I was so frightened and appalled that I wouldn’t talk to him for a month. He left flowers in front of my door, presents; he wrote letters. He tried so hard that, scared as I’d been, I was flattered. I agreed to meet him for coffee. He was the king of charming, sexy, and decorous behavior. And I’d missed him. I longed to reach across the table and touch his mouth.
We started again, but it finished in bed one night a week before I was to graduate. We had made love and it was good. Both of us were tired and we fell asleep immediately. I don’t know how much later it was, but I woke to his snoring. It was so loud it made me smile. I gave him a little poke in the arm but it did no good. I whispered, then spoke in a normal voice, then poked harder. Nothing worked. Still smiling, I reached over and gently squeezed his nose with two fingers. He breathed once; his throat choked and blocked. He jerked straight up wide awake. Grabbing my hand, he bent it back till I screamed.
“Don’t ever touch me when I’m sleeping,” he said, and slapped me full force across the face.
And then he beat me.
Your own bed is where you never need be afraid, if you’re lucky. Forget sex. Sleep and exhaustion, the pillow you know, your night light adjusted just so; this is where you can let your guard down completely. Leave it in a corner with the pile of still-warm clothes from today. The Dutch say there’s no sound more lovely than the tick of the clock in your own home. You in your own bed is even better. But when it goes wrong, when you’ve made the primal mistake of inviting the wrong person to join you in sex or sleep, oh, that is the worst nightmare: coming out of the black comfort of sleep in your own bed to terror.
I do not want to talk about it. Forgive me, but I cannot. He hit me till I bled and there were hanks of my hair on my bed, sticking to the front of his T-shirt. I screamed and screamed. My despicable neighbors, the ones I baby-sat for, did nothing for half an hour. Forty-five minutes? I don’t know. The police didn’t come until a vicious eternity had passed and I was beaten beyond hysteria. When they arrived, Matthew was on his knees in front of me, crying and apologizing. Please please please. I love you so much. Oh, my baby.
Two days later they released him. The first thing he did was return to my apartment. I was there because I had to hide my wrecked face at home. He opened the door with the key I’d given him on the anniversary of our first month together.
“Rose, honey, I’m home! Are you here?”
That is exactly what he called out. As soon as I heard his voice, I started screaming. He ran into the bedroom and caught me by the foot as I tried to climb out the window. This time the neighbors did act fast and called the police, but not fast enough.
In the few minutes it took for them to arrive, my lover had punched me in the throat, torn off my sweatpants, and, forcing me to the floor, started to rape me. Only now there was the shoe. New black high heels I had bought to wear to commencement. I’d been trying them on when he pulled his key from the lock and called my name. I didn’t plan to go to graduation, what with my face looking like bad meat, but they were new and I liked trying them on in the safety of my little bedroom.
There was the shoe on the floor. On my back, coughing from a punch, feeling him pump dry into me. His eyes were closed, his expression peaceful. I turned away. Barely able to breathe, I saw the shoe. My hand was already halfway there. Snatching it up, I swung as hard as I could at him—one two three. On the third blow, I felt no resistance when it struck—no hard bone, no bouncy skin. Soft, so soft. He froze, made a terrible strange sound, and flipped off me, roaring. The metal-tipped heel had gone directly into Matthew’s right eye, into the delicate jelly that was his perfect vision, and killed it.
God bless the rape victim. Stabbed soul who’s seen a face up too close to ever forget it, felt the groping hands, the heat of the breath, known no power and no hope. Who cannot go to the bathroom or welcome a lover there again without remembering, Once my body was not mine. Someone wrong took it and never gave it back. God bless you. I know what you know.
I called Arlen and, genuine friend that she was, she flew east immediately to be with me. Demanded I come back with her, come and sit in the sun and do nothing as long as I liked. She would take care of everything. She described life in Los Angeles as a mix between The Dating Game and the greatest meal you ever ate. I didn’t understand what she meant by that, but what was the alternative? Graduate, and when the two black eyes had healed again so I wouldn’t have to explain anything, go home and live? Everything I knew was finished; what I’d lived and trusted was either over or dead.
Arlen was between movies then and spent too much of her time ferrying me around, showing me the sights, and trying to perk me up. The irony was that, after two weeks in California, my spirits didn’t need lifting anymore. I was delighted to be there, eager to know as much about the place as I could and how it worked.
Through a friend of hers, I got a job as a publicist at a movie studio. It was interesting work, frantic and oddly fulfilling. I made friends, worked hard, started dating again.
At Arlen’s insistence, I continued living with her. We were entirely comfortable with each other and, as is often the case with people whose careers are meteoric, she liked being with someone who knew her from back when and loved her still.
She made Lazy Face and Mother of Pearl back to back. The critics dismissed her as one-dimensional and flavor of the year. They said it was easy to mistake her intensity for conviction. They said she was simply lucky; so far she’d worked only with great directors who were able to take her under their wing and show her what to do. Oh, yeah? To the dismay of her agent, Roland Jacobs, she agreed to make The Kingdom of Jones with an obscure English director. He thoroughly botched the film, but not her performance. When she came home from shooting on location in Austria, she told me she’d fallen in love with Vienna and, when she had enough money, was going to buy a house there.
One of the few things I could not understand about my best friend was her taste in men. While we lived together we talked endlessly about what made up Mr. Perfect. We were in almost total agreement about his qualities, but then she would become involved with either the strangest or most boring male. Rock stars with more tattoos than brains, actors or executives who looked in the mirror too much and had seizures if there wasn’t a telephone nearby. We double-dated a lot, and dinner conversation invariably revolved around new diets or tax shelters, new wonder(ful) drugs or personal gurus. I told her she could do much better than that and she agreed, but then another one would roll up to our door in a vintage Cobra and the de rigueur palomino haircut.
While she was filming in Austria, I began going out with her agent, Roland. He was quite a bit older, which made me hesitant at first when things between us went from fun to very nice to something-is-happening-here.
When Arlen returned and I told her what was going on, she hugged me and said she was jealous. I asked if she and Roland had ever gotten together, but she waved it away with a smile. “I wish! No, I made a pass at him a long time ago but in the nicest possible way he said I wasn’t his type. You’re a lucky girl.”
The only story I want to tell about the man I married has to do with the first time we made love. All my life I have had a very irregular period, so irregular that I always carry tampons in my purse. God knows, I would not have finally agreed to join Roland on the horizontal that night if I’d known it was going to arrive. But arrive it did and embarrassed the hell out of me. Normally that sort of thing didn’t bother me, even with a new lover. Love me, love my body and how it works. But come on; going to bed with anyone the first time is a fragile moment. Multiply that by a hundred when you’re going to bed for the first time since you were raped.