“Wait a second. The choir director? Mr. Jun?” Casey made a face.
“No. Professor Hong, he’s new. Mr. Jun retired. The professor is also a voice coach. And he is a composer. He’s writing a song cycle that will have a world premiere at a famous music school.” Leah rattled off the impressive things she knew about the choir director. “He’s coached opera singers from the Metropolitan—”
“Okay. Whatever. Why did you get in the backseat with him?”
“I didn’t know he wanted to have sex.”
“Did you think he wanted to hold hands and sing you songs?”
Leah sobbed, and Casey grew silent.
“But I must have made him have this desire for me. I didn’t know how to make it stop. I told him no, but he said I didn’t understand. He said he loved me.”
“You said no?”
Leah nodded. “I asked him to please. Please, no. I begged him. To please. . . but he couldn’t. A man can’t stop when he’s excited. I knew that. Everyone had told me that when I was a girl. I should have—”
“You said no.” Casey rolled her eyes. She inhaled deeply. “But he did it anyway. Men are not all the same. Some men can stop and will stop. You know nothing about men.” She said it quietly, without any harshness in her voice. “Nothing. You’ve slept with one man in your life. No, technically two, but I think you were date-raped, so just one.” But her mother didn’t know what that meant.
“It wasn’t some sin for you to take him to a diner. He was hungry, and you had a car. You would have never let anyone be hungry. He was your choir director, and you had a crush on him. Big fucking deal. He knew you were having a crush on him, because he’s been around, and he took advantage of you. He’s an asshole.”
He’d said she was beautiful. That he wanted her to come live with him. It had given her pleasure to think about running away, even though she’d felt awful about that, too.
“What happened between you and the choir director was hardly consensual. Did you want to sleep with him?”
“No. I. . . ,” Leah stammered. “You have to believe me. I wanted him to be interested in me. I took him to the restaurant. I really enjoyed myself during the dinner.”
“You’re allowed to have dinner with someone you like. That’s not the same thing as letting a man fuck you afterwards just because he wants to.”
“I want to die. Please let me die!” Leah began to scream.
“Stop it! Stop it. Calm down.”
Leah opened her eyes wide. She became silent.
“I’m very sorry this happened to you. I really am. But you’re not going to die. You can’t.”
“Suicide is a sin,” Leah said softly. “I can’t kill myself.”
“I’m glad you feel that way.”
Leah was still crying.
“Listen. You can’t tell Daddy. You’re not going to tell him what happened. There’s no point. Trust me. It would kill him, and why? So you can have a clear conscience? You had a crush. And you were raped. It’s not your fault. I’m not mad at you. I’m not. I don’t think less of you.” Casey stroked her mother’s white hair, feeling the awkwardness of having to comfort her mother. “It’s going to be okay.” Her mother was less experienced than most American teenage girls. Didn’t she talk to her friends in her geh about sex? About men? Didn’t they at least complain about husbands? Couldn’t sex have come up?
By having slept with nearly a dozen men, Casey had developed theories about sex; she had her own sexual point of view. She was interested in making love, in being a good lover, sometimes just fucking. Sex was often bracketed by both humiliation and flattery; awkwardness and beauty were found in the spaces between. She had learned that her body had value to herself and others. Jay had been someone she had trusted with her body. Unu was someone who had deserved that trust, and she had blown it by fucking Hugh. Hugh had been an irrational lay. She had not loved him, and he had not loved her. It was questionable if Hugh was capable of loving someone for a sustained period. Experience was a funny thing: The downside of knowing things intimately was that she had also, in the process, degraded sex. She was still lost. What was sex for? She’d had good sex, bad sex, losses, and conquests. Stretches without. But more importantly, if she were to take off her clothes again and agree to another round, why? And whom would she love?
Her own mother had gotten pregnant after she had been with the choir director. If it wasn’t rape, it was certainly some kind of molesting—Casey hesitated at the words, because they made her forty-three-year-old mother sound dumb.