The Women's Room (76 page)

They laughed: such complexities after such strains!

She was packed and dressed by nine thirty and Mira and Ben drove her to Logan. Her plane left at eleven. She admitted that she had not slept, but Val did not look too bad after a sleepless night. It was the day after that she showed wear. So when she left, she still had some glow, some sheen.

When she returned, that was gone. Actually, her friends did not see her when she returned. She and Chris had taken a cab from the airport, and it was several days before Val called any of her friends. She had been gone only a few days – four, or five perhaps. Everyone went over to see her and Chris, but both of them acted very strangely. Chris would barely speak, and glared at the people she had kissed good-bye last fall. She sat in a corner of a chair looking sullen. Val was strained and brittle. She tried to make conversation, but it was obviously an effort. She did not encourage them to stay, and not knowing what to do, they left. They were concerned and talking among themselves. They decided to leave her alone for a few days, until she unwound, and then visit one at a time.

I saw Val around that time and what struck me were her eyes. I have seen eyes like that since: they were staring at me out of the head of a Polish Jew who had spent her young adulthood in a concentration camp. The causes hardly seem parallel, but perhaps they were not so dissimilar. For I heard the story of that time, later.

Chris had been on her way home from a peace demonstration in Chicago, and was in high spirits, thinking she had done something good, and having had a good time. After the demonstration, she and some friends and a teaching assistant at the university had gone out for a pizza and a couple of beers. Chris’s apartment was in a fairly safe neighborhood, and she walked home from the subway. Her legs were tired and she was wearing bad shoes – they had high wedges and thin straps around the ankles. She was a few doors from her apartment,
walking along the sidewalk, when a boy leaped out at her from between two parked cars. He had leaped, not stepped, and he stood directly in her path. She was instantly terrified and thought about her rotten shoes. There was no way she could run fast in them, and no way she could slip them off her feet. He asked her for a cigarette. She gave him one, and tried to pass coolly by him, but he grabbed her arm. ‘What do you want?’ she shouted. ‘Match,’ he said, wiggling the cigarette at her. ‘Let go,’ she said, but he didn’t. ‘I can’t get a match unless you let go.’ He let go of her arm, but moved his body so that again he stood directly in front of her. Behind her, she knew, were the two empty blocks back to the subway. It was only about nine thirty, but there were no people on the streets. She handed him the match-book, her mind whirring. The apartment buildings rose darkly around her. She did not want to scream. Perhaps he was just trying to frighten her – her scream might frighten him, turn him violent. People were killed every week on Chicago streets. She decided to play cool. She asked him to get out of her way, then tried to walk around him. He grabbed her and pulled her off the sidewalk; he had one hand over her mouth. He pushed her down in the street between the two parked cars and held his hand over her mouth. He leaned down toward her ear and said softly that in the last months he had killed three people along these very blocks, that if she screamed, he would kill her. She did not see a weapon, she did not know whether to believe him, but she was too terrified to challenge him. She nodded, and he let her mouth go.

He pulled her pants off and put his penis, which was already stiff, into her. He thrust hard and fast and came quickly. She lay there wide-eyed, unable to breathe. When he was finished, he lay on top of her.

‘Can I get up now?’ she asked, hearing the trembling in her own voice. He laughed. She was thinking hard. It was not unknown for rapists to kill their victims. He was not going to let her go easily. Chris searched her mind. She never once thought of the possibility of using physical force to fight him; it never entered her mind that there was any way to get away from him except by outwitting him. She tried to imagine what would make a person a rapist. She thought of all the excuses for crime she had already heard, and all those she could imagine.

‘I bet you’ve had a hard life,’ she said after a while.

The boy got off her then, and asked her for a cigarette. They sat there smoking, as he talked. He told her wild, disorganized things; he told her about his mother, who was violent, and the things she had done to him as a child. Chris clucked and murmured.

Suddenly there was a noise, and the boy threw her down again with his hand on her throat. Some people had come out of an apartment building and were standing on the sidewalk talking. Chris hoped they would see the cigarette smoke rising from the street. She did not dare to scream. She felt if she had tried, her voice would have frozen in her throat. The men got in a car, one parked a few cars down, and drove off. The boy kept her head down, though, and stuffed his penis in her mouth. ‘Do it,’ he ordered, holding her head down and moving up and down over her. She was choking, she thought she would swallow her tongue, but he kept going, and he came right in her mouth, and the salty stinging semen burned her throat. She got her head up when he was through and choked and spat out the semen. He smiled. She tried to stand up, but he grabbed her arm.

