Afternoon of a Faun

by Afternoon of a Faun (retail) (epub)

  “She’s the only person who saw it. She told me it’d be a tough sell so I didn’t show it to anyone else. I’ve often wished I had. That’s one of the things I write about in my memoir by the way—my chronic lack of self-confidence.”

  “She didn’t tell you it came over as, you know . . .”

  “No! Nobody tells me anything, apparently. Except you.”

  “I’m sorry to be a bringer of bad tidings.”

  “Though here’s something even you probably don’t know, which is that I had a fling with Andrea’s husband. He was a junior minister under Blair and some photographer snapped us in his limousine. That’s why Andrea’s so keen to dish on me, no doubt.”

  “Huh.”

  “Not that it makes any difference. I’m sure Alec Rosedale would have got some other dirt into his grubby little mitts if this hadn’t shown up. Or rather twisted some other perfectly innocent thing to make it look like dirt. That’s what those people do, isn’t it?”

  “Lawyers?”

  She gave me an angry look.

  “Yes, lawyers.”

  Dusk had fallen outside. The rain had slowed. Yellow lights gleamed blurrily below us. Julia leaned against an empty bookcase.

  “So. Money. What else? You said Marco had a few different theories.”

  I shrugged. A slight weariness had fallen on me. “Does it matter what he thinks?”

  “It matters to me. Tell me.”

  “Well, he thought maybe you were punishing him for not offering you a serious relationship.”

  “Rubbish. Rubbish! What a fucking arrogant bastard!”

  “But actually then he changed his mind and said he thought it was more that he’d somehow ruined your relationship with Gerald.”

  “My god! You seriously believe that? As if I could possibly have any regrets about Gerald Woolley. Other than letting him cling to me as long as he did. Your mother thought he was an utter drip. She’s the one who persuaded me to ditch him for that American of hers.”

  “The one you—”

  “Got jilted by. Yes!”

  She gave a harsh laugh.

  “That’s someone I do regret losing by the way. Ralph ­Pommeroy. Just so you don’t think I’ve become some man-hating harpie. I loved that man with all my heart.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  She switched on a bright overhead light and sat back down in the chair facing me, clamping her temples between a finger and thumb.

  “What else? What other theories?”

  “Something about repetition, imitation,” I said. “Doing it just because so many other women are doing it.”

  “Accusing men of rape?”

  I nodded.

  She considered this for a moment, then tilted her head back.

  “What . . . exactly . . . is wrong with that?”

  “I guess he thought it made the accusation less, you know . . .”

  “Original?”

  I smiled, and she gave a faint smile back, just a flicker really, but it made me feel she hadn’t altogether merged me into Marco, for which I was grateful.

  “Raping people isn’t exactly original either, is it?” she said.

  “True. But listen, Julia . . . I want to ask you something.”

  “Yes?”

  “I mean—tell me if I’m out of line, but . . .” I broke off, unsure how to put it.

  “Go on.”

  She was gazing at me intently from the flimsy wicker chair. She seemed exposed at that moment, unguarded—the bareness of the little flat expressive, suddenly, of an acute and anxious vulnerability.

  “Well . . . What actually happened in that hotel room?”

  8

  THE QUESTION hung in the silence for an uncomfortably long time. I began to wonder whether, in my growing fascination with the story, I’d allowed myself to lose sight of a certain basic decorum or tact. But when she finally spoke, there was no particular rancor or even discomfort in her voice.

  “I’ve told you,” she said mildly. “What happened is that Marco raped me. What else matters?”

  “I suppose I’m trying to understand how it came about. I realize it’s not my business . . .”

  She gave a little movement of her head and the gesture seemed to express a tacit permission to probe. At any rate, I decided to take it as that, and she didn’t seem to object.

  “You’d gone up to his room with him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Voluntarily . . . ?”

  “Yes. And yes, I lay down on his bed voluntarily, and yes, we started kissing and touching and all the rest of it, voluntarily.”

