Chapter 12

When I got to the park, Franklin Jones found me in the clubhouse and told me, quietly, that Juniper had asked him to invite me over after the game. Evidently, she hadn't wanted to count on my hearing by telephone from Carla.

"How'd she seem?" I asked Franklin. I was confident that Juniper's stepfather and I were on the same side of this issue. I could expect him to talk straight to me.

"Not good," he said. "I got all encouraged when she told me to invite you to come by, but her attitude was kinda — I don't know. Strange."

"You know about her conversation with Carla — the woman from Minneapolis?"

"Yeah. She told us — EmJay and me — about it."

"But it didn't feel to you like she was ready to ... reconcile with me?"

"What do I know?" he said. "Maybe you two can work it all out. At least she's going to talk to you — and she's staying home tonight. That alone is worth something to her mother and me."

The game ran late but by eleven p.m. I was in the Cooper, following Franklin's car to the Jones' suburban house. He had called ahead, so "EmJay" and Juniper knew we were both on the way.

On arrival, I accepted a cold Sam Adams, exchanged a few pleasantries with Mrs. Jones, and got a tentative little hug from Juniper.

At that point Franklin and Mary Jane said their goodnights and retired upstairs. Juniper and I were left alone, sitting in the living room.

"Your friend stood up for you pretty good," she said.

"Carla, you mean?"

"Yes. I guess she's been keeping you posted. She wrote to me on email and we talked later, on the telephone."

"Yes, she did. She kept me posted."

"It didn't take all that much convincing," Juniper said, "about your innocence, I mean."

"That's good."

"I pretty much already had figured out that nothing happened, probably."

"You sure seemed to believe it at the time ... In Toronto."

"I did believe it at the time, but I thought about it some more, after you left my room. It was just like you said it would be. After I cooled down, I realized that probably nothing had happened with you and ... Carla."

"But you left town anyway."

"Yep."

"And you've refused to talk to me for almost two weeks."

"I just decided this wasn't going to work, Travis. I threw you out in Toronto because you'd cheated on me, but when I checked out a few hours later and came home, it was because I knew this thing with you wasn't going to work."

"That's crazy. We were going great!"

"But it was like playing 'just pretend, ' for me. I was pretending to be somebody I wasn't. I grabbed at the chance to blow up and leave you because I knew you were trying to re-make me into somebody I can never be."

"I didn't have the impression that you were uncomfortable or unhappy, being with me and living the way you were living."

"Uncomfortable? You mean, was I just dying to go back to being my old slutty self the whole time? No, you're right about that. I was ... I felt happy with you and with being this new-Juniper person. But I think I knew the whole time it was just a fraud."

"I don't understand this at all."

"It's built in, Travis. The way I am is ... just me. You're never going to accept that. You've made that very clear. And I'm never going to change. I'm not capable of it."

"I was amazed at how quickly you changed. It's just bullshit for you to sit here now and say you can't change. You already did! And then you just tossed it all out ... You know how Carla told you about how she'd dumped me back at school? Hell, she let me down easy, compared to what you did! And now you're saying it wasn't even real — that you knew before you even left Toronto that I hadn't cheated on you. Christ, Juniper, what's this all about? ... Really?"

"What it's about is that I'm a tramp, Travis. I've always known it. Ever since I was a little kid."

"Hell, I know about what happened to you when you were a kid. You think your mother didn't tell me about it? You think all of us, your mom and Franklin and I, don't understand the connection with the ... problems you're having now?"

"They love me," she said. "They've spent a goddamned fortune on shrinks so that I could get the help I needed. I've talked about this with so many different psychologists and psychiatrists that I don't think I could even write down all their names, anymore."

"They must have given you some insights into..."

"They gave me lots of insights. But most of those people didn't know what they were talking about. And when I'd try to tell them who I really was, they'd ignore it, and then they'd try to tell me who I really was. Only they didn't know! You don't learn about people like me in shrink school."

"Surely you discussed with these doctors what happened with you and your father."

She laughed bitterly. "As soon as a new shrink started zeroing in on First Causes, that's about the only thing we ever did talk about!"

"Well then, didn't it ever get through to you, talking to them, that you were just a goddamned victim? That what your father did to you wasn't your fault? Jesus, you were just a little kid!"

"It got through to me. Hell, I didn't need a psychologist to tell me my father was a perv who took advantage of his own daughter. I knew that, even when it was happening. The first time it ever happened, even."

