However he responded, it could not have fulfilled the rescue fantasy I had fabricated. Nothing could. There was no rescue. The table was awkward for a second and then Jamie found the answer. He ordered another round of drinks.
Jamie drove home alone in his car to his off-campus apartment. Chris, who lived in the opposite direction, walked me home. I lay on the bed and the room spun. I didn't like how drinking felt but I liked how it released me. News slipped out and the world didn't explode and eventually I could count on passing out. I had a headache in the morning and I always threw up, but Jamie, and everyone, it seemed, liked me when I was drunk. The added bonus: I often didn't remember much.
After Christmas, we drank more frequently, often without Chris. Jamie told me he had come back to finish his diploma after nursing his father through a protracted terminal illness. He confided that he owned a women's clothing store in Utica, and had to go down often to look in on it. All this made him more glamorous, but what I really liked about Jamie was his no-bullshit factor. He ate and belched. He slept around. He'd lost his virginity way before I had-he was something like fourteen and she was older. "I never had a chance," he would say, take a sip of beer from a long-neck, or wine from a glass, and snort gleefully. He joked about how many women he'd had, and told stories about being caught with married women by their husbands.
I didn't feel comfortable hearing a lot of this. His promiscuity seemed inconceivable, but it also meant that he had seen and done it all. There were no surprises. In his eyes I would not be a freak. Jamie was not a nice boy. But having a nice boy think of me as "special" was what I wanted least.
He listened patiently to what was going on in my life: about Gail, or the lineup, or my fear of going to trial. In the weeks that turned into months after the Christmas holiday, I lived in constant anticipation of the trial. Repeatedly it was pushed back. A pretrial hearing was set for January 22 and I went. It was canceled but I still had to show up, prep with the DA, Bill Mastine, and with Gail, who was now pregnant, and so handing most of the reins over to Mastine.
I saw in Jamie a recognition that the two of us were oddballs. He had gone through a lot with his father and believed that at nineteen, I was distinguished by the rape from most of my peers. But instead of making me feel my feelings, as Tricia from the Rape Crisis Center would want, he taught me how to drink. And I did.
Jamie and I talked about sex and I told a lie.
In the bar one night, Jamie asked me-it felt offhand-if I'd slept with anyone since the rape. I said no, but in that second, the expression on his face told me that was not the right answer. I rephrased, "No, don't be silly, of course I have."
"Yeesh," he responded, turning his beer glass in circles on the table, "I wouldn't have wanted to be that guy."
"What do you mean?"
"It's a pretty big responsibility. You'd be afraid of fucking up. Plus, who knows what could happen?"
I told him it hadn't been that bad. He asked me how many men I'd slept with. I made up a number. Three.
"That's a good amount. Just enough to know you're normal."
I agreed.
We continued to drink. I was alone now, I knew that. If I had told the truth he would have rejected me. The pressure I felt to "get it over with"-in my words to Lila-was overwhelming. I was afraid if I went too long, the fear involved in having sex would only increase. I didn't want to be a dried-up old woman, or become a nun, or live in the house of my parents and stare at the wall ceaselessly. These destinies were very real to me.
Just before Easter vacation, the night came.
Jamie and I went to a movie. Afterward, we got very drunk at the bar. "I've got to take a piss," he said, for not the first time that evening.
When he was in the men's room, I calculated. We had been leading up to this point for a while. He had asked the only question that would act as a restraint. I'd told a lie and it appeared I'd told it successfully. The next day he would take off for a ski weekend and I'd be alone with myself and with Lila for a few days.
He returned to the table. "If I get any drunker I can't drive home," he said. "Are you coming with me?"
I got up and we walked outside. It was snowing. The fresh bite of snowflakes pelted our booze-warmed skin. We stood and breathed in the cold air. Snowflakes gathered on the tips of Jamie's eyelashes and across the ridge of his ski cap.
We kissed. It was wet and sloppy, different from Steve, more like Madison. But I wanted this. I willed myself to want it. This is Jamie, I repeated in my head. This is Jamie.
"So, you coming home with me?" he asked.
"I don't know," I said.
"Well, it's cold as a witch's clit out here, I'm going home. Come or don't come."
"I have my contacts in," I said.
He was smooth and drunk and had done it all a thousand times before. "Well, you've got two choices. You can walk home and you can sleep alone in your bed, or I can drive you there and wait for you while you take your contacts out."
"You'd do that?"
He stayed outside in his car. I hurried up the elevator in Haven, went to my room, and removed my lenses. It was late but I woke Lila anyway. I knocked on her door. She answered it in her Lanz nightgown. Her room was dark. I had woken her up. "What is it?" she asked angrily.
"This is it," I said to Lila. "I'm going home with Jamie. I'll be back in the morning. Promise you'll have breakfast with me."
"Fine," she said, and shut the door.
I had wanted someone to be in on it with me.
It was snowing heavily now. To stay focused on the road, we were quiet. The heat rushed out of the dash onto my legs. Jamie was my guide on a mission to a place I'd never been. I had one last chance to make it before the walls closed in. His random promiscuity now seemed glorious to me. In the way he had talked about it, I knew there was as much bravado as there was real joy. I realized even then that he'd been drunk during so many of these encounters. He was drunk now. But all of this was detail work to me. Drinking. Promiscuity. An undirected life. They were all, to my mind, a product of his own choice. No one had made him drink or fuck or run. Now, I can look and see that it may have been otherwise; then, I stared out at the road. The wipers were going. Snow built up on either side of them and formed a white widow's peak in the middle of the windshield. I was going home with a normal man-by most standards an attractive one-and he was taking me there to make love to me.
I had spent time imagining his place. It was less than fabulous when we arrived. He lived in a one-bedroom apartment. The living area had no furniture, just milk crates jammed with albums and tapes, and a stereo that sat on the carpeted floor. He walked in and threw his school bag down, took a leak with the bathroom door open, from which I looked away, and reentered the kitchen. There was a let's-just-get-to-it attitude now that we were in his apartment. I stood in the hallway between the darkened kitchen area and the unfurnished living area. His bedroom was near the bathroom. I knew that was where we were going, knew that was what I had come here for, but I hesitated. I was afraid.
Jamie said he guessed I was new enough so he should offer me a drink. He had an open bottle of white wine in the fridge and two dirty wineglasses. He held the glasses under the tap and then filled both with wine. I took my dripping glass and sipped.
"You can put your bag down," he said. "Music would make this easier, huh?"
He walked into the living area and crouched down over a milk crate of tapes. He picked up, scanned, and tossed back two or three. I put my book bag near the front door. He chose Bob Dylan, the kind of slow, stalling melodies that always made me feel as if the dead were rattling their chains. I wasn't a Dylan fan, but I knew enough not to say anything.