Consent

by Donna Freitas

  But I wasn’t ready to scale those walls yet. I was learning to breathe again, learning to stand upright after being hunched over for so long. I decided I was allowed a few weeks of doing nothing, nothing other than taking in the experience of living my life without his constant interruptions. Without feeling like I was under siege. Without the fear that every time I turned a corner or opened a door he might be standing there. Without the dread of wondering what he would think of next to integrate himself further into my life and my family. Maybe someday soon I wouldn’t worry about leaving my classes or passing through the stairwells or walking from the parking lot into my building. These simple things were what I wanted. They were all I wanted.

  Only four people in the universe at this point knew what happened: Dan, the woman professor we told, me, and him. I wanted it to stay that way. I wanted to erase the story from my being and move on. I was repulsed by this man, but even more than this I repulsed myself by association. I felt I was disgusting, that other people would see that I was disgusting, too, if they knew. Christopher. Maybe even Hannah.

  Before I started wearing sweatpants and stopped showering before class, before I started trying to disappear, I’d stood out at my graduate program. I’d been fashionable Donna, in a place where no one else knew or likely cared about clothes and outfits. I stood out because of the way that I dressed, and because I inherited that big personality of my mother’s, embodied it wherever I went. Everyone knew me, my professors liked me, were kind to me, were excited that I was in their program, getting a PhD. I was told I was “a breath of fresh air,” and I liked being that fresh air, blowing through the department, making people smile and look up as I passed.

  But these things would also be the same ones that would cause people to blame me if they found out, to suspect me of being at fault. I was sure that if people knew the truth, I would never make anyone smile or laugh again. People would think I was terrible, that I’d lured an innocent, celibate professor with my charms, with those high-heeled boots and short skirts, that I’d enticed him to break his vows. I would never be able to hold my head up again or look people in the eye. I would rather quit my PhD program than allow this to get out. The shame was like a plastic bubble around me.

  If he had been a different professor, maybe I would have felt differently. If he had been handsome, if he had been taller, if he had not been a priest. Men who are not priests are at least expected to look at women, to flirt, to think about women in a sexual and romantic way, even if they aren’t supposed to look and think about their students that way. Maybe if other people found him handsome, if they saw him as a sexual person, too, then if they knew my secret they would look at me differently. As less disgusting, less reprehensible, less like a harlot. Perhaps they would have found his attention to me romantic. Perhaps I would have found it romantic.

  A friend of mine said recently that it sounded like puppy love. That even though he was a much older man, accomplished in his profession, it seemed like he was a twelve-year-old boy when it came to love and sex, that I was his first crush, that he had no idea how to handle his feelings for me or even what they meant. She said this after I’d told her about the kiss in the car, how he’d blurted out “I like you” and then run away.

  I think, on one level, she is right. He might have been older and accomplished, but because he’d chosen to become a priest when he was a young boy, he had grown into a man who was sexually stunted, a man who had never matured. He might have been an esteemed professor to all who knew him and read his work, but in fact what I had on my hands was a young teenager, barely out of middle school. I’d caught his eye and now he didn’t know what to do with all these powerful feelings coursing through him while he watched me out on the playground.

  But, of course, he wasn’t a teenage boy. A teenage boy I could have handled. He was a man with power and resources, resources that included access to all of my personal information, sway over my coursework, my PhD concentration, the ability to make or break my graduate-school experience and my future along with it. He was a monk and a priest in the Catholic Church, an important academic who enjoyed all the privileges that went with these roles.

  And this wasn’t a middle-school playground, this was my life.

  Whether it was puppy love, an innocent crush, or something far more sinister, he freely availed himself of his power and used it to influence me, to find me, to follow me, to harass me endlessly, even as I did my best to get away. He wielded his power like a club, and if there was any innocence to how he felt about me, that innocence was twisted and tainted, corrupted by the old man who embodied it.

  Months before, I’d started likening him to E.T. when people asked about him. I wanted people to see him as harmless, as meek, as a strange little alien figure, scurrying about, ugly, yes, but who ultimately couldn’t hurt a fly. But to me, by then, he was very much the grotesque, hunched-over monster, a kind of Gollum in my life, frightening and obsessed. I couldn’t see him as not-a-monster anymore, the way he went about the world in his flowing robes, his neck sticking up and out from them, his back curved and bent, head jutting forward. His voice was deceptively mild, even weak, but then he would use it to lash out when he was angry. He was a eunuch of sorts, a man who had mutilated himself when he took his vow of celibacy, who had self-castrated, unsexed himself, yet was still trying to act the man to a woman, even though he was only and could only ever be a half man.

  I tore open the card in my hand. It was maybe the fifth or sixth one I opened in the pile. The front of the card itself was innocuous—I don’t remember what was printed on it. But the inside I remember clearly.

