It came out that he had something to do with campus security and was around the night I was raped. I felt awkward and exposed, but I liked him too.
It also made me mad. I couldn't get away from it. I began to wonder how many people knew, how far the news had spread and who had spread it. My rape had made the city paper but my name wasn't used-just "Syracuse coed." Yet I reasoned my age, and even the name of my dorm, could still make me one of fifty. Naively, perhaps, I hadn't known I would have to deal with this question every day: Who knew? Who didn't know?
But you can't control a story and mine was a good one. People, even naturally respectful ones, felt emboldened in the telling because the assumption was that I would never choose to return. The police had placed my case in the inactive file when I left town; my friends, save Mary Alice, had done the same. Magically I became story, not person, and story implies a kind of ownership by the storyteller.
I remember Al Tripodi because he saw me not merely as "the rape victim." It was something in his eyes-the way he placed no distance between the two of us. I developed a sensing mechanism, and it would register immediately. Does this person see me or rape? By the close of the year, I came to know the answer to that question, or so I thought. I got better at it, at least. Often, because it was too painful, I chose not to ask it. In these exchanges, where I shut off so I could order a coffee or ask another student for a pen, I learned to close a part of myself down. I never knew exactly how many people connected what had been in the paper or the rumors that had come out of Marion Dorm with me. I heard about myself sometimes. I was told my own story. "You lived in Marion?" they would ask. "Did you know that girl?" Sometimes I listened to see what they knew, how the game of Telephone had translated my life. Sometimes I looked right at them and said: "Yes, that girl was me."
In class, Tess Gallagher was keeping my pencil busy. I wrote down in my notebook that I should be writing "poems that mean." That to tackle the hardest things, to be ambitious, was what Gallagher expected of us. She was tough. We were to memorize and recite, because she had had to as a student, a poem a week. She made us read and understand forms, scan lines, had us write a villanelle and a sestina. By shaking us up, using a rigorous approach, she hoped to both encourage us to write poems that meant, and to dispel any belief that feigning despond was what created good poetry. It got so you knew, very quickly, what would get Gallagher riled. When Raphael, who had a pointed goatee and a waxed mustache, said he hadn't a poem to turn in because he was happy and he could only write when he was depressed, Gallagher's Cupid's-bow lips pursed, her preternaturally raised eyebrows raised farther, and she said, "Poetry is not an attitude. It is hard work."
I had not written anything about the rape except journal entries in the form of running letters to myself. I decided to write a poem.
It was awful. As I recall it now, it ran five pages and rape was only a muddled metaphor that I tried to contain inside a wordy albatross that purported to be about society and violence and the difference between television and reality. I knew it wasn't my best but I thought it showed me to be smart, to be able to write poems that meant but also had format (I divided it into four sections using Roman numerals!).
Gallagher was kind. I hadn't turned the poem in to be work-shopped, so we met in her office for a conference. Her office, like Tobias Wolff's across the hall, was small and crowded with books and reference materials, but whereas Wolff's looked like he hadn't quite settled in, Gallagher's seemed like she had been there for years. Her office was warm. She had tea in a mug on her desk. A colorful Chinese silk shawl was draped across the back of her chair, and that day her long, wavy hair was held back by sequined combs.
"Let's talk about this poem you've given me, Alice," she said.
And somehow I ended up telling her my story. And she listened. She was not bowled over, not shocked, not even scared of the burden this might make me as her student. She was not motherly or nurturing, though she was both those things in time. She was matter-of-fact, her head nodding in acknowledgment. She listened for the pain in my words, not to the narrative itself. She was intuiting what it meant to me, what was most important, what, in that confused mass of experience and yearning she heard in my voice, she could single out to give back.
"Have they caught this guy?" she asked after listening to me for some time.
"No."
"I have an idea, Alice," she said. "How about you start a poem with this line." And she wrote it down. If they caught you…
When I finished this poem I was shaking. I was in my room at Haven Hall. Despite its wobbles as a poem, its heavily Plath-influenced rhymes, or what Gallagher later called "overkill" in many places, it was the first time I'd addressed the rapist directly. I was speaking to him.
Gallagher loved it. "Now that's the ticket," she said to me. I had written an important poem, she told me, and she wanted it to be workshopped. This was a big step. This meant sitting in a room with fourteen strangers-one of them, as it happened, Al Tripodi-and basically telling them I had been raped. Buoyed by Gallagher, but still afraid, I agreed to do it. I worried over a title. Finally, I made up my mind: "Conviction."
I passed the poem out and then, as was standard practice, I read it aloud to my fellow students. I was, as I read it, hot. My skin blushed and I could feel the blood rush to my face, prickle along the tops of my ears and the ends of my fingers. I could feel the class around me. They were riveted. They were staring at me.
When I was done, Gallagher had me read it again. Before she did this, she told the class that she expected everyone to comment. I read it again, and this time it felt like torture, an instant replay of something that had been hard enough the first time. I still question why Gallagher was so insistent that I workshop "Conviction" and that each and every student-this was not standard-respond to it afterward. It was an important poem by her standards, in that it dealt with important material. Perhaps, by her actions, she meant to emphasize this not only to the class, but to me as well.
But the eyes of most of my peers had a hard time meeting mine.
"Who wants to start?" Gallagher asked. She was direct. By her example she was telling the class: This is what we do here.
Most of the students were shy. They buried their response in words like brave, or important, or bold. One or two were angry that they had to respond, felt the poem, combined with Gallagher's admonition that they react, was an act of aggression on her part and mine.