Chapter 10

Every single person in the bar stared at her. After the shrieking was over, she then feigned notice of the icy chill of water upon her skin and the ridiculous eighties tune blaring from the bar’s antiquated sound system. She saw eyes, faces, jaws that dropped, the conversation that mysteriously paused, the apologetic bartender handing her a towel, and Claude Carolina’s back as he hastily defiled from the place.

As she wiped away the cold wetness from her body, she couldn’t suppress her tears. She had never been humiliated like that before. No one ever had the nerve, the gall, the wantonness to humiliate her like that. She swallowed her tears, hoping that the environs would return to normal—the talking, the clinking of glasses, the terrible song on the jukebox—returning to an equilibrium that had been shattered by that stupid sonofabitch she had the ill- fate of sleeping with earlier that afternoon. She didn’t want to cry in front of these strangers. She was a strong woman now, not a girl playing in a sandbox, and she must not let them see her cry, no, she had to be dignified, almost like getting slapped in the face and at the same time having the pride and the guts to turn the other cheek.

She shivered in the bar under the blasting air conditioners. And then she thought she should leave if only to save herself further embarrassment. She didn’t want to talk, didn’t want to think, only had the immediate impulse to leave the place and never return. The bartender, however, poured her a shot, and the blonde guy next to her bought it for her. She was about to leave when the blonde man said:

“Don’t leave in defeat. Stay strong. Have the shot and forget about that asshole.”

She smiled at him weakly. He took off his blue blazer and draped it around her shoulders.

“There, that’s better.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Thanks for the shot too.”

“No problem. You can’t let jerks like that push you around. Probably a criminal as far as I can tell.”

“I don’t know how I get involved with people like that,” she said, cupping her shot on the bar.

“It’s tequila,” he said.

She downed it quickly and then ordered another.

“I’m sorry, but I’m a little shaken right now,” she said.

“I don’t blame you one bit.”

“He’s so talented too.”

“He’s a savage,” said the man, “and he’ll probably wind up in jail.”

She returned the towel to the bartender who gave her a wink and a smile. “Everything all right now?” he asked.

“Yes. Thank you.”

“Your drinks are on the house tonight,” said the bartender, as a slow country-western tune—who was it? Waylon Jennings?—wafted through the bar.

The drinks certainly put her at ease. The guy sitting next to her, Ted his name, also made her feel comfortable.

It turned out she was glad he stayed. She didn’t surrender to one of her savage students. She did not leave the bar in humiliation. She didn’t let Claude ruin her right to be there. And the music on the jukebox seemed to fit her situation: a frustrated artist—in Waylon Jenning’s case—struggling in Nashville with nowhere else to go.

Ted put his arm around her, as a good friend would, and she realized the mistake of drifting too far away from her original home. She was far from West Hartford, and the bar had a West Hartford feel to it, almost like college again. These people comforted her, a little slice of white in the multi-colored South Orange pie, and she couldn’t help but sigh in relief and order another shot. The country music, this positively twanged Godsend from the Bible Belt, continued, and maybe those Southerners weren’t so bad after all. She felt relieved to be away from Claude, relieved to have Ted gently caress her shoulders like an old friend who had returned to her doorstep after years of being away.

She was also getting quite drunk, and the shock of being doused by ice water changed her a bit. She would never make the same mistake twice. She tried and tested a relationship with one of her students, and the result was disastrous. No wonder the university had policies against this sort of thing.

“I guess I’ll have to take you home,” said Ted matter-of-factly.

“No, really, it’s okay. I’m fine now.”

“But you’re drunk.”

“That’s okay. I only live a couple of minutes away.”

“There are cops all over the place. You’ll be caught. Trust me.”

“I’ll walk then.”

“C’mon,” he laughed, “let me take you home. I don’t bite.”

