would smile, I would laugh, I would gesture with my hands and arms, wave them around in a way that suggested dismissal of any cause for alarm or suspicion that this professor might be extending himself for any reason other than his selfless interest in my academic career and promise. I’ve always talked with my hands, and when I talked about him my hands were exaggerated, as though I could swat at the problem like it was a fly, smashing it dead with a good-natured expression on my face, everyone’s innocence still intact, his most of all. If he lost his innocence, I would lose mine, too. Of this I was certain.

  Why did I try so hard to protect him? Why did I work so hard to justify his behavior? Wasn’t I only prolonging my own suffering? Doesn’t my story, this effort at excusing his behavior, undermine my claims that something was wrong? Doesn’t it mark me as a liar?

  I know that, at least for a while, I made everyone outside of my own situation believe that all was well between me and my professor, that his behavior was entirely welcome. I colluded with my stalker’s behavior, as a way of preserving my own sanity. I did this because the potential cost of telling the truth was everything: my professional future, my reputation, their credibility, my general well-being. Lying to shield him was a form of self-preservation for me.

  There is a liminal space created between the powerful person and the person who is the target of unwanted attention, a liminal space between outright yes and outright no. That space is not a compromise—not a maybe-yes or maybe-no—but more of a hovering, a being caught and not knowing where else to go or how to move without making things much worse. So you stay put. You hold the person off as best you can without causing them to retaliate too terribly, and because you know they can retaliate if they want to, that they have the power to do this, that they could decide to ruin you for displeasing them or rejecting them too forcefully. On the outside you continue to exist as though nothing is wrong, you perpetuate everything as though it is normal. You maintain the status quo with the abuser and with everyone around the abuser. Yet inside you are at war, you are shrinking, you are wishing you could die rather than continue much longer as though everything were fine. You become exhausted with the responsibility of making a situation okay that is not at all okay.

  Part of the problem with any relationship that begins with a tremendous power differential is that the younger, less powerful party has everything to lose in this equation. That younger, less powerful party is in a dependent role so total that in the beginning, she likely doesn’t recognize exactly how dependent she is. She has no idea what she is getting herself into. She thinks she is more capable, more mature, more secure, in her own position than she actually is in reality—because we all think this when we are young, and don’t figure out until we are much older that we were in over our heads. Only after we are in the situation, only after the abuse and harassment start, do we realize how wrong our assessment was. Yet by then, it’s too late.

  For relationships like these to remain consensual depends entirely on the more powerful party to maintain them this way—and this is the problem. The older, more professionally accomplished person holds the reins. There is no getting around this. The younger, less powerful person is dependent on the willingness and ability of the other person to choose not to abuse his power. It is the older person’s job to see this imbalance of power from the outset, to see that the younger person is too callow and inexperienced to realize this for herself. Yet the older person might refuse to see his responsibility, might not care, might be entering the relationship exactly because the other person is naïve and he likes it that way. Or, he might be so unself-aware, so inflated with his own power, that he believes himself to be truly benign.

  I did want the attention from my professor that I got in the beginning. I wanted it and thought it was a good thing. That was my crime. But I was in way over my head before I realized my initial consent to his behavior could not be ungiven, that this man would continue to see how I was in the beg
inning and refuse to see how I soon became once my feelings about his behavior shifted. He was either emotionally and mentally incapable of seeing the shift, or he couldn’t bear it. He drowned it out, replaced it with his own ideas, which were hallucinations, and in the process he drowned out the real me that existed in front of him. I will never forget what it felt like to realize one day that it didn’t matter what I said or how many signals I sent, because this man simply could not see me. He’d erased the real me entirely. In place of me in reality, he substituted the me he wanted to see. He projected a Donna who didn’t exist, a young woman student who adored him and wanted all of his attention, who loved it, was desperate for it.

  And all throughout this time, I was trying to right the sinking ship I was on by acting like everything was all right. I really did not believe that coming forward was a possibility, so my only option was making things look okay. That fall, after my mother was diagnosed with cancer, this became my full-time job.

