We sit in the living room. John and I moved most of our travel souvenirs to the apartment in Manhattan, so the space is spare. When I return （or visit, maybe, I no longer know which） from the cramped city, I like to be surrounded by luxurious expanses of empty floors and walls.
“He’s not here, is he?” she asks. No, I tell her, he rarely returns to the house, he finds the long drive uncomfortable. She nods.
“I haven’t seen him for more than ten years,” she says. “I doubt he would recognize me. I’ve changed so much.” She looks down sadly at her body, which is not to her liking.
She is young and beautiful. “You are beautiful,” I say. “He would certainly know you.”
She smiles and asks if I knew it was her.
“That you were one of the seven?” I ask. “Your name was on the list.”
“No, that I started it. I got in contact with the other women. I organized the letter.”
“You did,” I say, my chest tightening. “Why?”
And I looked at her, this woman who had once been so formidable and impressive, charred, red, snakelike skin climbing up her sad, lined face. Once I asked John if she hated me, and he told me she didn’t think about other people enough to hate them. I was sitting between his legs, and he was telling me how talented I was. I didn’t ask, at what? I was blind at the time, reeling from the humiliation of high school, the scorn of my parents, the cruelty of the entitled young men who surrounded me at college. I had a volatile sense of self-regard, unable to befriend even the kindest girls my age while deeming professors my intimates, if only in my mind. “Talented at what?” I should have asked. Fucking, giving blow jobs, being desperate, he might have said.
I was in my early thirties, sitting inside of a blue and gray cocoon of boredom, an ergonomic chair outside the office of a senior vice president of a national accounting firm. Cars, travel arrangements, coffee runs, meetings, schedules, IT departments. Fielding angry calls from his bosses. Enduring, liking maybe, the moments he leaned over my shoulder to look at what I was working on. The smell of his upper-management cologne. Tabs of master’s degree programs saved on the desktop, for which I was too deadened, at the end of the day, to address. Weekends drinking and doing yoga, trying to recover a sense of self one way or another. The money wasn’t even that great. My only question was “Why did I think I was better than this?”
When I think of my mental state in college, I think of the Drunk Toddler video on the internet. In the video, a toddler dressed in a midriff top, her baby chub pressing against the confines of her clothes, lumbers from mini table to mini table chugging drinks that her parents have made to look like little alcohol bottles. She knocks over chairs, throws plates, stumbling with delirious confidence. She smears food all over her face. She is delighted with herself, unaware of the mess she is making, the sight she looks, the implications of her movements.
He should have seen it. He should have seen how young I was inside, how little I knew about what I wanted, about what was good for me. He should have thrown me out of his office, told me to take a cold shower, to grow up, to find friends or a boyfriend my own age. I was of age, but I was a child. He had complimented me, praised me, made me feel as though I had something to offer the world, but that was only courtship, I finally realized. I had taken it as truth.
As I sat at my desk, highlighting receipts, or on hold with the billing department, I started to wonder if there were other women like me, stumbling around in their late twenties and early thirties, wasting their lives, unable to find purpose. Other women who were so confused about what they were worth. I felt infused with an energy I hadn’t experienced for years, since before college, a sense that what I was doing was right, that it needed to be done. The college was supposed to steer me through the transition from adolescence to adulthood, and instead, it had knocked me completely off course. I reached out to alumni. It wasn’t difficult to find other women. We didn’t deserve to be treated so casually. Casually. That was the word. At an age when every moment was important, when we were forming our conceptions of who we were, we had been used and passed off without care.
Perhaps that is what she thinks. Or perhaps that is what I imagine the young woman, sitting across from me in the same seat as Vladimir sat on the night of our first meeting, might think.
“There were long-term psychological effects,” she says at one point in the evening. “I was so young,” she says at another. “I didn’t know what it meant,” she says, “and I didn’t realize, until much later, what it did to me.”
I take it all in. She wants me to bear witness and I am happy to comply. “Are you better now?” I ask.
“Mostly,” she replies.
She diverts the conversation frequently, telling me about fellow classmates and their outcomes, or reflecting on the changes in the town and student body since she graduated.
When we part, I touch her shoulder and say, “Everything is still in front of you.” Her eyes fill with tears and she thanks me. I don’t mind saying it. I believe it, and she needs to hear it.
Dazzling, explosive, pitch-dark and blinding light, like a steamroller, like a humming bird, in the body, in the atmosphere, in the currents of our blood, on the street corners, hidden in melodies, in smells and dropping temperatures and rising speed. In rooms we forgot we’ve inhabited, clothing we forgot we owned, touch we forgot we felt.
Oh, Shame.
Acknowledgments
The translation of the epigraph is by Anne Carson.
Thanks to David Rogers for early reading and advice. Thanks to Anna Stein—I feel so lucky that this book and I found our way to you. Thanks to Lauren Wein for artful and inspired editing and conversation. Thank you to Julie Flanagan, Lucy Luck, Claire Nozieres, Grace Robinson, and Will Watkins. Thanks to Ravi Mirchandani and Roshani Moorjani. Thank you to the Avid Reader cohort, especially Jessica Chin, Amy Guay, Jordan Rodman, and Meredith Vilarello.
Thanks to Hannah Cabell and Ryan King, Jennie and Chris Jonas, Janet and Rachel Kleinman, Miriam Silverman and Adam Green. Thanks to Steve Coats for scenic inspiration. Thanks to Hannah Heller for letting me use her joke and more. Endless thanks to Kallan Dana for her multiple reads, constant discussion, friendship, and life support.
Thanks to my parents. Thank you to Ruth, my star, and Archie, my good luck charm. And thank you, Adam, my first reader, thoughtful editor, biggest advocate, best audience, and truest friend.