The guy did seem harmless. She could leave her car in the parking lot and pick it up the next day. She agreed finally, and after another shot, they were off in his brand-new BMW, spiraling, it seemed, toward her home near the university. He turned on the car stereo. The car, more than anything, thrilled her, her teenage years at prep school returning like waves washing over her, and she wouldn’t have traded the joyride for anything, the car gaining speed along a silent stretch of road, the lampposts streaking across her vision like flashes of hot, white lightning, and she laughed and danced in her seat to the music.

When the car came to a full stop in front of her house, Ted turned the stereo low, turned off the headlights, cut off the engine, and held her hand in the darkness.

“That was so much fun!” she laughed.

“Much better than hanging out with that asshole,” he said.

She let his fingers slide from her moist hand to her knee, and slowly, as he talked about his job as an investment banker at a firm in New Jersey, about how his family was fabulously wealthy and lived in West Hampton, how he had a couple of cars like this and not just one, his fleshy hand moved to her inner thigh discreetly and innocuously, and she didn’t mind it so much, until this same hand moved further up her skirt and his tongue licked her neck, his hot liquored breath perking up the fine hair below her ear, and then for a moment he soothed her with all of his talk of how beautiful she looked by the lamppost light that filtered in from the street, but she knew she shouldn’t entertain thoughts of starting yet another relationship on the heels of a failed one. Even though the joy ride thrilled her for a bit, she couldn’t cover up her sadness over what took place in the bar. She appreciated his support, but sex was the last thing on her mind. She found his overtures somewhat comical, as it reminded her of her first boyfriend in prep school, when they decided to go steady, and when he moved in for a kiss in the backseat of his car. But this was not prep school. This was not her former boyfriend.

She wanted him to stop, but he continued to lick her neck, his other free hand unbuttoning her blouse, the hand on her thigh moving closer to the mound between her legs, until it seemed that his entire body was on top of her, groping her from every angle. She wanted it to stop, and when she told him to let go, he merely whispered:

“Shhh, darling. I know you like it.”

“No,” she muttered.

“Shhh. It feels good, I know it does.”

She braced his strong forearm in an effort to rid his hand from her fleshy inner thigh, but he wouldn’t let go, his hairy arm muscles like rods of steel unwilling to bend or to move, just fixed there like viral tentacles. What she had thought of as cute a moment ago seemed dangerous to her now. She did not know this man. He looked sophisticated and civilized, almost honorable, but she did not know him. Then a slow, burning panic set in. She struggled with his hand, but it wouldn’t budge, and she tore her neck away from his warm, sandpapery tongue, but he renewed his mission and trapped her close to his body. She squirmed restlessly in her seat as a full panic set in. She used two of her free hands to push him off, but she didn’t have the strength to make such a maneuver.

“Stop it,” she called.

“Shut up!” he ordered.

She grabbed him by the neck as the hand at her thigh ripped her skirt and the hand squeezing her breasts moved to the center of her chest and ripped her blouse clean off. She slapped him hard, and when she did, he covered her mouth with his hand, which she tried in vain to bite off. She screamed and shrieked, but his hand muffled her voice just long enough to avoid any interference from those close by. The sheer intensity of her panic found her scratching and clawing at any patch of skin she could find—his cheeks, his arms, his neck—all to no avail. She felt for the door handle as his leg swung around the gearshift and kneed her in the stomach, the full weight of his body suddenly pressed upon hers. The leather seat snapped back and flattened. She screamed, she scratched, she punched, she slapped, and she wailed in the darkness, but nothing stopped him. With his one hand trapping her entire face to the headrest behind her, he pulled his pants down but not without giving her a slap so hard as to knock her painfully near to the unconscious.

She didn’t have any more strength left, his dead skin caked beneath her broken fingernails, the blood from his scratches smeared on her collar, and when she finally realized that there was no way to resist him, she let out one last scream from the pit of her stomach—the most violent form of protest she could muster. Her arms twitched nervously and waved all about him like a squashed insect, her fists pounding him on his spine and punching the back of his head, until suddenly she heard the glass breaking and shards spraying all around her.

