“Oh,” Fran said, suddenly beaming, “and near the beginning, when they show a guy in a white shirt writing on a chalkboard? That’s my dad.”
We stayed up late talking, my phone resting on the island as my kids sent animal emojis and close-ups of their nostrils, and I sent back hearts and asked if they’d remembered their inhalers. Leo was seven that winter and Silvie was five. Leo was into sharks and LEGO Star Wars and baking, and Silvie was in a horse phase—as in, constantly pretending to be a horse.
Yahav texted, finally finally finally, about Wednesday: I have to see. I’ll let you know. Please believe me that I want to!
After Fran left I asked Oliver, “Do you check the news? Was there anything big today?” I was itching to check Twitter, but if Oliver could just tell me what had happened it would be better. It was important that I got sleep. Instead, though, he scooped up the remote and turned on the big TV in the seating area.
And there it was, the reason Jerome had warned me off the internet: Anderson Cooper with new developments on a story I’d found particularly disturbing.
It doesn’t matter which story.
Let’s say it was the one where the young actresses said yes to a pool party and didn’t know.
Or, no, let’s say it was the one where the rugby team covered up the girl’s death and the school covered for the rugby team.
Actually it was the one where the therapist spent years grooming her. It was the one where the senator, then a promising teenager, shoved his dick in the girl’s face. She was also a promising teenager. It was the one where the billionaire pushed the woman into the phone booth, but no one believed her. The one where the high school senior was acquitted of rape because the sophomore girl had shaved her pubic region, which somehow equaled consent.
Oliver asked if I was hungry, and I shrugged.
It was the one where the woman who stabbed her rapist with scissors was the one who ended up in jail. It was the one where the star had a secret button to lock the doors.
Oliver called Foxie’s and ordered us a white pizza with sage, and a mushroom and onion pizza, and extra packets of red pepper flakes. I decided I was allowed to eat one slice of each.
It was the one where the harasser ended up on the Supreme Court. It was the one where the rapist ended up on the Supreme Court. It was the one where the woman, shaking, testified all day on live TV and nothing happened.
Anderson had moved on to other topics, but Oliver asked if I minded his switching over to MSNBC. I didn’t. I said, “I can’t believe there’s finally cable on campus. We used to get three channels.” Just to watch Beverly Hills, 90210, we had to have Dani Michalek’s mom tape it every Wednesday in Darien and mail it to us on VHS.
The story was on MSNBC, too. The one where the judge said the swimmer was so promising. The one where the rapist reminded the judge of himself as a young rapist.
It was the one where her body was never found. It was the one where her body was found in the snow. It was the one where he left her body for dead under the tarp. It was the one where she walked around in her skin and her bones for the rest of her life but her body was never recovered.
You know the one.
The pizza was at the door. Oliver found us plates. He said, “So who’s watching your kids while you’re here?”
12
I took forever to fall asleep, and then woke too early, stewing over whether you’d in fact been a “creeper.” The idea bothered me, and I needed to weigh it—a strange marble I found I was holding in my hand.
There were kids who thought you were cute, or at least you were the answer if they had to confess a teacher they crushed on. The girls loved that your cheeks blotched red when you got up at colloquium to make announcements, and some boys did, too, I’m sure. Red cheeks and dark hair are a compelling combination.
And you certainly had your cult, the kids who wouldn’t only stop by your classroom but would sign up to carol with you on the town green or to watch the screwball comedies you screened. Occasionally they’d save you a seat at their dinner table, convince you to eat with them. This was a subset of the choir and orchestra kids, the ones who took private lessons, the musical theater divas like Beth and Sakina and Thalia who thought they could flatter their way into a lead. I’d never have gone caroling, wasn’t part of the group that got up onstage to surprise you with that German drinking song on your birthday—but I did feel free to stop by just to talk shop, as if we were colleagues. I felt you were my teacher, in a way Mr. Dar, for instance, whose history teaching seemed secondary to his hockey coaching, was not. Mr. Dar belonged to the hockey players, but you, you were mine and Fran’s and Carlotta’s, you belonged to the music kids and the speech geeks and the Italian club, to these tiny pockets of the school, not to everyone.
I’ll never know why, when you arrived my sophomore year, Mrs. Ross decided I was the tech kid to throw your way. Maybe she could spare me to work October Follies when she couldn’t spare her juniors and seniors, already busy building the set for Our Town. Follies was just a variety show, after all; it only needed to entertain families at Parents’ Weekend and pad a few seniors’ college portfolios.
Because you were new and I’d at least seen Follies the previous fall, I found myself in the odd position of explaining things to you. I saw it as my choice, the way we talked as friends. I was the one who teased you. I was the one filling you in on relevant theater gossip: who couldn’t memorize lines, who used to date and shouldn’t be onstage together, who was likely to miss rehearsals.
But things looked different in 2018. We were, all of us, casting a sharp eye back on the men who’d hired us, mentored us, pulled us into coat closets. I had to consider now that perhaps you were skilled at subtly eroding boundaries, making adolescent girls feel like adults.
We did spend a lot of time together—but no, you never stuck a sweaty palm to my knee. In college, a professor once felt the need, in his office, to tell me that the most erotic experience of his life had involved watching a French woman soap her unshaved armpits. You never said things like that, never invited me to sit in your desk chair to look at something on your computer while you breathed on my ear. Thank God.
Although, I reminded myself, the fact that you didn’t cross boundaries with me doesn’t mean you didn’t do it with girls less guarded, less wrapped in barbed wire.
More than once, before the curtain rose on opening night of a show, you looked at me and said, “You hold my career in your hands.”
You thought it was hilarious to write my name on rehearsal schedules as Body! Bodi! Bodé!
You told me, your first year, about the tiny public high school you’d attended in Missouri, and what I remember you saying—as we sat in front of the TV cart on that little brown corduroy couch in your office-slash-choir-slash-orchestra room watching old videotapes of previous Follies—was that some people are meant to travel beyond where they’re from. You didn’t mean the wealthy two-thirds of Granby, the kids who’d seen Europe as toddlers. You meant people who had to get themselves out of small towns, people with ambitions too big for where they’d been born. This wasn’t quite true of me; Severn Robeson was the one who’d sprung me from Broad Run, Indiana. But I loved that you assumed I’d fled on my own. For a teenager, being seen a certain way is as good as being that way—and soon your vision became part of my self-image. On first dates in my twenties, I’d talk about leaving Broad Run as a choice. I believed it.