But I felt I did not deserve her insight. Brison’s primary archive was Holocaust testimony, and with the Holocaust as referent, an experience such as mine becomes vanishingly insignificant, except—for me at least—inasmuch as the banality of its cruelty seems to bloom: This happened in a school? In a church school? In a cosseted New England boarding school? It’s not historic evil, it’s everyday evil: it’s wasteful, churlish, absurd.
There was nothing I could do about what had happened to me. I read as much as I could. I saved Sontag’s essays, I saved Brison’s paper. I did not know how to change my life because of what I found there.
Twice a year, St. Paul’s School asked me for money. There were invitations to receptions in Hong Kong and Hobe Sound. When the jewel-toned Alumni Horae arrived, thick and matte, I tossed it immediately. I moved cities, on average, every two years. When I interviewed after college to teach high school English, twenty-one years old and quivering, the department head who eventually hired me told me that I should find a way to make myself sound at least neutral about my own high school experience. I’d thought I had.
In addition to teaching, I tried being a reporter for public radio, but I hated coaxing people into sharing things they did not wish to say. I started work toward a doctorate in English and wrote a master’s thesis on metaphor in the rape testimonies of small children. I turned twenty-four, twenty-five. I hitched my wagon to the star of a lying man who looked good on television, and followed him to London. There I sat on the floor of an overheated charity office that had run out of chairs and wrote reports to tie together information coming in from the field, where staffers were using brand-new GPS technologies to identify illegally felled trees on the Thai-Cambodian border and illegally mined diamonds in Congo and illegal bribes to agents of U.S. oil companies in Niger.
But they couldn’t pay me, so I got a job with a British lord, writing his correspondence, and when I’d wobble down the stairs in the heels they’d requested I wear, summoned in sonorous tones to take a note, I’d find some of the dodgy corporate leaders I’d profiled in my charity reports waiting to go in: Kazakhs filling their three-piece suits like envelopes of cash, two or three matching monsters with fingers in their ears lingering in the vestibule. While the lying man was away, reporting on foreign wars, I met an English fighter pilot who shared his taxi in a downpour. He rang me up at the lord’s office and nipped over from Whitehall to take me for a drink—and then for an entire winter of chaste drinks, followed by supper and walks in the park, all under cover of the London night because of course he was already married. In this way I managed to pretend I was not alone, while not actually having to be in a relationship at all. No man touched me.
Everything glistened but nothing grew. I lived alone with my dangerous-looking Belgian shepherd and failed, year by year, to build a life. The plan was to drown myself in the Thames, though I left the door open for other actors to play the water’s part. It is an oversimplification to say this was all the fault of what happened at St. Paul’s. But the problem found its teeth there.
Not long before I turned thirty, I received a phone call from a strange number: a guy I had dated briefly, without intention or intimacy, a decade earlier, at the writers’ conference in upstate New York. He’d been living that summer in a rented house with five buddies and a lizard called Gandalf they kept alone in a room, lashing and hissing, at the top of the stairs. Once a day one of these college kids would crack the door and throw in a bag of frozen vegetables. I’d been working at a café, where I arrived before dawn to meet the baker’s van and her warm trays of pastry. Nights Ted was a valet parker. We made up stories about the people whose cars he drove. You could tell from the dash what lives they led. The key chain, the cupholder, the scents that remained. All of this ten years before. “Hi,” said Ted. “How are you? How have you been? Funny, yeah, gosh. Time!” Turns out he lived in Los Angeles now, where his sister the screenwriter had gone to a bar and heard from someone that I had herpes, and did he have to worry?
“Ted,” I said, in flames. “Are you serious?”
“Very.”
“Do you have herpes?”
“Uh, well, no,” he said.
“Are you sick?”
“No. I’m great, actually.”
“Then why are you calling me?”
“Because my sister said that a guy at the bar said you’d had it in high school, and I just didn’t remember what you and I did, and maybe if I still could have caught it—if I’d know by now—”
I would drown myself at dawn. As soon as I found someone to take my dog.
I said, “Ted, if you are unwell, I think you should call your doctor. Otherwise, I think you should leave me alone.”
“Oh,” he said. “Okay.”
“Thank you.”
There was a pause. I went to disconnect us. “I’m sorry,” he told me. “It’s just that I’m in love. I’ve met… the one. You know. And I don’t want her to get sick.”
It would be another year before the spring morning when I returned in light rain to my little flat and found a letter from the other woman my then-fiancé was engaged to. I remembered Budge’s Candace as I rang up the letter writer. She revealed that while I’d been wearing his diamond in our home in