She didn’t know exactly what was happening, as her face swelled and throbbed with pain, but she saw two, strong black arms grabbing the man on top of her by the neck and pushing him back into the driver’s seat. It was Claude Carolina. He immediately unlocked the door and yanked her clear from the passenger seat onto the sidewalk. He then went after the blonde man in the car, punching and beating him hard and fast, until the man turned the ignition and hit the gas, the tires tearing from the curbside.

The car dragged Claude along the side of the road for a few feet until Claude himself broke free from the car’s interior. It sent him rolling down the middle of the road as the BMW sped through the next stop sign and out of sight, the two red taillights like demonic eyes winking down the hottest corridors of a dreadful hell.

Her half-naked body quaked with soreness and pain as Claude collected himself from the middle of the road, his arms dripping with blood from breaking in the window, his bloody nose twisted and broken. He sat on the curb a few feet away from her. The distant sirens of police cars drew closer, and she was certain that nothing ever really ended, only began over and over again. This was her life, she thought, in all of its unruly sadness and brilliance, and if she just had a razor blade just then she would have used it on her wrists to spare herself any more agony. She looked to Claude, however, whose shirt was now bathed in blood and whose head sank deep into his hands, and she gave in to the relentless, overbearing idea that maybe she lived because of him, and such a gift, sent straight down from the divine, shouldn’t be violated with corrupt thoughts of killing herself. He did, after all, save her, and she wanted to feel grateful. The horror of the incident, however, like a reel-to-reel that played repeatedly in her consciousness, blocked any overt display of gratitude.

Her body sagged on the curb as the police cruisers arrived, one by one, and after that an ambulance, which took Claude to the university medical center in nearby Newark. She told the officers in vague language what had happened. She gave a physical description of the guy and the car he escaped in. It seemed fairly routine to the officers, their faces seen only through the swirling intermittent lights of their cruisers, lights that also grazed the sides of the adjacent mother-daughter duplexes along the road. She soon became very tired of answering their questions and gathered enough strength to say a final farewell to the officers on duty.

“That man has to be caught,” were her last words to them before she shuffled into her building. Luckily they did not ask her to come downtown to check mug shots or choose from suspects in a lineup. Claude intervened just in time. Still, she wanted the man found and thrown in jail for what he did.

Once inside her apartment, she bolted both locks and ran her bleeding hands under ice-cold water. She also took another one of her warm baths, and she must have lain in the tub for at least an hour, rubbing off the scent of the man and his terrible, alcohol-pungent cologne. Her body stung in the soapy water, but the water at least abated the soreness. She had pulled at least three muscles in her arms and legs and maybe pinched a nerve in her back, flickers of sharp pain that flared whenever she moved. She considered going to the hospital for a checkup as one of the policemen suggested, but she didn’t think it so necessary a precaution. An hour in the tub made her reconsider, as the stinging of her scratches and the soreness of her entire body flared beyond what she could tolerate, not to mention the side of her face which now transmogrified into a purplish, puffed up welt to which she soon applied ice.

She looked at her broken body in the mirror and couldn’t help but break down in tears again. She had the immediate urge to call her parents up in West Hartford, quit her lousy job at the university, and travel there overnight so as to be there by breakfast. She wanted and needed their comforting hand as when they tucked her in at night many years ago, her father’s fingers gently stroking her cheeks and combing through the tangles in her hair.

Her parents seemed so distant now. There was no way to return to those idyllic pastures where she lived in happiness. Nothing could bridge that kind of separation, and suddenly she found her apartment a strange and unwelcome place.

She decided to cancel her classes for the rest of the week and leave South Orange for the safety of West Hartford, a convalescence that would be far removed from the trauma of almost being raped and the strangeness of being in the building alone.

Despite the pain, she walked to the center of town the next morning, a little nervous and paranoid of the pedestrians rushing past her. She returned to the same restaurant and doted upon Claude Carolina for a spell. He should have never left her at the bar. A small part of her blamed him for the incident, and despite her vainglorious attempts at absolving Claude for any wrongdoing, she still reserved most of her anger and blame for him. She still didn’t know why he threw ice water on her. Maybe she took the joke a little too far, but she certainly didn’t deserve what he did. Claude must have known this himself, which is why he returned to her building after he doused her. She didn’t want to visit him in the hospital either. Better to forget about him, forget she had ever known him, and burn whatever bridges they had built together.

