Bright Young Women(61)
“He lets you,” Tina repeated damningly.
“No!” I cried. “No. I don’t mean it like that. You’re twisting it. Anything I say, you’ll find a way to twist it, because it’s not what you think I should be doing. I did struggle with the choice. I did. But in the end. This is…” I stopped, picturing my well-bred boyfriend, his needlepoint belts and stringy hair, remembering what it felt like when he threw his arm around me at Denise’s funeral, carrying me along at his own sovereign pace. Brian’s gait was one that was both sure and easy, as though he had places to be but there was no rush to get there. For him, people would wait. Marrying Brian was something I should want, and it made me feel diseased, how little I seemed to want the things that other women my age did without complication.
“This is a good option for me,” I concluded.
Tina nodded with profuse empathy. Like everything I said made perfect sense. For a moment, I felt light and unburdened. All I’d had to do was explain it, get that off my chest, and now even Tina had to admit that just because a relationship was complicated, it didn’t have to be disposable.
“The hardest part of my job,” Tina began in a heartsick voice, “is allowing patients to make their own choices. I cannot tell them what to do or what not to do, even when the right choice is clear as day to me. My role as a shrink is to provide people with a framework to understand what drives them and informs their behavior. A person’s childhood shapes everything about that framework. I don’t know you well enough to know what happened to you young, why you must always be going, going, going, why your life is so tightly scheduled and controlled”—she was making a fist and speaking through a clenched jaw, animating what I supposed she thought was my ironclad attitude toward life—“why you are so distressed by the thought of dating that you’d rather just marry Freddy Frat Boy than face the discomfort and explore what it is all really about. Anyway”—Tina placed her palms on the table and pressed her weight on them, leaning forward like she wanted her words to physically reach me—“you’re not my patient, and I’m not your therapist. Which means I can tell you exactly what I think you should do.”
The last of the diners were making their way out the door, yelping in the frigid night, on their way to kick up their heels, and I felt myself edging into the corner of my booth, unreasonably frightened about whatever it was Tina was gearing up to say.
“Being back here,” Tina said wistfully, watching the happy brigade set off down the powdered street, “I’m reminded of how short life is for some people. Ruth had gotten some really exciting news just before she died. She’d had a difficult few years, but she was finally turning her life around. Look at Denise. About to go off and apprentice with one of the last of the living masters. The two of them break the pattern. Almost all of them do, actually. Enough to establish a new pattern.”
The beaded sconce above my head flickered malevolently like some sort of paid actor. I knew nothing of patterns, then. Of intelligence, data, the psychology of the offender and his interactions with his victims and society. But in the years since, I’ve thought about what Tina said to me in that cracked leather banquette every time the story flared like pain in an arthritic joint, waiting for a time when people would realize how wrong they’d gotten things in the sepia-tinted seventies. But those closest to the case have continued to stick to the dog-eared theory that he leaned on his fine patrician bone structure and his magnetism to trick women into going off with him, so I’m done waiting now. I’m done with the defamation of Denise, of all of them. Soon I would learn that there was a group of high school girls within earshot of Ruth on the day he approached her, that they reported to the police that she clearly found him “annoying” though she still agreed to leave the beach with him. Another would-be victim grumbled to her friend she was pretty sure she was about to dance with a felon as she begrudgingly accepted his request for a dance at the night club next door to The House, the same night of the murders. Women got that feeling about him, that funny one we all get when we know something isn’t right, but we don’t know how to politely extricate ourselves from the situation without escalating the threat of violence or harassment. That is not a skill women are taught, the same way men are not taught that it is okay to leave a woman alone if what she wants is to be left alone.
“No one was lost or struggling or unhappy, all the things that predators usually seek out in their victims because it makes them vulnerable, and vulnerable people are easier to subdue. I’ve thought about this for so long.” Tina brought a fist to her mouth, scraping the thin skin of her knuckles with her two front teeth, the way you do when you want to scream but you can’t. “I’ve tried to make sense of how someone who didn’t stalk his victims in advance ended up going after the best and the brightest. And I think that’s it, the thing they all had in common—a light that outshone his. He targets college campuses and sorority houses because he’s looking for the cream of the crop. He wants to extinguish us—we are the ones who remind him that he’s not that smart, not that good-looking, that there’s nothing particularly special about him.” Tina removed her napkin from her lap and folded it, arranged her silverware upside down on the plate, the way you do to indicate to the waitress that you’re finished with your meal. “Because I am not your shrink, I get to say that you do a disservice to them, to every woman who was interrupted in the middle of something good, if you don’t tell this fiancé who lets you do what you want to go to hell, because you’re going to Columbia.”