‘You’re not going anyplace.’

She sat down again. She felt totally defeated. She tried to gather her wits and get him talking again. If she made him think she was his friend … She talked sympathetically, and he opened up. He talked about school, his block, his knowledge of the neighborhood, of much of Chicago. He knew, he boasted, all the alleys and dead ends for miles around. She listened with high sensitivity. She felt it would be fatal to make a move before he was in the right frame of mind. The moment had to be perfect. Once, she moved her body a little, and he threw her down instantly and was on top of her again, with his stiffened penis in her. It was clear to her that the thing that turned him on was his own violence, or a sense of her helplessness.

They sat up again, and smoked. ‘Listen, I’m awfully tired. I’d like to go home,’ Chris said finally.

‘Why? It’s early. This here’s nice,’ he said.

‘Yes, but I’m tired. Look, let me go home now, and we can get together another night, Okay?’

He smiled at her incredulously. ‘Really? You mean it?’

She smiled back. Oh, the wily female of the species! ‘Sure.’

He grew excited. ‘Hey, gimme your name and address and I’ll give you mine, and I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?’

‘Okay,’ Chris swallowed. They exchanged papers. Chris was afraid to put down a false name, because he could see her true one standing there on her notebooks. And she was afraid to put down a false address: he would no doubt watch her enter her apartment. But she put down a false telephone number, somehow imagining that that would save her.
He let her get up then. She pulled her clothes together as well as she could, and stood there facing him for a moment. It was imperative, she thought, not to run.

‘Well, so long.’

‘Yeah. See ya, Chris.’

‘Yeah.’ She turned gently, and stepped up onto the sidewalk. ‘Bye,’ she said again. He stood watching her as she walked rigidly toward her building, fiddled with her key – her hands were shaking – all the while trying to hear over the beating of her heart if he was coming after her, if he was just then right beside her, if he would force his way in, throw the door open and her inside. But he did not. She got the door open, got inside it, pulled the bolt and ran toward the inner door. She unlocked that and got inside and slammed it and bolted it. She was too terrified to turn on the light; she was too terrified to look out, as if he had the power to destroy her even from the street. She could not think what to do. She ran to the phone and dialed her mother in Boston. But then as soon as she opened her mouth, all that would come out was screams and sobs.

After she spoke to Val, she carefully, methodically followed her instructions. She was still screaming and crying: it would not stop. She dialed the operator and asked for the police. Somehow she told them what had happened and where she was. They were there in a short time; she could see the flashing light of the police car reflected in her room, even without going to the window. They knocked at the door, and despite the trembling of her hands, she was able to let them in. Her mouth kept crying; the sobs were coming from her depths.

They got her story and the slip of paper with the boy’s name and address on it, and their eyebrows raised. They told her they would take her to the hospital. They treated her gently. She remembered she had to call her mother. When she hung up, she turned to them feeling as though she had severed all moorings and was now letting herself go into a frightful ocean. They took her to a hospital where she was put on a stretcher on wheels and left in a room alone. She was still crying. She hadn’t stopped. But her mind had begun to work again. People came in and began to look at her body. They examined her vagina; she had to put her legs up in stirrups. And all the while she was crying and feeling demolished, people getting at her, all interested in the same place, that was all she was, vulva, vagina, cunt, cunt, cunt, that was all, there was nothing else, that’s all there was in the world,
that’s all she had ever been in the world, cunt, cunt, cunt, that was all. They examined her and ignored her. They did not give her a sedative, or try to talk to her. She kept saying over and over in her mind, while her throat kept crying, I am, I am, I am, I am Christine Truax, I am a student, I study politics, I am, I am Christine Truax. I am a student, I study politics, incantationally, hypnotically, as they led her out, still ignoring her sobbing, and put her back in the police car.

