“Yeah, but I’m not some girl.” She spoke gently, not angrily; she felt very aware that she was older than he was. “It wasn’t a fantasy. I tried to fight him, and he punched me in the face. It was really bad.”
He put his hand on her forearm. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Sometimes I tell people really awful stuff like it’s a joke. I don’t know why. I’m trying not to do that anymore.”
He put his arms around her. “I’m sorry anything bad ever happened to you,” he said. His embrace was soft, but muscular underneath. She lay in it, feeling the immense relief she might feel on finally explaining herself to someone who for years had refused to hear her out. She felt upheld by his youth and strength. She felt this even though she knew Michael still didn’t quite grasp that she wasn’t talking about a fantasy. Even though, really, she hardly knew him at all.
He wished he could roll her up in a ball and hold her. When she’d said, “I’m trying not to do that anymore,” it had provoked a storm of monstrous pathos in him. It was the kind of pathos that felt so good he wanted to make it go on forever. It shocked him that someone had hit her, but following close upon the shock was an overwhelming tenderness that made the shock seem like an insignificant segue. He remembered fucking her while she was crying, her legs all the way open; it made him think of eating sweet vanilla pudding while he watched TV.
“Let’s go for our drive,” he said.
He drove them to the Marina and across the Golden Gate Bridge into Marin County. The fog was heavy and wet.
“Right after I moved here, I had a dream,” said Valerie. “I dreamed me and my high school boyfriend were lying on a beach in California. The sun was so bright and the sand was like a giant, breathing body. In the dream it was like, finally, I was getting to do the stuff that everybody else did—I was lying on the beach with my boyfriend!”
Distractedly he patted her leg. He was staring helplessly at the inside of his head, at images of Valerie, openmouthed and victimized, her face tear-stained and humiliated and very dear. He thought of the sounds she sometimes made when he was way inside her, deep sounds that came out ragged, like they’d been torn off. On a whim, he took a Mill Valley exit. Without the light from the freeway traffic, it was suddenly very dark.
“Why’re you going to Mill Valley?” asked Valerie.
“No reason. Just driving.”
“Oh. Anyway, when I woke up I thought at first I’d dreamed about an actual memory, that me and my boyfriend had gone to a beach. Then I realized there weren’t any beaches where we grew up; it was just a dream. I felt somehow cheated.”
He didn’t say anything. He was driving up a warren of narrow streets wound around a steep hill. The glimpses of people puttering about behind their windows was soothing to her.
“It probably sounds strange that I felt cheated,” she said. “I think it’s because since I left home so early, I didn’t really have boyfriends my own age. They were always a lot older, and I didn’t go on normal dates or to proms or anything.”
“That’s kind of sad,” he said.
“I don’t know. I thought proms seemed pretty horrible, actually.”
Maybe, he thought, he could bend her over the seat back and pull her pants down. Maybe she would make a lot of those noises. Maybe she would cry again. If she did, he would hold her against his chest and stroke her hair until she breathed gently and evenly. He turned abruptly down a dirt road. She thought it was a very long driveway at first, but then she saw there was no house at the end of it. “Michael,” she said, “what are you doing?”
He pulled over and stopped the car. He turned sideways in his seat and leaned against the car door.
He didn’t answer her. She remembered the way he had held her and said he was sorry anything bad had ever happened to her. In the dark, she couldn’t see his face. “Michael?” she said.
He didn’t answer her.
“Michael?”
She was suddenly so scared she couldn’t think. She felt her weakness like a burst of nausea; if he wanted to hurt her, there was nothing she could do about it. Indignation rose up against her helplessness, but it was like the voice of a child crying, “But you said! But you said!” over and over again. Her fear took on the flat urgency of a trance. She put her hand in her purse so that she could find the heavy chain necklace she had been meaning to take to the jewelers. She found it and wrapped it around her fist, then carefully withdrew her fist from the bag. He leaned forward. She turned to face him and retracted her fist. Her voice came out in a hoarse growl. “Don’t come near me,” she said.
His retreat was like a sudden frown. “Valerie?” he said. “What’s wrong?”
“Don’t come closer.”
“Valerie?” There was a short, vibrant silence. “Are you afraid of me?”
His puzzled voice cracked her trance. She relaxed her fist and put the chain back in her purse. “Start the car,” she said. “I want to go home.”
“Wait a minute—”
“Start the fucking car. I mean now.”
He muttered as he pulled out of the dirt road and negotiated the dainty lanes. It dawned on him that if he took his hands off the steering wheel they’d be shaking. “Valerie,” he said, “are you really mad at me?”
She didn’t answer. He glanced at her. Her profile had the bristling intensity of a trapped rodent. “Shit,” he said. “This is really bad.”
“You must be a moron,” she said flatly. “For three weeks I’ve been doing it with a moron.”
He smarted as though from a blow across the bridge of his nose. “How could you say that to me?” he said.
“I don’t want to talk. I just want to go home.”
The rest of the drive was an abstract of misery. When he pulled up in front of her apartment they sat in private misery for some moments. “I don’t think I can see you anymore,” said Valerie finally. “This was just too awful.”
“Too awful? What was too awful? Nothing happened! I was only playing, I wasn’t going to do anything if you didn’t want it.”
“You already did something I didn’t want.” She shoved open the car door and stepped out onto the pavement, then spun back on the first step. “What do you think? You spoiled, stupid, ignorant little shit! I tell you I don’t want to fuck, I tell you about being raped, and you set up a rape fantasy? What’s wrong with you!”
“I was just doing what we do all the time.”
“It’s not the same!” But his quiet, injured voice had interrupted her anger, and besides, what he said was true. She sat in the car and stared at the sidewalk. She abandoned her anger. “You were disrespecting me,” she said quietly. “For real.”
Her small voice and her words hinted at the wonderful pathos that had so gripped him. Again it made him want to roll her in a ball, to see her cry, to split her open, to comfort her. He tried to think of how he might explain this to her. He couldn’t. “It wasn’t disrespect,” he said. “It wasn’t.”
Her silence was like a tiny, pale feather falling a long distance. For a moment he thought she might put her head on his shoulder. If she did that, everything would be okay.
“The problem is, you’re a kid,” she said. “Everything’s like TV to you. You don’t really know anything.”
He looked out the window. His cheeks burned. “Valerie,” he said. “If you don’t say something nice to me, this is going to be really bad.”
“Something nice to you?”
“Please. Say something nice to me.”
His plaintive tone pierced her. Without the anger, her emotions were like blunt, blind, vying shapes, each blotting the others out before she could tell what they were. The fragmentation dazed her, almost hurt her.