Age of Consent (29 page)

“Jesus.”

“I'd love to tell her that I understand. I've been on that ride, and it's a difficult one to get off of. Also, that however angry she is now, it will fade as her memory of him will fade. That it doesn't have to touch her. Not really. If she just looks forward, always forward in life, it will not.”

Dan nods. Then he reaches across the car and takes her hand again. “You should write her a letter when this is all over. Tell her that, what you just said.”

AT THE RESTAURANT
they are told they have to wait for a table.

“Good, then we have time for a drink,” Dan says.

Behind the bar the bottles are upside down, capped with taps, and gleaming in wild blue-and-yellow light, also reflected in the mirrors. He orders a bourbon.

“Anything else?” The bartender is a young guy with a black goatee and a pointy mustache.

“I'll have a ginger ale,” Bobbie says.

“And a whiskey for the lady,” Dan tells the bartender. Bobbie laughs. Dan turns toward her, grinning, the blue of the lights making a slash across his face. He says, “Okay, we'll compromise. Not a drink-drink but not a kiddie drink either, okay? Live dangerously.”

“Should I?” Bobbie asks the bartender, who smiles a lurid smile and nods his head. She orders a gin and tonic and they find a place in a corner of the bar, waiting for their table.

“I love being here with you,” Dan says. As always he is unguarded, stating exactly what he feels as easily as he might mention the weather. She wishes she could be the same.

“The person you remember was just a girl,” she says, almost sadly.

He shrugs. “Are we so different than we were before?”

“Is that a serious question?”

He nods.

She says, “I guess I still buy clothes that aren't warm enough. And I still like walking in the woods at night.”

“Are you still shy?”

“I was never shy,” she says.

“Your most important disclosures were said with your eyes on the ground.”

“That was shame, not shyness. And you might have noticed I didn't tell you much.”

“There shouldn't have been any shame. It wasn't your fault—”

“That,” she says, “makes no difference.”

He smiles at her. “You wouldn't even meet my parents.”

“Okay, that was shyness. But I did want to meet your mother.”

“My mother,” he says, shaking his head slowly. “She died. We spread her ashes on the Potomac last winter.”

“I'm sorry. And your father?”

“He's ninety. Lots going wrong with him. All his life he treated medicine as though it were a religion. Now he hates doctors.”

“Do you remind him that he
is
a doctor?”

Dan laughs, a single loud “ha.” Then he says, “I'm not sure he always remembers we're his children.”

They are quiet for a moment. They drink and look at each other, and strangely feel perfectly comfortable doing so without speaking. She admires the smile lines around his eyes, his white, slightly uneven teeth, the curly hair that is still in evidence, though graying. Eventually Dan says, “If I met you today for the first time, where do you think it would be?”

“You mean, where do I hang out?”

He nods. “I want to dream up a different intersection for our lives because I am uncomfortable with the real-life one. Actually, I'm pissed off about it. I feel my first love was taken away from me because of him.”

He will not use Craig's name. He has become a man who is very specific about what he believes, what he will do and not do. All the promise he'd shown as a boy has blossomed into an intelligence she can easily detect. But there is also something in Dan that did not used to be present in his youth, a darkness that comes over him at certain times, arriving and disappearing in an instant.

She says, “I would meet you at…” She scrunches up her face, deciding. She wants their conversation to become lighter, warmer. For him not to look so broody. “At a dog park,” she says, finally.

“A dog park?” He smiles. “Is that a place where you can bring dogs as opposed to all the other parks that are for cats?”

She nods. “Exactly. And I'd see you at the dog park with your…hmmm…with your Labrador.”

“Not a rottweiler?”

“No. Rotties are owned by the people who taught me how to shoot a handgun.”

“You know how to shoot a handgun?”

“You bet I do,” she says, and she sounds more serious than she'd like.

Dan shrugs. “What kind of dog have you got, then? I mean, in our imagined meeting.”

“A beagle,” she says. “The story is that I had this beagle, but it died before we met, and these days I come to the dog park the way that mourning widows visit a graveyard.”

“And that is where I find you? In the dog park, looking sad and dogless?”

“It's the Labrador that finds me. He's a charitable fellow; he senses my doglessness and does his best to fill in.”

“He prefers you, my dog,” Dan says. He pretends to be upset by this. “He likes you better than he likes me.”

“Don't be ridiculous. He's
your
dog.”

“But he sees something in you that is special and he persuades me to ask you out.”