"So, when the experts told you that you weren't to blame, why couldn't you accept that?"

"I knew I wasn't to blame for my father's coming in to my bed and ... doing the things he did. They'd keep telling me that, the shrinks, but I already knew. But then I'd try to explain to them how it had been, and they'd just ... they'd just get it wrong, over and over again. Because they had their own pet theories and ideas, and what I was telling them didn't fit."

It was getting late. It was after midnight now, and in less than six hours, I would have to leave my apartment for the airport. Juniper presumably had a working day tomorrow herself.

We didn't seem to be getting very far along in this discussion, and I halfway wished we hadn't tried to deal with it under these circumstances. But there wasn't any way to postpone the discussion now. There was nothing to do but press on.

"You want to tell me? The stuff you tried to tell them — the psychologists?"

"I'll tell you this, instead. Since I got back from Toronto, I've fucked two new guys. It would have been three, but one guy, I just didn't like him that much. I guess meeting you really has had an effect on me, Trav. I've gotten more picky. I've got standards, now. In the old days, I'd have fucked that third guy, too. What the hell, right? The more the merrier."

"But Christ, Juniper! You told me you already believed me — about Carla — before you even left town that day."

"I did. Or at least, I was pretty certain that I'd just blown up for no good reason and that you were probably blameless about that woman."

"So you're saying Carla was just an excuse?"

"Riiiiight! Hey, you're pretty swift, there, for a simple college drop-out ballplayer! Your friend Carla was just an excuse for me to return to the happy days of yesteryear, when I was giving it away like a philanthropist. That's what I am, Travis — a philanthropist of pussy!

"So you see, Lover, we're all blameless. You're blameless for drinking that cup of coffee with your old college sweetheart, and I'm blameless for fucking my dear old dad when I was ten years old!"

"Damn it, Juni, you've got to know that you really are blameless for that."

"When he came into my bed that first time," she said, "I knew right away what he was going to do, and I knew it was wrong, too. I knew it was something that everybody thought was bad-wrong. But he was my daddy, and I loved him, and if he wanted to do that, well, I was okay with it."

"That still doesn't make it your fault," I said.

"Oh, quit it with the amateur psychiatry. I know all the same hocus-pocus about this stuff as you do. I know it better, even. But you don't really understand it, Travis. You think you do, but you don't.

"Because, that first time he did it to me, I let him because he was my daddy and I loved him. And I didn't tell my mother because I knew it was really bad, what he'd done, and that he would be in a world of trouble if I told on him.

"But after that, other times, he would come and we would do it — he would have sex with me — and I didn't just let him do it because I loved my daddy. I let him do it because it made me feel good! Don't you get it, Travis? ... I liked it!"

"So you think that means you're ... evil, or something, right? You think you're the first child, ever taken advantage of by a parent, who had that kind of response?"

"I didn't think about that, one way or the other," she said. "I didn't care what other so-called victims thought or felt. I just knew that I liked fucking my father. And I knew that if my mother found out, it would all be over, so I made damned sure she didn't find out! And she didn't, either — for almost two years! The only way she ever found out was she caught us in bed together doing it! ... I'll bet ol' Mary Jane didn't tell you about that part, did she?"

"Juniper, I'm not all shocked and appalled by what you're telling me. People don't talk about it much, it's true, but you weren't the first child ever to have gotten co-opted that way. The professionals you talked to must have tried to explain that to you."

"Some did. Some didn't." She laughed. "You'd be surprised how many of the therapists — especially the women — they'd tell me how girls like me who were having sex with multiple partners, who were wild and indiscriminate about who they slept with — it took the shrinks a half-hour just to describe girls like that, because they'd all, every one of them, refuse to call them 'nymphomaniacs' like everybody else calls them!

"Anyway, lots of the shrinks would insist to me that these girls couldn't have an orgasm, and that's why they were behaving the way they were. And, Travis, that was so insanely off-the-mark that I would just laugh in their faces! I damned well knew I could have an orgasm. Christ, I could have a chain of 'em, like firecrackers! With almost any prick who had a prick! ... And all this time, poor ol' Franklin's paying hundreds of dollars to these idiots to provide therapy for me!"

"Okay. You had sex with your father, and you liked it. You liked it enough to cover up for him and to conspire with him to continue it for almost two years."