  “And then . . . ?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did something happen, to change your mind?”

  “No. I just realized I didn’t want to screw him.”

  “Do you remember the reason? Not that there, you know . . .”

  “Not that there has to be a reason. Quite. But there was a reason, and I do remember it.”

  “Was it Gerald?”

  “No. Well, yes, partly. That’s certainly what I told Marco.”

  “He . . . disputes that, by the way.”

  I began to explain that it was the timing he disputed, not the remark itself, but she silenced me with a dismissive wave.

  “Who cares what he says? Anyway there was something else, too.”

  “Yes . . . ?”

  She turned, facing the black window. I caught her eyes in her reflection.

  “It was because it wasn’t me he was screwing, or trying to screw. It was someone else. And I didn’t like that.”

  “You mean . . . in his mind?”

  She nodded, turning back to me.

  “I assume you know why we were in Belfast?”

  “For that IRA film, right?”

  “That’s right. Well, we’d spent the day in a flat with a view onto an alley where we’d been told by some disgruntled ex-OIRA man that the Provos were going to tar and feather a girl who’d been out with a British soldier.”

  She paused, seeming to lose herself in the memory. Another long silence passed. She’d drunk enough, it appeared, for her sense of time to have become somewhat elastic.

  “Marco told me,” I prompted her. “He said it had been grueling.”

  “Did he?” A glimmer of sarcasm showed in her eyes. “Well, it certainly was for the girl. They dragged her screaming from a car, stripped her to her underwear and tied her to a lamppost with her hands behind her back. She already had black eyes and bruises all over her face but she was struggling as hard as she could the whole time. Two enormous women shaved her head and then a man who’d been warming a pot of tar with a blowtorch poured it over her and someone else dumped a sack of chicken feathers over her. They hung a sign around her neck saying SOLDIER DOLL and drove off. It was the most horrifying thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I was sick with guilt, too, for not intervening. Not that there was anything we could have done, from where we were. When we got back to the hotel that afternoon I had to have about six whiskies just to begin to calm down. I was drunk by then, obviously, but I can tell you sex was the last thing on my mind. Still, I’ll admit that when Marco started in with the little caresses and kisses it certainly gave me something new to think about.”

  “He said it wasn’t the first time you and he . . .”

  She gave me a sharp look.

  “Of course it was the first time! It could only have happened because I was drunk, and that was definitely the only time I got drunk with him. He wasn’t the kind of boy you’d take that kind of chance with unless you were certain you wanted to end up in bed with him. Believe me!”

  “So you’d never had any physical contact with him before?”

  “No. It was the first time—and the last, needless to say.”

  She seemed to have accepted me, by now, as a kind of designated interrogator, as if I’d been appointed by some impartial agency to adjudicate the matter. I pushed forward, armored in the sanctioned iciness of the
role:

  “Actually, Marco thought it might not have been the last time either.”

  “What? Rubbish! Utter rubbish! How could anyone possibly believe that?”

  “He wasn’t sure. He just thought there might have been other occasions.”

  “Well, he’s sorely mistaken.”

  “You did go on working with him, though?”

  “Yes. I wasn’t going to give up my career. Why should I?”

  “And you never said anything about it at the time? Never reported it? Not that not reporting it means nothing happened, obviously . . .”

  She gave a grim laugh.

  “You have been well trained, haven’t you? You men all act like you’ve come through some sort of Maoist indoctrination program nowadays. I bet Marco’s the same. I bet he doesn’t go around raping people these days. Assuming he even could, any more.”

  “But just so I have it right, you didn’t tell anyone at the time . . .”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake. As if anyone would have taken any notice if I had. There was no such thing as rape in those days, once you’d got into bed with a man. I didn’t even think of it as rape myself, at the time. The word didn’t enter my head.”

