Lucky (21 page)

"Oh, Maria," I said, "I never meant to—"

"Stop. It's good. I need to face it."

"Have you told your mother?"

"She said she didn't want to hear it. She promised she would not tell my father as long as I never mentioned it again. She's not speaking to me."

I looked at all the get-well cards above her bed. She was a resident advisor and all the residents on the hall, as well as her friends, had sent cards. I was struck with what was painfully clear. By jumping but surviving, she was now completely dependent on her family to take care of her. On her father. "Have you told Tess?"

Her face lit up. "Tess has been wonderful."

"I know."

"Your poem said all the things I've been feeling inside for years. All the things I'm so afraid of feeling."

"Is that good?" I asked.

"We'll see," she said and smiled weakly.

Maria would recover from the fall and return to school. For a time she severed relations with her family.

But that day, we joked that she sure had commented on my poem by jumping, and that Tess would have to give her that. Then I talked. I talked because she wanted me to and because here, next to her, I could. I told her about the grand jury and the lineup and about Gail.

"You're so lucky," she said. "I'll never get to do any of that. I want you to go all the way."

We were still holding hands. Every moment in that room was precious to both of us.

I looked up eventually and noticed her father standing in the door. Maria couldn't see him. But she saw my eyes.

He did not leave or advance. He was waiting for me to get up and go. I felt this radiate from where he stood. He didn't know exactly what was going on between us, but there was something he seemed not to trust.

By November 16, the "known pubic hair sample from Gregory Madison" and the

"Negroid pubic hair recovered from pubic combings of Alice Sebold, May 1981" had been compared. The lab found that on seventeen points of microscopic comparison, the hairs had matched on all seventeen.

On November 18, Gail drafted an inter-office letter for the files. She posted it on the twenty-third.

There is no question this was a rape. Victim was a virgin and hymen was torn in two places. Lab reports show semen, and medicals show contusions and lacerations.

Identification is at issue. Rape was May 8, 1981 and victim gave detailed description to cops but no arrest made. She goes back to Pennsylvania May 9, 1981. When she returns to S.U. in the fall, she spots defendant on street, and he approaches her and says, "Hey, girl, don't I know you from somewhere?" She runs and calls cops. I had a line-up and she ID's wrong guy (who was a dead ringer for defendant and standing right next to him, and who defendant personally requested). Later she tells cops that she thought it could have been either the defendant or the other guy. Defendant's pubic hair was found to be consistent with one found in her pubic combings. There was a partial print on the weapon (knife) found at the scene, but it has insufficient ridge details to make a comparison (I had it sent to FBI for more testing). Lab advises they cannot determine blood type from semen because it is too tainted with her blood. Good luck. Victim is excellent witness.

I returned home to Pennsylvania for Thanksgiving. One day after coming back to Syracuse on Greyhound, there was a letter waiting for me at my dorm.

"Pursuant to your request," it read in part, "this is to advise you that the above-mentioned captioned defendant has been indicted by the grand jury."

I was thrilled. I stood in my single at Haven and shook with it. I called my mother and told her. I was moving forward. The trial seemed imminent. Any day now.

I was in class when Madison entered his plea on December 4, before Justice Walter T.

Gorman. On an eight-count-indictment, Madison pled not guilty. A pretrial hearing was scheduled for December 9. Paquette, representing Madison, admitted to one petit larceny conviction "back somewhere." The State didn't know enough to counter him, and Madison's juvenile record could not be considered. When Gorman asked Assistant DA Plochocki, who was representing the State because Gail was in another court, if he wanted to be heard on bail, Plochocki said, "Judge, I don't have the file." So bail was set at $5,000. Mistakenly, through Christmas and New Year's, I joyfully pictured my assailant in jail.

Before I went home for the Christmas holidays, I'd taken an incomplete in Italian 101, a
C-
in Classics, a
B
in Tess's survey course—my paper wasn't quite up to snuff—and two A's: one in Wolff's workshop, one in Gallagher's.