  I recognized his handwriting immediately. It was tiny, and it filled both the left and the right sides of the card, thin line after thin line of prose that continued onto the back. It was angry, he was angry.

  How could I have cut things off between us? How could I do this to him, to us? He’d done nothing wrong, he’d never done anything remotely close to wrong. I must have misunderstood everything, all of his intentions. What was my problem? He’d only wanted to help me. How could I do such a thing to a friend like him? I had to change my mind, I absolutely had to change my mind and restore things to how they were before.

  Worse still, he wrote, how could I do such a thing to my mother?

  How could I ask him to cut off contact with her, of all people? Didn’t I know how much she needed him right now? Didn’t I realize how important priests were in her life, to her cancer survival, how important he was specifically? By cutting off their correspondence, by not allowing him to go to Rhode Island to meet her, I was going to be the cause of her suffering, her terrible, terrible suffering. I had to change my mind not only for his sake, and for our sake, but for my mother’s sake. I had to, I must. He refused to accept the alternative.

  I stood there in the dim light of that vacant office, holding the card, reading and shaking, legs shaking, arms and hands shaking. He’d taken that phone call like a breakup, like a relationship breakup, and now was urging me to reconsider, needed me to, was desperate for me to, and refused to accept the alternative. The emptiness around me no longer felt peaceful, but frightening. I was alone, but was I really? Was he lurking somewhere in the office right now? Was he waiting somewhere for me? Would he pop out from behind a door, a building, a tree, when I walked back across campus to my apartment in the dark, alone?

  In a way he was right. I had been wrong about everything.

  He hadn’t heard me on the phone that day. He still couldn’t hear me. He refused to hear me, wouldn’t hear me no matter what I said, not until I gave him his yes. I’d fooled myself into thinking otherwise, into thinking my life was returning to normal when really it was just business as usual, business that involved his inability to hear my nos no matter how I said them, not even when they were written out in a lengthy list and spoken forcefully and clearly, one by one, in a carefully orchestrated context.

  I didn’t tell anyone about the card. Not at first.r />
  Once again, I wasn’t ready. I didn’t want to acknowledge that the plan hadn’t worked. I didn’t want to acknowledge this because I couldn’t bear the thought that I wasn’t free. I couldn’t bear the thought that there was nothing that I, alone, could do to make him go away. I went home that night, stepping carefully, looking around me constantly, jumping at the slightest noise, the slightest blur out of the corner of my eye.

  Another card arrived a few days later, also unmarked. This time it came in the form of a business-sized envelope, again with no return address, and the font used to print my address was different from the one on the card. It didn’t occur to me that it was from him when I was ripping it open. By the time it was mid-January and my Christmas break was ending, I’d received three of these unmarked cards. I began to fear the mail, fear opening any and every piece with my name on the outside of it.

  It was then that I widened the circle a little more.

  I told Christopher, even though I didn’t tell him the whole story, only the vaguest contours of it. I didn’t want to discuss it any more than I absolutely had to. I told Hannah, too, but again, only the most essential details. Both were horrified that I’d kept this inside, that I’d been so afraid, so unwilling to tell anyone, even them. They trod gingerly around this issue, careful not to prod too much, as if they sensed I was a deer, frightened and ready to bolt. The only person to whom I’d told every last detail was Dan. Even when I shared the barest bones of what had gone on, the hatred I felt was so potent, too potent for me to recount more than a few spoken details. The hatred I felt was not for him, though. It was for myself.

  The same night I told Christopher, I also called my mother. “Have you heard from Father L. lately?” I tried to ask this as normally as possible. I didn’t want to raise any alarms.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “I got a letter from him the other day. He’s looking forward to his visit with us.”

  I got off the phone, my hands, everything, shaking. I was always shaking now. I was right back in that place I’d been for so long, shattered, desperate, bent, and broken. Once more, I met with Dan. It was time I did something official.

  Professional Interlude

  There’s an old bank vault I pass all the time near my apartment.

  It has the most magnificent door, thick and gleaming, the gears round and intricate. The bolts are fat, they look like brass, these mechanisms for keeping out would-be robbers a gorgeous feat of engineering. It reminds me of an intricate clock, like something designed for a fantasy movie full of magic. I can see the door through the dusty windows of the empty historic building that houses it. The owners are in the process of renovating its upper floors. The vault door is always open, so people can admire it while walking by, swung wide in front of its now-empty chambers.

  I have a door just like this in my brain.

  I have often thought this as I’ve studied that vault on my way home from Whole Foods, arms laden with groceries, or after leaving my friend Mary’s apartment, where I am often visiting.

  My brain built that door for me. My brain is the master craftsman. But my brain is not keeping out would-be robbers, it’s shutting him and everything to do with him inside that magnificent feat of human engineering, locking him away and hoping I’ll forget he’s still lurking in there, living in there, inside my head.

