“What’s up?”
“Just, hang on,” I said. I wasn’t sure. No desire appeared, no simple appetite. I did not dare look at his face to work this out together, to share something of myself with him, or ask for something of him in return. I had the odd urge to tell him about Jed Lane. I was secure in my seat on the card table, my feet hanging down, hands firmly pressing his torso. I needed time. I hooked my fingers on his belt and rested them there.
“Oh,” he said, like a child. “Oh.”
I looked up. His eyes were wide. This sudden tilt of power from him to me rushed at me like the beer, like the awareness that we were alone in the basement now. I realized he was frozen. He moved my hands to his buckle. I undid his belt. It was black leather, with a silver buckle, and I liked the way the strap slid free—it felt purposeful, like I was untacking a horse. I still did not have a plan. He rubbed his hands on my shoulders and brushed one palm over my hair, awkwardly, as if he’d never touched a girl before, which I knew could not be further from the truth. He was pawing me to keep me going. It irritated me. I wanted to stay out ahead of his desire, rather than respond. For once, I wanted to be completely in the lead, as unpredictable to others as others seemed to me. I shook my head to toss his hand off my hair, and then opened his jeans, found the slit of his boxer shorts, and took out his already erect penis.
I looked for the first time.
This?
This.
I could not believe this man, this college freshman, would consent to stand in front of me, exposed as he was, letting me hold him, behold him, as I was. How convinced must he have been of my intentions? How certain of his own pleasure? I thought of him with near condescension, the entitlement of another man in his underwear in my dark house throwing a long shadow. What was this force that led men to break down like this?
I rubbed him for a bit, like I was warming up the arm of a child who had played too long in the snow. He adjusted my hands and modified my stroke. I did this for a while. He made encouraging noises. The train was stalling, though, and I was beginning to feel embarrassed by what was going on. I wondered if Steph might leave without me in her cool little car. I wondered what time it was.
There existed retreat, or advance. The former seemed to me to invite self-consciousness and shame. The latter showed clarity, even mastery. My old self was on one side and my new self—the fifth former, the girl on the stairs—was on the other. I lowered my head to his penis and took the end of it in my mouth. The noises he made were shocking. I did not feel my body respond, and he did not try to move me. His hands went limp on my shoulders. Periodically he squeezed the rails of my collarbone and leaned his weight toward me. My hair screened my face and my bizarre act. That’s what it was to me: bizarre. I was taking the dimensions of some vector of power, poling to the bottom to see what was down there. It was surprisingly physical, salty, silly.
I didn’t anticipate his coming, and it wasn’t pleasant. I swallowed hard and hopped down off the card table. He was gazing at me with a lopsided smile, faintly confused, but quiet.
“Wow, Lacy,” he said. “Thanks.”
I was embarrassed for his sincerity. Angry that he thought that I had meant to do something for him, that this had been about him at all.
We climbed the stairs and found the others, and I gave nothing away. There was nothing to give. I folded up the experience like a receipt in my pocket—it might come in handy later, if I wanted to check the details, but the errand was done. I said nothing and switched to soda from beer. About an hour later, Steph and I left by the front door. My host, who had not been in the basement with us, hugged me goodbye. Just before I turned to head down the front walk, he patted my middle and said, “They’re still swimming in there.” It was some months before I realized what he’d meant.
Really, it would be so much easier to tell the story of what happened at St. Paul’s and not tell this.
In the early pages of Alice Sebold’s luminous and bold account of her rape while a student at Syracuse University, during which she was attacked by a stranger in a park at night and badly beaten, she writes wryly of the advantages she discovered when she arrived at the police station to have her testimony taken:
The cosmetics of rape are central to proving any case. So far, in appearance, I was two for two: I wore loose, unenticing clothes; I had clearly been beaten. Add this to my virginity, and you will begin to understand much of what matters inside the courtroom.
The title of Sebold’s memoir, Lucky, is taken from the line an officer spoke about how the last woman they’d found in the place where she was raped had been murdered and dismembered. It’s a bitter term—evidence of how the same words have different meanings to a victimized woman and a world inclined to deny trauma. Where the word pivots is where Alice Sebold goes unheard. They called her lucky, which foreclosed the possibility of their understanding the impact of what