She decided never to lay eyes on him again, and if she reached West Hartford by five, she would phone Preston and tell him that Claude was no longer welcome in her classroom. And damn that Preston Whitcomb too for involving her in one of his ridiculous schemes. He obviously used her and lied to Claude to advance his failing career, and if she had the unfortunate pleasure of seeing him on the street that morning, she would have kicked him in the balls for all the trouble she had to put up with on account of his selfishness and greed. Men were such spoiled children when it came down to it, and she would make it a point to cut both of them loose as soon as she reached her parents’ place.

She drove all the way up to West Hartford feeling nothing but disgust and anger towards them both, her hands gripping the steering wheel as her SUV flew passed the slow trucks to the right of her on I-95. The speed of her car and the waves of anger she swallowed were synchronized, such that the angrier she got, the faster she drove, and soon she did eighty in a construction zone and didn’t care one bit if the state trooper waiting on the shoulder of the road, like a black and white frog, ticketed her or not. She checked her rearview mirror, and luckily the cop didn’t pull her over but chased after another driver further down the highway. She sighed in relief, buckled her seatbelt even though it hurt her, and continued onto I-91 without venturing above sixty-five. The closer she came to Hartford, the faster the butterflies swirled in her stomach.

She wondered if any of her childhood friends were still around. Once she entered her freshman year of college in the rough-and-tumble East Hartford section of the city, she slowly broke off contact with her childhood buddies in favor of a group of lighthearted sorority sisters who promised wild drinking parties, marijuana and cocaine, after-hour orgies, and most importantly, good connections after she graduated. Little did she know that she would abandon them too for art’s sake and get married to a then- successful poet who promised her the moon. A lot of good that did.

She returned to West Hartford at the lowest point in her life, and she hoped her parents wouldn’t ask too many questions about the bruises and scratches on her arms or her swollen face, or half of her left eye, blood-red from the beating she took. They were always right, and she was always wrong. She should have never succumbed to a poet’s life. More than anything she craved the normal life—as normal as the subdivisions of dense suburban sprawl, the stately colonial homes quaint, clean, and sharp like the edges of expensive stationary, and as she drove up the length of the driveway to her house on the knoll, she spotted her father cutting the lawn from his tractor and her mother pruning flowers in a new garden she cultivated earlier in the spring. When they spotted her car, her mother immediately dropped her shears and her father cut off the engine. They smiled and waved to her. They were unable to hide their joy and relief at seeing their only daughter returned to them.

Amanda didn’t act on the impulse to drive away. She nervously sat in the car and gauged what their reactions would be to her injuries. Perhaps they would never let her return again to South Orange, as the sudden need to escape and flee found her paralyzed in the car, her hand gripping the keys in the ignition. What farfetched story other than the truth could she concoct to relieve the worry, to have everything return to normal like things used to be? She thought of saying she fell, or she recently enrolled in a karate class and got the shit beaten out of her by an overzealous sparing partner, or that a dog attacked her, anything other than declaring outright that she was almost raped and beaten by a stranger. The whole incident was suddenly her fault for some reason—if only she didn’t crack that crude joke, if only she didn’t drink so much, if only she didn’t surrender to a complete, sophisticated stranger just to get back at Claude, if only she had the nerve to tell her parents, if only, if only, if only.

Her parents came out through the front door, both of them smiling and eager to see her. Her father’s hair had withered and thinned, his former hulk of a body shriveled and covered by a worn polo shirt. Her mother’s oversized gardening gown rippled in the slight breeze and hid the few extra pounds of cellulite she put on. Amanda drummed up whatever courage she could. She then left the vehicle. As soon as her parents came close enough, their happy, ebullient faces suddenly sagged and winced. They were in shock for a moment or two.

“Good God,” said her mother, “what on earth happened to you?”