They are smiling at each other and she realizes that this is the sort of conversation they used to have all the time, as teenagers.

“And do you need a lot of persuading?” she says.

“No,” he says, and finishes his drink in a single long gulp. “None. At. All.”

THEY SHARE A
bottle of wine over dinner. His glass is always on the wane, so quickly does he drink. She watches him drink and wonders what is going on with him. She can barely eat. She is so distracted by Dan being here, here with her if only for an evening, she doesn't pay attention to the menu and orders randomly. She isn't sure what she's ordered, in fact. Some kind of meat. It might taste delicious if she could taste anything at all. But she is too nervous, though in a most wonderful way.

“You weren't in court when I testified,” she says, a little question within the statement. She tries to make it sound like a gentle observation, but she really does want to know.

“Did you look for me?”

“Mmm, yeah, I did,” she says. “But I guess you weren't allowed to be there?”

Dan shrugs. “Allowed?”

“Because you were also a witness for the prosecution? I think the DA said—”

He makes a sweeping motion with his hand, waving away any ideas the lawyers might have.

She feels herself hesitate, and then she asks, “Then why weren't you there? Not that you were required to be, of course.”

He looks down at his plate, shuffles some food around, then glances up at her again. She sees something unlock inside him. There it is, only for a moment, a small cinder of love still burning from decades past. “I didn't want to hear your story there, in court, with you on the stand, and all those people…”

He pauses and she watches him in his cloud of thoughts. He shuts his eyes and when he opens them again, he says, “I didn't like the idea of people prying into your life, however long ago these events took place.”

She realizes all at once how little he knows about what Craig actually did to her. She has never told him. That is, she has told him enough and he has guessed quite a bit, of course. Some part of him knows. But they never spoke of the precise facts when they were kids. She could never have brought herself to say the words.

“Do you want me to tell you?” she says. “I don't mind.”

“No,” he says, resolutely. He tops up her wineglass, fills his own empty one. “What I mean is, I do. I want to hear anything you'd like to tell me, but not here, not now.”

She nods. Of course, he is right. Why ruin a perfectly good dinner? She says, “I once told a man I cared about that I'd had this history. I thought he should know. I didn't go into any details, but this man's response…” She shakes her head, recalling how the guy had looked up from what he was doing, sharpening a gardening tool above his kitchen sink. She'd been sitting on the countertop in her underwear and a T-shirt, a mug of coffee in her hand. The morning sun was breaking through the clouds and it was beautiful and still, a perfect summer day. She told the man a little about what had happened, this new lover with whom she'd just spent the night, and he'd looked at her with an expression that was half amused, half disgusted, and continued sharpening the blade. “Do you know what he said?” she asks Dan. “He said, ‘Wow, you must have been very wild as a teenager.' ”

Dan makes a face. “Send him to me. I'll tell him how very wild you weren't.”

“I don't talk to him now. I can't even remember his name,” she says. But the truth is, she does remember his name and it burns into her even now.

“But you remember what he said.”

She nods, thinking how you always hold on to the damaging things people do. “The awful part of it is that I imagine everyone thinks the same way he did. That underneath all the polite nods lies this notion that I was a tramp. That it had to have been my fault.”

“That's crazy. You were a kid.”

“I know,” she says. But she doesn't know, that is the problem. She's never been able to convince herself. She was an especially bright girl. Somehow, being smart ought to have made a difference. And, too, there are those in the world who believe almost any age is old enough. As long as such opinions exist, they hold some sway with her. She doesn't understand why. “I sometimes imagine that I might have done something. Said something—”

“Stop it. That's what rape victims say.”

“But it wasn't rape. He didn't have a weapon.”

Dan's expression grows dark. There it is again, a cloud of emotion that comes and goes. He leans into the table, looking at her sternly. He says, “He didn't need a weapon.”

“Maybe but—”

“All he needed was a little persuasion and a little threat.”

“—why couldn't I have said no?”

“Because he made sure you couldn't. And if you haven't put this thing to rest by now, you need help doing so. The sooner the better.”

She feels chastened, as though she's just been told off. It triggers a response in her that she does not like, but here she goes, firing back anyway. “Yes, sir,” she says. “And I suggest we go together to the therapist's office because whatever is bugging you about your own life shows on your face like a thunderstorm.”

She watches Dan as he is suddenly called to attention. He stops eating. He puts down his knife and fork, cups his forehead in his hands for a moment, then says, “I'm sorry. I'm an idiot. I hope you haven't spent all your life so far with idiotic men.”

