We lived unhappily on either side of the word. She was one, I wasn't one. At first my mother had joked about how the rape might put an end to her lectures on virginity, so now she would lecture me on chastity. But something in this didn't work. It would appear odd if my mother emphasized to my sister the old rules but made new ones up for me. I had moved, by being raped, to a category she found unaddressable.
So I did what I did with the hardest issues: I took the fall-back position of the Sebolds-a thorough analysis of the semantics involved. I looked up all the words and versions-virgin, virginity, virginal, chaste, chastity. When the definitions didn't provide me with what I wanted, I manipulated the language and redefined the words. The end result was that I claimed myself still a virgin. I had not lost my virginity, I said, it was taken from me. Therefore, I would decide when and what virginity was. I called what I still had to lose my "real virginity." Like my reasons for not sleeping with Steve or for returning to Syracuse, this seemed airtight to me.
It wasn't. A lot of what I figured out and subverted wasn't airtight in the least, but I couldn't admit to that then. I also created a painful reasoning for why it was better to have been raped as a virgin.
"I think it's better that I was raped as a virgin," I told people. "I don't have any sexual associations with it like other women do. It was pure violence. This way, when I do have normal sex, the difference between sex and violence will be very clear to me."
I wonder now who bought it.
Even with classes and court appearances, I had found time to nurse a crush. His name was Jamie Waller and he was a student in Wolff's workshop. He was older-twenty-six-and friends with another student in our class, Chris Davis. Chris was gay. I thought this marked Jamie-who was straight-as a highly evolved male. If he could be so openly comfortable in the company of a gay man, I reasoned, he might be able to find a rape victim okay.
I managed to do all the things love-struck girls do. I had Lila meet me after class so she could get a look at him. Back at the dorm we discussed how cute he was. Each time I saw him I would detail for her what he was wearing. He was a master of what I called shoddy prep. He wore rag-wool sweaters with egg stains on them, and his Brooks Brothers boxers often peeked out of his wide-wale cords. He lived off campus in an apartment and had a car. He went skiing on the weekends. He had what I wanted-a life apart. I mooned over him in private; in public I pretended I was tough.
I hated the way I looked. I thought I was fat and ugly and weird. But even if he could never find me physically attractive, he still liked a good story and he liked to get drunk. I could tell one and do the other.
Following Wolff's workshop, Chris, Jamie, and I would grab a few drinks, then Jamie would say, "Well, kids, I'm taking off. What are you two doing this weekend?" Chris and I never had good answers. We both felt lame. My weekends consisted of waiting for the grand jury and then what followed. Chris later admitted that his weekends had been committed to going to the gay bars in downtown Syracuse and trying, without success, to find a boyfriend. Chris and I both overate and drank too much coffee while reading good poetry. When we wrote a poem of our own that we didn't despise, we might call each other and read it aloud. We were lonely and hated ourselves. We kept each other laughing, bitterly, and waited for Jamie, fresh and back from a weekend at Stowe or Hunter Mountain, to fill our dismal lives.
There was the night that fall when I told the two of them about the rape. All three of us were drunk. It was after a reading or a workshop and we had gone to a bar on Marshall Street. It was a bar a bit nicer than most of the student bars, which were more like caverns.
I don't remember how it came out. It was in the day or two before the lineup and so it was all I was thinking about. Chris was stunned and the news had the effect of making him drunker. His brother, Ben, had been murdered two years before, though I didn't know this then. It was Jamie whom I cared about. Jamie I imagined myself falling in love with and marrying.
However he responded, it could not have fulfilled the rescue fantasy I had fabricated. Nothing could. There was no rescue. The table was awkward for a second and then Jamie found the answer. He ordered another round of drinks.
Jamie drove home alone in his car to his off-campus apartment. Chris, who lived in the opposite direction, walked me home. I lay on the bed and the room spun. I didn't like how drinking felt but I liked how it released me. News slipped out and the world didn't explode and eventually I could count on passing out. I had a headache in the morning and I always threw up, but Jamie, and everyone, it seemed, liked me when I was drunk. The added bonus: I often didn't remember much.
After Christmas, we drank more frequently, often without Chris. Jamie told me he had come back to finish his diploma after nursing his father through a protracted terminal illness. He confided that he owned a women's clothing store in Utica, and had to go down often to look in on it. All this made him more glamorous, but what I really liked about Jamie was his no-bullshit factor. He ate and belched. He slept around. He'd lost his virginity way before I had-he was something like fourteen and she was older. "I never had a chance," he would say, take a sip of beer from a long-neck, or wine from a glass, and snort gleefully. He joked about how many women he'd had, and told stories about being caught with married women by their husbands.
I didn't feel comfortable hearing a lot of this. His promiscuity seemed inconceivable, but it also meant that he had seen and done it all. There were no surprises. In his eyes I would not be a freak. Jamie was not a nice boy. But having a nice boy think of me as "special" was what I wanted least.
He listened patiently to what was going on in my life: about Gail, or the lineup, or my fear of going to trial. In the weeks that turned into months after the Christmas holiday, I lived in constant anticipation of the trial. Repeatedly it was pushed back. A pretrial hearing was set for January 22 and I went. It was canceled but I still had to show up, prep with the DA, Bill Mastine, and with Gail, who was now pregnant, and so handing most of the reins over to Mastine.
I saw in Jamie a recognition that the two of us were oddballs. He had gone through a lot with his father and believed that at nineteen, I was distinguished by the rape from most of my peers. But instead of making me feel my feelings, as Tricia from the Rape Crisis Center would want, he taught me how to drink. And I did.
Jamie and I talked about sex and I told a lie.
In the bar one night, Jamie asked me-it felt offhand-if I'd slept with anyone since the rape. I said no, but in that second, the expression on his face told me that was not the right answer. I rephrased, "No, don't be silly, of course I have."
"Yeesh," he responded, turning his beer glass in circles on the table, "I wouldn't have wanted to be that guy."
"What do you mean?"
"It's a pretty big responsibility. You'd be afraid of fucking up. Plus, who knows what could happen?"
I told him it hadn't been that bad. He asked me how many men I'd slept with. I made up a number. Three.
"That's a good amount. Just enough to know you're normal."
I agreed.
We continued to drink. I was alone now, I knew that. If I had told the truth he would have rejected me. The pressure I felt to "get it over with"-in my words to Lila-was overwhelming. I was afraid if I went too long, the fear involved in having sex would only increase. I didn't want to be a dried-up old woman, or become a nun, or live in the house of my parents and stare at the wall ceaselessly. These destinies were very real to me.
Just before Easter vacation, the night came.
Jamie and I went to a movie. Afterward, we got very drunk at the bar. "I've got to take a piss," he said, for not the first time that evening.