“Jesus,” said her father. “Amanda, are you alright?”

Her mother’s bony hands probed the side of her face and also the blood red eye that seemed to bleed inward from the purplish swelling.

“And your hands? Your arms? Oh, my baby, what happened to you?”

“Let me call Dr. Weill,” said her father abruptly, walking back to the house.

“No, Dad, please don’t.”

“You need to see a doctor right away.”

“Oh, my baby,” cried her mother.

“Really, I’m fine. I don’t need to see a doctor.”

“Like hell you don’t,” he said, marching through the front door, the screen door swatting noisily behind him.

She also had a bad limp. Her mother escorted her into the spacious home and sat her down on the sectional in the living room. She quickly fetched her a bag of ice.

“Mom, I’m fine.”

“No you’re not!” said her father angrily from the kitchen.

“You’re not listening to me.”

“It’s your turn to listen to us,” he said. “We’ve been listening to you for far too long, and look where it’s gotten us.”

“I’m surprised you drove all that way on your own,” said her mother.

“You should have called. We would have picked you up.”

“I wouldn’t be caught dead in that filth you live in,” said her father on the phone. “We should have never allowed it.”

“Dad, I’m almost thirty years old.”

He hung up the phone and said:

“That’s right! You’re almost thirty years old, and now you come running home all bruised and battered like a teenage tomboy after a fistfight. This is not the way, Amanda! You’re obviously not taking proper care of yourself down there.”

Her mother’s fingers continued to explore the purplish regions of her face.

“Ouch! Mom!”

“Oh, dear.”

“Y’know, it would help if you two just settled down a bit. I’m alright, I’m telling you. I swear it.”

“Hello? Dr. Weill? We have an emergency—”

“Must you call Dr. Weill? I said I’m alright.”

“—thank you.”

“Dr. Weill will be here any minute now,” said her mother, “don’t you worry about a thing. Go on upstairs, change your clothes, and get into bed, dear.”

“But Mom, I—”

“You heard your mother!” thundered her father from the kitchen. “Don’t argue!”

Yes, she loved being home again. She marched up to her old room on the second floor of the house. The room had been dusted, swept, and sealed off from the rest of the home since she’d been away, the pink-checkered bedspread pulled taught over the corners of the mattress, the fluffy pillows, also pink, propped on the bed rest, her stuffed animals neatly laid out, a matching pink slim-line telephone on the nightstand with an analog alarm clock displaying the exact time, also in working order. The room seemed a lot smaller than she remembered it, almost like a doll’s house in miniature with the awards she had won in school fixed to the wall as well as a bookshelf full of her old textbooks and a complete row of Nancy Drew mysteries, all of them read.

She remembered the words of one of her other professors at the college. That she was ‘always a good student,’ and the comment annoyed her, because it was too lukewarm a compliment for an academic overachiever like herself. A large part of her still wanted to be a brilliant academic, not merely a good one who just regurgitated information onto the pages of examination blue books, but one of those highly regarded professionals who actually used her mind to think, not to hold information and then clear it out like an evacuation chamber.

Of course she wanted to be a brilliant student after she left college and not during it. If anything, all those years of schooling taught her how to go to school, how to hand in her assignments on time, how to give her teachers what they wanted. It made her feel like she had a very average mind and wrote mediocre poetry that would never be remembered. One would think Amanda Larson had it all, but to her this was far from the truth. She figured she still had too much of the Barbie-doll in her to be taken seriously. Her face and body sold her chapbooks more than her words did. The incident with the blonde man in the BMW must have changed all of that.

As ordered by her mother, she crawled into bed but not without taking out a notebook and pen from her old desk drawer. She waited for something to spill out of her, but nothing came. Maybe the incident needed to settle more.