She shakes her head. She hasn't spent her life with any man.

He says, “When we were kids, I thought to myself that as long as we were together, nothing that had happened to you before mattered. That sounds selfish because, of course, it mattered. It mattered to you. But in my naïve way, in my colossal ignorance, I convinced myself that because we loved each other whatever occurred with another man wouldn't have an impact. I'm not saying I ever imagined that I could erase what happened to you, but I thought—I don't know—I thought that I might obscure it with my own feelings for you. Then you left. One day, you weren't on the phone. I couldn't find you. I was a dumb, besotted, teenage boy. I went to your school to look for you. I went to your house and there
he
was—”

She'd had no idea Dan had shown up at the house. She imagines him there in the doorway with Craig staring down at him.
Look, you little shit, what you're after isn't here.

“But you did make it better,” she says. “You made it
so
much better.”

“Even if I had made it better,” he says, and now she sees it, the source of his discomfort around her, “you still left.”

“He was in my house,” she says. “I couldn't live like that.”

He holds up his hands, as though in surrender. “I know that now. But don't forget that I was also young. I didn't understand anything back then.”

“He was in our home and in my mother's bed,” she says. “And he was angling for me all the while. It was impossible.”

Dan's shoulders slump forward. He puts his elbows on the table, rests his chin in his hands. “But I should have done something.”

“What could you have done? You didn't even know where I was.”

“I mean, kill him,” Dan says.

“Oh that.” She laughs. “I almost did kill him, you'll recall, but apparently he's indestructible.” She takes a long swallow of wine, reaches across the table, and puts her hand on Dan's arm. He takes her hand, turns it over, kisses her palm. “Do you remember the first time we were together? Every year, when the pumpkins come out, I think of you.”

“Of course, I do.”

“And do you remember that last time?”

She does.

1978

S
he rode buses to the McDonald's where Dan worked. In a window seat way in the back, she memorized the periodic table for a chemistry test. Hydrogen. Helium. Lithium. She felt gusts of wind flapping through the windows, looked outside and realized all at once it was Halloween. She could see crowds of trick-or-treaters sweeping through the soft spray of lamplight in their costumes. In the distance, colors of light from firecrackers pierced the sky.

She arrived at the McDonald's as a group of teenagers too old to go house to house came out of the restaurant through the glass doors with burgers in takeout bags. One wore green face paint to look like a corpse. Another wore a rubber mask with blood all down the side. They were shouting to each other, tossing the bag of burgers like it was a football. Meanwhile, a girl in a cat costume balanced drinks in a cardboard holder. Bobbie ducked to the side as they passed, entering the restaurant. She sat in the corner until the other customers were gone, catching glimpses of Dan as he worked behind the counter. It was late; he was closing. The tables had been wiped clean and she could almost hear the emptiness of the machines as one by one they were turned off.

She went up to the counter and called into the back for a cup of coffee. She heard his footsteps, then caught a glimpse of his brown uniform. He had a dishcloth over his shoulder, a set of keys on his belt. He was sweating with the steam of the machines. His hair was a tangle of black curls.

“Can I help you?” he asked, before looking up and seeing it was her. Now his face registered surprise. She heard her name on his lips, heard his laughter. He swept off the uniform cap and wiped the dampness from his brow, then flew over the steel countertop, landing beside her in an instant, his face gleaming. “It's so good to see you! I worry about you in that crazy house.”

“It's only crazy half the time now. He's going to work at night.”

“But I can't even call you after school!” She could feel the heat coming off him. He wiped his hand across the front of his shirt, then said, “What kind of regime is the guy running that means you can't take phone calls?”

They could hear police sirens outside. A red-and-blue light flashed by the great plates of glass that made up the restaurant's walls, sending blocks of colored light across the floor.

“He'll go, eventually,” she said. “Forget about him.”

“Wait here. I just have to throw everything into the walk-in.”

They headed for his house on foot, him in his brown polyester McDonald's uniform, her wearing his army-issue jacket because she hadn't brought her own. The air was heavy and damp; it smelled of bonfires and flash powder. They saw a bunch of costumed ghosts pile into a car driven by a zombie in a green wig. They heard bottle caps outside a 7-Eleven and thought at first they were pistol shots. As midnight came, the wind churned up, tearing strips of orange crepe paper from decorated porches. Cardboard witches came loose from doorways. Pumpkin candles sputtered their last. They passed flying candy wrappers, torn-off spider legs, a discarded witch hat. The lights inside houses clicked off one by one. It felt as though they were in the afterlife, out among the weary ghosts.

