After Christmas, Lila and I tried to make a go of it in Syracuse. I wanted to help her, but I also needed her. I believed in talking. To be with her after dark, I quit Cosmos. This was easy: They didn't want me back. When I had gone to ask about getting day shifts, the owner was distant and standoffish. The man who flipped the pizzas came up after the owner had left.
"Don't you get it?" he said. "The police have been in here asking questions. We don't want you here."
I left in tears and walked blindly into someone.
"Watch where you're going," the man said to me.
It was snowing. I quit the Review. The bus back to the place Lila and I were living broke down a lot. Tess was on leave. I stopped going to poetry readings. One night, I was a little later than usual getting home-it had grown dark-and Steve met me at the doorstep. "Where were you?" he asked. His tone was angry, accusatory.
"We needed food," I said.
"Lila called me because she was scared. She wanted someone to sit with her."
"Thanks for coming over," I said. I was holding a bag of groceries and it was cold.
"You should have been here."
I walked inside and hid my tears.
When Lila said it wasn't working out, that she didn't like the apartment, and she was going to go home for a few weeks and then move in with Mona, a friend she'd recently made, I entered a sort of shock. I thought we'd be in this together. Clones.
"It's just not working, Alice," she said. "I can't talk about it the way you want me to and I feel isolated here."
Steve and Marc were the only two people who had regularly visited the house. Both of them, though scrupulously avoiding each other, were more than willing to sit guard. But they were my friends-my boyfriends, to be exact-and Lila knew it. They were there primarily for me, and to help me out by helping her. She needed to separate. This is clear to me now. Then, I felt betrayed. We went through our record albums and other things that had been common property over our two years together. I cried, and if she wanted something, I gave it to her. I gave her things she didn't ask for. I left possessions behind me to mark my place. Could I ever get back to where I had been? Where was that? A virgin? A freshman in college? Eighteen?
I sometimes think nothing hurt me more than Lila's decision to stop speaking to me. It was a total blackout. She did not return my phone calls when I was finally able to get her new number out of one of her friends. She passed by me on the street and did not speak. I called her name. No response. I blocked her path, she moved around me. If she was with a friend, they indeed looked at me-burning with a hatred I couldn't understand but nonetheless took in.
I moved in with Marc. In four months I would graduate. I stayed inside his apartment for everything but my classes. He drove me everywhere, a willing chauffeur, but mostly he stayed away from me. He was at the architecture studio late into the night; sometimes he slept there. When he was home I asked him to investigate noises, check the locks, to please just hold me.
The week before graduation, I saw Lila again. I was with Steve Sherman. We were in the student mall on Marshall Street. She saw me, I saw her, but she walked right by me.
"I can't believe it," I said to Steve. "We're graduating in a week and she still won't talk to me."
"Do you want to speak to her?"
"Yes, but I'm afraid. I don't know what to say."
We decided that Steve would stay where he was standing, and I would circle around again in the opposite direction.
I ran into her.
"Lila," I said.
She was not surprised. "I wondered if you'd try to speak to me."
"Why won't you talk to me?"
"We're different, Alice," she said. "I'm sorry if I've hurt you, but I need to move on with my life."
"But we were clones."
"That was just something we said."
"I've never been so close to anyone."
"You have Marc and Steve. Isn't that enough?"
We somehow got from that to wishing each other well at graduation. I told her Steve and I were going over to a nearby restaurant to have mimosas. She could come and join us if she wanted.
"Maybe you'll see me there," she said, then left.
I rushed into the bookshop we'd been standing in front of and bought her a book of Tess's poems, Instructions to the Double. Inside I wrote something that escapes me now. It was sappy and came straight from my heart. It said I would always be there for her, all she had to do was call.
We did run into her at the bar. She was tipsy and had a boy with her whom I knew she had a crush on. She didn't want to sit with us, but stood by our table while she talked about sex. She told me she had been fitted for a diaphragm and that I was right, sex was great. I was audience now, not friend or intimate. She was too busy doing what I was doing-proving to the world that she was fine. I forgot to give her the book. They left.
On our way home, Steve and I passed by another, posher student hangout. I saw Lila sitting inside with her crush and a bunch of people I didn't know. I told Steve to wait, and I rushed inside with the book. The people at the table looked up.
"This is for you," I said, offering it to Lila. "It's a book."
Her friends laughed because the fact that it was a book was obvious.
"Thank you," Lila said.
A waitress arrived to take drink orders. Lila's crush was watching me.
"I wrote something inside," I said.
As her friends ordered drinks, she looked up at me. I thought she pitied me then. "I'll read it later, but thank you. It looks like a good book."
I never saw Lila again.
On the day of graduation, I didn't attend. I couldn't imagine being there, trying to celebrate, seeing Lila and her friends. Marc had a project due. His school wasn't over yet. Steve was at graduation. Mary Alice was there too. I had told my parents I just wanted to get the hell out of Syracuse. They agreed. "The faster, the better," they said.
I packed my remaining possessions in a silver rental car. It was a Chrysler New Yorker; they'd run out of subcompacts. I drove this boat back to Paoli, knowing the car itself would get a laugh out of my parents.
Syracuse was over. Good riddance, I thought. I was going to the University of Houston in the fall. I was going to get an MA in poetry. I would spend the summer trying to reinvent myself. I had not seen Houston, never been south of Tennessee, but it was going to be different there. Rape would not follow me.
Aftermath
The night John got punched in the face was sometime in the fall of 1990. I was standing outside De Robertis on First Avenue, waiting for John to come back with the cheap heroin we both snorted. We had a routine. We always said that if he took too long I would come after him, shouting. It was a vague plan, but it kept from our minds the fact that something might happen that we couldn't control. That particular night it was cold out. But those days cloud together. By that time, this was the point of it all. A year before, I had published a piece in The New York Times Magazine, a first-person account of my rape. In it, I beseeched people to talk about rape and to listen to articulate victims when they had a story to tell. I got a lot of mail. I celebrated with four dime bags and a Greek boyfriend who had once been my student. Then Oprah called, having read the article. I went on the show. I was the victim who fought back. There was another one who supposedly hadn't. Like Lila's, Michelle's resistance left no visible scars. But I doubt that Michelle flew back home to snort heroin.
I never made it through graduate school in Houston. I didn't like the city, yes, but to be honest, I wasn't cut out for it. I slept with a decathlete and a woman, I bought pot off a guy behind the 7-Eleven, and I drank with another student who also dropped out-a tall man from Wyoming-and sometimes, while the decathlete held me, or the man from Wyoming sat back and watched, I cried in hysterical trills that no one understood, least of all me. I thought it was Houston. I thought it was living in a hot climate where there were too many bugs and where the women wore too many ruffles and frills.