  Her candor startled me. I could hear Marco laughing mirthlessly at the admission, as if she’d just self-evidently wrecked her own credibility. See what I mean? I imagined him saying, his voice dripping with cynicism.

  “But so he was thinking of someone else . . .”

  “He was thinking of the girl.”

  It took me a moment to catch on.

  “The one they tarred and feathered?”

  “Yes. There was something he did—holding my wrists together behind my back, very tightly—that made me realize. It turned him on. Especially when I struggled.”

  I thought, naturally, of Marco’s affair with his tutor.

  “You’re saying he was getting off on some kind of S&M thing?”

  “Oh, I don’t care about that. It’s that he wasn’t thinking of me, wasn’t seeing me even. I didn’t like that. It offended me.”

  “So you tried to stop him?”

  “Yes! I said I was sorry but I didn’t want to go on. I told him about Gerald. I couldn’t have explained the other thing, even if I’d wanted to. I didn’t understand it myself until recently. I probably didn’t even realize I was offended. Not that it would have made any difference. Telling him about Gerald certainly didn’t. If anything, it just spurred him on. Anyway it was all over very quickly, as they say. Very quickly.”

  I nodded, absorbing the casual pragmatism she seemed to be admitting to. Apparently she saw nothing odd in adapting her emotions to fit her evolving perspective on the event.

  “But you stayed with him, all the same,” I said.

  “What?”

  “You spent the night with him. That’s what he says. You were there the next morning when the cameraman came to wake him for the flight home.”

  “Oh. Well, yes, that’s true. But what of it? I was drunk and I passed out. But I’d have stayed anyway, probably. I’m not going to pretend I was conflicted about that, at the time.”

  “But I mean, if he’d just forcibly . . . you know . . . why would you stay in his bed?”

  “I told you. I couldn’t articulate what I’d experienced, at the time. I didn’t tell myself: I’ve been raped. I knew something I didn’t want to happen had happened, but I didn’t know how to think about it. It wasn’t as if I was lying bleeding in a ditch, or tied up in a dungeon. It’s taken me a long time to see things for what they were. That’s not unusual, by the way, and I’m not going to apologize for it.”

  “No, of course.”

  She shook out the last drops of wine into her glass and went to open another bottle. I got up to pee. In the cramped bathroom a leaky tap hissed into a basin. There was a meager clutter of jars and half-squeezed tubes. I wondered what it must be like for Julia to live in a place like this. It wasn’t a dump, exactly, but it had a peculiar canceled atmosphere, as if it had been deliberately chosen for its lack of any qualities that might suggest the idea of a home.

  I realized, washing my hands on a cracked slip of soap, that I’d decided she was telling the truth. Or at least telling me truthfully what she remembered. There was always the possibility of false memory, I supposed, though I’d never really accepted that as a concept. I was temperamentally opposed to it. I don’t share the contemporary relish for questioning the reliability of the human mind as a processor of reality. At any rate, taking stock of things as I stood at the mirror with its reflection of the door on which a worn gray towel hung like an abstracted grimace, I noted the absence of doubt inside me. I’d been planning to press Julia on the question of whether that fateful evening was the first or last time she’d been to bed with Marco, but it seemed a minor quibble suddenly—not worth pursuing. And as if freed from some internal prohibition, my mind went to that other room, the hotel room in Belfast. I seemed to see it with stark clarity: a functional seventies box with a bed on which Marco with a drunken grin was ignoring Julia’s change of heart, her ineffectual attempt to push him off; forcing himself onto her, into her, the act compressing its own colossal implications to a blackness too dense for either of them to comprehend as they rolled apart. It was like one of those vitrines we’d been shown at that talk at the Irving Foundation: one figure sated, indifferent; the other staring out at the washbasin in the corner, the fly-specked light, the row of boots lined up against the wall, wondering what had just happened.

  “So . . . What are you going to do now?” I asked, returning to the living room.