“What if you stay over?” Dan asked. In fact, they hadn't much choice now. She'd arrived on a night bus but she had no intention of going back on one.

“My room is on the ground floor,” he said. “My parents are all the way upstairs.”

They felt nervous. Nervous they'd get caught in his bedroom. And nervous, too, at having a whole night before them.

His house was as she'd imagined it, one of the yellow mock-Victorians on the hill. His mother had set out a giant basket of pumpkins and squash for Halloween and it was pretty in the moonlight. They skirted around the side and she heard water trickling in the dark and realized there was a pond in the back with a pump that operated a small fountain.

“Did you make all this?” she said, marveling at the rockery with little purple flowers left over from summer still poking out from crevices, and the hebe bushes, lit by tiny bulbs hidden among them. The fountain fed a small pond replete with fish. A wall of rosebushes, their trunks ringed in mulch, separated one part of the garden from another like the walls of a house.

“My mother,” Dan said. “She spends all her time out here.” Bobbie nodded, as if that made perfect sense, though she'd never imagined that tending a garden would be a serious pursuit for a grown woman. She admired the tidy borders, and the zigzag of stone paths that led to other hidden places. There was even a wooden seat by the pond, so you could watch the fountain break the moon's reflection into a series of concentric circles and listen to the breeze that flowed above in the canopy of an oak. If she hadn't been so cold and so concerned about being seen, she'd have asked if they could sit here for a while.

“Our place is nothing like this,” Bobbie said. “It's just trees.”

“Trees are nice.”

“Which, one by one, fall down.”

He laughed at that, and then she saw that it sounded funny and laughed, too.

“That's my window,” he said. “Wait here and I'll make sure the coast is clear.” He hugged her briefly and felt her shivering. “I won't be long.”

When finally she climbed through the window into his bedroom, she was surprised. Not by what she saw but how she felt, peering into his life in so stark a manner. It was a privilege, she understood. He had a nice collection of records, and a turntable neatly tucked into shelves. In a rattan basket were clothes to be washed. The walls were decorated with posters from years back; a set of three track trophies grew dusty on the window ledge above a dozen or more ribbons from field sports. Surrounded by all his things, she felt she'd entered his life fully, and she turned to him with an exclamation on her lips and then could not think of what to say.

“I guess you can run fast,” she whispered.

He kissed her, then reached back and turned out the light. He put his finger to his lips to indicate they should undress silently. She watched as he unbuttoned his shirt. Through the darkness she made out the long drop of his torso, the weightless shoulders that seemed to point outward like arrows on a compass. She left her T-shirt and underpants on, he his boxer shorts. He came toward her, took her hand, and when she felt the heat of his chest against her own, she sighed aloud. She could hear music from another room upstairs, the soundtrack to a movie his parents were watching in bed. He put his hand on her lower back, drew her closer to him.

“What do we do if they come in?” she whispered.

He touched her hair, then ran his finger over her brow as he had that day in the bus stop when they'd first met properly. “They won't come in,” he said. “They have no interest in checking up on me. Anyway, I've locked the door.”

He was right about his parents. They watched their movie and then Bobbie heard their footsteps on the floorboards, then a sound from somewhere in the plumbing as they turned faucets on and off. She and Dan held each other in the single bed, its covers unable to contain them both, and waited until there was silence from his parents' room. At last, she felt the weight of sleep upon the house, and the two of them fully awake within it.

She realized what she was about to do now and understood all at once that she didn't know how. Sex had always been a kind of acquiescence on her part. She had always cooperated what with was asked, but now she was unsure what was being asked. Dan was cautious with her body. He kissed her, then stopped and talked. He nuzzled her neck, put his lips on her breasts, rolled her nipple in his fingers, then glided down the length of her body, laying his cheek against her belly, pausing there for a while as though suddenly struck with a thought.

He was so unhurried she didn't know what she was supposed to do. Sex with him was not a single act, as she'd always experienced it with Craig, but a series of moments. At one point, she wondered if he was waiting for her to do something, to take the lead, so she set into motion, doing the things as Craig had instructed her and which with Craig had been a kind of heartless routine. It was not so now. With Dan, she wanted to offer the things Craig had always just taken from her. She began to move around him, with her hands, her tongue, her lips. She felt his excitement, his thin muscular frame rigid with attention. She felt him hard against her, his pulse thudding against her cheek. But she sensed, too, that something was wrong, caught herself, and stopped. She was scaring him; she saw this clearly. She hadn't realized a guy could be scared.