I saw Steve Carbonaro. He had given up Don Quixote and taken to keeping a bottle of Chivas Regal in his apartment near Penn. He scoured flea markets for old, threadbare Oriental rugs, wore a satin smoking jacket, smoked a pipe, and wrote sonnets for a new girlfriend whose name he loved—Juliet. Through his window, with the lights turned off in his own apartment, he watched two extroverted lovers who lived in an apartment across the way. I didn't like the taste of scotch and thought the pipe was stupid.

My sister was still a virgin at twenty-two. I spent time wishing she were less pristine. I know she spent time wishing she were less pristine too. But our motivations were different. I wanted her to fall—for that was how it was seen in our household—so I wouldn't be alone. She wanted to fall so that she would have more in common with most of her friends.

We lived unhappily on either side of the word. She was one, I wasn't one. At first my mother had joked about how the rape might put an end to her lectures on virginity, so now she would lecture me on chastity. But something in this didn't work. It would appear odd if my mother emphasized to my sister the old rules but made new ones up for me. I had moved, by being raped, to a category she found unaddressable.

So I did what I did with the hardest issues: I took the fall-back position of the Sebolds—a thorough analysis of the semantics involved. I looked up all the words and versions—

virgin, virginity, virginal, chaste, chastity.
When the definitions didn't provide me with what I wanted, I manipulated the language and redefined the words. The end result was that I claimed myself still a virgin. I had not lost my virginity, I said, it was taken from me. Therefore, I would decide when and what virginity was. I called what I still had to lose my "real virginity." Like my reasons for not sleeping with Steve or for returning to Syracuse, this seemed airtight to me.

It wasn't. A lot of what I figured out and subverted wasn't airtight in the least, but I couldn't admit to that then. I also created a painful reasoning for why it was better to have been raped as a virgin.

"I think it's better that I was raped as a virgin," I told people. "I don't have any sexual associations with it like other women do. It was pure violence. This way, when I do have normal sex, the difference between sex and violence will be very clear to me."

I wonder now who bought it.

Even with classes and court appearances, I had found time to nurse a crush. His name was Jamie Waller and he was a student in Wolff's workshop. He was older—twenty-six—and friends with another student in our class, Chris Davis. Chris was gay. I thought this marked Jamie—who was straight—as a highly evolved male. If he could be so openly comfortable in the company of a gay man, I reasoned, he might be able to find a rape victim okay.

I managed to do all the things love-struck girls do. I had Lila meet me after class so she could get a look at him. Back at the dorm we discussed how cute he was. Each time I saw him I would detail for her what he was wearing. He was a master of what I called shoddy prep. He wore rag-wool sweaters with egg stains on them, and his Brooks Brothers boxers often peeked out of his wide-wale cords. He lived off campus in an apartment and had a car. He went skiing on the weekends. He had what I wanted—a life apart. I mooned over him in private; in public I pretended I was tough.

I hated the way I looked. I thought I was fat and ugly and weird. But even if he could never find me physically attractive, he still liked a good story and he liked to get drunk. I could tell one and do the other.

Following Wolff's workshop, Chris, Jamie, and I would grab a few drinks, then Jamie would say, "Well, kids, I'm taking off. What are you two doing this weekend?" Chris and I never had good answers. We both felt lame. My weekends consisted of waiting for the grand jury and then what followed. Chris later admitted that his weekends had been committed to going to the gay bars in downtown Syracuse and trying, without success, to find a boyfriend. Chris and I both overate and drank too much coffee while reading good poetry. When we wrote a poem of our own that we didn't despise, we might call each other and read it aloud. We were lonely and hated ourselves. We kept each other laughing, bitterly, and waited for Jamie, fresh and back from a weekend at Stowe or Hunter Mountain, to fill our dismal lives.

There was the night that fall when I told the two of them about the rape. All three of us were drunk. It was after a reading or a workshop and we had gone to a bar on Marshall Street. It was a bar a bit nicer than most of the student bars, which were more like caverns.

I don't remember how it came out. It was in the day or two before the lineup and so it was all I was thinking about. Chris was stunned and the news had the effect of making him drunker. His brother, Ben, had been murdered two years before, though I didn't know this then. It was Jamie whom I cared about. Jamie I imagined myself falling in love with and marrying.