  We doom ourselves, of course, when we do such a thing. We doom ourselves in the eyes of everyone around us. We undermine ourselves and our ability to seek justice later on. We create the materials that will be used against us, that will become the proof that yes, we consented to all of what happened. I, myself, created the fiction that told everyone who asked me how wonderful, caring, and concerned my professor was on my behalf, the lie that explained how I welcomed his attention, was grateful for it, how it was a kindness. I willingly participated in the charade of it, created the materials to keep the charade going. I was their author.

  Accused harassers and assaulters will often justify whatever transpired by pointing to the existence of “friendly” correspondence and interactions, before, during, and after the alleged behavior. They will argue that the accusers visited their houses, sent them kind, even flattering emails, accepted invitations and professional opportunities proffered by them. Such evidence is offered to make the accuser appear the liar, to make the woman the one who has been taking advantage of him. But what else are women supposed to do when the powerful men in charge of our careers and futures behave in this way? When women are convinced that no one else will believe our accusations? When we, ourselves, can scarcely believe what happened or is continuing to happen?

  This can account for why there is often such a delayed reaction to harassment, to assault, a keeping it to oneself for days, months, even many, many years.

  At the heart of being harassed by a person with a great deal of power is secret-keeping. From your friends, from your family, but especially from yourself. This secret-keeping may appear to others as collusion with the behavior. But you collude with yourself by not naming what is really happening, because naming it requires you to face it and you simply cannot. It may look a lot like consent, but it isn’t. It’s the way you survive.

  I remember, clear as day, the moment I realized my story was a lie. That my story was a cover-up. I remember the exact spot where I was standing, just outside the inner door to my apartment. The door between my office and my living room was wide open at the time. Several people were gathered there with me, a few friends, Christopher and Hannah among them. We were about to go out somewhere.

  The phone rang before we left, and I picked it up. It was him.

  Everyone overheard my side of the conversation.

  They heard me say no to his latest invitation. They heard how many times I had to say no, because he kept pressuring me to say yes, kept trying to persuade me to change my answer from no to yes, or at least from no to maybe. Everyone overheard how difficult he made it for me to get off the phone, the way he tried to keep me on the line even though I kept telling him I had to go, that friends were waiting for me, that they were waiting right there that very moment, in my apartment, while I talked to him. They heard me avoid telling him where we were going, and they knew he must be asking about this, since I was floundering around, trying to answer him without answering him.

  Finally, I hung up. When I turned around to rejoin my friends so we could head out, they were staring at me, silent.

  “What was that all about?” Hannah asked, with a weird, hesitant tone.

  I put on my happiest smile and then, like so many times before, I launched into the story. But on this telling, unlike every other, I heard myself rehearsing it as if from far away, outside my own body. I could see my own face as I spoke those tired lines, the one about this man’s kindliness and his concern, the repetition of the word priest over and over. And in that moment I finally sensed something different as the words emerged from my mouth. They rang hollow, they were off. There was a sickly sweetness to them, and I could taste it on my tongue.

  Everything I was saying was a lie. But I was not lying for him, or even for them, I was lying for me. I was lying to myself, as a way of avoiding the truth. I wanted to avoid the truth so badly because the alternative was not an option. This I believed was still true. I had no options. And now my cover was gone. Reality lay there before me like an exposed wire, live and dangerous.

  And that was when I knew I’d lost everything, because I’d lost my own lie, too.

  14

  He wanted me to see Wit with him.

  It was playing in New York City. I was driving back and forth to Rhode Island, passing by on a regular basis. Obviously, he told me, I should meet up with him there so we could go to the theater together.

  Wit is a one-act play by Margaret Edson about a woman who is dying of ovarian cancer. Emma Thompson would eventually do a version of it that aired on HBO to great fanfare. It would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1999. By the time he wanted to see it with me it had already been heaped with critical acclaim and deemed a masterpiece. I knew all about it and not just because of him. Other people had mentioned this play to me, its existence, because of my mother, informed me that it was supposed to be wonderful, riveting, heart-wrenching.

