'People do things you wouldn't believe. And they aren't always animals.
What happened the last time you saw Wendy?'
'I've never told anyone about this. Why do I have to tell you?'
'You don't. But you want to.'
'Do I?' He sighed again. 'She was home from college. Everything was the way it had always been, but there was something about her that was different. I suppose she had already established a pattern of getting involved with older men.'
'Yes.'
'She came home late one night. She'd gone out alone. Perhaps she let someone pick her up, I don't know.' He closed his eyes and looked back at that evening. 'I was awake when she came home. I wasn't purposely waiting up for her.
My wife had gone to sleep early, and I had a book I wanted to read. Wendy came home around one or two in the morning. She'd been drinking. She wasn't reeling, but she was at least slightly drunk.
'I saw a side of her I had never seen before. She... she propositioned me.'
'Just like that?'
'She asked me if I wanted to fuck. She said... obscene things. Described acts she wanted to perform with me. She tried to grab me.'
'What did you do?'
'I slapped her.'
'I see.'
'I told her she was drunk. I told her to go upstairs and get to bed. I don't know if the slap sobered her, but a shadow passed over her face and she turned away without a word and climbed the stairs. I didn't know what to do. I thought perhaps I ought to go to her and tell her it was all right, that we would just forget about it. In the end I did nothing. I sat up for another hour or so, then went to bed myself.' He looked up. 'And in the morning we both pretended nothing had happened. Neither of us ever referred to the incident again.'
I drank what was in my glass. It all meshed now, every bit of it.
'The reason I didn't go to her... I was sickened by the way she acted.
Disgusted. But something in me was... excited.'
I nodded.
'I'm not sure I trusted myself to go to her room that night, Scudder.'
'Nothing would have happened.'
'How do you know that?'
'Everybody has mean little places inside himself. It's the ones who aren't aware of them who fly off the handle. You were able to see what was happening.
That made you capable of keeping a lid on it.'
'Maybe.'
After a while I said, 'I don't think you have much to blame yourself for. It seems to me that everything was already set in motion before you were in a position to do anything about it. It wasn't a one-sided thing when you responded physically to Wendy squirming around on your lap. She was behaving seductively, although I'm sure she didn't realize it at the time. It all fits together-competing with her mother, trying to find Daddy hiding inside every older man she found attractive. Lots of girls try to seduce professors, you know, and most professors learn to be very good at discouraging that sort of thing. Wendy had a pretty high success ratio. She was evidently very good at it.'
'It's funny.'
'What is?'
'Earlier you made her sound like a victim. Now she sounds like a villain.'
'Everybody's both.'
NEITHER of us had very much to say on the way out to the airport. He seemed more relaxed than before, but I had no way of knowing how much of that was just on the surface. If I'd done him any good, I'd done so less by what I had found out for him than by what I'd made him tell me. There were priests and psychiatrists who would have listened to him, and they probably would have done him more good than I did, but I'd been elected instead.
At one point I said, 'Whatever blame you decide to assign yourself, keep one thing in mind. Wendy was in the process of turning out all right. I don't know how long it would have taken her to find a cleaner way of making a living, but I doubt it would have been much more than a year.'
'You can't be certain of that.'
'I certainly can't prove it.'
'That makes it worse, doesn't it? It makes it more tragic.'
'It makes it more tragic. I don't know if that's better or worse.'
'What? Oh, I see. That's an interesting distinction.'
I went to the Allegheny desk. There was a flight to New York within the hour, and I checked in for it.