She was unable to encapsulate that kind of fear into verse, and Bluestein certainly wouldn’t accept the darker side of reality from someone so prominent a prom queen as she, but he would ultimately give in, or else she would threaten never to write her usual strain of Stepford-wife bullshit ever again. Maybe she needed to join one of those lesbian girl-power groups or see a psychiatrist who would probably end up chasing her around a desk. Still, nothing flowed from her pen, the pains of sitting upright in bed distracting her. No wonder, she thought, that most people don’t think very much. The mind must hide trauma so well as to transform the brain itself into a virtual file cabinet of fear and torment, entire sectors of thought isolated and shut down like a surging power grid if only to save the very few remaining parts that were healthy and in-working-order. And pain changes the thought process into millions of broken, cognitive dysfunctions that attempt in some woefully miniscule way to make sense of it, almost like being touched by the hand of a vengeful God and trying for dear life to return to the hardscrabble parameters of reality. Not that she was a psychic expert by any means, but she had read somewhere before—was it Reader’s Digest?—how pain affects the mind. And after she blithely concluded that nothing of the sort would ever happen to her, that’s exactly when it happened.

Dr. Weill entered the room and approached her bed.

“Minor injuries,” concluded the old doctor, “but I’m going to prescribe something that will take away the pain for a spell. Also a sedative so you can get some rest.”

His prescriptions were bright spots in an otherwise cloudy sky.

“Are you experiencing any bleeding from vaginal tears or lacerations?”

“It didn’t get that far,” she said.

Her mother sighed and fought back tears.

“You’re a very lucky lady,” said the doctor after packing up his prescription pad. “It could have been a lot worse.”

Around the time her mother returned with the painkillers, her father had already fielded a call from Preston Whitcomb.

“How did he know I was here?” she asked of her father.

“He didn’t say. He did sound very concerned. I’d give him a call before it gets dark.”

She had never seen her father so gruff before. An abruptness colored the shades of his voice, as though he were talking to one of his employees at the plant. He usually hid strong emotions in this manner by approaching everything as a business matter or a work-related issue, and it worried her a bit to see him so angry with her for events that were beyond her control. He said three sentences, left Preston’s number on a chit, and exited the room as abruptly as he came in.

Preston was the last person she wanted to speak with. As usual he was probably more concerned about his own problems than giving a damn about what happened to her, or to Claude for that matter. He behaved the same way in their marriage. Why on earth he called her up in West Hartford she didn’t know, but she assumed he called her for some underhanded and deviant reason—anything to advance his own agenda. She didn’t think calling him on painkillers would do the job of purging him from her life. She needed to be in intense pain in order to give him a taste of the resentment she had been holding against him for years. Instead of swallowing the painkillers, she simply put them on the nightstand with the glass of water her mother provided. She dialed his number after her mother left the room.

“Preston, it’s Amanda,” she said over the phone.

“Jesus, Amanda,” he said, “thank God you called. I was worried sick about you. I heard what happened. Are you okay?”

“How did you hear about it?”

“Claude called me last night from the hospital. I went over there this morning.”

“Is he alright?”

“He has about ten stitches in his arm, but yeah, he’s recovering.”

“What is it that you want, Preston?”

“I’m calling to see if you’re okay. I was worried sick.”

“Before I hang up, what is it that you want from me? How can I help you?”

“I know you don’t feel like talking much. I know you’ve been through quite a bit over the last couple of days, but I’m being sincere. I want to know how you’re faring up in Hartford. You should have called me. I would have gone up with you. I had no idea you were raped last night. Claude is also very worried about you. You left in such a goddamned hurry.”

“For the record, I wasn’t raped. I was assaulted.”

“Rape, assault—whatever—but the most important thing is that you are safe and you’re recovering, and I’m thankful to hear your voice right now. It’s music to my ears, pardon the cliché of course.”

“Well, I thank you for your good wishes, Preston. As far as Claude is concerned, I don’t think it’s a good idea that he attends my classes at the university anymore.”

“Oh?”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“But why? He’s so close to finishing it.”

“I don’t have to explain everything to you, Preston. That’s just how I feel.”

“Listen, how about I come up to Hartford for a little bit? I’d like to spend some time with you. Most of all I want to know for sure that I’m doing everything I possibly can to help you.”

“Absolutely not. I don’t want any visitors right now.”