  Plenty of people process tragedy and loss by reading books that have to do with these same topics, books about how to get through grief, that help a person face whatever it is they need to endure. There are people who steep themselves in the stuff of their tragedy, who prefer to swim in it for a while before emerging, cleansed and whole, onto the dry sand of the shore. I am not one of them. I received a number of well-meant gifts in the form of such books shortly after my mother was diagnosed and given a death sentence. I said thank you, and I put them somewhere and never looked at them again.

  I needed to keep walking on dry land to get through what my family was facing. I was tired from making the sixteen-hour round-trip every other week or sometimes every week to cook for my father and grandmother, to take care of my mother. I was witnessing her suffering close-up. In the month between her surgery and her first round of chemo, she’d lost fifty pounds. It was shocking.

  My mother had always been this big Italian lady, nourished on daily bowls of pasta with homemade sauces, on Italian fried chicken, which we loved in my house and which she and my grandmother cooked weekly. My mother would often joke that she didn’t know whose genes I had, since I certainly hadn’t gotten hers. My mother and grandmother were robust and round in all the places I was skinny and flat. Her voluptuous figure was part and parcel of her larger-than-life presence, the big, loud Italian personality she possessed to go along with everything else that was big and loud about her. She shopped at Lane Bryant to get the sizes she needed, but she resented this. She spent her entire life intermittently dieting, going through every fad out there for women, going on and off Weight Watchers, and eventually tuning in as Oprah’s weight went up and down alongside her own. For years, my mother did aerobics every morning at 6 a.m. with Joanie Greggains, a thin, tall, muscular blonde on television who was always jumping and bouncing, encouraging women to keep going, to not give up, barking her orders as I ate breakfast before school. But Richard Simmons is the dieting guru I remember most from childhood. My mother loved him, loved his television program, his advice. She watched him every day, diligently, doing her best to follow his h
ealth and exercise plan. But no matter what my mother did, she never lost weight, or if she did, it was negligible.

  Now she’d shed fifty pounds in a few weeks. I almost didn’t recognize her. Her face had grown sunken. It was as though someone had let all the air out of her body. None of her clothes fit. They hung off her frame like collapsed tents. On one of my visits home, the moment I was about to walk inside the house my mother flung open the door before I could grasp the knob.

  “I’m a size ten!” She wore a big smile on her gaunt face. “I bought new clothes!”

  This was the one and only benefit, according to my mother, of cancer. She finally lost the weight she’d dreamed of losing. She went from a size sixteen to a size ten practically overnight, and soon she’d be down to a size eight. When her clothes stopped fitting, her friends took her shopping. They’d gone on quite a spree. She was thrilled by her new size. She modeled her new outfits for me, and I oohed and aahed over her new figure.

  “Who knew that cancer was the best diet of all?” she told me, laughing.

  I remember feeling happy that my mother could find this sliver of joy in the middle of her tragedy, that she had friends who wanted to help her take advantage of this faintly silver lining. I remember being in awe of my mother’s ability to look on the bright side of things, to find that bright side even when everything seemed shrouded in an impenetrable darkness from where I sat. She needed that pleasure, however perverse the source of it might seem. When she had her rounds of chemo, the darkness would eclipse all the light, every glimmer of it.

  Ovarian cancer is a terrible, virulent cancer, and her doctors were treating it with an equally terrible chemo. There have been so many advances in cancer treatment over the last two decades, but this was the late nineties. My mother would go to the hospital for her treatment and be there the entire day. It would take about six hours of sitting there, her arm stuck with a needle. One of us would try to be with her for it, to keep her company. She took her medicine with a smile, always in good spirits, her positive attitude coursing through her along with that poison dripping from the bags the nurses would change and change again, with an occasional cup of ice cream they would bring her in between.