  Julia was once again seated on the chair facing mine. A new bottle of wine stood on the table between us. She’d refilled both our glasses. I’d have liked to eat something before drinking any more, but food didn’t seem to be on the horizon.

  “About Marco?”

  “Yes.”

  “What I’ve been trying to do all along.”

  “You mean . . . ?”

  “I’m going to publish my book.”

  “You have a publisher?” I asked, surprised.

  “No, but I’m going to find one. Renata Shenker isn’t the only fish in the sea.”

  “Have you . . . sent it out?”

  “Not yet. I thought I might try to get an agent this time. Perhaps you can suggest someone?”

  I stammered something about being out of touch with the English literary scene. “I could probably find you some names though . . .”

  She must have noticed my lack of conviction:

  “Are you against me publishing it?”

  “No, no. Of course not. But . . . I mean, I do wonder if you’ve . . . if you’re aware of the impact it’ll have . . .”

  “On?”

  “Marco.”

  Her eyes flashed wide.

  “Why should I care what impact it has on him?”

  “No reason. Just that . . . I mean . . .” I looked for a neutral tone. “It will destroy his life.”

  “Well, that’s just too bad isn’t it?”

  “Do you want to destroy him?”

  “No. I don’t actually care what happens to him, to be honest. But I have a right to tell my own bloody story! Don’t I?”

  “Of course. But he will be destroyed. As long as you realize that. He’ll be finished as a journalist, a filmmaker. His personal life will be wrecked. He’ll—” I could hear my voice rising. I appeared to have shifted from the role of impartial magistrate, now that I’d accepted her version of events, into something more like Marco’s advocate. I was surprised at this, though the surprise didn’t change anything. I’d drunk enough to feel the gap between my acting self and my observing self. “His life will be over, for all intents and purposes. I’m not saying that’s necessarily unfair. Maybe it’s exactly what he deserves. I’m just . . . pointing it out. I mean, since you say you don’t actively want to destroy him . . .”

  The expression on Julia’s face seemed to suggest she hadn’t consider
ed this aspect of the situation until now. I continued, cautiously encouraged.

  “He’s very open to self-criticism, you know. He told me he regretted a lot of his own past behavior with women. He felt bad that he hadn’t been more considerate, empathetic. We had one conversation where he spoke very frankly about growing older and not being so governed by his libido. He said he was a lot happier. He admitted he used to feel compelled to make a conquest of every woman he encountered, but now that’s gone, and he says it’s actually liberating.”

  I repeated, as accurately I could, Marco’s spiel about the autumnal pleasures of life that he’d begun to appreciate: puttering off to the gym or bakery, savoring the aromas of the local restaurants and vegetation. She listened, clutching her glass of wine without lifting it.

  “I’m telling you this in case you think he’s still a danger to other women. I mean, if that’s part of the reason why you feel it’s important to publish your—”

  “It has nothing to do with it,” Julia burst out. “I don’t give a damn what he does to other women. He can rape his way across the entire fucking planet as far as I’m concerned. There’s one reason and one reason alone why I intend to tell my story, which is that he raped me. It happened. And I’m not going to be made to shut up about it.”

  Evidently I’d misconstrued her attentive expression. I felt suddenly out of my depth, bewildered by her seemingly implacable tenacity, but also by my own apparent compulsion to defend Marco, or at least plead for mercy on his behalf.

  “He has a gun in his drawer,” I heard myself say. “He showed me. He said he’d use it.”

  “On me?” She looked momentarily fascinated.

  “On himself. If you publish.”

  “Oh, for god’s sake.”

  “I’m just trying to convey how desperate he is.”

  “I told you. That’s not my concern.”

  “He has a daughter—”

  She glared furiously at me.

  “I don’t care. I don’t care.” She slammed down her glass of wine, which miraculously didn’t snap. “Why should I care? Would you care, if you were the one who’d been raped?”

  I looked away, thrown off my guard.

  “Would you give a fuck whether or not your rapist had a daughter?”