Her hysteria had abated a little; she was still crying uncontrollably, but the sudden agonized screams came less often. Her head kept going. I am, I am Christine Truax, I go to school. They took her to the police station and sat her down. She could hear them; they were speaking gently to her. They wanted this kid, they said. They had him on three other charges, they wanted to nail him. She started suddenly, her eyes horrified. He had her name, her address, he knew where she lived, he’d seen the notebooks with University of Chicago printed on them, there was no way she could get away, he’d find her …

Her mother was on the telephone. ‘They want me to sign a statement,’ Chris said in a dead voice between sobs.

‘Don’t do it! Don’t press charges! Chris, I’m telling you!’

He has my name, he has my address, he knows where I go to school.

‘They want me to and I’m going to,’ she said, and hung up. She went back. They started again, urging, begging. She nodded. She signed. They relaxed. They asked her where she wanted to go and she just looked at them. She began to cry again. They were growing impatient. She could not think. She could not go home. He has my name, he has my address.

Behind her, phones rang, policemen sat at desks, policemen walked through the room. Name, address. What is your name? I am Christine Truax, I am a student. I was out at a restaurant with some friends and my teacher, Evelyn, and was walking home at about nine thirty in the evening …

‘Take me to Evelyn’s,’ she said.

18

When Val arrived, she took a bus from the airport and found a subway that would take her near Chris’s apartment. She walked from the subway, looking around. Was this where it happened? Or here? It was a pleasant street in the lovely May afternoon. There were trees and women with baby carriages out walking. Chris was sitting in the dim living room: a friend was with her, Lisa. She ran to her mother and embraced her hard and they stood together for a long time.

‘Well, you look okay,’ Val said, gazing at her face.

‘I am okay,’ Chris said smiling. ‘I went to Evelyn’s last night and she was great. She’s my teacher, she’s a graduate student in English, I have her for my intro course. She was so great, Mommy! She said I was the fifth girl she knew to be raped this year. This year! She stayed up all night with me. I was pretty hysterical. She fed me Scotch,’ Chris giggled, ‘and I actually drank it!’ Chris turned to Lisa. ‘And Lisa too. I called her from Evelyn’s and she came over. They were both great. Evelyn drew a bath for me and put in the nicest stuff, bubbly and perfumed, and then after, she sat me down and combed my hair for me, just kept combing and combing. And talking. And she made me a sandwich and tucked me into bed. It was like you were there,’ she said, and her voice broke, and she clutched her mother again.

‘We came over to pack up Chris’s things,’ Lisa said.

‘Yes.’ Val sat down and Chris hurried into the kitchen and came back with a cup of coffee for her mother.

As she told me this story, Val stopped here. ‘It was as if she knew then. As if we both knew. What we were going to do with this thing, how we were going to arrange it. I kept doing things for Chris and she kept doing things for me. But they were different things.’

Val asked Chris for the story, and interrupted her often, insisting on knowing every detail, stopping her whenever the details became imprecise. She listened carefully. It took a long time. Lisa left; she had an appointment. It was starting to get dusky outside, and Chris began to look around nervously.

‘Yes,’ Val said, rising. ‘Pack a little bag, honey, and we’ll go to a hotel.’

Chris was delighted with such a simple solution. Everything was all right, now that Mommy was here. Mommy would take care of her. She
locked the apartment and they walked out into the street, each carrying a small suitcase. Chris wound her arm through her mother’s. They walked down the street that way, Chris leaning toward her mother, her body pressed closely against Val’s. At the intersection of the main street, Val hailed a cab, and they went to a small hotel for women only. They had dinner in a restaurant only a couple of blocks away, and walked to it, Chris clutching her mother. Then they got into nightclothes, and Val took a bottle of Scotch from her suitcase and they sat down to talk. They had already, while dressing for dinner and eating, settled all the practical details. Because Chris was a student and was going home soon, she had been given an early date for court appearance. Val laid it out in quick, efficient strokes. They would go early tomorrow to pack up Chris’s apartment. They would stop at shops along the way to get packing boxes: the supermarkets would probably help them out. It would take two days to pack; they would ship what they could not carry. Val called shipping companies and got rates. It was all set. In three days Chris was to appear at court. Since they could not tell how long that would take, they would plan to leave on the day following. Val called the airline and made their reservations. They would stop at Chris’s bank on this day; take Evelyn out for dinner on that. Chris felt good. She kept hugging her mother. It was so good to have everything organized, to know where you were, to have it all neatly plotted, this day this and that day that and the next day court and the next day home … Chris began to feel safe.