  The other day I was giving a talk about Title IX and consent at a university in the Pacific Northwest. The students sitting in the rows before me were engaged, their eyes on me. I could see the wheels turning in their minds, could sense that they were listening and cared about this topic.

  They seemed like nice people.

  During the course of the evening, I mentioned I’d written a book about Title IX and consent on campus that would be out in a few months. I explained that the central thesis was about how universities seem to have forgotten that they are universities, forgotten how to be universities, as evidenced by decades-long failures to address systemic sexual violence within their campus gates. I told the students how it made me sad that a federal law and the threat of losing government funding were what it took for most universities to finally acknowledge the problems of sexual harassment and violence within their communities, that it took the threat of national scandal to make universities care. But I told them, too, that I had hope, that this turn in attitude was an opportunity for a new beginning, a chance to find a way to change things.

  The entire evening as I spoke and then listened to students’ questions and comments, I thought about the fact that I’d had to make a Title IX complaint myself during graduate school.

  It was on the tip of my tongue:

  “I made a Title Nine complaint once. Back in the late nineties.”

  This line burned in my mouth, I could taste it, feel it tingling my vocal cords. I wanted to tell the students, to just blurt it out, confess it. It almost felt like lying not to mention it. For a solid hour and forty-five minutes while staring out at those earnest faces, I longed to tell them my secret.

  I didn’t.

  The event ended and I hadn’t done it, hadn’t found the nerve.

  The words hovered on my tongue, but I still didn’t know how to get them out of my mouth, I am not practiced enough with this statement to allow it to leave the shelter of my body. I wanted to find the strength to say it, with conviction, with pride, even: “I have a Title Nine complaint, people! I shall not be ashamed!”

  But the fear of what people would think, that people would think it inappropriate of me to have mentioned such a thing in public, to the public, during an academic lecture, was still greater than the impulse to speak it. That while standing at the podium in that beautiful theater full of students, I was once again two people, two women, one a scholar and researcher of Title IX, consent, and sex on campus, the other a girl who, scared and ashamed, made a Title IX complaint herself once and then tried her best to erase this fact from her being.

  A part of me wishes for a do-over, to go back and just say it this time.

  But the other part of me simply hopes that the next time I’ll find the courage to actually own it as mine.

  For the last twelve years, because of my research about sex on campus, I’ve spoken at nearly two hundred colleges and universities, in situations just like the one where my tongue was tied. Since 2011, Title IX has been a large part of that conversation, ever since the Obama administration forced colleges and universities to reckon with the relevance of this law to sexual violence and harassment on campus.

  For the longest time, I’ve held this law far from my own body. As if it has nothing to do with me and my personal history. As though it is and has been only a professional concern, never a personal one.

  Trauma is funny like that. It helps a person bury something so deeply they literally don’t remember it’s there—until they do. Until they are holding a document that proves this fact in their hands, reading it after twenty years have gone by, as I did myself, just recently.

  All these years, as I’ve traveled around the country to talk about my research, to raise the subject of Title IX in relation to it, I’d never thought about the fact that I, too, was forced to make a Title IX complaint when I was in graduate school. I’ve operated in the role of scholar and speaker and expert as though I didn’t even know that I, myself, had used this law to help when I needed it, to hold my school accountable, just like the other young women in college are doing in droves, lately. As a researcher and scholar, I know a lot about Title IX, more than most people, as much if not more than the Title IX coordinators who currently hold the responsibility of enforcing this law on their campuses. I’ve written a nonfiction book that has Title IX at its center—the book I mentioned to the students in that lecture. But it was only in the process of working on that book that I began to realize, began to remember, that I, too, might have made a Title IX complaint decades ago. I only knew for sure that indeed I had after I’d dug out the file from this time in my life, a file I’d buried under other bo
xes in my house.

  I know this must sound strange, even impossible. How could I possibly not know? How could Title IX be so central to my research and my academic identity for a decade, without my being aware that it’s also central to me, as a person, as a former student myself?

  It’s not that I didn’t know about my own history—I did know, somewhere in my brain—but it’s also true that I didn’t realize, because the part of my brain where I’ve stored this kind of knowledge functions differently than the rest of it. It seems to have its own timelines, its own will, and I am at its mercy. The knowledge has been lodged in a part of my mind that I’d sealed off. By the time I began my research about sex on campus, I was well into my life as a scholar, and my experience with this professor was far from my consciousness. I’d banished him and all the memories that went with him. I’d boarded them up, paved them over once, then again, then another time for good measure. I shut them behind that magnificent vault door and turned the wheel, locking them inside. Then I lived as though they never happened—or I’ve tried my best to do this.

  In the first few years after everything ended, I never spoke of this professor—and I mean never. I didn’t tell another soul, and only a few people close to me knew the whole story. Dan. Christopher. Hannah. Except for these friends and eventually the person I married, most people in my life had no clue this had happened, and I wanted to keep it that way.