However he responded, it could not have fulfilled the rescue fantasy I had fabricated.

Nothing could. There was no rescue. The table was awkward for a second and then Jamie found the answer. He ordered another round of drinks.

Jamie drove home alone in his car to his off-campus apartment. Chris, who lived in the opposite direction, walked me home. I lay on the bed and the room spun. I didn't like how drinking felt but I liked how it released me. News slipped out and the world didn't explode and eventually I could count on passing out. I had a headache in the morning and I always threw up, but Jamie, and everyone, it seemed, liked me when I was drunk. The added bonus: I often didn't remember much.

After Christmas, we drank more frequently, often without Chris. Jamie told me he had come back to finish his diploma after nursing his father through a protracted terminal illness. He confided that he owned a women's clothing store in Utica, and had to go down often to look in on it. All this made him more glamorous, but what I really liked about Jamie was his no-bullshit factor. He ate and belched. He slept around. He'd lost his virginity way before I had—he was something like fourteen and she was older. "I never had a chance," he would say, take a sip of beer from a long-neck, or wine from a glass, and snort gleefully. He joked about how many women he'd had, and told stories about being caught with married women by their husbands.

I didn't feel comfortable hearing a lot of this. His promiscuity seemed inconceivable, but it also meant that he had seen and done it all. There were no surprises. In his eyes I would not be a freak. Jamie was not a nice boy. But having a nice boy think of me as "special"

was what I wanted least.

He listened patiently to what was going on in my life: about Gail, or the lineup, or my fear of going to trial. In the weeks that turned into months after the Christmas holiday, I lived in constant anticipation of the trial. Repeatedly it was pushed back. A pretrial hearing was set for January 22 and I went. It was canceled but I still had to show up, prep with the DA, Bill Mastine, and with Gail, who was now pregnant, and so handing most of the reins over to Mastine.

I saw in Jamie a recognition that the two of us were oddballs. He had gone through a lot with his father and believed that at nineteen, I was distinguished by the rape from most of my peers. But instead of making me feel my feelings, as Tricia from the Rape Crisis Center would want, he taught me how to drink. And I did.

Jamie and I talked about sex and I told a lie.

In the bar one night, Jamie asked me—it felt offhand—if I'd slept with anyone since the rape. I said no, but in that second, the expression on his face told me that was not the right answer. I rephrased, "No, don't be silly, of course I have."

"Yeesh," he responded, turning his beer glass in circles on the table, "I wouldn't have wanted to be that guy."

"What do you mean?"

"It's a pretty big responsibility. You'd be afraid of fucking up. Plus, who knows what could happen?"

I told him it hadn't been that bad. He asked me how many men I'd slept with. I made up a number. Three.

"That's a good amount. Just enough to know you're normal."

I agreed.

We continued to drink. I was alone now, I knew that. If I had told the truth he would have rejected me. The pressure I felt to "get it over with"—in my words to Lila—was overwhelming. I was afraid if I went too long, the fear involved in having sex would only increase. I didn't want to be a dried-up old woman, or become a nun, or live in the house of my parents and stare at the wall ceaselessly. These destinies were very real to me.

Just before Easter vacation, the night came.

Jamie and I went to a movie. Afterward, we got very drunk at the bar. "I've got to take a piss," he said, for not the first time that evening.

When he was in the men's room, I calculated. We had been leading up to this point for a while. He had asked the only question that would act as a restraint. I'd told a lie and it appeared I'd told it successfully. The next day he would take off for a ski weekend and I'd be alone with myself and with Lila for a few days.

He returned to the table. "If I get any drunker I can't drive home," he said. "Are you coming with me?"

I got up and we walked outside. It was snowing. The fresh bite of snowflakes pelted our booze-warmed skin. We stood and breathed in the cold air. Snowflakes gathered on the tips of Jamie's eyelashes and across the ridge of his ski cap.

We kissed. It was wet and sloppy, different from Steve, more like Madison. But I wanted this. I willed myself to want it. This is Jamie, I repeated in my head. This is Jamie.