“What's the matter?” she whispered.

“It's like you went somewhere else.”

How did he know this?

“Stay here with me,” he whispered, and brought her close to him in what could have been nothing more than a friendly hug. She could feel his heartbeat; she could feel the sweat that rose up like a cloud from them both. He looped his leg around her leg, pressed his shoulder against her shoulder.

“You don't want to?” she said.

She felt his body sink against her, his teeth gently on the rim of her ear. “Of course I do but—”

“You're thinking of him, aren't you?” she said. “Thinking of Craig—”

He sprung back away from her. “No!” he said.

And then she realized it was she who was thinking of Craig, that he was contaminating the room with his gory face, his deep, sarcastic laugh. Laughing at her, at them, at the puny teenager, at the stupid girl.

“You're fifteen,” Dan said like an apology.

That didn't seem so very young to her, perhaps because Craig had been complaining for some time about how ratty she was getting now that she was “older.”

“But I've already done everything,” she whispered, and then felt her cheeks grow hot.

He said nothing and she squirmed under that silence.

“You're not much older than I am,” she said.

“No.”

She felt her heart pounding and Craig's voice in her head, calling her a little slut, calling her a bitch.

“I love you,” Dan said, speaking into her hair. He then whispered into the blind dark all the sensible explanations for why he felt as he did about sex. “I'm not saying no, just we can't do everything,” he said. She could see his eyes shining; she could see his smile, even in the dark.

“Of course not,” she said, though she'd assumed they would. She had a diaphragm stuffed into the pocket of her jeans, now on the floor.

He said, “This is making love anyway, isn't it? You and me right now, here. When does sex start and stop?”

It was a remark she would remember and that (she could not know this now) she would repeat to men she had yet to meet in years to come.

“You are right,” she said. She wanted to say another thing. That despite how she longed for him, sex was contaminated. It was mostly divorced of feeling. Her body did as it was asked, but to Bobbie it was a little like watching a sea anemone respond to the pressure of a finger. The only thing that felt genuine was kissing, possibly because she hadn't done very much kissing with Craig. And so she kissed Dan, kissed him for a long time.

THEY SAW EACH
other on Thursday nights because on Friday mornings there was a station meeting that Craig stuck around for after his show. This meant that neither Craig nor June was home early Friday morning, so nobody would miss her. From eleven at night right through until homeroom at school, nobody checked on where she was.

It was their great secret, requiring some stealth, but it wasn't difficult. Dan was the youngest of four children—the others much older than he, now into their twenties—and his parents suffered from what might be called child fatigue. They were relaxed. They didn't worry about an odd noise from Dan's room, or whether he looked particularly tired. This was not because they did not care about him but because the three children before him had all somehow miraculously survived to adulthood, Dan explained. They reckoned their last child would do the same without undue supervision.

When she needed the bathroom at Dan's house they would sneak together down the hallway from his bedroom, Dan being ready to shout out a greeting if his parents were to call out “Dan, is that you?,” which they never had. She insisted on being fully dressed even though this meant taking a lot of time just to traverse eight feet of hallway. Moving silently together, fingers entwined, they listened for footsteps, for squeaking floorboards, for opening doors. When at last they reached the bathroom, Dan would turn his back as she peed. Then they made the careful journey back to his bedroom, remembering always to lock the door.

“What would they say if they found me?” she asked once on a stormy November night. The wind was beating the panes of his windows, the roof sounding as though it might blow off. She always hated wind, having grown up in a house surrounded by trees. She worried one would break and crush the house in the middle of the night. She worried about falling branches, too.

“They'd want to know why I never introduced you to them,” Dan said casually. “I really don't think they'd care that much if you spent the night. My brothers had girls here sometimes. Why can't you meet them anyway? I don't get it.”

“I don't want anyone to know. It will ruin it.” She didn't believe this was true, not strictly anyway. It was only that if Dan's parents knew then soon her mother would know and that meant Craig would know. And Craig would certainly ruin it. He already knew she was seeing someone, but he couldn't do anything about it. He was still unable to drive and depended on June to get him to work for the midnight shift. One day he would be well and she imagined him tricking her, stalking her in his car, finding out where Dan lived. She could not bear the thought.

“They'd think they you were great,” Dan said. “How could they not fall in love with you?”